The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff

Jeroen W. Pluimers on .NET, C#, Delphi, databases, and personal interests

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Archive for the ‘Apple’ Category

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Microsoft Remote Desktop 8 on OS X stores RDP configuration in com.microsoft.rdc.mac.plist and passwords in keychain

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/03/15

One day I write some scripts based on:

Some starting materials are at:

A thing I learned is that the Microsoft Remote Desktop 8 is basically a rebranded iTap RDP (it looks like Microsoft bought iTap RDP for Mac, as iTap RDP for Mac is now discontinued)

–jeroen

Posted in Apple, Development, Mac OS X / OS X / MacOS, OS X 10.10 Yosemite, OS X 10.11 El Capitan, OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, OS X 10.9 Mavericks, Power User, Remote Desktop Protocol/MSTSC/Terminal Services, Scripting, Software Development, Windows, XML, XML/XSD | Leave a Comment »

Factory restoring a 3rd generation Apple TV was more cumbersome, but I learned about BlueTooth keyboard sharing from my Mac

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/03/03

Apple TV needs iTunes

Apple TV needs iTunes

A while ago, my model A1469 3rd generation Apple TV had a slowly blinking white light but nothing displayed over HDMI any more, so I searched for Apple TV slow blinking white and

Reading Restoring your Apple TV (when its white light is flashing) | Comics and gadgets, I opted for the first option: a soft-restart of the Apple TV. To do that you have to press menu+down on the Apple Remote at the same time for 5+ seconds, then wait for the Apple TV to restart. That initially did show an image over HDMI which later disappeared. I didn’t get the image at first as I thought it was looking for iTunes media over USB (like from an iPhone or iPad), so I waited for a time-out to occur.

After a while that image disappeared and the Apple TV white LED started rapidly flashing. Not good.

Later I found the image was portraying a USB cable not having a connection to an iTunes logo and some dark grey text on a black background pointing to support.apple.com/appletv/restore.

I didn’t see that at first as the room was a bit brightly lit since we had a lot of sun that day so this non-descriptive image with grey on black UX worked really well.

Conclusion: I had to restore the Apple TV which I thought would be straight-forward as it had been connected to my iCloud account.

 

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Posted in Apple, Apple TV, iOS, Keyboards and Keyboard Shortcuts, Power User | Leave a Comment »

Interesting historic read of notes on end 1970s Apple SSAFE project – how it started and ended

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/02/27

This appeared a few days back: [WayBack] http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/apple/ssafe/Apple_SSAFE_Project.pdf

It’s about “Software and Security from Apple Friends and Enemies” an early exchange of ideas and possibilities for DRM in the Apple ][ and Apple III era.

I got it via my bitsavers.org RSS subscription, but it has been over the net in quite a few other places as well:

I think the most important quote is from the one on reddit, submitted 20170223 by vadermeer  for which I added some WayBack/Archive.is links:

[WayBack] Found Internal Apple Memos about copy protection for Apple II, SARA, LISA(self.VintageApple)

Yesterday at the Seattle Goodwill Outlet, where everything is sold by the pound, I noticed the Apple logo on letterhead sticking out from a bin of books, so I started digging. What I found were the 1979-1980 files of Jack MacDonald, manager of system software for the Apple II and /// at the time

They tell the story of project “SSAFE” or “Software Security from Apples Friends and Enemies.” This was a proposal to bring disk copy protection in-house to sell as a service to outside developers. Inter-office memos, meeting notes and progress reports all give a good idea of what a project lifecycle was like. Different schemes and levels of protection are considered, as well as implementation primarily on the Apple II+ and the upcoming SARA (The Apple ///) and Lisa computers. [WayBack] Randy Wigginton is featured prominently throughout, along with mentions of Woz and many other familiar names.

