Author Archives: Antranig Vartanian

About Antranig Vartanian

Doing things @ illuria, Inc. Unix, BSD, InfoSec, Elixir/Erlang, DNS, XMPP. Mostly harmless.

macOS log(1): Finding out the previous name of BT device

I got a new mouse yesterday to use it with Mac Mouse Fix, an amazing application that “Makes Your $10 Mouse Better Than an Apple Trackpad!”. I can assure you it does.

The mouse connects via Bluetooth, a short-range wireless technology that even after 25 years, it’s either insecure, unstable or both. Sometimes it’s none, but only when the vendors of both sides are aware of each other.

Anyways. I connected the mouse and renamed it to “Antranig’s Mouse”, now all I need is a cat. An hour later a friend asked me which model was the mouse. I had no idea, but I thought, hey, the original name of the BT device was the model name, right? Maybe I can check that.

Luckily, macOS logs everything, and I mean everything, so I used the log(1) command to see what was the previous name.

Here’s the command to run and what the output looks like

log show --style compact --info --last 12h --predicate 'process == "bluetoothd" && subsystem == "com.apple.bluetooth”' | grep setName
2024-01-06 18:57:38.908 Df bluetoothd[375:8d0c1] [com.apple.bluetooth:CBStackController] setName: device 01903735-1591-7A71-C597-CE40C2ACB232, 'Dell Mouse MS5120W' -> 'Antranig's Mouse'

A simple explanation:

  • style compact: log has styles of output, there’s the default, which is long, and there’s compact, which is short. You can also set it to json.
  • info: type if information, it can also be default or debug.
  • last: time range, can be set to m, h, d for minutes, hours or days.
  • predicate: a macOS predicate, for more information check Predicate Programming Guide.
    • process: a process, in this case bluetoothd.
    • subsystem: a macOS subsystem, in this case com.apple.bluetooth. How did I know that? note sure, but my brains contains a lot of information.
  • grep: Unix grep(1), because we party like its 1969.

I also don’t remember how I knew that I should look for setName, but that’s life for you.

And of course, we get the output, the device was previously named Dell Mouse MS5120W

That’s all folks…

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macOS Sonoma’s Keyboard Layout Switching: When Apple needs actual diversity

I did it, I finally upgraded to macOS Sonoma. To my surprise there’s only a single thing that’s bugging me… Switching the keyboard layout.

Multi-lingual people use multiple keyboard layouts. Most of the time we use custom keyboard layouts because Apple doesn’t like listening to its customers on how keyboard layouts should look like.

Here’s what happens when you switch the keyboard layout on macOS Sonoma

(and here’s the GIF version)

This is really bad, as many people might have multiple layouts which have the same icon. In my case, for example, I use both the Armenian Eastern Alternative layout (custom made, as Apple still ships a very bad Armenian layout) and the Armenian Typewriter layout (custom made, as Apple still… you get the point).

They both have the same “icon” so it’s impossible to know which layout I’m choosing.

Compare this with macOS Ventura where you can see exactly which layout you’re choosing. Here’s a screenshot from Lilith’s computer.

Yes, Lilith uses Armenian Phonetic with English, also a custom layout, as Apple still… didn’t we just do this?

Clearly, Apple lacks diversity. They don’t have people there who use multiple layouts, or custom layouts, or maybe they all just use Emojis to communicate. I really don’t know how this happened, but it was clearly a very bad decision for the majority of the planet.

Dear Apple, if you are reading this, please just email/iMessage/call me, I will show you to to make this better again (just “minify” the old version) and show you the proper Armenian layouts. There are 7 of them. Actually, just have a look at Xorg, the community has published the proper layouts there decades ago.

Thank you.

That’s all folks… 

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Generating SSHFP Records

I added a new server to our hackerspace last week. This new server will be used for research in security. When I was adding the new DNS record when I realized that the previous server had a SSHFP record as well!

