Software on smcleod.net

New Apple Silicon M4 & M5 HiDPI Limitation on 4K External Displays

Sun, 29 Mar 2026 01:00:00 +1000

A regression in external display support on Apple Silicon M4/M5 generation chips prevents full HiDPI modes on 4K monitors, limiting users to either blurry non-HiDPI or reduced workspace HiDPI.

Open Budgeting - Subscriptions & Licences

Thu, 05 Jan 2023 12:41:37 +0000

Publicly documenting my subscription and license expenses

The Best Of - 2022 Edition

Wed, 19 Oct 2022 19:00:00 +0000

Near the end of each year I note down a summary of the best apps I've enjoyed using throughout the year, here's 2022.

Firefox Addons for 2022

Tue, 17 May 2022 08:00:00 +0000

Firefox Addons - 2022 Edition#

My list of must-have Firefox addons - 2022 edition

Updated: 2022-11-07

Privacy and Security#

Firstly - you should have Firefox's Enhanced Tracking Protection enabled.

Don't Track Me Google
LocalCDN
UTM Tracking Token Stripper
- Note: You can accomplish some of what this does by setting up the removeparam uBlock origin rules I've listed below.
Multi-Account Containers
- Useful for setting sites such as Amazon, eBay, Twitter, LinkedIn, Banking etc... each to always open in their own isolated container.
The official addon for whatever Password Manager you use.
Firefox Translations

uBlock Origin#

Probably the single most important addon.

Goodbye Evernote, Hello Bear

Thu, 22 Jul 2021 19:00:00 +0000

Until recently I used Evernote for my notes, web clippings and document drafts, I was a subscriber going on 14 years and had over 3000 notes.

However in recent years Evernote has gone downhill to the point it could be considered hostile to it's users.

The native macOS app was replaced with an Electron Javascript webframe and like almost all Electron apps I've tried it was plagued by poor performance, memory leaks and aggressive idle CPU utilisation and above all else it now lacks the low latency feeling the native application had.

The Best Of - 2020 Edition

Sat, 10 Oct 2020 16:00:00 +0000

Near the end of every year I note down a summary of the best apps, hardware & podcasts I've enjoyed throughout the year (and often for some time before).

This post has been superseded. You can find the latest version of this post here.

Software and Services#

Software - Mobile#

Browser Addons#

Hardware#

Podcasts#

YouTube Channels#

The Absolute Worst Software I've Experienced#

💩 Microsoft Office365 💩
💩 Microsoft Teams 💩
💩 Atlassian Jira 💩
💩 Atlassian Bamboo 💩
💩 Atlassian Confluence 💩
💩 McAffee Endpoint Security 💩
💩 Facebook 💩

Goodbye XenSever - Hello XCP-ng

Tue, 05 Feb 2019 13:00:00 +0000

In 2018 I set out to replace our XenSever 7.2 based virtualisation after Citrix essentially screwed over free / open source users.

This project was to directly replace XenServer 7.2 with something supported and manageable for our traditional virtualisation needs.

High Level Selection Considerations#

I evaluated a number of options, with the primary candidates below.

Key criteria (at a high level) I was evaluating:

Ease of moving from our existing XenServer 7.2 based hypervisor clusters.
Security (architecture, hardening, monitoring, logging).
Cost (both licensing if any and self-support / management costs).
VM Performance (Storage IOPs and throughput, Network latency and throughput, Processing latency, steal from over-provisioned workloads).
Management UI/UX and performance (for BAU activities).
Management / Cluster SPOFs, fail-over and redundancy.
Installation and upgrade process.
Update and security patching frequency.
Networking design and complexity.
Community (size, engagement, acceptance of suggestions / MRs).
Reliable live VM migrations.
Ease of management for a small team (Part of a low TCO).
Risk of vendor and technology lock-in.
Risk of survival (will it still be well maintained over the next 1-3 years).
Stability and reliability above practically all else.

XenServer 7.6 (w/ Paid License)#

For#

Potentially priority support from Citrix for issues.
Easy upgrade from 7.2.
Fresh installs and upgrades are simple, painless and easy to pxeboot, licensing can be a pain after install however.

