Apple Mail Not Showing Dock Unread Count

Suddenly, the Apple Mail icon in the dock was not longer showing unread items as a number in white against a red background. I wonder whether I inadvertently turned something off.

To get it back, go to Apple / Notifications, and choose Apple menu > System Settings, then click Notifications in the sidebar.

Choose which mailboxes to include in the count of unread messages in the red circle, called a badge, that’s shown on the Mail icon in the Dock. In my case I want the unread messages from all the email accounts in Apple Mail.

Then activate the unread count, but note this important caveat. The count appears only if “Badge app icon” is selected for Mail in Notifications settings.

Text Replacement On A Mac

How many times do I type out my email address in a form? Same for my phone number. Too many not to want a simpler, quicker way of doing it. I thought there had to be an easier and cheaper way than using TextExpander at the monthly price they charge for a subscription.

TextExpander can probably do much more than the inbuilt Apple Mac option, but then I don’t want to sink under the weight of all the shortcuts and contractions I might add. That is a road to ruin as I spend time cycling through my mind for the correct keyboard shortcut.

I am not sure what the maximum number I would want is, but it is pretty definitely not more than five keyboard shortcuts, and maybe even not more than three. After all, I have to know these instantly, or they are not worth knowing.

So I googled, and found a video from Gary at MacMost.com who posts the clearest videos you could want on topics like this. The particular one you need is Using Mac Text Replacements and you can find it on the website and on YouTube from MacMostVideos.

That said, this particular shortcut is very simple, so I don’t know whether you will actually need to see the video at all. I am glad I watched it because I learn best with speech plus visuals.

So – for anyone who just wants the most direct instructions, here they are.

If you are on Mac OS Ventura, go to System Settings / Keyboard / Text replacement and you will see one text shortcut has already been set up. It is three characters that expand to ‘On my way!’

You will also see a plus button where you can add new item. Click that and then it’s just a case of choosing an easy to remember shortcut and the text you want to appear when you type that shortcut.

I did it for my email address and phone number.

Local Fonts

A court in Germany fined a website owner for using Google fonts because they show the IP address of the visitor, in breach of GDPR. People are looking to host fonts locally.

GeneratePress has this Adding Local Fonts page in the documentation on how to pull down Google fonts and host them locally using this tool – google-webfonts-helper (now relocated – (so use this link to google webfonts helper) that identifies the files for Google fonts.

I have already done this on the e-commerce site and I am working my way through other sites. That said, in WP 6.2 it looks as though WP will incorporate some method of doing this without having to add custom CSS and without having to temporarily add php code to the functions file to allow uploading .woff and .woff2 files.

The code one needs to add to the functions file is to allow uploading .woff files, which to protect against malicious code being injected, are normally not allowed.

WP Tavern has a couple of articles on local fonts, and suggests Bunny Fonts as a plugin as an easier way to replace Google fonts. I read the documentation for Bunny Fonts and it seemed just as straightforward to use the GeneratePress method. And there is every reason to think that the same GeneratePress method would work on any theme, not that I have tried it. And it would work with any web font that one might buy and download.

Gzip and Brotli

Gzip and Brotli compress web pages. Let’s say you are running WordPress and have Litespeed active at server level. You install the Litespeed cache plugin, and set it up. Then you run a test on something like Pingdom and it tells you that Gzip compression is not configured.

And it’s true that it isn’t configured, but it’s because Litespeed uses Brotli for compression.

Check it at GiftOfSpeed

If it is enabled you will see something like this:

Results for: https://maincontrol.co.uk/
Brotli Is Enabled
Original Size: 52.47 KB
Brotli Size (compressed): 15.69 KB
Compression %: 70.1% is compressed
HTTP Status: 200
Request Time: 0.3036 ms
Compression Time: 0.0014 s
Content Type: text/html
Server: Uknown

Margin versus padding in CSS

In CSS, a margin is the space around an element’s border, while padding is the space between an element’s border and the element’s content.

I keep forgetting this and have to look it up time and time again.

Categories CSS

Copy Layer To New Photoshop Document

It used to be that if one isolated a part of a file and copied it with Cmd+C (I am on a Mac) and then Cmd+N, then the new document would be the size of the part one had isolated. And then one could paste in the part one had isolated and it would fit exactly, Not any more – instead the new document is, well I don’t know what it is, but it is not the correct size.

Jain Lemos, a Photoshop professional in the Adobe community forums provides the answer:

Please try checking Use Legacy “New Document” Interface in Preferences on the General tab.

And Cory Schubert, an Adobe employee, answers similarly in June 2022.

And I reset the preferences in Photoshop yesterday, and then was befuddled again by the copy paste problem. I googled it and found many people ask the same question over and over. And I forgot for a while that I had found how to solve it and forgotten I had found how to solve it.

More than that though, I discovered today that a lot of people use the function and are copying and pasting a crop of an image.