→ NVIDIA DGX Spark: great hardware, early days for the ecosystem

This Simon Willison’s post is mainly about NVIDIA’s DGX Spark, which has just started shipping, but what really caught my attention was the part where he mentioned Tailscale, and the subheading is “Tailscale was made for this”:

Having a machine like this on my local network is neat, but what’s even neater is being able to access it from anywhere else in the world, from both my phone and my laptop.

Tailscale is perfect for this. I installed it on the Spark (using the Ubuntu instructions here), signed in with my SSO account (via Google)… and the Spark showed up in the “Network Devices” panel on my laptop and phone instantly.

I can SSH in from my laptop or using the Termius iPhone app on my phone. I’ve also been running tools like Open WebUI which give me a mobile-friendly web interface for interacting with LLMs on the Spark.

That is what I’ve been talking about with my friends. Although I don’t have a powerful Mac mini or a shiny DGX Spark, the way I use Tailscale is approximately what Simon Willison described in his post.

When I take a break between bouldering sessions, believe it or not, I sometimes use the Termius app on my iPhone to SSH into my Mac at home, check Claude Code’s work, or assign it new tasks via tmux running in Ghostty on my Mac.¹ Or when I come across noteworthy startup fundraising news on the go, I can use my iPhone to pull the same trick: ask an LLM to do the news clipping for me via Simon Willison’s LLM CLI running on my Mac at home. (Hopefully I will write about my LLM news clipping workflow soon. 2025-11-20 Update: I wrote a post about it.)

Sometimes how I use Tailscale has nothing to do with AI. For instance, I host Linkding, an open source bookmark web app, on my Raspberry Pi, and I want to use it on my iPhone without exposing it on the internet. In this case, I can use Tailscale Serve to securely access it through my tailnet as if I were on the same local network.

Another use case is about safely using untrusted Wi-Fi. I use one of my Raspberry Pis as a Tailscale exit node, so when I’m at a coffee shop with untrusted Wi-Fi, I can turn on Tailscale on my MacBook Air and securely route all my traffic through the exit node—Tailscale encrypts every packet between my MacBook Air and my Raspberry Pi using WireGuard,² so even on an untrusted Wi-Fi, no one can snoop on my connection. In fact, I created a Keyboard Maestro automation that connects my MacBook Air to the Tailscale exit node whenever it joins a Wi-Fi network that’s not on my allowlist.

As a user, I appreciate how easy Tailscale is to set up, even though I’m only using a fraction of its capabilities. As an observer who is interested in the tech startup scene, I’ll definitely keep a close eye on how Tailscale grows as a business.

In July, I came across a thread on Mastodon about a new app called Macrowave. It is “a native macOS & iOS app that makes it easy and fun to share system audio with friends to listen to music together,” as the co-creator, Lucas Fischer, said in this toot. A few days ago, Macrowave officially launched.

What caught my eye at first was, of course, the retro-style visual design. It resembles a portable radio and reminds me of the Apple Podcasts app from 2012. I don’t know the two developers behind Macrowave personally, but I bet they had fun designing it.

But the real deal for me is the ability to easily share my Mac’s system audio, which means I can run my own station. I’ve always been into audio broadcasting: not only have I been a long-time radio and podcast listener, but I also produced and hosted several podcasts.

Three Steps to Start Your Station

Macrowave streams audio via low-latency WebRTC peer-to-peer connections.¹ Its Mac app has two modes: the “Broadcaster” is lets you stream audio, and the “Receiver” is for listening to stations.

If you want to make a live audio broadcast, you just need three steps:

1. Sign up using Apple Account
2. Set up a username
3. Give your station a name and a short description

After that, you can share the link to your station with others to let them tune in. If your audience has enabled notifications, they will be notified when your station is on air. People can listen to the station through Macrowave’s Mac and iOS apps, or via a webpage.

You can choose what audio to stream—whether it’s the system audio (everything you normally hear from your Mac), audio from a specific app, or even from a single window. (Important: you must use this app wisely, as Macrowave states at the bottom of its website, “broadcasters are responsible for obtaining appropriate licenses for any copyrighted content they stream.”)

In an update released shortly after launch, Macrowave revealed its subscription pricing for broadcasting: $3 per week (with a three-day free trial), $8 per month, and $60 per year.

I’ve been using Rogue Amoeba’s Audio Hijack for years. One of its features, the Broadcast block, can stream audio from your Mac to an internet streaming server powered by Shoutcast or Icecast,² allowing you to run a live broadcast. While powerful, it requires more setup and technical know-how. Macrowave, on the other hand, makes the process far simpler and more approachable for casual broadcasters.

