After the Zoom v4.6.10, Zoom broke support for external webcams, and apps like Snap camera (snap chat filters for your desktop computer). This is due to the recent versions more closely following security provisions pushed by Apple that libraries now must be validated and thus breaks the ability to use external camera sources.

I personally use EpocCam Pro and my iPhone as a camera as its a much higher quality camera (I'll explain this below).

The following is based on a reddit discussion.

1. Update Zoom to the latest version
2. Install Xcode via Terminal xcode-select --install
3. Once installed make sure Zoom is closed and run this in Terminal
   codesign --remove-signature /Applications/zoom.us.app/

Using a phone as a webcam with Zoom

There's no reason to buy a dedicated webcam if you don't mind using your phone or have an old smartphone lying around. Your smartphone's camera is undoubtedly better than any dedicated webcam on the market, so you might as well use it.

After enabling Zoom for external cameras, install Epoc Cam on your iPhone or Android phone, there's a free version (iOS, Android) and paid version (iOS and Android) that removes watermarking, and enables higher resolutions.

1. Enable external cameras for Zoom using the above hack
2. Install EpocCam or EpocCam Pro on your phone
3. Install the drivers found EpocCam's website, kinoni.com (scroll to step 2)
4. Launch Zoom
5. Launch EpocCam (make sure your phone is connected via wifi to the same network your computer is on)
6. Select EpocCam from Zoom, and it should connect.

Portland, March 23rd and March 24th, 2020

I've meant to make another new reality post, and I've put off as it seems trite, as by now almost everyone is experiencing it globally.

Biking to work is now a bit of a novelty. Usually, I'm one of the very few bikers to be found in downtown Portland these days, although I've seen a fair amount of leisure biking now that the weather has turned nice. Some bikers have an apocalyptic vibe, wearing sunglasses, gloves, and bandanas, taking the face mask recommendation to an absurd degree.

I usually see a few other bikers, but on 03/25 on my bike ride into work, I saw one other biker. Just one. Headed the opposite direction, and that was on in the South East, but I did see a lot of people walking.

Since then, with the nicer weather, I've seen more people on bikes, but mostly limited to the South Eastern neighborhoods that I frequent.

Bad Policy

Portland, 12th street, April 07

It's hard not to talk about the politics of Covid-19, as Donald Trump is wholely unqualified As he's either willfully ignorant or simply lacks the mental faculties to comprehend, let alone take action on such a multifaceted problem. There have been weeks of reporting that he and his staff ignored the health experts. The Guardian called his latest briefing presidential tantrum after tireless reporting that DJT ignored key advice. Meanwhile, Trump continues to make dictatorial edicts towards states who are acting responsible and using Covid-19 as a way to roll back regulation. NPR ran a line-by-line breakdown of his promises, A Month After Emergency Declaration, Trump's Promises Largely Unfulfilled. Trump gives himself a perfect 10. Meanwhile, he constantly plays with firing Fauci. Trump has a very delicate ego.

Quite frankly, if you do not believe Trump botched his response to Covid-19, you are willfully ignorant of the facts. Hospitals lack safety supplies. Trump failed to follow the recommendations of Health experts. People have died because of his gross incompetence. He has not delivered his promises and continues to give poor advice to Americans. History will not be kind to DJT.

Bad Reporting

Mericado Food Carts, April 5th 2020

Also, I'm frustrated thus I'm going to direct it against something absurd I've seen posted a few times Big Brother during the coronavirus crisis: GPS data shows which Oregonians are following ‘social-distancing initiatives’ GPS Data Shows Eastern Oregon Isn’t Listening to Social Distancing Directives. You can see the "quality" journalism from WWweek and The Oregonian, itching to slander eastern Oregon. While I might have some political differences being a craft beer and single-origin cold brew drinking, bike commuting web developer in Portland, I'm from truly rural Oregon, my graduating HS class was 60 people. I could list a laundry list of things my home town does not have (Mall, McDonald's, Fred Meyer, Walmart, StarBucks, Movie theater, etc) but the point is to get to a Costco or Trader Joe's or Home Depot, it's 139 miles. It's 25ish miles to Fred Meyer (Kroger) or Walmart or Safeway. There are two grocery stores and two hardware stores, though.

So I call bullshit. Straight up, 100%, USDA grass-fed bullshit as its using a flawed metric. Oregon is a rural state, it's population density would make it the #4th least populated European nation besting out Finland and Kazakistan, and we're fractionally larger than the United Kingdom by landmass. So for starters, anyone living in rural Oregon has large distances and considering roughly 3/4 of the state's population lives in the Portland Metro, Salem metro or Eugene metro, the density of the rest of the state is SPARSE. One look at the map shows the counties' "score" is a strike against population densities. Next up is the dubious methodology:

"Unacast’s location data comes from games, shopping and utility apps that tens of millions of Americans have installed on their phones — information the company normally analyzes for retailers, real estate firms and marketers."

This also seems like a test of modernity, job type, and technical affluence. I, for one, probably do not have unacast applications installed on my iPhone, and block location gathering for everything sans an exceptionally minor amount of applications and often use a VPN. All it shows is the movement has been MORE reduced in areas that have a lot more businesses that would be closed (service industries) or can be done remotely. Unacast is almost certainly isn't tracking devices at the tower level, so the data it's collecting is skewing towards likely Android users were until recently, it made it more difficult to block tracking, also meaning the more reduced users in rural areas might also not being accurately tracked.

After that, there's no way to gauge if the people are socially distancing, or what kind of travel people are performing. It's one thing to drive to the coast, but it's entirely another to drive to your job on the a farm or factory to keep grocery shelves stocked. Nor does it show if the people are clustering in densely populated areas. It's much easier to come into contact with hundreds of people in Portland just by visiting one or two stores, but doing that La Grande would take a lot more effort.

Escape

Windmills near Goldendale , March 28th and Pioneer Square, April 5th 2020

I've quietly taken to also hiking on BLM lands, which is a loaded thing to admit, but off by myself in the woods strikes me as a lot less dangerous than a trip to the local Target. Before someone lectures me like a parent, I get gas in PDX and bring my own food, and do not see other humans. I'm not part of the quarantine Olympics, or social media grandstanding. It's how I feel normal, just doing an activity that I'd normally do, but in some less common areas.

