Most of last week had gone in trying to recover from my fever,throat pain, runny-bloody nose, body pain. A video visit with my PCP got me on anti-biotics which is still taking effect as we speak.
Anomaly in visitor count
I have leanrned not to obsess over analytics, only look at it once a week. And last week was a shocker. It recorded 13K visits. Based on historical data Google Analytics was quick to point out this anamoly. 1 The unfortunate thing is I still don’t know what caused the anomaly.
A bad week for Apple, but nothing as a consumer you should be too concerned about.
Apple just got hit with an anti-trust lawsuit, researchers found a security loophole in Apple Silicon M chips which would allow attackers to extract secret keys2. Without going too technical, the TL;DR is that always install and run applications from known sources. Which leads to anti-trust lawsuit.
I was once of the opinion “my computer my rules”, but more recently I see the appeal of doing certain things a certain way. When you are selling a product which you have to service, giving the users untethered freedom could be a double edged sword.
The appeal of linux distro’s that everyone who is against the walled fruit garden is that they can tweak it to their heart’s content. But what people fail to see is with linux and open source softare, it is use as-is without any warranty or gaurantees. But that isn’t the case with Apple. In order to be able to service user issuse they need to limit the number of things that the user could do wrong(which for the general consumer is strong strategy). Not everyone is a poweruser. As person who once considered myself a power user, I am finding that I don’t really want or need that kind of power I seem to think I want. I have outgrown the stage where tweaking and fiddling to get things working on my system was fun. I now look forward to sane defaults and minimal friction software3.
So the best way around is for Apple to be the gatekeeper of the software that gets installed i.e: ensuring that software that lands on the user’s computer is through the App Store where inorder to publish you need to adhere to Apple’s practices and guide for app development.
But if you wanted you could still download and install using .dmg files outside the app store(which goes without saying install at your own risk).
Pushed my webserver IP and user info to my dotfiles repo 🤦🏼
I only realized it when there was sudden spike in visitor count that I had pushed my server IP and the user I use to push the changes facepalm . So I made the repo private. Not that I have anything particularly interesting in my dotfiles for anyone to view but I will create a new repo and make it public soon.
Now the IP isn’t really hard to get, a traceroute, ping or a nslookup would yield that answer. There are online sites which you can use too. But the user info is what I consider the critical piece. Although I have disabled password entry, I still don’t feel comfortable that I gave away that info due to lack of deligence on my side.
This has gotten me wondering on how to version control the senstive information in dots.
Utopia
Utopia is a text based strategy RPG, which I used to play during my undergrads. It was closest to gaming I could get on the outdated and no graphics desktop I had. I just signed up again to play today for nostalgia reasons and boy a lot has changed. Basically all the auxilary, community driven tools/extensions have been intergrated into the game. Which is nice.
I chose to play Faery/Mystic to keep things simple(hopefully).
Apple Network Tags
Necessity is the mother of invention, in weekly post 9. I noted that there was a way to get VPN working with mobile hotspot on my work mac. But it soon was annoying to always having to set and reset the settings. Behold there is an easier way to store/restore the settings: Network Tags
Choose Apple menu > System Settings, then click Network in the sidebar.
From the More pop-up menu below the list of services, choose Locations > Edit Locations.
Click the add (+) button below the list of locations, then type a name for the new location, such as Work, Home or Mobile.
Click Done. Choose your profile that you created for hotspot and set the settings.
Still mild inconvenience but much better than having to constantly open up the SO page to set the IP.
Through the lens
Photo taken in Hetch Hetchy