2026-03-16 20:35:06
When I bought my last new Mac two years ago, I set it up the way I had been setting up my personal computers for years: plug in a Time Machine drive and run Migration Assistant. On a modern Mac with an SSD, even if you have hundreds of apps installed like I do, the whole process takes about 20 minutes. It recreates your Applications folder, brings over preferences, and generally makes the new machine feel finished almost immediately.
Nothing could be easier.
There is a downside, though. Migration Assistant faithfully brings over all the accumulated cruft along with the good stuff. That’s how I ended up with Keychain entries for wireless access points I installed in 2014, and references in ~/Library/Application Support to apps I haven’t touched in years.
UPS is dropping a Mac mini on my doorstep sometime this morning. For the first time in a long time, I’m not going to use Migration Assistant.
Thanks to tools like Updatest and Cork, I’ve moved every application that can be managed by Homebrew into that ecosystem. On my current machine that covers 212 GUI apps plus 260 CLI packages and dependencies.
Recreating that environment on a new Mac is trivial.
To back up your current setup:
brew bundle dump
To install everything on a new Mac:
brew bundle install
By default, Homebrew can also install Mac App Store apps using the mas CLI. The generated Brewfile is plain text and extremely easy to edit if you want to remove anything before installing.
A small sample looks like this:
cask "gechr/tap/whichspace" cask "wifi-explorer" cask "wins" cask "xbar" cask "xnconvert" cask "xnviewmp" cask "zen" cask "zotero" mas "Acidity", id: 6472630023 mas "Actions", id: 1586435171 mas "Actions For Obsidian", id: 1659667937 mas "Amphetamine", id: 937984704 mas "AppTela", id: 6752568197 mas "AutoMounter", id: 1160435653
If you don’t use Homebrew, you can still automate Mac App Store installs directly with the mas CLI.
To export a list of installed App Store apps:
mas list | cut -d' ' -f1 > mas-app-ids.txt
To install them on a new Mac:
xargs -n1 mas install < mas-app-ids.txt
To identify apps that were installed outside Homebrew or the Mac App Store, run:
system_profiler SPApplicationsDataType -json > installed-apps.json
Open the resulting JSON file in a text editor like BBEdit. Any app showing:
_“obtained_from” : “identified_developer” _
was installed directly from a developer download and will need to be reinstalled manually.
Applications are the easy part. Configuration is harder.
Just entering license keys and registration details for my paid apps could easily take hours.
I briefly looked at Mackup, but it doesn’t seem well suited for a GUI-heavy workflow like mine. A more modern tool, chezmoi, looks promising for exporting and restoring my dotfiles, including things like:
• .zshrc
• .gitconfig
• ~/.ssh/config
• .config/nvim/init.vim
For everything else, my plan is simple: build a small set of rsync jobs by hand and move over only what I actually need.
To avoid permission issues and sandbox quirks, I’ll launch each application once before restoring its configuration so macOS creates the necessary directories:
~/Library/Application Support/
~/Library/Preferences/
~/Library/Containers/
~/Library/Group Containers/
Because I run a heavily automated setup with apps like Keyboard Maestro, BetterTouchTool, Hazel, and Raycast, I’ll rely on their built-in export/import features rather than trying to automate those configs.
It’s technically possible to script the capture of a large number of system settings. In practice, the time it would take to build and debug that script would probably exceed the time it takes me to reconfigure things manually.
Earlier in my career in edtech, I spent a lot of time doing large-scale Mac deployments. The workflow was simple: build a golden image and deploy it hundreds of times using NetBoot to whatever hardware the district had just purchased.
Later we moved to modern deployment systems like Jamf.
If you need 900 eMacs unboxed and deployed, I’m your guy.
Highly opinionated personal setups like the ones most of us run on our own Macs are a different animal entirely. There’s no universal image for that kind of machine.
But there’s a lot we can learn from each other about building reproducible setups that stay clean over time instead of dragging a decade of digital barnacles from one Mac to the next.
2026-03-16 16:18:54
"The Tracks of My Tears" by Smokey Robinson & The Miracles
A song that you discovered on a film soundtrack.
One of the odder qualities of Oliver Stone's 1986 classic about the Vietnam War, Platoon was the quality of the soundtrack. My father, who spent two years in country during that time, verified that the music the movie used accurately reflected what he and his fellow soldiers listened to.
2026-03-14 17:42:48
"Rock Around the Clock" by Bill Haley and His Comets
A song from the 1950s that you like or means something to you.
As a kid in the early 70s, the 50s seemed like ancient history. I found it hard to believe that my parents had actually been alive way back then. After watching American Graffiti and Happy Days, I was just so fascinated with the whole era. This song was the theme music Happy Days used in the early seasons before switching to something that was less expensive to license. Rock Around the Clock was also the opening song for the movie, Blackboard Jungle
2026-03-13 20:32:12
Independent developers continue to build some of the most thoughtful utilities on macOS. These are small, focused tools that solve real workflow problems instead of trying to become the next all-in-one productivity suite.
