I moved to Charleston, South Carolina recently and we found a Chinese restaurant that had vegan options. To say I was ecstatic is an understatement. There were so many options and it had so many things you never see at American Chinese take-out restaurants like eggplant, bok choy, scallion pancakes, and a bunch of different tofu dishes.
Unfortunately only a month and a half after we moved here they announced that they were closing down after 19 years. Fortunately for them, they are having the biggest rush I’ve ever seen in my life. Like 25 people lining up 30 minutes before the restaurant even opens.
Needless to say I really wanted to eat there once more but I’ve been unable to stop in and sit down because we have two young children and they don’t exactly like the idea of waiting.
Today I got lucky and was able to place an order for pick up. I called the minute they opened and they told me I would be the only pick up order because of how busy they got. Seriously, so much luck!
I’m going to miss Red Orchids but it’s nice to see how much of an impact they’ve made on the area.
Today we order General (Tso)’s tofu, sesame tofu, garlic bok choy, and garlic eggplant. Absolutely delicious.
Four of my favourite OS X/macOS wallpapers reimagined through AI in the artistic style of Vincent Van Gogh.
Following the unexpected success of Big Starry Sur, I am releasing a new wallpaper pack featuring four OS X/macOS wallpapers in the artistic style of the late Dutch painter Vincent Van Gogh.
History
In early March, I posted a photo on social media titled 'macOS Big Sur in the style of Van Gogh’s Starry Night' an AI-generated mashup of macOS Big Sur's default wallpaper attempted in the art style of Van Gogh's The Starry Night. Not being hyperbolic, the wallpaper exploded in popularity. Hundreds messaged me for a link, and when I uploaded it onto Google Drive, the surge to download it was so enormous that Google stopped access to the drive for several hours. It wasn't till the following day that I could finally host it on my webspace and provide a reliable link for people to download it.
That response to Big Starry Sur vastly exceeded my expectations. So positive was the reception that it inspired me to create another collection of four AI-generated macOS wallpapers, again inspired by Van Gogh. Enjoy.
Vincent Van Gogh
Quick history lesson: Vincent Van Gogh was a Dutch-born painter born during the impressionist/post-impressionist period. Selling just one painting during his short 37-year life (1853-1890), Van Gogh's artwork only became famous posthumously. His works, including thousands of drawings and over 900 oil paintings, were primarily created within a narrow 10-year window before his death.
Van Gogh is perhaps most well known for his many self-portrait paintings and works like his 1889 The Starry Night,1890 Almond Blossoms, and his 1888 Sunflowers series. His adoption of vivid colours and energetic brush strokes are perhaps two of the most notable artistic qualities of this post-impressionist painter; a man who struggled mightily with his mental health and desire to make an impression in the artistic world.
Process
These images were all created using the Midjourney, an AI model that generates images based on prompts provided by the user. Each image featured is the end result from hundreds of prompts, iterations, and creative variations supplied to Midjourney before I was satisfied with the result. From there, images were upscaled, sharpened and textured in Pixelmator Pro before being cropped and formatted for the Mac, iPhone, and iPad.
Wallpapers
This series utilizes four of my favourite OS X/mac OS Wallpapers: Lion, Mountain Lion, El Capitan, and Big Sur and tries to recreate them in the post-impressionist style of Van Gogh. Each wallpaper is available for the iPad, Mac, and iPhone. Enjoy!
Big Sur Take II
The first work is another take on macOS Big Sur's abstract hill wallpaper. But rather than referencing The Starry Night, as I did in my first post, I pointed Midjourney to use paintings from Van Gogh's Wheatfield series. After numerous iterations, the result is this stunning & vibrant wheat field at sunset with rolling hills off in the distance.
This second work is based on one of my favourite Apple wallpapers from OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion. Released in 2012, Mountain Lion featured the spiral galaxy NGC 3190 located a meagre 79 Million Light Years away from Earth. This photograph of NGC 3190 has always been mesmerizing, and I adore Apple's choice of Blues and Yellows to colourize it for their 10.8 desktop wallpaper. It was a perfect choice for a more minimal and abstract wallpaper to include in this collection.
This interpretation of OS X 10.11's wallpaper takes and remixes Yosemite's famous El Capitan. Bold brush strokes and vivid colours reference the palette of OS X El Capitan's signature wallpaper, with a foreground and character inspired by Van Gogh's Wheatfield series.
Lion with Cypresses was inspired by OS X 10.7, whose signature wallpaper is the beautiful Andromeda Galaxy, which was colourized with a mix of yellows, pinks, and blues for the official OS release. Those colours and the galaxy motif were integrated into a wallpaper that blended Van Gogh's 1889 Wheat Field with Cypresses and The Starry Night, creating a lively, saturated foreground and a vivid cosmic night sky that dances across the digital canvas.
It feels like magic to have software that can create these unique and beautiful works based solely on text prompts. The growth of AI technologies over the last several years has provided an exciting (and slightly unsettling) peek at previously unimaginable new tools for creative development.
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I like to display invisible characters in my text editors/IDEs because I want to know if the spaces I’m seeing are spaces or tabs. I also like to be able to tell immediately if I’m seeing multiple spaces or not.
Here is an example of what that looks like. Notice the grey dots between words.
In Xcode, you can find this in the Editor menu labeled as Invisibles.
Today I noticed that when using documentation comments, the invisibles are misaligned and lay on top of the characters instead of between them. I submitted a feedback, but I’m not sure it will ever be addressed so I wrote this post in case someone else runs into the same thing.
…you can filter the files in the sidebar to show only ones that have been modified! It’s a very subtle button in the bottom right corner with a +/- icon. Click that and Xcode will hide all the files you haven’t touched.
Say you have a bunch of open groups or you’ve performed a search and you want to see all the file names but not the places where the search query is found.
You can select all with ⌘ + a then hit the left arrow to close everything or the right arrow to open everything.
This requires that you know the name of your simulator and have jq installed.
You can also replace the device name with booted if you want, but I prefer to use the name of the simulator.
Here are the docs for using a simulator name versus booted for simctl.
For subcommands that require a <device> argument, you may specify a device UDID
or the special "booted" string which will cause simctl to pick a booted device.
If multiple devices are booted when the "booted" device is selected, simctl
will choose one of them.
Note: as far as I can tell, there are no docs for listapps or even anything stating its existence in the man page for simctl.
Before I left Missouri I stopped at my in-laws and noticed that their flowers were blooming so here’s a pick of some hyacinths. Not sure why theirs bloomed and ours didn’t because we planted them all the same weekend.
The flowers are coming. Shame I won’t see them when they’re in full bloom. I also realized the thing I thought was a tulip is a hyacinth.
Apparently chives will grow back after seemingly dying during the start of winter.
I tend not to use tabs and instead have a bunch of windows so I originally wanted to know how I could set my window title bar to show the current path, but in this post I’ll share how to do both in iTerm2.
Here is a screenshot of the iTerm2 Preferences window showing Profiles -> Window.
For custom window title you’ll set \(currentTab.currentSession.path).
For custom tab title you’ll set \(currentSession.path).
And that’s it!
Here’s what it would look like in iTerm2:
And here’s the Stack Overflow question I found that solved this for me. Wanted to blog about it so that I remember how to do this in the future.
Pretty little starling.
Made it to Coit Tower. 300ft elevation of stairs is surprisingly exhausting.
