After months of false starts and dead ends, I’m happy to report my Wireguard VPN server is now successfully running on macOS Mojave.
Wireguard is a relatively new VPN protocol, entering the scene just three short years ago in 2016. Compared to the anchient VPN alternatives like IPSec and OpenVPN, Wireguard’s simplicity and speed quickly earned it the attention and praise of various tech communities like Hacker News and Lobste.rs. Everywhere you look are Wireguard threads filled with enthusiastic comments urging others to give Wireguard a try.
The best part is, they’re right! Compared to the existing lineup of VPN protocols, Wireguard’s small codebase, blazingly fast speed, and relatively simple setup put Wireguard in a league of its own as the first truly modern VPN protocol. There’s just one tiny niggle: the protocol is so young there might be no documentation or guides for your platform of choice.
Unfortunately, that’s the situation I found myself in with macOS when attempting to set up my Wireguard server. Despite extensively reading what’s currently the finest Wireguard documentation available and following its relevant example to a tee, Wireguard would simply not function as expected on macOS. The best I could do was establish a direct connection to the server with Wireguard, but all attempts to access the LAN or surf the web timed out and failed.
Despite numerous attempts over the months, my Google-fu yielded no results, either. While there were plenty of help articles from others setting up Wireguard on macOS, every single one of them was for setting up a Wireguard peer on macOS. This peer was always intended to only connect to a Wireguard server on more common platforms like Ubuntu or CentOS, never the other way around.
However, from my on-and-off research over these past few months I’ve finally cobbled together a solution that’s working. Thus, I intend to fill this hole in the community’s growing collection of documentation and setup guides: here’s what you need to do to get a Wireguard server running on macOS Mojave with full traffic routing and LAN access.
It’s no secret I cherish music. That passion seeped not only into my physical library in the form of vinyl records but also into my personal projects with the introduction of the Bad Music Hertz website and podcast. It was only a matter of time until that same passion fueled a desire to find the perfect iOS music player.
By “perfect” player, I do not simply mean the app most appealing to the widest audience, or even the most well-rounded app (if that’s what you’re looking for, The Sweet Setup’s article is fantastic). No, what I wished to find in my quest was a niche app that’s unapologetically for people that love actively listening to and collecting music.
This past year, I’ve had the pleasure of using Fournova’s macOS git client, Tower 2, to version control my professional and personal work. After years of forcing myself to use the inconsistent, cryptic commands required to make version control with git marginally usable, I could finally relax and instead use Tower 2’s intuitive graphical interface to make my versioning tasks as easy as clicking a button.
Tower 2 didn’t just provide a suburb user experience, it also dazzled with a gorgeous, gold-standard macOS app icon. Icon redesigns are a difficult balancing act between the existing brand identity and the needs of the redesign (in this case, macOS’s 2014 redesign). Despite the difficulty, Tower 2’s refreshed icon danced between them with ease.
I still remember how thrilled I was the day I got my iPod Touch—or more specifically, how thrilled I was I could finally dump my old iPod Video. Besides the strict technical upgrade, after four years of hard but loving use, my iPod Video was showing its age. The battery hardly lasted an hour on a single charge (even with the screen brightness turned completely down). The once-gloriously shiny metal back was now dull and dented, and the infamously scratch-attractive screen was even worse, transforming its contents into a dim and smudgy mess that no amount of polishing could fix. The 30GB storage that once seemed as endless was practically bursting at the seams.
So, with the new iPod Touch in hand, I retired my iPod Video to the great “old electronics” drawer in the sky and didn’t look back.
About a year ago, I published a light “listicle” to highlight some of the smaller features in the then-new iOS 10 and watchOS 3. Before diving into the details, I mentioned offhand that I omitted macOS 10.12 simply because there wasn’t anything particularly interesting to include from that release.
Unfortunately, this year’s macOS 10.13 “High Sierra” release is again slim with regards to user-facing features, despite macOS falling increasingly behind iOS in feature parity. After all, macOS still does not have Message stickers and animations, still has the same broken App Store, and still has all its preexisting problems like pitiful window management and the festering mess that is iTunes. Year after year, Tim Cook’s Apple continues to demonstrate they don’t care about macOS by simply ignoring it.
In light of this, I’ve decided to completely ignore whatever new hotness iOS got this year and instead shine the spotlight on the operating system that remains deeply important to millions of people’s digital lifestyles (despite being continually sidelined by Cook’s Apple). To give macOS the time it deserves, I’m sharing all the small but fantastic features I’ve picked up over these ten years that help make macOS the finest desktop operating system available.
For those wanting to jump right in, I’ve sorted the features by importance; the topmost sections are must know, while the bottommost ones are just curious oddities. You can click on any individual features that interest you, or browse entire sections if you’re feeling adventurous. Have fun exploring!
