Since the release of macOS Mojave, applications have required authorisation to access your personal data and locations including the ~/Documents and ~/Downloads directories.
Authorisation requests are routinely handled by macOS when an application requiring access is first launched. Occasionally, an application may need to be authorised by manually granting it access.
(more…)This WordPress site uses the Google Authenticator plugin to provide two-factor authentication (2FA) when logging-in to the administration area. Occasionally I need to temporarily disable 2FA in order to publish posts from the blogging software I use. Traditionally toggling 2FA is achieved from the WordPress backend. This post looks at two alternative methods of doing this locally from the command line.
(more…)The first line of a shell script is known as a shebang and typically determines which interpreter parses the script’s contents. However, this is not always the case and on these occasions it may be useful to know which interpreter is being used.
(more…)By all accounts setting-up your own mail server can be a complex task and one I’ve always shied away from until recently when I thought I’d give iRedMail a go. Thanks to this open-source mail server solution I now have my own fully-functioning, well-configured mail server handling mail for numerous mail accounts on several domains.
(more…)Webmin is installed on the server that hosts this site and for the longest time I’ve been accessing it remotely through its default port at https://tech-otaku.com:10000. Despite connections being encrypted through SSL and having two-factor authentication enabled in Webmin this still presents a security risk.
WP-CLI is the command-line interface for WordPress. It allows you to manage your WordPress site from the command line without using a web browser. I currently use WP-CLI to temporarily disable the WordPress Google Authenticator plugin, create and configure a version of this site to run in a local AMP environment on my Mac and – in conjunction with launchd – periodically change the posts that appear in the slider on this site’s home page.
(more…)While moving selected local files and folders to iCloud I came across a folder on my Mac containing a large number of documents some of which appeared to be duplicates of those on iCloud. Before deciding which ones to move, I wanted to check each one to see if it already existed on iCloud.
(more…)Every so often – usually around the time of a major new macOS release – I perform a clean install of the OS on my Macs. Along with restoring user data I tend to restore the configuration data of certain applications including the Microsoft Office applications. While this is a great timesaver, it can also cause some unexpected results. For example, the Recent file lists in Excel, PowerPoint and Word. Let’s use Word as an example.
(more…)It’s no secret that Desktop icons can be hidden in macOS, but unlike many user-configurable options neither System Preferences nor the Finder‘s preferences provide a way to toggle their display. It’s true that the Desktop display of drive icons and some device icons can be controlled through the Finder, but in this context Desktop icons refer to all icons shown on the Desktop including those that represent folders, files or symbolic links.
Prior to OS X Mavericks 10.9 a user’s Desktop image was stored in com.apple.desktop.plist located in the ~/Library/Preferences/ folder and changed from the command line using:
defaults write com.apple.desktop Background '{default = {ImageFilePath = "/path/to/desktop/image.jpg";};}'
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