Category: macOS

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Nomad Network – Communicate Freely

Off-grid, resilient mesh communication with strong encryption, forward secrecy and extreme privacy.

Nomad Network allows you to build private and resilient communications platforms that are in complete control and ownership of the people that use them. No signups, no agreements, no handover of any data, no permissions and gatekeepers.

https://github.com/markqvist/NomadNet

Information is the basis of society in the digital world.
Freedom of expression/speech and free access to information are indispensable prerequisites for democracy.

Sadly, there are misleading and dubious organisations, lobbyists, parties, secret services, legislative and executive bodies that work against these liberal, enlightened and humanitarian values and demand or advocate censorship, online and offline.
This is a big threat for civil society – you and me, all of us.

And this is what makes projects like NomadNet important and valuable.

Stand up for freedom of expression/free speech and fight censorship!

(And as always, please note the disclaimer: All software and hardware can have security bugs).

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How to determine/find out whether your Mac/macOS is in Safe Mode?

  1. In the Apple menu, click on “About This Mac”
  2. Then click on the “More info…” button
  3. Click on the “System Report…” button
  4. In the appearing System Report window, click on the “Software” menu item in the left pane
  5. In the right pane, look for “Boot Mode:”. It should be “Safe”.

(I recently noticed that it’s quite difficult to distinguish whether your Mac has really been booted in “Safe Mode”, as visually, there doesn’t seem to be much of difference anymore to how the desktop looks in regular mode)

And BTW, to boot a Mac with Apple Silicon in Safe Mode:

  1. Shut your Mac/macOS down
  2. To boot it again, press the power button and hold it
  3. Select the volume to boot (i.e. click on the volume icon)
  4. Hit and hold the shift key
  5. Click on the appearing text (“Continue in Safe Mode” or so) below the volume icon
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macOS Ventura: Fix the “Operation not permitted” error in Terminal

The “Operation not permitted” error message is caused by one of the typical annoyancesfeatures in macOS, namely the Terminal app lacking “full disk access” by default (and by design).

This conclusion unfortunately isn’t obvious, as when encountering the above error message, one would typically first check the ownerships and permissions of the directory/file/symlink “causing” the error, then perhaps the ACL / extended attributes, then whether the resource might still be locked by another process accessing it, and last but not least, one would remember macOS’s SIP (System Integrity Protection) and even consider booting into recovery mode. But none of that is actually required. The solution is:

  1. In the macOS “System Settings”, go to “Privacy & Security”
  2. Then click on “Full Disk Access” and enable it for “Terminal” (slider turns blue)
  3. Open a new Terminal window/session

Irritatingly, upgrading to macOS Ventura apparently resets the Terminal app’s security privileges.

Example:

I wanted to remove and recreate a symlink, so that “MobileSync” (where macOS stores backups of iOS devices like iPhones, iPads) isn’t just a regular, local directory, but a symlink pointing to a directory on a mounted NAS share. Advantage: Backups of iOS devices don’t use up valuable (and expensive) SSD storage space on your MacBook Air/Pro, but use cheap NAS storage instead (further, you don’t create duplicate backups on each of your Macs). Here’s where the MobileSync symlink is located and where it points to, in my case (you can create it using ‘ln -s /Volumes/backups_ios/MobileSync .‘, my share is named ‘backup_ios‘)

mymac ~/Library/Application Support $ ls -lad ~/Library/Application\ Support/MobileSync
lrwxr-xr-x 1 myuser staff 31 Apr  1 00:47 '/Users/myuser/Library/Application Support/MobileSync' -> /Volumes/backups_ios/MobileSync

Even as root, I first couldn’t remove the symlink I created some time back before the upgrade to Ventura. Which is even the more puzzling considering this all happens in a regular user’s home directory.

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Got a recent Mac and Boot Camp? You’ll need unofficial drivers.

(Or: The sad state of Apple’s Boot Camp support)

If you use Boot Camp with the official AMD GPU drivers the Boot Camp assistant installs, you’ll notice that many recent games in Windows 10 will issue warnings about outdated AMD GPU drivers and/or will simply crash (e.g. after a couple of minutes, like Forza Horizon 4).

Apparently, the only remedy is installing unofficial AMD drivers from https://www.bootcampdrivers.com (kudos!). It worked fine for me ( Adrenalin 19.1.2 V3 on a 15 inch MBP late 2018 with an AMD Radeon Pro 560X) – the games stopped crashing – BUT apparently, installing unofficial drivers from the above web site happens to void your Apple Care warranty (read: You do it at your own risk).

This means that one has the choice to either void the warranty or stick with an unacceptably buggy Boot Camp installation. Really, Apple?

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PDF Squeezer for macOS

If you’ve ever looked for a macOS tool that can compress PDFs, you’ve probably come across a list of dozens of apps in the Mac App Store for exactly that purpose. The problem: Most of them seem to be really old, incomplete, buggy or hardly working anymore.

One tool I can recommend (I bought it, use it almost daily and like it): PDF Squeezer (5.99 USD) (Home page)

Unlike the barely usable PDF compression feature in Apple’s Preview app (in the macOS file previewer, choose “Export…”, then “Quartz Filter: Reduce File Size”), PDF Squeezer manages to reduce a PDF file’s size by about 60-90% while retaining the original file’s legibility and good quality.

P.S. Another useful (free) tool from the same publisher, the PDF Print Service Creator, can be downloaded for free and allows to customize macOS’s print dialog in order to send any printable document directly to any of the apps that are capable of opening PDFs.