Quickie

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. ...

Rsync is an amazing utility to copy (or sync) stuff from one place to another without having to worry about the command getting cut. With a plain cp, an interrupted transfer means starting over from scratch. Rsync compares source and destination, skipping files that are already there, and with --partial it can even resume a file that was only halfway through. It can also remember ownership and permissions, and even copy over ssh. That is, with the right flags, which I can never remember. Hence this post. ...

I’m used to formatting disks on Linux with GParted, but unfortunately there’s no version for MacOS. They offer some sort of bootable image, but that sounded like a hassle. Luckily it turns out MacOS has a built-in tool. Usage is simple. I wanted to format a drive to ExFat, and all it takes is: 1 diskutil list To list the drives on your system and find the name of the one you want to format. Then: ...