Building John The Ripper Jumbo for macOS Sierra

It’s quickly apparent that John The Ripper Jumbo doesn’t build out of the box on macOS, and probably hasn’t for a long time, due to its complaint about missing OpenSSL headers. This guide was almost helpful, except it’s out of date – e.g. the Makefile.in patch it provides no longer applies cleanly – and simply doesn’t… Read more

Nikon SnapBridge

Finally. Nikon have released the SnapBridge app so that the much-touted Bluetooth+Wifi capability of the D500 can actually be used.  A mere eight months after it was announced.  Fuck you too Nikon. However, as I’d clearly forgotten, it’s not very useful anyway.  It doesn’t work with raws, you see.  Doesn’t even acknowledge that they’re in the… Read more

Photo gallery services

I recently needed to find a photo gallery service, as though I put my personal & favourite work on Flickr, I don’t necessarily want to mix in other photography I do, plus Flickr makes it irrationally difficult to control access to photos (specifically, to arbitrary people or groups thereof). I also wanted, ideally, something that… Read more

Silent data corruption

Alternate title:  Apple’s file system engineers are sadly naive. I was quite disappointed to see that APFS isn’t even trying to provide data integrity.  Data integrity is kind of step 0 of any file system, and checksums or use of ECC is pretty much standard in modern & leading-edge file systems.  APFS doesn’t want to… Read more

Encrypted RAID volumes in El Capitan

Apple crippled Disk Utility in El Capitan, in their usual name of making good functional things pretty & pretty useless. Luckily I’m far from the first person to need to create RAID and/or encrypted CoreStorage volumes, in El Capitan.  Florian Knapp has a concise summary of how to set up an encrypted RAID volume.  Tom… Read more

Stellaris review

This is a fantastic game if you love spending hours meticulously crafting a beautiful empire, micro-optimising it to a cutting edge, and then having the AI come in and wipe you out instantly. Fun for the whole family. As best I can tell it’s fatally buggy, because it lets the AI essentially cheat, and you… Read more