Unclack for macOS: Automatically mute your microphone while you type

Unclack is the small but mighty Mac utility that mutes your microphone while you type. No more getting called out for clacking your way through a Zoom meeting on your clicky keyboard!

Heh, clever.

Unclack for macOS →

Related: I’m a happy user of Krisp, which uses AI to automatically filter out background noises (and typing, albeit only tested while using an external keyboard)

Preview, Edit and Generate Meta Tags with MetaTags.io

Speaking of meta tags in the previous post, the Meta Tags tool has been sitting in my bookmarks for quite a while now:

With Meta Tags you can edit and experiment with your content then preview how your webpage will look on Google, Facebook, Twitter and more!

Drop in an image, type some text, and you’ll get the resulting meta tags come out. Example Output:

<!-- Primary Meta Tags -->
<title>Meta Tags — Preview, Edit and Generate</title>
<meta name="title" content="Meta Tags — Preview, Edit and Generate">
<meta name="description" content="With Meta Tags you can edit and experiment with your content then preview how your webpage will look on Google, Facebook, Twitter and more!">

<!-- Open Graph / Facebook -->
<meta property="og:type" content="website">
<meta property="og:url" content="https://metatags.io/">
<meta property="og:title" content="Meta Tags — Preview, Edit and Generate">
<meta property="og:description" content="With Meta Tags you can edit and experiment with your content then preview how your webpage will look on Google, Facebook, Twitter and more!">
<meta property="og:image" content="https://metatags.io/assets/meta-tags-16a33a6a8531e519cc0936fbba0ad904e52d35f34a46c97a2c9f6f7dd7d336f2.png">

<!-- Twitter -->
<meta property="twitter:card" content="summary_large_image">
<meta property="twitter:url" content="https://metatags.io/">
<meta property="twitter:title" content="Meta Tags — Preview, Edit and Generate">
<meta property="twitter:description" content="With Meta Tags you can edit and experiment with your content then preview how your webpage will look on Google, Facebook, Twitter and more!">
<meta property="twitter:image" content="https://metatags.io/assets/meta-tags-16a33a6a8531e519cc0936fbba0ad904e52d35f34a46c97a2c9f6f7dd7d336f2.png">

Meta Tags →

`dive` – A tool for exploring a Docker Image, Layer Contents, and discovering ways to shrink the size of your Docker/OCI Image

You can use dive to help you optimize your Docker image layers.

Say you have these two layers in your Dockerfile:

RUN wget http://xcal1.vodafone.co.uk/10MB.zip -P /tmp
RUN rm /tmp/10MB.zip

Then you’ll end up with 10MB of wasted space. dive will tell you, so that you can combine these into one optimized layer:

RUN wget http://xcal1.vodafone.co.uk/10MB.zip -P /tmp && rm /tmp/10MB.zip

You can also integrate it as a build step in your CI/CD pipeline, and make it break the build in case you don’t meet a certain quotum.

Installation per Homebrew:

brew install dive

dive →

🔗 Related: In How to build smaller Docker images you can find some practical tips to keep your docker image size under control.

Mirror Displays — A Mac app and command-line tool for fiddling with display mirroring

MirrorDisplays a simple application that toggles between mirrored and extended desktop modes. It’s the easiest way to turn on, or turn off display mirroring.

Also comes with a (separately installable) CLI tool which makes this pretty interesting

The command line tool is good for giving shell-scripts the power to control display mirroring and opens up the possibility of controlling mirroring remotely over ssh.

usage: mirror [option]    Only the first option passed will be applied
  -h            Print this usage and exit.
  -t            Toggle mirroring (default behavior)
  -on           Turn Mirroring On
  -off          Turn Mirroring Off
  -q            Query the Mirroring state and write "on" or "off" to stdout
  -l A B        Makes display at index B mirror the display at index A

Unfortunately not installable using Homebrew, so you’ll have to get the app from the GitHub releases page. You’ll also have to explicitly allow the mirror CLI tool to be opened through the Security & Privacy

mirror-displays (GitHub) →
Mirror Displays Introductory Post →

💡 If you’re using a MacBook with only one external display connected you might not need this app, and can use the CMD+F1 shortcut to toggle display mirroring/extending.

Compress and Convert AVIF/WebP/PNG/etc images on the CLI with squoosh-cli

To compress and compare images with different codecs right in your browser there’s squoosh.app that you can use.

Announced at the still ongoing Chrome Dev Summit 2020 is Squoosh v2 with new codecs support (AVIF!), an updated design, and the release of CLI version!

Squoosh CLI is an experimental way to run all the codecs you know from the Squoosh web app on your command line using WebAssembly. The Squoosh CLI uses a worker pool to parallelize processing images. This way you can apply the same codec to many images at once.

Squoosh CLI is currently not the fastest image compression tool in town and doesn’t aim to be. It is, however, fast enough to compress many images sufficiently quick at once.

Run it using npx, or install it globally:

npx @squoosh/cli <options...>
npm i -g @squoosh/cli
squoosh-cli <options...>

Announcing Squoosh v2 →
Squoosh CLI (Repo) →