vladak

My Passport Studio

I bought the My Passport Studio external hard drive on eBay in 2024 to provide Time machine backup to my old mac mini. Specifically I wanted something that can be connected over Firewire, to save the USB ports on the mac mini. This worked well until one day the drive died - performed I/O really slowly and made classical clicking sounds of stuck/failed hard drive head.

The disassembly of the enclosure is easy, just a bunch of screws. It is a nice enclosure, all alluminium. Replacing the internal drive with Samsung EVO SATA SSD yielded nothing - the drive was not detected. I tried bunch of other drives, esp. classic 2.5" 5400 RPM drive (from Seagate), however none worked.

When a spinning-rust drive is connected to the board, it will start spinning, so there is definitely power being passed to it, however it does not get detected. This is what Linux says:

[11948.216367] usb 1-1: new high-speed USB device number 5 using ehci-pci

vladak

Tailscale: Quad100 vs. ACLs/grants

Consider the following Tailscale grant:

{
	"grants": [
		{
			"src": ["tag:foo"],
			"dst": ["tag:bar"],
 "ip": ["*"],

vladak

OpenBSD APU notes

Install

• download installXY.img from https://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq4.html#Download
• verify checksum: openssl sha256 installXY.img
• write it to flash (on Linux): dd if=installXY.img of=/dev/sda

serial console setup

vladak

There seems to be some trouble when resizing a Chronicle Map after going from XStream 1.4.20 to 1.4.21 (which is security driven release) for non-Serializable objects.

Current Chronicle map still uses xstream 1.4.20: https://github.com/OpenHFT/Chronicle-Map/blob/343bb22247c17da12ee63b4099099c085fa0cf5f/pom.xml#L132-L137 so they have not found about the issue yet.

            map.getAll(tempFilePath.toFile());

            String field = map.name();

            map.close();

vladak

mac mini mid-2011 with eGPU

These are my notes on running mac mini mid-2011 with macOS HighSierra 10.13.6 with eGPU.

Hardware

original:

• mac mini mid-2011
  • Intel Core i5 2,3 GHz
• 16 GB DDR3 RAM

vladak

Learning Rust gotchas

That is, learning from C99.

Basics

• by default variables are constant. To make a variable mutable, it has to have the mut keyword:
  • otherwise it would not compile

vladak

jetkvm/dc-extension-firmware#1

solution/workaround from https://discord.com/channels/1270105230989594634/1367610331806957699/1367624533598802011

Jared Jones — 02.05.25 0:11 Instructions to update your DC Extension to Power on by Default

1. Unplug everything from the DC extension and bring it over to your PC
2. Find a USB-C to USB-C (or) USB-A to USB-C cable and attach one end to your PC.

vladak

The OnScreen LG utility reports: (3.04, 0.12.16, 4.18)

After the update to macOS Sequoia 15.4, the display no longer worked as USB hub, rendering external keyboard connected directly to the display over USB useless. Had to unplug and replug the display power for this to work again.

Links:

• https://apple.stackexchange.com/q/476079/453691
• https://forums.blurbusters.com/viewtopic.php?t=11593

vladak

For the home/end keys to work on external USB keyboard in macOS, it is necessary to set key bindings like so:

mkdir ~/Library/KeyBindings && touch ~/Library/KeyBindings/DefaultKeyBinding.dict
cat << EOF > ~/Library/KeyBindings/DefaultKeyBinding.dict
{
  "\UF729"  = moveToBeginningOfParagraph:; // home
  "\UF72B"  = moveToEndOfParagraph:; // end
  "$\UF729" = moveToBeginningOfParagraphAndModifySelection:; // shift-home
  "$\UF72B" = moveToEndOfParagraphAndModifySelection:; // shift-end
 "^\UF729" = moveToBeginningOfDocument:; // ctrl-home

vladak

context: JDK 21 support: oracle/opengrok#4459

existing PR from Lubos contains some of the changes: oracle/opengrok#4570

Specifically, all the URL() constructors are being deprecated in Java 21: https://docs.oracle.com/en/java/javase/21/docs/api//java.base/java/net/URL.html. The only way to get URL object is to create URI object first and then use toURL() method to convert it (the URL.of() static method requires URI argument).

Fun fact: URL can establish connection to the target using the openConnection() method (even via proxy).

My note: oracle/opengrok#4570 (comment):

I took a longer look at the departure from the URL() constructors yesterday. The URL class by itself does not support any encoding/decoding, it merely breaks down the URL into pieces. The encoding is then supplied by the URI class.