The Tao of MacComplete Wiki/Blog feedhttps://taoofmac.com/atom.xml2026-04-11T08:43:20+00:00CC Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0Shottrhttps://taoofmac.com/space/apps/shottr?utm_content=atom2026-04-11T08:27:00+00:002026-04-11T08:43:20+00:00Rui Carmohttps://taoofmac.comShottr is a lightweight macOS screenshot and annotation tool that manages to stay focused on the useful bits while still packing in a surprising number of editing features: quick capture, measurement, redaction, OCR, scrolling screenshots, pinning, pixelation, arrows, callouts and the usual visual markup without turning into a full design app. It has the right kind of small-tool energy, and is one of those utilities that is easy to justify keeping around all the time.
It also has a free trial mode and is available via Homebrew, which makes it particularly easy to install and keep up to date:
brewinstall--caskshottr
]]>Markdownhttps://taoofmac.com/space/markup/markdown?utm_content=atom2007-02-28T21:44:57+00:002026-04-11T08:43:20+00:00Rui Carmohttps://taoofmac.comMarkdown is a text-to-HTML idiom, conversion tool and all-out ecosystem for web writers, content editors and… AI, allowing you to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, then convert it to structurally valid (X)HTML.
Althought I used to prefer Textile for its table support and other niceties, Markdown has won that war and enjoys indisputably wider adoption, as well as making for slightly more readable text when writing essays.
Amusingly, it became the lingua franca of LLMs and is now the de facto standard for most modern documentation as well.
]]>Hyperkeyhttps://taoofmac.com/space/apps/hyperkey?utm_content=atom2026-04-11T08:13:00+00:002026-04-11T08:16:16+00:00Rui Carmohttps://taoofmac.comHyperkey is a tiny macOS menu bar utility that turns Caps Lock into a proper Hyper key, which is one of those small affordances that can make a keyboard-driven setup much more pleasant. The nice bit here is that it does this without dragging in the usual heavier remapping machinery, so it feels like a lightweight answer to a very specific itch.
If you use custom shortcuts or window-management tools, having an easy way to get a full Cmd+Ctrl+Opt+Shift chord out of Caps Lock is surprisingly useful.
TypeWhisper is a rather pragmatic macOS dictation and speech-processing tool that can use Apple’s own speech stack as well as other on-device models, which makes it more interesting to me than the usual cloud-first transcription wrappers. It also layers prompt-driven text processing on top of raw transcription, so it sits somewhere between dictation utility and local speech workbench.
The more appealing aspect here is that it can stay local when you want it to, but still gives you a fair amount of flexibility in engines and workflow. That makes it potentially useful not just for transcription, but also as a general accessibility and text-entry aid across the desktop.
Cotypist is one of the more interesting recent takes on system-wide text completion on the Mac, mostly because it appears to keep processing local and to use screenshot-derived context to improve what it suggests. That makes it potentially useful well beyond the usual “AI writing helper” niche, especially in situations where the surrounding UI matters as much as the current text field.
It also strikes me as a potentially valuable accessibility tool, since this kind of ambient completion can reduce typing effort, help with repetitive text entry, and provide a softer assistive layer across applications rather than inside a single editor.
It is currently free during the beta period, which lowers the barrier to giving it a try.
]]>The Cudy AX3000 Wi-Fi 6 System (with OpenWRT)https://taoofmac.com/space/reviews/2025/09/14/1630?utm_content=atom2025-09-14T16:30:00+00:002026-04-10T20:52:08+00:00Rui Carmohttps://taoofmac.comAs I’ve been writing about once or twice, I’ve recently upgraded my Wi-Fi after an attempt to use ISP-provided equipment to replace my remarkably long-lasting (and extremely reliable) Airport Extreme base stations.
The short of it is that I ended up getting a few Cudy M3000 and setting up OpenWRT on them:
The M3000 standalone router/access point
Disclaimer: Although I sought out (and paid for) several M3000 units myself, I’m following my standard format and review policy for consistency, since this is more or less a “review”.
The long of it has been a somewhat fun journey, so here’s the full story.
In case you’ve landed here without any context, I recently switched ISPs and the initial configuration included a set of Wi-Fi 7 extenders to replace my (very) long-lived Airport Extreme base stations.
Fully local, browser-based management (I don’t mind managing each device individually).
Absolutely zero cloud management features. Zilch. Nada. No setting up a user account with the vendor or any external dependencies (I don’t want or need off-site remote management—and if I did, I could set it up myself.)
