Skip to content

Replace the mini music player that Apple took away

Back in the early Mac OS X iTunes era, there was a wonderful small window available that had control buttons, volume control, a visual progress bar, and a text display showing the artist, song, and album—it could even display a graphic equalizer in lieu of the artist-album-song info:

It was perfect. Sadly, it was last seen in iTunes 10 in Mac OS X 10.7. And today's version, while offering a mini mode, isn't nearly as mini or as functional as it used to be; read on for some details…

tldr summary: Mario Guzman's Music MiniPlayer is a full-retro near-perfect replacement for the original mini player. It's free, and I love it. If you're not into retro UI, Silicio on the App Store is also free and quite good, though you can't freely resize the window.

[continue reading…]



Revisiting literal music videos, 14 years later

2023 Update: Over the span of some 14 years since I wrote this (wow), all of the YouTube links broke. I've fixed them (except for two that sadly vanished), though you may see a "view on YouTube" message instead of being able to watch them as overlays here. I also added three more videos—two thanks to comments from Aaron and Jordan—and one I just stumbled on while searching for new links. Originally published June 10, 2009.

Recently a friend introduced me to something called literal videos. A literal video is a remake, with a twist, of a popular music video, usually something older from the 1980s or 1990s.

The twist in the remake is that the lyrics for the song in the video are changed to reflect what's actually happening in the video. So if there's a shot of a car driving down the street, the literal video's lyrics will be something along the lines of "So there's a car ... driving ... driving down the street."

The words are sung by someone doing their best to match the musical sound and pacing of the original singer, making it seem like this is how the video has always been.

It's actually much harder to explain than it is to demonstrate. So, without further ado, here are four six of the funniest (to me, at any rate) literal videos I've found. If you haven't seen the original versions of these videos, the literal videos may not be quite so funny; I've included links to the originals, too.

[continue reading…]



Speedier screen sharing startup in Sonoma

macOS Sonoma introduces a revised Screen Sharing application that lives in the Applications → Utilities folder1Though that's not really where it is, but that's not important…. It presents a list of recently-connected devices:

Select one, and you'll see the username and password dialog for that machine. While the GUI is nice to have, it's also slower than the old method: In Ventura and earlier, you could launch the (not in Utilities) Screen Sharing application, and start typing the IP address:

Select the host from the list, and you were done. This is much quicker than launching an app and waiting for the GUI, then navigating and selecting the desired machine. After just a bit of digging, I found a much quicker way to connect to my Macs in Sonoma (and earlier versions of macOS): The "vnc" URL scheme.

[continue reading…]



A quick iPhone 13 Pro vs iPhone 15 Pro photo comparison

I upgrade my phone every two or three years; I just moved from the 13 Pro to the 15 Pro, primarily for the new camera features. I'm not a pro photographer, nor even a prosumer photographer. I do like seeing how things have progressed, however.

So here are three photos shot with each phone, taken seconds apart, with each camera set to its highest resolution and HEIC-formatted photos. I then edited the photos only to improve their alignment, and reduce the sizes. See if you can guess which photo of each set was taken with which phone.

Indoors

[continue reading…]



New theme with a somewhat updated look

My blog's general appearance dates back to 2014, with a face lift in 2017. But the site was still using a (very!) old theme as its base, and that old code was throwing a ton of errors into the logs (mainly warnings). I felt it was time to find a new base to build from, so the site is now using a modified version of the Neve theme.

Things hopefully look mostly the same, though there will be some minor changes made going forward as I discover things that aren't working as they should, and clean up some loose ends—and probably change my mind on fonts a dozen more times. Please let me know if you run into any issues with formatting or functionality on any of the pages.

Update: Thanks to some great help from Many Tricks' founder and resident CSS expert Peter, the theme should now look fine on all devices—and he cleared up many other minor issues I was having. Thanks, Peter!



How to enable the “Beta updates” feature in macOS 13.4+

As of macOS 13.4, there's supposed to be a "Beta updates" button in System Settings > General > Software Update, as seen here:

Sure enough, that button is there on my iMac…but it wasn't on my MacBook Pro. Everything I read on Apple's site and elsewhere said it should simply exist, but it didn't. After much futzing around, I stumbled on the solution:

Click the ⓘ button on the Automatic Updates line to open the settings for automatic updates. My guess is that you'll find that the "Install macOS updates" setting is disabled. Enable it and click Done. The "Beta updates" feature may appear now, but if it doesn't, open that same panel again, and disable the "Install macOS updates" setting. You will now definitely see the "Beta updates" feature.

Nowhere in Apple's documentation does it mention that automatic updates must be enabled (at least once) in order to see the "Beta updates" feature. But that seems to be the case, as this fix has now worked for three Macs.



Idiot proofing my PC’s power switch

Although I'm a Mac person, I've almost always had a Windows PC in the house—partly to stay current on the competing OS, but mostly because I enjoy many PC games that never make it to the Mac. I tend to keep these machines much longer than I do my Macs, though—my 2008 PC lasted until the 2017 Frankenmac, and that one lasted until a few months ago, when I decided it was finally time to replace it (as it couldn't run Windows 11).

Long story short, I bought an assemblage of parts and built a new PC, which I love except for one niggling issue that was bugging me. The new machine has very quiet water cooling, a higher-end video card, super-fast SSD, and (most importantly for me) a nearly-silent case. But it's that case that was causing the niggling issue: The power button design was absolutely horrid, leading me to accidentally turn the machine on and off more than once.

[continue reading…]



Mazda’s Magnificent Miniaturized Marvel: MX-5 Miata

Way back in 1989, Mazda introduced the MX-5 Miata, its take on the two-seat convertible sports car. To say the car has been successful would be an understatement; it's perennially well reviewed and still going strong 34 years later.

Over the years, we've been lucky enough to own a couple—the first was a 1999 version that we sold shortly before the kids came along. And the second is still ours, a 2020 model that we bought used last summer...

We bought it to have something fun and involving to drive around in—complete with manual transmission, just like in the good old days. But this post isn't about our car, it's about something amazing that Mazda has done—or rather hasn't done—to the Miata over the 34 years of the model's existence: It hasn't bloated it into some oversized imitation of the car it used to be.

[continue reading…]



The greatest dishwasher innovation ever

This is definitely a "first world problem and solution," but in case anyone's in the market soon, I thought I'd share…

We'd had our dishwasher for over 12 years, and by last summer, it was starting to show its age—two of the modes couldn't be used at all (the buttons wouldn't activate), and the top rack would constantly want to fall out, despite my replacing its stoppers at some point. It was also quite loud.

Conveniently, I visited my father last summer and saw their dishwasher, which featured a thin silverware rack located at the top of the washer:

I'd never seen this feature before—hey, it'd been 12 years since we looked at new dishwashers—but after one cycle, I was a convert. This tray solves the single worst issue with traditional dishwashers: Loading and unloading the silverware bins.

[continue reading…]