It’s fun for Apple’s detractors to hammer away on Apple for a litany of perceived issues, the great majority of which are not real issues to be concerned with. We all know that Apple Intelligence is a work in progress (a polite way of saying a mess), and is labeled as BETA in System Settings. All “AI” is a work in progress, no exceptions. Since Apple is building on top of that, is it any wonder that Apple Intelligence is having problems? Apple Intelligence’s problems don’t detract from the overall usefulness of Apple’s products and services. Trust me, if Apple had decided to reactivate my Apple Intelligence on all of my devices I’d be here screaming like a banshee at Apple’s evil and nefarious ways.

I’m surprisingly happy and productive with Apple’s latest, warts and all.

Monday, 16 September, Apple unleashed software updates for iOS, ipadOS, macOS, and watchOS, just to name the four I got. In particular I was interested in macOS 15 Sequoia for my two Apple Silicon MacBook Pros, one of which you see in the fastfetch output at the lead of the post. It is the Apple Silicon MacBook Pros that will have Apple Intelligence features when those features are finally released.

I was pleasantly surprised that my aging iPhone 11 Pro Max was allowed to upgrade to iOS 18. Unfortunately my even more ancient 12.9″ iPad Pro was only allowed to update to ipadOS 17.6, which contained just bug fixes. Bug fixes I don’t mind, as the iPad is still just fine for my needs. My Apple Watch Series 7 updated to watchOS 11, which I find rather remarkable considering how old it is compared to Series 8, Series 9, and the latest Series 10. I’m quite certain that my iPhone will not get any new major iOS versions beyond this year’s iOS 18.

But back to my MacBook Pros. As it turns out, my oldest MacBook Pro, the 16″ Intel i9 Beast, also updated to macOS 15, this version for the Intel architecture. Again, I don’t know how much longer this will go on, but considering how bulked out it is I don’t intent to give it up anytime soon. If nothing else my Parallels Desktop license is bonded to this machine, and I continue to use it for Windows virtualization for those customers who need Windows 11 development.

Which leaves my two Apple Silicon M1 MacBook Pros, the 13″ regular M1 and the 16″ M1 Max. The 16″ M1 Max is meant to eventually replace the 16″ Intel system. When I purchased the M1 Max system it had been discounted so heavily at the time that it cost about 1/3 what was paid for the 16″ Intel system.

Interesting Features

Window Tiling

One interesting feature I’ve been trying out is window tiling. I use window tiling quite a bit on my Linux Mint system, which has had that feature for some number of years. And window tiling isn’t just limited to Linux Mint if you’re curious; there are a lot of Linux distributions that support it.

The example above is a screen capture from my 16″ MBP with three applications tiled on the desktop. You’ll note how crowded it can get. I should note that there are any number of tiling combinations, from side-by-side to one-above-another, or four in each corner, or a combination of those basic placements. In my example I have the right corners filled and the left side filled. My biggest complaint are the gaps between each window; Linux Mint has the window edges tightly abutted with no wasted space.

You can eliminate those gaps by going full screen with two of the applications, such as you see above side-by-side. You will note that macOS 15 has a slider bar between the two tiled windows, allowing you to tweak the devision of space between the two. Reminds me an awful lot of how iPadOS handles multitasking.

I have mixed feelings about how window tiling is implemented on this latest release of macOS. Perhaps over time the Apple coding meisters will clean it up, but I’m not holding my breath on that.

iPhone Mirroring

iPhone mirroring is now a feature of macOS. I can’t say this definitively, but I believe this will only work if you have an iPhone running iOS 18. The reason I can’t say definitively is because by the time I tried this feature my iPhone was already updated to iOS 18. And I have tried it with both my Intel MBP running Sequoia and my Apple Silicon MBPs, and it works with everything running Sequoia.

I like iPhone mirroring because I can control my iPhone from my desktop, and if I’m writing about some feature on my iPhone and I need to grab a screen capture then I can do it from my MacBook without littering my iPhone’s photo folder with junk images. Before sharing came along, I’d take a screen capture and then use AirDrop to move it from my iPhone to my MacBook before I could use it. And I had to be careful to make sure it wasn’t HEIC format, as WordPress won’t accept any HEIC images as media to be used in their blog. Instead I had to go into my iPhone and have my images saved as JPEGs.

It’s a long and somewhat convoluted process to set up iPhone mirroring, with multiple requests with passwords, but once set up you can click on the iPhone Mirroring application and there it is. If you’re wondering why my iPhone icons are big without text, that’s a new feature of iOS 18.

Basically, if you hold down on any bare spot of the iPhone screen to get the wiggling icons, an Edit selection will appear on the upper left corner of the screen. Tap that and you’re presented with the ability to select the icon size (Small vs Large) as well as limited coloration changes. Its the Small size that gives you the text underneath each icon, which I refer to as the classic look. It’s the Large size that makes the icons fill up and remove the text underneath each icon. I prefer large because the icons are easier to see, and the desktop looks less cluttered. A bonus is the larger icons are easer to recognize. What took Apple so long to give us this capability?

In general I can manipulate my iPhone through mirroring without issue. If you’re wondering how you get back to the main screen, if you look at the top right corner of the iPhone mirror window, you’ll see a 3×3 array of square dots. Click that to close the iPhone app or operation and get back to your main screen. You can swipe with the mouse to move between screens (or whatever app you have open that uses the swipe gesture).

I will make the following recommendation: You’ll come to a dialog that asks if you want your Mac to ask every time to log in when you start up mirroring, or to authenticate automatically. I strongly recommend authenticate automatically, unless you’re that paranoid. Either authentication only applies to the Mac you’re setting this up on, not every Mac in the universe. You should only do this on a Mac you control, not a Mac that the rest of the world has access to.

There will be other discoveries in the coming weeks, which may trigger new posts and the possible airing of grievances.

So the Arc Browser folks dropped another update, and I paid attention to the big changes this time. And I’m not all that enthused to read about them.

First up is the announcement that the Arc team is dropping support for versins of macOS older than version 13. This includes two of my Macs. What’s interesting is that every other browser out there is still supporting those older versions of macOS. I need that support in order to be able to safely browse the web.

Second is the comment about better support for crypto wallet extensions. I have absolutely no use for crypto currencies. Your browser many not support it directly but providing support for extensions is just as bad in my book, and is indicative of the type of customer you’re going after. And I’m not in your target demographic.

