See also fseventer - FileMon for OS X.
/mac | Jun 05, 2019
/mac | Jun 04, 2019
A martial arts student went to his teacher and said earnestly, "I am devoted to studying your martial system. How long will it take me to master it?" The teacher's reply was casual, "Ten years." Impatiently, the student answered, "But I want to master it faster than that. I will work very hard. I will practice everyday, ten or more hours a day if I have to. How long will it take then?" The teacher thought for a moment, "20 years."
—Zen Kōans
Men fated to be happy need not haste.
—Chinese proverbs from olden times, Peter Pauper Press
At the thought that it wouldn't be long before she saw Professor Hora again, Momo's courage revived. "Please," she said to Cassiopeia, "couldn't we go a bit faster?" "MORE HASTE LESS SPEED," came the reply, and the tortoise crawled on even more slowly than before. Yet Momo noticed, as she had the first time, that they made better progress that way. It was as if the street beneath them glided past more quickly the slower they went. That, of course, was the secret: the slower you went the better progress you made, and the more you hurried the slower rate of advance.
—Momo by Michael Ende, translated by J. Maxwell Brownjohn
/misc | Jun 02, 2019
HP generously provides an embarrassment of manuals for the 24-b029c, including a PDF entitled Hard Drive Replacement Instructions (cached copy) which is guaranteed to cause acute embarrassment and perhaps even irreparable harm as you and a friend struggle to follow them faithfully.
On page 2, we find:
which sounds straightforward enough.
Any lingering doubt that the screws should be completely removed vanishes as we read on page 3:
However, you would be extremely ill-advised to follow those directions, as the screws are not designed to come out at all.
Mad props to the folks at Up & Running Technologies for sharing the correct technique, which is to simply turn the screws slightly counterclockwise until the screen pops up. You can then use a plastic pry tool to finish the job before slowly and gently lifting the back cover up, starting from the bottom (the manual did get something right: mind the ODD cable running along the top).
/misc | May 28, 2019
/mac | May 27, 2019
along their long edge with the cross-platform XnView MP: Tools > Batch convert... > Actions > Add action > Image > Resize > Mode > Longest side. (In Lightroom: File > Export > Image Sizing > Resize to Fit: > Long Edge.)
UPDATE: I had completely forgotten about the tiny and handy Resize 2.6, which allows batch resizing by percentage, height, width, or maximum dimension while maintaining aspect ratio; it's been listed on the graphics page for ages.
/misc | May 10, 2019
Scouring the web for a macOS analog of Windows Exploit Suggester - Next Generation (WES-NG) (mentioned recently), I stumbled onto Howard Oakley's Scanning your Macs for security problems with Nessus.
Agreeing wholeheartedly with his assessment ("Installation is a bit fiddly and left me with a feeling of discomfort. The installer which you download is but the start of the process: this eventually takes you through to the Nessus web interface, which then downloads further and unspecified packages and installs them somewhere. For a security tool this is worryingly opaque and obfuscated, and I cannot see any convincing reason for having to do it that way."), I opted to install Nessus in a virtualized instance of the target Mac and run it against just 127.0.0.1 to find known vulnerabilities.
As Howard observes, the Basic Network Scan is anything but:
/mac | May 09, 2019
The name or title of any specific deity is capitalized just like any other name, so when "God" is used to refer to "the one God" (in other words, in any monotheistic religion), it is capitalized.
For example, you'd capitalize "God" in these sentences:
- Some Christians give thanks to God before every meal.
- Dear God, please let my team win tonight.
When referring to gods in general, though, or when using the word "god" descriptively, keep it lowercase:
- The Romans believed a god named Jupiter ruled the heavens.
- The Greek gods were always causing trouble for humans.
The same rule holds true for Yahweh, Allah, Zeus, and the names of gods in other religions. They're capitalized.
I get it – you're an atheist. You should still capitalize "God"
You've said it a thousand times, and I get it: You don't believe in capital-G God any more than I believe in Tinkerbell. That doesn't change anything. (See what I did there? I don’t believe in an entity named "Tinkerbell." But since it is the proper name of a, yes, fictional character, I capitalized it.)
...
When you don't capitalize a proper name like God's, you're violating a fundamental principle of grammar.
You heard me right: grammar! You don't want to violate the laws of grammar, do you? I mean, seriously: Is nothing sacred?
/misc | Apr 30, 2019
iPhone's Phone app freezing frequently? Rather than restarting (tedious and time consuming), respring by toggling bold text:
iOS does not actually restart; only SpringBoard.app is restarted (similar to relaunching Finder.app in macOS), which generally unfreezes Phone.app as well (in some cases, toggling Airplane Mode may also be necessary).
/misc | Apr 30, 2019
Ultimate: The Ultimate Image Browser - Powerful, "very pre-beta" disk image browser with support for: MBR, EMBR, GPT, FAT-12, -16, and -32, FYSFS, LEANFS, SFS, ISO (Standard CD-ROM), Ext2/3/4, exFAT, NTFS, and VHD. Files can be extracted from or inserted into images.
imapbackup - "A Python script for incremental backups of IMAP mailboxes" with zero dependencies other than Python 2.5 or higher. Worked a treat backing up tens of thousands of messages that Mail.app refused to archive properly. More info.
Kapur - Like MacDown in your browser, or rather, in a single HTML file!
The Definitive Classic Mac Pro (2006-2012) Upgrade Guide - "Definitive" is definitely the right word. A must for those intrepid souls who refuse to let go of Apple's last real desktop computer.
/misc | Mar 26, 2019