Rob Griffiths

When people ask me "Why don’t you take screenshots for help and whatnot using the cool Liquid Glass UI in macOS Tahoe?," I’m going to start sending this as my entire reply…

So yea, enabling "Reduce transparency" in Accessibility > Display is pretty much a must-do prior to taking screenshots. Even though the end result doesn’t reflect what most users see, at least it’s not … this.

Happy 25th birthday, Mac OS X / macOS! What a long strange trip it’s been.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_10.0

If you’re cruising some under-development Bay Area bridges in the near future, the good news is that it appears you’ll be able to use all the Many Tricks apps you know and love without any issues.

Heard a noise in the office last night, walked in, and found the culprit (his name is Hiccup) — I’m quite happy the trash was just paper!

With three kittens in the house, one must *always* check the trash before emptying it!

Test drove the new Rivian R2 today…I think they’re gonna sell a bunch of these, especially once the lower-priced versions come out. Felt solid, great ride, nice features, ultra responsive UI, and being able to drop the tailgate glass is so cool. Same general dimensions as a Model Y, but so much more space due to shape. Slightly better range, too.

I used Claude Code to develop The Queue, a web app for tracking TV shows and movies I’m watching, want to watch, or have watched. It uses free APIs (TVmaze, TMDB, and OMDB) to get info on shows and movies, and stores data in a local SQLite3 database.

https://robservatory.com/the-queue-helps-track-tv-shows-and-movies-to-watch/

It works quite well, and I’m happy with how it turned out. As someone who prefers "real" apps to web apps, though, I took this one to another level. But that’s a story for another day (there’s a teaser in the post…)

Moom 4.5 is out, with two often-requested features:

- Stage Manager awareness: Moom will leave room for Stage Manager icons, if you wish.
- Hide Others can be set for each saved layout, so activating will hide all apps not in the layout. For people (like me!) who hate Spaces, this is a good way to work in isolation without using Spaces.

We fixed a couple bugs and made some other behind-the-scenes improvements, too.

https://manytricks.com/blog/?p=6706

Our three kittens think they still all fit in one cat bed…not so much. (Our OG is off to the right; he knows better than to get involved with the pile o’ kittens.)

What could go wrong? I mean, it’s Murphy’s Theorem, right, so it’s not like it’s a law that will be enforced?

Wait, it IS a law?! Oh. I think I’ll take the stairs!

I had to speak to someone at Venmo, as somebody has (somehow?) connected their Venmo account to an email address on my personal domain. The email’s not hacked, I’m not getting Venmo transactions, etc., but I get account-related emails.

It seems impossible to reach a person at (855) 812-4430—it’s a fully-automated voice tree. But thanks to Reddit, I learned that if you just keep hitting 0, it will eventually give up and connect you to a person. I had to hit it about eight times, but it worked!

I have no idea how legal this is (not?), but if you’re a fan of Apple’s assorted desktop images over the years, this GitHub repo has a huge collection, all in at least 5K resolution.

https://github.com/LAYTAT/macOS-Wallpapers

It’s an assorted of the various default wallpapers, not every image included in each OS release. Still, it’s a great collection.

As one final step in updating my macOS release date tracking post, I wanted a simple way to be notified of any Apple updates. I had Claude Code write a script that checks Apple’s security page, where they (seem to) list all updates, even those that don’t have security-related issues.

Yes, there are tools that do this (urlwatch, for one), but I wanted something I specifically built for the Apple page. I then bundled this in a @KeyboardMaestro@mastodon.social macro for easy use.

https://robservatory.com/how-to-monitor-apple-update-releases/

Two Reddit saves in one day! First the Venmo contact, now a dead Apple Pencil Pro. My wife misplaced hers…for about a year. We finally found it, but it was completely dead. Wouldn’t connect, wouldn’t charge. I was just to recycle it, and thought I’d check the net first…

https://www.reddit.com/r/iPadPro/comments/1armydf/found_my_apple_pencil_2nd_gen_after_over_a_year/

Glad I did—I put it in a Ziploc bag in relatively warm water (hot tap, heated for a minute, then off) for about five minutes. Pencil now connected and charging. Never ever would have guessed to try that!

While working on a video for Moom, I ran into not one but two bugs in Stage Manager that make it really tough to create tutorial videos if Stage Manager is active. The first is a 30-second freeze in System Settings; the other is severely dropped frames.

The only fix is to disable Stage Manager. I have reported the bugs to Apple (FB22517070), so I hope they’ll be squashed.

https://robservatory.com/the-macos-stage-manager-needs-to-exit-stage-left/

Dramatis is a web app you run on your Mac that collates information about major characters in books, movies, and TV shows. It was 100% written by Claude Code, with me explaining what I wanted it to build. The web app itself is free—and not even licensed—but using it requires a non-free Anthropic API key (because it accesses data in their system, not from the web).

I find it invaluable in tracking who’s who in some of the more complicated things I watch or read.

https://robservatory.com/dramatis-tracks-characters-in-books-series-and-movies/

I’ve updatee my macOS release dates post for macOS 26.5 (and also 15.7.7 and 14.8.7). The number of security fixes in this release is astonishing; if I counted right, there are 61 in macOS 26.5!

https://robservatory.com/a-full-history-of-macos-os-x-release-dates-and-rates/

The 26.5 fixes:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/127110

macOS 26.4.1 has been added to my recently-revived macOS Release Dates and Rates post.

https://robservatory.com/a-full-history-of-macos-os-x-release-dates-and-rates/

First test of the new update system was (mostly) successful. Easy to add the new release, easy to update the charts, then realized that the JavaScript in the post body didn’t work for excerpts. Fixed that, and added the Month-Year of each major OS version’s release to its header area.

Until a few weeks ago, I’d never used Claude Code. Now it’s not only revived a retired post on my blog, but created two full-blown web apps for me. Both work perfectly, and automate tasks I’d been meaning to do 'some day.' Overall, I’m blown away by what it was able to do.

Is it "good" code? I have no idea. But it runs, it runs well, and it does what I want it to do.

https://robservatory.com/claude-code-turns-my-techie-to-dos-into-to-dones/

My blog is getting hammered of late with spammy comments; all of them, thankfully, have been caught by the spam guards and held. (See example below; that was one screen of 10+ for that comment alone, and I had four such comments.)

Unfortunately, while cleaning up the spam today, I (too late) noticed that I deleted a legitimate comment in the otherwise useless pile of rubbish. Whoever’s comment that was (it was on the "block Sequoia update notices") article, I apologize.

Spammers suck.