Author Archives: dre

About dre

I like all kinds of food.

Access Photos.app’s Judgements of your Photos

Ever look at the sqlite3 DB in the Photos.app library bundle ~/Pictures/Photos Library.photoslibrary? So much stuff. I would suggest making a copy of it, and only mess around with the copy. The output of the above code is shown below: … Continue reading

Posted in bit bucket | Leave a comment

A Better Activity Metric

Using CPU utilization to measure overall CPU activity is like trying to infer how far a car has traveled by looking at the speedometer instead of the odometer. Continue reading

Posted in quiesce, scripts, The More You Know | Leave a comment

Quiesce

Most of the time, I just proceed straight to asking my computer to do stuff for me. Sometimes, especially when I don’t yet know what stuff I want, I will instead start by asking my computer not to do stuff, … Continue reading

Posted in quiesce | Leave a comment

Splashguard of Departure

Trivia question: what kind of protection should you wear when calling diff from a Shortcuts.app “Run Shell Script” action? You should affix the Splashguard of Departure, ideally with some +charisma to offset the posix misalignment. This is because “Run Shell … Continue reading

Posted in development, OS X, Pro Tip, scripts | Leave a comment

os_log haystack needler

Here’s a method to find where any given NSUserDefault setting is persisted. This might help if you’re trying to write a script to get or set that setting. As a bonus, this post details a reusable strategy for withstanding the … Continue reading

Posted in OS X, The More You Know, tutorials | Leave a comment

The Silent Suffering of QuickLook

I experiment with lots of different software – there are currently 308 items in /Applications and 508 git repos in ~/work (only a handful of which are directly job related). If you’re thinking something like “that’s gross, I bet your … Continue reading

Posted in bit bucket | Leave a comment

On the value of money-as-currency

I first wrote this as a comment to a Veritasium video that analyzes the perils of a recommendation-based approach to content distribution. In attempting to link to that comment on Twitter, I found myself unable to do so because Twitter … Continue reading

Posted in bit bucket | 1 Comment

A Low But Significant Bar

A friend got a 4th gen AppleTV in late 2015 – a friend that enjoys retro video games, but that doesn’t own any consoles. I tried Provenance on my iPad and was pretty satisfied, and figured it would be pretty nifty on the … Continue reading

Posted in bit bucket, development, Pro Tip | Leave a comment

Silence sandbox log spam (or: Why is sandbox logging ALLOWED access?!)

I’ve been annoyed by sandbox log verbosity since always, but recently I was pushed over the edge when playing with a tool (htop) that calls task_for_pid a lot. It’s open source, so not code signed or entitled. There are various … Continue reading

Posted in OS X, Pro Tip | Leave a comment

Troubleshooting the Adaptive Firewall in OS X Server

Recently I did some spelunking into the Adaptive Firewall facility of OS X Server to devise a procedure for troubleshooting a reported failure of AF to block failed SSH logins. Consider this a supplement to this post at krypted. (although do … Continue reading

Posted in OS X | Leave a comment