How to enable MacFuse/PCloud Drive on Mac Sonoma 14.2.1
I recently upgraded to Mac Sonoma 14.2.1 and MacFuse stopped loading which affected my ability to load PCloud and NTFS drives. I spent a few days trying to troubleshoot everything and in the end it turned out I had to disable Mac System Integrity Protection to get everything to load. I’m sharing in case it helps anyone else.
To disable SIP on your Mac Sonoma for extensions like MacFuse and pCloud Drive:
- Shut down your Mac: Turn off your Mac completely by pressing and holding the power button until the screen goes black.
- Restart in Recovery Mode: Enabling Recovery Mode depends on your Mac. You can try the steps below or follow Apple’s guide here.
Power on your Mac and immediately press and hold Command (⌘) + R to enter Recovery Mode.
Power on your Mac and hold the power button down until Other Options displays. - Open Terminal: In Recovery Mode, select “Utilities” in the macOS Utilities window and select “Terminal.”
- Disable SIP: Type
csrutil disablein Terminal and press Enter. This disables System Integrity Protection (SIP). - Restart Mac: Click the Apple menu and select “Restart” to reboot your Mac with SIP disabled.
- Re-enable SIP (if needed): Follow the same steps but use
csrutil enablein Terminal to re-enable SIP.
Note: Disabling SIP poses security risks. Re-enable it once you’ve installed the necessary extensions. Only disable SIP when necessary and understand the potential risks involved.
How to Delete a Row in Excel Using the Elgato Stream Deck
Recently I was working on a massive Excel Spreadsheet and needed to manually review each entry and clean up rows that were no longer needed. The Elgato Stream Deck came in handy for a quick shortcut so I thought I’d share it in case anyone else can use it.
I took this opportunity to practice creating the first of what I hope are many training videos. This took me around 30 minutes to do from start to finish as I had to learn the video editing software including how to record, how to split and edit, and how to add text overlays. Hopefully the next videos will be faster but it was a fun exercise and I hope someone else finds it useful.
Installing font awesome pro with bun
After recently switching to bun.sh, I was trying to install Font Awesome Pro. It uses a private registry but their docs have not been updated to support non-npm package managers and bun does not yet support .npmrc files.
You can configure a private registry using an organization scope. First, you must get your auth token from your paid Font Awesome account by going to your account page, scrolling down to the Tokens section, and copying the token.
Copy and paste this string, and replace YOUR_TOKEN_HERE with the token you copied above:
[install.scopes]
"@fortawesome" = { token="YOUR_TOKEN_HERE" , url =
"https://npm.fontawesome.com/"}Open the terminal and enter these commands:
touch $HOME/.bunfig.toml
nano $HOME/.bunfig.tomlPaste in the config above with your token and then hit CTRL+X to quit, and Y to save when prompted. Now you should be able to run
bun add @fortawesome/fontawesome-proHow to Get Laravel Debugging to work with PHPStorm and MAMP Pro 5
This has been one of the more aggravating things I’ve had to deal with in setting up software for development. I’ve followed the official documentation from JetBrains, over 30 other blog tutorials, and literally failed in getting any of them to work.
I figured out an easy way to make the setup work so I’m sharing it in case someone else finds it useful and for self-reference since I’ll probably forget how to do this again in 6 months when I start a new project.
MAMP Configuration
- Load MAMP and setup your host. Make note of the host name as you will need it to configure PHPStorm.
- Go to PHP on the left under Languages.
- On the right under Extensions, check Xdebug (Debugger).
PHPStorm Configuration
- Load PHPStorm and load your Laravel project.
- Setup your PHP executable and interpreter as per the official documentation and then resume here.
- On the top right of PHPStorm, select Edit Configurations from the dropdown.
- Click on the Plus Button on the top left of the dialog and then select ‘PHP Web Page’.
- Enter a descriptive name in the textbox. I use the host name from MAMP so it’s easy to identify visually. Click on the 3 dots with next to Server.
- Enter a descriptive name. I use the host name here as well. For the host, omit the http/https and just add the host name from MAMP.
- Click OK
- Now add your breakpoints and click on the Debugger Button on the top right and PHPStorm will load the site into the browser and break when breakpoints are hit.
Happy debugging!
Self-signed SSL certificates not working with MAMP and Chrome
I use MAMP Pro for most of my PHP development and Chrome has annoyingly been blocking the self-signed SSL certificates MAMP generates, saying the certificate is not valid and “Your connection is not private”:
Thankfully, I found an easy solve to fix this. These steps assume you’ve created a host in MAMP. You’ll need to go to the SSL tab of the host you are trying to fix and
- Check the SSL button
- Click the self-signed certificate button.
- Fill in the fields in the dialog modal and click Generate
- You’ll be prompted to save the certificate. Choose whatever location you’d like.
- Click on the circle with the arrow to open the directory where the certificate was saved.
