Block unwanted sounds from boardgamearena

I want the ‘it’s your turn sound’ but not the ‘whoosh’ on every move, so I use this adblock rule to block the unwanted sound file:

---
# ||x.boardgamearena.net/data/themereleases/*/sound/move.ogg
action:
  type: block
condition:
  urlFilter: ||x.boardgamearena.net/data/themereleases/*/sound/move.ogg
---

Really, truly free “purgeable” space on macOS

Lots of ink has been spilled about this but many of the solutions given, such as installing 3rd party cleaner apps or filling your disk space with empty files, are terrible. You just need this terminal command:

sudo /System/Library/Filesystems/apfs.fs/Contents/Resources/apfs.util -P -high ~

It freed nearly 250GB of space on my machine after several minutes. If anyone knows how to tune the threshold at which this happens automatically I’d love to know. Until then this works at cleaning it up when problems arise.

Allow SMB access over Tailscale from Windows 11

By default Windows 11 categorizes a Tailscale network as “Public” and restricts most sharing. This can be easily fixed from an Administrator PowerShell with:

Set-NetConnectionProfile -InterfaceAlias Tailscale -NetworkCategory Private

To see other network names/aliases you can use:

Get-NetConnectionProfile

Using fish shell on Windows

PowerShell and cmd.exe just won’t work for me after years of Fish Shell, so lets use fish shell on Windows too:

  • Install MSYS2 from https://www.msys2.org/
  • Open the MSYS2 mintty, then run:
    • pacman -Su
    • pacman -S fish
  • Edit C:\msys64\home\<username>\.bashrc and append:
    • HOME=/c/Users/<username> fish; exit
  • Finally, configure Windows Terminal (Settings -> Open JSON file), and add the following to profiles/list:
{
  "commandline": "C:/msys64/msys2_shell.cmd -defterm -here -no-start -msys -use-full-path",
  "guid": "{71160544-14d8-4194-af25-d05feeac7233}",
  "icon": "C:/msys64/msys2.ico",
  "name": "fish",
  "startingDirectory": "%UserProfile%"
}

Set this new profile as your default in the Windows Terminal settings under Startup and you’re done.

Some Notes

The use of “-use-full-path” makes the shell inherit the entire windows $PATH so you can run anything you would have under a normal windows shell. Setting $HOME before running fish makes commands like “cd ~” use your windows home directory rather than MSYS2’s.

Go fish!