No mobile apps required (or desirable) for either initial setup or daily tweaks (which was something I actually didn’t like about the Airport Extremes even if it was very convenient to have management baked into iOS).
Not an ugly arachnoid eyesore (we can’t hang access points off walls or ceilings, and the Airport Extremes became effectively invisible in plain sight).
And the M3000 doesn’t look half bad compared to an Airport Extreme, so that was definitely a reason for me to take a second look (they come in black too, but the white ones were drop-in replacements for the Airports in our decor).
As you can see, they are pretty neutral. I will miss the extra LAN and USB ports, though.
Technically, I had a few more requirements:
I wanted “dumb” access points. No routing, no meshing, no weird/proprietary vendor features—just a box able to turn Ethernet packets into radio and back again.
I decided to aim for Wi-Fi 6/6E (I quickly realized that we only have a couple of MacBooks able to do Wi-Fi 7 and that most of our devices are Wi-Fi 6 capable).
Full control over all Wi-Fi features (channel, SSIDs, power, etc.) with support for an arbitrary number of SSIDs (with VLAN mapping of each) on both 2.4/5 GHz (or 6 GHz if available).
No band steering (it does not really work in our scenario, and one of the biggest gripes I had with our ISP setup was that I couldn’t turn it off).
2.5GbE backhaul (gigabit-plus Wi-Fi is useless if you can’t pipe it through.)
At least one pass-through Ethernet port (the Airport Extreme has three additional GbE ports, which is still apparently a premium configuration over a decade later but has proven very, very handy)
OpenWRT was not really a requirement, but since my first-ever Wi-Fi access points were indeed WRT54G devices and I have a long history with it, that’s where I started my research, and Cudy hardware had quite a few positive references.
Moreover, they actually provide instructions on how to re-flash their devices with OpenWRT, and there is an upgrade path to the currently supported version (as well as a likely runway of official OpenWRT support for a few years at least), so they soon rose to the top of my list.
The factory firmware is actually very nice, and makes an excellent job of exposing all of the features as well as guiding users through initial setup of the devices either as a router or as an access point in various configurations:
The base Cudy UI is very comprehensive.
I didn’t run it for long, but it seems to do a very good job of exposing both OpenWRT core functionality and the additional features Cudy added. Although I didn’t install their app or tried to manage it remotely, I’d say most people would be well served by the factory firmware–and since it even supports TR069 for carrier remote management, ISPs probably should take a look at it too.
But my objective was to make sure I had full control of the hardware and run these on the latest vanilla OpenWRT, so there were a few more steps involved.
The first thing I needed to do was unlock the factory firmware. The white/grey devices I have are “V2” hardware, but Cudy themselves say that the firmware is identical to the V1 (which is black with red trimming) and provide a vanilla OpenWRT 23.05 image, so I started out with that.
That ZIP file contains a Windows version of tftpd (which is an extra nice touch, even if it triggers a bunch of virus warnings), a comprehensive set of instructions for Windows users in a PDF and a few firmware files, which we’ll get to in a moment.
To get the latest supported firmware, I went to the OpenWRT Firmware Selector and looked for the Cudy M3000, downloading the latest sysupgrade file. I downloaded 24.10.2 (r28739-d9340319c6).
I then set up tftpd on one of my Fedora laptops (because, I don’t have personal Windows machines anymore) and wired it up to the LAN port on the M3000.
To enable it to get at the recovery.bin file via TFTP, I copied that file to /var/lib/tftpboot, set my laptop to IP address 192.168.1.88 and restarted tftpd.
I then held down the power button on the M3000, plugged in the barrel jack, waited until the lights settled (solid red in my case) and then reset my laptop to use DHCP, because the next step is to log in to the (now unlocked) Cudy web UI at http://192.168.10.1.
Once you’re there, go to Advanced Settings/Firmware and upload cudy_m3000-v1-sysupgrade.bin (checksum d09cdb39e9544b1d33a4daf28964c50b), which is also provided in the ZIP file.
This gives you a vanilla OpenWRT 23.05 install, and you then go to http://192.168.1.1/cgi-bin/luci/admin/system/flash, upload the 24.10.2 file and… you’re done.
Start tftpd with the recovery.bin file in /var/lib/tftpboot.
Plug in the power jack while holding the power button, wait until the lights settle (solid red in my case).
