My Apps, 2024

Following a bit of a blogger-trend, here's the stuff I use on the daily. I've omitted things I simply don't use, like custom launchers, podcast listeners, RSS, tracking and/or Mastodon clients; - Mail service: __GMail__ - Tasks: __Drafts in GMail__ - Cloud storage: __Dropbox__ - Web browser: __Chrome__ - Calendar: __Google Calendar__ - Weather: __BOM__ (Melbourne, Australia) app - Video: __Netflix, Disney Plus, Amazon Prime Video__ - Music (Listening): __Spotify__, Spotify via Google Home and/or Chromecast - Music (Creation): __GarageBand__ - Passwords: __1Password__ - Notes: __Drafts in GMail__ - Code: __Visual Studio Code__ - Terminal: __Terminal.app__ - Search: __Google__ This list has shown me how much I depend on Google a) not being evil; and b) not just giving up on a product because they're bored of it ... which concerns me a little. While it still exists though 😉, I *do* highly recommend the use of __Drafts in GMail__ as your general-purpose, cross-platform notes/todo app. You can attach files of arbitrary size, they sync to everything/everywhere *fast* (faster than Dropbox) and it's free (free-r than Dropbox... hmmm 🤔)

Sneaking through the Analog Hole

I perhaps-foolishly recently agreed to perform a media-archiving task. A series of books-on-tape (yes, on physical audio cassettes), almost unplayable at this point in the century, needed to be moved onto a playable media. For this particular client, that meant onto Audio CDs (OK so we're moving forward, but not _too_ far!). I myself didn't have a suitable playback device, but quickly located a bargain-priced solution, second-hand on eBay (of course) - an **AWA _E-F34U_** that appears to be exclusively distributed by the [Big W](https://www.bigw.com.au) retail chain here in Australia:

This device purports to be a one-USB-cable solution to digitising the contents of analogue cassettes. Unfortunately, the example I just purchased had extremely severe issues with its USB implementation. The audio coming straight off the USB cable would jump between perfectly fine for a few seconds, to glitchy, stuttering and repeating short sections, to half-speed slooooow with the attendant drop in pitch. Unusable. I only hope that the problem is isolated to my unit (which was _cheap_ and described as "sold untested" so I have no-one to blame but myself) - if not, someone's done a really bad job at their USB Audio implementation. Luckily, the USB Power works absolutely fine, so I had to resort to the old "Analog Hole" solution via my existing (rather nice) USB Audio Interface, a **Native Instruments _Komplete Audio 1_** which I picked up after my previous interface, a [**TASCAM _FireOne_**, finally kicked the bucket](https://blog.themillhousegroup.com/2020/07/tascam-fireone-on-macos-high-sierra.html).

In the following picture, you can see my digitising solution. AWA tape transport (powered by USB) to 3.5mm headphone socket, through a 1/4" adaptor to a short guitar lead and into the _Komplete Audio 1_'s Line In. From there, it goes in via the _KA1_'s (fully-working!) USB connection to GarageBand on the Mac. A noise gate and a little compression are applied, and once each side of each tape has been captured, it gets exported directly to an MP3 file. I intend to present the client with not only the Audio CDs but also a data CD containing these MP3s so that future media formats can hopefully be more easily accommodated.

What if I _didn't_ already have a USB audio interface? Would the client have given up, with their media stuck in the analog era, never to be heard again? It amused me that analog technology was both the **cause of** this work - in that this medium and the ability to play it has gone from ubiquitous in the 1980s to virtually extinct - **and its solution**, using an analog interface to get around a deficient digital one.

Importing/capturing digital video (DV) for FREE on a Mac in 2021

Like many others, I have a giant box of Mini DV video cassettes from 10+ years ago that I fairly-urgently need to get onto a more long-term-safe medium. As it's a pretty tedious job I have tended to do this in batches, when I can be bothered getting all the necessary bits together. Fortunately my trusty 2012 MacBook Pro has Thunderbolt ports that with just a couple of cheap adapters, can connect to the 4-pin Firewire port of my still-functional Panasonic NV-GS27 camcorder and do the job.

But while the hardware is willing, sometimes the software is not. It's all too easy to get on the upgrade treadmill and forget about applications you only use once every couple of years. In the past I used Vidi, which was minimal but $0, and thus excellent. But it won't work on 64-bit MacOS and appears unmaintained so I needed something new.

All I needed was something that could capture the raw data from each cassette and dump it into a .dv file that I can stash away on a hard drive.After a very dismaying tour through Google and YouTube made me think I'd either need to pay for a software package, or kludge something together using libdc1394 (which would be massive overkill) I finally found what I needed by searching Github directly: vrecord by AMIA Open Source.

vrecord works beautifully on my Catalina (OSX 10.15) MacBook Pro - follow the Basic Usage guide and you'll be capturing those precious memories in no time.

