The Machine Kingdom

violetLeave a comment

Everything is fuzzy. The world refuses to focus properly, what little we glean from what we see at first is nothing like the room we fell asleep in. It is white, and fairly bright. It wasn’t even a little bit off white like the room we had slept in.

We force ourselves to blink. Slowly it resolves. We are lying down in a large white room lit by recessed bulbs every ten feet or so(about 3 meters). We get up shakily and look around. There is a single door, well, at least a rectangle, our glasses don’t seem to be anywhere nearby.

We go closer to it and find a plaque, which we squint to read.

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“xcrun altool” not found on macOS

cbLeave a comment

I needed to attempt a notarization of a Mac app (currently still in the middle of that long story), but I wasn’t using Xcode, so I had to run tools manually. Unfortunately, I couldn’t use xcrun altool, as it couldn’t find the command. I had upgraded the version of Xcode I was using, so I guess I had some stale links somewhere. Running xcode-select -r did the trick and fixed it.

Cursed MinGW cross-compiling techniques

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I tend not to like cross-compiling, but sometimes it’s just the simplest solution, particularly if Windows and autotools come into the mix. Recently, I wanted to build xz for Windows, and build it in some particular ways.

windres (the GNU Windows resource compiler) will eat CPPFLAGS, but it won’t process most of them the same way. I often like to use it as a shorthand for both C++ and C compiler options (like -O2), but if windres is in play, only put preprocessor related things. As an example, if you enter -O2 for CPPFLAGS, you get unknown format type `2'.

If you need to target pre-Windows XP, be sure that the compiler is before 7.3. This patch has a hard dependency on a symbol that exists only on XP.

The end result is now I have a cursed xz for an even more cursed operating system:

xz 5.2.5 on Windows ME

Can’t add email accounts in macOS (stuck on final step)

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When I tried to add an Exchange account (but it seemed to affect IMAP accounts too) in macOS (I was running High Sierra, but it affects other versions too), from either the Internet Accounts preference pane or Mail.app, it would let would let me add an account right until the final step where it asks what kind of services you want enabled on the account, then the Done/Next button just does nothing. You might get a throbber for a second, but it subsides and does nothing.

There’s a lot of somewhat convulted steps posted on the internet, but the simplest is to just reset your keychain from the Keychain Access application (Application Menu->Preferences, it’s one of the options there) and reboot. You’ll have to enter your passwords again (including iCloud), but I had no trouble adding mail accounts after that.

Streaming a virtual machine to Twitch: my setup

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Every so often, I do a stream of some odd 1990’s software. I usually run this in VMware, because streaming from an old operating system is either incredibly challenging or just downright impossible. However, VMware isn’t exactly a game, and I wish to do other things on my computer while I stream (if it’s something like a music stream), so I end up having to create a little ceremony to do so. These are the steps I take, and they might prove to be useful for others.

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