Reconfigure your machine from 192.168.1.88 to DHCP.
Log in to the Cudy web UI (http://192.168.10.1), go to Advanced Settings/Firmware and upload cudy_m3000-v1-sysupgrade.bin (d09cdb39e9544b1d33a4daf28964c50b).
Wait for it to reboot.
Go to http://192.168.1.1/cgi-bin/luci/admin/system/flash and upload the 24.10.2 sysupgrade image.
I initially got a standalone unit to test and then bought a 3-pack and another standalone unit (to keep as a cold spare), so I had a working configuration I could use to set up the new nodes way before I got them all.
Over that initial week with the first unit, I sorted out all of the details:
Disabled the built-in DHCP server
Added both Ethernet ports to the br-lan bridge to allow pass-through (this way I can plug an Apple TV or similar directly into the gigabit port)
Set the timezone, checked that NTP worked correctly, etc.
Installed rsync and luci-app-statistics to play around with configuration files and monitoring
Set up the 2.4GHz radio for a “compatibility mode” that wouldn’t frustrate my IoT devices (including the many low bitrate ESP32s lying around)
Set up WPA3 on the 5GHz radio to enable full 802.11ax data rates (I also punched up the channel width to 160Mhz and set up 802.11r for faster hand-overs)
This bit is probably the most interesting for everyone, so here’s a redacted version of my initial /etc/config/wireless:
To set up the other nodes, I just uploaded the first one’s configuration backup, changed the hostname and IP address (given the vagaries of our new home gateway, I opted for static IPs) and plugged them in.
My iPhone and MacBook Pro can both do 1.2 Gbps down / 1.5 Gbps up within 2–3 meters of any of the access points when connecting to our internal OpenSpeedTest instance—which I’m hosting on one of my TerraMaster’s 10GbE interfaces:
OpenSpeedTest hosted on my 10GbE NAS
Running a second simultaneous test gives obviously lower (but similar) individual results and maxes out the 2.5GbE uplink, so I would say this is about as good as it’s ever going to get, since I suspect that even if we were using Wi-Fi 7 and 6GHz, physics and the 2.5GbE backhaul would start factoring in.
Again, this is in a pure “flat” configuration, with all physical interfaces and radios set as part of the br-lan–no routing is taking place, and no layer 3 handling is happening.
Our staple latency test (streaming games using Steam Link from a 2.5GbE server) is buttery smooth, but then again it was already good with the Airport Extremes (you only really need 30-50Mbps for crisp 1080p streaming), and the Logitech G Cloud (which, ironically, has worse Wi-Fi than any of our iPads) works perfectly.
But I’ll let the data speak for itself:
PHY bitrate in my living room
This is the same kind of performance I was getting with the Wi-Fi 7 extenders from my ISP, but:
I can now see it, monitor it and dive into the nitty-gritty details at will instead of having to guess what was happening.
Even though it’s not Wi-Fi 6E, it is a massive improvement over the sub-300 Mbps I was getting from the Apple Airport Extremes.
There is some occasional flip-flopping between access points, but that only happens in Linux and in places where coverage has strong overlap, so I’m not worried about it (I can always turn off 802.11r if it becomes a nuisance, and I consider it an experiment, not a requirement):
This is a good example--I see a similar pattern in the nearest AP to this one
Looking at the logs from both APs involved it seems to be a client issue:
Sun Sep 7 09:50:00 2025 daemon.notice hostapd: phy1-ap0: STA a6:a8:e5:87:20:d0 IEEE 802.11: did not acknowledge authentication response
Sun Sep 7 09:50:46 2025 daemon.notice hostapd: phy1-ap0: STA a6:a8:e5:87:20:d0 IEEE 802.11: did not acknowledge authentication response
Sun Sep 7 09:50:48 2025 daemon.info hostapd: phy1-ap0: STA a6:a8:e5:87:20:d0 IEEE 802.11: associated (aid 5)
Sun Sep 7 09:50:48 2025 daemon.notice hostapd: phy1-ap0: AP-STA-CONNECTED a6:a8:e5:87:20:d0 auth_alg=sae
Sun Sep 7 09:50:48 2025 daemon.info hostapd: phy1-ap0: STA a6:a8:e5:87:20:d0 WPA: pairwise key handshake completed (RSN)
Sun Sep 7 09:50:48 2025 daemon.notice hostapd: phy1-ap0: EAPOL-4WAY-HS-COMPLETED a6:a8:e5:87:20:d0
Sun Sep 7 09:54:34 2025 daemon.info hostapd: phy1-ap0: STA a6:a8:e5:87:20:d0 IEEE 802.11: authenticated
Sun Sep 7 09:54:45 2025 daemon.notice hostapd: phy1-ap0: AP-STA-DISCONNECTED a6:a8:e5:87:20:d0
This hasn’t recurred, but I will be keeping an eye on things–and if you want to dig deeper into 802.11r configuration, this great page has a bunch of detail on it.