Switching to git switch

A recent OS upgrade resulted in my Git version being bumped up to 3.x, an interesting feature of which is the new git switch command, which replaces part of the heavily overloaded git checkout functionality with something much clearer.

Now, to switch to branch foo you can just invoke git switch foo

And to create a new branch, instead of git checkout -b newbranch,
it's git switch -c newbranch

These are small changes, to be sure, but worthwhile in bringing more focus to individual commands, and relieving some of the incredibly heavy lifting being done by the flags passed to git checkout, which hopefully now can be my "tool of last resort" as it usually leaves me stranded in "detached head hell" ... my fault, not Git's!

I've also updated my gcm alias/script to use git switch, so accordingly it's now gsm.

Fixing internet access failures after upgrading to MacOS 10.14 Mojave

I innocently upgraded my 2012 Macbook Pro to Mojave (10.14) from High Sierra (10.13) purely because HomeBrew was refusing to let me install any new goodies on such an old OS. The upgrade itself was painless and everything seemed to be in good shape until I tried to access the wider Internet (access to my own local network was completely fine).

Now Internet access problems are extra-infuriating, because "Googling for the solution" instantly becomes far more of a palaver. An interesting quirk of this particular issue was that using my iPhone's "Personal Hotspot" worked perfectly with the Mac. Only accessing the internet directly through the home WiFi was problematic, and other devices were of course completely fine.

So to recap the scenario (and hopefully give this post some Google-ju to help anyone else in this situation), here's what we had:

• Macbook Pro was running OSX High Sierra (10.13) with no prior network problems
• Network has been carefully set up and tuned for "meshed" operation
• Local DNS services provided by DNSMasq running on a Raspberry Pi
• DHCP services provided by DNSMasq, handing out fixed addresses to "known" devices like the Macbook Pro
• All local network services working fine - e.g. accessing router admin webpages
• Internet access when tethered to an iPhone works fine (Mac gets assigned 172.20.10.2, iPhone is 172.20.10.1)
• Internet access through wired Ethernet (via a Thunderbolt adapter) works fine
• Internet access on home Wifi completely fails; no DNS, no ping, no browsing

After a frustrating day, I decided to blow through the Mojave upgrade in case it had been fixed in Catalina (10.15) ... it hadn't.

I went through probably a dozen different iterations/versions of the "recreate your network stack"/reboot/reset PRAM and/or SMC cycle; nothing was helping, and I was still mystified by how the wired Ethernet was working immaculately while the WiFi failed to get "out" of the local network.

Comparing settings with my wife's Macbook that had perfect Wifi yielded nothing, so just for the hell of it, I decided to check the gateway router's settings one last time to see if for some reason I had a special route or firewall rule set for the Macbook Pro's Wifi IP address (10.240.0.72) only, which would explain why the wired connection (10.240.0.77) had no problems. It wouldn't normally be something I'd do, but given the output of traceroute was showing that the hop to the gateway was working in all cases, I had to start suspecting that the MacOS internal routing of packets was not faulty ...

And lo and behold, WHAT IS THIS? On my (ISP-provided) TP-Link router's Security/DoS prevention page, a place I have rarely if ever visited ... My laptop's Wifi IP address has been automatically added to a blocklist for attempted DoSing of my network ... from the inside ?!?!

I removed the blocklist entry and instantly everything worked perfectly. Oh dear. I have no idea when my laptop started absolutely hammering pings/UDP/TCP SYNs but it must have been at some point during or immediately after the upgrade to Mojave, and the router did what it was configured (completely by default) to do when it saw more than 3600 packets/sec coming from my laptop. Wow.

Reading the rather scant documentation for this router feature indicates that it uses up (extremely precious) router CPU so I've turned this feature totally off - internal DoS prevention seems like a waste of time to me.

Addendum: Disabling SPI and DoS detection/prevention has massively sped up using the router's web UI so I can only imagine it's working wonders for the overall performance. So I guess it's been a win ... overall 😕

TASCAM FireOne on MacOS High Sierra: finally dead

I suppose it had to happen, but today, my TASCAM FireOne Firewire audio interface just ceased to work properly - namely, the audio input has a constant clicking sound making it unusable.

I suppose I should feel fortunate that it has lasted this long; I mean, look at the MacOS compatibility chart:

- yep 10.4 and 10.5 only, yet here I am on High Sierra (10.13) and it's only just turned up its toes.