Third, but by no means least, is the bold announcement you’re using ChatGPT 4o for your search engine. I’ve come to despise what is supposedly AI, or LLM (large language models) based AI, because it’s not AI but a very sophisticated pattern matching system. To quote from Infoworld:

The problem, however, is that LLMs don’t actually learn anything. They can’t reason. They’re great at pattern matching but not at extrapolating from past training data to future problems, as a recent IEEE study found. Software development has been one of the brightest spots for genAI tools, but perhaps not quite to the extent we’ve hoped. For example, GPT-3.5 lacked training data after 2021. As such, it struggled with easy coding problems on LeetCode that required information that came out after 2021. The study found that its success rate for easy problems plummeted from 89% to 52% and its ability to create code for hard coding problems tanked from 40% to 0.66%.

According to Michelle Hampson, the finding shows that ChatGPT “lacks the critical thinking skills of a human and can only address problems it has previously encountered.” Tim Klapdor less graciously states, “ChatGPT didn’t learn the topic, it did no research, it did no validation, and it contributed no novel thoughts, ideas, or concepts. ChatGPT just colonized all of that data … and now it can copy/paste that information to you in a timely manner because it’s spending $US700K a day on compute.”

Arc is no longer welcome on any computers I control. I have too many other excellent choices.

Links

AI’s moment of disillusionment — https://www.infoworld.com/article/2514409/ais-moment-of-disillusionment.html

I’ve had to create a Red Hat 9.4 virtual machine on my M1 Max MacBook using UTM ( https://mac.getutm.app ). Because this is an ARM architecture machine, I used UTM because it would use Apple Silicon’s native virtualization support, and I installed the aarch64 version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.4 so that it would be truly virtualized, not emulated.

So far the virtualization works flawlessly. Unfortunately for me and my work, the reason for installing it, to provide a RHEL environment for some work I’m doing, is a failure because the software I need to run under RHEL is only available for x86-64, not aarch64. Not everyone is rushing to embrace the future, especially with regards to processor architectures. It now appears that far too many vendors are refusing to support ARM systems, which is a sad state of affairs considering everyone is trying to install as much ARM-based silicon in their clouds; consider for example that AWS released Graviton 4, a 96 core beast that consumes far less power than Intel or AMD for the same workloads.

Anyway, this modest post documents how to set up UTM to install and then run aarch64 RHEL 9.4  on Apple Silicon M1 Max and a MacBook Pro. I’m going to leave the acquisition and installation of UTM as an exercise to the reader. It is open source, so you can either download a free copy from UTM’s website, or else use the App Store to purchase a permanent copy for $9.99. Using the App Store helps the UTM developers to help keep the lights on, and provides you, the user, a way to get automatic updates through the App Store.

After acquiring and installing UTM, you also need to get a copy of Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux to install. You can also do that for free by registering as a developer. You can download and install up to six copies for personal use. I’ve installed three so far, one under UTM and the other two using Parallels on another MacBook Pro running with an Intel i9. I wrote about that machine earlier, and called it the Beast.

With all the bits in place, it’s time to configure UTM and get RHEL installed on it. Again, installing the RHEL ISO isn’t that difficult, but the configuration can be somewhat perplexing. These settings work fine for me, and might work fine for you. But at least they’re a starting point.

I enabled everything on the virtualization tab except Rosetta on Linux. Remember this RHEL is aarch64. I have no idea how RHEL under x86_64 emulation might operate, and I don’t ever intend to find out. Also note that keyboard and pointer support are Mac keyboard and trackpad. The defaults are generic, and they don’t quite work as well.

I had absolutely no idea where to start with the display, so I had to play around with this for awhile before I found the value shown above. I can now shut down the VM window, and when I start it back up it will be at the correct size and resolution. Getting to this point was aggravating.

Finally we come to the networking. I found these settings on a forum posting, and discovered they work well for my setup. For one thing network traffic between my native MacBook Pro and the RHEL VM stay on my machine.

One nice note: power consumption at idle, especially inside the RHEL VM, is at an absolute minimum.

I’m still amazed at the power of Apple Silicon. With UTM installed I will probably start looking at other versions of Linux compiled natively for aarch64 under UTM.

I’ll let you look at the output of fastfetch to see what features it shipped to  my house with. This MacBook Pro is the last Intel MBP that Apple produced before the introduction of Apple Silicon. It was purchased on my behalf in 2020 in support of a consulting gig to a project I was hired to support. When it arrived I performed some cursory performance tests with tools I could run on both my older 2015 MBP and this one. I couldn’t believe how much more powerful the Beast was, but then at the price that was paid to secure the Beast, it should have run rings around my older MBP. After transferring everything I needed from the older 2015 MBP I turned it off and put it into its special protective bag. The 2015 MBP is considered “legacy” by Apple and doesn’t get macOS updates anymore.

Unfortunately for the Beast it had been sitting (turned off) since mid-2023. The contract that required its purchase ended in early 2022, and the Beast’s usage began to slowly ramp down until one day I turned it off and closed the lid. I’d power the Beast back up about once/month to install OS and application updates, and to make sure the battery was recharged and topped out.

Now, however, I have a need for the Beast as a host for Red Hat Enterprise Linux virtual machines. I have a paid-for license to Parallels Desktop Pro, so I downloaded a RHEL 9.4 ISO and spun up a pair of RHEL 9.4 VMs. So far everything installed and is working just fine, as I would expect. Which leads me to what I wanted to write about…

I live in the console. Going back to the earliest of commercial computers (DEC VAX, DEC Ultrix on MicroVAX, IBM 370) and the earliest personal computers (Apple II, Pet, C64, DEC Rainbow, IBM PC) I always was at some command prompt. When GUIs began to show up (X Windows, Windows 2) I always had at least one terminal open on the desktop. That’s what I’m comfortable with and what I will be using until the day I no longer have the presence of mind to operate a computer.

Which leads to the problem I had with using iTerm on the Beast. At this point in time I always try to install Power Line, or an equivalent, on every system that supports a shell in a terminal, which is every Unix-like system I currently have access to. On the Mac I use Apple’s supplied z shell (zsh). Within the iTerm I use the Hack font because it supplies the necessary special glyphs that work with the Power Shell feature. And it worked just find on my Apple Silicon systems, but strangely enough, not the Beast.

I dug in a little bit and discovered the following feature squirreled away in the iTerm configuration.

Note the section titled ‘Non-ASCII Font’ at the bottom of the Text dialog. On my other systems this is not even available because the checkbox titled ‘Use a different font for non-ASCII text’ isn’t checked. But on the Beast it is. When I saw this the first time non-ASCII text was set to sans serif mono, not Hack Nerd Font Mono in the screen capture. That caused the iTerm console to show glyphs that were not full-sized.

Only when i unchecked ‘Use a different font for non-ASCII text’ did the Power Line shell prompt properly display the glyphs, both ASCII and non-ASCII. And having proper non-ASCII rendering is very important, as you’ll see below.

