macOS

When I turned my computer into a Hackintosh about 2 years ago I was using an NVIDIA GTX 660 as my GPU and it worked without any additional drivers because of built-in support in Sierra. When I later bought a 4K display I could not make the GTX 660 drive the display at 4K@60Hz in macOS, although it worked well in Windows.

NVIDIA web drivers

I decided I needed a more powerful GPU anyway to play games on the new display in Windows so I bought a GTX 1060. It worked in Sierra and High Sierra thanks to the so called web drivers; GPU drivers provided my NVIDIA on their website. Without the web drivers you get no hardware acceleration, no 4K as maximum resolution, just one display working … the whole setup is basically unusable.

Those web drivers are version specific, every time the macOS build number changes after some update you need new ones (or to use a script to patch the previous ones). This is a bit annoying, you typically have to wait a few days after every macOS update for new drivers to become available and update then.

No web drivers for Mojave

When a new major version of macOS comes out, like Mojave, you cannot use web drivers for the previous version. NVIDIA needs to release new drivers and they now cannot do it without cooperation from Apple. Citing from the NVIDIA Developer forums

Developers using Macs with NVIDIA graphics cards are reporting that after upgrading from 10.13 to 10.14 (Mojave) they are experiencing rendering regressions and slow performance. Apple fully controls drivers for Mac OS. Unfortunately, NVIDIA currently cannot release a driver unless it is approved by Apple.

Apple basically blocks NVIDIA from releasing web drivers for Mojave, that is the reason the drivers are not out even now half, a year after Mojave release. If you are for example an iOS developer, XCode 10.2, the next version of Xcode, will only run on Mojave and you will not be able to use it unless you upgrade.

AMD GPUs in Mojave

Mojave natively supports some GPUs from AMD. You can buy a RX 560, RX 570, RX 580, Vega 56 or Vega 64 and it should work out of the box, no extra drivers needed. You not even have to install Lilu or Whatevergreen.

When working on an iOS app you may sometimes need to inspect or debug the network traffic between the app and the server to see what exactly is going on. Or you may be just curious to see what data other apps send about you to their servers. The way to achieve this is to run a proxy on your computer and route all the traffic from your iOS device through that proxy.

mitmproxy

Mitmproxy is a free and open source interactive HTTPS proxy. The UX is not as great as in paid app like Charles, but it is still good enough.

Installing and running

You install mitmproxy from homebrew

brew install mitmproxy

and run the command line interface with a simple mitmproxy proxy command. The command line interface takes some time to get used to. If you want something simpler, run the mitmweb command to get a web interface.

Setting up the iOS device

Proxy

When you have mitmproxy or mitmweb running you now need to set your iOS device to use that proxy. On your iOS device, go to Settings | Wi-Fi and to the properties of your Wi-Fi network. Switch the HTTP Proxy to manual and set the it to the IP address of your computer running mitmproxy and port 8080.

Update: With macOS Catalina I switched to bootable daily incremental backups.

If you are a macOS user you may be used to Time Machine as the standard for backups. Time Machine is fine if you want to backup your files and configuration, but if for example your disk dies or your hackintosh completely breaks with some bad update, there are better and faster ways to get it up and running again.

Requirements

Basically everything comes down to your backup requirements. These are mine

• full backup of the macOS SSD including EFI with Clover
• backups that can be restored without any additional configuration to the current macOS SSD or a new one in case of a disk failure
• no need for the ability to restore single files (all work data are in Git and Dropbox)
• reasonable backup and restore speed

Looking at different backup solutions I chose Clonezilla. It is not exactly the most user-friendly solution, but it is a very powerful one if you know what you are doing.

If you run macOS side by side with Windows or have some drives formated with NTFS, you may not want them to get automatically mounted when you start macOS. I have a Windows 10 SSD with NFTS and a data HDD with NTFS next to my macOS SSD and I do not use any o those two drivers when booted in macOS, so I was looking for a way to have them not mounted at startup.

The main reason for this other than them not being shown in Finder is that macOS spins the data HDD from time to time for no apparent reason and I really do not want this.

In a classic Linux system you could edit /etc/fstab. This file can be also created on macOS, but Apple does not recommend editing it directly but to use sudo vifs. The drives should be addressed by their UUID as opposed to their “location” on Linux, so you first have to find that UUIDs.

When you have the drivers mounted, run diskutil info /Volumes/"Volume name" | grep 'Volume UUID' where “Volumne name” is the volume name as shown in Finder. This will get you just the UUID.

Visual Studio Code is a neat editor with many good functionalities but I especially like the way it shows Git merge conflicts. Instead of a 2-way or a 3-way split it just shows one window with both changes, nicely highlighted with colors and actions.

I like this feature so much I decided to set Visual Studio Code as my Git merge tool for both the command line and Git Tower.

Command line

Using Visual Studio Code as a merge tool for Git when using command line means editing your .gitconfig. You just need to define a new tool called code and set it as the default merge tool.

[merge]
        tool = vscode
[mergetool "vscode"]
        cmd = code --wait $MERGED