A nice summary by Werner Fischer (Thomas-Krenn) about how to enable and use Serial over LAN, particularly for Linux boxes:
(In German, but you can easily translate it using your favourite online translation tool, e.g. deepl.com or Google Translate)
Make a diff!
A nice summary by Werner Fischer (Thomas-Krenn) about how to enable and use Serial over LAN, particularly for Linux boxes:
(In German, but you can easily translate it using your favourite online translation tool, e.g. deepl.com or Google Translate)
It might be worth taking a closer look at Clip OS, a relatively new, security focused Linux distribution by the ANSSI, based on Hardened Gentoo and with some similarities to Qubes OS.
“File History”, the built-in backup functionality of Windows 10, leaves a lot to be desired. It starts with a totally non-intuitive, “dumbed-down” user interface (displaying a backup size of 0 bytes, “backing up your data…” and an enabled “Back up now” button at the same time) and ends with lacking transparency (no information about progress and speed at all) and checkability in general.
Luckily, there’s a better open source alternative: Duplicati
Duplicati might not be the fastest backup solution either, but it has a good, intuitive GUI and wizard. And it’s fully transparent and highly adjustable.
(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drivers the Boot Camp assistant installs, you’ll notice that many recent games in Windows 10 will issue warnings about outdated AMD GPU drivers and/or will simply crash (e.g. after a couple of minutes, like Forza Horizon 4).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?
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.
Recently I ran out of space on a Boot Camp partition with Windows 10 Pro. So I looked around for ways to make more space for Windows by shrinking the macOS partition and enlarging the Windows partition. Apple doesn’t officially support this in Boot Camp without reinstalling Windows, and doing these operations by hand, e.g. with the help of GNU Parted, is time consuming and tedious.
Luckily, I stumbled over Paragon CampTune, a commercial macOS utility (ready for 10.14 Mojave) that automates these tedious tasks and allows to resize the macOS and Boot Camp partitions on the fly, without having to reinstall Windows or macOS.
It finally worked wonderfully, the only irritating thing was that the tool showed a bland error at the first start of the repartitioning process: “Object not found”. After restarting the process with slightly different partition sizes, it could be successfully completed.
I can thus recommend this handy utility as it can save hours of work for a few bucks (ca. 22 USD).
Apple’s hardware and software ecosystem generally provides a fantastic UX by tight integration, relatively good usability (compared to most competitors) and good services and support.
Sometimes, users may be bitten by terrible hw and sw bugs nonetheless. The worst Apple software bug I’ve personally experienced so far is that I recently noticed that all my many voice memos on my iPhone were gone! The exact reason why and how this happened hasn’t been fully investigated yet, but the observed issue is evidently linked to the recent iOS 12 update release (and potentially also to later iOS 12.x releases, as neither the problem nor any fix have been mentioned in any of the iOS 12.x update changelogs to date). The data loss seems to have to do with the introduction of the revamped voice memo app (that is now also available on the iPad), perhaps due to a bug in the iCloud synchronisation.
So, lots of invaluable voice memos I recorded for beloved ones, recordings of important conversations and thoughts, all gone! Nothing to be delighted about, to say the least!
I thus contacted Apple support and they were very kind and keen to determine the problem and find a mitigation or solution (I was on the phone with them for roughly 45 minutes, involving 2nd level support too). They didn’t find any such issue mentioned in their support database though and apparently, none of the supporters I talked to ever heard of anything like that before, despite it being mentioned all over twitter). For understandable legal reasons, as they never recommend “random” 3rd party tools as a matter of principle, they couldn’t recommend the solution detailed in this blog post, but suggested a more general solution, involving only Apple tools and services (see at the very bottom of this post; if you don’t mind the risk and backing up your iPhone to iCloud, you could try this alternatively).
After a quick assessment, I decided to go with another solution as all in all, it seemed more transparent and promising, less time consuming and with an acceptable risk for me.
Idea and big picture: Extract the lost voice memos from an old iPhone backup in iTunes, ideally the latest backup before the release/installation of iOS 12, i.e. before Sept 17, 2018.
Disclaimer 1: Although the following tips worked fine for me, I can’t guarantee they’ll work for you too – you follow these steps at your own risk. If in doubt, I recommend backing up all your data redundantly on various media before.