I have also been switching to Neovim ( https://neovim.io ) because I can’t install a version of vim with Python support. Vim needs Python support in order to have Power Line support at the bottom of the editing area. I tried to install it via Homebrew, only to be told that Homebrew considers my Intel-based Beast unsupported, and when I tried to pull the Vim source tarball and build a copy myself, the Vim build failed to use either the Homebrew Python 3.12.4 installed on this machine or Apple’s much older 3.9 default offering. I’m already using nvim on my other machines, so I went on ahead and pulled the Neovim version built for use on Intel Macs and dropped the binary into my local tools directory, in my home folder. I then installed AstroNvim ( https://astronvim.com ) to configure Neovim AstroNvim’s choices are quite good enough for me; I’ve not made any changes so far.

Note the use of glyphs in Neovim to indicate visually the type of file it is (i.e. PowerShell, bash, folder, etc). This comes from having the Hack Nerd fonts used in my iTerm. Working with Neovim is a pleasure. Why use Neovim when I have other more powerful coding tools such as Visual Studio Code? Because I can edit within the same shell I’m working in, and because a lot of times all I want to do is just code.

The Beast is now back in business and some of its rough edges smoothed down.

It’s been the gist of many posts how neofetch is no longer supported, and it’s been years since the last release. And that lack of support for neofetch is beginning to show when certain features don’t work the way they used to. So I went asking the Great Internet Oracle what was a suitable replacement for neofetch, and their were a lot of votes for fastfetch. I pulled the installation packages for Linux Mint and Ubuntu on RPi 5 and installed on both. It works just fine.

Fastfetch appears to be available for many operating systems, especially Linux. There is no release package for macOS on the fastfetch GitHub repo, so I downloaded the source from the repo and built it on my MacBook Pro. It built without error and runs just fine.

If you have Homebrew installed on macOS, you can install fastfetch within Homebrew, and it will be the current release. I built my copy because it’s absolutely easy enough to do.

If you do decide to build fastfetch on macOS, then you’ll need CMake. I installed CMake on my Mac via Homebrew.

Links

fastfetch — https://github.com/fastfetch-cli/fastfetch

Homebrew — The Missing Package Manager for macOS (or Linux) — https://brew.sh

I had a reader of my blog leave me a comment on my post about Arc’s split view that noted Vivaldi has equivalent functionality referred to as tab tiling. It’s a bit more involved than than Arc’s, which I will illustrate.

The steps I took to prepare two tabs for tiling where:

• Pressing the command key and only the command key, select two tabs to be tiled with the mouse. Each tab will have a dashed box drawn around it when selected. Note that this is a bit different than what you will read on the Vivaldi documentation website.
• Right click on either selected tab to pull up a dialog, and click on ‘Tile 2 Tabs’.

There’s a secret to having the two tabs tiled in the order you want. In my case I wanted the WordPress editor on the left and the other tab on the right. The order of the tiling is dependent on the order of the tabs. Thus, the WordPress tab should be above any other tab you want on the right. The example above doesn’t show that, unfortunately; it’s in reverse order.

After having tried this out I find Arc split view superior because;

• It’s drag and drop, and
• It doesn’t matter what order the tabs are in.

The Vivaldi method is too finicky for my tastes. However, if you’re a big Vivaldi fan, then you’ll quickly pick up the process and not really care. Nevertheless it would be nice of the Vivaldi devs would implement tab tiling as drag-and-drop and tab order agnostic. If the Vivaldi developers didn’t implement drag-and-drop, it would be more intuitive if the order the tabs are command key clicked is the order they would be tiled, from left to right.

Links

one way arc’s split view helps me write blog posts

Yesterday’s caturday post was written with the help of my favorite Arc feature, split view. This time it helped me rapidly write the post by helping me select photos I have on Flickr to then insert them into the post. First, a little back story about how I write a post in WordPress.

In ancient days gone by (late 1990s) I learned to write HTML using vi under Unix. The web server I chose to use was the very first Apache web server releases, and I had to pull sources and compile it myself because I was using Silicon Graphics Inc (SGI) computers that used Mips processors and SGI’s Ultrix, their version of Unix. I rocked along with that until one day I created a web account on GeoCities, at which point I graduated to HomePage (I think) on Microsoft Windows (95/98/Me; it’s all a bit fuzzy these days). HomePage was the “killer app” for me on Windows, and GeoCities was the place to be. All things must pass, which included my need for Windows, HomePage, my GeoCities site, and even GeoCities itself. But that easy comfort with working directly with HTML never left me.

When I started my first blog on Blogspot (right before it was purchased by Google), my ability to work directly with HTML (and later CSS and JavaScript) helped me to tweak my Blogspot blog. That lasted a good decade until I grew tired of wrangling with Blogspot, and it too faded. Then in 2013 I decided to create a second blog, this blog, using WordPress. I was especially drawn to what WordPress now calls the classic editor because I could lay down HTML within the body of a post to my hearts content.

Over the years my desire to work in HTML is now very specific. I keep a lot of my photos on Flickr, and use Flickr’s ability to dynamically generate an URL for any Flickr photo, an URL that I can copy and then paste into the post I’m writing. Here are the steps I take.

1. Open my WordPress dashboard and start a new post using the classic editor.
2. Open my Flickr account and navigate to my Photostream.
3. Drop my Flickr account next to my WordPress editor to create a split view.
4. Click on any photo in my Flickr account I might want to include in my post.
5. In the lower right corner click onFlickr’s Share Photo icon, the right turning arrow.
6. In the resultant Flickr dialog, select Embed, make sure to select a display size in the dropdown, click on the generated URL code, then copy it.
7. Back over on the WordPress post, go into Text mode, set the cursor where you want the photo to go, and then past what you just copied. While you’re in Text mode edit the URL you just pasted to remove any unwanted HTML. For me unwanted HTML is the script tag at the very end that embeds useless Javascript back to Flickr.
8. Go back into Visual mode, left click to get the mini control panel at the top of the photo, and then center the photo.
9. Click into the post away from the photo and add any text beneath in the body of the blog post.

Later, rinse, repeat.

It sounds complicated, but in practice it isn’t. In the past I would have had two open tabs to do this, swapping back and forth between the two as needed. Arc’s split view, when used like this in writing posts, is easier and thus faster and has the added benefit of helping me stay more focused.

Another Arc browser feature I stumbled into is split view, in which two different views of two different pages (or different views into the same page, see the next post) are presented. The way it appears to work so far is to grab a tab in the sidebar and then drag it into the main browser view. It will then split the view of the tab just above the tab you just grabbed. You can move that tab around in such a way that it either lands on the left or else on the right. Once released you get a view very similar to what is shown above.

Once split you can adjust the vertical split bar, grabbing it and moving it left or right. Most web pages will adjust the content accordingly, but not all. For example the Ars Technica page will readjust so much as you move the bar to the right, at which point the page basically just runs off the edge and the content is chopped on the right edge. As they say you mileage may vary. I prefer to let it stay at 50%.

