Recursive

Category: Code

  • Going Mac – Part 4

    Set up from scratch

    It’s silly how many settings aren’t sync’d to one’s Apple account.

    MacOS install

    TBF, this part would be more difficult to arrange since you’d have to log in.

    • Select Language and Location
    • Select WiFi
    • Enable Location
    • Allow Screen Time
    • Disable Siri
    • Allow FileVault
    • Setup Touch ID (add other index finger later)
    • Skip Apple Pay
    • Light / Dark / Auto mode

    MacOS settings

    • Control Centre, Clock Options, Show Seconds
    • Trackpad settings
      • Secondary click
        • Two Fingers
      • Enable Tap to click
      • More Gestures
        • Disable Notification Centre, Mission Control, Launchpad, Show Desktop

    • Empty the Dock
    • Turn on Dock Hiding

    • create ~/code directory

    • Replace Finder Sidebar items with folders in iCloud
    • Finder Settings
      • Advanced
        • Show all filename extensions
        • Keep folders on top
    • Cmd+Shift+. to show hidden files

    Installs

    JetBrains

    • Run JetBrains Toolbox, login, install
      • Open JB product
        • Do not import settings
        • Disable AI Assistant
        • Settings Sync
          • Fetch settings, restart
        • GitHub CoPilot
          • Sign in

    GitKraken

    • Sign in with email

    Appearance

    • Change Wallpaper

    Alfred

    • Disable Spotlight shortcut
      • System Settings, Keyboard, Shortcuts, Spotlight
    • Set Alfred shortcut
    • Import Alfred Prefs
      • and workflows
      • and snippets (e.g. emoji)
    • Enable clipboard history
      • and Advanced, Diacritic and …

  • Going Mac – Part 3

    So it seems I’m not going back. I still use a Windows machine for the family PC, but here I am on another MacBook Pro for work.

    Install Brew with this

    /bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"

    Then save the following as a Brew bundle file, `Brewfile`

    tap "homebrew/bundle"
tap "homebrew/cask-fonts"
brew "n"
brew "powerlevel10k"
brew "zsh-autosuggestions"
brew "zsh-syntax-highlighting"
cask "alfred"
cask "font-fira-code"
cask "gitkraken"
cask "hyper"
cask "jetbrains-toolbox"
cask "notunes"
cask "rectangle"
cask "whatsapp"

    and run brew bundle.

    Install Oh My Zsh with

    sh -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh/master/tools/install.sh)"

    Aliases to add to the end of ~/.zshrc:

    alias ls="eza"
alias l="eza -la"
alias c="clear"
alias cat="bat"

  • Going Mac – Part 2

    In a follow up to my previous posts, I’m updating my list of brew installs, and have discovered the bundle subcommand.

    Here’s my Brewfile:

    tap "homebrew/bundle"
tap "homebrew/cask"
tap "homebrew/cask-fonts"
tap "homebrew/cask-versions"
tap "homebrew/core"
tap "homebrew/services"
brew "btop"
brew "freetype"
brew "figlet"
brew "httpie"
brew "ncdu"
brew "the_silver_searcher"
brew "tldr"
brew "unar"
cask "alfred"
cask "amazon-music"
cask "firefox"
cask "font-fira-code-nerd-font"
cask "fontgoggles"
cask "gitkraken"
cask "http-toolkit"
cask "hyper"
cask "jetbrains-toolbox"
cask "notunes"
cask "postman"
cask "proxyman"
cask "rectangle"
cask "rocket"
cask "slack"
cask "the-unarchiver"
cask "whatsapp"

  • Going Mac – Part 1

    Part of documenting my transition to web dev on Mac is to record what needs to be set up  & configured. Should things ever go awry, this post could be a shortcut to getting back to a work-ready state.

     

    Apps etc installed

    The following needed to be installed manually.

    The following were installed via the commands in the next section.

     

    Other tasks

    Show hidden files. Apparently this needs the command line!

     

    Commands run

    /usr/bin/ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"

brew update
brew upgrade

brew tap homebrew/dupes 
brew tap homebrew/versions 
brew tap homebrew/homebrew-php 
brew tap caskroom/fonts 
brew tap caskroom/cask 
brew install node
npm install --global gulp-cli 

brew unlink php70
brew install php71

brew install git-flow-avh
brew cask install font-fira-code
brew cask install iterm2
brew cask install gimp

sudo xcodebuild -license

     

    Other changes

     

    References

    https://developerjack.com/blog/2016/08/26/Installing-PHP71-with-homebrew/

     

  • Going Mac – Part 0

    I’ll soon be starting a new job,  still in web development (as I have been for disturbingly more than a decade), though this time it’ll be in-house and for a huge company.

