So apparently the firmware for a number of of the old PPC Macs had Easter Eggs embedded within them and, with the right combination of woo, you could get the firmware to spit these Easter Eggs out for you to view.
A 27 Year Old Easter Egg
Category: Apple
Another look at Douglas Adams’ office
Another snippet of video and another quick look at Douglas Adams’ office space. Unlike my last post about Adams’ office, I’m having a little trouble narrowing down the source program – though the uploader of the original clip suggests that it may have been recorded around February 1995. If that’s true, then that suggests it was originally shown on a non-BBC channel as I cannot find anything in the BBC genome that references Adams during that period.
Douglas Adams’ Desk and Office in 1996?
This appears to be Douglas Adams’ nicely messy office and his cable spaghetti’d computer setup – complete with what appears to be a fantastic stack of external SCSI drives. Taken from this clip of October 1996’s ‘Break The Science Barrier with Richard Dawkins‘, this footage was likely filmed in the summer of that year.
The Strange Death of the Square Checkbox’d UI
This is a nice little potted history of the use of the square checkbox. It ends noting that Apple appears to have abandoned the use of the square checkbox and chosen to use an icon very similar to a radio button in their new VisionOS – which feels like a big step back in usability.
Space Scapes from Foundation
I must have missed this the first time around but Apple has put up a series of Space Scapes from their rather enjoyable adaptation of Foundation.
Miserablism of the iPhone Variety.
The iPhone 15 Pro in it’s fundamentally miserable set of colours.
Apple Digital Sales
Apple’s European DSA Recipients of Services Report (Archive.org) turned up in my RSS feed and it has some quite shockingly low numbers! Whilst personally I prefer a real book over an e-book, I was very surprised to find that Apple has less than 1 million monthly e-book purchasers across the entire EU! And the tvOS and watchOS user base feels incredibly low as well!
Leaking Pipes with Swift and External Executables
Observed with MacOS 12.4/Xcode 13.4.1/Swift 5
There are quite a lot of tutorials out there covering the basics of running external executables from within Swift and, with very little effort, it’s quite easy to throw together something like this…
import Foundation
let wrappedUname = Process()
wrappedUname.executableURL = URL(fileURLWithPath: "/usr/bin/uname")
wrappedUname.arguments = ["-v"]
let unameOutputPipe = Pipe()
let unameErrorPipe = Pipe()
wrappedUname.standardOutput = unameOutputPipe
wrappedUname.standardError = unameErrorPipe
do{
try wrappedUname.run()
} catch {
print("Unexpected error: \(error).")
}
wrappedUname.waitUntilExit()
let unameOutput = String(decoding: unameOutputPipe.fileHandleForReading.readDataToEndOfFile(), as: UTF8.self)
let unameError = String(decoding: unameOutputPipe.fileHandleForReading.readDataToEndOfFile(), as: UTF8.self)
print("Output: " + unameOutput)
print("Error: " + unameError)MacOS Updates Are Getting Slower
With 30 minutes to prepare and another 25 minutes to actually perform this mere point update (12.3 > 12.4), what – exactly – is a relatively modern Macbook Pro that’s capable of of writing to it’s boot disk at 2.2GB/s+ doing when it upgrades?
WWDC 2020
As it’s less than a month to the virtual WWDC, it’s time for an Apple/WWDC wish list.
On the MacOS-next side of things:
- AV1 support baked in (CoreVideo and wherever else it’s needed).
- APFS idle-time dedup.
- January’s ‘Pro’ mode rumours coming to fruition.
- And it’s equal and opposite ‘super battery saver’ mode.
- Time Machine revamp/APFS based time machine.
- Internet Time Machine.
- A BetterTouchTool clone. The touch bar remains a very expensive white elephant, this may make it less of a failure for most.
On the iOS side:
- Options for simultaneous multi lens pictures/video in default camera app.
- Raw photos option in default camera app.
- Option to replace default protocol handlers.
- AV1 support.
Hardware wise:
- A light field camera. This would link well with the LiDAR scanner that’s in the most recent ‘iPad Pro’.
Not in a million years but I still want:
- Aperture 4 with local AI powered object recognition, smart photo manipulation/editing, multi drive support and highly configurable iCloud storage options.