In just a short 48 hours the Arc browser has gone from an interesting curiosity to a truly useful tool.

The Browser Company ( https://thebrowser.company/ ) released a browser which they named Arc. I’d been aware of the browser since reading about it last year, when they offered to allow limited beta testing. I’d gone and registered to become an Arc beta tester (very similar to Bluesky). Because it took them so long to get back to me, I’d forgotten I’d even applied. When I went an read about the conditions of becoming a beta tester I decided to wait until Arc was fully released, then try it then. This past week I installed it from the macOS App Store. I still had to create an account using an email account, so I created an Arc account using my trash email over on Yahoo. That way, if The Browser Company gets hacked and my personally identifying information gets out yet again on the dark web, well, they’ve got my Yahoo email which I very seldomly check and don’t ever take it seriously. But I digress…

Conclusion

The Arc Browser is fast, at least as fast as any other browser on macOS. I couldn’t tell you which one is fastest if my life depended on it. The Arc Browser is definitely different on first start than any other browser I’ve experienced since my first exposure to Netscape’s Navigator back in the mid-1990s. A lot has certainly changed since those very early days, especially when looking at the Arc Browser.

So much is different in the Arc Browser that I was hit with a “who moved my cheese” moment trying to get started using it. But it didn’t take long to begin to use it, and after about a half hour of trying things out I decided to give the Arch Browser a “whirl” by writing this entry about it.

How much better is the Arc Browser than the others I’ve used? It definitely clears the vary low bar of being better than Apple’s Safari browser. It’s better than Google Chrome and Firefox. It’s on par with Vivaldi. And this is just on macOS. On Linux Mint it’s Firefox hands down. So your mileage may vary depending on needs and operating system.

My only concern is having my PPI with The Browser Company, along with whatever information my copy of the Arc Browser has (might?) shipped up to The Browser Company. Because of that concern I’m not logging into critical web sites such as my bank using the Arc Browser until I get closure on what is moved off my computers and where it’s kept.

I have a simple rule I try to follow: for every new app I install on my Mac, I look to remove one that is equivalent and/or I don’t use anymore. In this case I’m removing the WordPress stand-along blog editor. The Arc Browser does as good a job using the web-based editor, and is of course a full-blown browser in its own right.

Details

First and foremost the Arc Browser is a very clean, minimal design. This is quite unlike Vivaldi, which is working to include everything including the kitchen sink on its top page.

As an example of Arc Browser’s minimalism, I discovered that if I grabbed the movement edge between the left sidebar and the rest of the browser window, and moved it over to the far left edge of the window, that the sidebar would disappear. The first time it happened I panicked a bit because I hate when a feature unknown to me suddenly activates, making application control features disappear in the process. I then moved the mouse over the far left window edge and discovered that the left sidebar slid back over the left side. I then noticed in the upper left corner an icon that if you clicked it would lock the sidebar open and back into place. A mystery solved and a feature discovered.

I must admit that with everything off the window except the tab holding the web page itself (the WordPress editor in this case) that it makes the very clean layout easy to focus on the task. As long as I can get to the most important features of the browser, I’m happy.

This is how I have my copy of Vivaldi set up, with everything I can minimize, minimized. The tabs are on the far left, and rather than completely invisible they are as narrow as possible. I can click on any of the tab favicons to open up that tab. There’s a second panel on the very far left, beyond the tab panel, that can be opened or closed with the icon at the upper left. I’m now comfortable with this layout, as it makes the most effective use of screen space.

I’m not going to get into an argument as to which is superior, but I do intend to use Arc as my WordPress editor over Vivaldi, and similar word smithing tasks in the future.

If you’re the proud owner of a recent MacBook Pro and you have an iPhone with the latest iOS installed, then you’ll be familiar with a prompt on your MacBook screen asking if you want your iPhone to act as a webcam for your MacBook. I do not want that “feature.”

You’d think you could find and put a stop to that continual aggravation in your macOS Settings, but you’d be wrong. Instead it’s on your iPhone, a new feature Apple snuck into an iOS update while you weren’t looking.

If you’re tired of having to bat that damn macOS dialog away every time it appears, then go into your iPhone’s Settings, select General, then select Airplay & Handoff. Third toggle down is Continuity Camera. Mine was enabled be default. Opt out of that crap by sliding it to off.

Note the bottom toggle; the latest iOS allows you to share Apple’s $3,500 Vision Pro content on your iPhone. I can’t wait.

Once upon a time, say back around 2016 or so, I purchased a monstrous (for the time) 6 TiB drive called the Seagate Backup Plus Hub Drive. I don’t recall how much I spent, but I’m pretty sure I purchased it from my local Costco, a brand they sold for many years until recently. I’m sure it was on sale at the time, being the cheap person I am. I used it for a few years, at least up until 2019, when I stopped using it and put it away in one of my cabinets. I can’t recall why I stopped using it, but it sat unused for about the next five years until today.

In the last post I wrote about backing up my iPhone 11. That’s all well and good, but until today I didn’t have a backup drive for this newest MacBook Pro. I’d tried to purchase another 5 TiB Seagate Backup Plus Portable from Costco, but the warehouse no longer carries them. When they did I could purchase them for $99, which isn’t bad at all. I have four of them already, for each of my various Macs. Looking online at both Amazon and Walmart, I can purchase a new one for about $160. When I saw the cost of those my memory was jogged a bit and I went and pulled out this now-old Seagate Backup.

The first thing I did was plug it into my MacBook, and sure enough it mounted and I was able to at least read the drive contents. The drive had come preformated as NTFS, because at the time I was still using my 17.2″ Samsung notebook computer and that backup drive’s primary use was meant for Windows 10 Pro. I used it for that purpose a number of times, but around late 2019 I began a hard switch to Linux and, of course, macOS. That switch is the reason why I pulled the Windows 10 SSD out of the Samsung and put in a fresh blank SSD, and then installed Linux Mint on it. Except for a Parallels VM with Windows 11 installed, I don’t run Windows on any of my personal systems any more.

Once the Seagate was plugged in and mounted, I attempted to reformat the drive as APFS with case sensitivity. Long story short, that’s the file system you should format on any drive meant for any contemporary Mac. I’ve read enough older junk on the web saying Apple created this so it would run efficiently on an SSD, and that may have been true to start with, but any version of macOS that came after 2014 used this, so I might as well get with the program.

The only problem was I decided to select the option where the entire drive would be scrubbed with binary zeroes, with a total of seven passes. I chose poorly. After waiting nearly four hours, the first pass had barely started. I killed the Disk Utility process, then proceeded to reboot my Mac because the act of killing Disk Utility made working with the Seagate null and void. Once the Mac was rebooted, I restarted the Disk Utility and allowed it to sanely format the drive, which it promptly performed in less than a minute.

