Category: Mac

Frequently I’ll run into the case where my IDE (Intellij, Xcode/Vapor) will fail and leave a web server running on a port. I can’t start it again because it is already running. The only way to proceed is to restart your computer or find and kill the process.

To find the a process running on a port you can use the lsof command. You can filter with “-i”, which lists IP sockets.

$ lsof -i tcp:8080

The command will produce output like:

COMMAND  PID   USER   FD   TYPE             DEVICE SIZE/OFF NODE NAME
Run     8299 ddiego   15u  IPv6 0xb2782dc730d0c751      0t0  TCP localhost:http-alt (LISTEN)

The PID is the process identification number. You can pass this to the kill command to kill the process:

$ kill -9 8299

macOS has a feature that lets you change the word delimiter.  By default it considers the “.” to be part of the word and selects the whole thing.  But you can change it to break on the period.

This feature used to be called “Word Break” in previous macOS release.  In macOS Sierra it can be found by going to “System Preferences” and selecting “Language & Region”.  Here you’ll see an option for “Region”.  If you’re in the United States, it should be set to “United States”.  You can change it to “United States (Computer)”.

Here’s what’s happening: ASCII special characters that are part of words between alphabetic ASCII characters:

• '.:_ in Standard
• '_ in English (United States, Computer)

Here is an example of “United States”

Here is an example of “United States (Computer)”

If you change the word break setting, you have to quit and reopen applications to apply the changes.

Note: I found this tip a few years ago and used it on my Mac. After getting a new Mac, it took me awhile to figure out how to do this again. This post is a reminder to myself for next time I need to remember how to do this.

One of my favorite features of Alfred 2 for Mac is typing “Lock” to lock the screen. When I switched back to using Spotlight, I missed this feature. I created a Mac app that would lock the screen when launched. You can now type “Lock” in Spotlight to lock the screen or put it in the Dock and lock the screen with one click.

Source: https://github.com/dougdiego/mac-lock

Download: Lock.dmg

I recently bought at Western Digital My Book 1 TB Hard Drive for my MacBook Pro. I wanted to use it for Time Machine backups, which meant that I needed for format it as Mac OS Extended. It came pre-formatted as FAT.

I used Disk Utility to partition it and got an error a few seconds into it.

The error window said: “Partition failed. Partition failed with error: File system formatter failed”.

After pulling my hair out for a while, I finally figured it out…

I’m not exactly sure the reason why, but Mac OX has an issue with a “Master Boot Record” bigger than 512mb. Luckily the solution is easy.

1. Open up Disk Utility.

2. Select your drive on the left hand side.

3. Then click on the “Partition” tab.

4. Choose Volume Scheme: “1 Partition” and select the format: “Mac OS Extended (Journaled)”

5. Then click on the “Options” button.

6. Here is the important part. Choose “GUID Partition Table” instead of “Master Boot Record”. Then click “OK”.

7. Now click “Apply” to start the partition process. That’s it!

Occasionally I see the following error when starting the Cisco VPN client on my mac.

The error message reads:
Error 51: Unable to communicate with VPN subsystem.
Please make sure that you have at least one network interface that is currently active and has an IP address and start this application again.

To fix this problem, simply run the following command from the Terminal:
sudo /System/Library/StartupItems/CiscoVPN/CiscoVPN restart

Running a command with sudo, means you’ll need to be an administrator and it will prompt you for your password.