Disclaimer 2: Let me tell you this first: If you don’t have any backups of your iPhone, don’t use iTunes for iPhone backups and don’t have Time Machine backups of those backups in iTunes, you’re likely out of luck. At least I didn’t find any method to restore the disappeared voice memos on the iPhone itself – once iOS 12.x is installed, those memos apparently weren’t anywhere on the device itself anymore. Considering iOS 12’s and iPhone’s more and more restrictive data protection measures, it would likely also be difficult for professional data recovery services to recover any lost voice memos from the device (they would need to be technically on par with secret services and forensic experts -> seldom and accordingly expensive).
So here are the detailed steps to follow:
Interesting observations:
Finally, here’s what Apple support suggested doing, instead of the above method:
According to the Apple support, this should intelligently merge old and new data, so that you end up with iOS 12 and all the new and old data on it, without losing any, including the old, previously vanished voice memos.
If you don’t mind the potential risk of a failed data merge and don’t object backing up your iPhone to iCloud, you could alternatively try this.
Either way, I hope these tips are helpful. Good luck!
Apparently, there’s a macOS bug that if your Mac has been connected to a Thunderbolt Display for a long time, the brightness of the display can no longer be adjusted (neither by pressing the according F1/F2 keys on your keyboard nor by using the brightness slider in the display settings of the system preferences).
The simple yet surprising fix is:
(credits: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/thunderbolt-brightness-control-settings-gone.1254406/)
GitLab 10.5 introduced built-in support for Let’s Encrypt.
Unfortunately, if you follow the official GitLab instructions how to enable Let’s Encrypt support, you may encounter the following error when rebuilding GitLab:
Running handlers:
There was an error running gitlab-ctl reconfigure:letsencrypt_certificate[yourhost.yourdomain.com] (letsencrypt::http_authorization line 3) had an error: RuntimeError: acme_certificate[staging] (/opt/gitlab/embedded/cookbooks/cache/cookbooks/letsencrypt/resources/certificate.rb line 20) had an error: RuntimeError: [yourhost.yourdomain.com] Validation failed for domain yourhost.yourdomain.com
Running handlers complete
Chef Client failed. 11 resources updated in 11 secondsWarnings:
Let’s Encrypt is enabled, but external_url is using http
The last line is rather misleading, as the domain validation can apparently also fail if one sets external_url = “https://yourhost.yourdomain.com”
As a workaround, add the following two additional lines to /etc/gitlab/gitlab.rb (hat tip to Kai Mindermann and Thomas Jost for the hints):
nginx['redirect_http_to_https_port'] = 80 nginx['redirect_http_to_https'] = true
So, all in all, you need to set in /etc/gitlab/gitlab.rb:
external_url 'https://yourhost.yourdomain.com'
and add the following lines (adjust the notification e-mail address):
letsencrypt['enable'] = true letsencrypt['contact_emails'] = ['gitlab-notifications@yourdomain.com'] # optional nginx['redirect_http_to_https_port'] = 80 nginx['redirect_http_to_https'] = true
Make sure that your firewall doesn’t block access to ports 22 (SSH), 80 (HTTP), 443 (HTTPS).
After that, reconfigure GitLab (in a shell):
# gitlab-ctl reconfigure
That’s it! You can now register/login at https://yourhost.yourdomain.com.
Recently, the SystemUIServer process on my MBP running macOS Sierra has started “eating” a lot of CPU, slowing down the whole machine, even making the clock in the top menu bar stop working properly. It usually started using one-digit percentages of the available CPU power, then growing to 10%, 15%, 20%, up to well above 60%, sometimes even 80% and more! It wasn’t a steady growth – it sometimes shrank again, just to grow even further.
The only apparent remedy was to kill the SystemUIServer process (e.g. using the Activity Monitor) from time to time (i.e. every 30 minutes -> there are also scripts to automatically restart SystemUIServer). Its CPU usage then reset to a low one-digit number.
Taking a closer look at the process in the Activity Monitor, I then noticed that the number of (used) ports (so-called “Mach ports“) by the process were steadily growing, once SystemUIServer was started. This was weird, pointing to some kind of leakage. Typically, for a CPU load of around 50%, more than 5000 Mach ports were used.
By coincidence, I then noticed that, unlike expected, my MBP wasn’t actually using Ethernet, but only WiFi. Further investigation then hinted that the according Gigabit Ethernet port on my HP 1810 switch was apparently malfunctioning (or even dead): In the macOS Network Preferences, the Thunderbolt-Ethernet connection was constantly shown as red/disconnected, although the OS was apparently trying to establish a connection again and again (and failed). First, I even suspected a problem with the Thunderbolt-Gigabit-Ethernet adapter itself (it wasn’t the problem here, the adapter seemed to work fine with another Mac and connection).
The solution to this problem thus was:
Lessons learned: