My sister-in-law also brought her mid-2009 MacBook Pro to town last week, which was still running Capitan and not working as well as it could have with iCloud – she was getting annoying messages constantly asking her for her iCloud credentials.

Her Mac only has 4GB of RAM (2×2) and a spinning hard drive, both of which I would love to upgrade at some point. For now, I recommended that she try dosdude1’s app, macOS High Sierra Patcher (version 2.5.3), to install High Sierra on unsupported hardware. Reading dosdude1’s “Known Issues”, we found that her wifi card, ending in ID 0x8D, was reported to be compatible with the patch – full speed ahead!

Its important to follow dosdude’s “Recommended Steps“. I tried using my already downloaded copy of High Sierra with dosdude1’s app, but I received error messages we couldn’t get past. Instead, we used the integrated High Sierra download feature that dosdude1 integrated in the macOS High Sierra Patcher app. It took her machine about two hours to install the macOS and Post-Install routine – the limited RAM and aging Core 2 Duo inside her machine may have contributed to this.

Her trusty macbookpro5,4 seemed to be working fine with High Sierra. The only gotcha was that Photos.app was taking hours to “Update” her library – it never finished before she left, so hopefully its picked up where it left off when she returned home, despite us having to force-quit the library update. More importantly, her machine now seems to properly authenticate with iCloud, which is what we had hoped for in the first place.

Installing patches like this is not everyone’s cup of tea, but I’ve installed patches like this before and had good luck. We used the MacPostFactor app to get my wife’s old MacBook Pro on Mountain Lion, which it happily ran for years. I also helped co-workers install MacPostFactor on their aging MacBooks, which all ran it with good success after we consulted Black Manticore for some advice. With these successes in hand, I felt ok to recommend that my sister-in-law try it for her main machine. Will update if this approach backfires on us.

One of my three fabulous sis-in-laws was in town and brought her iPad 4, which hadn’t booted up in over a month. When plugging the Lightning USB cable into the iPad and a power supply, the red battery icon periodically flashed on the screen, and when the cable was removed the icon also flashed that it needed power. However, no matter how long the iPad was plugged in for, it never stored enough of a charge to fully power up, even after putting it in DFU mode and restoring iOS to the latest version.

After reading this site and skipping about a quarter of the way down, the following bullet was helpful:

I held the power and home buttons for at least 10 minutes while the iPad remained plugged into the power supply and USB cable. Sure enough, about 30 minutes later the iPad booted up and continued to charge! Success.

Extra bits: why does this work? In the first paragraph of this post, we mentioned that the iPad kept flashing that it needed power, it was caught in a loop of sorts. By holding the home button and power button simultaneously, we are breaking this loop and allowing the iPad to continue charging. Woohoo!

I waited a little while to upgrade to High Sierra until I knew what I might lose with the new system. One thing that went away was the ability to use telnet and ftp from Terminal.app.

Others have encountered and fixed this issue prior to me. Here’s the simple fix:

1. Open “Terminal.app” on your Mac
2. Type the following and then press enter: brew install telnet tnftp

You should get a response like this:

==> Downloading https://homebrew.bintray.com/bottles/tnftp-20070806.high_sierra.
######################################################################## 100.0%
==> Pouring tnftp-20070806.high_sierra.bottle.tar.gz
? /usr/local/Cellar/tnftp/20070806: 9 files, 262.9KB

If you receive an error message, you may need to consider installing XCode and “brew” for macOS High Sierra and repeat the instructions in this post.

** UPDATE ** These instructions work with macOS Catalina too.

We tried installing PufferPanel on a High Sierra Server today, but hit some snags with the installer and manually configuring Apache. Didn’t see much in the community forum, so we logged on to Discord and puffrfish, one of the lead developers, was gracious to answer some questions, pasted below:

Teddd just joined. Everyone, look busy!Today at 9:25 PM

Teddd – Today at 9:27 PM

Has anyone here tried installing PufferPanel server on a Mac?

puffrfish – Today at 9:27 PM

our installer isn’t designed for it, so while in theory it could someday work, it’s not going to right now

I’d recommend running it in a linux VM instead

Teddd – Today at 9:28 PM

Yeah, I saw the installer is meant for linux, but I figured I could manually configure it to work with Apache.

puffrfish – Today at 9:29 PM

we don’t have a darwin build for pufferd yet, so it’s a definite no

Teddd – Today at 9:31 PM

Is the pufferd code available too? Just curious if I could try to recompile on Darwin.

puffrfish – Today at 9:31 PM

yes, it’s all available on GitHub, but take it from me (I use a Mac) that it’s not as simple as just compiling it

Teddd – Today at 9:32 PM

Good to know :smiley:

puffrfish – Today at 9:32 PM

I plan to someday get to it, as it’s not that much work, but the amount of people wanting it is almost none..in fact, you’re the first one
at least that I can remember anyway

Teddd – Today at 9:34 PM

I know there are a few more out there, but most probably write it off when the site only mentions linux distros as supported.

puffrfish – Today at 9:34 PM

virtualbox works well enough though, just load up an ubuntu server iso into it and make sure networking is configured in bridge mode for ease of use

Teddd – Today at 9:35 PM

Thanks for the tips. If you ever want to bring it to the Mac, I’d be interested in helping.

puffrfish – Today at 9:35 PM

another issue is that the game servers themselves, for example srcds, don’t run well (if at all?) on mac

what game are you looking to run?