So far there haven’t been any unexpected behaviors, and since I am not using band steering (which you can add by installing usteer or dawn and their corresponding luci packages, by the way) everything’s been fine with my legacy devices.
While I was going through this process, I got a bunch of feedback from people online:
Why not UniFi? Value for money, plain and simple. I have used Ubiquiti devices before, but I wasn’t going to pay three digits for a “dumb” access point and don’t need most of their features.
Why not Wi-Fi 7? There isn’t anything similar with Wi-Fi 6E/7 support and 2.5GbE backhaul yet–at least not anywhere near this price point. Cudy does have other models, but they haven’t released unlocked OpenWRT firmware (yet, I hope) and besides, I am already getting gigabit-plus speeds for all my devices.
What about meshing? It’s useless for me. We have reinforced concrete walls and two lift shafts in the middle of our flat and even 2.4 GHz has issues, which is partly why I made sure we have at least two Ethernet jacks in each room when we renovated over twenty years ago.
What about roaming? This is a home (office), not an independent country. Standard Wi-Fi handovers work fine even if you walk around the house on a video call. I enabled 802.11r anyway but see no need for it.
What about central management? It’s just four active devices, and they’re all set up as “dumb” access points, so there isn’t a lot to manage except when I’m setting up a new VLAN or need a test SSID. Gathering stats off luci-app-statistics via collectd is a wheel that’s already been invented, so I don’t need a controller for that.
All in all, I don’t even need the LuCI web UI, and if I need to test a complex configuration I can hack something together with ssh and ansible for reproducibility in around 30 minutes.
The Cudy AX3000/M3000 models make for pretty great Airport Extreme replacements, and in this age of networking devices with cloud features nobody asked for OpenWRT turns them into very nice locally managed access points that I will never have to worry about again (until I break the configuration myself, of course).
Although it is much too early to weigh in on hardware reliability (some of the 802.11acAirport Extremes I was using were manufactured over a decade ago), the price/performance ratio is great, and right now I don’t mind it not being Wi-Fi 7.
After all, it took almost ten years for the 2.4GHz band to become saturated in my building, and it doesn’t look as if the 5GHz band is going to be massively swamped anytime soon, so I’m expecting something like 3-4 years of hassle-free operation if the hardware holds up.
A relevant thing I should point out again is that people who have less need for low-level control might actually be fine with the stock firmware—I did not use it extensively (nor did I try the Cudy app or any of the router/firewall features), but it already exposes a lot more functionality (and seems a lot more flexible) than ISP gear, so I would encourage people to give it a go.
I suspect I will eventually come across some OpenWRT corner cases as I succumb to the temptation to fiddle with the configuration a bit more, but given our particular situation there’s a very high chance these will just fade into the background and “just work”, which was the ideal outcome that Apple pretty much nailed with the Airport Extremes…
Update, September 24, 2025: I decided to tweak my settings a little bit and enabled 802.11k/v on both radios, which seems to have improved the flip-flopping. That meant upgrading wpad-basic-mbedtls to the full version (opkg update && opkg remove wpad-basic-mbedtls && opkg install wpad-mbedtls) and the following settings:
I suspect I might have to tweak the 802.11k settings a bit more, but so far it seems to be working well.
Update, December 2025: I've been told that [Cudy] has updated their [OpenWRT page][cudy_support] with newer firmware versions, so if you're doing this now, make sure to check there first since new hardware revisions (serial numbers starting with 2543) require a different recovery image (good thing I bought a spare unit to keep things uniform). So far, I've had zero issues with any of mine.
After a few more months of living with these, I ended up revisiting the 5GHz configuration. The main thing I changed was to stop trying to be clever with HE160. It did work, and on paper it looked great (those headline PHY rates are always tempting), but in practice it made the whole setup feel a bit too fussy for a house where I care more about moving around on FaceTime calls and carrying on with work than about wringing the last possible megabit out of a speed test. In hindsight this was fairly obvious: HE160 is a lot of channel width to throw at a multi-AP setup, and I was also leaving channel selection on auto, which wasn’t helping matters.
