If you’re a command line enthusiast and you’re the type of Mac user who likes to keep an eye on your system resources and resource utilization, you’ll likely enjoy checking out the btop command. btop offers real-time visualization of CPU usage, memory use, processes, network activity, and disk activity. You can even use btop as … Read More
The Mac command line tool tart continues to offer one of the simplest and fastest ways to setup a new virtual machine, and setting up a Tahoe VM is no exception. Whether you’re a developer, tinkerer, tester, or just someone who wants to give the latest MacOS Tahoe 26 operating system a trial run without … Read More
Homebrew is a powerful command line package manager that allows you to easily install, update, and manage popular command line programs and tools, as well as traditional graphical apps with cask (and third party tools like Applite help you manage cask through the GUI too). It’s a popular tool with advanced Mac users and those … Read More
Advanced Mac users who are savvy with the command line can rapdly build a MacOS Tahoe 26 beta virtual machine by issuing a few commands into the Terminal, with the help of tart. tart is a command line tool for managing virtual machines, and it’s one of the absolute fastest ways to get a virtual … Read More
If you’re running macOS Sequoia or macOS Sonoma, you might occasionally find yourself in a situation where you need to flush the DNS cache on your Mac. This can be necessary to fix DNS related issues or errors, to clear out outdated DNS settings or records, to resolve issues with certain websites, or even to … Read More
Advanced Mac users may wish to manually increase the VRAM allocation on their Apple Silicon Mac for performance reasons when engaging in graphics intensive tasks like running LLMs locally, AI models, or any graphics heavy applications, whether for gaming or video editing. This is possible because Apple Silicon chips offer unified memory architecture, meaning the … Read More
Llama is a powerful large language model (LLM) developed by Meta (yes, the same Meta that is Facebook), that is able to process and generate human-like text. It’s quite similar to ChatGPT, but what is unique about Llama is that you can run it locally, directly on your computer. With a little effort, you’ll be … Read More
If you have used Homebrew to try and install a particular package onto an Apple Silicon Mac and you see an error message stating “The arm64 architecture is required for this software” that prevents the installation of the package, you might be surprised by this error message given that you’re using an Apple Silicon Mac … Read More
There are various ways to monitor CPU usage on a Mac, with perhaps the two most common being with Activity Monitor on the graphical interface side of things, and htop or top on the command line side. While you can show an optional core graph in Activity Monitor, and htop will show CPU core activity … Read More
If you use Node.js for web development, creation of web apps, and javascript based network applications, you undoubtedly may come across situations where you’d like to make sure that the latest version of Node.js is installed on your Mac. Upgrading to the latest version of Node.js means you’ll have access to the most recent features … Read More
There are various ways to check the health of a hard disk drive (HDD) and solid state drive (SSD) that is used on a Mac with drives that support SMART, which stands for Self-Monitoring Analysis Reporting Technology. These options range from fairly simple using Disk Utility to check the SMART status of a drive, to … Read More
If you have a video file in MOV format, you may wish to convert the MOV video to MP4 format instead. While there are a variety of methods for converting MOV to MP4, the approach we’re going to address here is by using the command line, with a super easy to use and free tool … Read More
If you’re a Windows user, whether on a PC, in a dual boot environment with Boot Camp on an Intel Mac, or you’re running Windows 11 in a virtual machine on an Apple Silicon Mac, you may have an interest in installing Windows Subsystem for Linux, or WSL. Windows Subsystem for Linux puts a full … Read More
If you’re at the command line and perhaps interacting with Homebrew, Git, or similar, you may run into an error message that says something like the following “warning: unable to access /Users/Name/.config/git/attributes” : Permission denied”. This error message sounds more alarming than it is in most cases, but regardless, you likely want to fix the … Read More
While there are some command line wizards out there who never need to look at references, search manual pages, defer to command lists, LLM queries, or web searches, the rest of us mere mortal commands line users can be helped by a really great tool called cheat. The cheat command is able to provide a … Read More
Many advanced Mac users spend a lot of time working from the command line with the Terminal application. The command line offers ways to interact with various settings in MacOS through defaults commands and other tricks, so it’s a reasonable question to wonder if you can set or change the default web browser on a … Read More
Modern versions of MacOS no longer support HFS, meaning that new Macs can no longer read, mount, or write to classic HFS drives. But a fair amount of longtime Mac users continue to have older Macs and old Mac hard drives that are in HFS format, way back from the days of Mac OS 8, … Read More
Do you need to convert images to webp format from the Mac? Converting images to WebP offers tremendous file size savings, often compressing an image up to 70% without losing image quality, so it’s understandable why many Mac users and web developers, designers, and workers would wish to convert and compress images into WebP format. … Read More
