Random Stuff on Darth Null

Latest news on Spotlight Knowledge Events

Fri, 18 Apr 2025 10:02:50 -0400

This is a quick update. Yes. I know I say that a lot (or at least, I certainly think it when I start a post). This one really will be quick.

First, background. My main computer, a 2018 Intel Mac Mini, has been having its internal drive fill up. Regularly. To the point that apps crash without warning overnight, backups fail, Mail stops working, etc. In February, I traced the main source of the problem to a folder called SpotlightKnowledgeEvents (I’m just gonna say SKE most of the time.) At the time, this folder had over 37 gigabytes of data in it.

Word Salad - Slicing and Dicing with awk and sort

Fri, 11 Apr 2025 09:39:45 -0400

A few days ago, as I write this, Kelly Guimont posted the following question:

Let’s say you have a data set made up of a selection of songs by one artist. Let’s also say you want to slice and dice information from said dataset like how many songs come from each album, or average song length.

As of now what I want to know is the easiest way to “ask” my data set for this information. Do I have to type everything in a spreadsheet and filter? Can I use this to learn a teeny bit of python or something?

Managing Sequoia Disk Space

Tue, 11 Mar 2025 18:02:00 -0400

Disk Usage Woes: Day…whatever. How long has it been since I installed macOS Sequoia?

I’ve been struggling with the disk constantly filling up on my Mac Mini. See my last two posts for a deep and wonky dive into the situation, and lots of data collection to confirm my suspicions (or not).

At this point, I’m still continuing to collect data, but it’s more in the realm of “just making more graphs for reference” than actually figuring anything out. I think the fix is pretty clear at this point: I need to delete extraneous data from time to time. I just now have a better idea where to find the best low-hanging fruit for deletion.

Update on Spotlight and Disk Space Woes

Thu, 27 Feb 2025 16:45:00 -0500

My main day-to-day machine is a 2018 Mac Mini. Over the last year, and especially the last 6 months, it’s been a struggle to keep adequate space free. About two weeks ago, I’d had enough, and went on a deep dive to figure out what was wrong. In my last post, I described the journey I took to identify the likely problem.

Simply identifying a “likely” culprit wasn’t enough, though. I needed to take a methodical approach to testing different settings and recording the results.

macOS Sequoia Disk Space...Vanishing!

Wed, 19 Feb 2025 17:36:38 -0500

My everyday desktop is a 2018 Mac Mini. Last summer, I started noticing that some apps would crash overnight, mostly Ivory (my Mastodon client).

I assumed it was a memory thing. My disk space wasn’t great, but I had like 5 gigabytes or so free on the 256 gig drive, and wasn’t seeing any “your disk is full” errors. I wasn’t getting crazy “Your system is out of memory!” errors, either, but memory pressure seemed like a good explanation. I tried a few lazy tricks to get some data, try to collect logs, etc., but got nowhere.

Replacing my Synology DS1515+

Tue, 28 Jan 2025 17:25:00 -0500

Nine years ago, I migrated all my local house storage from a massive Dell with Debian and software RAID, onto a tiny little Synology NAS. Well, not exactly tiny, but probably 1/3 of the volume of the Dell. It serves as a file server, Time Machine target, and destination for various rsync and other low-level backup tasks from the rest of the network. At other times, it’s run a Plex server, the Channels DVR, and…I honestly don’t remember what else I’ve experimented with here. It’s a pretty capable little box.

Technology Sucks

Tue, 12 Sep 2017 07:15:00 -0400

Technology today is flat-out amazing. When I was a kid, walking uphill through the snow to get to school, cordless phones were massive (and amplitude modulated near the broadcast band), and video recorders had wired remotes. If you could quantify it, I’d venture that today’s capabilities are 3 or 4 orders of magnitude above what we had 30 years ago.

And at some point, almost without exception, I’ve hated every piece of technology I own.

Eclipse.

Thu, 24 Aug 2017 23:02:00 -0400

Scene: February, 1979. My fifth grade classroom. A large-for-the-time 17" or so black-and-white TV (the kind with a faint greenish tinge) sits on a cart. Everyone watching a total solar eclipse happening live in the Pacific Northwest. I don’t remember the mood in the room, but I suspect it was a mix of breathless, half-bored, and “meh.” I do remember, very clearly, learning that the next one was in 2017 and thinking how far away that seemed. And yet, resolving to see it.

Why I hate voting.

Tue, 04 Nov 2014 08:49:00 -0500

I just voted, even though pundits and statisticians have proven fairly definitively that my particular vote won’t matter. My district has had a Republican congressman for 30 years and his hand-picked heir is likely to win, and I don’t live in one of the 6 states all the news organizations tell me will decide control of the Senate. I voted because it’s the right thing to do, and because if I don’t vote, I lose the moral right to complain about the idiots in power (and anyone who knows me knows I love to complain.)

Memory Pressure, Capacity Limits, and Ubiquitous Computing

Mon, 02 Jun 2014 09:51:54 -0400

One of the things I was most looking forward to with my new iPhone 5S was faster switching between applications. It seemed like my 4S always took 5-10 seconds to toggle between two programs, even simple apps. Jumping from Angry Birds to YouTube (to see what I’m doing wrong) and back again was agonizing.