So I simplified things.
I kept the 5GHz SSID as the “good” network – WPA3, 802.11r, 802.11k, 802.11v, all the usual niceties – but moved the radios to HE80 and assigned fixed channels to each AP. That gave me a much saner setup: lower theoretical peak rates, yes, but much better behaviour in day-to-day use.
The current 5GHz plan is now:
AP 1: channel 36
AP 2: channel 52
AP 3: channel 100
AP 4: channel 116
And the relevant OpenWRT configuration now looks like this:
HE160 is fine if you care more about peak throughput than roaming, but I don’t.
Fixed channels make overlap and neighbour relationships much easier to reason about.
802.11r only really makes sense if all APs serving a given SSID are configured consistently, so tidiness matters more than “advanced” settings.
Keeping the 2.4GHz network as the compatibility lane for older and IoT devices is still the right trade-off here.
So far this seems to have paid off. The 5GHz metrics now look much more sensible, and the APs are behaving in a way that feels a lot closer to what I wanted in the first place.
The other thing I finally got around to doing was centralising the AP metrics. I already had luci-app-statistics and collectd on all of them, so rather than inventing some sort of controller story for a handful of dumb APs, I just pointed them all at the Graphite instance I already had on the network. This turned out to be mildly more annoying than expected, because although collectd-mod-write-graphite is available, the LuCI-side renderer for it wasn’t present on these installs – so adding a UCI block under luci_statistics wasn’t enough to get a runtime config generated.
The package installation itself is straightforward:
opkgupdate
opkginstallcollectd-mod-write-graphite
The part that actually mattered was dropping a native collectd include file into place:
and after that it was just a matter of restarting collectd:
/etc/init.d/collectdrestart
That was enough to get all the APs reporting centrally, which makes comparing station counts, signal levels and bitrate across the house a lot easier than peering at each box individually.
If anything, this only reinforced my original conclusion: there is still no compelling reason to replace a handful of perfectly good OpenWRT access points with a controller ecosystem when a bit of channel planning and a central metrics sink get you most of the way there.
]]>Clojure(Script)https://taoofmac.com/space/dev/clojure?utm_content=atom2013-08-20T17:09:00+00:002026-04-11T08:16:16+00:00Rui Carmohttps://taoofmac.comClojure is a LISP dialect that targets the Java VM - but that also happens to have a number of other back-ends, including a JavaScript one.
Error: Could not parse 'table.yaml'
while parsing a block mapping
in "<byte string>", line 2, column 1
did not find expected key
in "<byte string>", line 438, column 1
]]>Window Managershttps://taoofmac.com/space/apps/window_managers?utm_content=atom2010-08-05T21:43:06+00:002026-04-10T11:03:57+00:00Rui Carmohttps://taoofmac.comWindow managers on macOS (and Windows) are auxiliary programs that try to complement the system’s own handling of windows, and are not as powerful as X11 window managers. However, there are a few exceptions, and as I started using bigger and bigger (and more) displays I’ve been using them on a daily basis.
My requirements change over time and in different circumstances (sometimes I need an automatic tiling window manager, sometimes I just want good window snapping to predefined zones), so I experiment a fair bit–the listing below contains most of my favorites over time in various operating systems.
Apps are listed as primarily keyboard or mouse driven even though most support both kinds of input. What matters in that classification is the fastest way to arrange windows.
Some commercial solutions (and potentially insecure Mac solutions like yabai, which require you to explicitly disable System Integrity Protection) are intentionally ignored.
My 2012-2021 window manager, which allows you to store predefined layouts but wasn’t scriptable. The 2024 edition adds FancyZones-like functionality and a bit more flexibility.
My 2024 favorite for tiling. Provides a fast, snappy i3-like tiling window manager for macOS with its own workspace support, and the default config uses HJKL as control keys. Only issue I have with it is that it requires relatively new macOS versions, and I sometimes use an older Mac laptop.
a nice, also JavaScript scriptable window manager that includes an IDE. In May 2021, the IDE hangs up weirdly in Big Sur, so I opted for Phoenix instead.
