Mac on Fazal Majid's low-intensity blog

PSA: iCloud Private Relay can make Safari on your iPad unusable

Tue, 24 May 2022 21:01:00 +0000

After upgrading my iPad to iPadOS 15.5, Safari became unusable. It would take forever to load the Reddit login page, and many others like Dilbert.com. Opening the same in Firefox Focus had no issues.

Going into Settings / Safari / Privacy & Security / Hide IP Address and disabling it fixed this for me. Alternatively you can disable it only for specific networks (Settings / Wi-Fi / ⓘ / Limit IP Address Tracing / Off).

Batch-converting HEIC images to JPEGs on the Mac

Wed, 27 Oct 2021 10:49:05 +0000

I use Lightroom 6 to manage my photo collection, although it is falling victim to bit rot (e.g. the face recognition module no longer works, apparently due to a licensing logic time bomb in the code). Exploitative pay-forever software subscriptions are simply unacceptable so I will not yield to Adobe’s Creative Clout bondage, and since Lightroom will not work in newer versions of MacOS, that means I am working on migrating to Darktable, albeit very slowly.

Apple iCalendar's buggy SNI

Mon, 07 Dec 2020 18:15:05 +0000

I run my own CalDAV calendar server for my family and for myself. For a very long time I used DAViCal, but it’s always been a slight annoyance to set up on Apple devices because they don’t like DAViCal’s https://example.com/davical/caldav.php/majid URLs. What’s more, recent versions of iCalendar would pop up password prompts at random, and after re-entering the password a couple of times (once is not enough), would finally go on and work. The various devices would also all too often get out of sync, sometimes with the inscrutable error:

Exporting secrets from the Lockdown 2FA app

Sat, 14 Nov 2020 23:43:05 +0000

The Lockdown app mentioned in this article was last updated in 2015, and if you don't already use it, I would not recommend your adopting it.

I am (very) slowly migrating away from the Mac to Ubuntu Linux as my main desktop operating system. The reasons why Apple has lost my confidence are:

The execrable software quality of recent releases like Catalina (I plan on sticking with Mojave until I have migrated, however long that takes).
Apple’s increasing locking down of macOS in ways antithetical to software freedom, e.g. SIP or the notarization requirements in Catalina with the denial of service implications
The fact they no longer even pretend not to price-gouge on the Mac Pro. My days of buying their professional workstations every 5 years have come to an end after 15 years (PowerMac G5, Nehalem Mac Pro, 2013 Mac Pro)
As the iPhone market is saturating, in their eagerness to come up with a replacement growth engine in “services”, they are pushing app developers towards the despicable and unacceptable subscription licensing model
The butterfly keyboard fiasco exemplifies the contempt in which the company seems to hold its most loyal customers

On the plus side, ThinkPads have decent keyboards, unlike all Apple laptops since at least 2008, the LG Gram 17 is both lightweight, powerful and its huge screen is a boon to my tired eyes, and I am favorably impressed with the deep level of hardware integration offered by Ubuntu (e.g. displaying the logo and boot status in the UEFI stages of boot), even if I am not enamored of the software bloat or systemd.

Making ScanSnap Receipts usable

Wed, 11 Mar 2020 21:18:48 +0000

For a long time I used a service called Shoeboxed to scan and organize my credit card receipts. Basically stuff your receipts in a US prepaid envelope, drop it in the mail, and they scan, OCR and shred them, as well as analyzing the text to extract the information. Unfortunately, since I moved to the UK the service leaves to be desired, and the price has also gone up over time.

Scanner group test

Fri, 07 Apr 2017 03:28:13 +0000

After my abortive trial of the Colortrac SmartLF Scan, I did a comparative test of scanning one of my daughter’s A3-sized drawings on a number of scanners I had handy.

Scanner	Sensor	Scan
Colortrac SmartLF Scan	CIS	ScanLF.jpg
Epson Perfection Photo V500 Photo (manually stitched)	CCD	Epson_V500.jpeg
Epson Perfection V19 (manually stitched)	CIS	Epson_V19.jpg
Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500M (using a carrier sheet and the built-in stitching)	CCD	S1500M_carriersheet.jpg
Fujitsu ScanSnap SV600	CCD	SV600.jpg
Fuji X-Pro2 with XF 35mm f/1.4 lens, mounted on a Kaiser RS2 XA copy stand with IKEA KVART 3-spot floor lamp (CCT 2800K, a mediocre 82 CRI as measured with my UPRtek CV600)	CMOS	X-Pro2.jpg

I was shocked by the wide variance in the results, as was my wife. This is most obvious in the orange flower on the right.

Avery 22807 template for InDesign

Mon, 03 Apr 2017 02:59:09 +0000

The Avery 22807 2-inch circular stickers are a good alternative to Moo, PSPrint et al when you need a small quantity of stickers in a hurry. Unfortunately Avery has not seen it fit to provide usable InDesign templates as they do with some of their other sticker SKUs, only Microsoft Word, which is needless to say inadequate. A search for “Avery 22807 Indesign template” yielded some, but they have issues with missing linked PDF files.

On the bugginess of El Capitan

Mon, 17 Oct 2016 18:14:18 +0000

I never updated my home Mac Pro to El Capitan. To paraphrase Borges, each successive Apple OS release since Snow Leopard makes you long for the previous one. Unfortunately I have no choice but to run the latest OS X release on my work Macs as that is usually required to run the latest Xcode, itself required for the App Store.

I did not realize how bad El Capitan was until I upgraded my work iMac (27-inch 5K model) to Sierra last week. Previously, I would experience a mean time between crashes of around 3 days. I thought it was flaky hardware (the problems started from when I unboxed the computer), but couldn’t find the time to take it to the Genius Bar. I had also experienced the same problem with my old home 2009 Nehalem Mac Pro, which I had taken to the office, in fact that’s why I bought the iMac in the first place (and the first one I ordered had to go back because of defective pins in the RAM expansion slots). The Mac Pro had previously been rock-steady at home.

Avoiding counterfeit goods on Amazon: mission impossible?

Thu, 12 May 2016 19:15:01 +0000

I mentioned previously that I seldom shop for electronics on Amazon.com any more, preferring B&H Photo whenever possible. I now have another reason: avoiding counterfeit goods.

My company boardroom is in an electromagnetic war zone—dozens of competing WiFi access points combined with electronic interference from the US-101 highway just outside make WiFi reception tenuous at best, and unusable more often than not. To work around this, we set up a wired Ethernet switch, and since most of our staff use MacBook Airs, Apple USB Ethernet adapters purchased from Amazon. When I side-graded from my 15″ Retina MacBook Pro to a much more portable 12″ Retina MacBook, I wasn’t able to connect using the dongle, and the name of the device was interspersed with Chinese characters. At first I thought it was an issue with my Satechi USB-C hub, but I experienced the same problems via a genuine Apple USB-C multiport adapter as well.

Mac Pro first impressions

Mon, 03 Feb 2014 07:50:06 +0000

I received my late 2013 black cylinder Mac Pro last Monday. I ordered the 6-core model with D700 GPUs, since the higher-core models can’t Turbo boost to the full 3.9GHz the 4-core and 6-core ones can, and thus for most poorly-parallelized apps will underperform. I had to get a Promise Pegasus J4 with a pair of Samsung 840 Evo SSDs to hold my files, as I need nearly 2TB to do so and that is not available on the internal SSD, and it would be a shame to hobble this machine with spinning rust.