Teddd – Today at 9:35 PM

Minecraft PC or else Pocketmine-MP.

puffrfish – Today at 9:37 PM

minecraft java would work, not sure about pocketmine but I imagine so

Teddd – Today at 9:38 PM

Yeah, pocketmine works too.

puffrfish – Today at 9:38 PM

I have to say that it’s a little far off though, we have a lot of other issues we have to tackle first, mainly the panel itself

Teddd – Today at 9:38 PM

At least we’ve run several versions of pocketmine-MP.

puffrfish – Today at 9:38 PM

but we are set up in a way to theoretically support windows as well as macOS in future releases

Teddd – Today at 9:40 PM

That will be an exciting day :joy:

puffrfish – Today at 9:40 PM

I wouldn’t hold your breath for it

Teddd – Today at 9:42 PM

Ha, I won’t, but I think its really cool what you have already built with PufferPanel.

puffrfish – Today at 9:43 PM

thanks, I would definitely recommend just running it in a VM of some sort for now though. the game servers (besides minecraft) are more suited to running under linux. I’d say windows comes second since there are some windows-only games

Lord_Ralex – Today at 9:46 PM

Yeah, I know we wont have a build since environments are not set up for ot

Teddd – Today at 9:51 PM

Are there any alternatives to PufferPanel that might run on the Mac, like Multicraft?

puffrfish – Today at 9:51 PM

not that I know of

I recently updated my Mac to High Sierra and Illustrator CS5bwould no longer launch, because it wanted Java SE 6. I downloaded and installed Apple’s Java SE 6 run time, because the other workaround that follows DID NOT work, even though I tried enabling the root user and booting into Single User Mode to try and execute the following:

sudo mkdir -p /System/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/1.6.0.jdk

sudo mkdir -p /System/Library/Java/Support/Deploy.bundle

ln -s /System/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/1.6.0.jdk/Contents /Library/Internet Plug-Ins/JavaAppletPlugin.plugin/Contents

Click the “Dash Home” icon in the upper left hand corner of the screen, just below “Ubuntu Desktop” and type “Terminal”. Click the Terminal icon when it appears.

In Terminal’s window, type in the following commands:

sudo apt-get install python-software-properties

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:couchdb/stable

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install couchdb couchdb-bin couchdb-common -f

To navigate to where CouchDB database files are stored:

cd /var/lib/CouchDB

Extras

sudo chown -R couchdb:couchdb /home/adam/Desktop/couchdb

sudo chown -R adam:adam /home/adam/Desktop/couchdb

sudo chown -R adam:adam /var/lib/couchdb

To get Debian version from command line:

cat /etc/debian_version

For documenting my attendance at a webinar for professional development, I wanted copies of slides that were posted in a JW Player format. Right-clicking the video wouldn’t allow me to download it, boo hiss.

Using Safari on my Mac, I pressed Option-Command-U to view the “Resources” and then clicked the “Elements” tab. I then hovered over the video feed and Safari highlights portions of the code that generate the content. Keep expanding the carrots/arrows until you drill down to the code generating the feed. In my case, it looked like this and I right-clicked the code to “Copy Link Address”:

I added a few LIFX devices to Homebridge to make them available through Apple’s Home app. After LIFX added native HomeKit support to their lights, I decided that keeping the homebridge-lifx-lan plugin on Homebridge was unnecessary. I first quit Homebridge by pressing Ctrl-C and then used the following command to remove the plugin:

sudo npm uninstall -g homebridge-lifx-lan

Soon after I launched homebridge on my Mac mini and then the Home app on my iOS device to find that the LIFX accessories were still stuck under Homebridge. I also tried deleting the LIFX platform from the config.json file, but it was no help.

To fix this, I restored the config.json file and reinstalled the plugin:

sudo npm install -g homebridge-lifx-lan

Then I installed the Hesperus app on my iOS device and followed these instructions:

https://github.com/devbobo/homebridge-lifx-lan/wiki/Removing-a-bulb-from-Homebridge

Success! After this, I quit Homebridge, removed the platform code from the config.json file, and removed the plugin using this command:

sudo npm uninstall -g homebridge-lifx-lan

I’m loving my Garadget – thanks Denis! Recently, IFTTT stopped working with my Garadget. When I logged into IFTTT.com and looked at “My Applets” they appeared fine, but if I tried to look at the settings for them, IFTTT.com would throw up a red bar across the top of the screen saying “We can’t connect to your service.”

I corrected this  by clicking Services->Garadget->Settings->Edit connection and then entered my Garadget user credentials. I’m hoping this is related to the 90 day expiring token and that Denis’ new non-expiring tokens can be used with IFTTT to stop this in the future.