My Experience

From my brief experience using the app, I found that it doesn’t work well with my Audient iD4 audio interface. The mic input works fine, but for some reason, I couldn’t get the music playback to work in conjunction with it. However, if you use the Mac’s built-in mic (or something like EarPods connected via the audio jack), it works well.

As mentioned earlier, people can listen to your station via a link. In the first version, changing your username didn’t automatically update the link, but yesterday’s update (version 1.0.2) fixed this. If you encounter this issue, make sure you’re running the latest version.

Since broadcasting your Mac’s system audio requires specific permissions, you might wonder why it asks for “Screen & System Audio Recording” instead of just “System Audio Recording.” According to Lucas Fischer, this is due to a technical limitation of their upstream provider, despite the app only using audio from the screen sharing. They are working on it and plan to release a new version that requests only the “System Audio Recording” permission, but they must wait for the necessary changes from their provider.³

Thoughts and Questions

Macrowave has been officially available for less than a week, yet I already have many questions about where it’s headed. Will it become a two-way audio platform like Clubhouse or X Spaces, or stay as a simple broadcasting app? Will it introduce a text-based chatroom alongside each station? How does the app help users discover new stations? While I don’t think Macrowave is necessarily destined to be a major hit, there’s certainly room for a niche product like it.

Some aspects of the interface and visual design could be improved. For instance, the app lacks safeguards to prevent accidental quitting while broadcasting, and certain UI elements like button shadows don’t feel right to me. Still, Macrowave is genuinely a fun and intuitive app to use.

Although I didn’t join MailMate’s mailing list, I visit the archive from time to time, and sometimes I learn good tips and tweaks from it. Today, I’d like to share a useful tweak I recently came across in this thread: how to add a custom column to display a sender’s email address in MailMate’s message list, along with some variations.

In short, the OP wanted to have a column in MailMate’s message list to display the sender’s email address, so he can spot potential phishing emails instead of opening them to check From: in the message view.¹ By default, the From column in the message list shows only the sender’s name, and there is no such Address column in the View > Columns menu.

Out of curiosity, I checked Gmail’s web app, Mimestream (a 3rd party Mac email client for Gmail), and Fastmail, but none of them show the sender’s email address in the message list by default. They only show the address information in the message view.

A few days later, Benny Kjær Nielsen, the developer of MailMate, replied with a solution:

If you create the following path and then save the attached file then you should have a new column available for the message list (named “From Address”):

/Users/<username>/Library/Application\ Support/MailMate/Resources/MmMessageListView/

Here are the content of the plist file attached at the end of Benny’s response:

{
            columns =
            {
                    fromAddress =
                    {
                            title = "From Address";
                            sortKey = "from.address";
                            formatting =
                            {
                                    formatString = "${from.address}";
                                    placeholderString = "(No Sender)";
                                    doubleClick =
                                    {
                                            titleImage = "NSUser";
                                            titleSymbol = "person.fill";
                                            titleFormatting = { prefixString = 
    "From "; formatString = ""${from.address}""; separator = " or "; };
                                            queryFormatting = { formatString = 
    "from.address = '${from.address}'"; separator = " or "; escapeSingleQuotes = 1; 
    };
                                    };
                            };
                            relatedSearches =
                            (
                                    {
                                            titleImage = "NSUser";
                                            titleSymbol = "person.fill";
                                            titleFormatting = { formatString = 
    "From "${from.address}""; separator = " or "; };
                                            queryFormatting = { formatString = 
    "from.address = '${from.address}'"; separator = " or "; escapeSingleQuotes = 1; 
    };
                                    },
                                    {
                                            titleImage = "NSUser";
                                            titleSymbol = "person.fill";
                                            titleFormatting = { formatString = 
    "From "${from.name}""; separator = " or "; };
                                            queryFormatting = { formatString = 
    "from.name = '${from.name}'"; separator = " or "; escapeSingleQuotes = 1; };
                                    },
                                    {
                                            titleImage = "NSUser";
                                            titleSymbol = "person.fill";
                                            titleFormatting = { formatString = 
    "From or To "${from.address}""; separator = " or "; };
                                            queryFormatting = { formatString = 
    "#any-address.address = '${from.address}'"; separator = " or "; 
    escapeSingleQuotes = 1; };
                                    },
                                    {
                                            titleImage = "NSUser";
                                            titleSymbol = "person.fill";
                                            titleFormatting = { formatString = 
    "From or To "${from.name}""; separator = " or "; };
                                            queryFormatting = { formatString = 
    "#any-address.name = '${from.name}'"; separator = " or "; escapeSingleQuotes = 
    1; };
                                    },
                            );
                    };
            };
    }

But Benny didn’t mention the name of the attached file. (As I said, I didn’t join the mailing list, so I don’t know what the attached file would look like in a real email.) Then I recalled that I had read something about it in MailMate’s user manual; it should be named outlineColumns.plist.

