Tech & Geekery

I have several user accounts on my mac that are intended for a specific purpose. For example, I have a user only for my installation of homebrew. One thing that bothered me about this approach is that it clutters up the login screen with users I don't intend to use often. It turns out that there's a command to clean this up: sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow HiddenUsersList -array-add homebrew joe user Basically, any of the users that you list after the -array-add option will be hidden from the login screen. You can always still login to the account by choosing the Other option. You then need to provide the user name for that account. Also, note that this is the actual user name for the account, not the display name. In the image, you can see that the user is called "Administrator" but the actual account name is "administrator". You want the account name for this command. If you change your mind and want the ol...

One of the things that I absolutely love about Linux is the package manager. It was the thing that took the most getting used to when I switched from Windows, but now that I'm in the habit of apt-getting almost everything I need (especially as a developer) it's hard not to have it on other platforms. This year, I switched my life to Mac and am loving it, but I still miss my package manager. Enter homebrew , a package management system for Mac. I was suspicious for a while about this solution, since I'm not really comfortable with installing packages that aren't part of a trusted repository.  My friend David convinced me to give it a try and I think the transparency of the system and the degree to which it keeps things nicely isolated soothes most of my concerns. I run my mac as a non-admin user for day-to-day work. This is a best practice that I think everyone should follow. It did mean that I needed to do things a little bit differently when setting up homebre...