Your system has run out of application memory HUR HUR HUR

I hate this dialog with the fire of a thousand suns. When this appears, it basically means one (or both) of two things: Some application went nuts and chewed through all your memory and/or disk space. macOS got itself into a darkly comical & embarrassing deadlock. Quitting any of the listed applications is rarely the correct … Read more

#if DEBUG in Swift

Sigh. The Swift team give an impeccable impression of a group of people who’ve never actually tried to use Swift. An incredibly basic compiler task is to provide code a way to distinguish between debug & release builds, in order that it can behave accordingly (e.g. change the default logging verbosity, change asserts from fatal to … Read more

Nikon SnapBridge

Finally. Nikon have released the SnapBridge app so that the much-touted Bluetooth+Wifi capability of the D500 can actually be used.  A mere eight months after it was announced.  Fuck you too Nikon. However, as I’d clearly forgotten, it’s not very useful anyway.  It doesn’t work with raws, you see.  Doesn’t even acknowledge that they’re in the … Read more

Encrypted RAID volumes in El Capitan

Apple crippled Disk Utility in El Capitan, in their usual name of making good functional things pretty & pretty useless. Luckily I’m far from the first person to need to create RAID and/or encrypted CoreStorage volumes, in El Capitan.  Florian Knapp has a concise summary of how to set up an encrypted RAID volume.  Tom … Read more

Stellaris review

This is a fantastic game if you love spending hours meticulously crafting a beautiful empire, micro-optimising it to a cutting edge, and then having the AI come in and wipe you out instantly. Fun for the whole family. As best I can tell it’s fatally buggy, because it lets the AI essentially cheat, and you … Read more