Once you have finished the setup and relaunched MailMate, you should see a new option named From Address in the View > Columns menu. Now you can combine the default From and the new From Address column to display the complete information about the sender in the message list.

An Alternative Tweak

However, if you feel that those two columns use too much space on the screen, the OP provided a tweak to mitigate it. You can replace formatString = "${from.address}"; in line 10 (of the content of the plist file I showed above) with formatString = "${from.name:-${from.address}}${from.name:+ (@${from.domain})}";. Now you get Someone (@example.com) instead of someone@example.com in the From Address.

After all, what the OP wants is to verify whether the domain name of the sender’s address looks suspicious. There is probably no need to display the username in the message list. Additionally, since we have both the sender’s name and the domain of the address in From Address, this makes the From column redundant.

If you make the tweak, you may want to hide the From column. But at this moment, the From option is not only checked but also grayed out in the View > Columns menu. To remove the From column, you have to choose the From Address option in the View > Columns > Outline Column at first. Then, you can uncheck the From option in the View > Columns menu.

A Little Tweak, Huge Satisfaction

I appreciate the OP’s design for presenting more information in a compact and streamlined way. The discussion thread I mentioned earlier also demonstrates just how customizable MailMate is.

In today’s Mac ecosystem, it’s increasingly rare to find apps that allow this kind of low-level tweaking. Apple could do more to encourage users to explore slightly more advanced interactions with macOS.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s not that Apple has done nothing. Shortcuts is a very good example that encourages users to try building automations that fit their needs. But Apple could go further.

As users become more comfortable with this kind of control, they’ll start to expect—and value—more flexible and powerful Mac software.

For users, in an age where help is just a search or a chat away, discovering that they can interact with their computers in this way will not only help them get things done but also reveal that they can accomplish much more. And more importantly, it’s fun and delightful.

Related Posts

• Three Useful Hidden Preferences in MailMate

I like MailMate and use it as my default email app on my Mac. I wrote about MailMate in this post (in Traditional Chinese, though). One of its biggest strengths is that it’s highly customizable.

However, many of its customizations aren’t available in the app’s settings panel. You have to set up these hidden preferences through the Terminal. You can find the relevant instructions in MailMate’s user manual. Today, I want to share three useful hidden preferences in MailMate that make it more convenient and better suited to my needs.

1. Set a “Delayed Sending Time”

The first one is setting a default delayed sending time. As the name suggests, this lets you specify a delay before emails are actually sent.

MailMate does have a built-in “Send Later” option in the composer. There’s a list icon (with a “⌄” symbol) in the upper-left corner of the window, below the paper plane icon (the “Send Message” button). “Send Later” is in the dropdown menu.

But this is a one-time setting—it only applies to that specific message. I want to show you how to set up a default Send Later time. This setting effectively combines the benefits of both Undo Send and scheduled sending.

To enable it and set the default delay, run the following command in Terminal:

defaults write com.freron.MailMate MmSendMessageDelayEnabled -bool YES

To disable it:

defaults write com.freron.MailMate MmSendMessageDelayEnabled -bool NO

The default delay is 5 minutes. If you want to change it, use:

defaults write com.freron.MailMate MmSendMessageDelayString -string "3 minutes"

My setup is 40 seconds, so the command would be:

defaults write com.freron.MailMate MmSendMessageDelay -integer 40

(If you don’t include a time unit, seconds will be used by default.)

Please note: you must relaunch MailMate after running these defaults commands for the changes to take effect. After relaunching, you’ll see a new header in the composer named “Send Later,” and the time you set will appear there every time you compose a new message or reply.

After hitting the send button, the message will be temporarily placed in a mailbox named “Outbound.” Before the timer runs out, you can still edit or cancel the email.

Scheduled Sending

With this new “Send Later” header, you can also schedule messages using natural language. For example, if you want to send an email at 10 am tomorrow, type “10 am tomorrow” in the “Send Later” field. And if you’re not sure whether your input is valid, the manual explains:

If MailMate cannot parse the expression and the user tries to send the message, then a sheet is shown which allows the user to correct the problem or set an exact time using a calendar and a clock.

