Finished reading: The Case for Degrowth by Giorgos Kallis, Susan Paulson, Giacomo D’Alisa, and Federico Demaria 📚
Finished reading: The Case for Degrowth by Giorgos Kallis, Susan Paulson, Giacomo D’Alisa, and Federico Demaria 📚
Finished reading: Forward the Foundation by Isaac Asimov 📚
Finished reading: Prelude to Foundation by Isaac Asimov 📚
Grocery shopping is better with a bike and a baby.
I am joining Remote to help create more remote employment opportunities. Working at GitLab remotely was great for me and my family, and demonstrated to me the advantages of remote organisations. I would like more people to have this freedom, and I am excited to join a team of people with the same ambition.
Personally, remote work allowed me to:
Job (CEO, Remote), in his blog post I’m leaving GitLab to help everyone work remotely, writes why remote work is good for business:
If you’d like to learn more about remote work check out Remote and GitLab’s guide to remote work.
SoundSource is “sound control so good, it ought to be built in.” It is a menu bar app that makes it easy to switch input and output devices, adjust levels, and add effects like an equalizer.
Regular video calls and recordings mean I want to hear and be heard - SoundSource makes that easier for me. Two features I particularly appreciate:
This is the custom profile I created for my CalDigit dock because the audio output was too loud at even the lowest setting.
Preamp: -15.0 dB
Filter 1: On PK Fc 0 Hz Gain 0 dB Q 1
It would make my day if SoundSource would remember the last used Headphone EQ for each output device so that I don’t switch profile manually.
Control your external monitor brightness, contrast or volume directly from a menulet or with keyboard native keys.
Why isn’t MonitorControl a built-in feature of MacOS?
I use Arq to backup my computer to Dropbox (off-site backup) and a Synology NAS (on-site backup). The most obvious approach is to use a folder stored on your NAS. I previously explained how using Autofs can make this easier, but I’ve still found it unreliable and slow.
Arq calculates checksums when performing a backup to verify uploads, and when validating backup data every 60 days. When using the folder approach, Arq needs to download the data to calculate a checksum. S3-compatible storage, however, can calculate the checksum, allowing this work to be offloaded to the NAS making backups and validation faster.
Arq supports S3-compatible storage including MinIO, which can be run on a Synology NAS using Docker. Unfortunately, only Synology devices with an x64 CPU can run Docker. My DS216play has an ARMv7 CPU, so I can’t use the Docker package.
Here’s how you can compile MinIO to run natively on an ARMv7 Synology NAS without Docker. 🎉
Before you begin, you need Git and Docker to be installed.
Clone the MinioSPK repository, which contains build scripts for creating a Synology MinIO package.
# Clone the project
git clone https://github.com/darkmuggle/MinioSPK.git
# Change directory
cd MinioSPK
Two commands are needed to compile MinIO.
# Download the MinIO source and logos
make init
# Build the MinIO package for Synology
make arm7
With our newly built package, we are ready to install MinIO.
From Synology DiskStation, the web interface for managing your Synology NAS, open Package Center.
Next, from the Installed section (top left), select Manual Install (top right) to launch the installation and upgrade wizard.
Click Browse to locate the package you compiled, likely similar to minio-2020.04.04-arm-7.spk. Then click Next.
After a short while you’ll be shown a warning because package hasn’t been signed. You will need to click Yes to proceed.
The wizard will prompt you to set the MINIO_ACCESS_KEY and MINIO_SECRET_KEY, and then install MinIO. Once installed you will be able to open MinIO from Package Center. Use the access key and secret key you set during the installation to login.
Now that you’ve installed MinIO, you can use the guide on the Arq blog Backup to Synology NAS using Minio and Arq.
(Summarized from my post for GitLab, One simple trick to make your screenshots 80% smaller)
When you capture a screenshot on your Mac, it will be saved in the PNG-32 format, with support for 16 million distinct colors and transparency. This means that the screenshot will perfectly capture every pixel on your screen, but having four 8-bit channels for red, green, blue and alpha (transparency) for every pixel makes the file very large. If you’re interested, you can verify this yourself using pngcheck.
In practice, the subjects of my screenshots are buttons and forms, not photographs. Since we don’t need 16 million colors, we can take advantage of the PNG-8 format with it’s more compact 256 color palette.
The first step is to reduce the color palette of the screenshot. This is a type of lossy compression called color quantization, which will reduce the number of distinct colors in the image. The pngquant command line utility is the perfect tool for this job, and if you’ve used the popular ImageAlpha tool, you’ve already used the pngquant library.
# Install pngquant using Homebrew
brew install pngquant
# Quantize 32-bit RGBA PNG to 8-bit (or smaller) RGBA-palette
# pngquant [number of colors] [options] input.png
# --skip-if-larger only save converted file if they're smaller than original
# --strip remove optional metadata
# --ext=.png set output filename to be same as input filename
# --force overwrite existing output files
pngquant 256 --skip-if-larger --strip --ext=.png --force example.png
I’ve observed for most screenshots you can comfortably reduce the color palette to as few as 64 colors before it becomes noticeable. If you frequently take screenshots of gradients or more complex images, you may want to stick with 256 colors to avoid noticeable artifacts.
The PNG file format uses DEFLATE compression internally for an added layer of lossless compression, but most PNG libraries do not implement aggressive lossless compression. This provides another opportunity to reduce the file size further.
In 2013, Google released zopfli, which claimed to improve compression by 3-8% compared to zlib. The trade off for this improvement: waiting an extra 1-2 seconds. (There is no decompression penalty when viewing the compressed image).
# Install zopfli using Homebrew, which includes zopflipng
brew install zopfli
# Optimize PNG compression
# zopflipng [options] input.png output.png
# -y do not ask about overwriting files
zopflipng -y example.png example.png
Relative to the massive savings from color quantization, improving lossless compression provides a much smaller reduction, but in the context of pages with many images these marginal gains do add up to worthwhile savings.
The trick is to make this happen automatically every time I capture a screenshot using Automator. This allows you to run commands based on file events, like every time a new screenshot is added to a directory.
I create a dedicated Screenshots directory, so that they don’t clutter your desktop.
# Create a Screenshots directory in the current users Home directory
mkdir -p "$HOME/Screenshots"
# Configure macOS to capture screenshots to this location
# If you want to revert this change, and save screenshots to your desktop,
# instead use "$HOME/Desktop"
defaults write com.apple.screencapture location "$HOME/Screenshots"
Using Automator, create a new Folder Action that receives notifications from the Screenshots folder. Add a Run Shell Script block, and make sure to Pass input as arguments. Combining the commands above, and this time using $@ syntax to handle multiple arguments, and absolute paths for pngquant and zopflipng, the final script is:
for f in "$@"
do
# Quantize to PNG-8 with 64 colors (lossy, fast)
# Majority of file size savings come from this
/usr/local/bin/pngquant 64 --skip-if-larger --strip --ext=.png --force "$f"
# Rename to communicate the majority of file size savings complete
# Allows me to grab the file faster
new_f="$(dirname "$f")/$(date -r "$f" +"%Y-%m-%dT%H.%M.%S").png"
mv -n "$f" "$new_f"
# Improve deflate compression for an extra 10%
/usr/local/bin/zopflipng -y "$new_f" "$new_f"
# Copy to clipboard (optional)
# osascript -e "set the clipboard to (read (POSIX file \"$(perl -e "print glob('$new_f')")\") as {«class PNGf»})"
done
Finally, I add the Screenshots folder to my Dock for easy access. This is achieved by dragging the Screenshots folder from Finder to your Dock.
Fresh flowers in preparation for the week ahead.
