Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

microsoft

Unexplored Territory Episode 087 – Microsoft on VMware VCF featuring Deji Akomolafe

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For the last episode of 2024, I invited Deji Akomolafe to discuss running Microsoft workloads on top of VCF. I’ve known Deji for a long time, and if anyone is passionate about VMware and Microsoft technology, it is him. Deji went over the many caveats, and best practices when it comes to running for instance SQL on top of VMware VCF (or vSphere for that matter). NUMA, CPU Scheduling, latency sensitive settings, power settings, virtual disk controllers, just some of the things you can expect in this episode. You can listen to the episode on Spotify, Apple, or via the embedded player below.

OneDrive stuck syncing on OSX

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I have had this issue with OneDrive for days where it said it is syncing a file but not making any progress whatsoever. I tried all kinds of different solutions people have recommended, from remove the OneDrive app to killing the agent to deleting the .plist file. Nothing helped solve the problem. Unfortunately on OSX you can’t see which file is stuck either, so it is very difficult to troubleshoot. I managed to solve it as following in the end:

Go to “Resources” under your OneDrive app folder, for me this was:

cd /Applications/OneDrive.app/Contents/Resources

Then run the following command, not this may (will) trigger a resync, which is annoying, but did solve the sync issue:

./ResetOneDriveAppStandalone.command

If this doesn’t solve it, it could also be that there’s a hidden file called “.DS_Store” in the folder which is not syncing. Simply look at Finder and find the folders which are not syncing, use the Terminal to go to each folder, and look for the file “.DS_Store” by using “ls -a” (I always use “ls -lah” by default). It hopefully shows a list of files with that hidden file included. If that is the case, simply delete the file using “rm” and then restart the OneDrive agent.

I hope that helps others who hit the same issue.

Disable Dark Mode for Outlook in OSX?!

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Yes, after the latest update MS Office is now also capable of supporting the OSX Dark Mode. Nice, but rather annoying for MS Outlook I must say, the dark mode just makes reading the different panes very challenging. I went looking for an option in the UI that allowed me to change the default, I couldn’t find it, unfortunately, but I did find a way to disable it through the command line. For MS Outlook, in particular, this is how you do it:

defaults write com.microsoft.Outlook NSRequiresAquaSystemAppearance -bool yes

You can do this for other apps as well if you want, simply change the identifier string of Outlook (com.microsoft.Outlook) with the string of the app you want to disable it for. If you don’t know the string you can do the following to find it:

osascript -e 'id of app "Outlook"'

In the above example, I am looking for the identifier of Outlook, but this could be “Spotify” or anything else as well of course. Figured I would share this, as I found myself searching for half an hour. Note that you need to close/open the app after making the change!

MS Word: Paste and Match Formatting by default

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Something that bugged me for a long time on a Mac was the copy/paste behavior. I always wanted it to default to match the formatting of the document I am working in, or even paste in unformatted text. Pasting formatted text just messes up your whole document. I never knew how to do this until I recently saw a tweet about it. As I received a question about it today I figured I would write a short blog as the original post on this topic is difficult to find. I do want to point out that all credits for this trick go to user “BAT”, and of course thanks to Rob Nolen for tweeting this!

So how do you “change” the default “paste” option? Well, you don’t really, but you can configure a shortcut and set it to call a menu item. You do this as follows:

  • Open System Preferences
  • Go to Keyboard
  • Click Shortcuts
  • Add an “App Shortcut”
  • Select “Microsoft Word” as the app
  • Use the following as the “Menu Title”: Paste and Match Formatting
  • And in the keyboard shortcut use the key combination COMMAND-V

Now you have created a shortcut that maps to the “paste and match formatting” menu item. Which is very very handy! Thanks Rob and BAT for sharing this, you saved me from a lot of frustration.