Mac at Work (was FreeBSD on Dell C400, and other stuff)

long story.. Disk Utility partition lead to second container disk that looked wrong, so went into terminal and used diskutil eraseDisk to erase the whole disk and use APFS. That looked fine.  Had troubles with the network recovery.  Important content could not be downloaded so I wanted to boot from USB installer for Mojave, but I could not.  tried to use startup security utility, but since I had erased the drive, there was no admin password and so startup security utility would not run. I plugged in the USB drive and disk utility recognized it.  In terminal, I navigated to /Volumes/Install Mojave..../Contents/MacOS and ran InstallAssistant in the background.  That seems to have worked so far. After restart, everything was fine.

I wanted to prepare images to be posted on Facebook which means I needed to resize them to 1200x600 pixels and overlay a watermark.  I also want to keep a local copy of the image I post, so I decided to automate the image manipulations with a folder action and GraphicsMagick 1.3, which is available in MacPorts.  This is tested in Mojave and Catalina, but should work on most version of MacOS and OS X NOTE: My solution modifies the image that is saved in the folder and makes no backup copies. It also creates a temporary file called "wm" in the watched folder, then deletes it. Folder actions are performed on all new files that are put into a certain folder.  I created a new folder action in Automator with one action called "Run Shell Script".  In the top-right corner, I told Automator to pass the files as arguments to the script.  The script itself is shown below: for f in "$@" do dname = $( dirname "$f" ) /opt/local/bin/gm mogrify ...

Lately, I have been creating lots of how-to videos for my colleagues at work.  I like to include subtitles since some people may prefer to read the words I am saying.  We use Microsoft Stream to host the videos since it is part of our Office 365 subscription. One of the great things about Microsoft Stream is that it will automatically generate captions (subtitles) from the audio in the video file.  You can edit the captions right in the web interface as you watch the video.  Microsoft did a great job on this user experience. Today, I needed to burn the subtitles into the video because of limitations of the customers computers.    Handbrake does this well, but it does not understand the WebVTT format.  There are several online converters, but I do not like giving my content to unknown internet services, so I starting learning about the difference between the formats.  JBI Studios have a very helpful explanation about the differences.  I w...