So recently, while using CS6, I was hit with a message from "Adobe Genuine Software Integrity Service" that looked like the following. I have a legit copy from my company but had installed CC demos to open up Illustrator files from CC in the past, and they're legal. I'm not sure what I did to trigger this, but I found others who had been somehow dragnetted as well.

Being busy and also currently using Pixelmator Pro with some moderate success, I opted for the nuclear option and found the Adobe CC Cleaner Tool. Surely that should clear up the annoying pop-up? I removed all of the Adobe software on my computer and decided I'd reinstall Photoshop when I needed to again... and yet the pop up persisted after I had deleted all Adobe products off my computer. The popup didn't have a close button, and clicking "learn more" didn't remove it. I used the activity monitor and saw it was still running the Adobe Geniune task and force quit it. Hours later, it was back. This annoyed me.

As a UX developer, nothing irks me more than dark UX. The pop-up software failed to recognize I had removed the software in question, and better yet, why the hell is it still there if I removed all of my Adobe software? That felt deeply dishonest. Fortunately, I know how to grep and use htop. I debated for posting this as I might be helping out some would-be pirates but I'm annoyed that someone like me was sideswiped by this.

• Launch Activity Monitor from Applications -> Utilities on your Mac. View all the running processes and force quit any of the Adobe ones, especially the Adobe Genuine instances.
• Go to ~/Library/LaunchAgents and look for the com.adobe.GC.Invoker-1.0.plist although the version may change after you have read this. Trash anything with the adobe.
• Go to /Library/Application Support/Adobe and delete the AdobeGCClient directory

I can't say the messaging will return if I try to re-install Photoshop but at least it's stopped the damn pop up. Buy software, support your developers, but also... I might recommend supporting someone other than Adobe, like Bohemian Coding (Sketch), Affinity, and Pixelmator. Please don't email me asking for help on this topic, as I'm not in the business of assisting software pirates.

But this isn't true, and it just requires downloading the v3.3.11 drivers, which can be found here (direct link to the drivers on numark.com) or at theproduct pages.

Apple really obfuscates drivers in Mojave in about the worst way possible. I'm unsure if this method works for Catalina as I've yet to upgrade, but my guess is probably not.

I personally only have the NS7s, but this should work for the NS6, N7, NS7FX as well as they all share the same drivers.

1. Install the drivers
2. Reboot
3. You should see a System Extension Blocked message
4. Go to system preferences first thing, and then click Security and Privacy
   
5. Click the Allow button. This will bring up a list of extensions, check the Serato drivers, and look for any drivers that end with GmbH (low latency drivers) and check those as well and click ok.
6. The Numark drivers come with a utility that can detect if the NS7s are connected, they also should show up in your control panel as well.

Congrats, that's it, now you can use your Numark N series in Mojave. Serato DJ Pro is free for as well.

Left to Right: Downtown construction, Hosford-Abernathy Hopscotch with 92 steps, and Graffiti, March 19th, 2020

I really don't want to write about doom and gloom, but the word "husk" seems to be quietly reverberating across the city. Layoffs are happening, and they're happening fast, it hit one of Portland's star tech companies were one of my best friends works, with 50+% layoffs in a single day... and pay cuts for the remaining staff. He described it as a "bloodbath".

My brother and sister-in-law meanwhile are trying to figure out the future for their company, Bandon Rain Unique Craft Ciders. They were planning a taproom this summer, but now like most breweries, they're looking at a delivery operation just to keep interest alive. They make a wonderful product, but they've yet to bottle, and their life-blood has been keg sales. Now every restaurant, bar, and taproom is either closed or offering to-go food in a desperate plea to survive. The OLCC seems to be a bit relax for once, and although we could take a cue from Kentucky.

Protecting our culinary arts is going echo off the walls of every town and city. I just hope the shouts are heard. The PNW was a foodie paradise before foodie was a word. Oregon is a state that prided itself home to the best breweries on the planet, fantastic coffee, renowned vineyards, and home to the best damn cheese in the world. We've enjoyed these things for decades, and to lose them would be a travesty. This isn't though just for Oregon or the PNW, but goes for all the regions, everywhere. Food is sustenance, and sustenance is life. There's a reason why we cherish those who excel in it as it forms one of the bedrocks of culture. Humanity certainly will survive but at a cost. I'd much prefer this to be financial than cultural.

Universal Basic Income has to be a new reality. Meanwhile, in a nihilistic fashion, the Whitehouse is asking to delay layoff figures, so the carnage might be hard to measure. Oregon seems to trail Washington and California. It's a dice roll, will we have a lockdown? Portland shoppers sure think so.

On a more positive note, bike rides home have been uplifting. I had to dodge and weave people around the waterfront yesterday (dare I say crowds?) as people are still going for runs, walking the dog, and trying to find enjoyment.

Unknown solo hiker, Wahkeena Trail, March 20th, 2020

I left work a bit early with Becky and hit the Columbia Gorge to visit Wahkeena Falls and Fairy Falls. There were quite a few people out, and Angel's Rest lot was packed in a way even for a Friday was beyond what I'm used to seeing. Unlike downtown, there was a bit of sterility among hikers, by avoiding acknowledging each other as if social sanitizing their behaviors. Usually, people are friendly and smiling. If I could think of a better word, I'd use "somber" to decribe the mood but it doesn't accurately describe the experience.

It was another night of social distancing in a city park with beers among friends. I picked up Crowlers for $6 from Wayfinder. I hope their business makes it. I hope all of them do.

Powell's Books 'stay well & well read', March 19th, 2020

Social distancing on the docks, Portland, March 18th, 2020

Normal is the buzzword for Wednesday. News media has run amock with it, and the most on the nose being the local Willamette Weekly, "This is the new normal". The other buzzword is likely to be the "Shut-in Economy" as people demand at-home services. Amazon is hiring big in PDX, and sadly this might upend local shopping as we know it. In the book, The Warehouse a series of terrorist attacks, causes everyone to close in and fear going outdoors, work, and shop exclusively from the oligopsony, Amazon-like corporation. It turns out it's much more mundane.

Work is work. Coworkers are still cool, and like everyone, we're scrambling to figure ways to stay connected, including a running group where we log our exercise as health is a concern for all of us. Hopefully we have work in the future.

I decided to start an office wellness program: Since Target is down the street, I'll start a morning trek to score toilet paper, I don't intend to horde it, just get enough in case an office mate runs out and needs a few rolls, they can swing by and pick it up. There should be one community source than each one of us hoarding for the end times. It's all in the name of reducing stress.

