Negative: Free PDF Reader With Inverted Colours Mode

I was looking for some free – like in free beer – alternatives to PDF Expert, the reader I’ve been using for years for its invert colours feature but can’t install anymore (both my licences are not recognised anymore). I found Negative.

This cool little app doesn’t seem to have any tool (no highlighter, no handwriting, no annotations, and so on). But it’s small, fast, free. And it does what it says:

Negative, free on the App Store.

Audio Equalizer for the Mac (and Spotify)

Having recently switched from iTunes to Spotify for all my music, it baffled me to discover the Mac app doesn’t come with an equalizer. Is no one at Spotify giving a fuck about, you know, sound

So, yesterday I searched for a solution that would work with Spotify. 

eqMac2 is a free and Open Source equaliser for the Mac. Yep, for the Mac: the app will let you adjust the sound system-wide, not just in Spotify.

Once started, it quietly sits in the menu bar.

I’ve just started using it, so there is not much I coudl tell beside the fact that so far it’s wroking well. It comes with a set of pre-defined settings but you can easily create and save your own. Which is neat.

The app itself is lightweight and doesn’t seem to be intrusive at all. Kudos to its dev(s).

I Don’t Need All That Power (Keep The Mac Quieter & Preserve Battery Life)

This is not a secret: most of us don’t need a 10th of the power that comes with our computer, or even with our phone.

“So, what?” You may ask.

Three things. Beside the fact that we keep on paying for power, most of us probably just don’t need. This power also has two side effects that can be a problem: heat and shorter battery life.

Heat is the processor getting hot doing its job–crunching numbers–which in the long run can be bad for the hardware, wearing it down. A CPU working harder is also more power hungry, reducing autonomy and battery life. And a CPU getting hotter needs more air… from spinning fans, that will also impact the battery and generate noise. I hate noise.

Solution? Put a leash on the CPU, don’t let it go too high, too hot. It’s good for the hardware, for the battery, and for the ears.

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Downgrading a Mac that shipped with Catalina to Mojave

It’s on Scripting OS X and it’s what I’m doing right now to a new Mac Mini.

I genuinely tried to use Catalina, but no, thanks. I’ll go back to Mojave for the time being.

This is not a long-term solution–I will have to upgrade eventually–but it gives me time. Time during which I can work without having to fight my operating system. Time for Apple to fix the mess.

Let’s just hope they change course faster than they did with their Butterly keyboards…

Creating a Custom Resolution with SwitchResX

Yesterday, I mentioned using SwitchResX to create custom screen resolutions when those provided by Apple are not enough to compensate for my bad eyesight.

But you don’t have to have a bad eyesight to create a custom resolution. Maybe you want things on screen to be a bigger so you can see them from farther away? Or whatever.

Let’s just create a custom together.

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Drafts, Quickly Becoming my Main Text Editor

I’ve been using Drafts for many years. But merely as a quick notepad as it’s lightening fast to open and to let you write anything and then, much later or immediately after jotting something down, to let you decide what to do with it–making Drafts the perfect and fastest ‘everything bucket’ there is on iOS: no need to hesitate, just write everything, anything, down in Drafts knowing you’ll decide what to do with all your notes later on.

But Drafts is much more capable than being the fastest note-taking app. Much more. It was just that I had no need for more features in an iOS app… that had no Mac companion app to let me, well, access my texts and notes outside of iOS.

Since then, the dev has released a Mac version. Alas, it was lacking some advanced features that would make me consider using it. That’s no more the case since its latest update: the Mac version now fully supports Actions–in short, Actions are the scripting thingy that comes with Drafts, that let you do many, many funny things to and with your notes.

And that changes everything.

So, even though the Mac version still has a few rough edges, for the last two weeks I’ve been almost only using Drafts to write on the iPad, the iPhone and on the Mac. And it has been an amazing experience. So much, I can hardly believe it myself.

Drafts stays lightweight and fast (it now contains a tad less than 700 notes, as I imported quite a lot of research in it, some very short or very long), while offering me as many–or as few–advanced features as I need to organise my notes, without ever turning itself into an ugly, cumbersome monster.

