Technology

I recently screwed up my Desktop Icons in Windows 11. I had been playing with the scaling factor and that had messed up the icon space scaling. The icons ended up with a massive hit size as shown above. To reset the icon sizes all you need to do is edit the WindowMetrics in the Windows Registry. Using the Registry Editor search for IconSpacing or follow the path in the image bellow. The default seems to be -1125 and if you see a massive negative number then that is the problem. ...

Mac doesn’t support Cut and Paste from Finder using: CMD-X CMD-V But you can achieve exactly the same results by using: CMD-C and then CMD-OPT-V This isn’t very intuitive as most OS’s use Ctrl-X and Ctrl-V, but the functionality is there if a little hidden. For a bonus tip: if you hold press ALT/OPTION over the open Menu Bar you will see alternative functions appear. There is at least one plugin on the App Store, that turns this into CMD-X, but to be honest, I don’t think CMD-OPTION-V too hard a combination to master.

I mentioned in a previous post that I had used git and git hooks to upload Hugo blog posts to my server, and that I am now using rsync as a faster more succinct alternative. This has left me with lot of git history in my .git folder, which I really don’t need. I don’t think I am ever going to want to recover a blog post version, ever. So I thought why not just delete all the history and reduce the junk in the site directories. ...

The Hugo theme template partial google-news has been deprecated for quite some time. A warning message has been posted on build for just that very reason. After the last update of Hugo v0.111.2+extended the partial appears causes Hugo to fail while building. This is the error thrown on my Mac: ❯ hugo Start building sites … hugo v0.111.2+extended darwin/arm64 BuildDate=unknown ERROR 2023/03/07 23:21:02 render of "page" failed: "/Users/mark/websites/markbtomlinson.com/themes/PaperMod/layouts/_default/baseof.html:5:8": execute of template failed: template: _default/single.html:5:8: executing "_default/single.html" at <partial "head.html" .>: error calling partial: execute of template failed: html/template:partials/head.html:162:18: no such template "_internal/google_news.html" I had been expecting an error, or problem, eventually and as is normal, it happened late at night. It took me a little file search in VSC to find the file in the Hugo theme directory and delete the line causing the issue. ...

Getting un-hooked You Git I have been using Git Hooks to sync local Hugo website files to my remote server. This has worked well, mostly, but I wondered if it was the most efficient way of syncing up. I use Git on the local web structure and so have version control. Using Hooks allows me to upload to a remote location and then have the remote server copy the modified file into the live site directory,. This involves a few steps and some repetition and isn’t completely error free. If the Hooks location gets out of sync, which it did for me a couple of times I had no alternative, at least one that worked, but to recreate the Hook directory and start again. ...

Open, command Mac terminal: Most Mac users will know that the open command in the Terminal will open files in the GUI or open a directory in Finder for example open . will open Finder in the current directory, this is useful, but there are a few more things it can do including opening in a specified application. Here is the usage dump from the tool: Usage: open [-e] [-t] [-f] [-W] [-R] [-n] [-g] [-h] [-s <partial SDK name>][-b <bundle identifier>] [-a <application>] [-u URL] [filenames] [--args arguments] Help: Open opens files from a shell. By default, opens each file using the default application for that file. If the file is in the form of a URL, the file will be opened as a URL. Options: -a Opens with the specified application. -b Opens with the specified application bundle identifier. -e Opens with TextEdit. -t Opens with default text editor. -f Reads input from standard input and opens with TextEdit. -F --fresh Launches the app fresh, that is, without restoring windows. Saved persistent state is lost, excluding Untitled documents. -R, --reveal Selects in the Finder instead of opening. -W, --wait-apps Blocks until the used applications are closed (even if they were already running). --args All remaining arguments are passed in argv to the application's main() function instead of opened. -n, --new Open a new instance of the application even if one is already running. -j, --hide Launches the app hidden. -g, --background Does not bring the application to the foreground. -h, --header Searches header file locations for headers matching the given filenames, and opens them. -s For -h, the SDK to use; if supplied, only SDKs whose names contain the argument value are searched. Otherwise the highest versioned SDK in each platform is used. -u, --url URL Open this URL, even if it matches exactly a filepath -i, --stdin PATH Launches the application with stdin connected to PATH; defaults to /dev/null -o, --stdout PATH Launches the application with /dev/stdout connected to PATH; --stderr PATH Launches the application with /dev/stderr connected to PATH to Examples: View a MD file in Marked 2.app: open -a Marked\ 2 markdown.md ...

This post appeared in my feed: # 7 Reasons why I don’t write Nobody’s going to read it anyway Let’s be honest: nobody likes to shout into the void. Everyone wants their content to be seen, and social validation is the sweet sweet dopamine reward we all crave. … Don’t underestimate how many people actively read personal blogs though! The web dev community is especially fond of RSS, and with the Fediverse gaining more and more popularity, original content on your own domain has a much better reach now than before. ...

Cloud storage, for me at least, is becoming too vulnerable and time consuming to manage. It is also a huge pit for data hording, take Photos for example, so many old and irrelevant images going back years just sitting there on the cloud gathering pixel dust. With that in mind I have decided, that this year I am moving back to local storage and away from the likes of Google and One Drive. I have repurposed my old Mac Mini as a local storage server. The 2012 machine has a very low power foot print using around 10W in idle, better than many dedicated NAS devices I have used. ...

The default installation of Linux Mint on my iMac went very well right up until the moment it didn’t. I don’t know the cause, but I did find a few posts online about the problem I had, namely a login loop: whereby the login screen appeared to accept the login details only to show a blank screen momentarily, and then return to the login prompt. There were comments online proffering a solution in the form of ALT-CTRL-F1 etc. Which is supposed to open a terminal window to allow fixes to be applied. The problem for me was that none of the function keys worked F1, F2 etc. ...

Bring back personal blogging This post from the Verge appeared on my feed this morning: Twitter is creaking. Social media seems less fun than ever. Maybe it’s time to get a little more personal. In the beginning, there were blogs, and they were the original social web. We built community. We found our people. We wrote personally. We wrote frequently. We self-policed, and we linked to each other so that newbies could discover new and good blogs. I want to go back there. The Web 1.0 landscape looked a lot different than the Web 2.0 experience we are used to these days, and personal weblogs or “blogs” were a big part of the evolution of Web 2.0. In those days, it was really simple. You could sign up for a free site on GeoCities, Yahoo, Blogger, Diaryland, or any of a number of free hosting sites that allowed you to set up your blog, get going with a WYSIWYG editor, and send your thoughts out into the world… ...