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Mac OS X 10.9 (Mavericks) and SSH pkcs8 keys
After upgrading to Mavericks (Mac OS X 10.9) I found that ssh-add wasn’t working. After investigating I discovered that the SSH shipped with Mavericks has a regression and doesn’t support pkcs8 keys. Mac OS X 10.8′s SSH supported these keys … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
3 Comments
iMessage on Mac OS X not working
My iMessage suddenly stopped working in the Messages app and I couldn’t get it to log in properly. In the accounts section it would spin for a while when I typed my password and then give this error: The registering … Continue reading
Posted in System Administration
13 Comments
Calling Applescript from Ruby
Today I wrote a Ruby version of my quicky function for calling Applescript from Perl: The usage looks like this (almost identical to the Perl version): osascript <<-END tell application “Finder” display dialog “Hello” end tell END
“An Ancient Piece of Computer Lore in a Place You’d Never Expect” or “Dungeon (Zork) Map in Duplicity”
Back in March of 2012 I was watching Duplicity and I noticed something odd about 28 minutes in: In the top right corner there’s an 11×17 paper with an image on it that’s really hard to make out. I recognized … Continue reading
Posted in Games, Life
10 Comments
libvirt based QEMU VM pausing by itself
I just debugged this for hours. I have a bunch of QEMU VMs and different sets of them would start pausing themselves. If I resumed them they would immediately pause themselves again. Checking logs showed nothing. I found a disk … Continue reading
Posted in System Administration
5 Comments
The Core Memory Module from my dad’s homebuilt PDP-11/05
Here is one: This is basically the 1974 version of a DIMM. It measures 16″ by 11.5″ and holds 16 kilobytes. It’s technically 18 bits wide but only 16 were used in the PDP-11. The raised part in the middle … Continue reading
Posted in Hardware, Life
22 Comments
Emacs For OS X . com gets a new Mac Mini
I recently used Funded By Me to help raise some money for a new build server for Emacs for Mac OS X . com. I set it up and then decided to start publicizing it on a Friday and by … Continue reading
Posted in Hardware
4 Comments
VLC 64 Bit Problems
I just spent way too long trying to figure out why VLC wasn’t opening DVDs. I was getting this error in the log window: no access module matched “dvdnav” Turns out the problem is that VLC 1.1.11 only has 32-bit … Continue reading
Posted in System Administration
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Daemon-Manager: Manage your non-privileged daemons
It seems I’ve been writing little daemons a lot lately–small things that don’t want to run as root but still need to be launched in the background as services. I’ve been noticing because it’s such a pain to integrate them … Continue reading
Posted in Software, System Administration
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Crysis 2–weapon stuck in semiautomatic mode.
So I was playing Crysis 2 and hit a random button on my xbox controller and my weapon went into semiautomatic mode. I could not for the life of me figure out what I had done or get it to … Continue reading
Posted in Games
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Snow Leopard Time Machine Tweaks
Sparse bundles created by Time Machine in the latest versions of Snow Leopard are created slightly differently than they used to be. It used to be that Time Machine would create a sparse bundle with a name like “machine-name_001122334455.sparsebundle” where … Continue reading
Posted in System Administration
1 Comment
Introducing Daemon Manager
The idea for Daemon Manager came about when I was converting a web site from Apache to Nginx. Nginx doesn’t launch FastCGI programs itself—it only connects to FastCGI sockets and so it requires that you manage the FastCGI server yourself. … Continue reading
Posted in Software, System Administration
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Fridge Schematics/Wiring Diagram
I couldn’t find these schematics online anywhere. They came from the behind the front panel of my Kenmore Coldspot refrigerator, model number 106.9555923. Continue reading
How to get fsaclctl off your Leopard install DVD
Leopard came with a program called fsaclctl that let you turn on and off ACL control for a filesystem. Here’s how to get it off your Leopard (10.5) install DVD. Continue reading
Posted in System Administration
3 Comments
How to find out what Mac OS X system is installed on a random disk
Ok, so you have a random disk lying around and you plug it in and it looks like it has Mac OS X installed on it. How do you tell what version it is without booting into it?
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Posted in System Administration
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CentOS (RHEL) 5.4 kernel source
Say you want to build the source tree for a RHEL/CentOS 5.4 kernel (2.6.18-164.11.1.el5 in my case) and you are running a recent Debian or Fedora system. You might get patch failure errors.
… Just add this to fix it:
%define _default_patch_fuzz 2 Continue reading
Cool things about Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6) that no one but me will care about
I admit, I am easily amused. Continue reading
Posted in Life, Software
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What I had to do to get Snow Leopard to install on my MacBook
I was getting this message:”Mac OS X cannot be installed on “silver”, because this disk cannot be used to start up your computer.”
…
The problem turns out to be that the Mac OS really wants 128MB of unused space after your main Mac OS partition.
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Posted in System Administration
8 Comments
All My Stupid Man Pages Are Out Of Date
So at some point the system installed new, nicely gzipped man pages but somehow failed to remove the old ones. And it turns out the man give the non-gzipped version precedence. Giving me old out of date documentation when I ask for it. Weak.
…
I had about 4500 that I was able to delete, and now my ls and chmod man pages have up-to-date info again. Aaaahhhhh. Continue reading
Posted in System Administration
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PC – Perl Calculator
For years I was GUI calculator fanatic. Desperately searching for that perfect calculator that did all the things I wanted it to do… At some point I decided to write my own. Finally one day it hit me that Perl’s eval() was really what I wanted. And so “pc“, Perl Calc, was born. Continue reading