Since I began using NextDNS, I noticed the top domain my Macbook was querying was ss-prod-ew1-notif-20.aws.adobess.com, by far. I use Lightroom and Photoshop so I had to install the Adobe Creative Cloud thing. Even though I disabled the only two settings that could enable Adobe stuff running in the background, I noticed a bunch of processes running anyway. I don’t know which one is at fault (maybe related to cloud storage syncing?

In my team at work, we have a whole Vagrant + Docker setup in order to run the development environment. We use VirtualBox as the provider for Vagrant. When I first set it up, everything went as expected and my VM was running fine. The next day, it wouldn’t connect over SSH and crashed. I ran vagrant up --provision && vagrant destroy -f countless times and experienced all kinds of strange and inconsistent errors:

At work we have some internal subdomains that only resolve via a specific DNS server only available via a VPN, that is pushed automatically upon connection. I don’t want all my queries to go trough this DNS resolver, mainly because the one I usually use blocks ads and trackers. After doing some research, I stumbled upon this tip on Mac OS X Hints from… 2004! The solution is simple: to specify the resolver to use for a specific domain, create a file named after the domain in /etc/resolver/ and add the nameservers.

Since I’ve switched to my 13" Macbook Pro nearly 2 years ago, I fell in love with the trackpad. It’s insanely good. It’s so good that I stopped using a mouse altogether, even though I had the Logitech G502 which is a pretty high-end gaming mouse. One of the things I couldn’t do without the trackpad was the gestures. Plus, I didn’t feel any strain on my forearm, unlike most laptops.

While I usually use a VPN in public places like cafes, I don’t always do on networks I trust more, like my home or University. Nearly all of my network traffic is encrypted thanks to HTTPS, so my DNS requests are the only plaintext data I sent out in the wild. I’ve been using DNS-over-TLS (DoT) on my Android phone for nearly 2 years thanks to Android’s native DoT support since version 9.

I absolutely love unlocking my MacBook Pro with my fingers. I could live without it, of course, but it’s really convenient! The good news is that it’s natively available as a PAM module! Meaning Touch ID can be used to authenticate with sudo. All you need to do is to add this line to /etc/pam.d/sudo: # sudo: auth account password session auth sufficient pam_tid.so #<= this line auth sufficient pam_smartcard.so auth required pam_opendirectory.

…and make it look like High Sierra’s. With macOS Mojave, Apple disabled a feature called “Subpixel antialiasing”. Apparently, it is some complex, legacy code, and they decided to remove it. On Hacker News, ridiculous_fish, an ex-macOS software engineer, says subpixel antialiasing is painful to implement: ex-MacOS SWE here. Subpixel antialiasing is obnoxious to implement. It requires threading physical pixel geometry up through multiple graphics layers, geometry which is screen-dependent (think multi-monitor).