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In quick praise of Quinn "The Skimo"

Apple is dismal with their documentation, and their Feedback Assistant is a cruel joke and waste of time that makes users and devs work for free for one of the biggest companies in the world – and then ignores them anyway. So when you're diving for information among the layers of deprecated debris, you end up noticing and remembering the rare nice nugget.  I've been noticing the name of Quinn "The Skimo" appearing at the bottom of many random dives, I'd swear since before OS X. And I just found that I'm not the only one remembering him! People in Hacker News also noticed the same .  So, I just wanted to thank you, Quinn "The Skimo"! (Possibly I failed to notice others with less memorable signatures... there's a lesson here)

Introducing DARUM - DAfny Resource Usage Measurement

Warum? Ach, darum! My team at Consensys R&D worked mostly with Dafny , the verification-friendly language. We enjoyed good success with it in our projects during the last few years; our extensive use got us a mention in Rustan Leino's Program Proofs book, and we even got a Best Paper Award in the 2022 edition of the International Conference on Formal Methods for Industrial Critical Systems! Unfortunately, our team at Consensys is no more. So I finished my tool DARUM for a v1.0 release, and this post aims to gather the lose threads and offer an easier entry point for external users.

What kext was that??

MacOS sometimes asks you to accept some system extension / kext. Unfortunately it can be difficult to clarify why, which can be scary. Sometimes you will only get notified that the kext signed by XYZ has been updated, and then it's on you to find out how to relate XYZ to a specific file and functionality in your system. I have found myself in the situation a couple of times, so in case it helps others, here's my notes to connect signers with kexts. BEWARE, just because something is in my list doesn't mean that it's OK in your system; instead, I recommend that (1) you re-confirm my information and then (2) decide if this kext makes sense in your system. If you don't know why you have some kext, maybe you should just remove it.

Home Assistant on macOS, the easy way

I almost got put off trying Home Assistant on my Mac because of the complex/useless installation instructions in the docs . For HA-OS, there's no KVM for macOS (you'd have to use QEMU), and VirtualBox is (still?) unavailable for current ARM (Apple Silicon) Macs. And the instructions for HA Core are off-puttingly involved, probably more useful for someone developing HA than for an end user. (... possibly a Python ecosystem-level problem...) Fortunately, it's actually much easier than any of that. I just gave feedback so hopefully it will be fixed in place, but just in case here's my instructions.

Así hace un Valenciano e̶x̶p̶a̶t̶ emigrante una paella con arroz integral

Viviendo fuera de España como expat emigrante es difícil (y caro) encontrar arroz bomba para hacer una paella de verdad. Pero además, si estás intentando reducir hidratos de carbono en tu dieta, el arroz en sí es ya un mal paso. Así que me puse a hacer pruebas para hacer una paella con arroz integral normalucho, del que encuentras en cualquier supermercado. Y lo conseguí. Resulta que no es tan difícil, así que me pregunto por qué cuando empecé a buscar cómo hacerlo no encontré nada al respecto – aunque sí que encontré marcianadas como usar "arroz de coliflor" o arroz arborio.  Curiosamente, los que hacen cosas así suelen ser de fuera de España, así que supongo que nunca han probado una paella de verdad y les da igual acabar con un risotto amarillo. ¿O quizás es que los influencers no tienen paladar? Pero yo nací y crecí entre Alicante y Valencia, así que no puedo aguantar algo así. Y más cuando la morriña ataca. En fin, al grano. A mí me ha funcionado con paella y con arroz...

A script to announce new chat messages in Zoom

Available at https://github.com/hmijail/announce-zoom-chat-messages . It's so disheartening to see AppleScript to stay so ... unloved. It was never easy to deal with it, enough so that I decided this time to force myself to get into the newish JavaScript syntax. And yes, that eases the syntax; but the whole ecosystem feels so devolved since the last time I used it. Even Apple's own Accessibility Inspector has lost capabilities. osacompile works but the resulting app does something different. I didn't try looking for new Scripting Additions, and in fact it wasn't needed; good old System Events was enough. But, gosh... even Smile was last released on 2013 . I wonder how would I do something like this announcer without AppleScript. What do Windows users do? Well, who cares for Windows ;P, what do Linux users do? Maybe next time I'll have to research it.