After work, biking home has a soulful serenity, as people in pairs of twos mill around and enjoy just being among each other and outside. Even behind the beauty is the melancholy backdrop, as the iconic Powell's announced it's response plans.

10th Street at 10 am, Portland, March 19th, 2020

I met two of my friends for beers in Laurelhurst park last night, sitting a few feet from each other, talking and drinking. This is the new normal.

This blog has never been directly about me. It's always been mostly how-to guides that are reflections of problems I've encountered in adventures in tech. Maybe you know, maybe you don't, but the cliff notes are I've been working in tech since 2010. I moved from Eugene, Oregon, to Portland, Oregon, in 2013. Many people visit my blog, in fact nearly 20,000 people do a month. Despite the numbers, I don't know if I have any connection with readers.

So I've decided to shift the blog a bit as it seems impossible to just mindlessly blog about tech without addressing the elephant in the room. This means letting my actual life bleed into this blog. I haven't decided on a format, but I'll let it organically evolve, as such things have had a habit of working themselves out. It probably won't be daily, and it'll probably occasionally have politics, which professionally I tend to avoid. It'll also still contain helpful blog posts around silly technical issues, as always

Portland's downtown isn't a ghost town, but it feels perpetually like Portland's downtown at 7 am on the weekend. There's some bustle, but a bulk of businesses are closed, and offices are empty. I have the luxury to work from home, but in an ironic twist, for once, I do not want to as my apartment starts to feel more like a jail shared by two people. Thus, I'm the only person in an office space that's designed for roughly 45-50 people and usually occupied by about 25. As such, there's no one really to endanger, although I have a feeling I'll see a coworker or two finding the same sort of solace in an office space of all places.

It hasn't hit me hard, as inconveniently dodging mindless people involved with their cellphones still feels like a relief. I'm, however, far from an introvert, and thus, even the basic interactions of getting take out are welcome from Cafe Yumm.

The iconic coffee shops are closed for the most part (tried both Stumptown and Heart in my area), and restaurants have desperate "We're open! Take out only!" messaging. It makes me wish I had more money to give. It's strange to see so much infrastructure dedicated to people be somewhat void of them.

One of the more ironic fates is for years has been a sense of paranoia and fear from people of many political persuasions that big government is bad and inefficient. Here we are, makers of our own doom with a president who shut down an NSC pandemic unit despite being briefed on an eerily similar scenario and incapable of understanding basic facts and now we're forced to come to terms with slash and burning of the government. Death and taxes are the two truisms but have ever considered death being delayed by taxes? Perhaps a functional federal government isn't so bad after all.

Yep, it's a Corona post. You literally cannot escape it, as it's the unending vortex. With pretty much all entertainment slowly being whittled away: pro sports, college sports, restaurants, concerts, movie premieres, theaters, plays, theme parks (even Vegas), gyms there's little else to focus on other than news, and how little there is with the all of those as mentioned above being closed. The global recession is on its way.

What's clear is the worst has yet to come and will define a generation in the way 9/11 defined a previous one as it has the creeping paranoia of post 9/11 with the despair of the 2008 stock market crash. Even if the virus disappeared tomorrow, there'd still be life before the panic and life post-panic. It's a broad spectrum and reach makes it different than other tragedies as it's happening at a granular level, per person, creating macro-event that is felt by everyone.

There are some silver linings as there likely to be some societal changes as vaccines will become en vogue. Hopefully, a nation will find more common ground with its neighbors as everyone will be experiencing the effects of society on pause, regardless of socio-economics. Just maybe, also those who don't value science will start to do more as we're all counting on sciencing our way back to normalcy.

That said, things are going to get rougher as incomes shrink, entire sectors are going to be hurt with cascading waves. There'll be some people who prosper and profit, but most will not. We've already seen some of the American psyches at work, filled with paranoia and creeping anxiety, causing the typical spike in guns and ammo sales, coupled with a newfound obsession with toilet paper. To borrow Bill Maher, "people are scared shitless."

I don't have any real salient advice as I'm neither a healthcare professional nor a high ranking bureaucrat. I've seen some positive pieces, asking people to buy gift cards. I've also seen the first gofundme for a small Jazz club in Portland. It isn't enough, but at least people are looking for solutions. For the interim, I'd suggest reacquainting with the great outdoors as in North America, most of us live near beautiful splendor, as we have many biomes and geography to explore. It's a chance to unplug and go hiking, mountain biking, kayaking, or whatever your flavor is.

Lastly, the best resource I can name is Ars Technica's Don’t Panic: The comprehensive Ars Technica guide to the coronavirus, demostrating why they're the best in the biz (the author has a PhD in microbiology).

As per whatsmybrowser.org, Edge is Chrome on Windows...

...and as per whatsmybrowser.org, Edge is Edge on macOS.

I imagine this will be sorted by the "what's my browser" genre of sites in time but still amusing for the time being. I wrote up my thoughts about the death of EdgeHTML in late 2018.

With Wordpress 5, Gutenberg has introduced a (nearly) modular experience for content creation, allowing for amazing customization previously not seen in the open-source world. Gutenberg also has an active port for Drupal, and even allows Drupal modules to be inserted into pages and promises full compatibility between Wordpress and Drupal. Suddenly Gutenberg seems like the solution for the woes of CMSes.

A Brief overview of Gutenberg's workings

Gutenberg works because of it's simplicity. CMSes previously always fell apart when the user wanted to enter content that a template was equipped to handle. This meant adding fields and/or modifying/creating a new template. The way Gutenberg approaches this is to simply store HTML with flags around the content to define a Gutenberg block. Rather than using multiple database fields, Gutenberg stores its data within the post-body. This in itself isn't novel, but how it's handled is.

A Gutenberg block has two presentations:

• An editor view visible when creating a page or post
• The rendered page (front end) that a regular visitor sees

Where Gutenberg is clever is that the block for the admin view, the markup is parsed into a React component, and the states for the component are captured and written into the block as the developer sees fit. A Gutenberg block can actually consist of Gutenberg blocks inside Gutenberg blocks, meaning developers can leverage pre-existing blocks to create new blocks.

The big downfall is that the markup is very fragile. If you were to change a Gutenberg block's HTML output, all previous blocks will result in errors such as “This block appears to have been modified externally”. Gutenberg does include validation.

