Why my Mac CI nodes kept forgetting they were allowed to read files, and the 30-kilobyte app that now remembers for them Every so often a machine in my Mac build fleet would come back from a reboot — or from a routine gitlab-runner upgrade — and the first job scheduled on …

How a 1984 Cray X-MP/48 actually stacks up against a decade of iPhone silicon — and why the honest numbers are smaller than the marketing math There's a familiar genre of technology writing: take some storied old machine, hold it up against a modern phone, and marvel that the phone …

I run my Apple builds on a small fleet of Mac runners wired into GitLab CI. Most of the pipeline is unremarkable — build, test, archive, upload — and it had been humming along for months. Then our App Store packaging job started failing intermittently, and the failure made no sense: the …

I received a question this afternoon from my cousin about the amount of free flash in her MacBook Air and figured that the answer would probably be useful to others as well. Note that none of this is officially from Apple, so it might be wrong, but I have had …

Wow! Apple certainly wants more people to sign up as Mac developers, that's for sure. In changes made today, the ADC Premier and Select tiers have disappeared and they have been replaced with Mac Developer through the current developer portal (which has the iPhone developer sign-up as well). Mac and …

David Pogue (NY Times) has written a blog entry about his experience as an author selling an ebook with no DRM... and it wasn't the end of the world, or even his career as an author. With the nook and a possible Apple tablet coming to contend with the Kindle …

I'm an iPhone user... my wife (Hi, Carol!) is an iPhone user, and I even have an iPhone set up for development purposes that doesn't get used for anything else (despite the fact that we pay for it monthly). I also have an AT&T Data card, for use when …

Many of you have already seen that Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6) will be releasing on Friday. I've been running it as my primary OS on my laptop since the WWDC in June and look forward to getting a real install on there. You're probably also aware that PPC …

In the process of moving, I had occasion to find my CD collection (yes, intellectual property fans, I have every single CD that I used to load my iPod with). I decided that it was time to replace the nasty 128kbps CBR MP3 encoded with the zing encoder using a …

With Apple having announced some new machines with really nice price points within the last week, I've been asked by some friends what my suggestions would be for copying the data to a new machine and removing data from the old one. Here, I'll try to put forth my current …

A little known (but much loved by me) feature of every iPod (except the Shuffle) and the original iPhone was that you could charge the phone using the FireWire port on your computer. Of course, it's been quite a while since you could transfer data over FireWire, but you could …

Normally, I wouldn't post about an Apple security update, because they're relatively common and generally attack most of the issues within a period of time that everyone agrees is a bit too long. However, there was a lot of hubub about Apple's "delay" in getting the security patch out for …

Since the iPhone 2.0 release, more people are considering Mobile Me (the follow on to Dot Mac). For those of us with more than one computer, it's a very easy way to keep your contacts, calendars and other data in sync. However, there are some tricks for some kinds …

Generally, I don't talk about the FSF (promulgators of the GNU "Free Software" license). The main reason is that I've spent most of my life writing software for a living and these folks are just plain wrong on how collaborative software should be done, in my humble opinion. However, this …

Thanks to The Unofficial Apple Weblog for a pointer to these Apple ads of the past from the advertisements section of the web site, Attached. There's not a lot of recent stuff in here, but some of the older stuff, such as the every- ad-page-in-newsweek ad are classics.

Edward Tufte, one of the preeminent authors and speakers on effective visual communication and design has some things to say about Apple's iPhone. Much of his commentary on the iPhone is complementary, but he has some suggestions, which seem pretty reasonable. If you have a chance, take a look. Thanks …

An article from MacWorld tells that analysts from The Yankee Group (unlike those from Gartner and some other IT analysis groups) think that both the security and policy issues about the iPhone have been overblown. Basically, it boils down to not being any worse than any other smart phone, and …

The wacky Fins at F-secure have decided to put an iPhone through its paces in a fridge and the result is a chilling video. Thanks to The Ultimate Apple Weblog for the pointer, and YouTube for the video.

There are plenty of stories floating around these days, such as Apple faces mounting complaints on iPhone battery from MacWorld. I have an iPhone and have owned (and still do) a number of iPods and thus expect to be dealing with the battery issue any day now, except that I've …

Many of you know that I've had a large number of (annoyingly expensive) smart phones over the years. In general, I've been pretty loyal to Sony Ericsson, especially the Pxxx series (P800, P900, P910, P990) because of their large screen, pretty good web browser, email support, and, in the case …