This is a basic app that pulls down raw output from the swift DeviceActivity API. So all it does is interrogate the iOS DeviceActivity API and relay the output to the screen. This project is just meant to experiment around with the DeviceActivity API documented at https://developer.apple.com/documentation/deviceactivity. Requires the DeviceActivity entitlement to load the DeviceActivity Monitor Extension. A few things to know: Users need to be in the same Family Plan (there might be a way around this) The app requires authorization (understandable but there isn’t any error correction in the experimentation app to correct for a state where a device hasn’t granted it). We have to import FamilyControls, ManagedSettings, and…
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Staging Extensions
Extensions have been back for a long time. Mac OS 8 is proud. But they’re more thoughtful than they ever were in previous generations. One aspect of how Apple has built these new extensions in, harkening back to the days of old when we got corrupt extensions, is to stage some new extensions. These are the ones we have to enable in the Security & Privacy System Preference pane when we install unsigned software (or the software that tells us it’s inauthentic, as though its whole life is a lie – which it might be). That software goes into a pair of directories according to the type of extension at…
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Export Objects from Keychain
Once upon a time, we could run a command like the following to dump all our keychain data: security dump-keychain -d ~/Library/login.keychain > ~/Desktop/dump.txt I go into more detail on those techniques in an article I did back in 2009, here: Now there are more keychains and the entitlements for the security binary to access this kind of information has changed. We can make some changes to the authorizationdb (as explored in https://krypted.com/utilities/authorizationdb-defaults-macos-10-14/) but I’ve yet to find a magic combination that allows me to script interactions with the keychain without a GUI pop-up (and one that blocks synthetic interaction. The data for each keychain is stored in an encrypted…
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It’s not wget or curl, it’s iwr in Windows
Powershell comes with a handy little cmdlet to download files from the internet called Invoke-WebRequest which is documented at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsoft.powershell.utility/invoke-webrequest?view=powershell-7.2. There’s an alias for it so it can be called as just iwr. Let’s say there’s a file at https://pathtothefile/myfile.txt and we want to download it to the working directory as simply myfile.txt. That could be done with the following command: iwr -uri https://pathtothefile/myfile.txt -OutFile ./myfile.txt -UseBasicParsing -UseDefaultCredentials In the above example, we used the -uri to identify the target resource and -OutFile to list the local location. The above command used basic parsing as we were accessing a resource from an older server, although that wouldn’t be required for…
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Basic Guide To Troubleshooting FDM 3D Prints
I wrote up a little guide to troubleshooting 3D printing issues for FDM printers. I’ll have to knock out a resin one soon enough, but in the meantime… I chose to post this one on the old work account at: https://www.bootstrappers.mn/post/an-introduction-to-troubleshooting-3d-printers
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Dragonne .stl from the Monster Manual
For all you D&D print and paint nerds out there, here’s another design from the 1st edition Monster Manual: Dragonne. There are two versions (wings opened and wings closed): https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:5413146 and https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:5415625. I’ve found the supports are easier with the wings opened There are two versions available for download. This is part of the larger Monster Manual project. To see all the .stl files (only a few are mine) check out https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1nAJ4y2JxQU2lb6jWOzqU9GdQtHIS4Z3P3NDHgOMEE9I/edit#gid=0.
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Research In Motion and the Rise of the Blackberry
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Neo-Otyugh from the 1E Monster Manual
Published a 3d model for printing, along with the source Blender file but some experimentation in ZBrush later and here’s an stl of a Neo-Otyugh ready to print. Also please find the .zpr file in the same Thingiverse post at https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:5404664. It printed easily and there weren’t that many supports to remove, although I might focus on fewer supports in future models. I’m painting it so I’ll post a photo to the Thing when it’s done.
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State Preservation vs Power Nap for macOS
Mac OS X Lion was introduced in 2011 and came with a new feature called Power Nap. This allows computers to receive push notifications, check for new messages, update calendar events, run iCloud updates, download software updates, and run Time Machine backups in the background while a computer is asleep – they don’t go all the way to sleep, they just kinda’ take a nap. Application persistence was released the next year and is an API that Apple uses in a number of programs on and exposes to third party software developers who can opt into the ability to have the state of an application persist and be restored when…
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Let’s Go On A Colossal Cave Adventure