As shown in the screenshot below, if you see the text in the “Send Later” field turn red, it means that MailMate can’t parse the expression. Then, after you hit the send button, a reminder with an orange background will appear, along with a sheet containing a calendar and a clock that let you correct the “Send Later” time.

One limitation of this feature is that MailMate must be open and your Mac must be connected to the internet when the message is scheduled to send.

Since this changes the default sending behavior, MailMate will display a warning about pending delayed messages when you quit the app. You can also disable or modify this warning if needed.

2. Change the Focus in the Composer

If, like me, you prefer to always have the focus in the text editor when opening a composer window, you can use this command:

defaults write com.freron.MailMate MmComposerInitialFocus -string "alwaysTextView"

To revert to the default:

defaults delete com.freron.MailMate MmComposerInitialFocus

I find this setting useful because it lets you start writing the email as soon as the composer window opens. There’s also a nice side effect: since the focus is in the text editor and not the “To” field, you haven’t filled in the recipient’s address. This significantly lowers the chance of accidentally sending the email. (Well, if your cat somehow hits the keys in a perfect sequence, an accident could still happen.) However, this “nice side effect” doesn’t work when replying to a message, so be careful.

3. Enable Auto-Expanding Email Threads

I prefer viewing emails in thread mode, and I like MailMate to automatically expand all threads at all times. You can enable this with:

defaults write com.freron.MailMate MmAutomaticallyExpandThreadsEnabled -bool YES

(New messages will also trigger auto-expansion.)

If you want MailMate to expand only those threads that contain unread messages, use:

defaults write com.freron.MailMate MmAutomaticallyExpandOnlyWhenCounted -bool YES

Bonus: Turn on Automatic Message Selection After Switching Mailbox

When Benny Kjær Nielsen, the developer of MailMate, introduced this setting in revision 6216 (BETA) on January 26, 2025, he mentioned it as an experimental feature:

Changed: Automatic message selection (after switching mailbox) can now be enabled (MmAutomaticMessageSelectionEnabled). Consider it experimental for now.

Although it’s experimental, I’ve found it useful. I use the “Correspondence” layout, and with this enabled, MailMate automatically displays the last message (because it’s selected) after I switch mailboxes—saving me the extra step of pressing Tab.

To enable it:

defaults write com.freron.MailMate MmAutomaticMessageSelectionEnabled -bool YES

To disable it:

defaults write com.freron.MailMate MmAutomaticMessageSelectionEnabled -bool NO

I think MailMate has so many “hidden preferences” because it’s hard to fit them all into the settings panel. And, according to Benny, most of them are experimental:

Some have just not been added to a Preferences pane yet, but most of them are used to enable experimental features which cannot yet be considered stable or complete features.

However, in my experience, the first three “hidden preferences” I introduced have been stable for the past two and a half years.

If you’re a MailMate user and haven’t explored these hidden preferences yet, I encourage you to check out the MailMate user manual. There’s a lot of useful information there, and I’m sure you’ll find something that fits your workflow.

Even if you’re not comfortable applying the settings yourself, you can export the manual pages as PDFs and upload them to an LLM chatbot like ChatGPT or Claude. Then, you can ask it to help you identify features that might be useful for you and how to enable them.

I plan to share more of my settings and tips on using MailMate in the future. I’d love to hear what features you enjoy most, or any handy settings you’d recommend.

Related Posts

• Customizing MailMate: Display Sender Addresses in Your Message List

I appreciate this video. Both Adam and Norm share their genuine opinions based on over a year of experience with the Vision Pro. (Btw, I’m a fan of Adam and his crew!)

Norm clearly enjoys using the Vision Pro, but what I find most interesting is how he feels after taking it off. At the end of the video, he says:

I might not be using it every day. I’m certainly using it at least once a week, but every time I put it on, it’s like, “Wow, I forget how nice it is in here.” At the same time, every time I take it off, I’m like, “Oh, the real world’s pretty nice too.”

“Oh, the real world’s pretty nice too.” reminds me of something Jaron Lanier wrote in his essay “Where Will Virtual Reality Take Us?” for The New Yorker last year:

In the nineteen-eighties, we used to try to sneak flowers or pretty crystals in front of people before they would take off their headsets; it was a great joy to see their expressions as they experienced awe. In a sense, this was like the awe someone might experience when appreciating a flower while on a psychedelic drug. But it was actually the opposite of that. They were perceiving the authentic ecstasy of the ordinary, anew.

