A bill that’s currently making its way through the New York state assembly would require smartphone manufacturers to build in the ability for law enforcement to decrypt or unlock phones on demand.
- New York bill would give law enforcement a backdoor into your smartphone” TheNextWeb.com

This is no different that asking building doors (Commercial, Home, or otherwise), safes, file cabinets, vehicles, pad locks  and bike locks to be unlock-able with one master key. 

What could possibly go wrong?

Videos especially on user services like YouTube & Vimeo, sometimes have panned audio that are terrible, sometimes only on one channel or have bizarre mastering such as this video.

Go to Accessibility -> Audio and check “Play Stereo Audio as mono” 

That’s it! Don’t forget to uncheck it when you’re done!

Occasionally in your adventures on the internet, you’re bound to encounter cue/bin disk images. For this example, I’m using an old PSX game, Crash Team Racing and converting it for use with pcsxr, OS X/Windows Playstation emulator, however, this isn’t the only reason for converting to ISOs as Parallels / VMWare and VirtualBox all use ISOs.

Method 1) Roxio Toast

In the era of disk burning, Toast was THE utility to own and still is, if you happen to still use optical media. If you happen to have a copy, it’ll convert BIN/CUEs to ISOs without much trouble.

Step 1) Launch toast, select image file

Step 2)  Drag the bin file to Toast

Step 3) Select  from the file menu, “Save Disk Image…”

Step 4) Save ISO

You may get an error prompt on naming the disk, type in a name and proceed. At the actual save dialog to be sure to change .toast to .iso and save. Congrats, you’re done!

Method 2) Binchunker

Binchunker is a CLI utility, meaning it’ll take a few terminal commands to operate. Its pretty easy once its set up as you simply need to run a single command to spit out an ISO. Most guides for using Binchunker are pre-10.11 (El Capitan) and suggest installing Binchunker to /usr/bin. OS 10.11 really wants you to avoid using this so we’ll be using the “rootless” method. Users running old versions OS X may be able to use the now defunct GUI wrapper BChunkerFE, but I was unable to, despite my damnest to make it work. To my knowledge, the only freebie utility for OS X that’ll convert ISOs is Binchunker, fortunately, its fast, free and easy to use. Users with even basic terminal familiarity shouldn’t have any problems.

Step 1)

Install MacPorts; the full instructions are here including the download links. MacPorts is package manager and compiler for open source software.

Step 2)

Open a terminal and type:

Now you’re able to run binchuncker

Step 3)

Binchunker requires the paths to the bin and cue files and always follows the following pattern:

or the less terminal savvy, dragging files to the terminal window will automatically type the path to the file. In the terminal type (with a trailing space) and do not hit return:

Drag the bin file to the terminal window, it should read:

bchunk -v path-to-file/my.bin

Make sure there’s a trailing space after bin and drag the cue file. It should now read:

Now name your file by typing in your desired name. Note: You do not need to type .iso as the file will be given the .iso suffix.

Hit return and binchucker will do its magic; the completed .iso will end up in the root of your user/home directory. Congrats, you should now have an ISO file.

If you’ve recently updated to OpenEMU, you may have a problem importing newly supported consoles (PSX, N64, etc.) or are having problems playing games after the update.

Step 1)

Go to /Users/<your-user-name>/Library/Application Support/ and locate the OpenEMU folder and drag it to a temporary spot, such as the desktop.

Note: You may need to enable your users ~/Library.

Step 2)

Launch OpenEMU, it’ll take a second to launch. Then run check for updates. Likely your update didn’t fully take, and you’ll see the pop up for OpenEMU 2.0.1. Install your update.

Note: You may need to manually install the OpenEMU drag and drop if you do not see the update.

Step 3)

Relaunch the application. You should now see more console options. Quit.

Next, you’re going to need to go to /Users/<your-user-name>/Library/Application Support/OpenEMU and your old OpenEMU folder.

Drag your old Games Library folder into the /Application Support/OpenEMU folder.

Step 3.5) Optional

Recovering your Game Saves requires more work. There should be several more folders with names of the emulation cores like PicoDrive, SNES9x, GenesisPlus, etc. and Save States folder. Drag all these folders (excluding the Cores, Bindings, Bindings Configurations and openvgdb.sqlite file).

Step 4)

Relaunch go to your preferences. Reinstall your cores. Congrats! You should have a working OpenEMU.

Note:, Mupen64Plus won’t play all games. Super Mario 64 is a good test.

As the lead front end dev for on a redesign of a Fortune 100 company’s corporate site, I was told the client loves gifs... so much so they want to have the ability to post animated gifs for their Hero image. 

Their Hero image is size is supposed to be 1440 x 700… and double density. So much for Google Site Speed.

Some will burn me for saying this but I think shutting down Apple’s pro software line is not such a bad idea. The problem of the OSX platform is not the software.

Pier Bover, The problem of OSX hardware in 2016

There’s a reason why my blog posts about Mac Pro drive the majority of traffic to my blog and echos my own reaction to the abysmal Mac Pro 2013. In the nexi-verse of 2016, creative pros are switching to Windows. 

