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© Rakhesh Sasidharan

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Trying out macOS 11 (Big Sur)

Posted: June 24th, 2020 | Tags: , , | Category: Mac | §

So WWDC 2020 was this past Monday. I didn’t watch the keynote but I downloaded macOS 11.0 soon after that from Beta Profiles. Not sure what I was thinking really, it’s a bit of a silly move downloading a beta version of macOS, especially considering even “stable” versions like 10.5 have been flaky. Anyhoo, too late to think about it now … the only solace is that at least I didn’t install it on my primary Mac, so assuming it doesn’t cause any data corruption like delete my iCloud files or emails I am good. Worst case I will just re-install the older version. 

First impression – the new look took a minute to get used to, but once I did I started liking it. It feels a bit too bright to me, but that’s probably just my eyes. 

I couldn’t try the new colourful wallpaper as it would keep going to the Catalina wallpaper whenever I’d select that. I was able to use the Big Sur mountain wallpaper though – that works. 

Funny this, just earlier that day I was reading a blog post about monitors (yay for the author – good post!) and had turned off font smoothing in the OS. Interestingly, after upgrading the option is no longer available. Has Apple turned off font smoothing for good in macOS 11? That’s good if they have. 

I love the newish Music and Podcasts app. They are new in the sense that they are newer than the version in 10.5. I prefer the new look and I enjoy using these apps now. I also like the new look of the Dock, how it has rounded corners and is slightly lifted from the base (bottom or sides of the screen – wherever it is placed). For some reason with macOS 11 I have moved the Dock to the left side as I find it better there. Somehow the change in look has made me feel like putting it there (when I had put it there with earlier versions of macOS I didn’t like it). 

The upgrade broke a few apps as expected:

  • Bartender is unable to control the menubar items any more.
  • Karabiner Elements is broken (you can follow this issues page for a discussion). I simply turned off Karabiner and stopped using the Microsoft Sculpt keyboard for now (that’s the reason I was using Karabiner Elements) and went back to the Magic Keyboard.
  • Toothfairy works as usual – good!
  • No issues with Alfred 4 either.
  • Contexts works but the theming is broken. Not a big deal.
  • Homebrew broke. Thankfully the fix is simple – download the latest Xcode and CLI tools from Apple. Thanks to the people at this issues page for pointing me in the right direction. 
  • That’s it for now! This is not my primary Mac so I don’t have too many apps there. The only other apps I have are stuff like LastPass, Bitwarden, BBEdit, TextMate, iTerm2 … and all these work fine. 
  • Oh, forgot! Safari Developer Edition doesn’t even launch. Expected I guess. (Update – 26th June – now fixed in an update)
  • The Music app still has this bug wherein when I am listening to a song and I add it to my library it stops playing the song. I’ve had it since macOS 10.15, I just put up with it.

Checkout this WWDC 2020 music playlist from Apple while you are at it. Good stuff!

macOS: find app using Secure Input

Posted: February 10th, 2019 | Tags: , | Category: Mac | §

Ran into an irritating problem today with my task switcher Contexts. It stopped working and there was an orange exclamation mark in the menu bar saying some application has Secure Input turned on and until I close it Contexts can’t work. Initially it told me that Firefox was responsible, and I was about to close it when I realized that whenever I switch to a different app it blames that app as having Secure Input turned on. 

So clearly the issue is elsewhere. This page gives you a list of apps that can usually have Secure Input turned on. Thanks to this forum post I learnt that you can find the offending app by running the following command:

ioreg -l -w 0 | grep SecureInput

Find the process ID from the kCGSSessionSecureInputPID field. Then use a activity monitor (easier, you can sort) or the following command:

ps auxww | grep <pid>

In my case the culprit turned out to be loginwindow. I tried to kill it but the system warned me that it would log me out. I was in no mood to get logged out, so upon a whim I tried locking and unlocking the system. That worked! :)

macOS Terminal make Ctrl-Left go to beginning of the line

Posted: January 30th, 2019 | Tags: | Category: Mac | §

In most places on macOS the Ctrl-Left key makes the cursor go to the beginning of the line. But in the terminal, when I press Ctrl-Left it puts in the following ;5D.

To change this, if one is using bash, we can use the bind command. You can type bind -p to see all the keyboard bindings in bash (thanks to this blog post). 

I need to map Ctrl-Left to the beginning -of-line function. 

If I open Terminal and go to the Keyboard section I see Ctrl-Left is mapped as \033[1;5D. 

NewImage

So all I need do is the following two commands (one for beginning of line, another for end). 

bind '"\033[1;5C": end-of-line'
bind '"\033[1;5D": beginning-of-line'

Add these to .bashrc and it’s always bound in every new session. 