]]>Model Context Protocolhttps://taoofmac.com/space/ai/mcp?utm_content=atom2025-05-01T17:30:00+00:002026-04-10T11:03:57+00:00Rui Carmohttps://taoofmac.comThis page is a collection of notes and links related to the Model Context Protocol (MCP), a proposed standard for extending managing context in large language models (LLMs) via external tools.
local markdown-first knowledge indexing/search engine with hybrid BM25/vector/reranking and MCP transport for Claude-compatible clients, plus context-aware retrieval via CLI.
a WebMCP demo that lets agents compose music in a browser-based sequencer via WebMCP tools
]]>Pythonhttps://taoofmac.com/space/dev/python?utm_content=atom2007-04-15T10:44:37+00:002026-04-10T11:03:57+00:00Rui Carmohttps://taoofmac.comPython is one of my favorite programming languages due to its terseness and amazing flexibility, and after decades using it I find it quite amusing that it is now the language of choice for data science and machine learning.
This will install packages to your Library folder rather than to the
system directory, saving you the trouble to use sudo or risking
messing with the system installation. Of course virtualenv does a
better job for keeping track of project-specific dependencies, but this
is great for common/complex dependencies and is sure to survive
operating system upgrades.
And then you can use easy_install or pip install --user with
impunity, although you might need to do something like:
]]>Xteink X4https://taoofmac.com/space/hw/xteink/x4?utm_content=atom2026-04-09T13:19:00+00:002026-04-11T08:16:16+00:00Rui Carmohttps://taoofmac.comThe Xteink X4 is a small open e-ink reader that has become more interesting because of the growing CrossPoint ecosystem around it. The hardware itself is attractive mostly as a hackable reading device: simple, portable, and now backed by a fairly active alternative firmware community—one that feels more relevant now that it is a device that I recently got.
The most sensible starting point is the upstream CrossPoint Reader firmware, then branch out into more specialized forks only if you need particular UX changes, CJK support, or more experimental features.
Adafruit guide for running CircuitPython on the ESP32-C3-based Xteink X4, including installation, web workflow and display demos
]]>Obsidianhttps://taoofmac.com/space/apps/obsidian?utm_content=atom2022-08-03T12:00:00+00:002026-04-09T18:14:07+00:00Rui Carmohttps://taoofmac.comObsidian is a very popular cross-platform note-taking application that allows you to use plain Markdown as a very flexible notes database and that I have somewhat begrudgingly adopted as a key part of my workflow during 2025.
I don’t exactly remember when I started using Obsidian daily—I suspect it was when I finally figured out how to use it with SyncThing on my iPad, but another (just as important) milestone I remember was when I got the Kanban plugin working, since that gave me a sensible cross-platform way to manage my to-dos across Mac and Linux (Reminders just doesn’t cut it in that scenario).
Don’t get me wrong, I still don’t like Obsidian. It is one of the many Electron-based nightmares that we have to run on our devices because, unfortunately, there isn’t anything demonstrably more developer-friendly (note that I didn’t say better).
In particular, I don’t like that it’s not open source, since despite not minding paying for software I think that anything I commit to using for multiple years should last “forever”. I don’t like how it approaches linking and metadata, and I absolutely didn’t like that it tries to tie you to a proprietary syncing service.
Despite all that, I use it daily on Linux, macOS, and iOS, and the combination of cross-platform access and the Kanban workflow fits my day-to-day needs perfectly.
The Kanban plugin has turned into my master to-do list, and I never managed to get Reminders to work cross-platform in the same way.
There is a plugin that allows me to have my Supernote Nomad notes show up in Obsidian, which is a nice trick. In fact, I can even run Obsidian on the Nomad itself.
The Markdown editor essentially disappears when you’re editing, which I like because it lets me focus on the content rather than the formatting. Somehow iA Writer feels less polished, which is weird—I suspect it’s about it not being truly WYSIWYG.
Obsidian’s secret power on mobile is the iOS swiping keyboard—I’m able to thumb type quite quickly with it, to the point where it’s just ridiculously easy to take an idle moment to jot down ideas.
The Data Tables feature is stupendously powerful, and I am actively resisting using it too much because I know it will make my notes less portable.
There are enough rough edges that I still keep coming up against the same issues:
Its WikiLinks can’t be relative, or link to a page/folder rather than an .md file.
Electron is a resource hog and feels sluggish on older hardware, so I end up editing in Vim or another editor quite often.
It cannot deal with front-matter “properly” (at least not the way I want it to), so importing this site into it never worked (and it is highly likely that it never will). That also means I can’t use it as a primary editor for this site directly, or, in fact, for a few MkDocs-based sites I maintain.