    I’ve been persuaded to go over to what I’ve long considered the dark side; Apple.

    I still don’t believe I’ll ever pay for Apple products with my own money, but it’s becoming clear that Windows really isn’t keeping up with the ease of development on MacOS, and my future employer will be the one stumping up the cash so what’s to lose?

    This is to be the 0th in a series of posts on my conversion, or will that be “enlightenment”? 0th not 1st because I’ve not started yet – I’m just beginning to look at what tools I’ll likely be using.

    Where I spend most of my work days at the moment is in the excellent JetBrains PHPStorm and I’m very pleased to see that I will be able to stick with it. The other software I use is the also excellent FileZilla and the frankly pretty ropey SourceTree. I will likely ditch both and finally get round to instead using the built-in functionality of PHPStorm, and, of course, modern deployment methods.

    I’m a fan of the command line, but it’s always been in *nix (mostly Debian on web servers and Raspberry Pis), so I’m hoping that the move to Apple will mean I can actually do all the modern web dev things instead of spending so much time persuading Windows to let me.

    So far, I’ve used all the contemporary techniques (proper MVC development, proper git usage like branching and pull-requests, npm, gulp, Sass), but never all in one project, and I’m really looking forward to it.

  • WordPress config snippet for dynamic domains

    Quite why this isn’t how WordPress works by default, I’ll probably never know.

    $domain = 'http' . (false ? 's' : '') . '://' . $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'];
define( 'WP_SITEURL', $domain );
define( 'WP_HOME', $domain );

    If anything, this snippet is for my own reference.

    Prevents redirects on development / staging sites without changing the wp-config.php

  • Google Sheets Formula – show an age from a DOB

    I couldn’t find a decent formula to show an age from a Date Of Birth, so I wrote this:

    =CONCAT(FLOOR((TODAY() - B2)/365),CONCAT("y ",CONCAT(FLOOR((((TODAY() - B2)/365) - FLOOR(((TODAY() - B2)/365))) * 12), "m")))

    Shows an age in years and months; e.g. “10y 6m”.

  • Regex to split “){” to two lines, retaining indenting

    I was quite proud to come up with this, so here’s my first blog post for a while:

    Search:
    ^([^\S\n]*)(.+))\s*{

    Replace:
    $1$2)\n$1{

    and as a bonus:
    ^([^\S\n]*)}\s*else\s*{
    $1}\n$1else\n$1{

    NB (2013-09): it seems that the escaping slashes in this post were lost  at some point, I’ve put them back, but not tested!

  • CSS3: Rounded Table Corners (No images)

    You cannot give a whole table (<table>) rounded corners using CSS, browsers will ignore it, you must round the corners of the cells (<td>) inside.

    The following uses CSS2 selectors (:first-child etc) and CSS3’s corner-rounding border-radius to selectively round the outer corners of the cells in the corners.
    This will work for any size table.

    table.rounded-corners tr:first-child td:first-child {
    	border-top-left-radius: 5px;
    }
    table.rounded-corners tr:first-child td:last-child {
    	border-top-right-radius: 5px;
    }
    table.rounded-corners tr:last-child td:first-child {
    	border-bottom-left-radius: 5px;
    }
    table.rounded-corners tr:last-child td:last-child {
    	border-bottom-right-radius: 5px;
    }

    And now, in 2025, with overly nested CSS, which ought to be changed to use block and inline rather than top/left/etc.:

    table.rounded-corners {
    tr {
        &:first-child {
            td {
                &:first-child {
                    border-top-left-radius: 5px;
                }

                &:last-child {
                    border-top-right-radius: 5px;
                }
            }

            &:last-child {
                td {
                    &:first-child {
                        border-bottom-left-radius: 5px;
                    }

                    &:last-child {
                        border-bottom-right-radius: 5px;
                    }
                }
            }
        }
    }
}

  • PHP Bug: json_encode() misleading warning on object with private properties

    I have found a peculiar issue with PHP’s json_encode() function.

    If you have an instance object with private properties and use json_encode() it will give you a very misleading warning.

    class ExampleObject {
    private $privateProperty;
    ...
}
$obj = new ExampleObject();
json_encode($obj);

    results in

    Warning: json_encode() … recursion detected …

    There are two workarounds in the comments for the function at php.net but this is simply a PHP bug as far as I am concerned.