Weekly roundup of the most useful local-model improvements, with a focus on setup friction and developer value Local LLMs Are Getting Easier: The Complete Guide (2026) on SitePoint.
#computing
38 posts
28 May
Comprehensive guide covering this topic with practical implementation details. Local LLM Deployment: Ollama vs vLLM vs LM Studio Compared on SitePoint.
22 Apr
Hardware-matched tutorial covering model selection, quantization levels, and performance optimization for 10GB VRAM systems 10GB VRAM Local LLM: The Complete Setup Guide (2026) on SitePoint.
Mac-specific deployment guide covering Ollama MLX setup, model quantization by Mac tier, and performance optimization Llama 4 Scout on MLX: The Complete Apple Silicon Guide (2026) on SitePoint.
20 Apr
Step-by-step guide to deploying DeepSeek R1 on your local machine or private servers. Covers hardware requirements, environment setup, Docker containerization, inference optimization, and integration with Python apps. Perfect for developers wanting privacy-first reasoning model access. Running DeepSeek R1 Locally: Your Complete Setup Guide (2026) on SitePoint.
30 Sept 2025
I use OpenIn to open links in a given browser when I click on them in other applications. This is really helpful to keep various work related stuff in different browsers or profiles and I find it very helpful. One thing that's bothered me is that links from the Jira Cloud Slack App ignore my OpenIn rules and always open…
1 Jul 2025
We have an HP all-in-one scanner and printer that is on our local network. Recently, I was away from home and needed to reconfigure the scanning settings for unimportant reasons. Usually, when I'm not in the office, I use Tailscale to connect back to machines as required, but the printer isn't running Tailscale, so its built-in web app isn't directly…
24 Jun 2025
I run a Tailscale network so that remote computers can access local services. I also have a Linux box at home on that network that advertises itself as an exit node and recently noticed that it wasn't working. I had some time recently to sit down and work out what was going on. My initial suspicion was that it was…
10 Jun 2025
On a server that I help to maintain, it has postfix installed for emailing results of cron jobs and other status updates. This was set up to relay through SendGrid as they had a 100 email per month plan and we send out significantly fewer than that. Unfortunately, SendGrid are retiring their free plan, so I had to move to…
3 Jun 2025
I've had a few cases recently when I wanted to know the number of words that I had written. To do this, I've copied the text to BBEdit which displays the word count in its status bar, but this is a bit of a faff. I finally sat down and created a Shortcut for it that took 10 mins. This…
8 Apr 2025
With the release of macOS 18.4, Safari no longer shows a padlock when you visit a website that uses https. I assume there's a reason for this but I was scratching my head trying to work out how to view the SSL certificate when I went to a new-to-me website domain that my bank asked me to go to. This…
25 Mar 2025
I'm using Signal more now and as it's fully end-to-end encrypted, if something goes wrong with your phone or you lose it, you will lose your entire message history. Signal on Android has an official backup method, but there isn't one for iPhone or desktop. As a result, a number of backup tools have been written by various people. The…
11 Mar 2025
By default, the first user that you create on macOS is an administrator and has more power over the system than a normal user account. The reason it does this is obvious as you need this power to create other users, to install software and so on. However it also means that the computer is slightly more vulnerable to attack…
4 Mar 2025
I was helping a friend set up a new website and hit a problem where the website was in an infinite redirect loop: I could see this in curl quite easily: $ curl -I https://myfriendswebsite.example.com/ HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently Location: https://myfriendswebsite.example.com/ To debug, we turned off Cloudflare by setting the Proxy status on the DNS record in Cloudflare's admin to…
4 Feb 2025
One very minor thing that's been bugging me since macOS Sequoia came out is that if you launch an app that lives in your menu bar, but also has a hidden Dock icon a second time, then the Dock icon will re-appear. This happens to me a lot because I use Alfred to launch apps and also to bring an…
21 Jan 2025
My preferred calendar app for the Apple ecosystem is Fantastical as I've found that it meets my needs well. One minor irritant is that the editor popover defaults to a collapsed view and I have to expand it to see everything, in particular the notes field which I use frequently. I recently discovered that there's a hidden preference to change…
14 Jan 2025
One thing that I've found helpful is to add a set of patterns to my global git ignore file (config/git/ignore for me) that allow me to create temporary files that are automatically excluded from git. The patterns I use are these: # Ignore a file by renaming it with ignore its name *.ignore ignore.* *.ignore.* This lets me create a…
7 Jan 2025
When I'm on a Zoom or FaceTime call, I want stop all notifications on my Mac so that I'm not distracted by them and would like this automated. It's not easy to tell when a call is happening, so I simplified the problem to stopping all notifications if the Zoom or FaceTime is running as I only run these apps…
17 Dec 2024
I recently discovered the /usr/libexec/corebrightnessdiag command line tool on macOS. In particular, /usr/libexec/corebrightnessdiag nightshift-internal will give information about when the Mac's nightshift settings, including when sunrise and sunset are! $ /usr/libexec/corebrightnessdiag nightshift-internal Night Shift Status { AutoBlueReductionEnabled = 1; BlueLightReductionSchedule = { DayStartHour = 7; DayStartMinute = 0; NightStartHour = 22; NightStartMinute = 0; }; BlueReductionAvailable =
3 Dec 2024
I recently acquired an Elgato Prompter which acts as an additional screen on my Mac. It does this using DisplayLink and the DisplayLink Manager app needs to be running. A new security feature of the newer macOS versions is that when your screen is being recorded, an icon is displayed in your menu bar. It looks like this and cannot…