Where Web Components come in

Below is the save function for a really simple Image block I wrote.

      save: props => {
            const { imgURL, imgAlt,  imgURLSmall, selectControl } = props.attributes;
          return (
              <div className={selectControl} >
                <picture>
                  <source srcset={ imgURL }   media="(min-width: 992px)" /  >
                  <img src={ imgURLSmall } alt={ imgAlt }/>
                </picture>
                  <caption>{imgAlt}</caption>
              </div>
          );
      },
    

Let's say, at a later date I wanted to change how my image block renders, and changed markup :

      save: props => {
            const { imgURL, imgAlt,  imgURLSmall, selectControl } = props.attributes;
          return (
              <div className="responsive-image">
                <picture>
                  <source srcset={ imgURL }   media="(min-width: 992px)" /  >
                  <img src={ imgURLSmall } alt={ imgAlt }/>
                </picture>
                <div className={ selectControl}><caption>{imgAlt}</caption></div>
              </div>
          );
      },
    

You'll notice that it now has an image container with a different class, and the caption now has a parent div. Every image on the site would now be receiving a “This block appears to have been modified externally”. One vector would be validation, but an even simpler solution would be to avoid this error by using a web-component. In this hypothetical, I've offloaded all the rendering to a web component, called my-image

      save: props => {
            const { imgURL, imgAlt,  imgURLSmall, selectControl } = props.attributes;
          return (
              <my-image src={imgURL} alt={imgAlt} small-image={imgURLSmall} selectControl={selectControl}></my-image>
          );
      },
    

Not only do we consolidate all the markup to prevent validation problems, we also have the bonus of the web component world. Any frontside JS features, perhaps a lightbox for our responsive image, could be handled, complete with encapsulated CSS. The opportunities only expand as you leverage slotted content.

I plan to update this post with actual code demos soon. Stay tuned.

After a few discussions and my previous blog post, I've noticed that I've changed my tenor on macOS, by far my most loved Apple product. I used without question profess macOS as the superior OS* (aside from gaming). Unfortunately, this post is going to feature some serious nerdage without a lot of explination, for the sake of brevity.

Now that asterisk has expanded to include a lot more things. Take the following: I cannot properly stream a 4k movie ¹ in surround sound ² in HDR ³ on an Nvidia GPU ⁴ or be sure it's using hardware decoding ⁵.

Let me break that down:

1. macOS currently does not support the latest DRM that Netflix most other DRMed streaming services use. macOS is capable of playing back 4k media. Windows can play back 4k Netflix in Edge and its app. Vudu and UltraFix also support 4k Windows playback. Windows users face the same issue as Mac users with Amazon Prime and Hulu.
2. macOS still does not have any multichannel decoding for popular consumer codecs from Dolby or DTS. Even the Apple touted AAC can do multichannel audio, but macOS has no ability to decode to multichannel outputs. macOS can route multichannel audio via CoreAudio using prosumer/professional hardware, but to this day, no front end for software exists to route multichannel audio to analog outputs. It can, however, pass pre-existing bitstreams via SPDIF and HDMI in a few applications, most notably VLC and not any Apple software.
3. 10-bit support for macOS is completely bonkers. My MacBook Pro 15 inch 2017 has a Radeon Pro 555x and reports 10-bit on the internal display. The internal display is not 10 bit, but rather 8 bit. My Mac Pro 2010 has a Vega 56 connected to a BenQ PD3220u (a true 10 bit panel, not FRC) reports 10-bit, but it's unclear when/if 10 bit is actually being piped to the display as I can't seem to read the bitstream info. Mac OS does not any consumer formats for HDR support regardless. Windows 10 will automatically in games trigger the HDR color profile on the monitor as it detects the HDR10 bitstream. macOS never even does this. By visual tests, it appears my MacBook will output 10 bit to the monitor. The Vega 56 will not but reports otherwise.
4. Apple, as of 10.13 has actively blocked NVidia support for any non-Keppler GPU. Want an RX 2080 for your Mac Pro 2019? It'll only work in Windows. The spat has drawn widespread media coverage outside the Mac universe. Theories range from eGPU support to Nvidia and Apple stalemating over CUDA. Whatever the case, Mac users are severely handicapped in GPU choice.
5. Apple no longer officially supports hardware decoding for certain codecs for non-T2 chipset enabled computers. My MacBook Pro 2015 in Catalina now uses the T2 chipset to assist with H264/H265. My Mac Pro, despite having much better hardware without the power consumption requirements, does not. It is unclear if the Mac Pro 2019 can use its $5000 GPU options to assist with these codecs.

I do not like Windows 10's UX (Why does it have two sets of control panels still!?!?) and inborn advertising, but you gotta hand it to MS. I can run some programs written for Windows 98 using compatibility mode, any 32-bit apps, and it comes with pretty good threat detection with Windows Defender.

Apple did something though that MS never had to clear two nearly impossible hurdles with the Macintosh platform. The first, switching from Mac OS 9 to *nix, and jumping x86 to PPC. This meant to a few less-than-ideal solutions like Carbon, which eased Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X. That said, x86 Cocoa Apps (Carbon's successor) from 10.6 often do not work in macOS 10.15. Apple does not offer a compatibility mode. Apple also dropped 32-bit binary support in 10.15 arbitrarily, meaning old apps are even less likely to work. This is not a confidence builder for a platform's robustness.

As far as threat detection, Apple's "security" almost entirely comes from negatively sandboxing the user in 10.15 and over-reliance on signed code, which ironically puts power users at greater risk, as they're the most likely to disable system-integrity-protection. It's evidenced by Malwarebytes' report that Mac malware outpaced Windows PCs threats for first time in 2019. The T2 chipset has some interesting features, and eases things like disk encryption but also is wantonly silly for the most common threat vectors and gives less-educated users a false sense of security. Apple has gone to excessive lengths recently to iOSify its security by depreciating services like Kexts but still has yet to offer threat detection. The Mac Pro 2019 cannot use 3rd party SSDs in its two factory SSD slots because of the T2 despite plenty of M.2 adapters existing to Apple NGFF. If anything, the T2 chipset feels like kneecapping macOS with self-destruct button it can hit at any time, locking users out of their own hardware.

