echo ${core_dump} > /www/blog

From day one on the Macbook I looked at how I could make this thing work for me in a way I was accustomed to. I come from Linux, a world of endless possibilities. In the 15+ years I used it as my main system, I got a certain workflow that was my own. People used to joke that I didn’t need to lock my laptop when I was away, as it was unusable to anyone else. I didn’t use a bar. A logged in system would show nothing but the wallpaper. Pressing the super (Windows) key did nothing. Right clicking the desktop did nothing. Sure, a Linux window manager user would press super + enter and they would be greeted by Kitty, my terminal emulator, but no Windows user would press that combination. ...

I don’t like a messy home. Home is where all your stuff lives and if you want to find something, it’s easier if there’s not a bunch of clutter in the way. This is true in your physical home and your digital $HOME. Most Linux distributions and macOS populate your $HOME with directories you never asked for. The difference is whether you can rid yourself of them. On Linux they come from xdg-user-dirs. You can remove or disable it, delete the directories, and they stay gone. macOS has no such switch: delete its home directories and the system quietly recreates them. So on the Mac you can’t remove them… but you can hide them. ...

A little indicator on my prompt tells me the state of the git repo I’m in, if I’m in one. It’s quite minimal. Green tick: repo is clean; yellow cross: there are changes; red dot: there are merge conflicts. It’s a nice visual cue and for the longest time and the following code in my ~/.zshrc file made it possible. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 git_status_prompt() { git rev-parse --git-dir >/dev/null 2>&1 || return if git diff --name-only --diff-filter=U 2>/dev/null | grep -q .; then echo " %F{red}●%f" elif git status --porcelain 2>/dev/null | grep -q .; then echo " %F{yellow}✘%f" else echo " %F{green}✓%f" fi } This works fine. It does what it’s supposed to… It’s ugly though. ...

When moving around in my terminal, I use two commands in sequence all the time. You’ll know them, they are cd and ls. Change directory, then list the contents of that directory. I decided this was getting annoying. Why is there not a single command to do this? Why not make one? I first thought an alias might work, but then I realised you cannot call an alias, hand it a variable and have it do something after that variable. <alias> <user variable> <second action> is just not possible. ...

It’s great that your OS tries to protect you from yourself, because let’s face it, you don’t always make the best decisions. When you download an app macOS slaps a com.apple.quarantine extended attribute on it. This is what triggers Gatekeeper’s super duper handy popup asking you if you are really, truly sure you want to open a thing you just deliberately downloaded. If you could just click OK on this and move on, that’d be fine. It’s a little reminder that “hey, you did a thing you might not want to do”. And it does this sometimes. Other times it will flat out deny you running it. You’d have to go into settings and click through menus to allow the application in order to actually launch it. This is going too far. Luckily a single terminal command will handle it in one fell swoop. ...

So you’ve now got yourself a dumb phone. You bought an e-reader for reading and an old iPod for them tunes. You’ve deleted Candy Crush - I worry that reference is old as fuck now - and instead you’ve gotten yourself a small gaming handheld, be it a vintage Game Boy or one of those cool new AliExpress ones. You jot down whatever’s important on trusty old paper, in that little book you’ve got in your back pocket. Along with it you obviously got a pen. A special pen, perhaps one you meticulously picked out. It might even be a fountain pen. ...

When you see one, it’s AI. In any text, if there’s a dash anywhere, AI wrote it. It’s a guarantee. Except, it is not. I recently dove into my old websites in my This Domain post. I noticed something. All the way back in 2004 I used dashes in my writing. They show up in the screenshot I took of my site in 2012 as well. Twice even! Both the first and the second post have one. There’s three of them in the first post of this website even. ...

The Jorisvandijk.com domain goes back quite a while. Using any whois tool, you can discover it’s been registered 17 years, 3 months and 26 days ago on January 31st 2009. It first appears in the Wayback Machine on the 13th of July 2003. Have a look at it in all its glory. July 13th 2003 As you can see it’s not completely cached. The iframe on the left got lost. If you read the text you’ll notice this is not the first iteration of this site either. I upgraded from using tables for the UI, to using div elements. Cool. 2003 is six years older than 2009. But looking at the footer of the site in the image, you can see the real date it was once registered. 1997. That’s 29 years ago! This address is ancient. It predates the likes of YouTube and even Google (by a year, give or take). ...

I have been switching browsers a lot these last few months. The new CEO of Mozilla, Anthony Enzor-DeMeo, stated in his post that “It [Firefox] will evolve into a modern AI browser”. This rubbed me the wrong way. Granted, Mozilla has been adding junk to their browser for a while now and none of it is good. He floated the idea of blocking ad-blockers in an interview. The Verge wrote: “He says he could begin to block ad blockers in Firefox and estimates that’d bring in another $150 million, but he doesn’t want to do that. It feels off-mission”. ...

On an Apple Macbook, there’s a file browser. It’s always “open” and always in the program switcher, which bugs the heck out of me. It’s called Finder and I need it to go away when I am not using it. By default it’s impossible to actually quit Finder due to it being such a large part of the OS. It even handles the desktop, for example. I personally don’t use macOS in the intended way. I don’t have a launcher bar, all my applications are launched through shortcuts. I do not use, or really ever see the desktop. I do use the application switcher. A lot. Having that stupid face icon there is one thing. Having to tab over it to get from one app to the next is too much. ...