Apple Mail crashes on launch if connection logging is enabled

This was a fun one.  Mail started crashing on launch for absolutely no apparent reason – nothing had changed to its config or similar in a long time.  The crash logs were all fingering an identical culprit – -[IMAPTaskManager secondaryIdleMailboxName] called on the wrong GCD queue: Process: Mail [19884] Path: /Applications/Mail.app/Contents/MacOS/Mail Identifier: com.apple.mail Version: 11.3… Read more

‘Fake error’ about immutable values when using popFirst() on Array

It’s been a while since I wrote any meaningful Swift.  How I didn’t miss the Swift compiler’s bullshit error messages. That yields, on the popFirst() method: Cannot use mutating member on immutable value: ‘someArray’ is immutable. No it’s not.  It’s simply not. For whatever reason, if you instead call popFirst() on ArraySlice – ostensibly indistinguishable from… Read more

Handbrake’s H.265 ‘Preset’ setting affects ‘constant’ quality

I always consternate over what the ‘Preset’ setting should be when doing H.264 encodes with Handbrake.  It’s always tempting to slide right on over to ‘placebo’ to, in theory, ensure you’ve got the best possible encoding.  And in my experience that at least roughly works – file size decreases (marginally) as you use more time-consuming… Read more

Lightroom “Classic” doesn’t play well with others

So far the new “Classic” Lightroom looks & feels mostly identical to the prior version(s), which isn’t really a compliment, but could be worse.  There’s no apparent performance improvements, that’s for sure, so as expected Adobe’s promises to suddenly learn how to write efficient & performant software, well… at least their marketing department gave it… Read more

Your system has run out of application memory HUR HUR HUR

Screenshot of the macOS dialog saying "Your system has run out of application memory"

I hate this dialog with the fire of a thousand suns. When this appears, it basically means one (or both) of two things: Quitting any of the listed applications is rarely the correct move.  It’s often enough the case that none of them are the root cause, and you can kill all of them if you… Read more

macOS 10.12.2 appears to have brought with it some GPU issues

I run Einstein@Home, using both CPU cores & my GPU.  Other than a few month period where Einstein@Home was issuing broken GPU work units, I’ve been successfully doing this for years, I think.  Longer than I can really remember, in any case. It appears, however, that 10.12.2 has introduced some serious issues impacting those GPU… Read more

Swift’s String.write(toFile:…) can’t handle tildes

Result?  Explode: Error Domain=NSCocoaErrorDomain Code=4 “The folder “sigh.txt” doesn’t exist.” UserInfo={NSFilePath=~/Desktop/sigh.txt, NSUserStringVariant=Folder, NSUnderlyingError=0x1018110b0 {Error Domain=NSPOSIXErrorDomain Code=2 “No such file or directory”}} And since there’s no documentation on that write() method, and this is obviously a perfectly reasonable request that can’t sanely yield that bizarre error message, you could be forgiven for having no idea how… Read more