Author Archives: dre

About dre

I like all kinds of food.

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 →

Posted in OS X | Leave a comment

Traffic micro-management: limit network bandwidth used by an OS X process

Posted on August 8, 2015 by dre

Problem: you have some silly uploader app that only knows one speed: maximum. You would love a way to make that app back off so it doesn’t saturate your uplink and badly impact the other things using your network. Previously in … Continue reading →

Posted in OS X, scripts, The More You Know, tutorials | 3 Comments

Nuke and pave of pfSense on the SG-2440

Posted on May 1, 2015 by dre

I may not be the first to deal with the fallout of filesystem corruption on an SG-2240 running pfSense 2.2 due to sudden power loss, but I might be the first to put the cliff notes of the recovery process in … Continue reading →

Posted in bit bucket | 1 Comment

PKTAP extensions to tcpdump in OS X

Posted on July 8, 2014 by dre

The tcpdump man page in OS X contains various references to something called PKTAP, such as in the documentation for the -k option: Control the display of packet metadata via an optional meta- data_arg argument. This is useful when displaying … Continue reading →

Posted in OS X, Pro Tip, The More You Know | 1 Comment

Newpro is boss

Posted on July 3, 2014 by dre

2011 was drawing to a close, and I was uneasy at the lack of a Mac Pro refresh. My 2009 MacPro4,1 was still performing admirably, but video workflows were starting to feel sluggish as I incorporated more high-frame-rate content. Tasks like video encoding … Continue reading →

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SSL enabled, registration disabled

Posted on March 28, 2014 by dre

… and now an announcement from the custodial engineering department: SSL has been enabled. Jihad nuclear al-qaeda infiltrate spy NSA snowden very much wow. I updated media links for recent posts (the ones that load on the front page), but … Continue reading →

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Storage options for a SAS enclosure owner in a thunderbolt world

Posted on December 13, 2013 by dre

I posted the following at creativecow; below is a copy for my archives: — I’ve got an iStorage Pro 8 bay filled with 2 GB drives, and an ATTO R380 running on my 2009 Mac Pro in a RAID5 config … Continue reading →

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irssi auto-op your friends

Posted on December 7, 2013 by dre

From the ‘short and sweet’ department, here’s a fast recipe for configuring irssi to automatically op users of your choosing. cd ~/.irssi/scripts curl -O https://scripts.irssi.org/scripts/friends_peder.pl mkdir -p autorun ; cd autorun ; ln -s ../friends_peder.pl If irssi is already running … Continue reading →

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