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x-cart guru & custom programmer

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MacBook External DVD Player

August 21, 2021 by joecodes Leave a Comment

My trusty mid-2012 MacBook Pro running Catalina got an upgrade by replacing the integrated SuperDrive with an OWC Data Doubler and SSD, moving the SuperDrive to an OWC SuperSlim external enclosure. Everything went great except they don’t tell you make it clear that the DVD Player app will not play DVDs from an external SuperDrive.

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Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Apple

Progressive Enhancement

December 28, 2020 by joecodes Leave a Comment

I learned about progressive enhancement as a way to take a simple html site and add styles and scripting to enhance its appearance and functionality, as needed, without interfering with the basic purpose of the site. This keeps it simple, fast, and compatible. If bandwidth and browser supports a feature, it will display it, but these enhancements should never interfere with the basic purpose of the site.

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Filed Under: Personal, Programming Tagged With: simple, stability

Keychain Password Search

October 29, 2018 by joecodes Leave a Comment

Recent security breaches at online companies large and small has been making the news and becoming disturbingly routine. Now we’re starting to get spam that shows a real password from these old security breaches. It would be handy to know all of the places where I’ve used this old password so I can update it. Since I use the macOS and iOS keychain to store these passwords across all of my devices I wanted to search all of my saved logins but Keychain Access doesn’t let us do that.

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Filed Under: Programming Tagged With: Apple, security

Smarty preg_match

September 24, 2018 by joecodes Leave a Comment

This was not obvious to me nor apparently anyone else trying to use preg_match in Smarty so I thought I’d share the solution. Given $href=’home.php?cat=1′ and trying to get 1 out of it:

{if "/cat=(\d+)/"|preg_match:$href:$match}
  {$href = "My-Page-`$match.1`.html"}
{/if}

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Filed Under: Programming Tagged With: Smarty

iPhone Plus Experiment

September 21, 2018 by joecodes Leave a Comment

When the iPhone 6 Plus introduced the massive new screen option four years ago, it came with compelling Plus-only landscape features that were heavily promoted. This seemed like a great new option that should only get better as its features would surely be enhanced over time. With the iPhone XS Max debut, the experiment is over.

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Filed Under: Personal Tagged With: Apple

Time Machine Speed-Up Tip

August 10, 2018 by joecodes Leave a Comment

If you’re like me, Time Machine tends to run slowly most of the time, or maybe you are trying to do a large initial Time Machine backup and want to squeeze some more performance out of it. A simple tip: Quit the Finder.

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Filed Under: Programming Tagged With: Apple, speed, stability

Sync Bookmarks Across Browsers

August 3, 2018 by joecodes Leave a Comment

Testing web pages in different browsers is part of my daily routine and I start with Safari, Chrome, and Firefox. It’s handy to have the same set of bookmarks always at-the-ready no matter which browser I am using at the moment. This used to be done simply with the Xmarks browser extension but after that service went away I could not find a simple replacement. With a little work you can use iCloud bookmark syncing to do this for you.

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Filed Under: Programming Tagged With: Apple, security, stability

Spot the Malware Challenge

July 19, 2018 by joecodes Leave a Comment

As somewhat related to last month’s Malware checklist, I thought this would be a good follow-up about spotting malware on an infected site. Maybe yours.

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Filed Under: Programming Tagged With: security

Malware 2018

June 19, 2018 by joecodes Leave a Comment

Someone very close to me who is computer adept was tricked into downloading and running a sneaky Flash installer that actually installed malware. This exercise was a good time to review my checklist for finding and fixing this situation. I was pleasantly surprised to discover some new useful tools and updated my checklist for 2018.

Don’t think you are immune because you know more than others. If your computer is connected to the internet and you use a web browser it can happen to you, especially if you use Outlook (aka Lookout!).

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Filed Under: Programming Tagged With: Apple, security

FileVault Undo

June 13, 2018 by joecodes Leave a Comment

When I upgraded to High Sierra, I thought it was time to try a semi-clean install since I had done many years of upgrades. After wiping the drive and restoring from a Time Machine backup, it was time to enable FileVault as I had done for years. It did not go so well this time.

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Filed Under: Programming Tagged With: Apple, security

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Quick Thoughts

  • I was surprised to learn that foreach in JavaScript does not have a traditional break. The loop will run to completion.

  • Who knew that combination sums across all permutation lengths of an array would be so difficult? It was a challenge but the final product looks good and takes a lot of resources. Limiting the max length for basic memory limits. Would only do something like this for occasional reporting.

  • Working on a new project that can have hundreds of forms on a page. The browser was spending way too much time in Parse HTML. Wasted a bunch of time before learning this is a long-standing bug in Chrome when there are many forms or inputs. Other browsers are fine.

Recent Posts

  • MacBook External DVD Player
  • Progressive Enhancement
  • Keychain Password Search
  • Smarty preg_match
  • iPhone Plus Experiment

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