I am writing this on my new(ish) BabyDoll. I sold my Surface 4 and bought this MacBook Pro 13″ Touch Bar. There were a lot of reason to re-evaluate the Surface, not least of which was that it didn’t actually work on my lap. Despite what MS says in their “it’s lappable” dogma, it is not. That dogma don’t hunt. I have a work Macbook Pro, but I want my own box without a bunch of corporate software on it and that I can do personal junk on without feeling guilty. I use my personal box full time for work for the above reasons as well. So off I went to Best Buy. I had an open mind and was initially looking at another DOS box. As I over-analyzed though, I went with another Mac.
An OS is a tool to get a job done. I used to spin up VMs a lot, but the main reason, Office, is usable on Mac at this point. To that point, I can load Windows on my Mac, but I can’t – at least ethically – load MacOS on other hardware. So, why is MacOS my goto? Chicks dig it. Also, it has much better native tools for what I do and I can customize it more than a DOS box.
I love going to customer sites and getting crap from my Windows elitist buddies for using a Mac. My usual response is “I understand that Unix can be intimidating, I get why you’d stay with DOS”. Usually sometimes gets a begrudged laugh. It’s true though. I’m not an *nix snob. I don’t want to compile the kernel to use a new mouse, but I want a bash shell damn it! Yeah, I get the Linux Services for Win10 thing, but it is bloaty and gross. There are tools for Linux boxes that I can’t /easily/ use on my Mac as well though, so there is always a tradeoff. MacOS gives me the happy medium. I plug crap in and it works. I get lots of native WiFi tools and several good suites not available on Windows or Linux (WiFi Explorer Pro being the one that comes to mind most readily). I can capture packets natively and now I can even use Ekahau without spinning up a VM or BootCamping into Windows!
I love the customizability of the terminal on MacOS. I use iTerm and a highly aliased .bash_profile to give me shortcuts and visuals I like, I love having nano, cat’ing a file so I don’t screw it up, and all that fun junk. See my profile below. It is a mashup of stuff my coworkers have found useful, stuff I’ve dug up around the web and a few things I came up with.
I also use my the ⌘+Space to open Spotlight and type in the app name almost exclusively for launching apps. I hate mice, all of that hand movement and taking my hands off the keyboard, so the more I can do to not move to it, the better. It’s just so damned inefficient. To that end, I actually prefer a laptop keyboard as the trackpad is closer than taking my hand off of the keyboard to dink with a mouse then moving it back over. Most can agree that the trackpad on a Mac with its multitouch stuff is top of class.
I love virtual desktops that I can switch between easily with a 3 finger swipe on the trackpad. I keep a Jump Desktop based RDP session open to my AD server, Jump Desktop VNC to my Ubuntu Box and sometimes one to my lab NUC running Windows 10 as a jump box. Swipe Swipe done.
So in the end, I pretty much keep all OSs running in one form or another. BabyDoll is the easiest way to do it. It’s efficient, it’s extensible and its got the tools I need. I never open my iPad unless I am reading comics or reading Scootering magazine. I use a Pixel 2 XL. I’m not an Apple fanboy, but my Mac is the best tool in the box for what I do in a day. Also, chick digs it (the only one I care about does anyway).
My .bash_profile, it’s all about the aliases baby.
alias ..='cd ../' #back that thing up alias reload='source ~/.bash_profile' #since I constantly dink with this, I like to easily reload it alias f='open -a Finder ./' # I avoid the trackpad when I can, one less movement and click to open finder at / alias inet='curl ifconfig.me' # easier than opening the browser to whatsmyip.com so I can throw an nmap at the outside of the router alias ip='ipconfig getifaddr en0' #cleaner than ifconfig if I just need my ip alias speed='curl -o /dev/null http://speedtest.wdc01.softlayer.com/downloads/test10.zip' #decent but not perfect quick and dirty speedtest alias tw='open -a /Applications/TextWrangler.app' #I use nano mostly, but if I need something more rich this makes it easy to open the file in TextWrangler (MUST HAVE for Mac nerds) alias master='sshpass -p mypassword ssh rocky@aruba-master' #This is my lab, I don't mind cleartext passwords, this makes it easier to jump into my boxes alias s3500='sshpass -p mypassword ssh rocky@s3500' #see above alias s1500='sshpass -p mypassword ssh rocky@s1500' #see above above alias dl380vm1='sshpass -p mypassword ssh rocky@dl380vm1' #see above above above alias pi='sshpass -p mypassword ssh pi@192.168.0.96' #c'mon, you get the pictures alias c='clear' #since I copy a lot of my ssh sessions for code snips for my customers, I clear a lot, that way I can do a ⌘A to snip it alias weather="curl -s 'http://rss.accuweather.com/rss/liveweather_rss.asp?metric=2&locCode=en|us|portland-or|97209' | sed -n '/Currently:/ s/.*: \(.*\): \([0-9]*\)\([CF]\).*/\2°\3, \1/p'" #stupid terminal trick I found somewhere alias ss="/System/Library/CoreServices/ScreenSaverEngine.app/Contents/MacOS/ScreenSaverEngine" #launch screensaver and lock screend alias ls='ls -GFh' #We all have our ls fave, this is mine. alias iscan=' nmap -p 1-65535 -T4 -A -v' # I forget command arguments because I am old this is for an intense can alias osmap='nmap -A' # See above, this is a quick scan with OS alias pscan='nmap -sn' #Quick ping scan #borrowed from this post that has a LOT of great stuff https://natelandau.com/my-mac-osx-bash_profile/ # cleanupDS: Recursively delete .DS_Store files # ------------------------------------------------------------------- alias cleanupDS="find . -type f -name '*.DS_Store' -ls -delete" # finderShowHidden: Show hidden files in Finder # finderHideHidden: Hide hidden files in Finder # -------------------------------------------------------------------