So now the Seagate’s attached and Time Machine has performed it’s first full backup of this Mac; about 140 GiB in about 20 minutes. That Mac backup includes my iPhone backup to the Mac, so now I’m (I hope, fingers crossed) doubly backed up.

By the way, the name of the backup drive is named BACKUP6T (for terabyte). I don’t expect anything terrible to happen with this older backup drive. You can still purchase them with capacities up to 14 TiB. I also need to read one more time what the two USB A ports are used for. According to the flashy documentation I can use those front ports to backup “your files, precious photos and videos while connecting to and recharging your tablet, smartphone or camera.” I can certainly appreciate backing up my iPhone, but since I’ve never done that kind of backup before it will be another adventure!

Links

Seagate Backup Plus Hub Drive — https://www.seagate.com/products/external-hard-drives/backup-plus-hub/

Not performing backups to computing equipment is a dangerous habit to be in. I do try to keep everything backed up because shit happens at the worst possible time, especially the moment when you absolutely need to depend upon a device. My iPhone hasn’t been backed up in years. I back up to my MacBooks, and the last time I backed my iPhone 11 up was three, maybe four years ago on the Intel i9 MacBook Pro.

That’s plain stupid to be honest. Why? The personal history my iPhone now represents. Every time I’ve purchased a new iPhone I’ve always moved everything on the older iPhone to the new device. I have photos and text messages that go back to my first iPhone 6s Plus on November 2015. Same with text messages. Notes and other files as well.

As you can see in the lock screen capture from my former iPhone 6s Plus, iOS was still using the “slide-to-unlock” widget that Apple tried unsuccessfully to sue Google for adding to Android. On top of that I miss not having that Mars image on my current unlock screen. Apple would just blow away wallpapers when major iOS updates were installed, never bothering to ask if a user wanted to keep all of that. Yet another example of Apple’s arrogance.

Anyway, my iPhone represents an unbroken nine year slice of the last nine years of my life up to today. Not all of my life to be sure, but the bits that are important to me. I really don’t want to lose it; it’s worth protecting through backups.

One final note: the total amount of storage Finder measured at the bottom added up to about 119 GiB. Yet when the backup was complete it totaled a smidge over 80 GiB. That 74.64 GiB was “Documents & Data,” meaning my stuff. The backup preserved enough all of that, plus (I’m assuming) the state of the iPhone itself, which would include a catalog of all the applications installed and those application’s stateful information. Buying that iPhone 11 with 512 GiB back in 2019 was a waste in storage as well as overall processing; unfortunately it came with the largest battery at the time and I felt I needed that feature. When I trade in and up, I intend to drop back to the 256 GiB storage tier, which is about $300 cheaper than the $512 GiB tier. I’m also not buying the Pro version either. I’ll keep my iPhone in the latest Otterbox and pocket hundreds of dollars more in savings.

I bring up Ken Thompson’s talk because today I was reminded of why he said he was leaving Apple in that talk. After starting Visual Studio Code on my brand new M1 Max MacBook Pro I attempted to check for VS Code updates and was gobsmacked with the following error dialog:

Look in the lower right corner at the dialog with the red circled ‘X’ about running on a read-only volume. There’s a link to mitigate the issue, but the the statement that “This might mean the application was put on quarantine by macOS” just royally pisses me off. This is the very first time I’ve been hit with the “quarantine application” issue on macOS, but not the first time I’ve run into a show-stopping problem on macOS that shouldn’t have happened.

I followed the link in the message, and based on the post I performed the following to get things straightened out.

sudo chown $USER Library/Caches/com.microsoft.VSCode.ShipItxattr -dr com.apple.quarantine ~/Applications/Visual\ Studio\ Code.app

My VSCode is located locally in my account folder, not under global /Applications. I’m sure that chown isn’t needed, but still it’s good to have around. Once those changes were made, I quite VSCode and restarted it via Launchpad as always, then checked again for updates, and it worked just fine (VSCode was already up to date anyway).

It’s obstacles thrown up like that that make developers like me who actually know how to get work done want to just walk away from Apple. I’m sure Apple will point to XCode, but I don’t want to develop with XCode because I do a lot of wide-ranging work well beyond Apple and macOS. It’s not as bad as Microsoft, who have basically driven me away from Windows permanently with their shenanigans with regards to Windows 11. But it’s getting close. If it gets bad enough I may indeed contemplate migrating to Asahi Linux; that’s another reason why I chose this M1 Max over a later version of Apple Silicon; Asahi Linux was originally developed on, and for, the M1.

Links

Code won’t update on macOS #7426 — https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/7426

I suddenly find I have need to do a little Java development. It’s been a long time since I dipped my fingers, as it were, into writing Java code. This was back around Java 9 (September 2017) and it was such as mess with the way Oracle had blown up Java’s libraries that I just basically walked away from Java. I still install it when I need it because I have some tools that depend upon the Java runtime.

Here I am trying to come up to speed, which at this point in my life may be impossible. I haven’t changed so much as Java has. Right now I’ve installed Java 21, what now passes for an LTS. I’ve installed the JDK and an IDE to work with it on my M1 Max MacBook Pro. Here’s what I did to get something working.

First I tried to install the JDK. I went searching for the latest LTS that would run on aarch64/arm64. When I searched on Duck Duck Go, I got nothing but hits on installing the Oracle version, which is not what I wanted. Instead I had to remember to search for Adoptium ( https://adoptium.net ). Rather than take the default offered on the landing page I chose to go to the alternate downloads page and pick it that way;

As you can see I whittled my choices down to two. I went with the .pkg because it’s a Mac, so that should be a no-brainer installation. That was a mistake. It installed alright, I just don’t know where. I came back and downloaded the tar.gz archive, unpacked it in a location in my local folder, defined JAVA_HOME to point to the location and then added it to my path. Once that was all done I could do a java --version and get the LTS version release.

I then decided to install NetBeans 20. I was a long-time NetBeans user and felt comfortable trying it again. The problem is that it would never find my installation of Java. I finally went into the app directory structure and ran, from the command line, ./netbeans --jdkhome $JAVA_HOME, at which point it finally came up. I was able to set up a decent look-and-feel and began to get comfortable with it. I even checked to see if NetBeans knew about the local Java installation, and it appeared to. However, when I closed NetBeans and tried to start it via Launchpad, it failed to start just like before. After that I removed NetBeans and installed IntelliJ IDEA 2023.3.2 (Community Edition) and immediately got to work learning how to get productive with it. I’ve used IntelliJ tools in the past for a number of years and I’ve never been disappointed. This time I chose to use the Community Edition because I didn’t need the full-blown suite, and I don’t have the funds right now to pay for a full commercial license. Maybe if this bit of work leads to something more substantial then I’ll expense it. Right now I’m just getting started.

