March 14, 2024

Monterey/Big Sur – Dialog box not responding to mouse clicks

I’ve run into this problem multiple times where Monterey prompts that an application needs access to a folder such as Downloads or Documents. However, when I click ‘OK’ nothing happens. When I click ‘Don’t Allow’ nothing happens. The button responds visually, but doesn’t actually do anything. Further, I can move the dialog, drag it around the screen, and make it go away, but the actual buttons don’t register. After searching, a lot of people have run into the same issue. You can click everywhere else, but those specific system dialogs don’t respond. About the only key that works is pressing ESC to make it go away. I found the issue, at least for my system. If I turn off the mouse pointer tool, myPoint Pro the issue goes away and I click the dialogs and they respond as expected. myPoint Pro has no issues anywhere else, nor does it have issues on my Mac Pro running Mojave. This seems to […]

March 13, 2024

A 4 year Covid retrospective

It was March, a Friday the 13th in 2020 to be exact, an auspicious day to start a 4 year lockdown. That was the day the country shut down and we took shelter to curb the spread of Covid. At the time, I wasn’t even aware of what Covid was. I’m not known for keeping up on current events. It was like an orderly evacuation. I left everything at work, including this Mac Pro, figuring I’d be back in a week. Oh the naivety. While everything has reopened, I’m still taking shelter, just to be safe. And quite frankly, I prefer it this way. After 4 years, I’m entrenched in the remote working lifestyle. I work from home 100% of the time. It took a hot minute to adjust, but I have the pieces to be my most productive self while steering clear of contagion. Those first couple of months were a little unsettling. Obviously there was pandemic uncertainty. Matters […]

February 6, 2024

Using AI to Learn Bash shell scripting

January was a busy and interesting month. I spent a fair bit of time working with AI as my mentor/tutor to dig deeper into Bash shell scripting. I haven’t used AI for mentoring before and it was a pretty fun experience. Bash is incredibly powerful, and you can combine it with Keyboard Maestro to create some powerful applets. It’s easy to make a UI in Keyboard Maestro to populate values, then call a shell script to accomplish some really impressive tasks. To get the ball rolling, I started off asking for tutorials on different aspects of Bash scripting, such as “Can you give me a tutorial on Strings in Bash scripting.” That would produce a short lesson on Strings with a few examples. It gave me the basic usage, which was perfect. In those simple examples, it also provided some other topics I could look up. Then, I moved on to practical examples of where and how to use various […]

October 15, 2023

Converting audio and video with Permute

The number of converter apps out there is almost overwhelming, perhaps even maddening if you just want to get the job done. Permute is the other part of the Downie combination that converts files between formats and extracts audio. Permute reads and writes to multiple formats, but by default there are presets for MP4, MP3, AAC and settings for specific mobile devices. If you need more, go into Preferences and define a new Preset. My uses include extracting audio from a video file, converting .mov to .mp4, and the occasional conversion to MP3. For my needs it’s a three step process, drag the video files onto Permute, select MP3 as the format, click Convert. After a time, I have the full audio track as a separate file. Permute can also trim, crop if you’re trying to make something specific. I’ve never had need to go this route, but I have used the Stitch Together feature, which is available through the […]

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