It’s proprietary in key ways (syncing, mobile app limitations, not open source).
The Canvas feature is a nice idea, but it is nowhere near as good as a proper mind-mapping app like XMind (or even Apple’s Freeform).
The graph view is cute, but not really useful for anything other than showing off.
Setting a common look and feel across platforms is tricky, especially on iOS where CSS tweaks are limited.
Plugins are very brittle, and hit-or-miss in quality. After a few months of trying out various plugins, I have no clue as to whether my current set of plugins will be maintained in the future (a couple that I use already bear deprecation notices, and I certainly don’t want to maintain them).
It really doesn’t understand about folders, or about “one note per folder with all attachments” approaches. With the right plugins you can just paste an image into a note and it will store the attachment in the same folder, but it still feels hacky.
I eventually worked out a set of alternatives and workarounds that make Obsidian usable for me:
On iOS you can use Möbius Sync to keep a local folder and then use SyncThing to sync a single vault. You do have to be careful about it, since the mobile app is way behind the desktop apps in functionality and feels artificially gimped—for instance, you cannot pick a vault location at will, so you need to be creative with workarounds (this is even true if, like me, you’re used to iOS folder sharing).
Thanks to the Linter plugin, I can enforce a set of formatting and metadata rules that make my notes consistent across platforms and editors, even if Obsidian itself doesn’t really understand them.
I have a little script that takes an Obsidian note and moves it across to this site, where I finish editing it and publish it using VS Code. In fact, if VS Code had a decent live Markdown editor and a comparable Kanban editor, I might just use that instead of Obsidian altogether.
I suspect that some day I will take something like Foam and hack it into a workable notes system that I can run in VS Code, but for now Obsidian is “good enough” despite its many flaws.
local-first CLI for Obsidian vaults that operates directly on markdown files without the Obsidian app, designed as a memory system for AI agents using progressive disclosure.
Plugin that gives Obsidian agents a dedicated, persistent memory interface to retain and recall conversation context and project notes across sessions.
Zero-terminal real-time sync engine for Obsidian using your own Cloudflare Worker instead of conventional file sync or self-hosted database-heavy setups.
Agent Skills bundle for Obsidian that teaches compatible agents to edit Obsidian Markdown, Bases, JSON Canvas, and interact with vaults via the Obsidian CLI.
AI-powered assistant panel that plugs into GitHub Copilot or BYOK providers, bundles agents/skills/tools/prompts/triggers, offers ghost-text autocomplete and editor context menu actions, and boots a sidekick/ folder with sample configs.
Probably the nicest, most straightforward LLM plugin for revising grammar and overall formatting. Supports LiteLLM and custom endpoints without any issues.
a static site generator that can directly publish Obsidian vaults. It’s beautiful, but suffers from the usual PWA stupidity of downloading a contentindex.jsonwith your site’s entire plaintext to facilitate search.
]]>ESP8266 (and ESP32)https://taoofmac.com/space/hw/esp8266?utm_content=atom2016-05-08T23:49:00+00:002026-04-09T07:14:14+00:00Rui Carmohttps://taoofmac.comThese little modules have taken hobby electronics by storm, so of course I grabbed a few of them and have been hacking away quietly on both the ESP8266 and the ESP32.
a lightweight TCP/IP stack for resource-constrained MCUs with no dynamic allocations, fixed socket/buffer limits, BSD-like sockets, and a FreeRTOS port.
]]>Hardwarehttps://taoofmac.com/space/hw?utm_content=atom2005-02-01T12:32:00+00:002026-04-09T07:14:14+00:00Rui Carmohttps://taoofmac.comThis page is a placeholder for a category.
]]>Agentic Systemshttps://taoofmac.com/space/ai/agentic?utm_content=atom2025-12-23T10:00:00+00:002026-04-09T07:13:02+00:00Rui Carmohttps://taoofmac.comNotes and resources on building and operating agentic AI systems, covering orchestration frameworks, task routing, memory, and evaluation approaches that extend baseline LLM capabilities.
Pi.dev is the home of the Pi coding agent and its ecosystem of extensions, adapters, and clients. See the Pi.dev Ecosystem page for the curated project list.
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]]>Porting Mac OS X to the Nintendo Wiihttps://taoofmac.com/space/links/2026/04/08/1805?utm_content=atom2026-04-08T18:05:00+00:002026-04-08T18:05:00+00:00Rui Carmohttps://taoofmac.com
This was not on my bingo card for 2026.