I remember that I should use the ssh-keygen command, however, like a normal human being, I forgot which flag to use. A simple search in the manual page says that I should use -r flag, so here we go.

antranigv@srv0:~ % ssh-keygen -r srv0
srv0 IN SSHFP 1 1 785b3fa04870e92bf25f4c7f7092733acf586ffb
srv0 IN SSHFP 1 2 847fd4a76ef7dfcef31ac3fa18c139413ab0017fa17014b3884bff161c3364de
srv0 IN SSHFP 3 1 8268aa7b8dccf4c0e7881472c72093589ca46b2e
srv0 IN SSHFP 3 2 ea0c9f0a50a825f5a0a59cebf8637876970a34000e6e0afd46bf269e08294a88
srv0 IN SSHFP 4 1 2fbe9d0e2ecdbd9dd58576e4683ee70858ca3f25
srv0 IN SSHFP 4 2 a34643bdce1ef3042cdd76fb7e46fcaf108dc436f8fcdb55daf993a27da0654b

All I need to do is to add these into the DNS zone. Luckily I run BIND, so I copy-pastad them into the file, did +1 to the SOA’s serial and done!

Now I can try logging in.

antranigv@zvartnots:~ $ ssh srv0.hackerspace.am -v
OpenSSH_9.3p1, OpenSSL 3.1.3 19 Sep 2023
debug1: Reading configuration data /Users/antranigv/.ssh/config
debug1: Reading configuration data /Users/antranigv/.ssh/personal
[…]
debug1: Server host key: ssh-ed25519 SHA256:OCsizTimnJi1grbxSY5LpvpLozfZ2pk+4Jzwg60WKYA
debug1: found 6 secure fingerprints in DNS
debug1: verify_host_key_dns: matched SSHFP type 4 fptype 1
debug1: verify_host_key_dns: matched SSHFP type 4 fptype 2
debug1: matching host key fingerprint found in DNS

and I logged in properly!

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Antranig Vartanian

November 12, 2023

I spent some time and moved my What I Use page to WordPress. I finally have a good reason to use the details HTML tag.

I also updated the content! My new music player(s) is the iPod! More about that, soon!

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Antranig Vartanian

November 8, 2023

If you’re seeing this then the migration is done! The weblog has moved from weblog.antranigv.am to antranigv.am.

I have also spent some time updating my About page, I hope I haven’t missed anything important. I will be adding more pages soon, such as link to friends, blogs that I read, what I use, etc.

I hope ActivityPub is working properly with the new domain.

Long Live The Web!

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macOS Desktops limit?

If you’ve ever wondered how many Desktops you can have on macOS, the answer, based on my 10 second test is 16. I do, however, have two apps in fullscreen mode (OmniFocus and Music.app).

Foo

I wonder if this is per screen. If any of you has an external monitor, please test and let me know!

Fun fact: you cant do “⌘⇪3” (Command+Shift+3) to capture the screen if you’re in Mission Control, instead I ran the following inside a terminal.

sleep 5 && screencapture /tmp/foo.png

If you like to nerd out on Unix-y stuff, here’s a screenshot from the manual page of screencapture(1).

Screenshot 2023 11 02 at 7 52 29 PM

Better documentation is needed, indeed.

That’s all folks…

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Upcoming migration

In the coming days/weeks, this blog will be migrated to a new address. Notably, the subdomain will be dropped and I will use antranigv.am for my blog.

I’ve been meaning to do these changes for a while now, and it occurred to me there’s no time like the present. Of course, the biggest kicker was discussing about this with my good friend Rubenerd.

Three major changes:

  • weblog.antranigv.am → antranigv.am
  • The blog’s name will be changed from “Freedom Be With All” to something… else
  • The theme, while staying the same, will be modified a bit. Mostly the internals

I always had a love and hate relationship with the subdomain weblog., however, I realized that the only thing on my homepage is little information such as projects I’m working on, some contact info and some banners.

