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Hacker's Guide to Setting Up Your Mac

lapwinglabs.com

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Re: Hacker's Guide to Setting Up Your Mac

#111
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did I miss something or does Chrome use the Keychain?

Chrome uses the Keychain for passwords, but it handles certs itself AFAIK.

Not according to this: http://www.chromium.org/Home/chromium-security/root-ca-polic...

Re: Hacker's Guide to Setting Up Your Mac

#112

This "cool hacker settings for your Mac" script turns off your laptop's power saving features (sleep, display dimming, hibernation even though sleep was off(?)), removes at least three kinds of backups for data loss (MobileTimeMachine, Resume, hibernation file), and changes AppKit settings in a way your customers will never be using (by turning off Automatic Termination, which is pretty harmless). Please don't run sc…

Just like PC's, Macs have entered the world of, what I call, "car guys." Car guys are always fiddling with things for a tiny performance or perceived security boosts without really thinking things through. In the Windows world you'll hear them tell you how you must disable the UAC, must install registry 'cleaners', must use $av_vendor_x because $av_vendor_y sucks, fiddle with some obscure registry change, use drivers…

I recall that this sort of stuff was very prevalent on the Mac before OS X.

Re: Hacker's Guide to Setting Up Your Mac

#113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just like PC's, Macs have entered the world of, what I call, "car guys." Car guys are always fiddling with things for a tiny performance or perceived security boosts without really thinking things through. In the Windows world you'll hear them tell you how you must disable the UAC, must install registry 'cleaners', must use $av_vendor_x because $av_vendor_y sucks, fiddle with some obscure registry change, use drivers…

Yeah, people still recommend automatic task killers for Android and it has never been useful, just harmful on speed and battery life.

Huawei even builds this nonsense into the OS! The Mate 2 (which is neat because I get 30+hours battery) has this stupid easy-to-hit button on the app switch page that terminates everything. Despite my usage never going below a GB free, it gleefully proclaims "XXX MB freed!" Well shit, I can go buy a 1GB SODIMM and leave it on my desk and always have 1GB free.

Re: Hacker's Guide to Setting Up Your Mac

#114
post #43
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just curious, what's wrong with Homebrew? I'm just a student, not a full-time developer, but I've never had problems with it and find it pretty pleasant to use.

It's slow and it has to build the packages most of the time. pkgin will install a precompiled packages very quickly. It is also a whole C program and Homebrew is just ruby scripts.

> It is also a whole C program and Homebrew is just ruby scripts.

And that's a problem?

I would argue that it's a feature. Due to Homebrew being written in Ruby, it has easily allowed over 4,000 contributors [1]. Recipes are easy to read and inspect for verification purposes.

What is the advantage of C over Ruby?

[1](https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew/graphs/contributors)

Re: Hacker's Guide to Setting Up Your Mac

#115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try using cpan to install basic modules like MySQL

I've never gotten CPAN to work reliably with any OS's included copy of Perl. As with Python and Ruby, if you want to use things not available via the OS's package manager, you're best off installing a separate copy.

Use cpanm - Easy bootstrapping documentation here http://search.cpan.org/~miyagawa/App-cpanminus-1.7012/lib/Ap...

Re: Hacker's Guide to Setting Up Your Mac

#116
post #96
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the opaque pre-compiled blob that installs other pre-compiled blobs is somehow better than a collection of scripts that lets you build from source? I don't think so... As an update is something that is done occasionally and in the background "slow" is not exactly a reason to change.

So the opaque pre-compiled blob that installs other pre-compiled blobs... Why use OSX, then? Shouldn't you be using Gentoo?

Well the largest issue by far is the fact that it overrides system blobs. Homebrew installs into it's own sandbox area and symlinks if requested.

Re: Hacker's Guide to Setting Up Your Mac

#117
post #40

After installing Mackup, the Mac backup tool mentioned in this guide, I noticed that it backed up my entire ~/.ssh directory to Dropbox. This included my id_rsa private key, which I would prefer not to have on Dropbox, even with a key passphrase.

I would like if it defaulted to nothing. With options to add all, all but ignored, or specified applications.

Re: Hacker's Guide to Setting Up Your Mac

#119

The next thing you should do is update the unix tools you already have on your mac. This is more relevant than ever since the recent "Shellshock" debacle. How many developers are launching bash scripts with environment variables defined by third parties?

not to mention that many scripts & apps often hardcode the system bash (i.e. /bin/bash) so they won't use the homebrew version

Which is why you symlink the homebrew version ontop of /bin/bash!

Re: Hacker's Guide to Setting Up Your Mac

#120
I have an Ansible setup [1] that installs my dot files and other useful tools on Mac and Debian/Redhat derived platforms. I also created recently a Docker image [2] that runs my Ansible script so I can easily dev inside this Docker container. Just "git clone" and start working!

[1] https://github.com/KyleAMathews/linux-config [2] https://registry.hub.docker.com/u/kyma/dev-image/

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