Unfortunately, though the 5S is significantly faster, switching has in some ways become worse. The slowest reloads are faster, but I feel like I need full reloads more frequently. I’m convinced this is simply due to memory usage. Many applications (especially those with lots of full retina artwork) are taking the device to its RAM limits. No amount of new processor power can mask the fact that there’s just not enough memory in the device.

iOS Backups are Still Broken

Mon, 19 May 2014 06:46:55 -0400

A quick take on some of the many issues backing up large, complicated iOS configurations to iCloud backup.

Apple needs to make some hefty changes to iCloud. It needs to allow you to backup and take advantage of the full size of your iPad (128GB max) inexpensively. In my case, since most of my data is strung between four cloud services (OneDrive, Dropbox, Google Drive, and iCloud), I didn’t need to back it all up. However, for a while I used iBooks to store my side-loaded ePubs and PDFs. In this case, I had to stop backing it up to iCloud because of space concerns. Loosing all of those in the case of a system failure led me to put my PDFs back on Dropbox and use Goodreader to access them. Being able to keep them all in iCloud (about 50g of data) would be very nice.

Apple ID Madness

Sun, 04 May 2014 12:58:04 -0400

One of the reasons I was so excited to get an iPhone a few years back was because of contact management. For years (from 1997 until about 2010) I carried around a Palm Pilot, which had reasonably good tools to synchronize data between the mobile device and my computer. Then I got a “modern” cell phone, which could do text messaging and everything, and setting up data syncing with that was….nearly impossible. But the iPhone, well, most of the time it works just fine.

It's time to (re)start.

Fri, 02 May 2014 04:16:18 -0400

Wow, I haven’t posted here in nearly a year. For a while last year, I was experimenting with a second blog where I could post quick little blurbs, links to interesting current events, but that never really took hold. I think part of it was it was just too much of a pain to post the little things. Plus, I don’t know, somehow I just got busy or somehting last summer.

First Anniversary

Tue, 23 Aug 2011 08:46:00 -0400

A year ago today, I left the comfortable confines of an 18-year career in big-name Government contracting, and joined a very small security startup called Intrepidus Group.

It’s been an interesting year.

One major change – I’ve really stepped up my blogging. I’ve posted detailed analysis on issues ranging from the RSA breach (including a theoretical attack on their SecurID tokens) to the question of whether iPhones were tracking your location (I still say “no.”)

iOS Overlays - Archived Comments

Sat, 12 Mar 2011 11:33:00 -0500

Benson

March 12, 2011 at 11:33 pm

That would totally work, and using Union mounts (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UnionFS), it would probably take very little time and effort to implement. All you’d have to do is figure out how to union mount an expanding-as-needed file over the top of /users and /apps (or whatever places need to handle changes), and everything would fall into place

Crazy idea for multi-user iPads

Fri, 25 Feb 2011 11:43:00 -0500

While lying on the couch last Friday, trying to decompress after a busy day and expecting an even more hectic weekend, I had a crazy idea for how Apple might implement multiple user accounts on iOS devices like the iPad.

File System Overlays.

Applications in iOS are all restricted to their own sandbox – that is, they can only access files and data within their own application bundle, and nothing else. So right off the bat, data’s pretty well segregated.

Belief-vs-Skepticism - Archived Comments

Tue, 20 Apr 2010 03:09:00 -0400

Bryan Schuetz

April 20, 2010 at 3:09 pm

“”Would Gizmodo really have it in so bad for the entire community that they’d try to play everyone with an elaborate hoax? That too, seems unlikely.”"

Remember though that this is the same site that left the whole community agonizing over a long weekend back in 2006 by claiming they had the details on the new iPhone before it was launched. Come Monday and the big reveal, it just turned out to be a new product from Cisco. http://gigaom.com/2006/12/17/iphone-is-available-but-not-that-iphone/ I don’t think this was a hoax, but I do think they’ve got the all douche nozzle credentials that would be required for such an endeavor.

Blind Belief vs Excessive Skepticism

Tue, 20 Apr 2010 02:11:00 -0400

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that I’m still skeptical about the whole “Gizmodo’s got a 4th generation iPhone” story. Yes, it looks a lot like it could be real. And they’re saying all the right things. But the one thing that I can’t get over is this: they’re only saying those things.

There’s still no real proof. Everything we know about this comes from Gizmodo (other sites with pictures claim to have only received those photos, none of them have actually handled the unit).

It's Time To Start

Wed, 14 Apr 2010 04:56:00 -0400

I’ve got a blog on another site. Sort of. It’s never updated. It’s been over a year since the last posting, and, frankly, that’s embarrassing. However, I’m constantly thinking of things that I want to talk about, that won’t fit into the limitations of Twitter or Facebook status updates. But because I never post anything, I don’t post anything new, ‘cause then I’d look like an idiot who never posts anything.

misscellany Archive

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000