The Wii is, indeed, a PowerPC machine, but getting Mac OS X to boot on it still requires a fair amount of kernel hacking—never mind the real life altitude it was actually written at, although it does confirm that flight time can, indeed, be used productively.
]]>JavaScripthttps://taoofmac.com/space/dev/javascript?utm_content=atom2007-02-28T21:44:19+00:002026-04-08T07:07:58+00:00Rui Carmohttps://taoofmac.comThe ECMA - 262 Standard, ratified after Netscape and Microsoft (mostly) agreed to make JavaScript and JScript interoperable.
In order to run NodeJS sanely on macOS and WSL, I’ve taken to setting up an unprivileged package install folder like so:
mkdir"${HOME}/.npm-packages"# Add a new dotfile, without expanding $HOME
cat<< 'EOF' >> ~/.npmrcprefix=${HOME}/.npm-packagesEOF# Add the following five lines to .bashrc, without expanding variables:
cat<< 'EOF' >> ~/.bashrc NPM_PACKAGES="${HOME}/.npm-packages"PATH="$NPM_PACKAGES/bin:$PATH"# Unset manpath so we can inherit from /etc/manpath via the `manpath` commandunset MANPATH # delete if you already modified MANPATH elsewhere in your configexport MANPATH="$NPM_PACKAGES/share/man:$(manpath)"EOF
I’ve taken to looking for alternative ways to develop in JavaScript that don’t require me to put up with its syntax and overall insanity. Here’s a few I like (mostly compilers, since that’s what makes the most sense for me):
Most of these are library-independent. Check my jQuery page for more, since there’s an entire sub-culture that believes it to be JavaScript programming in and by its own…
Node-based CLI that runs your dev server through a local proxy so every service gets a stable .localhost URL (with HTTPS/2, host sync, and auto-managed ports for subdomains/worktrees).
another lightweight web framework, focusing on edge platforms
]]>Go (lang)https://taoofmac.com/space/dev/golang?utm_content=atom2013-06-28T10:12:00+00:002026-04-09T07:13:02+00:00Rui Carmohttps://taoofmac.comA great systems-oriented programming language I’ve taken up to complement Python due to its ability to cross-compile and produce (mostly) self-contained static binaries.
]]>Visual Studio Codehttps://taoofmac.com/space/apps/code?utm_content=atom2016-12-20T18:30:00+00:002026-04-08T07:07:58+00:00Rui Carmohttps://taoofmac.comVisual Studio Code became my de facto default editor (well, other than vim back in 2016 (years before I joined Microsoft) simply because it was inhumanly fast for an Electron application and completely usable on Mac and Linux from day one.
Throughout the years, its Monaco editor, support for every single programming language I wanted to use and explosive extension ecosystem just made it better and more “sticky”, and I use it daily on almost every single device I own (including the iPad, via Blink).
VS Code extension that wires a drag-and-drop Kanban board to GitHub Copilot Chat, storing each task as a markdown file with YAML metadata so you can plan/todo/implement with @kanban commands while keeping a version-controlled chat history.
]]>AI Speech Technologieshttps://taoofmac.com/space/ai/speech?utm_content=atom2025-05-01T18:15:00+00:002026-04-11T08:16:16+00:00Rui Carmohttps://taoofmac.comThis page is a collection of notes and links related to AI speech technologies, including Text-to-Speech (TTS), Speech-to-Text (STT), voice synthesis, voice cloning, and other related frippery in the modern AI space.
an on-device Apple Silicon voice agent for macOS that combines STT, local LLM inference, TTS, 38 local actions, and document RAG in a low-latency TUI/CLI.
a family of models optimized for fast and accurate automatic speech recognition on resource-constrained devices. Designed to run efficiently on smaller hardware.
A macOS dictation and transcription app that can use Apple’s speech stack as well as other local on-device engines, with optional prompt-driven post-processing.
An offline, cross-platform speech-to-text app built with Tauri that transcribes locally. Uses Whisper and Parakeet models without sending audio to the cloud.
a Go-based local voice-to-text tool for Linux terminals that streams whisper.cpp transcription to stdout, files, or keystroke injection for dictating into focused terminal apps.
an open-source voice cloning studio with DAW-like features, local-first voice synthesis powered by Qwen3-TTS, multi-track timeline editor, and REST API
