Posts on X2Q tagged macos. Updated as new posts are published.
The old way to update a Garmin — WebUpdater — was discontinued years ago. In 2026 you use Garmin Express (a desktop app, cable connection) for firmware and map updates on nüvi/DriveSmart units, or Garmin Connect for over-the-air updates on watches and newer handhelds. Here's the current path for each, what to do with very old nüvi units, and the hidden nüvi debug menu.
Back in 2007 I recorded a short demo of Launchy — a keystroke application launcher that replaced the Windows Start menu with a few typed letters. That idea (hit a hotkey, type, fuzzy-match, launch) started on the Mac with Quicksilver and LaunchBar, jumped to Windows via Launchy, spread to Linux, then split in two: it grew into productivity platforms like Alfred and Raycast, and it dissolved into the Cmd+K command palette that now lives inside nearly every app. Here's the 19-year arc.
Years ago I ran transcription through the Google Speech API. In 2026 you don't need a cloud API for that — whisper.cpp runs OpenAI's Whisper models locally on a laptop, CPU or GPU, with no keys and nothing leaving the machine. Here's the full path from clone to transcript.
bchunk (binchunker) splits a .bin/.cue CD image into .iso for the data track and .wav files for each audio track. The canonical tool for turning a mixed-mode BIN/CUE into something you can mount or burn.
fcrackzip is a small, old, command-line tool that recovers passwords on classic-ZipCrypto-encrypted .zip files. Brute-force or dictionary, runs everywhere, still useful in 2026 — with hashcat/john as the modern follow-up when it isn't fast enough.
pdfcrack is a small, single-threaded CPU tool for recovering lost PDF user and owner passwords. Fine for 40-bit RC4 and small dictionary attacks; for 128/256-bit AES PDFs, migrate to pdf2john + hashcat on a GPU.
Windows uses CRLF line endings, Unix uses LF — and the mismatch breaks shell scripts, configs, and diffs. dos2unix converts them in place; on Debian/Ubuntu it's now its own package (no more tofrodos). Includes a recursive batch and a sed fallback.
sshfs mounts a remote directory on your local machine over plain SSH — nothing to install or configure on the server. Mount it with your own uid/gid for write access, add reconnect options so it survives flaky links, and unmount with fusermount.
find -printf with sort gives you a newest-last list of every file in a tree; -mmin/-mtime filter by age. macOS's BSD find lacks -printf, so this covers the portable variants too. Handy for 'what just changed on this server?'
iconv converts a text file from one character encoding to another. Detect what you have with file -i, convert with iconv -f FROM -t TO, and use //TRANSLIT or //IGNORE for characters the target charset can't represent. Includes a recursive batch one-liner.