Advanced features like Workspaces (think ‘saved smart folders’), Tags and now Actions that let me organise my notes and projects like I want them to be, with only the tools I need within each project (this is amazing), and with an almost instant-on search engine to find whatever I need within a specific project or through all of them, with the tools to do whatever I need to do with my notes–and that includes publishing content to WordPress, though I’ve not tested it yet.

Drafts is lean, it’s fast, it’s powerful, and it’s well-thought. I’m in love with this app.

It is not perfect, sure. And it lacks a few features to replace Ulysses in my toolbox–give me inline images (not in Preview), first-line indentation (it’s a visual clue I rely on a lot to navigate my prose), and give me a Split/Merge tool–but nonetheless I’m so tempted as it’s such a pleasant experience to use it on the iPad and the iPhone, and now on the Mac too.

Drafts is free–like in free beer, no string attached to fully enjoy the fastest notebook on iOS–or subscription based (20€/year) if you need its advanced features.

BTW, if you read French and want to find some real world use cases, it might be a good idea to go read my old friend Urbanbike: he is a long time Drafts user and share a lot of advice 😉

Edit: Some precisions in what I’d love to see in Drafts.

macOS: How-to invert colors in a video

Why would anyone want to invert colors in video, you may ask?

Well, let me ask you this: why wouldn’t they want?

More seriously, I do that for a very specific reason: my bad eyesight makes it so that I can’t read black text on a white background. You know, the kind of text you occasionally find in books, or in slides. The kind of slides, you’ll find almost everywhere while watching College de France many lectures. Like in Dario Mantovani’s Usages juridiques du passé (dans la pensée des juristes romains).

A slide from Dario Mantovani’s lecture "Usages juridiques du passé (dans la pensée des juristes romains)". Text is printed in red on a white background.
A slide from Dario Mantovani’s lecture “Usages juridiques du passé (dans la pensée des juristes romains)”. Text is printed in red on a white background.

To read this slide, I need the background to be dark and the text to be light.

Under macOS, I could easily invert colors of the whole screen, but that’d be impractical as that’d also invert colors in all my other windows that are already dark.

Here is how I invert only the colors of a video under macOS (see here for Windows).

  1. Install IIna, a free fork of VLC optimized for macOS. It’s a great app, really.
  2. Open the video you want to invert and go to Video->Video Filters.
  3. In the window that opens, click the + sign at the bottom left and select Negative. Click Add.
  1. Back to the first window. Click the Save button that is next to the new line with your filter and give your filter a name.
  2. Done. From now, with any video you play in IIna, you just need to go to Video-> Saved Video Filters, and click your filter. Or you can define your own custom keyboard shortcut in the Filter window.
The same slide in inverted colors. The text is now blue on a black background.
The same slide in inverted colors. The text is now blue on a black background.

My deepest apologies to Dario Mantovani for the treatment I put him through, but I’m sure he’ll understand that I was more interested in being able to read his slides than to look at him during his lectures 😉

Cloud & Privacy: Boxcryptor

Abandon privacy all ye who enter the cloud” is something that should be engraved over the entrance of most, if not all, cloud services.

At least this is what it feels like to me, having to relinquish all notion of privacy and intimacy knowing my files will be analysed—some cloud providers being more invasive than other in that regard. 

I’ll gladly open all my files and folders to any legit authority asking me to do so, provided they have a reason and the right to ask. But I don’t want anyone else accessing my files–be it on purpose, in order to offer me some service, or because of a security breach–to be able to read them.

I don’t want anyone to discover that I’m the author hiding behind the pen name of dear « Dulcinea Von Liebe, Duchess of Hot Steamy Romance ». I don’t want anyone or any algorithm to be able to read my medical documents, or to see the pictures of my cat. That’s none of their business. That’s, you know private. And that’s not the reason why I decided to use cloud to store my files.

The obvious solution would be to not use the cloud at all. Problem solved, thx for reading, bye. Save that I want to use the cloud: it’s a great tool. It’s just the lack of a stricter legislation that makes it such this Wild West and this Eldorado for those companies, giving them free rein over our data.

Enters Boxcryptor. 

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