Apple – www.chrisrcook.com

MacOS Tahoe’s Terrible Icons

One Foot Tsunami has an entirely reasonable rant about MacOS Tahoe’s terrible Squircle icons. They’re just corporate blanding to the max.

Retrieving the Time Machine Estimated Full Backup Size for MacOS Tahoe

Well, it’s been a little while since I last looked at sizing Time Machine backups on MacOS and, with MacOS 26 (‘Tahoe’), the magic incantation needed to pull that information out has changed.

Open up a terminal and enter the following…

log show --predicate 'subsystem == "com.apple.TimeMachine"' --info | grep "will be in backup of all sources"

…and this will print out a number of records from previous Time Machine sessions thus…

2025-11-17 08:59:01.989807+0000 0xdd79ec   Info        0x0                  27411  0    backupd: (TimeMachine) [com.apple.TimeMachine:SizingProgress] Estimated a total of 3112764 files (13.52 TB) will be in backup of all sources
2025-11-17 09:54:37.554473+0000 0xde7d23   Info        0x0                  27411  0    backupd: (TimeMachine) [com.apple.TimeMachine:SizingProgress] Estimated a total of 3113582 files (13.51 TB) will be in backup of all sources
2025-11-17 10:54:38.754477+0000 0xdfb366   Info        0x0                  27411  0    backupd: (TimeMachine) [com.apple.TimeMachine:SizingProgress] Estimated a total of 3119251 files (13.51 TB) will be in backup of all sources
2025-11-17 11:54:25.417194+0000 0xe0dd3f   Info        0x0                  27411  0    backupd: (TimeMachine) [com.apple.TimeMachine:SizingProgress] Estimated a total of 3123208 files (13.51 TB) will be in backup of all sources

I’ve started to develop a fondness for these older computer adverts. This ‘Apple/Independence Day’ tie-in ad – from the dark days of 1996 when Apple was on the cusp of bankruptcy and Jobs was yet to return – feels comfortingly of that moment.

The old MS Mac Lab

A 27 Year Old Easter Egg

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.

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.

Retrieving the Time Machine Estimated Full Backup Size

Another handy little magic spell for MacOS Sonoma’s Time Machine tool is…

log show --predicate 'subsystem == "com.apple.TimeMachine"' --info | grep "Estimated full backup will"

…which – when entered into a suitable Terminal instance – will print out Time Machine’s recent estimates of the storage costs of a full backup…

2024-05-02 06:46:35.507588+0100 0x3c5be8   Info        0x0                  291    0    backupd: (TimeMachine) [com.apple.TimeMachine:SizingProgress] Estimated full backup will contain 3113124 files (8.91 TB) from all sources
2024-05-02 07:46:49.802454+0100 0x3cd657   Info        0x0                  291    0    backupd: (TimeMachine) [com.apple.TimeMachine:SizingProgress] Estimated full backup will contain 3113163 files (8.91 TB) from all sources
2024-05-02 08:46:57.526626+0100 0x3d611b   Info        0x0                  291    0    backupd: (TimeMachine) [com.apple.TimeMachine:SizingProgress] Estimated full backup will contain 3113223 files (8.91 TB) from all sources
2024-05-02 09:47:03.731963+0100 0x3e04eb   Info        0x0                  291    0    backupd: (TimeMachine) [com.apple.TimeMachine:SizingProgress] Estimated full backup will contain 3114585 files (8.91 TB) from all sources
2024-05-02 10:47:35.409635+0100 0x3ecb04   Info        0x0                  291    0    backupd: (TimeMachine) [com.apple.TimeMachine:SizingProgress] Estimated full backup will contain 3116304 files (8.91 TB) from all sources

All very useful when shopping for a new target disk of if your monitoring your storage growth.

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.

Tag: Apple