Against#

Slow moving development.
Incredibly expensive, it would cost us something like $140,800 AUD per year (shelf price) for our 32 hosts (each with 2 sockets).
Features heavily restricted by licensing model.
Mostly older-fashioned enterprise users.
No web management interface (although you can use Xen Orchestra from the folks behind XCP-ng).
Diminishing community since XenServer licensing changes in 7.3.
Poor storage performance compared to KVM based solutions.
Many outdated packages, while kind of based on CentOS 7, there are a great deal of packages from older releases or completely custom rebuilt.
Uses old technologies like EXT3 and doesn't support SSD/Flash TRIM/DISCARD functions.
SELinux not enforcing or supported.
OpenvSwitch still uses a lot of Dom0 CPU (same as XenServer).
Dom0 often ends up limiting VM storage operations (tapdisk maxing out Dom0 CPU).
Applying updates can be painful or at least slow, requiring binary ISO files to be downloaded from Citrix.
Uses Jira for bug tracking (I just can't stand the thing, it's painfully laggy, give my GitLab or Github over it any day).

XCP-ng #

XCP-ng is a relatively recent fork from XenServer after it was open sourced, tracking upstream but clearly prioritising modernisation and community.

Run youtube-dl (or similar) in the background

Mon, 30 Jul 2018 08:52:00 +0000

I wanted an alias or function to use youtube-dl in the background. Looking around the web lots of people seemed to want this and most of them were banging their heads against a wall due to:

A) bash quoting
B) backgrounding dying when their terminal closed
C) passing the argument (url in my case) to the function

Here's a simple function I whipped up that seems to 'just works'™:

function yt
{
  nohup youtube-dl "$1" --no-progress 2>&1 > youtube-dl-"$(date +%Y%m%d-%H%M%S)".log &
}

And if you don't want logs, simply send the output to /dev/null:

Disabling scroll-wheel zoom in Firefox

Mon, 16 Jul 2018 10:57:14 +0000

This feature annoys me endlessly, I end up zoomed in and out of websites all over the internet. ... But the fix is easy and there's no addons required.

Navigate to about:config (in Firefox's URL bar)
Change the value of the following two properties to 0:

mousewheel.with_control.action
mousewheel.with_meta.action

If you use Firefox sync and want these settings to sync between your machines, also add the following properties:

Create two new properties both of type boolean and set them to true:

GlusterFS

Mon, 25 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000

We're in the process of shifting from using our custom 'glue' for orchestrating Docker deployments to Kubernetes, When we first deployed Docker to replace LXC and our legacy Puppet-heavy application configuration and deployment systems there really wasn't any existing tool to manage this, thus we rolled our own, mainly a few Ruby scripts combined with a Puppet / Hiera / Mcollective driven workflow.

The main objective is to replace our legacy NFS file servers used to host uploads / attachments and static files for our web applications, while NFS(v4) performance is adequate, it is a clear single point of failure and of course, there are the age old stale mount problems should network interruptions occur.

Return Of The RSS

Fri, 22 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Of all the tools for reading news and subscribing to software releases, I still find RSS the most useful.

I use Feedly to manage my rss subscriptions and keep all my devices in sync, but instead of using the Feedly's own client, I use an app called Reeder as the client / reader itself.

Link: My Feedly RSS Feed

Feedly #

RSS feed subscription management

Features:

Keyword alerts.
Browser plugins to subscribe to (current) url.
Notation and highlighting support (a bit like Evernote).
Search and filtering across large numbers of feeds / content.
IFTTT, Zapier, Buffer and Hootsuite integration.
Built in save / share functionality (that I only use when I'm on the website).
Backup feeds to Dropbox.
Very fast, regardless of the fact that I'm in Australia - which often impacts the performance of apps / sites that tend to be hosted on AWS in the US as the latency is so high.
Article de-duplication is currently being developed I believe, so I'm looking forward to that!
Easy manual import, export and backup (no vendor lock-in is important to me).
Public sharing of your Feedly feeds (we're getting very meta here!).

Reeder #

A (really) beautiful and fast iOS / macOS client

Monitoring SystemD Units With Nagios

Mon, 23 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Ever forgotten to add a critical service to monitoring?

Want to know if a service or process fails without explicitly monitoring every service on a host?

...Then why not use SystemD's existing knowledge of all the enabled services? Thanks to 'Kbyte' who made a simple Nagios plugin to do just this!

