René Rebe

For a while I already watched some other business struggling with workflow inefficiency by using cloud services that randomly (like monthly) change some user interface, options etc. and thus waste hours and hours of the time of workers to actually get their work done.

While we protect our data and investment by not using cloud services for anything productive (exception like Google Adwords, …) today we hit a similar issue. I automated invoice generation from our online store PayPal email notifications. Some days ago on October the 15th PayPal deviced out of the blue sky that it would probably be nice if they modernized their email templates.

Well, great for them, no so for our nicely script automated invoice generation. But even for the users:

Before the PayPal notifications where: Content-Type: multipart/alternative; with a Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 and a Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8 and about 20 kB in size.

Unix veterans could still nicely read the text/plain part in pine, mutt or wherever. The new emails did away with the text/plain part, and only send a Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8 and the designers even blew that up to now consume a whooping 90kB.

Worst of all as of today they still send us a mix of old a new template based emails. Obviously awesome for some reliable processing, …

So this is what the silicon valley companies call progress? :-/

Update: Most of the size increase is actually mobile optimization CSS. WTF optimization is that? I rather have a smaller, plain text email than a 80kB CSS monster when I’m on the go :-/

Can the tech industry please stop messing with everything and thereby actually making things worse? :-/!

All the FLAC and high bitrate hi-fi testing? Right now I’m listening to a 192000Hz FLAC:

# play *flac

Alanis Morissette - 01. Eight Easy Steps.flac:

File Size: 106M Bit Rate: 4.92M
Encoding: FLAC Info: Purchased from 7digital.com
Channels: 2 @ 24-bit Track: 1 of 10
Samplerate: 192000Hz Album: So-Called Chaos
Replaygain: off Artist: Alanis Morissette
Duration: 00:02:52.37 Title: Eight Easy Steps

In:100% 00:02:52.37 [00:00:00.00] Out:33.1M [ | ] Hd:1.7 Clip:0

on a last-gen Retina MacBook Pro 15″ under (you guessed it from the quote above, right?) (T2) Linux.
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Believe it or not in 2016 I came across updating some aging x86 hardware, and it did not want to boot from our usual so2stick.sh T2 USB pen drive disk images. After some research and debugging it turned out syslinux has the answer:

On these BIOSes, you’re generally stuck booting them in USB-ZIP mode.
…
A standard zipdrive (both the 100 MB and the 250 MB varieties) have a “geometry” of 64 heads, 32 sectors, and are partitioned devices with a single partition 4 (unlike most other media of this type which uses partition 1.) The 100 MB variety has 96 cylinders, and the 250 MB variety has 239 cylinders;

And this stupid hack indeed works, sigh. PC BIOS programmers, a very special kind of bread, … :-/

This is one of the few and longer review articles I write on this site, for two reasons. First of all I am pretty dissatisfied with Apple’s laptops (and workstations) for a decade, and second Dell provided me with XPS 15 to try for a few weeks.

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So this stupidly smart Apple MacBook batteries set a permanent failure bit once they are simply discharged by sitting on a shelf for a month or two. With this permanent failure bit the controller will not charge them again, even when the cells are brand new and otherwise perfectly fine. Another day I need to try sending a reset sequence or otherwise rewriting some flash cells, sigh:

Some notes for now:

Battery Firmware Hacking

MacBook battery (Rom) cycle reset

So Apple does not publish nice Windows driver downloads, you need the BootCamp.app for that, sigh. You need to download hundreds of megabytes even if you only need a driver, or two, sigh.

And where does it store it? /Library/Application\ Support/BootCamp/

The last days I wasted too much time with a Windows to go setup for an EFI MacBook’s. Stange thing that some (or many) combinations of USB drives and setup methods would result in INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE errors, … :-/ ?

To my surprise I finally found the so far best combination (for me): a Seagate Seven USB 3 drive, with the GPT/legacy setup (no VHD/VHDX).

Oh my, grub2 is an overly complex piece of *** and a kitchen sink:

grub-mkimage -O x86_64-efi -d . \
-o /mnt/EFI/BOOT/BOOTX64.EFI -p “” \
part_gpt part_msdos ntfs ntfscomp hfsplus fat ext2 \
normal chain boot configfile linux multiboot btrfs \
all_video reiserfs xfs jfs lvm crypto cryptodisk luks

:-/

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UEFIBooting#Apple_Mac_EFI_systems
http://askubuntu.com/questions/265644/dual-boot-surface-pro-with-ubuntu

Update: cryptomount (hd0,gpt3)

Update 2:

grub-mkimage -O powerpc-ieee1275 -d /usr/lib/grub/powerpc-ieee1275/ -p /mnt/ -o /mnt/grub part_gpt part_msdos ntfs ntfscomp hfsplus fat ext2 normal boot configfile linux btrfs all_video reiserfs xfs jfs lvm crypto cryptodisk luks part_apple suspend sleep reboot search_fs_file search_label search_fs_uuid hfs

boot hd:5,grub.elf

Update 3: OMG, who comes up with such syntax and alien non-Unix way of tools:?

hmount /dev/hdaX
hattrib -b Untitlied:
hattrib -t Untitlied:grub.elf
boot hd:5,\\tbxi

nvsetenv boot-device /pci@f2000000/mac-io@17/ata-4@1f000/disk@0:5,\\:tbxi

Update ‘18 Maybe better yet:

grub-mkimage -O x86_64-efi -d /usr/lib64/grub/x86_64-efi/ -o BOOTX64.EFI -p “/efi/boot” part_gpt part_msdos ntfs ntfscomp hfsplus fat ext2 normal chain boot configfile linux multiboot btrfs all_video reiserfs xfs jfs lvm crypto cryptodisk luks

wuauclt.exe /updatenow

yay, let’s break the internet, Avg: 56.93 MBit/s ;-)

Of course you could also go, buy a physical copy

I never quite liked that new Macs do not come with any installation media anymore. In former times you got pretty optical discs. But since the DVD-less Mac’s and the App Store one get’s “nothing” anymore :-/

The trouble comes after some time, when you want to reinstall your OS. Case in point: I wanted to install the latest OS compatible with the black, polycarbonat (awesome, stylish [did I say black?] machines, btw. - except the breaking plastic border, unfortunately). Turns out the App Store does not allow to download my “purchased” 10.7 with errors such as: “Item temporary not available” (or so).

With billions on the bank account: Why does Apple need to be so unsupportive and impolite to good old customers - when they already do not support recent, security updated OS versions on the slightly older machines, ..?

So not only can I not (without hacking and tweaking) install 10.8 or 10.9 on this still nice Macs form just some years ago. I can not even download the last supported Mac OS (10.7) to at least get some latest (and not so greatest) security updates.

This state of this former computer company is really sad.

Thankfully I often burn some backup discs, especially for installation on more than one Mac, and thus found a self-burned Mac OS 10.7 Lion disc in my archive stack and could install it on this Mac in point after all.

And this is not only about the base OS - with the current App Store implementation we will often find ourselves with purchased software, that we can no longer download for older OS and hardware in the future.

Like today being able to install vintage (and often still pretty useful) versions of an OS, and applications. Often even expensive ones: Photoshop, InDesign, Acrobat Professional, … and games. How much fun is it to boot up some vintage game from the Amiga, or old PC and play thru it again, with your kids, or friends?

What dim, brave new world, … :-/