03/31/2022 Useful bash / zsh aliases:
https://lobste.rs/s/qgqssl/what_are_most_useful_aliases_your_bashrc
One I like, but did not see mentioned is as follows:
alias bc="bc -l"
which loads the math library and provides non-truncated results
for division.
From: https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2019/10/29/computing-pi-with-bc/
https://leancrew.com/all-this/2021/02/some-bc-stuff/
03/31/2022 Enable / disable low power mode on Monterey (12.x) with pmset:
$ sudo pmset -a lowpowermode 1
$ sudo pmset -a lowpowermode 0
From: https://osxdaily.com/2022/03/30/enable-low-power-mode-mac-command-line/
03/31/2022 History of MacOS Releases:
https://robservatory.com/a-full-history-of-macos-os-x-release-dates-and-rates/
03/28/2022 The rise of Python in scientific computing:
https://cerfacs.fr/coop/fortran-vs-python
It has been decades since I've used Fortran or had to
do scientific programming, but even I was using Fortran
it wasn't particularly likable or easy to use. Python
and numpy, on the other hand, are fairly likable and
easy to use, while not being *that* slow, which makes
it funto try out things that can be optimized later.
03/28/2022 Thoughts on retro-computing:
https://kevinboone.me/retrocomputing.html?i=1
I generally agree with this, with perhaps the exception
of the statement that "[o]ld computers are not, for the
most part, things of beauty, or even evocative of a lost
culture, like steam locomotives or duelling pistols."
A NeXT Cube, an Indigo, an Indigo2, an Iris, an O2, a G4
iMac (Lampshade), a SS2/SS10, G3 Pismo, TiBook (sans
delamination), and a G4 SawTooth/Mystic/Quicksilver, a
Qudra 700, a 20th Anniversary Mac, all of which are
probably considered "retro" now, could definitely be
considered "things of beauty" and are "evocative of a
lost culture" where users could easily work on their
computers.
03/27/2022 Interesting thoughts on Voyager (especially the observation
that "the crew settled down *awfully* quickly"):
https://danluu.com/voyager-story/
I can't help but think that a crew that took longer to
integrate would have made the first season more watchable.
Along the same lines, it was probably a missed opportunity
to explore a storyline where Seska finds out that she is
Cardassian but wants to remain Bajoran (a reverse Kira, if
you will). Her relationship with the crew and Chakotay
might have been much more interesting, not to mention that
we might have gotten stories like the Wire or Empok Nor.
03/26/2022 Debian 11.3 is available:
https://www.debian.org/News/2022/20220326
03/24/2022 OpenZFS Feature Flags Compatibility Matrix:
https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2022/03/25/zfs-compatibility/
03/22/2022 KeePassXC 2.7.0 is available:
https://keepassxc.org/download/
https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/releases/tag/2.7.0
https://www.ghacks.net/2022/03/22/keepassxc-2-7-0-update-whats-new/
03/22/2022 CrossOvers 21.2.0 is available:
https://www.codeweavers.com/support/forums/announce/?t=24;mhl=257259;msg=257259#c1
"CrossOver 21.2 includes over 300 updates to wined3d from
upstream Wine. We also included dozens of changes from
Wine 6.0.1 and 6.0.2 and updated to Wine Mono 7.0.
Audio now works on both Mac and Linux for Halo: Master
Chief Collection. We also fixed an issue with a recent
Steam update that was causing some connections to take
a very long time.
On macOS, we fixed a long-standing issue with mouse
control in Unity games. We also included fixes for the
latest Rockstar Games Launcher and Quicken updates that
caused those applications to stop working on M1 machines."
03/21/2022 Recent gravity wave detector studies rule out certain
scalar field dark matter models and dark photon theories:
"In December, a team led by Hartmut Grote of Cardiff
University reported in Nature that they had used a
gravitational wave detector to look for scalar-field
dark matter ... . The team didn't find a signal, ruling
out a large class of scalar-field dark matter models.
Now the stuff [dark matter] can only exist if it affects
normal matter very weakly - at least a million times more
weakly than was previously thought possible.
...
Meanwhile, [Keith] Riles [at the University of Michigan]
and his colleagues have been searching for signs of 'dark
photons' in data from LIGO ... and its partner [] Virgo[.]