Lastly comes the most controversial statement, but macOS is not the fastest OS. You can take your pick of benchmarking site, but macOS on the same exact hardware routinely is bested by Windows (and, of course, Ubuntu). It's tough comparing benchmarks as many tasks aren't fully cross-platform, or some are heavily stilted towards a single platform (example, Java drastically performs better on Linux than Windows or macOS). That said, all things considered, Windows generally performs better than macOS by a noticeable margin, be it better-assisted technologies like CUDA, or DirectX, better ports, and sadly many native OS operations.

The last great push forward feels like 10.9 Mavericks when Apple introduced Timer coalescing, Memory compression, App Napping, 4k support/Retina for all (10.9.3), maximum RAM increase beyond 96 GB, IPoTB (ThunderBolt transfering between two Thunderbolt equipped Macs), ability call/receive Facetime and a notification system (finally putting growlr to rest). Compare that against Windows 8.1 (both OSes release in 2013) which was almost entirely damage control. I used to confidently say OS X was the best, but in the era of macOS my answer far more pragmatic: "it depends".

Every year, Jason Snell of SixColors does a round-up of Apple via a scorecard from various Apple pundits, the interesting takeaway was Catalina was a bad move. I always find this interesting, as an (exceptionally) minor one myself. Gruber has some of the most damning feedback.

If Apple has somehow determined that typical users need these sort of permission alerts, fine, but there should be a single switch for expert users to toggle to effectively say “I trust all of the software on my Mac”. Call it “Pro Mode”, call it “Developer Mode”, call it “Expert Mode”, whatever. But I don’t know a single expert Mac user who is not seriously annoyed by the heavy-handed security design of Catalina. Not one. Every single expert user I know is annoyed. That is a bad place for MacOS to be. MacOS 10.16 needs a serious course correction to fix this, and if 10.16 goes the opposite way — growing even more heavy-handed in restricting professional Mac users from just using their machines as they want and expect to — I genuinely fear for the future of the Mac as a platform for serious computer users. Which is crazy considering that Apple just unveiled Mac Pro workstation hardware that can cost upwards of $50,000. - John Gruber, My 2019 Apple Report Card, daringfireball.com

Catalina marks the most significant regression in macOS functionality since Yosemite, with glitches aplomb. I've put off upgrading on both my Mac Pro 2010 and my MacBook Pro 2017 as I just didn't want to deal with the headache. This is only a delaying tactic as inevitably, I will be required to upgrade. While 10.14 was controversial for many users as it switched to Metal, it had to happen as OpenGL was a dead-end, and it made little sense for Apple to put it's GPU fate again into another OpenSource project when it had its own API.

Catalina's security conscience, as a friend pointed, was a bad pattern when Vista adopted it. It effectively trains a user to suffer alert blindness, and it actually encourages power users to disable SIP and turn off code-sign verification. Apple still refuses to introduce basic detection for when its walled-garden is inevitably scaled. All it can do is revoke certificates. This isn't very good. Having used Windows 10 and tried to use sketchy utilities like a save-file editor for an older video game, I'm impressed how reliably Windows Defender rejects applications. Granted, I'm not much of a Windows 10 user, so perhaps I'm skewed by ancedotalism but fact remains: Apple has no analogous feature to Defender. It still operates primarily on security-through-obscurity and user-hostility to promote its own app store.

Then to add insult to injury, Apple removed 32-bit Application support. There's plenty of older media utilities that'll be forever sealed to a 32 bit OS, I own a few audio utilities, and there are Steam games I have that aren't Catalina compatible. 32-bit executables weren't holding anyone back. Windows 10 has no plans to phase it out. Catatlina is exceptionally low on meaningful updates, sidecar being one of the big sells but strangely locking out hardware that is still capable of running it.

The OS has always been the catalyst for all my Apple purchases. I prefer macOS to Windows/Linux, and I prefer iOS to Android. I'm pretty sure any working professional doesn't by Apple products because of their hardware merits alone as I've yet to read of Windows users buying Macs only to run Windows full-time. You can make a strong case for the iPhone and iPad as it's indeed best in class. The Mac? Much less so. Apple is playing a dangerous game with macOS.

If I were scoring Apple's properties: the Mac line-up would get a C+, as most of its laptops still have goofed keyboards, the prices hikes have been rough, the iMac Pro is stuck. The Mac Pro is beautiful but priced out of reach in a way that feels out-of-touch. For its software, a D. iOS 13 was painful in its first releases and Catalina marks regression in functionality and bugginess. Also, there's been some idling on Logic and Final Cut Pro, although its new services all seem solid (Apple Arcade, News, TV+) and yet it's biggest win, Apple Maps landed in 2020.

I'm keeping my fingers crossed with Apple's renewed interest in "pro" comes OS upgrades and software worthy of its high priced hardware.

I'm writing this blog post using Panic Software's newest IDE, Nova.A lot has changed since the first release of Coda in 2007. At that time, we were still primarily making websites, and thus it was an all-in-one-tool tool for a different era where an FTP (yeah, remember those?), a web preview, terminal, and editor all in a single window akin to Dreamweaver without all the bloat. Panic holds a special place in my heart, as they're based here in Oregon, and hailed from PDX long before it was "Portlandia," I was a super fan of Audion, used Transmit for quite a while and as fate would have it, I work two blocks from Panic's downtown location.... I fully admit I change the color of their sign colors every now and again.

I used Coda from about 2007ish to 2013, and professionally during 2010-2013 and served, forever leaving Dreamweaver behind. I've since gone from Sublime to Atom to WebStorm, but fingers crossed, I'll circle back to the Panic.

I'm struck deeply by how much the "IDE" application has morphed into its own sub-genre of UX that defies the native OS's visual language. Any of the usual UI is generally disregarded; File trees, scrollbars, icons, gradients are all abandoned. The multi-pane interfaces look nothing like what we've come to expect as the OS standard. In short, code editors seem to exist outside of their host. I have a feeling outfitted with similar color schemes. The average user would have a tough time identifying Visual Studio vs. Atom vs. Sublime vs. Webstorm at a quick glance. However, Nova is certainly the child of Coda, as it carries a similar "Mac-like" feel. It looks fantastic in its black-text-on-white-background. For whatever reason, the dark theme doesn't seem as "nice," and it's largely due to the Apple UX choices. Gradients, transparencies, and San Francisco (the font). It's all here.