26 Nov 2024
I've been playing with different Ethernet network adapters to see if I can maximise the throughput to my Mac as my ethernet didn't seem particularly faster than WiFi. To test the speed, I want to use my internal network only as going onto the Internet will create too many variables. iperf3 is the solution for this. Running the test To…
19 Nov 2024
For some work I'm doing, I have been given access to a Linux box that is part of a legacy production system. The first thing I have done is updated the terminal prompt to include the word PRODUCTION in red, by adding this to .bashrc: export PS1="$(tput setaf 1)PRODUCTION $(tput sgr0)$PS1" The nice thing about doing it this way is…
29 Oct 2024
There's a new feature in macOS Sequoia that allows mirroring of your iPhone to your Mac. This is a nice feature that allows you to fully interact with your iPhone as an app on you Mac's desktop. When I upgrade to Sequoia and run the iPhone Mirroring app, it selected Victory, my old iPhone 14 Pro Max which is running…
15 Oct 2024
Last week, Dave Winer posted that Scripting News turned 30. That's an amazing milestone and Dave's still writing daily. 1994 seems like quite a while ago; the web was only 3 years old! I started blogging in 2003 on a personal domain and added this blog in 2005. I don't write daily though and I tip my hat to Dave.…
20 Aug 2024
It's common to use a UUID when you need a primary key for your database records. Unlike incrementing numeric keys, it has the advantage that it's not tied to a specific database instance and can be created before insertion into the database. Usually, people use version 4 UUIDs, which contains a lot of randomness to ensure that it's going to…
13 Aug 2024
I'm a huge fan of making my life easier and one thing I have found really helpful is automatic text substitution. The Mac has a built-in solution, but it's slightly clunky as it uses a popup to confirm that you want to substitute, so I use Keyboard Maestro, however there's many alternatives out there. My personal preference is to prefix…
9 Jul 2024
I use FastMail for my email and as I control my own domain, I needed to set up SFP, DKIM and DMARC on it. These are DNS records that help the email servers put the emails that I send into my recipient's inbox and to mark any forged emails as spam. These are my tidied up notes so that I…
14 May 2024
It's been over a decade since I last updated my article for new users to the Mac, so time for a new one that I can point people too. This article is intended to give a quick and easy introduction to some key things that I think you should know when you move to using macOS. Basics There’s one menu…
7 May 2024
I've always been a huge fan of the command line and have been using the gh command line tool to access GitHub for a while. My current client uses GitLab and I was delighted to discover that there is a glab CLI tool. As you can imagine, both tools do essentially the same thing: operate on GitHub/GitLab from the command…
23 Apr 2024
While reading Alex Chan's post about experimenting with the Flickr API, I noticed the call out to keyring by Jason Coombs for accessing the macOS Keychain. The built-in app: security The built-in way to access the keychain from the command line is /usr/bin/security: To create a password: $ security add-generic-password -s FlickrAPI -a rodeo -w redacted-key Note that you need…
2 Apr 2024
I install Python apps on my Mac using pipx like this: pipx install rst2pdf This will then install rst2pdf into its own isolated environment so that its dependencies do not affect and are not affected by any other Python app I have installed. Internally, it creates a venv at /.local/pipx/venvs/rst2pdf with symlinks to the currently installed python in the bin…
12 Mar 2024
One annoyance I had with my external USB hard drives is that they weren't sleeping when idle which makes them noisy. We can't have that! My first port of call was hdparm and its -S parameter: sudo hdparm -S 60 /dev/sdb However this didn't help. Fortunately, I found hd-idle which worked! After installing, you need to edit /etc/default/hd-idle and change…
5 Mar 2024
I recently added a second SSD to my Linux server and had to look up how to format it and set it up, having not taken notes for the first one. These are the notes I took the second time. This is all done from the command line and the monospace text is to be typed directly – though change…
30 Jan 2024
I have a Linux-based server that acts as my Plex server amongst other things. It's fanless and I added an additional SSD for to hold the media data so it is nice and quiet. I'm a little bit of a belt-and-braces person when it comes to backing up my data, so in addition to backing up to the cloud, I…
23 Jan 2024
I upload lots of pictures to Flickr and sometimes I just want to point at a file in Finder and upload it. Fairly recently, macOS introduced Quick Actions to Finder and this seemed like the ideal way to have a quick and easy way to upload an image to Flickr. To do this, the easiest way is to use Automator…
15 Jan 2024
I regularly need to darken images for background use behind a title. I've been using a filter in Acorn, but finally decided to make it a script that uses ImageMagick so that I could simplify it all with Alfred. This is the script: darken-image.sh #!/usr/bin/env bash if [ -z "$1" ] then echo "Usage: darken-image [contrast=40]" echo "" exit 1…
1 Nov 2023
I have a set of Markdown files with YAML front matter that contains a created property containing the date that the file was created. Due to various machinations, the file creation date no longer matches this date, so I thought I'd fix this. Setting created date of a file On macOS, to change a file's creation date you use SetFile…
7 Mar 2023
TL;DR: If someone sees you enter your passcode on your phone and then steals your phone, they can lock you out of your Apple account, losing access to all your iCloud data, including photos. Treat your phone passcode as carefully as the secret it is. The problem I heard about "A Basic iPhone Feature Helps Criminals Steal Your Entire Digital…