Wait, what?
I was running a script and I didn’t parse something correctly, it ended up creating a Unix user named ''. You know, an empty string.
Is this supposed to be a bug?
According to pw_checkname in pw_user of pw(8), it’s not rejected.
If you think this is supposed to be a bug, please let me know.
Around a year ago I got an M1 MacBook Air for work. At this point, a lot of people that I know use these Apple Silicon machines.
While my personal machine is running FreeBSD, many times I’ve been in a situation where I need to run FreeBSD on my M1 MacBook Air, at least as a Virtual Machine.
For 9 months I’ve been running the AMD64 version of FreeBSD on QEMU/UTM.app using emulation. It gets the job done.
But whenever I want to do FreeBSD development, I need a fast machine. While M1 is pretty fast, VM emulation is still slow.
The problem is that whenever I booted the arm64.aarch64 FreeBSD on QEMU, it would use so much CPU on the host, that my battery would die in an hour or so.
After a lot of searching, I finally found this, this and this, which eventually got me to this page on the handbook
1. Set Boot Loader Variables
The most important step is to reduce thekern.hztunable to reduce the CPU utilization of FreeBSD under the Parallels environment. This is accomplished by adding the following line to/boot/loader.conf:
kern.hz=100Without this setting, an idle FreeBSD Parallels guest will use roughly 15% of the CPU of a single processor iMac®. After this change the usage will be closer to 5%.
Configuring FreeBSD on Parallels
So I tried that, and here you go!
Ahh, finally, I can do some work.
That’s all folks…
What does modern macOS and old-school Instant Messaging systems (like AIM or Pidgin) have in common?
They both support “Status”, you know, that thing we had in IMs, where you can set yourself to “Do Not Disturb” and your avatar becomes red.
macOS, as always, does not call that “Status”, instead they call is “Focus”, but it gets the job done.
So yes, I’d like an IRL (In Real Life) version of DND (Do Not Disturb). Maybe my ears should turn red, but most people would confuse it with some other emotions.
That’s all folks…
I don’t remember the first bookmarklet that I’ve used, but as far as I can tell, I’ve never stopped using them.
One of the nicest things of WordPress on iOS is that I can use 3D touch to write a post instantly.
Yet, somehow, I’ve been using a typical bookmark on my computer. So I’d click on the bookmark, which would open my WordPress instance, then I’d click on Add New Post.
Even if I had the Add New Post page bookmarked, it would be “somewhere” on my screen.
But with a bookmarklet, I can make it a popup, which usually would center, and there would be no distractions as well. Just content.
I’ve been running my own instance of Lobsters for a while (at letstalk.netter.am) and one of the niceties is Lobsters’ bookmarklet to submit links.
I realized that I should use a bookmarklet for writing posts as well.
So here it goes.
javascript:{window.open("https://your.wordpress.blog/wp-admin/post-new.php", "NewPost", "popup");void(0)}And just like that, I can write a new post instantly, as I did right now 🙂
Technically, the first argument can be any URL that you wanna have front and center. Hope this helps you to write/blog/tweet more.
That’s all folks…
I think it was Mark Twain who said once,
Giving up smoking is the easiest thing in the world. I know because I’ve done it thousands of times
In reality, I’ve never felt addicted to smoking, sometime around 2018 I’ve even stopped smoking for like 9-10 months, but after a couple of stressful days I’ve started smoking again.
I made a deal with myself that next year I will run a marathon. I know it wont be easy, but at least I can try.
Obviously I started with walking and turns out my cardio is worse than ever, and hence, I will quit smoking.
So, a new event has been added to my calendar, well, multiple actually, where every 3 months I check, “hey, you didn’t start smoking again, did you?”
And hopefully, I will finally run a marathon.
That’s all folks… Wish me luck!
I’m a huge fan of the Dvorak keyboard layout, but if there’s one thing I love more than “Evolved vs Engineered” solution debates, is that nothing wins the ”standardized” debate.
That being said, the main reason I never moved to Dvorak properly was always a device not having a proper keyboard. Sometimes it was my Android phone with a weird ROM, but most of times it was my iPhone.
However, I just learned that Apple shipped the Dvorak layout with iOS 16.
Here’s Lilith‘s iPhone running iOS 15
And here’s my iPhone running iOS 16
And I’ve gotta say, it’s not bad at all
That’s all folks…
I’m running two VMs on my M1 MacBook Air. An x86_64 FreeBSD and x86_64 LureOS (illuria‘s OS), both are emulated.
and yet, somehow, according to macOS, my browser is Using Significant Energy.
To be honest, I believe macOS, but the real question is, how did we get to a place where a piece of software is consuming more power than a complete Operating System?
According to the 2018 edition of The Open Group Base Specifications (Issue 7), there’s a command named command which executes commands.
Wait, macOS is OpenGroup UNIX 03 certified, right?
command running uname -aI tried tracing back the history, macOS is mostly based on FreeBSD, as we can see in their open-source code.
So I started tracing back the FreeBSD code, and I found the current one.
I found the oldest commit about command in FreeBSD’s source tree, but it said
Import the 4.4BSD-Lite2 /bin/sh sources
builtins.def
So I opened up the SVN tree of CSRG, and there I found this
date and time created 91/03/07 20:24:04 by bostic
builtins.def
However, if I knew how to use SVNWeb, I’m pretty sure I’d navigate around the /old/sh directory.
It’s funny, how this line# NOTE: bltincmd must come first!
Is both in the macOS code AND the CSRG code from 30 years ago.
That’s all folks…