M. Frister mfrister

April 2026 TLDR setup for Ollama + Gemma 4 on a Mac mini (Apple Silicon) — auto-start, preload, and keep-alive

April 2026 TLDR Setup for Ollama + Gemma 4 on a Mac mini (Apple Silicon)

Prerequisites

Mac mini with Apple Silicon (M1/M2/M3/M4/M5)
At least 16GB unified memory for Gemma 4 (default 8B)
macOS with Homebrew installed

This was a huge hassle to figure out, so I wrote up a little guide in hopes that others would find it helpful:

How to convince macOS to do IPv6 DNS lookups when your only IPv6 address is via a VPN or tunnel of some sort

The Problem

macOS's domain name resolver will only return IPv6 addresses (from AAAA records) when it thinks that you have a valid routable IPv6 address. For physical interfaces like Ethernet or Wi-Fi it's enough to set or be assigned an IPv6 address, but for tunnels (such as those using utun interfaces) there are some extra annoying steps that need to be taken to convince the system that yes, you indeed have an IPv6 address, and yes, you'd like to get IPv6 addresses back for DNS lookups.

I use wg-quick to establish a WireGuard tunnel between my laptop and a Linode virtual server. WireGuard uses a utun user-space tunnel device to make the connection. Here's how that device gets configured:

How to get a free StartSSL.com SSL certificate

I'm writing this up from memory, so errors may appear.

This has been updated to use SHA256 certificates.

Start

Go to http://www.startssl.com/
Click on 'Control Panel'

a simple git branching model (written in 2013)

This is a very simple git workflow. It (and variants) is in use by many people. I settled on it after using it very effectively at Athena. GitHub does something similar; Zach Holman mentioned it in this talk.

Update: Woah, thanks for all the attention. Didn't expect this simple rant to get popular.

Make it real

Ideas are cheap. Make a prototype, sketch a CLI session, draw a wireframe. Discuss around concrete examples, not hand-waving abstractions. Don't say you did something, provide a URL that proves it.

Ship it

Nothing is real until it's being used by a real user. This doesn't mean you make a prototype in the morning and blog about it in the evening. It means you find one person you believe your product will help and try to get them to use it.

Do it with style

I see this error when I try to suspend an Ubuntu 10 guest in Fusion:

The request to Suspend this virtual machine failed because the corresponding VMware Tools script did not run successfully.

If you have configured a custom suspend script in this virtual machine, make sure that it contains no errors. Attempting the operation again will ignore the script failure. You can also submit a support request to report this issue.

As the dialog states, the second time you try to suspend the VM it ignores the non-zero return code of the script and it seems to work. But it's annoying.

The problem appears to not be VMware actually, but Ubuntu (or Ubuntu's service script). I tried to figure out where exactly Ubuntu's initctl configuration/scripts is broken to no avail but found a work-around that I'm happy with.

	# Thanks to commenters for providing the base of this much nicer implementation!
	# Save and run with $ python 0dedict.py
	# You may need to hunt down the dictionary files yourself and change the awful path string below.
	# This works for me on MacOS 10.14 Mohave

	from struct import unpack
	from zlib import decompress
	import re
	filename = '/System/Library/Assets/com_apple_MobileAsset_DictionaryServices_dictionaryOSX/9f5862030e8f00af171924ebbc23ebfd6e91af78.asset/AssetData/Oxford Dictionary of English.dictionary/Contents/Resources/Body.data'
	f = open(filename, 'rb')

	#!/usr/bin/ruby
	# Create display override file to force Mac OS X to use RGB mode for Display
	# see http://embdev.net/topic/284710

	require 'base64'

	data=`ioreg -l -d0 -w 0 -r -c AppleDisplay`

	edids=data.scan(/IODisplayEDID.*?<([a-z0-9]+)>/i).flatten
	vendorids=data.scan(/DisplayVendorID.*?([0-9]+)/i).flatten

	- Tune /etc/ssh/sshd_config

	UseDNS no # Disable DNS lookups
	GSSAPIAuthentication no # Disable negotation of slow GSSAPI

	don't forget to restart it, use a script provider to set it , or create it with veewee or snapshot it

	- Tune Vagrantfile

	vb.customize ["modifyvm", :id, "--natdnshostresolver1", "on"]

	package cp

	import (
	"io"
	"os"
	)

	func cp(dst, src string) error {
	s, err := os.Open(src)
	if err != nil {