Egg Freckles

December 2019

• Pizza Box Mac Pro

  Does anyone remember a story from the early 2000’s where a guy was trying to make a business of selling Apple Power Mac G4 repair parts in a custom molded pizza box case? Long story short Apple Legal stepped in and persuaded the chap that he couldn't use Apple repair parts for this purpose. I remember reading about this story while I was in college, but I can't find an article anywhere. Personally I would love to purchase a Mac Pro logic board and outfit it with a CPU, RAM, and and off the shelf AMD graphics card. But even if I got an Apple Certified Repair Center to see me one hooking it up to a conventional ATX power supply would be the greatest challenge. As for a case and cooling, i am pretty sure I would just wing it, using commodity third party PC parts. Nothing elegant like an Apple Mac Pro case, but I think Apple's professional desktop logic board would look really great on an open air test bench under tempered glass. Obviously there are all kinds of hardware incompatibilities…

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November 2019

• The Fate of the…

  nWith the SeaMonkey 2.49.5 release the 2.49.x line comes to an end. Unless a catastrophic bug is discovered 2.49.5 will be the last ESR 52 based version. Backporting security fixes and at the same time working on the next, already overdue, major release is not possible with the few remaining developers.n nPlans are to do further interim 2.53 versions based on a much enhanced Gecko 56 base while working on bringing you the next ESR 60 based 2.57 version. After 2.57 we will decide about the future. The current Mozilla Gecko codebase has seen a flow of constant major changes and api removals in the last 2 years and is no longer really usable for our needs. By the end of the year the SeaMonkey project is expected to be completely independent of Mozilla. We will see how this pans out but we are doing our best and already have a new infrastructure in place where we do builds and website hosting.n nWe would also like to remind everyone again that this a community project independent of…

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July 2019

• Choosing an 13 inch…

  Stephen Hackett, writing for 512 Pixels, outlines some of the differences between the entry level 2019 MacBook Air and entry level 2019 MacBook Pro. With today’s revisions to the Mac notebook line, choosing between a new MacBook Air and a new MacBook Pro has gotten a little more interesting. The machines are similar in many ways. They both come with two Thunderbolt 3 ports, Touch ID, 8 GB of RAM and a 128 GB SSD. Both can be stepped up to 16 GB of memory … [but] once you start poking around, you can see some differences. I have been a 2018 MacBook Air owner for the better part of a year, and I can agree with Stephen’s assessment; “for almost everyone, the MacBook Air is the right notebook.” If you are willing to pay for more power and plus sacrifice some battery life, get the MacBook Pro. That being said there are great deals to be had on last year’s MacBook Air. Microcenter is offering 2018’s MacBook Air with 128 GBs of storage for $799. Not only that, but you can get it in gold!

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June 2019

• Immutable Design

  After reading about some of the new features available in macOS Catalina it became clear to me Apple is working towards an immutable design. Dedicated system volumenmacOS Catalina runs in a dedicated, read-only system volume — which means it is completely separate from all other data, and nothing can overwrite your critical operating system files. By enforcing a read-only system volume, Apple can ensure that every installation of macOS Catalina is immutable.nThat means that every installation of macOS Catalina is identical to every other installation of the same version,nand the operating system on your Mac’s hard disk is exactly the same as the operating system on the hard disks in the Macs at Apple Park. An immutable design comes with some big advantages.nmacOS Catalina should be more stable, less prone to bugs, and easier to test and develop for than previous versions of Mac OS.nSystem updates can be installed faster.nNo need to wait for patches to be applied; simply reboot…

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May 2019

• Why I Switched to…

  I recently made the switch from Pixelmator to Acorn, but not for the reasons you might expect. Pixelmator and Acorn are both best-in-class image editors for Mac OS X. Developed by small dedicated teams, each app has a long history of updates dating all the way back to September 2007. As far as features are concerned there is very little I can do in Pixelmator that I can’t do in Acorn and vice versa. Both apps cost $29.99, (although Pixelmator has received free upgrades since appearing in the App Store). No, the reason I switched from Pixelmator to Acorn has little to do with features and even less to do with price. I switched from Pixelmator to Acorn because I believe in indie Mac app development,nand I want to support applications that continue to grow outside of the Mac App Store. Pixelmator has been an App Store only app since the release of version 2.0 in 2011. At the time I choose Pixelmator as my primary image editor for its impressive features and familiar Photoshop-like…

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• New Materials

  Last week Apple announced the 2019 MacBook Pro, and the word keyboard did not appear in the press release. Apple is not talking about MacBook keyboard reliability because the problem is fixed. They are not talking about MacBook keyboard reliability because they want the problem to go away. It will take times for us to learn if the ‘new materials‘ Apple has added to the 2019 MacBook Pro keyboards will solve the reliability problems, but even Apple has their doubts. The “Keyboard Service Program for MacBook, MacBook Air, and MacBook Pro“has been extended to cover not just the 2018 models, but the keyboards in last week’s 2019 MacBook Pro’s as well. If you are aware of the risks, new materials or not, now is a good time to buy a new MacBook. Should things go wrong, Apple will cover the replacement of your keyboard for up to four years from the data of purchase. If you have already been burned by Apple’s keyboard reliability problems or want to…

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• Why Vim

  Seven years ago this blog post by Mark O’Connor changed my life. On September 19th, I said goodbye to my trusty MacBook Pro and started developing exclusively on an iPad + Linode 512. This is the surprising story of a month spent working in the cloud. Mark went from working locally on his MacBook to working in the cloud using his iPad.nWith a reliable network connection Mark could take his work with him anywhere.nFrom the office to the coffee shop, Mark’s mobility was made possible by the portability of Vim. Perhaps the only reason this transition has been so smooth was because my favourite editor / IDE looks and feels almost exactly the same running on an iSSH console as it did running locally on my Macbook. iSSH supports xterm-256color, which means you can still have pleasant colour schemes despite working in a terminal. All my plugins are there, my code-completion, quick navigation and so on. Seven years ago I started work at MIT.nI needed to work on dozens of different systems…

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