I like watching videos about people working, especially when they articulate their thoughts through monologues or provide commentary.

About one year ago, during a certain period, I frequently watched YouTube videos about cameras and photography. One day, I watched a video from The Verge about the Hasselblad 907X & CFV 100C. After that, I ended up watching a few more videos about the camera. One of them was made by Willem Verbeeck.

Willem Verbeeck is a Belgian film photographer and YouTuber based in Los Angeles. Yes, he is a film photographer and made a video about the digital Hasselblad camera. But soon, my focus shifted from Verbeeck talking about the camera to how he was using it, and then my thoughts were all about his projects. At that point, I no longer wanted to watch more videos about Hasselblad.

In the video, Verbeeck said he wanted to use the Hasselblad for a project about the freeway landscapes in Los Angeles. The next scene shows him driving to a spot. That is a slope with a distant view of the freeway. “It’s 5 a.m. here in Los Angeles. It’s a really cold, windy morning. And I’m back at the spot I’ve photographed…” As Verbeeck says this, he sets up the tripod and gets ready to shoot. After a few shots, when I still thought about the photo he just made, he moved to the next spot.

On the second day, he did the same thing again. He left home by car at about 4:30 a.m. to a spot he wanted to shoot before sunrise. I’ve seen the sky before sunrise many times. It’s beautiful. Then I realized this is not about a YouTuber or working as a freelance film photographer (although I believe many jobs require you to get up early). It’s about the way he lives. He wants to shoot some photos, so he just drives out at midnight or early in the morning. Free and simple.

At that moment, the words “I envy this YouTuber” surfaced in my mind. I know it’s not an easy life. (I guess there is no such thing as “an easy life.”) What I envy is his mindset and lifestyle. It’s like: I want to do something and can do it right away. Of course, I can get up at 4:30 a.m. and go out for a jog or a walk, but driving my car to some spots to get a good photo shot for several consecutive days is a different thing.

The Morro Rock

Putting my envy aside, I really appreciate his projects and related videos. There are two other fascinating projects I want to talk about in this post.

The first project is about a massive rock. It’s the “Morro Rock,” a giant volcanic plug in Morro Bay, California. Before the project, Verbeeck went to Morro Bay once to shoot some photos. One day, while reviewing those images and prints, he noticed a theme that many of them have the Morro Rock in them. In some photos, the rock is the main subject; in others, in Verbeeck’s words, “it’s lurking in the background.” He then came up with an idea: how about making a project about it?

Compared to one-time photography—whether professional or tourist–style—continuously and repeatedly photographing the same subject, or even the same object, over a long period is not only more challenging but also a constraint that hones and stimulates creativity. Verbeeck said the following in a video titled “The Importance of Long Term Photography Projects,” where he reflected on the project called “The Morro.”

Instead of constantly trying to turn new corners now to look for the next best Landmark that I hadn’t gotten a picture of yet, I find it just as exciting, if not more, to go back to the same place that I’ve photographed a 100 times and just see how it looks different this time around.

This reminds me of what Dimitri Bruni and Manuel Krebs, the Swiss graphic designer duo, said in the documentary “Helvetica”:¹

Dimitri Bruni: “We like restrictions. We can’t operate, we can do nothing without restrictions. The more restrictions we have, the more happy we are.”

[…]

Manuel Krebs: “When it comes to type, we will only use, if possible, one typeface, or two, and if possible we will use one size.”

They feel excited and happy when they face challenges and constraints.

Verbeeck’s work is impressive. I particularly like a few of the photos. For example, one shows a storefront full of hand-painted signs, which nicely reflects Morro Rock.

Another good one is a series of photos, or I can call it a sequence of time shifts. Those were taken in the morning as sunlight and shadows swiftly moved across Morro Rock. Verbeeck captured this fleeting transformation in four photos, showing the rapid shift in light over a brief moment—almost like a time-lapse of the moon’s phases. You can see the “dark side” of Morro Rock gradually fading until the entire surface is bathed in golden light. It’s fascinating.

I also like an image of two people playing basketball on the court while the massive Morro Rock fades into the misty background. When Verbeeck pressed the shutter, one player released the ball while the other took a shot. In reality, the mist was constantly shifting, and in the next second, both balls would fall. Rather than simply capturing that fleeting moment, Verbeeck’s camera seems to freeze time itself.

Of course, Verbeeck shows many other good photos in the videos. But I have to stop right here and leave the rest to tempt you into watching the video.

