Category: Apple

HP Color LaserJet Pro 4202dn with macOS Sonoma : don’t!

Apple history

Since more than 40 years there are HP printers that are connected to Apple computers. It is a simple thing: Some document is in the computer, it should get printed on paper. Happened in this specific Apple/HP combination many billions of times. HP’s market cap is around 35,470,000,000 dollars right now. That of Apple is 3,400,000,000,000.

Two devices connecting for this super simple thing. Should be easy in 2024.

IT IS NOT.

Fucking not.

The latest macOS Sonoma 15.1 will not work reliably with the HP Color LaserJet Pro 4202dn.

Printing a document multiple times will only work when you open the print dialog as many times and print one page.

The printer insists that it wants to double-sided print.

I spent hours with this. Tried everything. It did not work out of the box. Neither does it now.

Again: All I want is to print a simple text document.

Enshitification.

Here it is not intended. But infuriating. I love my MacBook Pro. The design for the HP printer I personally like. The hardware of it seems to be built right. But the software that moves the data to the printer does not work with the software of the printer. A task that should be solved since more than 40 years.

Sudo MacOS 15.0 Sequoia and timestamp_timeout

Apple OSX

It seems that MacOS 15.0 does not respect altered timestamp_timeout values.

Trying to find out why, and how it might be fixable I found nothing. Instead the ability to do sudo via touch ID came to light. Looking for

/etc/pam.d/sudo_local.template

will get you details. I tried for 5 minutes. And it is nonsense!

You work in a terminal, a sudo is needed. With this config enabled, a popup shows up, you have to reach for the mouse, give the window focus, and then do touch id. Typing a password every three days is SO much quicker.

Error Code -43 macOS Sierra / OS X 10.12

Apple technology

Under Mac OS X 10.12.1 aka macOS Sierra attempting to put files into the trash results in an error message:

The operation can't be completed because one or more
required items can't be found.
(Error code -43)

Currently a solution can not be googled that well: As general as the error message sounds there is a large heap of well meaning system care advice.

In my situation the problem seems to have been caused by no cleanly un-mounting CF cards and/or external hard drives.

A reboot makes the issue go away. Nothing more and nothing less required.

deleting all photos from iPhone

Apple misc

Somehow Apples cloud based photo system got enabled on my iPhone. Which also meant that the delete button in the OS X application “Image capture” got grayed out.

To re-enable it had to turn off iCloud Photo Library and My Photo stream via Settings -> Photos & Camera

And then I had to reboot the phone (running IOS 8.1.3)

I am old enough to remember that any change on a Windows machine last century also required a reboot.

Apple

Apple misc

“Designed in California”

Made in China

Taxed in Reno

hfs dmg files in Centos

Apple linux

In Centos 5.7 mounting dmg files created under OS X 10.6 with hdiutil no longer worked:

mount  -t hfsplus -o loop dmgFileFromOSX10.6.dmg  /mountpoint

results in

mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/loop0,

Without having researched it I doubt that it is the actual Centos Version that matters here.

The dmg has been created under OS X 10.6 in the terminal via:

hdiutil create -size 1024k dmgFileFromOSX10.6.dmg -fs HFS+ -volname 'test dmg'

DMG creation in the command line is a work around for the (arbritrary?) minimum size requirements of the Disk Utility program of 5.2MB and 10.1MB.

It turns out that a dmg file created with the same command line in OS X 10.4 ( on a G4 machine ) works fine. On which side 10.5 falls we did not test.

once we had it we had to waste it

Apple misc

This looks like a nice mac memory stat.

Just that the whole circle represents 8 GB – and that there is no applications running (in the dock)

What is the OS doing with all that memory? A computer not doing anything and still using 6.5GB or memory.

Nice.

Apple Cinema Displays

Apple misc

Just switched back from the 27″ Apple Cinema display (latest with Thunderbolt etc) to the 30″ one after a couple of weeks.

The 27″ has a nice picture. But it is useless. I am ready to write it off and put into a corner. It looks nice. When it is turned off. Or when one glances over pretty pictures.
But for any work that requires reading it is not usable. A glossy screen is in the end a mirror. My brain sees the content on the screen and the reflection of the room behind
me. For me that causes un needed strain after a couple of hours. Maybe that’s related to the fact that I also get to see myself 🙂

I find it amazing that the 7 year old 30″ design is still the best screen that Apple ever made. There were hardware bumps etc. No wonder they go for a high price on eBay.

The whole glossy saga let me degrade my 13″ MacBook Pro’s into Backup and Wife usage. Back on the 17″ non glossy display I must say that it was really worth the switch.
A shame since the 13″ is a neat little machine. With 8GB Ram and a recent CPU it is quiet a bit of punch. Back on the Aircraft Carrier I realized that I missed all those pixels though.

apple: don’t bother

Apple technology

iTunes just rejected to play a song that I purchased 3 years ago, since it told me I need to authenticate my current computer.
Instead of trying to figure out what is broken with the Apple authentication for that song I just went ahead and bought it again on Amazon. Without CRM.

Apple is notorious for having one of the worst user management systems for their online services. The documentation of my Apple ID changes and resets
spans many pages. There are none for other systems and services that I used equally long.

Funny how one company can be so great in a couple of areas and fail so consistently in others.

requested architecture/executable not found

Apple technology

On a recent Macbook Pro (i7, Macbook Pro 8.1) post Feb 2011 I did not have much love from a kernel driver. Oddly google was not that helpful.

/var/log/system.log system log complained along the lines of:

[0x0-0x30030].WebToGo.ePlus2_1[1106]:
/System/Library/Extensions/HuaweiDataCardActivateDriver.kext failed to load -
(libkern/kext) requested architecture/executable not found;
check the system/kernel logs for errors or try kextutil(8).

The fix was pretty simple: Just boot the machine into 32bit mode. Turns out the default boot mode is 64bit on later hardware. One way to find out which OS mode you run is to go to:

About this Mac
More Info …
click directly on the Software item on the left.

You will see 64-bit Kernel and Extensions: “Yes” in the second last line.

If you hold the numbers 3 and 2 during boot then you will be in 32bit mode and get probably much more love from 32 bit extension. In my case it was an Aldi Surfstick S4012 based on a Huawei one that caused some grief in 64bit.

Since not many 64 native machines are out there it explains why this topic is not easier to google right now.