Willkommen im Weblog von Yves Luther

A few weeks ago good mother @vowe made me aware of an Amazon.de special offer for the external Samsung Portable SSD T5. Since one of my SuperDuper! backup drives failed a few days ago, my wife also needed some new backup drives, and the Arlo Pro 2 base station for continuous video recording, I ordered four of them.

The latter one worked flawlessly after I formatted it with FAT – yeah. But the other three keep ejecting themselves after some time – meh. I know all the Energy Saver settings to prevent the Macs and hard disk from sleeping automatically. But nothing seems to prevent the unwanted ejecting.

I don’t know if it was related on my insistence to format the T5 with APFS (ding!) but three different Macs (an iMac 5K, a MacBook Adorable and a MacBook Air) all with the latest macOS version could not be wrong. So I took it to the Internet and boy what a mess I found. Suggestions to use some Windows tools from Samsung to disable some security settings on the T5 or to install some kext drivers on my Macs. I was sure I would have found some terminal commands to make the T5 behave as expected – but I didn’t want to go this route.

Then I remembered the Sandisk Extreme Portable SSD attached to my iMac 5K via an OWC Thunderbolt 2 Dock. This SSD worked reliably and quietly for years, that I nearly forgot it. Luckily Amazon.de doesn’t make any fuss when returning stuff so I sent the Samsungs back and ordered the same amount from Sandisk. These now work like a charm, even with APFS and we will forget them surely soon.

PS None of the Amazon.de links are affiliate links – just that you know.

What is the new improvement?

L1/R1, L2/R2
3.5" IPS screen
Screen: 60Hz refresh rate
Dual Micro SD slot
Play PS1/ SNES games without any problem

Not as nice as a Nintendo Switch but should be really affordable, the display looks decent and the gameplay is fluent. Video here.

Why use a heatsink and a case, when you can use a heatsink case?! This sleek, anodised aluminium case for Raspberry Pi 4 will give you 10-15°C of passive cooling under full CPU load. Pretty cool.

Can’t agree more. That’s a real beauty and a good example for a great symbiosis. Unfortunately my Raspberry Pi 4 is integrated in a pi-topCEED and there’s no room for this aluminium heatsink case. But once the kinks are ironed-out of the Pi 4 I will buy another one together with this case.

Since Panic’s Coda is my preferred one editor, I am deeply interested in its successor Nova. Therefore it is no wonder that I was quite surprised when they posted a screenshot on May 1st of their then still unnamed editor.

I was even more surprised by the theme Panic customized which was inspired by the SynthWave '84 VS Code theme from Robb Owen.

I immediately thought of adapting SynthWave '84 for Twitterrific – my favourite Twitter client. But tinkering in a plist file seemed to be very time consuming and so I forgot to look further into my first own Twitterrific theme. The gentle reminder came in the form of a tweet from Jason Snell, who took the burden and adapted the sample theme provided by the Iconfactory to his custom dark theme.

So I started tweaking my custom theme “macOSynth” (more on the name choice later) and it was indeed quiet time consuming.

The reason is to find which key / value pair is responsible for which part of the interface. Sometimes the key names give a rough indication but often the only choice was to switch the color to 255:0:0 and then hunt the red down in the many windows and dialogues of Twitterrific.

In the end I was rewarded with a nice looking Twitterrific theme on macOS which adapted the bold color choice of SynthWave '84 but sticked to the black dark mode background of macOS. One cool supported feature of the otherwise unsupported theme customization of Twitterrific is the syncing between macOS and iOS through the power of Apple’s iCloud drive, where the Twitterrific themes are stored in their corresponding “Dark” and “Light” folders.

Unfortunately some key / value pairs don’t seem to correspond between the macOS and iOS version of Twitterrific. E.g. the color for the selected icon and the compose Tweet button is shared with the “tweetTypeDefault-linkColor” and the other icons share the color with the “tweetTypeDefault-detailColor”. Also some tweaks were necessary for the “profilePositiveColor” and “backgroundColor” on iOS. Therefore I forked my “macOSynth” theme to an “iOSynth” theme and then selected the latter one on iOS.

If anybody is interested in these themes, you may download them here:

• macOSynth
• iOSynth

If anybody has ideas for constructive improvements, I am more than happy to get your suggestions either via Twitter (@yves_io) or via email.

Mit ActiveX, Marquee und für den Microsoft Internet Explorer optimiert – always the bad guys.

Via John Gruber and Jason Kottke

One of the first games to use rotoscope technology for realistic animations, with backgrounds that were entirely hand-drawn, this 1993 science fiction classic now includes a modern mode, complete with Post-FX graphic filters, completely remastered sound and music, a brand new “rewind"" function and an adjustable level of difficulty!

Vor einigen Wochen hatte ich Flashback auf meinem RetroPi wiederentdeckt. Leider war die Steuerung mit dem SONY DualShock 3 Controller etwas hakelig und ich habe mir dann Flashback für dies Nintendo Switch für 19.99 Euro gekauft. Nun haben die Nintendo Diebe den Preis auf 5,99 Euro gesenkt – danke dafür. Und danke mir selbst, dass ich kurz vor dem Ende des Spiels an einer Stelle gesichert habe, wo ich ohne ein weiteres Leben sofort draufgehe.

The system will also come with a smaller 5.5-inch screen, weighs less than the original Switch hardware (approximately 0.61 lbs), and comes in three colors: yellow, gray and turquoise. The Nintendo Switch Lite also boasts longer-lasting battery life, ranging from three to seven hours of play.

Das wird ein Weihnachtskracher werden – besonders in Kombination mit den neuen Games “Pokémon Sword” und “Shield and The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening”.