Retrieving the Time Machine Estimated Full Backup Size

Posted on 2 May 2024 by ChrisC

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 Adam’s Desk and Office in 1996?

Posted on 13 March 2024 by ChrisC

This appears to be Douglas Adam’s 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

Posted on 28 February 2024 by ChrisC

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

Posted on 9 October 2023 by ChrisC

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.

A Game Boy Camera to FaceTime Bridge

Posted on 13 September 2023 by ChrisC

Completely impractical but with a delightfully retro output, this Game Boy Camera to FaceTime bridge is really rather neat.

Miserablism of the iPhone Variety.

Posted on 12 September 2023 by ChrisC

The iPhone 15 Pro in it’s fundamentally miserable set of colours.

Apple Digital Sales

Posted on 28 April 2023 by ChrisC

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!

European DSA Recipients of Services Report

Online platforms with 45 million or more average monthly active recipients of the service in the Union, may be designated as very large online platforms (VLOPs). With this framework in mind, the below figures, compiled in accordance with Article 24 (2) of the DSA regarding recipients of the service, are approximated based on information that is readily available to Apple in the normal course of its business:

iOS App Store: 101 million
iPadOS App Store: 23 million
macOS App Store: 6 million
tvOS App Store: 1 million
watchOS App Store: under 1 million
Apple Books: under 1 million
Podcasts paid subscriptions: under 1 million

Leaking Pipes with Swift and External Executables

Posted on 1 July 2022 by ChrisC

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)

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MacOS Updates Are Getting Slower

Posted on 7 June 2022 by ChrisC

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?

Douglas Adams in MacWorld (May 1985)

Posted on 11 May 2021 by ChrisC

An old (and, alas, they’re all old now) interview with Douglas Adams from the May 1985 issue of Macworld. Transcription is via OSX’s images to text service.