Requirements#

Python3 (For RHEL/CentOS 7 yum install python34)
python-nagiosplugin My pre-built RPMs or pip3 install nagiosplugin
PyNagSystemD

Online Conversion from SQL_ASCII to UTF8 in PostgreSQL

Mon, 23 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Scripts and source available here: sql_ascii_to_utf8

The Goal#

To be able to take a Postgres Database which is in SQL_ASCII encoding, and import it into a UTF8 encoded database.

Requirements:

Python3 (For RHEL/CentOS 7 yum install python34)
python-nagiosplugin My pre-built RPMs or pip3 install nagiosplugin
PyNagSystemD

The Problem#

PostreSQL will generate errors like this if it encounters any non-UTF8 byte-sequences during a database restore:

Speeding Up rsync

Tue, 03 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000

The most common way to use rsync is probably as such:

rsync -avr user@<source>:<source_dir> <dest_dir>

Resulting in 30-35MB/s depending on file sizes

This can be improved by using a more efficient, less secure encryption algorithm, disabling compression and telling the SSH client to disable some unneeded features that slow things down.

With the settings below I have achieved 100MB/s (at work between VMs) and over 300MB/s at home between SSD drives.

Mirroring a Gitlab project to Github

Thu, 04 Feb 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Let's pretend you have a project on Gitlab called ask-izzy and you want to mirror it up to Gitlab which is located at https://github.com/ask-izzy/ask-izzy

Assuming you're running Gitlab as the default user of git and that your repositories are stored in /mnt/repositories you can following something similar to the following instructions:

Grant write access to Github

Get your Gitlab install's pubkey from the git user

cat /home/git/.ssh/id_rsa.pub

On Github add this pubkey as deploy key on the repo, make sure you tick the option to allow write access.

The Best Of - 2014 Edition

Sun, 15 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000

At the end of every year I note down a summary of the best applications, hardware & websites I've enjoyed & depended on throughout the year (and often for some time before).

This post has long since been superseded. You can find the latest version of this post here.

Software / General Use#

Fastmail - https://www.fastmail.com
Evernote - https://evernote.com
Reeder - http://reederapp.com
Keynote - https://www.apple.com/au/mac/keynote
Lastpass - https://lastpass.com
Plex - https://plex.tv
Calibre - http://calibre-ebook.com

Software / Geek Use#

Sublime Text - http://www.sublimetext.com/3
Homebrew - http://brew.sh
DropSync - http://mudflatsoftware.com
Beets - http://beets.radbox.org
Textual - http://www.codeux.com/textual
XLD - http://tmkk.undo.jp/xld/index_e.html
Code Academy - http://www.codecademy.com
Exercism.io - http://exercism.io
Sickbeard + Headphones + Couchpotato + Sabnzbd - http://www.totalhtpc.com/ultimate-usenet-guide.html

Software / Mobile#

Tweetbot - http://tapbots.com/software/tweetbot
Pushover - http://pushover.net
Lastpass - https://lastpass.com
Keynote - https://www.apple.com/au/ios/keynote
Reeder - http://reederapp.com/ios
Evernote- https://evernote.com
Plex - https://plex.tv
Backblaze - https://www.backblaze.com
WTF Podcast - http://www.wtfpod.com/app
MiniHack - https://itunes.apple.com/au/app/minihack-for-hacker-news/id631108846?mt=8
Uber - https://itunes.apple.com/au/app/uber/id368677368?mt=8
Goodreads - https://itunes.apple.com/au/app/goodreads-book-recommendations/id355833469?mt=8
Notify4M - https://itunes.apple.com/au/app/notify4m/id499161979?mt=8
Bandcamp - https://itunes.apple.com/au/app/bandcamp/id706408639?mt=8
Hype Machine - https://itunes.apple.com/au/app/hype-machine/id414315986?mt=8
Nuzzel (Only got onto this today) - https://itunes.apple.com/au/app/nuzzel-news-from-your-friends/id692285770?mt=8
Alien Blue - http://www.reddit.com/r/alienblue