Here are a few that recently caught my attention.
For anyone whose workday involves frequent Zoom, Teams, or other online meetings, presenting a professional, distraction-free screen matters. The same is true if you record tutorials or training videos. You want viewers focused on the content; not scanning your Dock, desktop, or menu bar for clues about your life.
I installed Stealthly for both myself and my wife as soon as I heard about it.
Stealthly is a $12.99 utility available directly from the developer (recommended) or on the Mac App Store. It automatically hides desktop icons, application windows, Dock items, menu bar icons, and even your wallpaper when you’re sharing your screen. It also enables Do Not Disturb to silence calls, alerts, and notifications.
When your meeting or recording ends, Stealthly restores everything exactly as it was.
Automation works in two ways:
The app includes a two-week free trial and is available in six languages.
If you regularly share your screen, this is one of those utilities that solves a problem you didn’t realize you had until someone else built it.
When I started doing IT support at a small private university, I was shocked to discover that many students and even junior faculty dumped every document into a single folder and relied entirely on search to find things later.
I still can’t wrap my head around that approach.
I prefer a defined file structure with folders that have clear roles in my workflow. It isn’t complicated, and most of the time I can navigate directly to what I need.
Search still has its place, though.
File Minutes sits somewhere between a search tool and a lightweight file manager. It’s keyboard-driven, easy to learn, and extremely fast when you need to locate images, Markdown files, archives, or other documents across your system.
Once you find the file, you can either open it in its native app or reveal it in Finder.
Some features I particularly like:
If I’m looking for a PDF, my view isn’t cluttered with unrelated file types.
Jump instantly to locations you use frequently.
Search for files named invoice and narrow the results to Downloads; or browse Downloads and filter results to files containing invoice.
Up and down arrows browse the current branch of the file tree. Left and right arrows move up or down a directory level.
Open, copy, or preview files using keyboard shortcuts.
Search inside PDFs, Markdown files, documents, and text files.
File Minutes collects no telemetry and performs no data collection. It runs on macOS 13 or later and costs $10 for a single license or $21 for three seats.
MiddleDrag is a tiny free utility (about 2 MB) that adds natural middle-click functionality to your Mac trackpad; whether that’s your laptop trackpad or a Magic Trackpad.
If you work without a mouse, this can make a surprising difference.
Some places where it really shines:
Pan and orbit smoothly in Fusion 360, Blender, OnShape, FreeCAD, and SketchUp without reaching for a mouse.
Open links in background tabs, close tabs instantly, and auto-scroll long pages with a simple three-finger tap.
Paste selections in Terminal (Linux style) and interact more naturally with VS Code multi-cursor editing.
It’s small, simple, and one of those utilities that quickly becomes muscle memory.
If you run a multi-monitor command-center setup with several tiled windows, a browser full of tabs, and a dozen apps open at once, recreating that layout every time you switch tasks gets tedious fast.
Workspace+ lets you capture an entire workspace and restore it with a single click.
Apps reopen, windows return to their positions, and browser tabs reload as part of the workspace.
This makes switching contexts dramatically faster.
Some useful capabilities include:
Navigate and trigger workspaces entirely from the keyboard using hotkeys.
Works with Safari and Chromium-based browsers including Chrome, Edge, Opera, Brave, Arc, and Vivaldi. Firefox is not currently supported due to technical limitations.
Workspaces can restore automatically when displays connect or disconnect; ideal if you move between a desk setup and a laptop environment.
If you already use a window manager like Rectangle Pro, Snaps of Apps, or Moom, you can approximate a similar workflow. There’s also the free utility Bunch, which comes close but requires some basic scripting.
Workspace+ is easier to configure and requires far less setup.
A lifetime license costs $14.99, or you can subscribe for $2.99 per month with a three-day free trial.
One current limitation: the app does not yet restore windows across multiple Spaces in Mission Control. The developer has indicated that this feature is on the roadmap.
2026-03-13 17:14:56
"Hill Street Blues (From "Hill Street Blues")" by The Daniel Caine Orchestra
A song from a TV show that you like.
A couple of years ago, over the span of two months, I watched all eight seasons of Hill Street Blues and reveled in the sheer quality of the writing and acting. It may have been one of the most influential shows of all time. So much of what we now consider common were ideas first explored by this ensemble.
2026-03-12 19:35:36
"Detroit Rock City" by Kiss
What is a song by an artist you don't usually like
This is an oddly worded prompt. Is it asking for a song I like by an artist who usually doesn't appeal to me or does it just want an example of a horrible song by a horrible artist? I'll let you guess.
