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thought_alarm

Delete /etc/ssl/cert.pem and replace it with the one from MacPorts.

    # /usr/bin/curl https://dv-g3b-aaa-noct-emudhra.we-have-a-problem.com/
    Your client successfully connected to the site. That's bad!
    
    # sudo mv /etc/ssl/cert.pem /tmp/
    
    # sudo ln -s /opt/local/libexec/openssl3/etc/openssl/cert.pem /etc/ssl/cert.pem
    
    # /usr/bin/curl https://dv-g3b-aaa-noct-emudhra.we-have-a-problem.com/
    curl: (60) SSL certificate problem: unable to get local issuer certificate
    More details here: https://curl.se/docs/sslcerts.html
Yeah, my iTunes library is over 20 years old and it's more valuable to me now than ever. The iPod halo effect lives on.

Once or twice a year during the holiday sales season I'll buy some new shows/seasons from iTunes. These are always downloaded and backed up, so I never have to worry about license changes, etc.

For old shows (20+ years) I will either rip the old DVDs or torrent guilt free.

When I travel, I load up my iPad or an SD card with my latest queue of shows so I can stick to my weekly TV schedule..

And I spend nothing on streaming.

Re:macOS Golden Gate Is a Buggy Mess on Tuesday September 29, 2026 @11:27AM (#49894982)
The golden rule with MacOS is never update before February, or after August.

I waited until Aug 31 before updating to MacOS 26, a new record for me. I very much hope 27 will be ready to go by Feb 1.

Re:Logo Programming Language on Friday September 11, 2026 @12:19PM (#49660980)
Try hideturtle or ht.
Re:Logo Programming Language on Friday September 11, 2026 @12:03PM (#49660693)
This on-line version of Logo is pretty great: https://www.calormen.com/jslogo/
Or in the case of Superbad, a film based on Seth Rogen's experiences as a Vancouver teenager in the late 90s, Vancouver is a stand-in for Los Angeles, which is a stand-in for Vancouver.
Re:Stop the Apple Music app from launching on Monday June 08, 2026 @06:58PM (#48453608)
I use the built-in `hidutil` utility to remap F3-F9 to my preferred keys.

F3/F4 are remapped to the keyboard backlight brightness.

F5-F9 are remapped to be plain old function keys.

This post has a lot of great info: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35555475

This is the mapping I use on an M1 MacBook:

    hidutil property --set '{
      "UserKeyMapping":[
        {"HIDKeyboardModifierMappingSrc":0x0000FF0100000010,"HIDKeyboardModifierMappingDst":0x00FF00000009},
        {"HIDKeyboardModifierMappingSrc":0x0000000c00000221,"HIDKeyboardModifierMappingDst":0x00FF00000008},
        {"HIDKeyboardModifierMappingSrc":0x0000000c000000cf,"HIDKeyboardModifierMappingDst":0x00070000003e},
        {"HIDKeyboardModifierMappingSrc":0x000000010000009b,"HIDKeyboardModifierMappingDst":0x00070000003f},
        {"HIDKeyboardModifierMappingSrc":0x0000000c000000b4,"HIDKeyboardModifierMappingDst":0x000700000040},
        {"HIDKeyboardModifierMappingSrc":0x0000000c000000cd,"HIDKeyboardModifierMappingDst":0x000700000041},
        {"HIDKeyboardModifierMappingSrc":0x0000000c000000b3,"HIDKeyboardModifierMappingDst":0x000700000042}
      ]
     }'
Re:Stop the Apple Music app from launching on Monday June 08, 2026 @06:47PM (#48453468)
iTunes didn't go anywhere.

Just about everything I watch or listen to is served from the same iTunes Library I've had for over 20 years. It's more important to me now than it has ever been.

Re:Robert X Cringely is back to blogging on Friday May 22, 2026 @04:45PM (#48241406)
It's always fun when an old relic pops up in ye olde RSS reader. His feed would have been one of the originals I started following 25 years ago or so.
I would really love to see something like EndBASIC built around a Lisp-family language.

I've recently been playing around with some of the old Logo implementations from the 80s and I've been really charmed by just how powerful and elegant that language can be once you've wrapped your head around it. It makes BASIC look barbaric by comparison.

Re:What if the Apple ][ had run on Field-Sequential? on Sunday March 08, 2026 @03:17PM (#47300212)
Hypothetical question:

Let's say that back in 1930s when they were assigning frequencies for the broadcast television channels, they allocated enough extra bandwidth for a future color (chroma) signal, apart from the existing monochrome (luma) signal.

