How to switch the Commodore 1571 into 1541 mode and back
The Commodore 1571 floppy drive powers up in compatibility mode and behaves just like a 1541 drive – unless a C128 is connected and sends it a fast serial transfer. They did this because otherwise the drive wouldn’t be compatible with the C64 and Plus/4. The C128 speaks to its attached disk drive when we power it on, and that’s how a 1571 turns on its super fast magical properties. Holding down the Commodore key will boot into C64 mode, and the 1571 will in turn reset itself to 1541 emulation mode. Lucky for us, we can...
read moreHow to check the Fan Speed on your Mac
Sometimes you may want to know how fast your fans are spinning, more as a “number value” rather than a “noise value”. While you can hear when your Mac in front of you is working hard, it’s impossible to tell how fast those fans are spinning when you’re miles away from your Mac in a data centre. Thankfully there is an easy way to read out the fan speed with a small built-in utility we can access from the command line. Launch a terminal session and issue spindump as admin user: sudo spindump Password:...
read moreHow to disable System Integrity Protection on OS X El Capitan
System Integrity Protection was introduced in El Capitan to add another layer of security to OS X. The system prevents the root user from doing things that are potentially harmful. Apple did this because any app at any time may ask for the administrator password and execute commands with elevated permissions, which is a big security risk on single user systems. There are downsides to yet another layer of security, and much like Gate Keeper, System Integrity Protection brings us one step closer to a completely locked off system like iOS. I...
read moreHow to turn plain URLs into clickable links in WordPress
The marvellous P2 Theme has an interesting feature: write out a plain link, and it magically becomes clickable without explicitly adding the a href tag. This may not be a big deal if you’re writing posts in the visual WordPress editor rather than HTML, but for those of us who like to write in HTML, it’s just one less thing to worry about. I was investigating this feature recently, and it turns out WordPress has a built-in function that can do this: they call it make_clickable(), and it works with URIs, FTP, Email addresses and...
read moreHow to display Jetpack stats per post in WordPress
Some websites employ this or similar technologies to show how many views a single post has had. I was wondering how they did that without starting to count stats that have already been counted for several years, either by Google or by Jetpack. Yesterday I came across this post by Topher about how to render Jetpack Stats: http://wpgr.org/2013/03/02/rendering-jetpack-stats/ I decided to test this in TwentyThirteen, and it works a treat – here’s how to do it. The principle will of course work with any theme. Adding code to...
read moreZen Dash – Version 1.5 released
I’ve just released an update to my Zen Dash plugin. Besides adding funky zen-bamboo artwork to the WordPress.org page, I’ve made the following minor amendments: the option to hide the Jetpack menu now only shows up when Jetpack is activated, otherwise it’s hidden I’ve verified compatibility with the immanent release of WordPress 4.4 added funky zen-artwork (see above, courtesy of GraphicStock) I’ve you’re one of the 70+ active lucky users, you can upgrade the plugin from within WordPress as usual, or you...
read moreHow to see which users are logged in on OS X and Linux
There are two funky commands that can help us see who’s currently logged in, and what operations were performed last. Those two commands are who and last. Let me show you how to use them. The who command Type who at the command prompt and you’ll see a list of currently logged-in users: who versluis tty1 2015-11-19 11:21 (:0) root pts/0 2015-11-19 11:46 (10.0.1.55) This system has two users logged in: versluis, via TTY, and root via PTS. We also get to see which IP addresses these users are logged in from (:0 is localhost). On this...
read moreHow to burn an ISO image with OS X El Capitan
Sometimes it’s important that things change for no apparent reason. You know, the way they move things around in supermarkets just to drive you crazy. If you’ve tried burning an ISO image to disk in El Capitan recently, you know what I’m talking about: because the option to burn an ISO has been removed from Disk Utility. Yeah, I get it: plastic disks are out, no one should be using them anymore, there are no more Macs with SuperDrives in production as of 2016, so it’s time to remove this option from the built-in...
read moreChild Theme Wizard – Version 1.1 released
I’ve released a new version of my popular Child Theme Wizard plugin today. Everything remains the same, except for one thing: the parent theme is no longer loaded via CSS, it’s now being loaded via PHP. Let me explain why. When I wrote this little tool in 2014, the best practice to create a child theme was to load the parent’s style sheet via CSS. This was done with an @import statement, like this: @import url("parent-theme/style.css"); While this approach works just fine, this is no longer regarded as the best...
read moreHow to open WordPress Custom Menu links in a new tab
My wife is currently attending a blogging course at The Daily Post’s Blogging University. One thing that was bugging her (and me) was that Custom Links in the WordPress Menu do not open in new browser tabs. The default behaviour is to open links in the same tab, which is useful for internal site navigation. I explained to her that in plain HTML, we would just use a target such as “_blank” in our link tag, but I didn’t see how to apply my old fashioned knowledge to something so sophisticated and elegant as the WordPress...
read more