Gems of August 25"

Long time no see, huh? Let’s try to bring this habit back.

Technology

Fish

Recently I started using the Fish shell again. Fish is greeting you every time you open a new instance. To disable this you can set the fish_greeting variable to an empty string in your ~/.config/fish/config.fish:

set fish_greeting

MacOS

Host names

Did you know that your Mac has three different host names? There is the ComputerName, that is the name you see in the Finder or AirDrop for example. Then you have the LocalHostName, which is used for Bonjour and other discovery services. And finally, there is the networking HostName, which is used for SSH and other network services. The ComputerName and LocalHostName can be set via the System Preferences, but the HostName can only be set via the command line. I like to set all three via the command line:

sudo scutil --set ComputerName "PearEatsApples"
sudo scutil --set HostName "PearEatsApples"
sudo scutil --set LocalHostName "PearEatsApples"

By the way, how do you choose your host names?

Greedy updates with brew

Some GUI apps like to update themselves. A few examples are Visual Studio Code, Chromium or AltTab. brew treats this apps differently than other apps. It doesn’t update them with brew upgrade --cask, because brew expect them to update them independently via their own mechanism.

I usually like to update everything at once, so I found out that you can use brew upgrade --cask --greedy to update all casks, including those that usually update themselves.

Podman

Recently when I had the problem, that when I triggered an update of an app hosted on Podman, sometimes it forgot the credentials to the container registry.

By default the podman login is stored in /run and with that, doesn’t survive reboots. When you specify --authfile the credentials are stored persistently. So when I logged in with podman login --authfile ~/.config/containers/auth.json cr.gitlab.com I didn’t have the issue anymore.