Missives

I spent a bunch of time trying to get Texinfo to work correctly with Nix on macOS. I wanted my nix-env installed packages to have the info files and top level index file (called dir, confusingly 🙂). I don’t really use the info cli tool, but I use Emacs and I want to view the … Continue reading Texinfo and Nixpkgs

I wanted to make a script that updated to the latest nix channel automatically when it was released, the same way I do with my Debian boxes. Nix doesn’t have any nice way of querying the list of channels programmatically, but you can query their git repository since releases are created as branches there: git … Continue reading How to find the latest NixOS stable release channel

Firefox describes its quarantined domains this way: Firefox version 115 introduced Quarantined Domains to protect user privacy and security when we discover significant security issues presented by malicious actors. This feature allows us to prevent attacks by malicious actors targeting specific domains when we have reason to believe there may be malicious add-ons we have … Continue reading How To List Firefox’s Current Quarantined Domains

I got a weird error while trying to compile a slint program with the skia backend on my macOS machine: Compiling skia-bindings v0.75.0 error: failed to run custom build command for `skia-bindings v0.75.0` […a huge section of output snipped…] clang -MD -MF obj/third_party/externals/libpng/libpng.png.o.d -DPNG_SET_OPTION_SUPPORTED -DNDEBUG -w -Wno-attributes -ffp-contract=off -fstrict-aliasing -fPIC -fvisibility=hidden -isysroot /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/MacOSX.platform/Developer/SDKs/MacOSX14.5.sdk -target arm64-apple-macos11 … Continue reading Building Slint on macOS with the skia backend

I’ve been annoyed recently with a bunch of junk in my dmesg output: [Thu Jul 11 10:29:27 2024] docker0: port 5(veth9509698) entered blocking state [Thu Jul 11 10:29:27 2024] docker0: port 5(veth9509698) entered disabled state [Thu Jul 11 10:29:27 2024] veth9509698: entered allmulticast mode [Thu Jul 11 10:29:27 2024] veth9509698: entered promiscuous mode [Thu Jul … Continue reading Docker Spam in dmesg

I was trying to compile a third party Rust crate today on a Debian box and I was getting a weird error I’d never seen: = note: cc: fatal error: cannot read spec file ‘./specs’: Is a directory compilation terminated. I’ve done a bunch of embedded C stuff in the past so I knew what … Continue reading Bizarre Error while compiling a Rust program

I can’t remember who wrote this first, but my friend and I have been using some version of this shell snippet for years: ssh_find() { for agent in “$SSH_AUTH_SOCK” /tmp/ssh-*/agent.* /tmp/com.apple.launchd.*/Listeners* /tmp/keyring-*/ssh; do SSH_AUTH_SOCK=”$agent” ssh-add -l 2>/dev/null case “$?” in # 0 some keys, 1 no keys, 2 no agent 0) export SSH_AUTH_SOCK=”$agent”; echo “Found … Continue reading ssh_find

I played around with Apple’s Automator app when it was first released, but I could never really find a good use for it (I wrote some actions but I would never reliably use them for whatever reason). But I did eventual write one that I use constantly. It’s a “Quick Action”, which means it shows … Continue reading Automator Is Pretty Sweet

My MacOS Element Matrix client (Electron based) started getting errors when I searched. My Windows Matrix client worked just fine, so I was pretty sure it wasn’t a server issue. When I typed anything into the message search I’d get this error right underneath: “Message search initialisation failed, check your settings for more information” And … Continue reading Fixing Element Search

Do you know the printf trick in shell? Shell printf repeats its format pattern if you give it more arguments than the pattern has. You can use this for all kinds of tricks: $ printf “/some/path/%s ” file1 file2 file3 file4 /some/path/file1 /some/path/file2 /some/path/file3 /some/path/file4 $ printf “%s=%s\n” a 1 b 2 c 3 d … Continue reading Shell printf tricks

I was banging my head against a wall trying to get help for go build with go build help (and for some reason go doesn’t support go build –help, but I kept getting this error: package help is not in GOROOT (/opt/homebrew/Cellar/go/1.18.3/libexec/src/help) Does brew not come with docs by default? How else am I supposed … Continue reading I’m so dumb

My nightly Emacs builds stopped about a month and a half ago. A couple days after I noticed it was failing I tried to debug the issue and found that building openssl was hanging—I found that Jenkins was timing out after an hour or so. I should mention that it’s dying on a Mac OS … Continue reading Failed Emacs builds, hanging kernels, abort(), oh my

On Wednesday as I was going to bed I noticed it was quite hot in my house. I checked my central air blower unit and there was frost on the coils and the blower wasn’t moving. It kept trying to start but not being able to start. The 7 segment led was showing “b5” which … Continue reading Fixing the blower motor in my central air system

I was digging around and I found the original SSV announcement posted to Dominion (the (in)famous Sisters Of Mercy Mailing list). What is SSV? Just read the letter—it explains everything. More info can be found here, here, or here, or here. Here is the email, reproduced with headers for posterity: Received: from maekong.ohm.york.ac.uk by rewind.indigita.com … Continue reading Screw Shareholder Value

I wanted to get DKIM working on an Debian box I have that runs Exim. The first thing to do is to create the keys: $ openssl genrsa -out diamonds.key 4096 $ openssl rsa -in diamonds.key -pubout > diamonds.pub I was following these instructions and noticed that Exim supports ed25519 DKIM signatures. Neat! I decided … Continue reading DKIM and Exim4 on Debian

Today my Jenkins builds were not working because all of the build slaves were offline. Digging around in the logs showed that the couldn’t connect because of name resolution failures. I use mDNS on my network (the slaves are Mac OS X VMs running on a Mac Mini), and so they were named something like … Continue reading AT&T causes mDNS on Linux To Fail

My imgur had been acting up for a while now. In my Firefox it wouldn’t render the actual image but rendered most of the rest of the page just fine: If I went to i.imgur.com (adding the .png or .jpg to the url) then the image loaded just fine. So it wasn’t getting blocked by … Continue reading Firefox imgur failure

Some people were reporting that an IMAP server wasn’t working on their Mac. It was working from linux machines, and from Thunderbird on all OSes. From Macs I was getting this testing from the command line: $ openssl s_client -connect <my-imap-server>:993 CONNECTED(00000003) 39458:error:1407742E:SSL routines:SSL23_GET_SERVER_HELLO:tlsv1 alert protocol version:/BuildRoot/Library/Caches/com.apple.xbs/Sources/OpenSSL098/OpenSSL098-64.50.6/src/ssl/s23_clnt.c:593: This led me to a recent libssl package … Continue reading Debian OpenSSL 1.1.0f-4 and macOS 10.11 (El Capitan)