Michael Lynn pudquick

Reproducible Builds for macOS

There's a neat writeup I stumbled across recently titled "Reproducible codesigning on Apple Silicon" from Keith Smiley about some gotchas when it comes to compiling a binary in a way that's repeatable and always generates the exact same byte output (which would then checksum to the exact same hash) - even if compiled on a different Mac.

In applying the suggestions I found in the blog post, I found a few other corner cases that I just wanted to get documented more explicitly somewhere.

Tools Matter

Footnote 2 from that blog post is important:

Running shell scripts easily in Gaming mode on Steam Deck

(Alternatively: "How I stopped using Syncthing on Steam Deck")

Disclaimer: As the title implies, this is about shell scripting on your Steam Deck. The guide won't teach you how to do that part, it assumes you already have ideas in mind about what scripts you'd want to write. Stopping the usage of Syncthing was what I wanted to do with it, but you can do whatever you like.

Background (you can skip this part)

If you're an avid gamer who picked up a Steam Deck and now you're splitting your time between it and a more traditional gaming computer (or in my case, several other gaming systems as well), you may come across a situation where at some point you want to start doing more advanced things on your Steam Deck - which may mean "how do I get files onto or off of this thing".

brew is a bad neighbor

This isn't a guide about locking down homebrew so that it can't touch the rest of your system security-wise.

This guide doesn't fix the inherent security issues of a package management system that will literally yell at you if you try to do something about "huh, maybe it's not great my executables are writeable by my account without requiring authorization first".

But it absolutely is a guide about shoving it into its own little corner so that you can take it or leave it as you see fit, instead of just letting the project do what it likes like completely taking over permissions and ownership of a directory that might be in use by other software on your Mac and stomping all over their contents.

By following this guide you will:

Never have to run sudo to forcefully change permissions of some directory to be owned by your account

Steam Deck Notes

Running scripts in Gaming mode easily

This became its own writeup: https://gist.github.com/pudquick/981a3e495ffb5badc38e34d754873eb5

Artwork on non-Steam games

There's several different kinds of art that can be configured for an entry. The only real place to configure them all is from Desktop mode, not Game mode.

	# put this in your .zshrc
	function background_danger_color_change() {
	case $PWD/ in
	/Users/frogor/dangerous/*)
	# uh oh, be careful in here
	osascript<<END
	tell application "Terminal"
	get the background color of the selected tab of the front window
	if the result is not equal to {65535, 0, 0} then
	set the background color of the selected tab of the front window to {65535, 0, 0}

	# Make a self-signed private/public keypair usable for HTTPS, including SAN / Subject Alternative Name and CN / Common Name, non-interactively and without additional files

	# Parentheses around the command spin it up in a subshell so that the FQDOMAIN variable is local to execution and doesn't persist after it's created
	(FQDOMAIN="example.local" && openssl req -x509 -nodes -newkey rsa:4096 -keyout server_key.pem -keyform PEM -days 365 -subj "/CN=${FQDOMAIN}" -addext 'basicConstraints=CA:FALSE' -addext "subjectAltName=DNS:${FQDOMAIN}" -addext 'keyUsage=digitalSignature' -addext 'extendedKeyUsage=serverAuth' -out server_cert.pem -outform PEM 2>/dev/null)

	# Alternatively, if you're setting FQDOMAIN somewhere else, you can just run directly:
	openssl req -x509 -nodes -newkey rsa:4096 -keyout server_key.pem -keyform PEM -days 365 -subj "/CN=${FQDOMAIN}" -addext 'basicConstraints=CA:FALSE' -addext "subjectAltName=DNS:${FQDOMAIN}" -addext 'keyUsage=digitalSignature' -addext 'extendedKeyUsage=serverAuth' -out server_

	import uuid, json

	def find_all_keys(key, var):
	if hasattr(var,'items'):
	for k, v in var.items():
	if k == key:
	yield v
	if isinstance(v, dict):
	for result in find_all_keys(key, v):
	yield result

	#!/bin/zsh
	function cleanup {
	if [ ! -z "$TMPD" ]; then
	rm -rf "$TMPD"
	fi
	}

	trap cleanup EXIT

	if [ "$#" -eq 0 ]; then

	// helper.h
	// two functions in this dylib - helper and helpersecret
	void helper();
	void helpersecret();

	from AppKit import NSPasteboard, NSFindPboard, NSStringPboardType, NSString

	def get_fboard():
	fboard = NSPasteboard.pasteboardWithName_(NSFindPboard)
	if NSStringPboardType in fboard.types():
	return fboard.stringForType_(NSStringPboardType)

	def set_fboard(findstr):
	fboard = NSPasteboard.pasteboardWithName_(NSFindPboard)
	fboard.declareTypes_owner([NSStringPboardType], None)