- In the finder window that opens, double click the .crt file (be sure it’s the same file name that’s in the SSL window in case you have multiple).
- In the Add Certificate window, click Add. I testing adding it to login and system and both worked, so add whichever you prefer.
- In the Certificates Window, double click the certificate. It’s easier to filter by name if you have a lot of items.
- In the next modal window, choose Always Trust from the dropdown.
- Close out the next confirmation window, and you’ll be prompted to authenticate with your mac login to save the updates.
Go back to Chrome, and reload the page and the certificate should work now:
How to get website average latency in BASH
I was working on a project today and wanted to be able to get the average latency for an API that I was working on. Performance is a concern because we’re running the API over a VPN, and then SSH tunneling over to another server. I wanted a quick way to do it and wrote a little bash function that will calculate the average for me. I couldn’t find an example on how to do this online so I’m sharing in case anyone else runs into the same issue.
This is tested on Mac only. Add these two functions to your .bashrc and do a shellupdate in terminal to load the latest, or just grab my dotfiles from my github: https://github.com/gregvarghese/dotfiles
curlb(){
curl -s -o /dev/null -w '%{time_starttransfer}\n' "$@"
}
# Usage:
# latencyavg [# of times to run] [URL]
function latencyavg()
{
time=0.00
for (( c=1; c<=$1; c++ ))
do
num1=$(curlb $2 -H 'Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate, sdch' -H 'Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.8,ja;q=0.6' -H 'Upgrade-Insecure-Requests: 1' -H 'User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_11_4) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/50.0.2661.86 Safari/537.36' -H 'Connection: keep-alive' --compressed)
echo "$c - $num1"
time=$(echo "$time + $num1" | bc -l)
done
echo "Total Time $time"
echo $(echo $time / $1 | bc -l)
}Usage example:
latencyavg 20 https://www.godaddy.comHow to fix npm WARN checkPermissions Missing write access to /usr/local/lib/node_modules
A friend was running into an error when using node to install a package. When installing the package he was getting the error “npm WARN checkPermissions Missing write access to /usr/local/lib/node_modules”. The fix turned out to be pretty simple and he just needed to take ownership of the node_modules folder.
Open terminal and run this simple snippet to fix the problem:
sudo chown -R $(whoami) /usr/local/lib/node_modules/How to remove wrapping tags in PHP Storm
How often do you code something and need to delete a wrapping link or div? I was using PHPStorm and had grabbed some code from another file that had links in the tags which weren’t needed in the new file. I didn’t want to manually remove each link and after a quick look around PHPStorm’s menus, discovered that PHPStorm has a really useful command to remove the wrapping element for you.
Select the element, then from the menu, choose Code > Unwrap/Remove… or use the keyboard shortcut, Command + Shift + Backspace and then choose the appropriate wrapping element to remove.
How to fix VMWare Fusion Pro 10 “Cannot find a valid peer process to connect to”
I recently got a new mac and was migrating a VMWare Windows Virtual Machine from my other computer. When starting the virtual machine, I received a random message from VMWare Fusion saying “Cannot find a valid peer process to connect to.”
The fix was rather simple as it was just Apple blocking VMWare from running. To fix it, follow these steps:
- Open System Preferences by searching in Spotlight or clicking the gear icon in the dock.
- On the top row there is an icon for Security and Privacy – Click that icon
- Near the bottom of the screen that appears the following statement
“System software from developer “VMWare, Inc.” was blocked from loading” - Click Allow
How to use Teensyduino to send cmd + enter
Recently we purchased a bunch of Teensyduino powered buttons for a trivia game we were building for a client’s convention as a fun learning experience. Now that the conference is through, the buttons are sitting unused, and my boss asked me if I could reprogram one of them so he could use it to send emails through Outlook on Mac.
It was a fun little exercise since I’ve never worked with programming Teensyduinos before. It turned out that this wasn’t so complicated to accomplish. I figured I’d share the script in case anyone else would find it useful.
int key1 = KEY_ENTER;
int spacesAllowed = 1;
void setup() {
Serial.begin(9600);
pinMode(10, INPUT);
digitalWrite(10, HIGH); // C7
}
void loop() {
if (digitalRead(10) == LOW && spacesAllowed > 0){
Keyboard.set_modifier(MODIFIERKEY_GUI);
Keyboard.set_key1(key1);
Keyboard.send_now();
delay(5);
spacesAllowed = 0; // no spaces allowed anymore
}
if (digitalRead(10) == HIGH){
Keyboard.set_modifier(0);
Keyboard.set_key1(0);
Keyboard.send_now();
delay(5);
spacesAllowed = 1; // button is up again
}
}
If you need to send through Outlook on Windows, change the line
Keyboard.set_modifier(MODIFIERKEY_GUI);
to
Keyboard.set_modifier(MODIFIERKEY_CTRL);