For whatever odd reason, I like to unwind from a trip and, if accessible, walk to an airport terminal. I’ve now done this in Las Vegas, Minneapolis-St Paul, and San Diego.

Today I tried building to the list by walking/biking from JFK to La Guardia. From Terminal 8, I didn’t find a good way to walk straight out into Jamaica. For $8.25, I caught the AirTrain outside Terminal 8 and rode it to the Jamaica stop, which is where you must pay to exit. From there I began walking north, figuring I’d grab a Citi bike from their area north of JFK. After over an hour of walking I found a Citi bike and rode 25 minutes to a Dunkin’ Donuts for a late breakfast. From there I walked into La Guardia by walking up 82nd St to Marine Terminal Rd only to find a sign preventing pedestrian access to Terminals B and C. I decided to hop on the free shuttle bus to reach my destination, Terminal B. I understand if I had entered LGA from 94th, I could’ve walked all the way in, next time! JFK on the other hand is a bit disappointing, surely there’s a way to do it sans AirTrain?

When our garage was rebuilt in 2017 a Chamberlain 8550WL belt-driven garage door opener was installed. We love how quiet it is, that it has a battery backup, and that it could be paired to a homebridge and operated with HomeKit, at least until September 2023 when Chamberlain closed access to third party plugins.

Enter Paul Whelan and ratgdo. Paul reverse engineered the encryption that Chamberlain has on these openers and made a board that has been open-sourced by others – for a good interview with Paul, check out this video. I bought Paul’s board, coded it with the ratgdo homebridge web installer, wired it to our Chamberlain garage door opener with an external power supply, and it worked flawlessly until I swapped out our Apple TV 4K for the latest Apple TV 4K that does Thread and Matter. Here’s an example of what the wiring looks like when the ratgdo is connected to the Chamberlain opener and here’s an example of pulling 3.3 volts from the 8550WL to power the ratgdo – I haven’t tried the latter, but likely will this spring/summer when it is warmer in the garage.

A few gotchas… Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge are required to transmit the ratgdo’s firmware to its board. Changing the user agent does nothing to help Safari communicate to the ratgdo through the web installer.

Infrequently I come across old pdf files with pages that contain text as a single static image and lack searchable text. I’ve wanted an easy and free OCR solution and I’ve now found it, although I’ll keep looking for an open source option that is just as easy to use. For now, my Mac is rocking OwlOCR and it offers right-click contextual menu access to making searchable pdf’s without paying for it (for now), here’s how:

1. Download OwlOCR through the App Store app on your Mac.
2. Enable OwlOCR’s Finder Extensions using these instructions beginning with the section “Enabling Finder Extensions in MacOS”

When you have a .pdf in the Finder that you want to make searchable, right-click the .pdf’s icon, choose “Quick Actions->Create Searchable PDF” and wait until a status window indicates that it is done. Thanks OwlOCR team!

Once a year, we back up Tina’s Photos library to an external hard drive and deliver it to friends who keep it at their house, just in case ours burns down or something terrible. For whatever reason, it seems we can’t just drag her “Photos Library.photoslibrary” to an external hard drive or at least when we do, it seemingly spins forever without a good status updated. In steps rsync.

From Terminal.app, I pasted in the following command on her MacBook Pro while the backup drive is plugged in and this seems to do the trick with a live status update spewing in Terminal’s window.

sudo rsync --archive --stats --human-readable --progress /Users/christinaschwie/Pictures/Photos\ Library.photoslibrary /Volumes/Tina\ Photos/Photos\ Library.photoslibrary

I should’ve published this as a tip for others. And even if you’re not syncing a 250+ GB photo library like this scenario, hopefully it helps you with your large directory transfer needs.

** UPDATE 2-15-2024 **

Resource forks may have been damaged using the above command. Next time, try it with “–hfs-mode=appledouble”, such as:

sudo rsync --archive --stats --hfs-mode=appledouble --human-readable --progress /Users/christinaschwie/Pictures/Photos\ Library.photoslibrary /Volumes/Tina\ Photos/Photos\ Library.photoslibrary

Or install rsync with brew and then add –xattr to the command.

Or sudo rsync -xrlptgoXvHS --progress --delete --fileflags / /Volumes/BackupClone using tips here.

** UPDATE 11-11-2024 **

This is the command I ended up executing that works great:

rsync -Pha --delete --stats /Users/christinaschwie/Pictures/Photos\ Library.photoslibrary/ /Volumes/Tina\ Photos/Photos\ Library.photoslibrary/

Note: while testing these commands, one of them made a “Resources” folder and a “.photoslibrary” file within the main .photoslibrary I was syncing over that I learned about here – this happened when I omitted a trailing / after .photosplibrary. Fortunately, deleting the Resources folder (it was empty anyway) moving the nested .photoslibrary document up one directory (and deleting the main one) fixed this mess and left me with a single .photoslibrary document that opens in Photos.app and can up updated using the command above a second time. Future updates seemed to be fast, finishing in less than 5 minutes and this on a mid-2015 13-inch MacBook Pro. If I have enterprising friends or family who want to store backups safely off-site, this could be a useful command. So glad this is working!

A few additional notes. It appears check sums are verified after the transfer completes. If for some reason you want to verify check sums before the transfer, append a “c” to “-Pha” to make “-Phac”.

Kevin talks about making a cron job out of this, but these days it will likely have to be launchd.

If we start messing around more with iCloud Photos, this script may be helpful.

