A History of Hard Drives
Peter Cohen: IBM made the first commercial hard disk drive-based computer and called it RAMAC – short for “Random Access Method of Accounting And Control.” Its storage system was called the IBM 350....
View ArticleThe Mac App Store Is Full of Scams
Justin Pot (via John Gruber): Try to put yourself into the mental state of a novice computer user. You have a brand new iMac, and you want to edit some Excel spreadsheets. In the dock you find that App...
View ArticleSpark Mail Stores Credentials in Cloud
Readdle: Spark is much more than a mailbox. It’s a smart, unified inbox which collects all of your emails and automatically categorizes them for easy processing. Ole Begemann: While everyone’s raving...
View ArticleApple’s New OS “Activation” for Touch Bar MacBook Pros
Erik Gomez (via Hacker News): Last week Joe Chilcote discovered an interesting message when imaging a Late 2016 MacBook Pro TouchBar […]: A critical software update is required for your Mac. To install...
View ArticleThe Limitations of Android N Encryption
Matthew Green:Android’s early attempts at adding encryption to their phones followed the standard PC full-disk encryption paradigm. Beginning in Android 4.4 (Kitkat) through Android 6.0 (Marshmallow),...
View ArticleAmazon Fire TV Stick 2
Joe Rosensteel: Apple doesn’t offer anything remotely in this price range [$30]. The 3rd generation Apple TV was discounted to $70, and then discontinued this September without any replacement, leaving...
View ArticleStatus Board Discontinued
Cabel Sasser (MacRumors): Unfortunately, while Status Board became a beloved friend to offices around the world, sales weren’t enough to sustain further development. […] First, we had hoped to find a...
View ArticleFile Reference URLs Don’t Work in Swift 3
SR-2728: In Swift 3.0 (i.e. Xcode 8.0 or Xcode 8.1 beta 1), a call to fileReferenceURL does not give a file reference URL anymore... this code import Foundation let string = "file:///Users/admin" if...
View ArticleThe RawRepresentable Protocol in Swift
Ole Begemann: Note that adding raw values to an enum doesn’t affect how the enum is laid out in memory. The compiler always determines how many bits it needs to discriminate between all enum cases and...
View ArticleBacking Up the Internet Archive
Jason Scott: The first is that the Internet Archive is adding another complete mirror of the Wayback machine to one of our satellite offices in Canada. Due to the laws of Canada, to be able to do...
View ArticleExploring Swift Memory Layout
Mike Ash: This function works on an arbitrary type, takes a value and returns an array of unsigned 8-bit integers, or bytes. After you create an arbitrary item, calling this function and passing it...
View ArticleThe Operating System Fountain of Youth
Jean-Louis Gassée: Today, macOS is a fully-grown computer operating system, pleasant, fast, flexible. But it’s also enormous — RAM and disk storage requirements are measured in gigabytes — and it isn’t...
View ArticleGuarding Against Long Swift Compiles
Soroush Khanlou: In May, Jordan Rose added a Swift flag for emitting warnings whenever a function takes longer than some threshold to compile. You can leave this flag enabled in your project, and it...
View ArticleAnil Dash Is the New CEO of Fog Creek Software
Joel Spolsky (Hacker News): In short, we need Anil to help support us with ideas and leadership for HyperDev (now renamed Gomix) and any future products we come up with, and we need his soapbox and...
View ArticleDistributed Visa CVC Guessing
Juan Buis (via Andrew Abernathy): According to research from the University of Newcastle, there’s a gaping hole in credit card security that makes it easy for hackers to retrieve sensitive information....
View ArticleHow to Disable Magic Mouse Scrolling
Brian Dunagan: Yes, yes, multi-touch is amazing. Unless you’re my grandmother, and you’re just trying to use the mouse that came with the computer to get your email. She was constantly getting...
View ArticleApple’s Support Gap
Nick Heer: I’ve been trying to book some time at my local Apple Store to get my iPhone’s battery swapped, and it has not been easy — at least, not compared to the way it used to be. Previously, I’d...
View ArticleWhy Does calloc Exist?
Nathaniel J. Smith (via Hacker News): So there are lots of books and webpages out there that will claim that the calloc call above is equivalent to calling malloc and then calling memset to fill the...
View ArticleFinder Keyboard Shortcut to Show Invisible Files
Quinn Taylor: macOS 10.12 #protip: Finder supports ⇧⌘. to toggle visibility of hidden files, just like Open/Save panels have for a while. That’s Shift-Command-Period.
View ArticleTransferring Photos to a New Mac
Becky Hansmeyer: The next thing I wanted to do was move my Photos and Music libraries over. I dug into my last Time Machine backup and transferred the 90GB Photos library file to my new Mac. However,...
View Article