My brother nerd sniped me the other day. He wanted to see if he could extract the images out of an old game by Ambrosia Software called “Slithereens”. It was released on 1998-12-15 for Mac OS 9. That sounds easy enough… Digging though resource forks Old Mac OS had the ability to have a 2nd … Continue reading Decoding the sprite format of a 25 year old game
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
Last night I was playing Maquette and I got stuck on the final level (called “The Exchange”) for a really long time. I was at a place with some towers with crystals above them and I had opened the doors to the first tower; Inside was a switch. Flipping the switch made a bunch of … Continue reading Stuck on the final Maquette level
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)
Today we upgraded a server that ran a bunch of VMs to Fedora 25 and all the VMs failed to come back online after rebooting. Checking the logs I found this: 2017-04-14T08:39:35.304547Z qemu-system-x86_64: Length mismatch: 0000:00:03.0/virtio-net-pci.rom: 0x10000 in != 0x20000: Invalid argument 2017-04-14T08:39:35.304579Z qemu-system-x86_64: error while loading state for instance 0x0 of device ‘ram’ 2017-04-14T08:39:35.304759Z … Continue reading Fedora libvirt/qemu error on upgrade
After you override the core in the Xi Cauldron (which unlike the others I’ve played through so far, happens pretty early), Aloy says “now I can override more machines”. But annoyingly, you don’t actually get the override until you finish the quest, which happens when you exit the cauldron. Along the way back you’ll encounter … Continue reading Horizon Zero Dawn Xi Cauldron Is Confusing
I used to use this Homebrew “Tap” to install Rust nightly versions, but it stopped working at some point. I messed around with it a lot and determined it had something to do with newer Rusts not liking the install_name_tool calls that homebrew forces on libraries during installation. So I looked into rustup (the nice … Continue reading Rust nightly + Homebrew
I wrote a simple little Perl Module recently, and it reminded me how frustrating it is to get it all working. I’m not even talking about the .xs preprocessor (xsubpp)—that’s weird, but it’s fairly straightforward. Most contingencies are accounted for and you can make it do whatever you want, and in my case, the results … Continue reading Perl Module XS configuration is hard
I was pulling my hair out getting this compiler message tonight: warning: property ‘x’ requires method ‘x’ to be defined – use @synthesize, @dynamic or provide a method implementation in this class implementation [-Wobjc-property-implementation] According to Apple’s Objective C documentation: By default, these accessor methods are synthesized automatically for you by the compiler, so you … Continue reading 32-bit clang deficiencies on Mac OS X
I just discovered this wonderful bug. Apparently “hdiutil makehybrid” is stripping code signatures in some cases. I first verify the code signature on an App (a build of Emacs, in this case)—there are no errors: $ codesign –verify _dmg-build/Emacs.app/ $ I then use “hdiutil makehybrid” to create a disk image out of the directory. $ … Continue reading Mac OS X codesigning woes
All my Playstation 4 downloads were failing today with “DNS Error” and “NW-31250-1”. I ran a tcpdump on my router and found this: 15:07:10.389761 00:ee:ff:aa:bb:cc (oui Unknown) > 11:22:33:44:55:66 (oui Unknown), ethertype IPv4 (0x0800), length 109: (tos 0x0, ttl 64, id 0, offset 0, flags [DF], proto UDP (17), length 95) red-death-router.porkrind.org.domain > 10.0.0.113.49218: … Continue reading Playstation 4 NW-31250-1 Error
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 just fine. Earlier in the year I had read an article about using pkcs8 formatted … Continue reading Mac OS X 10.9 (Mavericks) and SSH pkcs8 keys
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 device does not have appropriate credentials I finally decided it must be some background task … Continue reading iMessage on Mac OS X not working