While it’s a cool static page with a cool theme, I generate it in a complex way: OPML → XSLT → HTML, to be specific.

By moving the blog to the homepage, it will make it a better “reading experience” (is RX a thing? or is that part of UX as well?)

The name of this blog “Freedom Be With All” has a bit of history.

Initially, I only had an Armenian blog (which used to be blog.antranigv.am moved to antranigv.am/blog and currently settled to անդրանիկ.հայ which is “my name in Armenian dot Armenia’s IDN TLD”), I was too scared to blog in English.

The title of my Armenian blog was and still is “Ազատութիւն Ամենեցուն”, literally meaning “Freedom to all”. It’s a “mod” of the common “Peace to all” phrase mentioned in The Divine Liturgy Of The Armenian Church.

Personally, freedom is the highest value of all, hence I went with it, instead of peace.

The tagline will stay the same: I’m your worst nightmare. You see, when I was a kid, back in school, back in Syria, I was bullied (I mean, who wasn’t?), but not for my nerdiness, instead, for my “sharpness”. It wasn’t cool to know things, read books, talk with strangers on this thing called “the internet”. It wasn’t cool to talk about Star Wars all day (don’t you have history to study? who cares about WHY the Trade Federation attacked Naboo). It wasn’t cool to “know how to run pirated PlayStation games” because we were, well, poor is the right word here.

But I loved the internet, and the people on the internet introduced me to Unix, specifically to Linux. And that got me to (pirate, of course, because Syria, and) watch a documentary named Revolution OS, where the intro starts with Eric S. Raymond telling a story, ending with “I’m your worst nightmare”.

That feeling, of being such a good computer hacker, that you feel like a god in front of the computer and you feel that you can be a whole corporation’s nightmare is what made me feel powerful, is what made me feel “un-bully-able”. After that I would spend my days (well, technically nights, after my father went to sleep) chatting on IRC, reading books about programming, cracking the neighbour’s WiFi, reinstalling X11 3 times, and being nicer when you know you have the ability to be batman a nightmare.

All of this story aside, I don’t know what to name the blog. Maybe “Antranig Vartanian”, maybe “Antranig’s Notes”, maybe “antranigv”. Still not sure… Have a thought? Reply in the comments 🙂

The theme of the website will stay as is, but some nice modifications will be added, like a calendar, maybe a tag cloud, etc.

Finally, and I just remembered about this while I was typing this post: ActivityPub!

Dear lazyweb

I have a WordPress blog that uses the ActivityPub plugin, which means that you can follow it from the fediverse, e.g. from Mastodon!
However, I am planning to migrate the domain of the blog. Do I need to keep a static JSON somewhere meaning the “account” has migrated?

Any tips will be appreciated!

Otherwise, around 40 nice people will need to follow again 🙁

Wow, this post went more than I expected!

Thank you for reading (or skimming!)

That’s all folks… 

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Antranig Vartanian

October 31, 2023

Once a month, the WordPress app on my iPhone stops working. Specifically, it stops loading and sending data. It just “hangs” there. I’m honestly considering using the mobile web interface to blog remotely.

I wish there was MarsEdit for mobile…

Any alternatives or suggestions? Maybe I should use the “Post via Email” feature like back in the good old days 🙂

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Antranig Vartanian

October 26, 2023

The following happened in a group chat (technically, XMPP Multi-User Chat)

<inky> @antranigv, looks like the sarian website is broken again

<antranigv> @inky, fixed! It was an SSL/TLS certificate issue

<inky> @antranigv, It seems that now, the bot that cross-posts the submissions from sarian to here is not working

<antranigv> Looks like there’s an issue with Ruby. I have to upgrade it

<tigran> This is how the robot revolution begins!

<inky> If we are going to "do it", it will end just like it starts: one robot will fail because of SSL, the other because of a wrong version of ruby.

I’ve been ROFLing for 3 minutes now… xD

Cheers.

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