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.
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 sourcesAll very useful when shopping for a new target disk of if your monitoring your storage growth.
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.
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.
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.
Completely impractical but with a delightfully retro output, this Game Boy Camera to FaceTime bridge is really rather neat.
The iPhone 15 Pro in it’s fundamentally miserable set of colours.
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!
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)
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?