So far the choices I’ve made appear pretty solid, and IntelliJ IDEA is a very nice environment.

Some personal history: I’ve been using Wireshark since it was called Ethereal, all the way back to the very start of the 21st century, when I was introduced to an early version I used to examine a workplace network issue. Wireshark’s strongest feature is its ability to capture everything and then decode the packets it finds. I’ve been able to solve more than one seemingly intractable problem with Wireshark after all other attempts at problem solving failed.

In the screen capture above you can observe all the various devices on my home network sending out network messages. For example, you can see one of my Espressif boards (an ESP32-S3-DevKitC-1-N8R8) sending out an address resolution protocal (ARP) message. The lower windows show a packet I selected for further examination. It’s associated with one of the Amazon devices I have running in the house, and I do have a few.

The device I’ve been searching for recently is my Ring doorbell camera. I want to find it, then associate it to a fixed IP address within my WiFi access point, then trap all communications to another node within my home so I can enable all the features it can support locally and then shut down my monthly payment to use this device. I don’t need the service Amazon provides, but more specifically, I don’t want any more surveillance video flowing out to Amazon to be used by “law enforcement.” This is the start of my drive to discover all information flowing out of my home, and to curtail as much of it as possible. I’m done being a part of surveillance capitalism.

Wireshark Installation Note

This is installed via Homebrew. If you install Wireshark, then make sure to use brew install --cask wireshark in order to pick up the GUI frontend. If you perform a brew installation without cask, then you only get the command line portion. If you try to pick up the GUI with a following cask installation, it will fail, forcing you to remove the initial wireshark installation and starting over with cask.

Links

• Wireshark Wikipedia — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireshark
• Wireshark — https://www.wireshark.org
• Surveillance capitalism — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance_capitalism
• High tech is watching you — https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2019/03/harvard-professor-says-surveillance-capitalism-is-undermining-democracy/

problems running wireshark on macos 13

Unlike many, I do not move all my macOS settings from machine to machine unless the new machine is a complete replacement for the old machine and the old machine is on its last legs. I’ve done that exactly once, from my 2015 MBP to the 2019 MBP. After that transfer I spent a fair amount of time weeding out items that did not make sense on the new machine as well as items that were a good idea at the time, but time later proved to be a bad choice.

I made the decision after that one full transfer between MBPs to carefully curate all software before installing anything on the new machine. One of the choices I tried on the older MBP was Powerline. It didn’t work, and I almost skipped it entirely on the new MBP, but I decided to install it anyway and try once more to make it work.

I’ve been using Powerline on my Linux systems for some number of years now. I like what it does and how it looks and I try to install it anywhere I have a terminal and a command line prompt. It’s a bit counter-intuitive to want to have a sophisticated command line and terminal on a computer with a graphical user interface, but I keep a terminal environment active because I have decades of CLI experience that has served me admirably (once I was properly trained on how to use it). This post documents how I finally figured it out and what I did to get it to work. And it does work, both on the command line as well as within vi/vim.

Initial Environment

This machine has the following pre-installed:

• macOS 14.2.1 Sonoma
• zsh 5.9 (x86_64-apple-darwin23.0)
• python 3.9.6

This is all you really need to get started. A lot of how-tos (all of them old to very old) insist you install Homebrew (brew), and then via the brew command install zsh. The version of zsh Apple currently uses is the latest stable release, a far cry from the ancient version of bash it used to use.

Installation

Installation needs three main pieces; iTerm2, the Nerd Hack font and the Powerline status software itself.

iTerm2 can be downloaded from here: https://iterm2.com. Once downloaded, unzip the downloaded file and start the binary. Once running, iTerm2 will pick up and use zsh and it will automagically ask you if you want to move iTerm2 into the Application folder of you Mac. Select yes when asked. From that point iTerm2 can be selected via Launchpad, and once launched, you can right click the resultant icon in the Dock and chose to have it stay in the Dock (right click | Options | Keep in Dock).

The font I installed is Hack and can be found here: https://github.com/ryanoasis/nerd-fonts/releases . Download Hack.zip and unzip it, then use Apple’s Font Book utility to install the fonts.

Not all of them will install due to issues with certain fonts, and rather than hassle with trying to resolve those issues I chose to skip them. Skipping the problematic fonts still allowed the fonts I needed to get installed, so no problems there.

Once the fonts are installed, open iTerm2’s Preferences and go to Profiles.

Select Hack NF as the Font, Regular weight. I chose to use a 15 point font size because the size of the 16″ display makes reading 15 point text in iTerm2 very easy. Even at 15 points a lot of text can still be seen in the terminal window.

With the terminal and font set up, install the Python package powerline-status using pip: pip3 install powerline-status.

Once installed execute the following command:

$ pip3 show powerline-statusName: powerline-statusVersion: 2.7Summary: The ultimate statusline/prompt utility.Home-page: https://github.com/powerline/powerlineAuthor: Kim SilkebaekkenAuthor-email: kim.silkebaekken+vim@gmail.comLicense: MITLocation: /Users/wbeebe/Library/Python/3.9/lib/python/site-packagesRequires:Required-by:

The line we’re interested in is the Location at line 9 in the listing. In this example, because I’m not running as root, the package is installed locally in my home directory, which it should be. Every home directory has a $HOME/Library directory. It’s underneath site-packages that you’ll find the site package for powerline. Here’s what we are looking for specifically:

$ ls -AlFh Library/Python/3.9/lib/python/site-packages/powerline/bindingstotal 24-rw-r--r--   1 wbeebe  staff 0B Dec 29 15:32 __init__.pydrwxr-xr-x   3 wbeebe  staff96B Dec 29 17:03 __pycache__/drwxr-xr-x   4 wbeebe  staff   128B Dec 29 15:32 awesome/drwxr-xr-x   3 wbeebe  staff96B Dec 29 15:32 bar/drwxr-xr-x   3 wbeebe  staff96B Dec 29 15:32 bash/-rw-r--r--   1 wbeebe  staff   9.8K Dec 29 15:32 config.pydrwxr-xr-x   3 wbeebe  staff96B Dec 29 15:32 fish/drwxr-xr-x   3 wbeebe  staff96B Dec 29 15:32 i3/drwxr-xr-x   6 wbeebe  staff   192B Dec 29 15:32 ipython/drwxr-xr-x   3 wbeebe  staff96B Dec 29 15:32 lemonbar/drwxr-xr-x   4 wbeebe  staff   128B Dec 29 15:32 pdb/drwxr-xr-x   4 wbeebe  staff   128B Dec 29 15:32 qtile/drwxr-xr-x   3 wbeebe  staff96B Dec 29 15:32 rc/drwxr-xr-x   3 wbeebe  staff96B Dec 29 15:32 shell/drwxr-xr-x   3 wbeebe  staff96B Dec 29 15:32 tcsh/drwxr-xr-x  11 wbeebe  staff   352B Dec 29 15:32 tmux/drwxr-xr-x   6 wbeebe  staff   192B Dec 29 17:03 vim/drwxr-xr-x   4 wbeebe  staff   128B Dec 29 15:32 wm/drwxr-xr-x   4 wbeebe  staff   128B Dec 29 15:32 zsh/

The two folders we’re interested in are line 19 (vim) and line 21 (zsh). Since we’re interested in zsh, let’s concentrate on that for the moment.