I like how Verbeeck sets up a project in the video. As a former student of a specialized art program in middle school, I find it similar to sketching and painting the same objects over and over—sometimes hundreds of times. It’s a good way to hone my skills and push myself to explore different angles and expressions. I can also apply the concept to a personal photography project, perhaps in a place where I live or one I visit frequently.

Verbeeck has visited Morro Bay about 20 times. Recently, he finished the last shot of the project and made a video about it. I recommend you watch all three videos. You may come up with some ideas to start your own projects. I’m looking forward to seeing the results if he puts them in a photobook.

The Purple Glow at the Night

The other project is about streetlights. The story is that one day Verbeeck learned that in Los Angeles, due to some kind of coating problem, a few LED streetlights started emitting a purple glow. Again, he drives out at night to find the purple streetlights to shoot and make it a personal project. People tipped him where to find those purple streetlights through Instagram DMs, and he marked them on Google Maps. “It’s like a treasure hunt,” Verbeeck said.

When I saw the purple streetlights in the video, I kept thinking about a scene in the Pokémon Go app or its predecessor, Ingress.² Because the location with the purple streetlight is like indicating there is a “Gym” or a “Portal.” And it’s not on your smartphone screen; it’s in real life. Isn’t that cool?

Although I love shooting photos in bright sunlight, night photography has its own unique charm. From time to time, I take more good photos at night than during the day. And since night photography usually involves long exposures (in Verbeeck’s case, he’s doing film photography), what we see and what the camera captures can sometimes be drastically different. This visual dissonance—or even conflict—can be intriguing.

The other reason I like this project is that it’s fun, and its theme comes from unexpected events in everyday life. “There was a time when, every evening, the neighborhood would be shrouded in a purple glow.” I don’t know if any local residents will recall their childhood this way, but I hope they can use Verbeeck’s video as proof when sharing this strange memory with friends.

Verbeeck’s YouTube videos cover various photography-related topics in multiple formats. While some may not be as popular or entertaining, they are genuine. I truly enjoy watching his passion for photography unfold. I think you will find some of them truly inspiring and beautiful.

Thanks to Verbeeck, I’m planning to write a post about a photobook I discovered through another one of his videos, “A Tour of My Photobook Shelf.” I’m so glad I had a chance to read a photobook like that. Feel free to take a guess at which one it might be.

→ Link to the original post, “macOS Tips & Tricks,” by Saurabh

I came across this post through a toot from Jeff Johnson. If you’re like me and always looking for ways to operate your Mac more easily and efficiently, be sure to check it out.

Here are five useful tips I selected, arranged in the order they appear in the post:

1. Press ⇧⌘/ to search all of the current app’s menu items. Then use the Up/Down arrow keys to navigate the results and press Return to execute the selected menu bar action.
2. Press ⌃⌘D while holding the pointer over a word to view an inline dictionary definition.
3. After pressing ⇧⌘4, press the Space bar to select a window to screenshot. Hold down Option while taking the screenshot to remove the window’s shadow.
4. Press ⌥⌘C to copy the full pathname of the currently selected file.
5. Press ⇧⌘A to select the output from the previous command.

I use the first keyboard shortcut most often—it’s so convenient for searching and executing commands. It works best for native apps. Alternatively, you can use this Alfred workflow, “Menu Bar Search.” (I wrote a paragraph about this workflow in this post in Traditional Chinese.)

The second and third tips are already well known. I can add something to the second one: you can choose dictionaries and arrange their order in the built-in Dictionary app’s settings.

The fourth tip is for Finder. It’s better than right-clicking the file, holding Option, and selecting “Copy [File] as Pathname” in the context menu. However, it’s quite annoying that macOS Sequoia now encloses the copied pathname in single quotes. I even made a Shortcut to clean it up. If you know a better way to get a “clean pathname,” please let me know!

Finally, the fifth tip is for the built-in Terminal, and it’s what I miss most when using Ghostty. Another terminal emulator, Warp, also provides this handy feature, but even better–it lets me copy the command, the output, or both using different keyboard shortcuts.

The original post contains many other useful tips and tricks. Although it’s an update for macOS 14 Sonoma, it’s still worth your time.

Back to where I found the post, the context actually is more important than the post itself. I agree with what Jeff Johnson said about “peak Apple”:

They used to be great at progressive disclosure. You don’t eliminate complexity, you just hide it from new users, progressively disclosing the complexity as users become more experienced and knowledgeable.

That’s exactly how I used to feel about Apple.