For a couple of little home projects I need an always-on computer. In an ideal world, perhaps, this would be something like a Mac Mini. Powerful [enough], easy to install & maintain, runs anything & everything (including anything Linux through Docker or at worst a straight VM). Unfortunately, Mac Minis are surprisingly expensive – even… Read more
Yet another example of a really bizarre macOS bug that’s pretty inexcusable as a test escape, given it occurs with the default installation settings on a completely clean OS install. In short, the Mojave update installer does not work (on High Sierra at least) if you have ‘Optimize Mac Storage’ enabled for iCloud Drive (System… Read more
I’ve been struggling since Mojave came out to deal with it’s over-bearing expansion of SIP (“System Integrity Protection”), which is basically a super-root notion that blocks access – even to root – to lots of basic parts of the system, including obvious & mostly sensible ones like /System and /Library, but also less usefully things… Read more
I’ve been using ffmpeg to trim clips from a trail camera, as most of the time there’s only a few seconds of anything interesting in frame out of the 30+ seconds of video it records each time, but I don’t want to re-encode them and lose video quality as a result (or balloon file sizes… Read more
I need a ‘facepalm’ category apparently. There’s been a lot of that lately. You cannot import, let-alone work on, Photoshop files (“PSB” file extension) in Lightroom. It flat-out doesn’t support them. That’s such a weird limitation & oversight, for a program that Adobe now officially names ‘Adobe Photoshop Lightroom’. See also this six year old… Read more
Apple supports two styles of two-factor authentication, that they call (and distinguish as) “two-step” vs “two-factor”. “Two-step” is their older method, though functionally they’re basically equivalent. If you have multiple accounts on a Family Sharing arrangement, and some use “two-factor” while others use “two-step”, you’re in for a bag of hurt. For example, any time you change… Read more
I hadn’t ’til yesterday realised that EXIF metadata doesn’t actually store dates & times correctly. Whoever came up with the spec all those decades ago clearly didn’t know how to work with dates & times correctly. This is immensely frustrating since now we have countless images taken with timestamps that are collectively gibberish. The problem is… Read more