Underneath the zsh folder is one file we need:

ls -AlFh Library/Python/3.9/lib/python/site-packages/powerline/bindings/zshtotal 32-rw-r--r--  1 wbeebe  staff   5.4K Dec 29 15:32 __init__.py-rw-r--r--  1 wbeebe  staff   6.5K Dec 29 15:32 powerline.zsh

The file powerline.zsh is sourced inside the .zshrc file. But before we add this to our .zshrc file, we need to make one more change for the powerline script to execute. At the same level as the lib (library) folder is a bin (binary) folder. Here’s what that folder holds:

$ ls -AlFh Library/Python/3.9/bintotal 160-rwxr-xr-x  1 wbeebe  staff   263B Dec 29 15:32 pip*-rwxr-xr-x  1 wbeebe  staff   263B Dec 29 15:32 pip3*-rwxr-xr-x  1 wbeebe  staff   263B Dec 29 15:32 pip3.11*-rwxr-xr-x  1 wbeebe  staff   263B Dec 29 15:32 pip3.9*-rwxr-xr-x  1 wbeebe  staff34K Dec 29 15:32 powerline*-rwxr-xr-x  1 wbeebe  staff   624B Dec 29 15:32 powerline-config*-rwxr-xr-x  1 wbeebe  staff13K Dec 29 15:32 powerline-daemon*-rwxr-xr-x  1 wbeebe  staff   385B Dec 29 15:32 powerline-lint*-rwxr-xr-x  1 wbeebe  staff   928B Dec 29 15:32 powerline-render*

You need all the highlighted files for Powerline to work properly. For that, you’ll need to add the path to bin to your full path in .zshrc, for example;

export PATH=$PATH:$HOME/Library/Python/3.9/bin

before you add the following line to .zshrc;

source $HOME/Library/Python/3.9/lib/python/site-packages/powerline/bindings/zsh/powerline.zsh

Once all of that is completed then you should at least get the colorful powerline prompt as seen in the screen capture at the top of this post.

vi/vim Setup

First the bad news. The version of vi/vim supplied by Apple wasn’t built to support Python scripting, and you need that support for this to work. The good news is you can get a version that works, but you’ll have to install Homebrew and then use Homebrew to install that version of Python. First, go to the Brew site ( https://brew.sh ) and follow their directions to install it. Once installed you can install the “proper” vi/vim that will support Python scripting. Please note that you’ll need to add the location where Homebrew installs binaries (/opt/homebrew/bin) to your path in order to execute them. And this should be at the start of path, not the end, otherwise you’ll keep executing Apple’s version instead of the version installed by Homebrew.

For vi/vim, you need to add the following to your .vimrc configuration file;

set rtp+=$HOME/Library/Python/3.9/lib/python/site-packages/powerline/bindings/vimset laststatus=2set t_Co=256

Once that’s in your vi configuration file, the status line should look like the following:

There’s a lot more going on inside my vi config file, but the last three lines enable the bottom status line, and that’s what’s important here.

This makes the second Apple Silicon computer I’ve purchased. The first was the 13″ MBP with the basic M1 in December 2021. In both cases each computer was heavily discounted, especially the newest by nearly half its original MSRP. The question is why not get an M2, or possibly an M3 based MBP?

One word: expense. This latest MBP is more than a match for everything I want and need to do, and it’s a computer that I can afford to pay off over time, which is what I have to do. I’ve learned to buy my computers the way I buy camera equipment, which is to wait for it to fall pretty far down the trailing edge before purchasing a heavily discounted copy for myself. I now have a 16″ MBP that is, on average, eight times faster than the Intel i9 2019 MBP that was purchased for me back in early 2020. In spite of all the extra cores in the Intel chip, and the fact it has 64 GiB compared to 32 GiB in this latest machine, I can assure you it runs rings around the 2019 MBP and consumes a fraction of the power doing it. Considering how power and heat are going to play a key part in the unrolling climate disaster, those are critical features to consider.

What was funny to me was powering up the M1 Max MBP for the first time. It still had Monterey (12.5) installed. I had to pull down a 10 GB (!) installation binary to bring the computer up to macOS Sonoma (14.2.1).

I’d forgotten the skeuomorphism still prevalent in macOS. It was sort of like stepping back in time, well, two years to late 2021.

And then I rebooted and realized that perhaps it the skeuomorphism wasn’t as bad as I thought it was. And then I went to work, moved the dock to the left edge, and trimmed out quite a few apps from the doc. That’s when I realized how much I’d modified it from stock, and how many of the Apple applications I’d forgotten about due to lack of use.

The first application I installed after initial setup was the Vivaldi browser. The second thing I did after that was to change the default Vivaldi search engine from Bing to Duck Duck Go. Now that Microsoft is mixing ChatGPT into Bing and Bing’s query results, I find I neither like nor trust what Bing returns. I then installed iTerm2, setting up that environment, and then installing Brew to pick up the few command-line tools I’d rather not have to live without.

So far, so good. I love the mechanical construction of this MacBook Pro; it’s thicker, as thick as my old 2015 Intel MacBook Pro, and far more robust and thicker than either the Intel i9 MacBook Pro or the little 13″ MacBook Pro. I credit that to the fact that Jony Ive isn’t driving design at Apple anymore, and to that, I say good riddance to the entire style-over-practicality design ethos. This machine has re-introduced MagSafe power connector, as well as an HDMI port and a port for SDHC/SDXC cards directly on the chassis. It also has three USB-C connectors for just about anything else I need. The key here is I don’t need a mass of dongles anymore. I still need one adapter from USB-A to USB-C, but that’s it.

This MacBook might be two years old, but at today’s purchase price it is the best budget solution by far. I contrast the 2019 MBP with this 2021 MBP, and note that the 2019 was three times the cost of this one, and roughly 1/8 the performance level of the 2021 MBP.

Unless some wild event occurs in my life, this will be the last computer of its type I’ll ever purchase. I turned 70 in December and I can’t imagine needing anything more as I approach my 80s, assuming life and circumstances allow me to live that long. So far, I’m amazed and pleased as punch with this MacBook Pro and the Apple Silicon M1 Max.

