iMac running Linux Mint from Debian

Minting an iMac

Sadly, Apple has retired my 2012 iMac, after 10 years. The iMac is still working, has a decent CPU and memory and a nice display, albeit not retina, so the retirement does feel somewhat premature to me. Apple puts things out to pasture far too quickly in my opinion, Microsoft is a lot better in this regard, and Linux is top. Due to concerns about the aging MacOS version on the machine, it limits my application upgrade path, how long will developers keep compiling for older systems 2 or 3 versions, maybe, often they want the latest and greatest version immediately, who can blame them....

10 December 2022 · Mark

Multiple Symbolic Links Windows

Create a batch file, for example: symlink.bat with the following content and edit the source and target locations to suit. @echo off set "source=c:\source\directory" set "target=c:\target\directory" set "exclude=%temp%\exclude.txt" ( rem exclude files/dires with these strings into full path echo .txt echo pipe.cmd rem escaped backslash and initial and final quotes to avoid partial matches echo "c:\\source\\directory\\something.txt" rem exclude thisNot file/directory from source directory echo "%source:\=\\%\\thisNot" )> "%exclude%" forfiles /P "%source%" /C "cmd /c (echo @path|findstr /i /v /g:"%exclude%" >nul) && if @isdir==TRUE (mklink /d \"%target%\\\"@file @path) else (mklink \"%target%\\\"@file @path)" del "%exclude%" > nul Original answer posted on: stackoverflow

2 November 2021 · Mark

SSH copy keys from Windows

I have recently been setting up an old Mac Mini as Webserver and NAS server. One of the things I wanted to do was enable ssh key pair login and wondered how one used ssh-copy-id on a Windows machine to get the public key from a local machine to the server. It turns out you can’t but the cat command can do it just fine. Here is the template: type C:\Users\<user>\....

22 October 2021 · Mark

SMB Mac 11.3.1

Apple in its infinite wisdom changed the settings for Samba ‘SMB’ protocol and killed access to my NAS server, thanks Apple not like I wasn’t using it all the time. I found a fix online, don’t trust me check if there are any risks in this fix: Create or edit this following file and add the 2 lines to the file. ~/Library/Preferences/nsmb.conf [default] protocol_vers_map=2

8 May 2021 · Mark