An Apple focused history of software Easter Eggs. It’s a nice watch over your morning tea.
Tag Archives: Tech
Time Machine
Apple’s Time Machine is a neat little utility to automate onsite backups. However its machinations are, like so many of Apple’s products, completely opaque to the end user using the standard user interface and so troubleshooting can be rather difficult. Fortunately for us, this is one of those circumstances where Terminal commands can come to the rescue.
Our first magic spell is…
log show --predicate 'subsystem == "com.apple.TimeMachine"' --infoThis will show logged message from the past and can be useful if you’re trying to troubleshoot an issue that’s already in progress. Run this command and macOS will display the last few weeks of Time Machine logs before exiting
The second magic spell is…
log stream --style syslog --predicate 'senderImagePath contains[cd] "TimeMachine"' --infoThis command will run – and will remain running until you explicitly exit it – and will display any log messages that Time Machine writes out to the system log.
Raspberry Pi with PCIe
The Raspberry Pi 4 is out! And I’m not going to buy one because A) revision zero is buggered, B) the load this site produces on it’s current 3B+ host is functionally zero (so there’s very little point in upgrading it) and C) I’m currently far too busy to do any pottering around with one outside of that.
However other people have and they’ve started playing around with the new PCIe bus – even going as far as desoldering the USB controller and adding a PCIe riser.
Which is very neat indeed.
For All Time
194.66.232.91 - - [01/Jul/2019:07:54:49 +0100] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.0" 200 47 "-" "bl.uk_lddc_bot/3.3.0-LBS-2016-02 (+http://www.bl.uk/aboutus/legaldeposit/websites/websites/faqswebmaster/index.html)"
194.66.232.91 - - [01/Jul/2019:07:55:02 +0100] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 1851 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Unknown; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/538.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) PhantomJS/2.1.1 Safari/538.1 bl.uk_lddc_renderbot/2.0.0 (+ http://www.bl.uk/aboutus/legaldeposit/websites/websites/faqswebmaster/index.html)"
194.66.232.91 - - [01/Jul/2019:07:55:11 +0100] "GET /assets/main.css HTTP/1.1" 200 9924 "https://www.chrisrcook.com/" "Mozilla/5.0 (Unknown; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/538.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) PhantomJS/2.1.1 Safari/538.1 bl.uk_lddc_renderbot/2.0.0 (+ http://www.bl.uk/aboutus/legaldeposit/websites/websites/faqswebmaster/index.html)"
194.66.232.91 - - [01/Jul/2019:07:55:11 +0100] "GET /resources/images/home.jpg HTTP/1.1" 200 382760 "https://www.chrisrcook.com/" "Mozilla/5.0 (Unknown; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/538.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) PhantomJS/2.1.1 Safari/538.1 bl.uk_lddc_renderbot/2.0.0 (+ http://www.bl.uk/aboutus/legaldeposit/websites/websites/faqswebmaster/index.html)"
This is kinda cool – this site seems to have made it as far as the UK Web Archive’s crawlers! Apparently I will now taint the web long after I’m gone.
There are also a couple of snapshots on Archive.org but they only exist because I was playing with their Wayback Machine website – alas, I have not yet to made it far enough up the list for them to visit of their own accord.
Linkspam
Mac Open Web is an interesting little link for Apple users out there; it’s a curated web directory (remember those!) of open source and small developer software targeting the open/indie web with nothing from the big players and the major corporations.
I do hope that, as we push into the early 2020s, the slash-and-burn axis of facebook-twitter-reddit-google starts to weaken.
ISDN
I have now managed to screw my Amazon Advertising Profile up so much I now receive adverts for ISDN Splitters!
ISDN? ISDN was old when I took my first job (a worryingly long time ago). It was, along with some older vampire tapped BNC, one of the first things I tore out and replaced with a more civilised solution.
I mean, I could understand someone with some new old stock and a huge warehouse quietly listing it in the hope that someone might buy it and that they wouldn’t end up paying for recycling, but to actively advertise ISDN kit? That takes both commitment and an up front cash payment.
Madness!
Seti@Home
I’ve given in and installed Seti@Home again, this time dialled back to the point where it is — effectively — indistinguishable from my computers background cpu noise. The Intel GPU instance gave me terrible performance issues on my older MacBook Pro but that can be disabled via the website.
If we have another long hot summer I suspect that I’ll have to suspend running it until temperatures return to normal.
A Burning Sensation
It’s been so long that since I’ve had to burn real, physical media that I’ve completely forgotten how to do it – especially on MacOS.
Anyway, it turns out all you have to do is right click on the iso and select burn.
And, just like that, I’m now an owner of a Kubuntu 19.04 install CD.
In other good news, it appears that my external blu ray reader/writer still works!
Link Rot
The internet of my youth continues to bitrot into nothingness. This time it’s the (presumed) death of lspace.org – a site that was once the premier Discworld location on the web. I must have spent hours working through the annotated Pratchett files when I should have been studying for my GCSEs.
Now all it returns is…
DNS_PROBE_FINISHED_NXDOMAINIt’s hardly an auspicious end.
Go Faster Stripes
Apparently Virgin Media has upgraded the upload on the link that this little site sits behind from 20Mb/s to 35Mb/s. That means that all none of you who actually read these entries should be able to access things a little quicker.
The rumour mill also suggests that my download will be bumped to 500Mb/s some time next week – which in theory is nice but, unlike the upload, I very rarely manage to hit the current top speed even with a wired connection.