The golden rule with MacOS is never update before February, or after August.
I waited until Aug 31 before updating to MacOS 26, a new record for me. I very much hope 27 will be ready to go by Feb 1.
5,142 karma · joined April 6, 2010
I waited until Aug 31 before updating to MacOS 26, a new record for me. I very much hope 27 will be ready to go by Feb 1.
F3/F4 are remapped to the keyboard backlight brightness.
F5-F9 are remapped to be plain old function keys.
This post has a lot of great info: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35555475
This is the mapping I use on an M1 MacBook:
hidutil property --set '{
"UserKeyMapping":[
{"HIDKeyboardModifierMappingSrc":0x0000FF0100000010,"HIDKeyboardModifierMappingDst":0x00FF00000009},
{"HIDKeyboardModifierMappingSrc":0x0000000c00000221,"HIDKeyboardModifierMappingDst":0x00FF00000008},
{"HIDKeyboardModifierMappingSrc":0x0000000c000000cf,"HIDKeyboardModifierMappingDst":0x00070000003e},
{"HIDKeyboardModifierMappingSrc":0x000000010000009b,"HIDKeyboardModifierMappingDst":0x00070000003f},
{"HIDKeyboardModifierMappingSrc":0x0000000c000000b4,"HIDKeyboardModifierMappingDst":0x000700000040},
{"HIDKeyboardModifierMappingSrc":0x0000000c000000cd,"HIDKeyboardModifierMappingDst":0x000700000041},
{"HIDKeyboardModifierMappingSrc":0x0000000c000000b3,"HIDKeyboardModifierMappingDst":0x000700000042}
]
}'Just about everything I watch or listen to is served from the same iTunes Library I've had for over 20 years. It's more important to me now than it has ever been.
I've recently been playing around with some of the old Logo implementations from the 80s and I've been really charmed by just how powerful and elegant that language can be once you've wrapped your head around it. It makes BASIC look barbaric by comparison.
Let's say that back in 1930s when they were assigning frequencies for the broadcast television channels, they allocated enough extra bandwidth for a future color (chroma) signal, apart from the existing monochrome (luma) signal.
If the bandwidth was available, would it have been possible to include separate chroma and luma components in the broadcast signal without the two interfering with each other, thereby producing a much cleaner color image while maintaining backward compatibility with the original B&W TV sets?
- Design Patterns by the Gang of Four
- Modern C++ Design by Andrei Alexandrescu
- Code Complete from the Microsoft Press
That's enough old paper to raise the display height to a comfortable level.
Surprisingly, this version does not require MacOS 26 (Tahoe).
Time Machine to a local drive connected via USB is great.
If you want to backup over the network you will have to find another solution.
Were PDP-10 text editors of the day able to easily work with such large documents? And how long would it typically take to assemble all of that code in one go?
Here's a little 6 minute clip: An acid trip, and the origins of Hypercard.
While it's true that early production machines had reliability problems, the same was also true for the C64. The machine we got for xmas 1983 was as solid as a tank.
The tapes were extremely robust and resistant to abuse, much more so than floppy disks. I tried to fry tapes, and couldn't.
For games, the tape drives were surprisingly effective. Sequential data transfer rates are faster than the C64 disk drive, and unlike the C64 they operate independently from the main CPU, with DMA access to the full 64 kB address space.
This means that many games were up and running in seconds and could load upcoming levels in the background while you were playing the game.
(The tape drives were much less effective for random-access, file-based storage, as the seek times were obviously atrocious compared to a disk drive.)
First-party software was also very high quality.
The problem was the business plan. Coleco made the same mistake as Atari and Texas Instruments, in that the business plan was modelled after the game console business. The tapes were expensive and proprietary when they didn't need to be, and the 3rd-party software ecosystem was completely locked down. Technical info was unavailable for hobbyists and independent developers.
By the time the Adam is released, the C64 and Apple IIe are already entrenched in the home markets with exponentially expanding library of independent software. The Adam's locked-down ecosystem couldn't complete.
It only took one year for hobbyists to completely reverse engineer the Adam, at which point some interesting independent software starts to appear. But by that time the business was already dead.
However, for a machine released in 1983 (the Apple IIe) it is indeed very odd. But the IIe is an odd machine in many ways.
The Apple II platform stagnated as Apple poured all their resources into the Apple III (which has all those features and much more).
