Computers & Tech posts

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In Mac OS Sonoma, browsers now require and the OS will ask for the “Local Network” permission to access local websites. I didn’t know why it was asking and didn’t allow it, but then couldn’t access my sites. I had to go to “System Settings”, the “Privacy & Security” pane, select “Local Network” and turn on for my browser(s) to get access again.

If it matters, my local dev setup uses domains set in /etc/hosts pointing to IPs of VMs run by VirtualBox, managed by Vagrant, set up like web.vm.network 'private_network', ip: '192.168.56.1'.

Mac: create app launch keyboard shortcuts

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I wanted to create some global keyboard shortcuts for launching apps on MacOS. I used to do this with Quicksilver, but I’ve stopped using that and now just use Spotlight for most of what I used that for. Spotlight, of course, doesn’t have all the features of Quicksilver, including keyboard shortcuts for arbitrary actions. The “Keyboards Shortcuts” pane in System Settings can do a lot, but not specify a specific app to launch. Searching around the web, I found that Automator could be used to add services to it. So a flow to do this for an app would be like:

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Compact about:profiles in Firefox

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Firefox allows us to create multiple browser profiles to separate our activities, such as work, personal, finance, etc. It has an about:profiles page to manage and launch these. The page has not gotten much UX love and does not make very good use of space. On load, I can’t see the full second profile on my laptop (Macbook) screen. After living with this a long time, I decided to use userContent.css to customize the appearance so everything fits on one screen and I can quickly and easily find the two things I need most of the time: Each profile’s name, and the button to launch it with.

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New phone: Samsung S24

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Yesterday, I got a new phone, a Samsung Galaxy S24. Jade green, ordered from samsung.com because that was the only place to get green. I never got my Pixel 3a running again and my Moto X was just a little too broken, slow, poor network connecting, and unable to handle some apps. The S24 was my first Samsung and notably more expensive than any phone I’ve gotten before. But I justified it by its:

  • likely longevity with 7 years of updates, strong build, waterproofing
  • reasonable size
  • full features
  • 5G data
  • Dex desktop mode and USB video out

I’m still getting set up and getting used to it, but I think I’m happy with it.

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xz backdoor

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Reading this weekend about a backdoor introduced to the open source xz project. It doesn’t appear to affect my Ubuntu servers, so I had assumed it wasn’t relevant to me. However, the homebrew version on my Mac was “vulnerable”. It sounds like the exploit would only work on some versions of Linux, but if it does work on Macs, that could be bad. I do a lot of stuff on this computer, including banking, email, coding, etc. They know about it backdooring ssh, but if there’s something they don’t yet know about, it might be a problem.

I have a Fedora install as well. I haven’t checked it yet, but Fedora is usually on the bleeding edge, so if it’s on there, I’ll probably wipe and reinstall. I’ve been considering anyway. Luckily, I don’t do anything important on there.

Even if it didn’t actually do anything bad on the Mac, it may have done something. I had noticed some weeks or months ago (I can’t remember when) that running PHP on the command line was going slow. Running anything would take a minimum of about five seconds, including something simple like php -r 'echo "hello\n";'. I know when I had been making scripts in the past they hadn’t been taking long at all. I did some searches on the web for anybody mentioning something like that and couldn’t find anything. So I kinda just figured maybe it had something to do with the new opcode / whatever cacheing newer versions do or something, like it takes some initial setup that the server can reuse but not the command line. I assumed I was stuck with it and even started moving some scripts to bash partly because of it. When I downgraded xz via homebrew though, I decided to test it. time says the simple php -r line took 0.092 seconds. Nice and snappy. So maybe xz was doing some checks to see if the device was exploitable. It was in the dependency graph of PHP through curl and gd. Can’t say for sure that it just sped up though and if the xz change was what caused it.

I’m glad my scripts finally run quickly again, but hope that nothing was exploited here. I’ll keep an eye on the web to see if anything comes up about Macs being exploitable, and if so I’ll probably reinstall the OS to be safe.

Note: If you have used homewbrew to install PHP, curl, or anything else that might depend on xz, run brew update; brew upgrade to be safe. The dangers of being on the bleeding edge I guess.

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My Moto X phone, a stand-in for my non-functioning Pixel 3a, scared me by force shutting down and then getting stuck in a reboot loop for a bit. That’s too similar to the behavior of the Pixel. Luckily, plugging it into a different USB charger and giving it time, the problem resolved itself and it has been running fine for almost a full day. Hopefully, that keeps up, as I still haven’t gotten the Pixel going or figured out what I want for a new phone.