MacOS
Since I recently got an Elgato Key Light Air for the Home Office of Isolation™, I’ve been playing around with how to automate it. I’ve seen a lot of people using Elgato Stream Decks for automating these lights, but I don’t really have the need for a dedicated device for this. At least not yet.
As it turns out, it’s actually pretty easy to automate these lights via other means. The light itself runs a http server on port 9123, and via /elgato/lights it’s possible to connect to it’s internal API for remote control.
There is even a Postman Collection available, which makes it very easy to get started with connecting and changing settings around.
After working pretty well for many, many months, my external mic, a Blue Yeti, suddenly started having issues in Microsoft Teams on macOS. The issue was isolated to Teams, other video and audio solutions worked fine. For some reason, Teams had decided to start auto-adjusting the input level on its own, rendering it pretty useless. While some might say it’s a blessing that I get auto-muted, seemingly at random, but for me at least it’s pretty annoying.
The macOS Menu Bar tends to get cluttered over time, as applications really like to put an icon up there. I’m aware that you can remove most of them by dragging the icon away from the meenu bar, while holding down command (⌘) but, some times the icon is useful when you need it. It just doesn’t have to be in your face all the time.
I use my Ubiquiti USG for Remote User VPN Using L2TP, but L2TP does not provide routing information to the client, so I needed a way to automatically create routes when the VPN connection fires. Thankfully, this is pretty easy in macOS (and Linux). The /etc/ppp/ip-up file triggers every time a PPP (L2TP is based on PPP) connection is made, thus making it easy to trigger a route command when a connection is made.
I’m a big fan of Public Key authentication for SSH but I recently ran into an issue after adding my Public Key to a couple of new Linux VMs I use. The problem was that macOS kept asking for the SSH passphrase when connecting to them, which kind of defeats the purpose of using Public Key authentication in the first place. Thankfully, the solution is pretty simple.
Some times there is a need to use custom DNS servers for some domains, in my case specifically for access to the new lab environment we are building at work (more on that later, this is one beefy lab!)
One way of doing this, is adding custom DNS servers to /etc/resolv.conf but in macOS you really shouldn’t be editing that file manually, as it often gets overwritten or otherwise edited by VPN clients and such.
Thankfully, there is a better way to create persistent and manageable custom domain specific DNS settings.
I recently got a pair of new displays for the office, a couple of lovely Dell U2719DC’s. These offer USB-C connectivity, which is really nice, and makes it easy to connect my MacBook when I’m in the office. Connected to one of the displays is a Logitech Z337 set of speakers with a sub, since there is no built-in speakers in these displays. The problem I had with that setup, is that macOS doesn’t let me easily differenciate between the two as they are named exactly the same, sometimes creating confusion as to which of them should be the sound output to the speakers.
How to fix Error: Git must be installed and in your PATH! with Homebrew in macOS 10.14 Mojave.
Software Recommendation: LuLu is a small, shared-source macOS firewall that’s finally reached v1.0. Unlike other macOS firewall solutions, LuLu is 100% free, with no ads and no trial version. I’ve been using it on my home Mac Mini for a while, and it works perfectly.
macOS: Vanilla
Small, unobtrusive and easy to use. That’s a pretty good description for a macOS utility I recently discovered: Vanilla (non-affiliate link).
Simply put, this little gem let’s you hide any or all menu bar icons in macOS, while still keeping them easily accessible behind a small arrow: