Enabling Apple Intelligence on macOS 15.1 (Sequoia) Developer Beta

---------- On Red Hat Linux ---------- 
$ cat /etc/redhat-release

---------- On CentOS Linux ---------- 
$ cat /etc/centos-release

---------- On Fedora Linux ---------- 
$ cat /etc/fedora-release

---------- On Debian Linux ---------- 
$ cat /etc/debian_version

---------- On Ubuntu and Linux Mint ---------- 
$ cat /etc/lsb-release

---------- On Gentoo Linux ---------- 
$ cat /etc/gentoo-release

---------- On SuSE Linux ---------- 
$ cat /etc/SuSE-release

AS you can see this various depending on on which form of the original Linux Operating System so I usually end up searching for this as it is not something that I use day to day in my professional or work life. I hope it makes somees’s day that much easier. 🙂

In my day job I recently came across a much easier was to deal with file and/or directory permissions on Linux based systems. Typically, to determine the permissions of a file or directory you would use the ls command with various potions appended to the end of the command and to change the same file or directory’s permissions you would use the chmod command. As I recently discovered the chmod is also able to clone or copy permissions as well as manually set them.

To lustrate what I ma talking about let’s create a hypothetically example where we have two files with the following permissions.

$ ls -l file*
-rwxr-xr--. 1 lrendek lrendek 0 Apr  7 14:39 file1
-rw-rw-r--. 1 lrendek lrendek 0 Apr  7 14:40 file2

If we wanted to copy the permissions from file 1 onto file2 we would run the following option appended to the chmod command.

$ chmod --reference=file1 file2

As we can see the permissions for file2 have been cloned from file1.

$ ls -l file*
-rwxr-xr--. 1 lrendek lrendek 0 Apr  7 14:39 file1
-rwxr-xr--. 1 lrendek lrendek 0 Apr  7 14:40 file2

If we extend this example further we can also clone the permissions of a directory as well!

$ ls -ld dir*
d--x--x--x. 2 lrendek lrendek 40 Apr  7 14:52 dir1
drwxrwxr-x. 2 lrendek lrendek 40 Apr  7 14:52 dir2
$ chmod --reference=dir1 dir2
$ ls -ld dir*
d--x--x--x. 2 lrendek lrendek 40 Apr  7 14:52 dir1
d--x--x--x. 2 lrendek lrendek 40 Apr  7 14:52 dir2

I had a little bit of an issue finding this but stubbled across this site that provided me with the syntax and examples. Although, I am making this entry mainly for myself but I also hoping that this post will make another Sys. Admin. Job easier. Uf you have any questions, comments, etc. please feel free to contact me on my Contact page or on Twitter.

Some of these are pretty basic and some are a bit more advanced and/or obscure in my opinion. I hope they are also useful to others out there. Please not that files names and file paths are just made up examples and might not fit what you are attempting to accomplish.

• cd – change directory
• Carl + c – cancels the currently running foreground operation
• pod – s/how your current fill file path
• cp /path/to/file.txt /path/to/your/new/file.txt – copy a file from one location to another location
• move (rename) a file from one location to another location – mv file1.txt file1.back.txt
• show the tail end of a file with any new additions that are written to the file – tail -f /var/log/messages.log
• determine if a node is online – ping duck.com
• determine the network route to a given node – trace route duck.com
• perform a DNS lookup on a given address – nslookup duck.com
•  show xx number of lines at the tail end of a file – Show the tail end of a file with any additions – tail -f /var/log/messages
• run a shell script – bash shellscript.sh OR sh shellscript.sh
• check drive mappings for the currently mounted file system – do -h
• change to another system user – su username
• easy way to change to the root user if you have sudo level access – sudo -i

Recently WordPress has updated their WYSIWYG editor to Gutenberg which is absolutely fantastic!  The only issue thus far is that when editing or updating a post within WordPress you see is the following.

This prevents the auto save and publish functions from working.  WordPress and Cloudflare are working on the issue and have a workaround in place.   The fix involves disabling two rules in the WordPress rules set in the Web Application Firewall settings in your Cloudflare account.

1. Once you are logged in click on the domain that you need to edit.
2. Click on Firewall from the top menu.
3. Scroll down to the section titled IP Firewall Button.
   1. Click the button to the left titled Web Application Firewall.
4. Look for the section titled Package: Cloudflare Rule Set.
   1. Click Rule Details.
5. Scroll down to the section titled Cloudflare WordPress and click the link.
6. Click on page 4 from the pagination at the bottom of the section.
7. Look for the rules WP0025A and WP0025A.
   
8. On the far right side of the section under the Mode heading you will see a drop down list.
9. Choose disable for both rules.
10. You should see a green par across the bottom of the screen indicating that the settings are saved.
11. Click the Close button.
12. Go back to your WordPress Admin area and try to edit a post.

Unfortunately this workaround has never worked for me even after Gutenberg was updated and Cloudflare pushed out patches on their end.  As a last resort I had to whitelist my IP from the Firewall Events section of the Firewall page.

Now I am once again able to edit posts and whatnot in WordPress!

I stumbled across this interesting article this week from The Verge from my beloved NetNewsWire feeds. The article is titled Today I learned you can easily pause the Windows Task Manager to stop apps moving around. The gist of the article is the below quote for those in a hurry. 😝

I can’t believe I’ve been struggling with apps in the Task Manager randomly moving around without realizing there’s a simple keyboard shortcut to pause the Task Manager and stop its contents in their tracks. Yup, all you have to do is hold down the CTRL key and it will pause the Task Manager on both Windows 10 and Windows 11, and perhaps even older versions of Windows, too.

Tom Warren via The Verge

This tip only applies to Windows 10 and 11 and I wish I had known this years ago! At any rate as you can see in the original article at your leisure and I hope it helps out others out there in this wide world.

If you use the popular Homebrew package manager on MacOS you are very familar with running something similar to this command on a regular basis.

brew update && brew upgrade && brew cleanup

this type of command informs Homebrew to update it’s list of package versions, locate any that need to be updated, and clean up any left over files generated by there processes. If you remember to run this all the time then it is a pretty quick command, but if like me, you forget to do this for weeks or months at a time it can start to take quite some time to finish it’s maintenance.

Yesterday, I was looking into ways to automate this process through adding the command to Cron or to have Cron run a shell script or apple script file with the commands in it. After some quick searching on my search engine of choice, Kagi, I found a great Github project called Homebrew Autoupdate.

The project describes itself thusly.

An easy, convenient way to automatically update Homebrew.

This script will run brew update in the background once every 24 hours (by default) until explicitly told to stop, utilising launchd.

brew upgrade and brew cleanup can also be handled automatically, but are optional flags.

Notifications are enabled by default using a new, code-signed, universal AppleScript applet.

https://github.com/DomT4/homebrew-autoupdate

If you decide to install this project every morning you can look forward to notifications like this.

Do you already use this project? If you tried it, what did you think? Hit me up on Mastodon or my Contact page so we can discuss it or you can ask me any questions you might have.