Ed Glazer edglazer

macOS Internals

Understand your Mac and iPhone more deeply by tracing the evolution of Mac OS X from prelease to Swift. John Siracusa delivers the details.

Starting Points

How to use this gist

You've got two main options:

Intro

Out of the box, my SMB performance on macOS 12.3.1 would top out at around 20MB/s in short ~5 second bursts, which was absolutely horrendous, slow to navigate in Finder and slugish to interact with.

Since making these changes, I now get sustained ~80-100MB/s+ and instant Finder navigation which is superb and how things should be out-of-the-box (OOTB)!

May 2023 update: As of Ventura, the SMB issues were just horribly inconsistent and hard to maintain. Something in the combination of Unraid, macOS and SMB just doesn't play nice. I ended up binning NFS/SMB all together and heading to a locally hosted Nextcloud instance for file syncing, then using SFTP/Ansible Git flow for editing files within appdata.

Sources

Debug with GDB on macOS 11

The big reason to do this is that LLDB has no ability to "follow-fork-mode child", in other words, a multi-process target that doesn't have a single-process mode (or, a bug that only manifests when in multi-process mode) is going to be difficult or impossible to debug, especially if you have to run the target over and over in order to make the bug manifest. If you have a repeatable bug, no big deal, break on the fork from the parent process and attach to the child in a second lldb instance. Otherwise, read on.

Install GDB

Don't make the mistake of thinking you can just brew install gdb. Currently this is version 10.2 and it's mostly broken, with at least two annoying bugs as of April 29th 2021, but the big one is https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=24069

$ xcode-select install  # install the XCode command-line tools

Nerd Fonts for your IDE

https://www.nerdfonts.com/font-downloads

The following solution thanks to @hackerzgz & @snacky101 will install all nerd fonts;

brew tap homebrew/cask-fonts
brew search '/font-.*-nerd-font/' | awk '{ print $1 }' | xargs -I{} brew install --cask {} || true

So you want to modify the text of a PDF by hand...

If you, like me, resent every dollar spent on commercial PDF tools, you might want to know how to change the text content of a PDF without having to pay for Adobe Acrobat or another PDF tool. I didn't see an obvious open-source tool that lets you dig into PDF internals, but I did discover a few useful facts about how PDFs are structured that I think may prove useful to others (or myself) in the future. They are recorded here. They are surely not universally applicable --
the PDF standard is truly Byzantine -- but they worked for my case.

Brew Bundle Brewfile Tips

Copyright & License

Unless otherwise noted (either in this file or in a file's copyright section) the contents of this gist are Copyright ©️2020 by Christopher Allen, and are shared under spdx:Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 4.0 International (CC-BY-SA-4.) open-source license.

Sponsor

If you more tips and advice like these, you can become a monthly patron on my GitHub Sponsor Page for as little as $5 a month; and your contributions will be multipled, as GitHub is matching the first $5,000! This gist is all about Homebrew, so if you like it you can support it by donating to them or becoming one of their Github Sponsors.

	S1_Joy	S2_Joy
	1.662181	0.6112171999999999
	1.584762	0.6978757
	1.413029	1.19836
	1.99548	0.9504414
	1.981835	0.6698406
	2.159827	-0.0786763
	1.727152	-0.0233572
	1.90065	0.4239428
	1.627397	0.7201727

	import argparse
	import glob
	import plistlib
	import re

	from os import path, mkdir

	import yaml

	'''

	{
	"episodeid": 1397, // Don't change this
	"content": [
	{
	"punchline": "<BLANK>", // Use placeholder "<BLANK>". Can have text before/after.
	"decoys": [ // Default topics and "Joke for me" options. Each entry seperates topics/punchlines with " \| "
	"lasagna \| Lasagna has layers.",
	"pizza \| Pizza is less cheesy.",
	"raw tuna \| One stinks of fish, the other is sushi."
	],