The documents were all a jumble so I’ve put them in chronological order and scanned the collection, please enjoy. [Archive.is]

The reddit thread is very nice reading as it explains how close we are now to this Level 1:

Level 1. Totally secure. Absolutely no method of stealing the software. 100% effective. Note that the ideal, level 1, is achievable only through disallowing any access of any kind to the software and the computer. Not very practical in our circumstances.

and this one from boingboing:

It’s so neatly packaged and well-documented it could be a Harvard Business Review case-study.

Edit 20240819: the above Googl links pointed to [Wayback/Archive] Apple SSAFE Project.pdf – Google Drive.

--jeroen

Posted in 6502, Apple, Apple ][, History, Power User | Leave a Comment »

iMovie on a 2010 iMac was starting and running slow: 2 simple steps solved that

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/02/27

iMovie on a 2010 iMac was starting and running slow. During startup, it wasn’t using much memory, but during editing it did: less than 2 gigabyte out of 8 gigabyte free memory left.

The hard-disk was like 30% full, there wasn’t much in the cache, few processes were auto-starting and the recycle bin was almost empty.

So my first thought was adding more RAM (which is easy): duplicating it to 16 megabyte was easy and not expensive when you look at the Amazon prices for it.

After that it was faster, but not really fast: especially the loading was still slow (less slow than before, but still taking minutes).

Then I scanned for permission issues and there were quite a few as the machine had been getting updates since 2010. So I repaired the permissions using disk utility.

Now iMovie loaded much faster as well: in under a minute.

So out of 17 Ways to Speed Up Mac OS X Lion – ChrisWrites.com, only 2 steps were really needed so far.

–jeroen

Posted in Apple, iMac, Mac, Mac OS X / OS X / MacOS, Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, OS X 10.10 Yosemite, OS X 10.11 El Capitan, OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, OS X 10.9 Mavericks, Power User | Leave a Comment »

Ultimate Micro Releases the Universal PSU Kit and Upgrade – Call-A.P.P.L.E.

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/02/24

I might buy this as a preventive measure: Ultimate Micro Releases the Universal PSU Kit and Upgrade – Call-A.P.P.L.E. [WayBack]

Videos of how to install are below.

–jeroen

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Posted in //e, 6502, Apple, History, Power User | Leave a Comment »

Finder doesn’t work since Yosemite – Ask Different

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/02/20

Source: Finder doesn’t work since Yosemite – Ask Different [WayBack]:

This fix from Reddit worked perfectly for me!!

http://www.reddit.com/r/osx/comments/2jtikj/finder_not_responding_new_yosemite_install/ [WayBack]

You can most likely fix the issue by clearing out Finder’s saved state, caches, and/or settings.

Use Spotlight (the search icon in the far right of the menu bar) to find and open the “Terminal” application. Triple-click the following line in order to copy and paste it into Terminal’s window:

rm -fR ~/Library/Saved\ Application\ State/com.apple.finder.savedState ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.finder; killall Finder

If it still doesn’t work, try this one:

mv ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.finder{,.backup}.plist; killall Finder

–jeroen

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Posted in Apple, iMac, Mac, Mac OS X / OS X / MacOS, MacBook, MacBook Retina, MacBook-Air, MacBook-Pro, MacMini, OS X 10.10 Yosemite, Power User | Leave a Comment »

Apple ][ history – Nibble magazine

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/02/16

I recently found some old magazine issues of my early programming escapades. It reminded me of the really old days where – as a school kid – I tried to buy Nibble magazine at a regular base. It was expensive (I think it was around 8 Dutch Guilders (or NLG) – close to EUR 4 – which was a lot for me, though less expensive than diskettes that were like NLG 10 each).

But it was fun as the magazine focussed at computer programs and programming transitioned my life. From Integer Basic via AppleSoft Basic (and various smaller attempts in FORTH, MuSimp, LISA Assembler and LOGO) to Turbo Pascal on CP/M.

Recently I learned that all issues (16k pages total!) have been scanned and OCR-ed and can be obtained on DVD for a modest price. Even better: all their software is available for free.