Picture: Nova top, Atom middle, Webstorm bottom

Here's what I've noticed thus far in a bullet point of unorganized thoughts:

• My first order was to switch the default font to Operator Mono. I'm happy to see ligatures are fully supported, but it's not making use of italics; thus, the beautiful monospaced cursive I love isn't rendering properly. I don't see any documentation on theming. Maybe I'll look under the hood later...
• In-window organization feels a bit more natural than the other IDEs, allow you to drag and position windows nicely. However, trying to split both horizontally and vertically doesn't work as it should. Based on the UX, I'm sure it will.
• It feels zippier than Atom/VisualStudio. Electron kinda sucks and hence why I went to Webstorm.
• The visual language all about denoting tabs by a top-border. Blue is a local document, and green is a local terminal, and purple is a remote server. The borders are only visible on the front window.
• Auto tag completion works as expected. Tag/bracket highlighting is nice is and well done.
• Docker annoyingly triggers the terminal process forever spinning icon.
• I can't rename terminal windows like Webstorm. It does name the name of the active task.
• Auto soft-wrap is, by default, on. I'm always curious as to who doesn't use soft-wraps? Am I the unpopular opinion guy when I think this should be the default?
• Extensions are the main event. Sublime paved the way on this, and Atom/Visual Studio ran with it. It's pretty clear what's the big new killer feature. Pretty much all the documentation that exists currently for Nova is for extensions. It makes sense, functionality for IDEs should be flexible and Nova is no different. The only question is can it attain critical mass? Hopefully.
• Edit: Tried Nova on my 25,000+ word blog post and the delay between each keypress and rendering to screen was brutal. Looks like Nova for now isn't as speedy as Coda 2 or even Atom.

All-in-all, Nova feels like progress.

Diskwarrior still even two decades and change later is a lifesaver. I found my work Time Machine HDD had become corrupted, and Apple's disk utility couldn't fix it. However, I received a "Directory must be rebuilt from a recovery disk because of MacOS security restrictions" error from Diskwarrior. Fear not, you do not need to do this. Under 10.14+, you'll need to grant it the proper permissions.

Step 1: Open the Security and Privacy panel in System Preferences

Go to the Security & Privacy Preference pane in the System Preferences, and click the Privacy tab. Scroll Down on the left-hand side to Full Disk Access.

Step 2: Unlock and click the Plus button

You'll need to click the Unlock button and enter your password to ungrey out the +/- buttons. Once you've entered your password, click the + button as pictured.

Step 3: Locate Diskwarrior and add it

By default, Diskwarrior will install into the Applications folder, locate it (or where you store your copy of Diskwarrior) and click open.

Once you've completed this, you should see Diskwarrior in the Full Disk Access list.

Congrats, relaunch Diskwarrior, and you should be able to use Diskwarrior. Fair warning, Time Machine repairs can take hours and a lot of RAM.

My girlfriend at her company holiday party won a pair of PowerBeats Pro by Beats and gave them to me as she already has the Airpods. I haven't personally owned a set of wireless earbuds ever, as it never been a huge ordeal for me to use wired headphones, and Bluetooth still kind of sucks. They also have the benefit of not requiring a charge, meaning one less thing to charge repeatedly in my life. That said, the place that wireless headphones are attractive is working out, and the beats are designed for such an activity. Here are my collected impressions as someone who's finally slipped into wireless.

• The beats aren't nearly as comfortable as other ear wrap designs. The early Shure Earbuds, the e2cs used a cable ear wrap design I found more comfortable.
• The ear hooks are moderately goofy to put on even after a week I'm still a bit cumbersome putting them on or removing them.
• They rest against the ear instead of in the ear. I bought foam tips hoping to change this. They only minimally block out the outside world, making them not the best for noisy environments like riding a bike to and from work or the gym.
• Apple has completely screwed over the consumer forcing wireless headphones. I still hate it.
• Apple knows the Bluetooth experience is shitty. Hence it has developed its own proprietary system with its W1 and now H1 chipsets as opposed to making it an open standard or at least something like MFI where manufacturers can produce there own. The experience of pairing is wonderful for the iPhone and they way wireless headphones should work, but Apple purposely has kept the H1 experience limited to the Airpods line and a few select Beats headphones.
• The 3D presentation of the beats devices on iOS is garish and feels like an advertisement. If I'm at the point of pairing the device with my iOS device, it's pretty obvious I know what it looks like as it's in my hand.
• I've only owned one pair of Beats headphones (the original earbuds). I bought 15 years ago for $99 at an Apple store. These aren't nearly as overblown in the soundstage but are certainly bass-heavy, but slightly thin, with an airy/breathy feel. I'd say that audio quality is less than that of 1more Triple drivers, which MSRP for $99 but have tumbled down into the $65-70 range. The PowerBeats Pro's soundstage is simply just ok, with an exaggerated soundstage, and overly bright treble and meaty bass at the expense of rich mids.
<liThe charging case is big. The magnet functionality, though, is undeniably cool and handy.</li>
• The controls work just like a cord on a headphone, although I find myself hitting the play/stop button when inserting into my ears.
• Auto-pausing when removing an earbud is nice.
• Call quality is about as good as I've experienced from any type of headphone. It's honestly my preferred method for speaking on the phone over speaker now as there's no risk of cable noise. My girlfriend reported "clicking sounds" like I was typing when I was walking outdoors at the beginning of a call but then said it stopped shortly after. Otherwise, there's been little complaint from anyone I've talked to.
• With corded earbuds with mic controls, often sweat causes the play/stop to trigger, it is nice that this doesn't happen when working out.
• I can charge and listen to my iPhone. I'd be able to do this if Apple hadn't actively blocked case makers from producing cases with audio jacks.
• The looks are in the eye of the beholder. I'm indifferent. The beats logo doesn't mean much to me, and I do like that I'm not wearing the same white earbuds everyone else seems to have. That said, the Airpod Pros seem like a better product.
• The lack of noise blocking is my biggest point of contention with these.
• The foam tips are better than the rubberized tips they ship with as they reduce the "thud" effect from walking.
• Battery life seems pretty good.
• The range on the PowerBeats Pro is much better than expected, I've walked 50 feet away and still had a connection my large office.
• The PowerBeats Pro immediately showed up in MacOS as already authorized in MacOS which is a nice touch but there isn't a snappy "hand off" which would have been nice. I don't expect seamless uninterrupted audio, but it'd be nice if I could I could set up auto switching. I'd envision as any not system alert from the iOS device or MacOS device triggers the take-over (assuming the beats aren't already receiving an audio stream). Pause your audio on your iPhone, and hit play on your Mac and the beats auto pairs to the Mac, and then repairs to the iPhone when the Mac is paused and the iOS device plays an audio stream.

