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…
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…
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…
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…
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
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…