Author Archives: dre

About dre

I like all kinds of food.

Splashguard of Departure

Posted on February 3, 2022 by dre

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

Posted on March 25, 2021 by dre

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

Posted on February 12, 2021 by dre

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

Posted on May 19, 2019 by dre

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

Posted on February 24, 2017 by dre

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?!)

Posted on July 10, 2016 by dre

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

Posted on March 25, 2016 by dre

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

eGPU intrigue

Posted on February 20, 2016 by dre

As we consider a mac user’s renewed quest for GPU performance – this time for an ‘external’ GPU in a tbolt2 PCI chassis – we find similarities to other timeless quests. For instance, in our quest, the path is not clear in the beginning, and there … Continue reading →

Posted in mac pro | Leave a comment

How to rescue aborted QuickTime Player audio recordings

Posted on February 1, 2016 by dre

Know that feeling when you remember you don’t have your keys while you are closing a locked door? It’s the same feeling as when you use QuickTime Player to record some lengthy audio, and you remember you didn’t stop the recording while you are putting the … Continue reading →

Posted in media, OS X, Pro Tip, scripts, The More You Know, tutorials | Leave a comment

Spotlight, UserFilesOnly, kMDItemSupportFileType, and MDSystemFile

Posted on December 6, 2015 by dre

Recently, VMWare Fusion stopped appearing in Spotlight results. Other queries return expected results, and the spotlight index info for Fusion appears OK at first glance via: mdls “/Applications/VMWare Fusion.app” What’s going on, then? To get a different perspective, I tried … Continue reading →