If the bandwidth was available, would it have been possible to include separate chroma and luma components in the broadcast signal without the two interfering with each other, thereby producing a much cleaner color image while maintaining backward compatibility with the original B&W TV sets?

I just use some old textbooks to raise the height of the display:

- Design Patterns by the Gang of Four

- Modern C++ Design by Andrei Alexandrescu

- Code Complete from the Microsoft Press

That's enough old paper to raise the display height to a comfortable level.

Re:Xcode 26.3 unlocks the power of agentic coding on Tuesday February 03, 2026 @01:50PM (#46875417)
Release notes: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/xcode-release-note...

Surprisingly, this version does not require MacOS 26 (Tahoe).

Re:Stewart Cheifet, creator of The Computer Chronicles, has died on Wednesday December 31, 2025 @03:32PM (#46447980)
Computer Chronicles and MotorWeek were fixtures of my Saturday afternoons as a young kid in the 80s. 35+ years later both shows became fascinating and priceless time capsules of the era.
Re:30 years ago today "Netscape and Sun announce JavaScript" on Thursday December 04, 2025 @10:41AM (#46148849)
That's also why Apple renamed OpenStep to Cocoa. Java was supposed to be the primary development language for Mac OS X (because Java and Cocoa go great together).
Re:A brief history of Time Machine (2024) on Monday November 10, 2025 @08:12AM (#45875627)
When you hear people complaining about Time Machine you can stop listening once they mention their NAS. Time Machine over the network has never been properly supported and is inherently unsafe.

Time Machine to a local drive connected via USB is great.

If you want to backup over the network you will have to find another solution.

Re:Microsoft BASIC for 6502 Microprocessor – Version 1.1 on Wednesday September 03, 2025 @03:45PM (#45119710)
I'm very surprised it's organized as just a single 162 kB source document instead of being divided into smaller modules to make the code easier to work with, speed up build times, etc.

Were PDP-10 text editors of the day able to easily work with such large documents? And how long would it typically take to assemble all of that code in one go?

Re:Bill Atkinson has died on Saturday June 07, 2025 @03:01PM (#44211782)
Bill Atkinson was a very fascinating guy. His interview with Leo Laporte from 2013 is a great listen.

Here's a little 6 minute clip: An acid trip, and the origins of Hypercard.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdJKjBHCh18

Re:The Coleco Adam Computer on Friday June 06, 2025 @01:54PM (#44203357)
Sorry, but none of this correct.

While it's true that early production machines had reliability problems, the same was also true for the C64. The machine we got for xmas 1983 was as solid as a tank.

The tapes were extremely robust and resistant to abuse, much more so than floppy disks. I tried to fry tapes, and couldn't.

For games, the tape drives were surprisingly effective. Sequential data transfer rates are faster than the C64 disk drive, and unlike the C64 they operate independently from the main CPU, with DMA access to the full 64 kB address space.

This means that many games were up and running in seconds and could load upcoming levels in the background while you were playing the game.

(The tape drives were much less effective for random-access, file-based storage, as the seek times were obviously atrocious compared to a disk drive.)

First-party software was also very high quality.

The problem was the business plan. Coleco made the same mistake as Atari and Texas Instruments, in that the business plan was modelled after the game console business. The tapes were expensive and proprietary when they didn't need to be, and the 3rd-party software ecosystem was completely locked down. Technical info was unavailable for hobbyists and independent developers.

By the time the Adam is released, the C64 and Apple IIe are already entrenched in the home markets with exponentially expanding library of independent software. The Adam's locked-down ecosystem couldn't complete.

It only took one year for hobbyists to completely reverse engineer the Adam, at which point some interesting independent software starts to appear. But by that time the business was already dead.

Re:Redesigned Swift.org is now live on Wednesday June 04, 2025 @04:37PM (#44185220)
If that kind of complexity frightens you then you probably want to stay away from C++ entirely.
Re:Yes, the Apple II MouseCard IRQ Is Synced to the VBL on Thursday May 08, 2025 @01:14PM (#43928508)
It's not odd at all for a machine that was designed in 1976/77.

However, for a machine released in 1983 (the Apple IIe) it is indeed very odd. But the IIe is an odd machine in many ways.

The Apple II platform stagnated as Apple poured all their resources into the Apple III (which has all those features and much more).

The Apple II refused to die, so Apple assigned a pair of engineers to design a cost-reduced version of the Apple II, and this became the IIe. The goal was only to minimize manufacturing costs, so the new features like timers were off the table.

