trick77.com – …gadgeteers at work

Slow oh-my-zsh loading on macOS 11

At some point, starting a zsh (I’m using iTerm2 here) took almost 10 seconds on macOS 11 Big Sur. This only happened the first time when I opened iTerm2 after a reboot. After mentally going through all the software changes I had done to my rig, I was pretty sure this happened right after installing Xcode. After some debugging in the oh-my-zsh code I found the culprit: it’s related to Apple’s git version which comes with Xcode. After installing the Homebrew version of git, the delay no longer occurred. It’s important though that the Homebrew git binary is found first when calling git from the command line.

GA-Z97X-UD5H and macOS 11 Big Sur with OpenCore

Interestingly, my 6 year old Hackintosh rig is still going strong and so I decided to upgrade it from macOS X Mojave to macOS 11 Big Sur. Since OpenCore is pretty well documented by now, I wanted to give it a try and replace Clover (which seems to use OpenCore as well by now).
However, the transition from Clover to OpenCore wasn’t smooth at all. OpenCore has quite a steep learning curve and I spent almost an entire, foggy November Sunday to get it all up and running.

The best cloud desktop solution for Linux is… Windows!?

I like using a remote desktop work/office environment for various reasons, travelling being on of them. This is also known as a cloud desktop. Thanks to the awesome Apache Guacamole remote desktop gateway software, I can access it everywhere, just by using a web browser (and an Internet connection).

While I love Linux, it sucks when it comes to running a remote desktop server using non-commercial software. Yes, I’ve tried xrdp. While it works, the graphics performance/latency sucks even though I was using the low resource environment xfce4. Obviously there is commercial remote desktop server software like RealVNC or NoMachine but I don’t want to shell out cash for my cloud desktop and in the case of NoMachine, its proprietary NX protocol isn’t supported by Guacamole.

How to use IPv6 on Quickline/WWZ and pfSense firewall

Here’s how to configure your pfSense firewall for IPv6 on Quickline/WWZ. The settings may work with other ISPs too but YMMV. I’m assuming your modem is already in bridge mode and pfSense is up and running for IPv4 DHCP on the WAN interface.

Auto-restart crashed mining processes in ethOS 1.2.9

ethOS 1.2.9 brings a few changes which break my auto-restart script for ethOS 1.2.7. Since 1.2.9 contains improved GPU crash detection, I rewrote the restart script to use the built-in detection mechanisms. For the required cron job please see my initial post which is available here.

As long as the DRY_RUN variable is set to false, the script won’t take any action, it just logs what it would do.