Now this is a very annoying behavior I’ve observed with Safari on Mac and accessing a variety of SAML2 protected sites – while other browsers such as Chrome don’t appear to have that problem. The authentication process may just hang, or also fail with an uninformative cookie error.
Ultimately, what helps is this: Search Keychain for “com.apple.idms.appleid.prd” – there’s probably one certificate starting with that name and having a longer extension:
You will see other certificates depending on it. Delete that certificate, at which point the others will show up as no longer valid:
Delete those too. You don’t even need to restart your browser. Just go back to the site where the authentication was not working, and refresh the page. It should work now.
Here is a screen cast that I’ve done on my academic workflow. Have fun:
Yesterday, I had created a pretty useful workaround for the still fucked up PDFKit in Sierra, which prevents Skim from running. Motivated by Andrea Alberti, I’ve today created a much better version which can be applied in one minute, with one single command, and does not require to keep System Integrity Protection off and swap around versions of PDFKit in the future.
In other words, this is there to Make Skim work again… The solution is on GitHub.
So I had written here about the problem with PDFKit under MacOS and shown how to get an deploy an alternative version of PDFKit which fixes the problem. Unfortunately, that makes Preview no longer work with PDF files, which is why I had also supplied there a script for switching back and forth between different versions of PDFKit. What’s really missing, though, is to have that process automated. I’ve written a solution for that and put it on GitHub. Feel free to use it.
I just saw that there was a runaway fontd process. Fixed it like so:
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sudo atsutil databases -remove; atsutil server -shutdown |
Most importantly, this has drastically brought down CPU usage overall. Apparently, it impacts a whole lot of applications.
As part of my DBA, there is what the university calls a “personal development module.” So people ask me questions that are meant to make you think. The question we got over the holiday period was this: “What is your main purpose in life right now?” I don’t know whether my answer will resonate with you at all, or even is in any way good. I share it anyway.
This is absolutely awesome. I just came across Pi-Hole, a DNS based ad blocker that you can install on a Raspi or just some Linux box you may have around.
I truly think, I just fell in love with a program. I’m talking about Scrivener. Since I’m doing research / academic writing rather than novel writing, I had not really looked at the program after I had bought it and played a bit with it a couple of years ago. Now, I’m starting here a series of blog articles about how to make Scrivener really work for academic writing and research. It’ll go very much in detail.
I think there’s been enough rant about the new MBP. For me personally, I’ve been waiting patiently, and am always open to be convinced. I’m not this time, and have hence explored, and implemented, some alternatives. They may not be useful for you, but if you use a 2013 MacBook Air, and if you’re running out of disk space, and look moreover for a solution to have versioned backups all the time – this post may be for you.
I don’t have enough disk space on my MacBook Air. So specifically I don’t want iTunes to occupy lots of it. I’ve my iTunes library on an external disk, which is fine until I happen to start iTunes without having that disk attached. In that case, iTunes will silently revert to using its default, internal storage location, and next time I import music, I’ll just not notice – and end up with a complete mess. For example, the media library location I am using resides on a server that is also used by my Sonos installation – and I’ve ended up swearing at Apple for making things easier than necessary when importing a CD and then still not seeing it in my Sonos library – because I had really imported it into my local music library which iTunes had reverted to at some point.
So here’s how to fix that.