Ultimately, had I paid $200-$250 I would have experienced some buyers remorse. These are not my daily driver earbuds as they're not as comfortable, nor do they block out sound (which is great when doing noisy chores like vacuuming, or biking etc). They're (mostly) a pleasure to use but the fit/comfort is subpar and the lack of noise blocking is surprisingly bad. I imagine its Airpods Pro or bust for the Apple headphones.

“I never understood wind, I know windmills very much, I have studied it better than anybody. I know it is very expensive. They are made in China and Germany mostly, very few made here, almost none, but they are manufactured, tremendous — if you are into this — tremendous fumes and gases are spewing into the atmosphere. You know we have a world, right?”
- Donald Trump, Dec. 21. 2019

From the man, who thinks you can nuke a hurricane comes this verbatim quote.

I noticed there aren't any clear instructions on setting up Operator Mono in Webstorm or any of the Jetbrains IntelliJ IDEs. Changing the font doesn't work quite like one would expect, like the italics, but you can get it working with a little TLC. Out-of-the-box, my copy wasn't supporting alt-characters for italics and it needed to use a fallback font for characters. Webstorm like new IDEs support characters regularly not found in many fonts, called Orthographic ligatures (ligatures). These include less common font glyphs and assist by saving space and are more distinguishable. For examples of ligatures, see Medium.com Ligatures & Coding by Andreas Larsen. Adding the ligatures also seems to fix Operator Mono's italic character set although it could be Operator Mono vs Operator Mono SSM (Screensmart).

1. Download the latest release from the operator-mono-lig project and decompress it
2. You'll need to copy Operator Mono into original the directory located in the newly created folder, operator-mono-lig.
3. Next, open a terminal window and install fontools, pip3 install fonttools
4. Navigate to your newly created operator-mono-lig folder in the terminal and run npm install
5. The run ./build.sh from the root directory
6. Your newly created fonts will be located in the build directory
7. Next, install your fonts. The easiest way to install the fonts is to select all the fonts in finder and double click, then click install. This will install them correctly and appear as new font family, Operator Mono Sm Lit, or something similar.
8. Go into Webstorm, Open preferences, Editor, then Font, and select your newly created font.

To get Webstorm to behave like Atom or VScode, you'll need to manually edit the code styles to use the italics. It only takes a few minutes. I recommend viewing code within Atom as a reference point using Operator Mono as it makes very good use of Mono's italics. I also have guides for Setting up Operator Mono for Atom and Setting up Operator Mono in Coda.

Troubleshooting: I noticed that the original Operator Mono font I had didn't work, I redownloaded Operator Mono SSM, and it worked. SSM is the limited weight set that removes several weights like thin, ultra). File names cannot have any spaces. I'm also using the material UI for WebStorm, which may or may not make a difference.

I try and not recommend hardware based on my preferences on the Definitive Mac Pro upgrade guide, but here are my opinions for anyone looking for a cheat sheet on what to buy.

CPU

Mac Pro 4.1/5.1 configurations vary quite a bit but there's really only two CPUs to really consider due to pricing. The x5680 is cheap, even with a dual CPU Mac Pro, its roughly $70 to purchase 2 CPUs, making it almost the same price as a single x5690. The x5690 is the best CPU a Mac Pro 4.1/5.1 can house.

• Better: x5680 - 6-Core 12M Cache, 3.33 GHz $35 (used)
• Better:x5690 - 6-Core 12M Cache, 3.46 GHz $60 (used)

GPU

GPUs on the Mac Pro are limited to the AMD sphere for 10.14 Mojave and 10.15 Catalina. The RX580s are floating around often for cheap, and they're a good entry-level card. The 560 and 570s are even cheaper, but it is hard to beat the price-to-performance. The Vega 56 is probably the best overall value as its performant and can be flashed to a Vega 64 and lands just shy of the Vega 64 in performance after flashing. The Radeon VII is the king and hard to come to buy. At $700, it's expensive but much mightier in the compute benchmarks than the 5700 XT, making it a much more well-rounded card for video editing and other GPU accelerated non-gaming tasks.

• Good: RX580 $100 (used) or $185 (new)
• Better: Vega 56 $225 $300 (new)
• Best: Radeon VII $600 (used) $699 (New) (Mojave and above only)

Soon the Radeon 5700 XT will be supported for the Mac which occupies a space between the Vega 56 and Radeon VII. The Radeon 5700 XT is great for gaming but it computational scores are low, it performs much lower than the Vega 64 in Blackmagic's Da Vinci Resolve.

Storage

There's a lot of storage options for the Mac Pro. The Mac Pro doesn't support bifurcation, so inexpensive dual PCIe cards out a no go. The SanDisk Ultra 3D splits the price and cost intersection nicely besting a lot of the really cheap SSDs like Kingston, although the Samsung 860 is a better SATA drive. Moving the drive to SATA3 doubles the max-transfer speed. The HP EX950 again is another splitting the middle drive between price and performance, in spitting distance of the Samsung Evo 970. NVMe requires a firmware flash for 4,1/5,1s and much more leg work for 3,1s.

• Good: SanDisk Ultra 3D 500 GB $65 + optional SYBA SY-PEX40039 2 Port SATA III PCI-e 2.0 $15
• Better: HPEX950 1 TB - $130 + PCIe card $30
• Best: IO Crest IO-PCE2824 (dual NVMe) $200 and Samsung 970 EVO 1TB SSD 2x $170 or Samsung 970 Pro 512 GB $150 x 2

Memory

Not a lot to say, for the 4,1/5,1 buy 1333 Mhz, go for 16 GB DIMMs if you can afford it.

• (Mac Pro 3.1) 800 MHz DDR2, FB-DIMMs
• Better: (Mac Pro 4.1/5.1) 1333 MHz DDR3 $17 per 8 GB DIMM
• Best: (Mac Pro 4.1/5.1) 1333 MHz DDR3 $28.50 per 16 GB DIMM

I/O

There's no reason to mess around on the cheaper solutions, Sonnet USB cards are problem-free and do not require external power. The Allego Pro and Allegro 3.1c are the same, featuring two USB 3.1 controllers with 10 Gbps (2.5 GB/s) for 4 ports. The only difference is the interconnect. The regular Allegro has one USB controller for 5 Gbps (1.25 GB/s) total bandwidth.

