Category: tip

A photo of a screenshot about to be taken on macOS

How to fix slow loading when trying to take a screenshot with CMD+SHIFT+4

 

I don’t know how common this is, but I wanted to share a tip that I recently learned about how to fix slow loading when trying to take a screenshot with the CMD+SHIFT+4 shortcut. It used to pop up the selector instantly, but recently I noticed it was taking multiple seconds to load up. Nothing earth shattering, but annoying and taking me out of my flow state. Here’s how I fixed it.

Load up the full screenshot panel using CMD+SHIFT+5 (note the 5, rather than 4) and see what your microphone is set to. If it’s set to anything other than None, set it _to_ None and then hit the Esc key a few times to exit out of there. Now try doing your CMD+SHIFT+4 again and it should pop up nearly instantly.

Before: A Revelator Dynamic microphone is selected
After: No microphone is selected

My assumption on why this works is that if you have a microphone configured, it probably needs to physically interface with the device and initializing hardware can sometimes take a few seconds. Having a microphone might be useful if you’re doing a screen recording using CMD+SHIFT+5 but the ...+4 option doesn’t do any video, so microphones are really not necessary here. It would be great if Apple bypassed this check already since it’s completely useless, but as it stands today, this should get your screenshot taking back instantly.

man in bluee ssweater

How to debug Terraform variable content using this custom module

  

A lot of the time when I’m having to debug Terraform, I find that I want to quickly look at what Terraform may be storing inside a variable so that I can understand where I’ve made a mistake passing data around. After literal years of using the old TF_LOG=debug method – which can get way too unwieldy with any decently sized environment, I realized I could write a simple module to dump out what I was looking for. Hopefully this will help you too.

resource "null_resource" "terraform-debug" {
  provisioner "local-exec" {
    command = "echo $VARIABLE1 >> debug.txt ; echo $VARIABLE2 >> debug.txt"

    environment = {
        VARIABLE1 = jsonencode(var.your_variable_name)
        VARIABLE2 = jsonencode(local.piece_of_data)
    }
  }
}

Just replace var.your_variable_name_goes_here with your actual variable reference and then run your terraform apply. A file should be spit out in the same directory that the .tf file that you inserted this resource lives in, which you can then open up and understand what might be going on.

I don’t know why it took me so long to figure out something so simple, but coming from PHP/Laravel – where you can just dd() or dump() the contents of a variable to the console – the idea of using the local-exec provisioner to debug terraform just never occurred to me.

EDIT [Jan 6, 2020]: Wrapped variable data in jsonencode() to avoid issues with echoing an empty string to a file. Also show how to dump multiple variables to the same file.