Tag: OS X

Apple will be releasing macOS Sierra this coming Tuesday, September 20th.  This also means that the rcd file will be replaced with the stock version so you will have to patch it again. I upgraded one of my computers and was able to verify that the patch still works as expected.

Read full post… “Play Button iTunes Patch Works on macOS Sierra”

OS X El Capitan has been released, and my iTunes Play Button Patch is not compatible with it because of the new System Integrity Protection (SIP) that restricts any user (even root user) from modifying any system files. You can get around this by temporarily disabling SIP, applying the patch and then re-enabling SIP. I feel like this is not a good solution because it is cumbersome and it will likely have to be redone every time iTunes is updated (something needed by the existing method as well).

So, what’s the alternative? I have used Vox music player on and off, and I noticed that it has a preference pane which works with El Capitan and accomplishes the same goal with a different approach. I believe they use a background service that listens for the key and handles it, if configured. I feel like that’s a better approach to this problem and properly deals with the SIP restrictions that Apple has added to OS X El Capitan.

I am new to OS X service programming so I am going to research and see if I can learn about it to address this need. This will likely also address the enhancement request that many folks have submitted to allow control from other devices.

Play Button iTunes Patch GUI app is almost ready to go. You can download the beta version from the project page. Source code is in the gui branch.

I am working on migrating the Play Button iTunes Patch to a GUI app. Here is a sneak peak of what it looks like so far. You can see the source code in github.

This has been an interesting project because I have had to learn about elevated privileges in OS X, which apparently isn’t a very common use case. I am hoping that this version will be simpler and minimize the xcode command line tool installation.

You had brewed PostgreSQL and can’t get it to start after the Yosemite upgrade? Check the logs and see if you get the following error.

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FATAL:  could not open directory "pg_tblspc": No such file or directory

If so, then you need to create a few directories that went missing as part of the upgrade.

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cd /usr/local/var/postgres
mkdir pg_tblspc pg_twophase pg_stat_tmp

After running the above commands try starting PostgreSQL and it should start. Thanks to this Stack Overflow post for the details.

Apple released the 10.9.3 update recently and I noticed that it installed a new version of rcd, breaking the Play Button iTunes Patch. If you experience this, please delete the backup first and then run the patch so it uses the most recent file. To delete the previous backup use the following command.

rm /System/Library/CoreServices/rcd.app/Contents/MacOS/rcd_backup*

And then run the patch.

OK, one more Apple event scheduled for October 22nd. I am really hoping that we’ll have new MacBook Pros announced this time. New iPads are pretty much guaranteed, but come on Apple, I want to upgrade my MBP (need Haswell)!

Apple has released the Golden Master OS X Mavericks to developers. I am hoping that this means that the new MacBook Pro will be released soon. I have been waiting for too long to upgrade my MBP!

Lately I have had to preview a lot of JSON files. Apple’s QuickLook is a great feature for that, but, unfortunately, the base OS X doesn’t come with any QuickLook plugin for JSON. After a quick search online I found a free plugin that works fairly well. Not only does it preview the contents of the file, it pretty prints and supports folding. So, here is my shout-out to quick look JSON

There is also a website, quicklookplugins.com, dedicated to QuickLook plugins.