• Better: Sonnet Allegro USB 3.0 $50
• Best: Sonnet Allegro Pro USB 3.1 Type A $129 or Sonnet Allegro 4-Port USB 3.1c

Wireless

Wireless is slightly annoying, but there are three options: Use a PCIe card, use a mini-PCIe card, or buy the parts online separately. Honestly, its best to just read the very long upgrade guide.

This example is not a hypothetical. The meal-kit company Blue Apron revealed before its public offering that the company was spending about $460 to recruit each new member, despite making less than $400 per customer. From afar, the company looked like a powerhouse. But from a unit-economics standpoint—that is, by looking at the difference between customer value and customer cost—Blue Apron wasn’t a “company” so much as a dual-subsidy stream: first, sponsoring cooks by refusing to raise prices on ingredients to a break-even level; and second, by enriching podcast producers. Little surprise, then, that since Blue Apron went public, the firm’s valuation has crashed by more than 95 percent. - Derek Thompson, The Millennial Urban Lifestyle Is About to Get More Expensive, The Atlantic

I don't usually do much news commentary but I've been skeptical of the gig-economy and mommy-services for ages.

The bigger question for me has, how did Silicon Valley start-ups manage to fleece investors for this long? The example that jumps to my mind is MoviePass, which was hemorrhaging money so fast that it went as far as to change user passwords to keep users from using its service. Many of these services existed as a "hack" via legal shenanigans. Labor laws are catching up, as Gavin Newsom signed AB 5.

When these services actually charge what it costs to use them, like eScooters, or have the double-whammy of having to raise prices to be profitable and content with actually employing the people they're exploiting and be profitable, it's going to be brutal. Many customers will be priced out from food delivery to ride-hailing services. They'll be just like the services they "disrupted" but only with a nicer app to show for it.

In 2015, I wrote an article, Visual CSS Regression Testing 101 for Front End Developers, where I covered the two competing philosophies of Visual Regression testing, Comparative vs. Baseline. Since then, PhantomCSS was sunsetted as PhantomJS was not as good as running Headless Chrome and BBC's Wraith works but wasn't ever as useful as I'd of liked.

What is Visual Regression Testing?

There are other primers on the concept, but it's worth quickly covering visual regression testing. In the course of development, CSS/JS/templating changes can potentially have unintended changes on your website or web app. Visual Regression Testing seeks to automate the laborious task of comparing visual elements to see if any unexpected changes have occurred. This is performed by running scripts with headless web browsers to render the webpage, then capturing its renderings, and using a show diff tool to compare the screenshots, flagging changed elements for review. Once approved, the latest changes are "approved" as the gold master and then saved to compare against next time you run the test.

Now, four years later, Backstop.JS emerged, mixing (mostly) the best of both Wraith and PhantomCSS.

Back when I first investigated visual regression, I spent time discussing baseline and comparative tools. Baseline visual regression tools in the talk I attended were complete screen renders, whereas the comparative tools could query individual DOM elements. In hindsight, The distinction between baseline and comparative is somewhat of a moot one, as comparative tools can do baseline checks as they're able to query the screen, be it the entire body. That said, tools like Wraith that only do full-page screen renders can't make individual element selection thus are far more limited. At this point, I doubt either term gets much play, nor does it need the distinction as people have gravitated naturally to a tool that can query DOM elements.

Backstop.js

Backstop.JS gets major points out the gate as easy to use. Just run the global npm installer, then navigate to your project directory and run backstop init. It'll create a boilerplate template ready for you to start writing tests. This a serious upgrade, considering I once wrote a 12-step guide on how to install PhantomCSS.

Running tests is also easy, run backstop test from the root directory and backstop will take care of the rest. Approving a batch of changes is easy, just punch in backstop approve.

Next up is formatting: All the tests are created in using JSON, which is easy to read and familiar. I've never been super into YAML, and I like JSON. Everyone likes JSON.

Where Backstop shines is how quick I went from never having written a test to having queried a roster of visual elements found our company website. Start up by declaring a set of screen sizes, and I created my own mobile, tablet, desktop, and large desktop screen sizes.

{
  "viewports": [
    {
      "label": "phone",
      "width": 320,
      "height": 480
    },
    {
      "label": "tablet",
      "width": 1024,
      "height": 768
    },
    {
      "label": "laptop",
      "width": 1280,
      "height": 800
    },
    {
      "label": "highdef",
      "width": 1920,
      "height": 1080
    }
  ],
}

My first tests were entire pages, then I quickly graduated to advanced Backstop, testing our mobile menu. The mobile menu had a few considerations:

• It must be clicked
• It only makes sense to test it on a mobile resolution
• There's a delay for the animation

{
  "label": "Emerge Menu Open",
  "cookiePath": "backstop_data/engine_scripts/cookies.json",
  "url": "https://dev-site-url",
  "referenceUrl": "",
  "readyEvent": "",
  "readySelector": "",
  "delay": 20,
  "hideSelectors": [],
  "removeSelectors": [],
  "hoverSelector": "",
  "clickSelector": ".hamburger",
  "postInteractionWait": 1000,
  "selectors": ["header #site-navigation"],
  "selectorExpansion": true,
  "expect": 0,
  "misMatchThreshold" : 0.1,
  "requireSameDimensions": true,
  "viewports": [
    {
      "label": "phone",
      "width": 320,
      "height": 480
    }
  ]
},

And there you have it; my mobile navigation is being tested against JS breakage and CSS changes. I'm fairly impressed. There's even integration for Running custom scripts. The only hiccups I've had is with AJAX content. I used remove element to hack out the DOM elements, which created reliable elements to test around the AJAX content, and for the AJAX content itself, I used the readySelector.

Lastly, chaining events is a bit cumbersome as you'll be coding up scenarios, but its still much less overhead than the days of PhantomJS.

Chaining Backstop to deploys

The next step is to chain backstop test to deployments. The demo shows Backstop playing with Jenkins deployments. At my office, we use bitbucket pipelines. It's a matter of translations.

Git flow

The gif work flow is pretty straight forward with Visual Regression testing, ignore the test folders, and track the gold masters. Backstop creates a new timestamped directory for each test in /backstop_databitmaps_test for each test. Depending on the number of tests, you run, it's easy to churn out hundreds of megabytes of images, so be prepared to have a trash collection method if you're running via a deployment method that might require such.