It's even less whelming on the Windows side:

... XP only (!)

So now I'm on the hunt for a good interface that will last as long as this one did. Firewire seems to have been effectively killed by Apple, and Thunderbolt interfaces are incredibly expensive, so it'll be back to good ol' USB I guess. I'm thinking that with the rise of podcasts etc, Apple will be obligated to ensure USB audio interfaces that use no additional drivers (aka "Class-Compliant devices") work really well for the foreseeable future...

Home-Grown Mesh Networking Part 2 - When It Doesn't Work ...

A few months ago I shared some tips on using existing Wifi gear to make your own mesh network.

Turns out though, it might not be as easy as I initially made out. In particular, I was noticing the expected switchover as I walked down the corridor in the middle of my house:

... was simply not happening. I would be "stuck" on Channel 3 (red) or Channel 9 (green) based on whatever my Mac had woken up with.

Lots of Googling later, and the simplest diagnostic tool on the Mac turns out to be Wireless Diagnostics -> Info - take a snapshot, turn off that AP, and wait for the UI to update. Then stick them side by side and eyeball them:

I wasted quite some time following a wild goose because of the differing Country Codes - it's not really something you can change in most consumer AP/routers so I thought I was in trouble, until I discovered that "X1" really just means "not broadcast" so I decided to ignore it, which turns out to be fine.

Now the other thing that was most definitely not fine was the different Security policies. I thought I had these set up to match perfectly, but as you can see, MacOS thought different (pun not intended).

When is WPA2 Not WPA2?

The D-Link AP (on Channel 9, on the right in the above screenshot) was supposedly in "WPA2 Personal" mode but the Mac was diagnosing it as just WPA v1. This is most definitely enough of a difference for it to NOT seamlessly switch channels. Even more confusingly, some parts of the MacOS network stack will report this as WPA2. It's quite tricky to sort out, especially when you have access points of different vintages, from different manufacturers, who use different terminology, but what worked for me (on the problematic D-Link) was using Security Mode WPA-Personal together with WPA Mode WPA2 plus explicitly setting the Cipher Type to AES and not the default TKIP and AES:

This last change did the trick for me, and I was able to get some automatic channel-switching, but the Mac was still holding on to the Channel 3 network for much longer than I would have liked. I could even stand in the same room as the Channel 9 AP (i.e. in the bottom-left corner of the heat map above) and not switch to Channel 9.

Performance Anxiety

The clue, yet again, is in the Info window above. In particular, the Tx Rate field. It would seem that rather than just naïvely choosing an AP based on signal strength, MacOS instead (or perhaps also) checks the network performance of the candidate AP. And look at the difference between the newer dual-band Linksys on Channel 3 (145 Mbps) and the D-Link on Channel 9 (26 Mbps)!

There are plenty of ways to increase your wireless data rate, the most effective being switching to be 802.11n exclusively, as supporting -b and -g devices slows down the whole network, but (as usual) I hit a snag - my Brother 2130w wireless (-only) laser printer needs to have an 802.11g network. As it lives in the study, a couple of metres from the D-Link AP, I'd had the D-Link running "mixed mode" to support it.

Printers were sent from hell to make us miserable

As it turns out, the mixed-mode signal from the Linksys at the other end of the house is good enough for the printer (being mains-powered it's probably got very robust WiFi) and so I could move the D-Link to "n-only". But there was a trick. There's always a trick ...
You need to make sure the printer powers up onto the 802.11g network - it doesn't seem to be able to "roam" - which, again, makes sense - it's a printer. It knows to join a network called MILLHOUSE and will attempt to do so - and if the "n-only" network is there, it'll try to join it and never succeed.
So powering down the n-only AP, rebooting the printer, checking it's online (ping it), then powering the n-only AP back up again should do the trick.

Summary

Moving the D-Link AP to n-only doubled the typical Tx Rate at the front of the house to around 50 Mbps, the result being that the Mac now considers Channel 9 to be good enough to switch to as I move towards that end of the house. It still doesn't switch quite as fast as I'd like, but it gets there, and doesn't drop any connections while it switches, which is great.

Here's the summary of the setup now:

	Living Room	Study
Device	Linksys X6200	D-Link DIR-655
IP Address	10.240.0.2	10.240.0.3
Channel	3	9
Mode	b/g/n	n-only
Band	2.4 GHz	2.4 GHz
Bandwidth	20 MHz	20 MHz
Security	WPA2 Personal	WPA Personal (sic)
WPA Mode	n/a	WPA2 Only
Cipher Type	n/a	AES Only

Stand by for even more excruciating detail about my home network in future updates!