... But the researchers found no such correlations in the
data. Their result, reported last year, means that dark
photons, if real, must be at least 100 times weaker than
previously allowed."
https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-tool-for-finding-dark-matter-digs-up-nothing-20220321/
03/21/2022 VLC v.3.3 for iOS 9.0+ will be available today:
https://www.videolan.org/press/ios33.html
Supports Phone 4S, iPad 2nd generation, 1st generation
iPad mini and Apple TV HD
03/18/2022 Shakespearean Play Essentials:
https://wronghands1.com/2022/03/18/shakespearean-play-essentials/
Previously, Regency Novel or Pandemic Life:
https://wronghands1.com/2020/05/26/regency-novel-or-pandemic-life/
03/18/2022 Notes on viewing the text in PDFs in Terminal on MacOSX:
https://srirangav.github.io/notes/osx_pdf_cli.txt
03/17/2022 BBEdit 14.1.1 is available:
https://www.barebones.com/support/bbedit/notes-14.1.1.html
03/17/2022 Falsehoods programmers believe:
https://github.com/kdeldycke/awesome-falsehood
03/16/2022 CERN experiments with super-cooled Helium with an electron
replaced with an anti-proton:
https://www.interactions.org/press-release/asacusa-sees-surprising-behaviour-hybrid-matter-antimatter
"[The researchers] saw a decrease in the width of the
antiproton spectral lines. Moreover, when they decreased
the temperature of the liquid helium to values below the
temperature at which the liquid becomes a superfluid, i.e.
flows without any resistance, they found an abrupt further
narrowing of the spectral lines.
...
The researchers think that the surprising behaviour
observed is linked to the radius of the electronic orbital,
i.e. the distance at which the hybrid helium atom's electron
is located. In contrast to that of many normal atoms, the
radius of the hybrid atom's electronic orbital changes very
little when laser light is shone on the atom and thus does
not affect the spectral lines even when the atom is immersed
in superfluid helium."
See also: https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/03/absolutely-bonkers-experiment-measures-antiproton-orbiting-helium-ion/
https://www.quantamagazine.org/icy-antimatter-experiment-surprises-physicists-20220316/
03/16/2022 QEMU 7.0 will have 9pfs for MacOSX hosts (yay!):
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=QEMU-7.0-Coming
https://wiki.qemu.org/ChangeLog/7.0#9pfs
Hopefully someday, sound for PPC and 3D acceleration for
Windows, respectively, will be merged in:
PPC Screamer Audio: https://github.com/mcayland/qemu/tree/screamer
PPC Screamer HOWTO: https://gist.github.com/akemin-dayo/0e9bdcd74b2ad7f0bcf56e0680256103
3DFX Emulation for Windows Guests:
https://github.com/kjliew/qemu-3dfx
03/15/2022 Pulsars may be the source of some of the positrons (anti-
matter) we detect here on earth:
http://www.sci-news.com/astronomy/gamma-ray-pulsar-filament-10619.html
https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.03506
03/15/2022 A new theory on ultra-light dark matter particles helping
matter to collapse into supermassive black holes during
the early days of the universe:
http://www.sci-news.com/astronomy/early-universe-phase-transition-supermassive-black-holes-10621.html
https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.128.081101
According to the article, this theory makes a testable
prediction on a type of gravity wave that could be detected
by next generation gravity wave detectors.
03/15/2022 Instructions on running FreeBSD 13.0 ARM64 on qemu on MacOSX:
https://srirangav.github.io/notes/osx_qemu_freebsd_arm.txt
03/15/2022 US Senate passes bill to make daylight savings time permanent:
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/03/us-congress-begins-march-toward-permanent-daylight-saving-time/
03/14/2022 Happy Pi Day / Einstein's Birthday!
03/11/2022 Some recommended Firefox privacy settings:
https://privacyinternational.org/guide-step/4330/firefox-adjusting-settings-enhance-your-online-privacy
03/10/2022 Interesting discussion about inflation:
https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2022/03/did-early-universe-inflate.html
and teleparallel gravity:
https://www.quantamagazine.org/in-mexico-cosmologist-hunts-for-cracks-in-einsteins-gravity-theory-20220223/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNKUW0vyzDU
03/10/2022 Disable recent tags in MacOSX Finder:
$ defaults write com.apple.Finder ShowRecentTags -bool false
$ killall Finder
To reenable recent tags in the MacOSX Finder:
$ defaults write com.apple.Finder ShowRecentTags -bool true
$ killall Finder
See: https://derflounder.wordpress.com/2021/11/29/disabling-recent-tags-in-the-finder-window-sidebar/
03/10/2022 I discovered something new about macports today:
$ sudo port reclaim
which, according to port(1), "[r]eclaims disk space by
uninstalling inactive ports and removing unneeded
installation files."
Not sure how I had missed this despite using macports
for years. From now on, I will have to remember to do
the following when updating macports:
$ sudo port selfupdate
$ sudo port -u upgrade outdated
$ sudo port reclaim
See: https://lists.macports.org/pipermail/macports-users/2022-March/050900.html
In other macports news, macports 2.7.2 is now available:
https://lists.macports.org/pipermail/macports-users/2022-March/050894.html