tinyapps.org / blog

Dark Mode for Hacker News #

is requested regularly:

• Upvote for HN Darkmode? 2019, 344 points
• Ask HN: Dark mode for HN please? 2020, 780 points
• Ask HN: Dark mode for HN please? 2021, 60 points
• Ask HN: Please Dark Mode for HN 2021, 89 points
• Ask HN: My annual plea for dark mode 2022, 115 points

and while @dang expressed a willingness to implement it back in 2020, support is still absent as of early 2023 (in his defense, he did mention: "remember our motto: move slowly and preserve things...When I say slowly I mean slowly.").

Browser extensions like Dark Reader or Cascadea (among many others that support userscripts for customizing webpages) are often recommended as an alternative by those who are unaware of or indifferent to the risk:

(Apple really needs to display required permissions in the Information section of App Store listings so users can evaluate them before purchase.)

• If an extension goes rogue, everything you do in your browser is compromised
• My browser, the spy: How extensions slurped up browsing histories from 4M users
• DataSpii: The catastrophic data leak via browser extensions
• Chrome Extension Stealing Cryptocurrency Keys and Passwords
• Google removes 500+ malicious Chrome extensions from the Web Store
• The Case for Limiting Your Browser Extensions

Perhaps Stylish, an extension expressly for managing userscripts and one of the most popular add-ons of its time, best demonstrates the danger:

• "Stylish" browser extension steals all your internet history | HN discussion
• "Stylish" extension with 2M downloads banned for tracking every site visit
• The 'Stylish' extension has been removed after collecting users web-usage histories for over a year.
• Chrome and Firefox pull history-stealing browser extension
• "Stylish" is back, and you still shouldn't use it | HN discussion

Apple provides a framework for Safari web extension developers to leverage the least invasive permissions possible. Happily, Justin Wasack did just that with his open source Userscripts extension:

Combined with Vishal Patel's HN Dark Mode userscript (modified to handle the white flash, aka "flash of unstyled content" when navigating between pages on the site via @run-at document-start), it offers the least bad option for Safari users until HN offers native dark mode (or until Apple allows custom style sheets in Settings... → Advanced to apply to specific websites, as Firefox's userContent.css does via @-moz-document domain).

/mac | Jan 28, 2023

VMWare Fusion: "D:\ is not a valid Win32 application." #

Attempting to update VMWare Tools in a Windows XP VM under Fusion 13 returned:

"D:\ is not a valid Win32 application."

A more helpful message would've been something like:

Windows XP cannot run VMWare Tools versions higher than 10.0.12; download it here.

More info

• VMware Tools support for Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows Server 2003 (81466):

  VMware Tools 10.0.12 will be the last version to support legacy Guest Operating Systems (Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows Server 2003).

• VMware Tools 10.0.12 Release Notes:

  • VMware Tools support for Guest Operating Systems in version 10.0.12
    • winPreVista.iso supports Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows 2003.
    • linuxPreGLibc25.iso supports Linux guest operating systems earlier than Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 11, Ubuntu 7.04, and other distributions with glibc version earlier than 2.5.
    • darwinPre15.iso supports Mac OS X versions 10.10.x and older.
  • VMware Tools 7.7.0 support for the following guest operating systems has been already frozen
    • winPre2k.iso supports versions earlier than Windows 2000.
  • VMware Tools 8.1.0 support for the following guest operating systems has been already frozen
    • netware.iso supports NetWare guest operating systems.

• Legacy VMware Tools packages for Windows, Linux, OS X and Netware OS (for GOSes that have reached end of support):

  • Name: VMware-Tools-10.0.12-legacy-4448496.zip
  • File size: 122.15 MB
  • Release Date: 2016-11-05
  • Build Number: 4448496
  • MD5SUM: 1fc53cc75dd6b9e02cd67867f73a6a86
  • SHA1SUM: 0b6e5f954eb848ffe1ae8ba1c297c335e95c6312
  • SHA256SUM: 5eb1c9c1c5533c530839ea714a8b2ecbba201022c99c340b0332f966e7a68f80

/mac | Jan 04, 2023

Default MMC snap-ins (MSC files) in Windows 10 #

Microsoft does not appear to host a list of Windows' default Microsoft Management Console (MMC) snap-ins/Management Saved Console (MSC) files.

Here is one from a clean Windows 10 installation with descriptions cobbled together from a variety of linked sources. Launch MSC files from an elevated command prompt via mmc name.msc.

See also:

• What is Microsoft Management Console?: "You use Microsoft Management Console (MMC) to create, save and open administrative tools, called consoles, which manage the hardware, software, and network components of your Microsoft Windows operating system."

• MMC Console Files

• Step-by-Step Guide to the Microsoft Management Console

• mmc

• Glossary of MMC Terminology

• Microsoft Management Console

/windows | Jan 02, 2023

Bypass Windows 11 GUI bloat via CPL commands #

Today's HN discussion on How many layers of UI inconsistencies are in Windows 11? included a thread sparked by csours on working around Windows' byzantine maze of UI elements with CPL shortcuts.

Microsoft's documentation is woefully out of date, so here's a list of those found in %SystemRoot%\System32 on a clean Windows 11 Pro 21H2 install:

Just press Winkey+R, type the desired CPL filename, and press Enter to open.

/windows | Jan 02, 2023

Microsoft ISO checksums/hashes for Windows, Office, etc. #

For most of its online history, Microsoft made ISO checksums/hashes publicly available on TechNet and MSDN (even if with a free Microsoft account), but since late 2017, a paid Visual Studio account is required (starting at $1,199 per year) to access the database.