The IIe became an unexpected smash hit in the home and education markets (stealing those markets from the 128k Mac), and only then did Apple devote some new resources to the platform (and reposition the 128k Mac as a laughably underpowered productivity machine).

The Apple IIc (1984) was the first Apple II to get a proper modern makeover. Of course it was a flop, while the odd-ball IIe continued to fly off the shelves.

Re:Glider for Apple II on Thursday March 27, 2025 @12:57PM (#43495537)
This game achieves its smoothness by synchronizing to the video refresh. That's not a particularly challenging thing to do, but it wasn't a viable option for commercial games back in the day due to uncertainty of how to do it properly across the different Apple II models.

Apple added VBL polling with the IIe in 1983, and then broke it a year later with the IIc. And an unfortunate typo in the IIc technical reference manual meant that developers couldn't figure out how to do it properly.

The only official, cross-platform way to do it was through the mouse firmware, but most users didn't have the mouse hardware installed.

This game uses the mouse firmware, if available (II+ w/ mouse card, IIc, IIgs), to generate VBL interrupts. On the IIe without a mouse card, it polls for VBL.

By the way, if you're running this game on the Virtual ][ emulator for MacOS, be sure to disable the mouse card. Its emulated mouse card only generates VBL interrupts at 30 Hz, so the game runs at half speed.

Re:I Ditched the Algorithm for RSS–and You Should Too on Thursday January 16, 2025 @12:12PM (#42728009)
I never left RSS.

After Google Reader shut down paid for Feedly for a while before switching to self-hosted FreshRSS. (https://freshrss.org)

I'm not a web guy and I detest all forms of system administration, but I had no trouble setting it up on my host. I've got it configured to update its feeds one per hour from 6AM to 8PM. It just does its thing, and works fine on both desktop and mobile.

Re:Performance (On an HP48GX Graphing Calculator) on Wednesday January 01, 2025 @04:19PM (#42569397)
Flashback to lurking around comp.sys.hp48 looking for downloads.

https://groups.google.com/g/comp.sys.hp48/c/BS7c8hRAau0/m/P5...

Re:Apple Photos phones home on iOS 18 and macOS 15 on Saturday December 28, 2024 @02:58PM (#42534040)
It does not send your photos to be indexed on Apple servers.
Re:Microsoft Confirms Password Deletion for 1B Users on Tuesday December 17, 2024 @11:46AM (#42442873)
It sounds like you're arguing against passkeys, two-factor authentication, and password managers.

Do you use single, easy-to-remember plain-text passwords for all of your accounts and services? If not, you need to understand what the recovery process is when your passkey/2FA/pw-manager is unavailable or lost.

Re:M4 Mac mini's efficiency on Tuesday November 12, 2024 @05:44PM (#42120617)
I wish the same could be said of the Studio Display, which is quite power hungry. If the Mac is running then the display is using minimum 10 Watts of continuous power usage at all times, fan running, with the screen off.

I guess it takes 10 Watts to maintain the Thunderbolt controller, USB hub, A13 processor, and run the fan.

Power usage does drop to <1 Watt when the Mac is actually sleeping, unless anything is plugged into the USB hub. Even an empty iPhone cable will cause the display to draw 5 Watts. It's disappointing.

It's just a bug.

The system save panel (NSSavePanel) is only supposed to infer the file extension when it has been given a list of supported file types/extensions. If the user does not specify a file extension, NSSavePanel will use the first extension in the supported list. If the user specifies an unsupported extension, they see an error message.

Text editors like VSCode and Sublime Text would configure NSSavePanel to allow any file type/extension, which means it's supposed to just accept whatever the user types.

Re:Emulating the Early Macintosh Floppy Drive on Sunday August 25, 2024 @03:03PM (#41350206)
It's all just an evolution of their existing disk drive technology that started well before the last-minute decision to go with the Sony 3.5" drive.

The variable drive speed comes of the development of the "Twiggy" drive, which was an 850 kB 5.25 disk format originally intended for the Apple III in 1980 but never worked reliably.

BTW, the Atari ST uses the same floppy disk format as the IBM PC, 360 kB per side.

The Amiga uses a variable drive speed like the Mac, but they eke out extra capacity by eliminating sectors. This allows an extra 512 bytes per track, but the trade off is that the disk controller can only read or write an entire track at a time, rather than individual sectors.

An infamous Apple II copy protection scheme used the same trick to expand 5.25 disk capacity from 16 sectors to 18 sectors (512 bytes per track).

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