In this post I explain how I manage my data on a Mac. My goal is to work at full speed from anywhere with the most frequently used data, have extra storage for less accessed data, and of course have multiple backups. The source data lives on the Mac’s internal SSD and a couple of external drives. The replicas and backups are on iCloud, a remote Linux server, and Google Drive. Multiple locations, different technologies, speeds, and needs. The rclone tool is perfect for helping me maintain multiple synchronized backups. …

In this post I describe how to repurpose an old MacBook Air (2015) by installing Linux on it and extending its useful life. Over time, these Macs become nearly useless machines, painfully slow and with insufficient memory. Why not take advantage of them with Linux? A 2015 MacBook Air with 8GB of RAM and a 128GB drive can become a very useful machine. …

To perform a full reboot you can use the systemctl reboot command, but how can you schedule it at a specific time? In this post I explain how to do it using systemd, the boot manager and administration system for Linux distributions. Among the systemd timer services there’s a little-known feature that allows you to schedule an automatic reboot whenever you want. …

In this post I cover how to customize VSCode. I work with GitHub in a cross-platform, multi-account environment and want to sync my settings, use the same extensions, and leverage licenses. I explain the multi-account topic, synchronization of my global and per-project preferences (settings), and extensions. I normally use Windows, Linux, and macOS, and I’ve chosen VSCode as my editor/IDE. The goal is to have a unified work experience – launch VSCode on any operating system, clone a personal or professional project, keeping the same extensions and settings, and even using the options to connect to a host, tunnel, WSL, etc. …

Vagrant lets you create and configure virtual development environments that are lightweight and reproducible. It does so by creating virtual machines and requires a Hypervisor. It doesn’t care which hypervisor you use – it supports VirtualBox, KVM, Docker, VMWare, and 30+ others. It’s a fantastic tool for spinning up Servers for our software development projects. This guide only works, for now, with INTEL chips. I haven’t been able to make it work on a Mac with ARM (Apple Silicon) as the host yet. …

In this post I describe my configuration log for setting up a Mac (INTEL or ARM) as a development machine. I install several graphical and command-line applications that are important for using a Mac as a development workstation. The installation order can be varied, but this is what I recommend starting from a fresh macOS installation. …