While in the Keyboards section also tick the “Use Option as Meta key”. This lets you use the Alt/ Option key in the Terminal. So I can do Alt-Left and Alt-Right to go back and forth one word. 

NewImage

VPN client over-riding DNS on macOS

Posted: January 19th, 2019 | Tags: , | Category: PowerShell | §

Spent a lot of time today with this. Such an irritating topic! Primarily coz there doesn’t seem to be much info on how to do this correctly.

I have blogged about this in the past, in an opposite that. That time once I connect via VPN my macOS wasn’t picking up the DNS servers offered by VPN. That was a different VPN solution – the Azure Point to Site VPN client. Since then I have moved to using GlobalProtect and that works differently in that it over-rides the default resolvers and makes the VPN provided ones the primary.

Here was my DNS configuration before connecting to VPN:

Once I connect via GlobalProtect these change:

And I have no idea how to change the order so that my home router stays at #1 and the VPN provided one is added as #2.

Initially I thought the “order” in the DNS configuration might play a role. So I tried something changing the order of my home router to be better than the VPN one. I tried both setting it to a larger and smaller number, neither worked.

This is how one can try to change the order:

Didn’t help.

As an aside, don’t use tools like ping or nslookup to find how your DNS resolution is working. From this StackOverflow article which I’d like to copy paste here:

macOS has a sophisticated system for DNS request routing (“scoped queries”) in order to handle cases like VPN, where you might want requests for your work’s domain name to go down your VPN tunnel so that you get answers from your work’s internal DNS servers, which may have more/different information than your work’s external DNS servers.

To see all the DNS servers macOS is using, and how the query scoping is set up, use: scutil --dns

To query DNS the way macOS does, use: dns-sd -G v4v6 example.com or dns-sd -q example.com

DNS-troubleshooting tools such as nslookup(1), dig(1), and host(1) contain their own DNS resolver code and don’t make use of the system’s DNS query APIs, so they don’t get the system behavior. If you don’t specify which DNS server for them to use, they will probably just use one of the ones listed in /etc/resolv.conf, which is auto-generated and only contains the default DNS servers for unscoped queries.

Traditional Unix command-line tools that aren’t specific to DNS, such as ping(8), probably call the traditional gethostbyname(3) APIs, which, on macOS, make use of the system’s DNS resolver behaviors.

To see what your DHCP server told your Mac to use, look at the domain_name_server line in the output of: ipconfig getpacket en0

 

So ping is probably fine but nslookup and dig are definitely a no-no.

Anyways, in my case I finally decided to do remove the DNS entries provided by VPN altogether and replace it with my home router DNS. I’d have to do this each time I reconnect to VPN, but that can’t be helped I guess. If I launch scutil from the command line and look at the list of services and their DNS settings I can identify the one used by GlobalProtect.

I just chose to over-ride both the SearchDomain and ServerAddresses with my local settings (thanks to this post and this):

For my own copy paste convenience for next time, here’s what I would have to do once I launch scutil:

Ok, so far so good. But what if I also want resolution to the VPN domains working via VPN DNS servers when I am connected? Here I go back to what I did in my previous blog post. I create multiple files under /etc/resolver for scoped queries, each having different search_order (queries to internal DNS have a lower search_order and a timeout; queries to external DNS have a higher search_order).

Update: Turns out GlobalProtect over-writes the DNS settings periodically. So I made a script as below in my home directory:

And put it in my crontab:

 

New MacBook Air

Posted: August 11th, 2018 | Tags: , , | Category: Gadgets, Mac | §

So I finally dipped my feet into the Mac ecosystem and bought myself a MacBook Air. Yes, I know it’s 3 years old but what the heck – it was the cheapest Mac I could buy! Went for the 8GB/ 256GB i5 version as that’s the one I found on a deal with our local online shopping provider. Might have gone with a different spec if I decided to go with the version available officially with Apple but a) that had a UK English keyboard and b) the same model there was about 33% more expensive so if I were to get a better spec’d one I’d be spending a lot lot more (bringing the costs up to the MacBook range). 

One thing about MacBook purchases though – it isn’t easy. I mean, with an iPhone. you only have to choose along the color & size, and then pick the capacity you want. But with Macs I have to worry about size, CPU (i5 or i7), RAM, and storage; and each choices ups the price by so much! And more than the price the choices just exhaust. It’s the paradox of choice concept (I’ve read the book) and the feeling is similar to Windows laptops where there’s so many choices and you just get bogged down trying to pick what you want and eventually let go of the idea itself. Which is what I had done here (let go of the idea) until my wife suggested this MacBook Air model that was on a deal and I thought what the heck and just purchased it. My focus here is to get something that will get me a toehold in the Mac ecosystem and probably settling on price as a criteria than anything else was what was needed. 