If hackintoshes were more viable, I’d of ditched Apple hardware ages ago. I tried. I really did. 

In your OS X adventuring you may come across this message: 

“Application Name” is damaged and can’t be opened. You should move it to the Trash.

Fortunately, there’s a giveaway. The icon shown is the Security & Privacy icon. Go to your prefs, to Security and Privacy and in the “Allow apps downloaded from:” set to Anywhere.

Now try relaunching the application. It should launch now.

Then go back to your security and privacy and set it back to “Mac App Store and identified Developers” (if it wasn’t set there before, you really should. Some of the best apps aren’t in the Mac App Store)

There are two fantastic posts already on upgrading to OS X 10.11 El Capitan from 10.10 Yosemite regarding Apache. 

• How to set up Virtual Hosts in Apache on Mac OSX 10.11 El Capitan
  
• The cure for El Capitan “breaks” locally vhosted .dev sites
  

I followed the instructions and found that Apache still was giving me Internal Server errors and Internal Server error 500s. It turned out for whatever reason; the mystery was my vhosts needed error logs.

Previously my vhost entries looked like this:

Once I added both the error log and custom log, I stopped getting the errors.

Considering that highest end iMac best all but the highest end Mac Pros, its a safe bet that the Mac Pro is due for an upgrade. Pike’s Universum found evidence of a likely new Mac Pro model with 10 USB 3.0 ports. 

Call me a cynic, but if the hypothetical Mac Pro returned to one with 4 PCIe slots, one could add as many USB 3.0 ports as one so desire.

I recently updated to OS X 10.11 El Capitan and received an “Update Needed” login screen, that looked like the following, but without a guest user.

Photo Credit: StackExchange

After a bit of digging, it was apparent that FileVault was the culprit (encryption).  I booted up my copy of Mountain Lion and was able to access my drive with my encrypted password. However, it was apparent I needed a newer OS to decrypt it as the option was greyed out.

I pulled my drive and stuck it in an external enclosure and fired up my MacBook Pro. 

1) Access the drive from another copy of OS X

Boot your problematic Mac in Target disk mode or plug the drive into an external enclosure or simply boot another copy of your OS or recovery partition, the requirement is Yosemite or El Capitan (and perhaps Mavericks) to decrypt Yosemite/El Capitan drives, 

2) Launch Disk Utility

If you’ve booted from your recovery partition, disk utility is available on the menu> Otherwise, Disk Utility can be found in its normal location: /Applications/Utilities

3) Find the drive in question, and select Turn off Encryption under the File menu.

Turn off encryption, maybe elsewhere depending on your OS version. See the previous link for more details.

4) Check status

You can check the status using from the terminal:

Look for the"Conversion Progress," note if you run this right after enabling the task you may see that your conversion progress is -none-, wait for a few as the drive is still unlocking.

It took me several hours to decrypt a 750 GB SSD through USB 2.0. Now my drive is bootable. No need to reinstall. You can re-encrypt the drive using FileVault in the background.

If this happens to a decrypted drive, try option booting. If that doesn’t work, run disk utility on the offending drive then option boot.

Today I was faced with a taxing problem; I’ve been left without any way to use the database credentials for my local copy of a drupal website I’m working on. The only person who knew the server info is out of town, so I was left to get creative.

After several battles trying everything from rewrite rules to middleware; I arrived at the stupidest and best solution. Without needing to modify a single line in my grunt task, I included a link in my footer to my local version of my CSS file, a simple <link href=“local.lvh.me/path/to/app.css”> 

BrowserSync refreshes the local CSS file for CSS injection, meanwhile staging server still works. So much for the “correct” solution.

Anyone googling some variety browsersync remote server injection or something to that effect may save some time by just using the stop-gap measure until a better workflow can be established. It’s not a proud moment, but at least I’ll be able to work more smoothly for the remainder of the week.

You’re probably here because you’re seeing the following your browser’s console.log:

And perhaps you’ve found posts like “How-To: Enable CORS in BrowserSync” and it didn’t work. 

The problem isn’t BrowserSync but Apache. You’ll need to configure your local server. Following the guide, “Getting CORS to work with Apache” here’s what you need to do. Users using MAMP will have to translate these instructions, to use the MAMP files associated instead of the /etc files in the system.

Step 1) Make sure you have httpd.conf mod_headers.so enabled.

Go to /etc/apache2/ and use your favorite text editor to open httpd.conf, you’ll need to use admin access to edit the file. For non-terminal users, Its easiest done through the terminal. 

Locate 

(for me it was roughly about line 120) and uncomment it if it hasn’t been already. (Delete the #). 

Save and exit (control x)

Step 2) 

from the /etc/apache2/ go to the extra director

Step 3) Modify your Vhosts

use your favorite text editor to open httpd.conf, you’ll need to use admin access to edit the file. For non-terminal users, Its easiest done through the terminal. 

Locate your vhosts entry of the local domain.

It should look something like following:

Add the following within the directory tags if they exist.

Save and exit.

Step 4) Restart Apache

In the terminal use the following command:

You may need to restart grunt or gulp.