Software / SysAdmin or DevOps Specific#

Gitlab - http://gitlab.org
Gitlab-CI - https://about.gitlab.com/gitlab-ci
Dash - http://kapeli.com/dash
PostgreSQL (Makes my list every year & just keeps getting better) - http://www.postgresql.org
PGBadger - http://dalibo.github.io/pgbadger
Docker - https://www.docker.com
Consul - https://consul.io
Puppet (I couldn't do my job as well without it) - http://puppetlabs.com
iTerm - http://iterm2.com
Nginx - http://nginx.org
Htop - http://hisham.hm/htop
Bonnie++ - http://linux.die.net/man/8/bonnie++
Openfire - https://www.igniterealtime.org/projects/openfire
Hiera-Eyaml - https://github.com/TomPoulton/hiera-eyaml
Rubinius - http://rubini.us
Puma - http://puma.io
XenServer - http://xenserver.org
ElasticSearch - www.elasticsearch.org
Logstash - http://logstash.net
FPM - https://github.com/jordansissel/fpm
PFsense - https://www.pfsense.org
Debian Jessie (Not quite released but the next great version of the best linux Distro IMO) - https://www.debian.org/releases/jessie
Check_MK Multisite - https://mathias-kettner.de/checkmk_multisite.html
PWSafe - https://itunes.apple.com/au/app/pwsafe-password-safe-compatible/id520993579?mt=12
Supervisord - http://supervisord.org

Websites#

Last.fm - http://www.last.fm/user/sammcj2000
Feedly - https://feedly.com
HackerNews - https://news.ycombinator.com/news
Lucidchart - http://lucidchart.com/
MondoTunes (Might be a little biased here!) - http://mondotunes.org

Hardware#

Das Ultimate 4- http://www.daskeyboard.com
Logitech Performance MX - http://www.logitech.com/en-au/product/performance-mouse-mx
15'' Macbook Pro Retina - http://www.apple.com/au/macbook-pro
iPhone 6+ (because its bigger than bigger, or something) - https://www.apple.com/iphone-6
CuBox - http://www.solid-run.com/product/cubox-i4pro
Parani SD1000 Bluetooth Serial Adapter - http://www.senaindustrial.com/products/industrial_bluetooth/sd1000.php
SanDisk Extreme Pro 480GB SSD - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820171999

Other / Non-tech#

All Day Socks - http://alldaysocks.com
Sennheiser Amperior On-Ear Headphones - http://www.head-fi.org/products/sennheiser-amperior-on-ear-headphones
O2 + ODAC - http://www.jdslabs.com/products/48/o2-odac-combo
Benchmark DAC1 HDR - http://benchmarkmedia.com/products/benchmark-dac1-hdr-digital-to-analog-converter
Bellroy Wallets - http://bellroy.com
Ink Shoes - http://www.inkshoes.it
Kindle Paperwhite - http://www.amazon.com.au/gp/feature.html?docId=3077740006
Nerf Jolt - http://nerf.wikia.com/wiki/Jolt_EX-1

Books#

The Phoenix Project (Reread this year for the 3rd time) - http://itrevolution.com/books/phoenix-project-DevOps-book
Surely You're Joking Mr Feynman! - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5544.Surely_You_re_Joking_Mr_Feynman_
The Dark Tower Series - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/43615.The_Gunslinger
Snow Crash - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/830.Snow_Crash

Software on smcleod.net

New Apple Silicon M4 & M5 HiDPI Limitation on 4K External Displays

Open Budgeting - Subscriptions & Licences

The Best Of - 2022 Edition

Firefox Addons for 2022

Firefox Addons - 2022 Edition#

Privacy and Security#

uBlock Origin#

Goodbye Evernote, Hello Bear

The Best Of - 2020 Edition

Software and Services#

Software - Mobile#

Browser Addons#

Hardware#

Podcasts#

YouTube Channels#

The Absolute Worst Software I've Experienced#

Goodbye XenSever - Hello XCP-ng

High Level Selection Considerations#

XenServer 7.6 (w/ Paid License)#

For#

Against#

XCP-ng#

Run youtube-dl (or similar) in the background

Disabling scroll-wheel zoom in Firefox

GlusterFS

Return Of The RSS

Feedly#

Reeder#

Monitoring SystemD Units With Nagios

Requirements#

Online Conversion from SQL_ASCII to UTF8 in PostgreSQL

The Goal#

The Problem#

Speeding Up rsync

Mirroring a Gitlab project to Github

The Best Of - 2014 Edition

Software / General Use#

Software / Geek Use#

Software / Mobile#

Software / SysAdmin or DevOps Specific#

Websites#

Hardware#

Other / Non-tech#

Books#

XCP-ng #

Feedly #

Reeder #