Category: Mac

Categories
Mac

Remote Control another Mac on your network

You need to go to the Mac you want to access and under System Preferences->Sharing activate the following:

macOS Sharing Settings

On all this options you can limit the users that can have access.

On the File Sharing option, you can determine what folders can be accessed in the network and by whom.

On Remote Management you will be asked what you want from this list, use option/alt click to select all:

macOS Remote Management Options

Once that is done you can go to the other Mac you want to use and in Finder you should see the Mac on the sidebar under Locations or click Network:

macOS Finder ScreenShare Connect As

You see on the top right options to Share Screen or Connect As. Click Share Screen to get remote control of the other Mac or Connect As to simple browse the folders that you gave permissions on the File Sharing step.

Categories
Dev Mac

Change macOS terminal shell to Bash 5

Since macOS Catalina that zsh is the default shell. From what I could understand this was caused by a change in Bash license to GPL after version 3.

So, since version 3 of Bash is pretty old they changed the default to zsh.

Since Homebrew is not yet fully Apple Silicon compatible using Homebrew was not an option. If your Mac runs Intel a simple brew install bash will install a newer version of Bash on /usr/local/bin/bash (if you had Homebrew installed obviously). You can follow the updates for Homebrew compatibility with Apple Silicon here.

This leaves us with installing Bash the good old fashion way:

curl -O https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/bash/bash-5.1.tar.gz
tar xzf bash-5.1.tar.gz
cd bash-5.1
./configure --prefix=/usr/local && make && sudo make install

After that is done, you just need to add Bash to your available shells:

sudo bash -c "echo /usr/local/bin/bash >> /private/etc/shells"

And make Bash the active one:

chsh -s /usr/local/bin/bash

Open a new terminal window or restart your terminal app and check with:

echo "$SHELL"
bash --version

Categories
Dev Mac Tech

MAMP Pro – Oops, something is badly wrong!

Out of the blue, MAMP Pro started presenting me with an alert when I tried opening the app:

Oops, something is badly wrong!
Either you did not provide the necessary admin credentials or the MAMP PRO package could not be initialized correctly. You can either restart the application and try again or re-install the software.

I contacted support, they advised me to uninstall/reinstall and that didn’t help. The alert kept on being the only thing I saw when I tried to start the app and then it would just close.

After doing some digging around the web, I ended up here and the following command fixed it:

sudo launchctl load -w /Library/LaunchDaemons/de.appsolute.mampprohelper.plist

I suspect this might have been caused because I manually disabled MAMP Pro helper Launch Agent on macOS. Still not sure why MAMP Pro needs that running to start the app but it looks like it does.

BTW: the databases and settings for MAMP Pro are not in /Applications/MAMP but in /Library/Application Support/appsolute/MAMP PRO/

Categories
Intel Mac Tech

Mac Mini 2018 graphics Intel UHD 630 and 4K Monitor

The Mac Mini 2018 comes with Intel UHD 630 graphics without a possibility to upgrade unless you use an external eGPU.

I was a bit worried about how it would perform with a 4K monitor scaled at 2560×1440. I use 27 inches 4K monitors and they need to be scaled to 2560×1440 as MacOS default resolution from a 4K monitor (3840×2160) is 1920×1080 and that is way too big for 27 inches.

The problem with scaled resolutions in MacOS is that they degrade performance, as internally the resolution needs to double and then be shrunk down. In my case 2560×1440 is in fact 5120×2880 (5K). As the warning mentions when you scale in System Preferences->Monitors “Using a scaled resolution may affect performance”.

I bought the base configuration Mac Mini in 2020, the 2018 Mac Mini in 2020 comes with 256GB SSD PCIe and the same Intel Quad-Core i3-8100 (graphics UHD 630) and 8GB of RAM.

My plan was to upgrade the RAM myself and save some money and I did to 16GB.

When I initially tried the Mac Mini with 8GB of RAM and scaled resolution there was some noticeable slowness (visual lag and stuttering) in the UI, most noticeable to me when scrolling and on entering/exiting Mission Control. I was getting a bit frustrated/worried but the strange thing is that the graphics history in Activity Monitor didn’t report large spikes in usage during those actions.

After upgrading to 16GB of RAM it felt much smoother. Probably not as smooth as running default scale but for me it has been working fine.

Categories
Mac Monitors Tech

Cheaper high resolution external ISP Monitor for Mac (retina like)

For a long time that I wanted to have a “retina” screen on my desktop but as I work from multiple locations (and needed to buy more than one monitor) I wanted a solution that was not expensive and where I could plug and play from a Macbook or Mac Mini.

I knew I needed to go 4K or 5K to get the crisp text and high resolution images but the cheaper monitors use TN or VA panels and those suck in terms of color accuracy, viewing angles and general brightness. So, I knew I had to go with ISP (or OLED but currently OLED monitors are rare and very expensive).

After multiple searches I decided that the LG 27UK850-W (ISP 27 inches 4K) monitor would be a good solution. It had good color accuracy (with some configuration), little distortion from different angles and USB-C that allowed for single cable setup with a MacBook (charge+image+passthrough for USB hub).

Still, this was not cheap and when I finally decided to buy a second monitor for another location, I went with the LG 27UL550-W (ISP 27 inches 4K). The panel is vey similar. The 550 loses some peak brightness, it also loses USB-C + the USB hub and it has “uglier” bezels but I don’t notice any difference in image quality from one to the other and it cost me almost 3 times less (in a promo).

I think that the LG 27UL550-W is a great value for money if you want a 4K display for productivity work.