Category Archives: Pro Tip

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 →

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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 →

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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 →

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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 →

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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

Longcuts occasionally form when shortcuts conspire

Posted on July 29, 2013 by dre

Saw a tweet about one of those one-touch ‘build me a VM’ things for Oracle server + rails and decided to try it; this one is mostly driven by some software called vagrant, which seems cool enough. It definitely doesn’t seem … Continue reading →

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The case of the excessively congratulatory Memory Slot Utility

Posted on October 15, 2011 by dre

A while ago I filled up my final unused memory slot in my awesome Mac Pro with an additional 4 gigorams (for a grand total of 16). Since then, whenever I reboot I’m showered with praise by the Memory Slot … Continue reading →

Posted in mac pro, OS X, Pro Tip, The More You Know | 3 Comments

Of logs and non-boot volumes

Posted on March 14, 2010 by dre

It’s a beautiful Sunday morning, and as you wait for the coffee to start working, you figure it’s probably about time that you started on those benchmark results that have to be done by Monday. You’re sitting there thinking “MAN … Continue reading →

Posted in OS X, OS X Server, Pro Tip, The More You Know | 2 Comments

When your seagate 1.5 TB hard drive begins to fail…

Posted on February 24, 2009 by dre

you might say to yourself, “yes, that’s definitely busted up. I can tell by all the fsck failures, and how sometimes it’ll spin up and down a bunch of times all anxious-like, right before a nasty kernel panic.” perhaps you … Continue reading →

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