Just follow these links:

For some history:

–jeroen

Posted in //e, 6502, Apple, Apple ][, Development, History, Pascal, Power User, Software Development, Turbo Pascal | Leave a Comment »

Managing WIFI connections using the Mac OSX…

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/02/10

These links:

Made me add this to my ~/.bash_profile:

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Posted in Apple, Mac, Mac OS X / OS X / MacOS, Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, MacBook, MacBook Retina, MacBook-Air, MacBook-Pro, MacMini, OS X 10.10 Yosemite, OS X 10.9 Mavericks, Power User | Leave a Comment »

Date format converter from Text or Unix/Mac/Filetime/Microsoft to virtually any readable form

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/02/09

Brilliant Date format converter from dates in Text (almost any format) or timestamp numbers in Unix, Mac, Filetime or Microsoft (which is the same as Delphi TDateTime) format to any of these formats:

Text Date:
Date in human-readable text		 Wednesday, March 23, 2016 4:05:39pm
RFC 822:
RFC 822 formatted date		 Wed, 23 Mar 2016 16:05:39 +0000
ISO 8601:
ISO 8601 formatted date		 2016-03-23T16:05:39+00:00
UNIX Timestamp:
seconds since Jan 1 1970		 1458749139
Mac Timestamp:
seconds since Jan 1 1904		 3541593939
Microsoft Timestamp:
days since Dec 31 1899		 42452.670590278
FILETIME:
100-nanoseconds since Jan 1 1601		 131032227390000000
01D1851D:D7B58B80

Source: Date format converter

–jeroen

Posted in *nix, .NET, Apple, Delphi, Development, Mac, Mac OS X / OS X / MacOS, Power User, Software Development | 1 Comment »

Determining the current shell in *n*x variants including ESXi

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/02/08

On most systems, I use bash as shell, but not all systems have it, for instance the shell.xs4all.nl server uses tcsh and ESXi 4+ uses a very limited ash shell from busybox (ESX 4 had bash though).

There is this huge script that covers many shell and operating system versions (even DOS, Windows) and interpreters (python, ruby, php, etc) what shell is this which I got through Stéphane Chazelas‘s answer in linux – determine shell in script during runtime – Unix & Linux Stack Exchange

I wanted a shorter thing that works in current Linux, BSD, OS X and ESXi versions.

Some very short scripts are less reliable, for instance echo $SHELL looks nice, but isn’t always set.

Similar for echo $0 which will fail for instance if it shows as sh but in fact is a different shell in disguise.

This works for bash, tcsh and busybox sh, is a bit more precise than getting $0. It’s based on HOWTO: Detect bash from shell script – Stack Overflow:

lsof -p $$ | awk '(NR==2) {print $1}'

But on ESXi it shows this because lsof doesn’t take any parameter there and just dumps all information:

----------+---------------------+---------------------+--------+------------------

It’s because lsof on ESXi always shows this header where Cartel and World aren’t exactly well documented:

Cartel | World name | Type | fd | Description
----------+---------------------+---------------------+--------+------------------

Empirically for non VM related processes, it looks like the Cartel is the PID and World name the command.

On Linux and BSD based systems, the header looks like this, so command and PID are reversed in ESXi:

COMMAND PID USER FD TYPE DEVICE SIZE/OFF NODE NAME

This command then works on both ESXi, OS X, Linux and BSD assuming you can word search for the PID and noting that PID/command will be reversed on ESXi as compared to OSX/Linux/BSD:

lsof -p $$ | grep -w $$ | awk '(NR==2) {print $1,$2}'

–jeroen

Posted in Apple, bash, BSD, Development, iMac, Mac, Mac OS X / OS X / MacOS, Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, MacBook, MacBook Retina, MacBook-Air, MacBook-Pro, MacMini, OS X 10.10 Yosemite, OS X 10.11 El Capitan, OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, OS X 10.9 Mavericks, Power User, Scripting, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

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