Oh, and the MacBook Air is the only one with a decent set of ports. Yikes! All the other MacBooks have just USB-C ports so there’s the additional cost of dongles and the hassle of having to carry them around. If it wasn’t for the dongles and the fact that the MacBook has a 2nd generation butterfly keyboard which is known for problems (which is fixed in the MacBook Pro’s 3rd generation keyboard) I might have gone for the MacBook. It has more colors too. 

Anyways, back to the MacBook Air. I’ve had it for less than a day now so these are just initial thoughts. 

  • I love the keyboard and size. There’s a lot of room for the hand, and the keys feel good to type on. It’s a very “lapable” laptop. 
  • I thought I’d be put off by the 1440×900 screen as I am so used to full HD nowadays and when I had recently tried using a 1440×900 external monitor I didn’t like it at all, but no I don’t mind this screen. Yes I notice the difference but I don’t mind it. 
  • I like the feel of the OS. I had various people tell me it is complicated and unintuitive etc. but I don’t see that. I love the two finger way of scrolling up and down pages and going back and forward, and the three finger way of moving across apps. That feels very intuitive and much better than having a touch screen. There’s a lot more gestures but I am yet to get the hang of that. I tried to memorize those initially but then figured I’ll pick them up as I go. I think I know the main ones that I am interested in at least. 
  • It’s a jarring experience going to the App Store and seeing all the prices! Boy. It’s like the pre-iPhone days when software used to be expensive. Pretty much everything is US$10 and above, and if something is free it is bound to have a in-add purchase. Even the same app which for iPhone & iPad is (say) US$5 would be US$50 or above here! I imagine it is because the code base is different and so there’s more effort? I don’t know. That’s something I am having trouble getting my head around. The Windows OS store apps are much cheaper (but yeah there aren’t many). Anyways, the App Store is like a trip back in time to expensive software. I don’t think I’ll be buying much apps. Or I hope I won’t be buying much apps – it is not a sustainable option. 
  • The laptop came with MacOS High Sierra 10.13.1 and I couldn’t update to the latest 10.13.6 via the App Store. I downloaded it and tried to upgrade manually, but that failed saying the volume doesn’t meet some pre-requisites. I downloaded 10.13.2 and 10.13.3 and was able to upgrade to them manually, but 10.13.4 fails with the same error. That’s when I came across the macOS Recovery options, especially the Internet Recovery option which you get to by pressing Option-Command (⌘)-R (instead of just Command (⌘)-R for regular recovery). Internet Recovery actually connects to the Internet (it prompts you for Wi-Fi details etc) and can download the latest version and do a fresh install. When I tried this it complained my disk was still being encrypted and so it cannot upgrade. Am guessing that is why the update previously failed so I’ll wait for the encryption to finish and try again. That is so cool though, being able to connect to the Internet and do a recovery! Windows recovery options are nothing compared to this. Even the Recovery screen has a good GUI etc. (of course, that’s easy for Apple to do as it controls the hardware; versus Microsoft which can’t cater for every single display where Windows might be installed on). 
    • Update: After encryption completed I was able to install 10.13.4 successfully. I tried to just to 10.13.6 directly but that failed. I realized that these updates are deltas so I’ll just have to install 10.13.5 and then 10.13.6. Tried that and now my system is finally up to date. Yay! Pity MacOS doesn’t do cumulative updates. 
  • What else? The Finder is good, the uniform way in which each app shows a menubar where you can go and find its options etc. is good. I love the UI as expected for its consistency and sleekness. I also loved how I could just click on the Apple icon and go to “About this Mac” to quickly find its OS version, free storage etc. I don’t know why I liked that, but I found it incredibly thoughtful of Apple to present this information via this option. 
  • There’s still (obviously) a lot to pick up. Keyboard shortcuts and gestures etc. 
  • Oh, forgot. Installing apps from outside the App Store is cute in the way you download the DMG file and then (in most cases) just drag and drop the application to the Applications folder. I remember reading somewhere that in the Mac each application is sandboxed to its own hierarchy or something so it’s not like Windows or Linux where everything just writes to a common place and there’s dependencies and DLL hell etc. 
  • I love how the MacOS restores all my previously open apps after a reboot/ shutdown. It’s just the other day I was wishing Windows could do something similar (my laptop crashed and I had to restore all my Windows) and it was pleasant to see the MacOS do exactly this whenever I’d reboot. Such a user friendly and useful thing to do!

More later!