Automator Action to Toggle the Display of Desktop Icons in macOS

3-minute read

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.

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Setting the Desktop Image in macOS Mojave From the Command Line

Steve

Mac

14-minute read

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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Setting the Date and Time Format for the macOS Menu Bar Clock Using Terminal

Steve

Mac

4-minute read

In the Clock tab of the Date & Time pane of System Preferences you can choose between displaying a digital or analog clock in the menu bar. For a digital clock there are five options that determine how the date and time are displayed:

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Add a Recent or Favorites Folder to Your Dock Using the macOS Terminal

Steve

Mac

3-minute read

Type the query add recents dock terminal into any Internet search engine and most – if not all – relevant entries on the first results page will give the following code or a slight variation of it:

defaults write com.apple.dock persistent-others -array-add '{"tile-data" = {"list-type" = 1;}; "tile-type" = "recents-tile";}'; killall Dock

Most of these articles are from 2015 or earlier and the Mac OS has changed a lot since, but the code still appears to do exactly as advertised.

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Conditional Statement in Python One-liner on Command Line

Steve

Mac

3-minute read

I had a situation where I needed to pass code to Python in the form of a single command instead of a script file. While this is easily done by invoking Python in command mode, the code contained a conditional statement that caused Python to throw an error.

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Secure Erasing a Mac Fusion Drive

Steve

Mac

8-minute read

Before selling my late 2015 27″ iMac Retina 5K I wanted to secure erase its 1TB Fusion Drive consisting of a 24GB SSD and 1TB HDD. Secure erasing an HDD is simple enough using the Security Options in Disk Utility, but for Fusion Drives and SSDs this option is not available. To secure erase the iMac’s HDD I first needed to break the Fusion Drive into its constituent parts using Terminal.

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Changing the MySQL Root User Password in MAMP

Steve

Local Server

4-minute read

Having recently changed my local testing server environment from XAMPP to MAMP v2.0.5 I wanted to change the password for the MySQL root user. By default it’s set to root.

Changing the MySQL password for the root user was straightforward enough, but locating and editing the files to reflect the new password was a different story. Failure to update all the necessary files results in MAMP reporting the following error:

/Applications/MAMP/Library/bin/mysqlcheck: Got error: 1045: Access denied for user 'root'@'localhost' (using password: YES) when trying to connect

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Entering File and Folder Paths on the macOS Command Line

Steve

Mac

2-minute read

The one thing that trips me up time and again when using the command line in Terminal or other terminal emulator is being able to navigate the directory structure and target files or folders. After struggling getting the correct file or folder path I’m usually greeted with No such file or directory reminding me that the command line doesn’t like spaces in file and folder paths.

With that in mind here are a few ways to enter file and folder paths on the command line.

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