The Apple II refused to die, so Apple assigned a pair of engineers to design a cost-reduced version of the Apple II, and this became the IIe. The goal was only to minimize manufacturing costs, so the new features like timers were off the table.
The IIe became an unexpected smash hit in the home and education markets (stealing those markets from the 128k Mac), and only then did Apple devote some new resources to the platform (and reposition the 128k Mac as a laughably underpowered productivity machine).
The Apple IIc (1984) was the first Apple II to get a proper modern makeover. Of course it was a flop, while the odd-ball IIe continued to fly off the shelves.
Apple added VBL polling with the IIe in 1983, and then broke it a year later with the IIc. And an unfortunate typo in the IIc technical reference manual meant that developers couldn't figure out how to do it properly.
The only official, cross-platform way to do it was through the mouse firmware, but most users didn't have the mouse hardware installed.
This game uses the mouse firmware, if available (II+ w/ mouse card, IIc, IIgs), to generate VBL interrupts. On the IIe without a mouse card, it polls for VBL.
By the way, if you're running this game on the Virtual ][ emulator for MacOS, be sure to disable the mouse card. Its emulated mouse card only generates VBL interrupts at 30 Hz, so the game runs at half speed.
After Google Reader shut down paid for Feedly for a while before switching to self-hosted FreshRSS. (https://freshrss.org)
I'm not a web guy and I detest all forms of system administration, but I had no trouble setting it up on my host. I've got it configured to update its feeds one per hour from 6AM to 8PM. It just does its thing, and works fine on both desktop and mobile.
https://groups.google.com/g/comp.sys.hp48/c/BS7c8hRAau0/m/P5...
Do you use single, easy-to-remember plain-text passwords for all of your accounts and services? If not, you need to understand what the recovery process is when your passkey/2FA/pw-manager is unavailable or lost.
I guess it takes 10 Watts to maintain the Thunderbolt controller, USB hub, A13 processor, and run the fan.
Power usage does drop to <1 Watt when the Mac is actually sleeping, unless anything is plugged into the USB hub. Even an empty iPhone cable will cause the display to draw 5 Watts. It's disappointing.
The system save panel (NSSavePanel) is only supposed to infer the file extension when it has been given a list of supported file types/extensions. If the user does not specify a file extension, NSSavePanel will use the first extension in the supported list. If the user specifies an unsupported extension, they see an error message.
Text editors like VSCode and Sublime Text would configure NSSavePanel to allow any file type/extension, which means it's supposed to just accept whatever the user types.
The variable drive speed comes of the development of the "Twiggy" drive, which was an 850 kB 5.25 disk format originally intended for the Apple III in 1980 but never worked reliably.
BTW, the Atari ST uses the same floppy disk format as the IBM PC, 360 kB per side.
The Amiga uses a variable drive speed like the Mac, but they eke out extra capacity by eliminating sectors. This allows an extra 512 bytes per track, but the trade off is that the disk controller can only read or write an entire track at a time, rather than individual sectors.
An infamous Apple II copy protection scheme used the same trick to expand 5.25 disk capacity from 16 sectors to 18 sectors (512 bytes per track).
The answer to the question "Why didn't Apple add X/Y/Z to the Apple II?" is that they did add those features, starting with the Apple III in 1980, and continuing with the IIc and IIgs.
The problem is that there was a 2-year window between the release of the III and the explosion of the home/education market that Apple ignored the II and assumed sales of that quirky, obsolete system would dry up.
The IIe was designed within that window, and the skeleton crew of engineers who worked on the IIe did not have the green light to add significant new features. The only goal was to reduce manufacturing costs and maintain compatibility.
It wasn't until after the IIe was locked in that the Apple leadership began to realize the importance of the II within the suddenly booming home/education market, and only then did they put any significant resources back into the platform.
The IIc (1984) and IIgs (1986) were the result of those renewed efforts, but by that time the cat was already out of the bag. The IIe remained the most popular machine of the platform, and the "modern" features added to the IIc and IIgs were left unused by most developers and users.
VBlank interrupts were only available through the Mouse Firmware, which was built into the IIc but a rarely-installed option on the IIe. As a result, there were no interrupt-driven games for the 8-bit Apple II machines.
The complete lack of consistent frame rates and timing is a hallmark of Apple II gaming.