This example is meant to run on a M1 Macbook Pro with Ventura 13.5.2. I’ve tested against Python versions 3.9.6 (native to macOS), 3.10.13 and 3.11.5. The last two versions were installed via brew and inside a virtual environment for each one. You don’t have to install any other Python versions for this utility; the version native to macOS is just fine.

I’ve tried to write readable code and avoid my penchant to write complex single-line code that performs multiple functions. Yes, it’s Python, but it makes it difficult to read, I don’t care how adept you are writing Python. Anyway…

Lightroom managed all my original photo files in a directory structure that directly reflected the date the photo was taken. It was easy to navigate such a structure, even as they grew ever larger over time. The problem with that structure is that it lumped all photos taken on the same date, but with different cameras, in the same date folder. In my example I’ve actually created a directory structure that reflects all the cameras I currently own, and on occasion use:

Photography├── EM5├── EP2├── G4├── G9├── OM1M2└── PENF

When I want to save a set of photos, I plug the camera’s card into an adapter on my Macbook, then step into the directory that corresponds with the camera I’m copying from. I then run the script, which then copies all those files in, in the process creating new directories based on the camera photo file’s time stamp. This is what my Pen F folder looks like after a run.

Photography...└── PENF├── 2023_08_13├── 2023_08_15├── 2023_08_29├── 2023_08_30├── 2023_08_31├── 2023_09_02├── 2023_09_06└── 2023_09_09

Thus, if I want to see all the photos taken on 9 September 2023 then I look in the folder named 2023_09_09, and there are all the photos I took on that date using my Pen F.

On my Macbook I have the script in the Photography folder. When I want to copy photos I step into the folder corresponding to the camera I use, then execute ../copy-photos.py. The script will

1. Check to see if a card is plugged in, discriminating between my Olympus cameras and my Panasonic cameras. If it can’t find either one it politely exits with a message.
2. Perform a directory listing on the camera card, creating a set of folder names based on the photo files date it was taken, as well as a list of all the files.
3. Create folders based on the unique dates it found via the photo files. If the folder already exists it won’t try to create it.
4. Copy all the files from the card into each of the data folders. The copy also brings over each photo files metadata, so that the date the photo file was created is kept with each file, not the date it was copied over to the Macbook. If the file already exists it will not perform a new copy but skip it.

I’ve also made some minor changes on my Macbook, essentially in Finder, setting each folder holding photos to show the folder contents as a gallery. This is another essential feature that Lightroom has that is now a feature of macOS’ Finder.

macOS will not only show JPEG contents, but the OS understands Olympus and Panasonic RAW file contents to properly display them in gallery mode. I have Finder to automatically associate my photo files with Affinity Photo 2. If I need to perform additional editing I can do it there, and then export to another folder. I now have every essential Lightroom feature I used, reproduced on my Macbook and macOS. As far as I’m concerned my migration away from Adobe is complete.

#!/usr/bin/env python3## Utility script to copy files from an attached digital camera# card to another location such as a folder on a Mac.#import osimport shutilfrom pathlib import Pathfrom datetime import datetime# The function converts the year/month/day portion of# a file's timestamp into a string that can be used to# create a directory, or can be used as a copy path later# when moving photos off the card and onto my system.#def create_timestamp(timestamp):d = datetime.utcfromtimestamp(timestamp)return d.strftime('%Y_%m_%d')# Set up the various global resources we'll need.## These are the known digital camera card file paths.#olym_volumn = '/Volumes/Untitled/DCIM/100OLYMP/'pana_volumn = '/Volumes/LUMIX/DCIM/100_PANA/'basepath = ''if os.path.exists(olym_volumn):basepath = olym_volumnprint('Found Olympus digital camera card.')elif os.path.exists(pana_volumn):basepath = pana_volumnprint('Found Panasonic digital camera card.')else:print("No known digital camera card found. Exiting.")exitphotopath = Path(basepath)## photo_dirs is a set. We can add many entries,# and the set functionality will make sure that# only one instance is in the set. The set# filters out duplicates.#photo_dirs = set()photos_on_card = set()# Find all the photographs on my camera's SDXC card.#for photo in photopath.iterdir():if photo.is_file():if photo.name[0] == 'P':photos_on_card.add(photo)info = photo.stat()tstamp = create_timestamp(info.st_mtime)photo_dirs.add(tstamp)# Create folders based on the unique timestamps.# Skip the make directory if the folder already exists.#for photo_dir in sorted(photo_dirs):if not os.path.exists(photo_dir):print(f'{photo_dir} - created')os.mkdir(photo_dir)else:print(f'{photo_dir} - skipped')# We now have our list of photos in the attached SDXC card.# Build full paths to copy from each photo's location on the card# to the current location where the script is executing.## If the photo on the card has already been copied, then don't copy# it again.#for photo in photos_on_card:source_photo = basepath + photo.namedestination_folder = create_timestamp(photo.stat().st_mtime)destination_target = destination_folder + '/' + photo.nameif not os.path.exists(destination_target):print(f'copy {source_photo} to {destination_target}')shutil.copy2(source_photo, destination_target)

Today was one of those days. I’ve got Wireshark installed on my Macs, and I’ve had Wireshark installed on all my Macs for years (decades, back to when it was called Etherial). Today after upgrading to macOS 13.2 I decided to do a bit of home network research and fired up the latest version of Wireshark, 4.0.3. That’s when I got the error you see below. I did a fair amount of internet research (i.e. “googling”) and finally constructed a solution that works for me. First my solution, then a partial explanation of what might be happening.

My solution consists of creating the following zsh alias:

alias wireshark='sudo /Library/Application\ Support/Wireshark/ChmodBPF/ChmodBPF && Wireshark'

When I open a shell (iTerm in my case) and type in wireshark I’ll get a prompt for my password, then Wireshark will start and execute correctly.

Why is this happening? Somehow, someway, the script ChmodBPF is not executing with proper permissions to create Wireshark pseudo devices, /dev/bp*. The script is supposed to execute every time I log in, and create many of those pseudo devices (256 on my machine) that Wireshark then uses. I don’t have a deep knowledge of Wireshark so I don’t know what Wireshark is doing with all those devices.

Because of ChmodBPF’s failure, only four pseudo devices were created, and they all had root:wheel ownership, not my username:admin. That then caused Wireshark to fail to properly work.

I discovered a lot of half-assed solutions, such as changing permissions directly on the pseudo devices. Running the script as sudo came from reading a thread on Wireshark’s GitLab issue wiki: https://gitlab.com/wireshark/wireshark/-/issues/18734 . It should be pointed out that if you reboot your Mac that the devices are wiped out, and you’re going to have to run the script as sudo again, at least once. I just combined everything into a terminal alias. I live in the terminal so it doesn’t bother me.