A number of projects have sprung up to keep this important information accessible:

Online:

• Microsoft SHA1 Hash Archive from my.visualstudio.com: Currently lists 94,980 files. Maintained by Jan Krohn, author of Microsoft Windows and Office ISO Download Tool, mentioned back in 2017. The free service has won glowing praise from Samir.

• List of files by Microsoft: "This project contains all necessary information on files (family, the version, language, a hash sum [MD5, SHA-1, SHA-256 and SHA-512] and also their actual size)." Browse or search the database of 114,610 files.

• MSDN.SU: "Technical information about the files available for downloading on official site from 'MSDN Subscriber Downloads' section." 42,512 files.

Offline:

• MVS Dump thread on My Digital Life. Updated regularly.

• Windows and Office Genuine ISO Verifier: Standalone, freeware .NET app that "allows verification of Windows and Office x32 x64 (ISO, EXE ...). Finds ISO hash and compares it with the official hash (MSDN, VLSC)."

• msdn-mirrors: GitHub repository last updated July 7, 2020; primarily focused on Chinese and English versions.

• List of MD5/SHA1 hashes for various Windows OS ISOs: Modest list of some Windows 2000 through 7/2008 distributions.

See also:

• How to check whether an Office 2013 ISO is genuine or not?

• Microsoft Windows ISO checksums

• How to cryptographically verify the authenticity and integrity of Microsoft Windows .iso releases (with gpg?)

• macOS downloads and checksums/hashes

/windows | Jan 02, 2023

Microsoft 365: Set up email aliases / forwarders to external addresses in Exchange #

Free email forwarding / aliasing is a common feature at most mail hosts, but Microsoft appears to have left the process undocumented for their 365 Exchange offering. Here's how:

1. Head to https://admin.exchange.microsoft.com/#/contacts (click Recipients → Contacts if the link lands on the Exchange admin center Home page)

2. Click "Add a mail user"
   

3. Fill out required fields (Display name, Alias, User ID, Domain, and Password) and enter the desired destination address in the optional "External email address" field
   

4. Click Next → Create

H/T: 4IT

/misc | Dec 17, 2022

If Parallels Desktop 18 hangs while signing out or signing in #

to your Parallels account via the GUI, try these commands instead:

Sign out:

% prlsrvctl web-portal signout
The user has signed out successfully.

Sign in:

% prlsrvctl web-portal signin "mail@example.com"
Please enter password:
The user has signed in successfully.

Activate license (registered license beforehand at my.parallels.com/home → "Register a License Key"):

% prlsrvctl install-license -k XXXXXX-XXXXXX-XXXXXX-XXXXXX-XXXXXX
The license has been successfully installed.

/mac | Nov 24, 2022

Offline speech-to-text that is accurate and free (as in speech) #

Accurate speech recognition has largely been relegated to the cloud, with unfortunate if predictable results:

• Apple contractors 'regularly hear confidential details' on Siri recordings

  Workers hear drug deals, medical details and people having sex, says whistleblower

• This journalist’s Otter.ai scare is a reminder that cloud transcription isn’t completely private

  A report recently published by Politico about the automated transcription service Otter.ai serves as a great reminder of how difficult it can be to keep things truly private in the age of cloud-based services. It starts off with a nerve-wracking story — the journalist interviewed Mustafa Aksu, a Uyghur human rights activist who could be a target of surveillance from the Chinese government. But though they took pains to keep their communication confidential, they used Otter to record the call — and a day later, they received a message from Otter asking about the purpose of the conversation with Aksu.

Even Apple's "privacy respecting" macOS has removed offline-only speech recognition since macOS 10.15 Catalina.

Happily, there is an accurate and free (as in speech) option for offline speech to text processing - OpenAI's Whisper (GitHub | Hacker News). According to the blurb, it "approaches human level robustness and accuracy on English speech recognition"; daily testing has borne that claim out.

Installation is a breeze:

pip install git+https://github.com/openai/whisper.git

as is basic usage:

whisper audio.mp3.

A number of models are available, including the default "small" (which "works well for transcribing English" and weighs 483MB) and "large" at around 3GB.

/nix | Nov 02, 2022

Check ISO images for consistency #

with filesystem-level headers via Isolyzer. Supports "ISO 9660, High Sierra, Universal Disk Format (UDF), Apple Hierarchical File System (HFS), Apple HFS+, and hybrids of the above file systems, e.g. ISO 9660 + HFS; UDF Bridge (UDF + ISO 9660)". Open souce Python / Windows binaries. Detailed documentation.

/misc | Oct 11, 2022

Image-to-text OCR tools for macOS #

Because Live Text in Preview is so fickle:

• TRex: "Copy any text on your screen, stop retyping." Open source Swift.

• Shottr: Features OCR, scrolling screenshots, pixelate/erase, markup, overlays, screen ruler, color picker, and more. Freeware.

• TextSniper: "Extract text from images and other digital documents in seconds." From $8.

• OwlOCR: "Grab any text on the screen, convert images or scans to searchable PDFs, open QR-coded URLs, integrate via CLI, access with Finder Extensions and more." $14.

• LensOCR: "LensOCR enhances the screenshot feature from macOS, it allows you to capture, text, objects, QR and Barcodes." $20.

• CleanShot X: "CleanShot X provides over 50 features making it the ultimate screen capturing tool." $29.

/mac | Oct 11, 2022

Subscribe or visit the archives.