I seem to get into this more often than I need to. I was preparing a report this weekend that grew to ~500 pages and 80 MB in size. I wanted to transmit the report as a .pdf via email. Using services like OneDrive work, but they are annoying when they require an external user to verify who they are. I also tried reducing the file size with a few other options, including:

1. PDFCompress, an old app on my Mac
2. Preview, using it’s Export option
3. Others I’m forgetting to list here

None of the options above produced a small enough .pdf file or at least not one that was less than 50 MB. Finally I turned to Ghostscript, but first I had to install and configure it:

1. Open Terminal.app and enter: brew install ghostscript
2. After Ghostscript installs, use Terminal to navigate to the folder containing your .pdf, in my case: ls ~Desktop
3. Insert this command into Terminal, replacing input.pdf and output.pdf with the file names you prefer:

gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dPDFSETTINGS=/ebook -dNOPAUSE -dQUIET -dBATCH -sOutputFile="output.pdf" "input.pdf"

The above-command produced a file about 38 MB and I was able to get it down to 36 MB using the following command:

gs -q -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -dSAFER -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 -dPDFSETTINGS=/screen -dEmbedAllFonts=true -dSubsetFonts=true -dColorImageDownsampleType=/Bicubic -dColorImageResolution=144 -dGrayImageDownsampleType=/Bicubic -dGrayImageResolution=144 -dMonoImageDownsampleType=/Bicubic -dMonoImageResolution=144 -sOutputFile="output.pdf" "input.pdf"

I found these references helpful in developing this approach:
https://gist.github.com/ahmed-musallam/27de7d7c5ac68ecbd1ed65b6b48416f9
https://www.cisdem.com/resource/shrink-pdf-file-size-on-mac.html

Our above-referenced vacuum wasn’t producing as much vacuum and we found that its filter was clogging faster. I figured portions of its cyclone, where air moves upward its path to ultimately reach the motor’s impellers and debris falls downward to the collection canister, had become blocked. While taking apart the cyclone, I published my journey here:

https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Dyson+DC17+Cyclone+Cleaning/168779

After reassembling the cyclone and putting it back in the DC17 the vacuum cleaner is running like its brand-new again.

One of the Homebridge plugins was whining about “node” being out of date. Sure enough, when running this with Terminal:

node –version

Showed my Mac mini was running “v16….” and it needed to be upgraded to 20. Easy enough with brew:

brew install node@20
brew unlink node@16
brew link node@20 -f –overwrite
nano ~/.zshrc

In nano I edited the following line from:

export PATH=”/usr/local/opt/node@16/bin:$PATH”

to

export PATH=”/usr/local/opt/node@20/bin:$PATH”

Exit and save with:

Control (key) and X
Yes

Next I closed the Terminal window, opened a new Terminal window, and typed in:

node -v

Which now proudly says:

v20.9.0

Yes!

Wes makes his podcasting debut Yessir!

From time to time I’ve found these blog posts handy on what version your Mac’s firmware should be on:

• “Which EFI firmware should your Mac be using? (version 6)”
• “Which EFI firmware should your Mac be using? (version 5)”
• “Which EFI firmware should your Mac be using? (version 4)”

In February, I swapped the Taptic Engine and then moved the NFC chip from Tina’s old (broken) Apple Watch Series 4 display to a new display. The NFC transfer had me on edge, but Circuit Trama’s instructions and technique were fabulous. One improvement to Circuit Trama’s approach, like this video I placed droplets of alcohol on a razor blade and gradually slid it in, no heat, and it worked so much better and it was much faster. I’ve got some pics I can post later.

Prior to these improvements, the watch entered a recovery mode and I figured I’d make the improvements before restoring it, since it was mostly broken anyway. After the hardware improvements the watch refused to restore, instead erupting with a “Failed to setup Apple Watch” alert. There are several options to get past this:

Option 1: Access the hidden lightning port where the watch band slides in and complete a wired restore. Unfortunately, the adapter fetches $100 or more plus more time, bleh.

Option 2 (failed approach): the trade-in value for the Series 4 is $60 and mine appeared to meet all the requirements, so I decided to take Apple up on the offer and FedEx took it off my hands. I replaced it with an Apple Watch Series 8 in Product Red that was heavily discounted by Amazon Prime Days. I looked at iFixit’s battery replacement guide and it appears battery replacements will be easier in the future and I should have all the tools to do it. Let’s hope the first battery lasts at least 3 years. Unfortunately, several days later, Apple returned the Series 4 to me, because they said they couldn’t restore it! What a joke. They obviously didn’t try Option 3, below.

Option 3 (worked for me): I wished I had learned of this before trying Option 1 and 2. During a hard restore, I put my iPhone on the older 802.11b network in our house and then the Apple Watch Series 4 properly restored! I didn’t record all the steps I used to implement this, as I’m writing this a couple months later, but it ultimately worked and my daughter is now rocking the Apple Watch Series 4.

The only side effect of my NFC transfer, was that I used a bit too much heat during the soldering process and now the side of the screen no longer responds to touch. The portion that doesn’t work isn’t required for most interface tasks and my daughter doesn’t mind – we also enabled Assistive Touch, so she can always get past interface hitches if the screen doesn’t respond to touches. If I have extra time on my hands, I may replace the layers between the screen and the glass to correct this unresponsive touch issue, but for now I’m moving on.

I also still have a bag of parts for one more Apple Watch 4. It needs a new battery connector soldered to the board, a new screen, and its NFC soldered to a new screen. If used parts dip low enough, I may give it a whirl or dump the parts on eBay while they still have value to others.