“I certainly wouldn’t want to be someone who relies on Twitter for my main business operation”
Jon does battle with a sleepy MacBook Pro, before extolling the virtues of dishwashers and diesel cars that have their own apps
The ongoing saga of Space Karen and his social media toy just continues to rumble on. I confess I am somewhat surprised that the platform is still working: given the savage cuts to staffing of around 75%, I expected it to have collapsed into a smoking pile by now. It has had some ups and downs, but nothing too dramatic.
The main app continues to be worked upon, but note how I don’t say “improved”. The introduction of the “For you” view, where an algorithm decides what you see, was unwelcome. Especially so when this was made the default view. Twitter fixed this, but in my view it was a punt that it only decided to unwind after the protests.
Far more unwelcome is the removal of any means for third-party apps to connect to the Twitter service, to provide an alternative view. Tools such as Twitterific have built up a very strong following over many years, and they were simply cut off at the knees with no prior warning.
I can see why Twitter has done this. A third-party app might not show the content in the way that you, as Twitter, want it shown. It might filter out adverts and other items that are annoying to the customer, but important to the Twitter business model. Nevertheless, this cancellation was sudden and brutal, and very unwelcome to users.
I can just about cope with the iOS app but the macOS app is just horrible, and I shall be uninstalling that. It’s slow, buggy and often doesn’t update correctly. In addition,
I would be happier if it actually had the same design and naming convention as the web view – which is marginal but workable – so maybe the Mac app isn’t being updated at the moment.
Mastodon? I wish I could be enthusiastic about the service.
Like many PC Pro readers, I joined up a few months ago, and quickly amassed a number of friend connections. However, I simply haven’t managed to gel with it so far. I realise that it’s early days, and appreciate that it’s wrong to expect my Twitter experience to directly match that of Mastodon, and I also know that I should investigate the third-party tools that are appearing. For instance, last month Davey detailed just such a tool that can take your Twitter friends’ profiles and migrate them into appropriate Mastodon account connections. But I haven’t tried it yet.
Who knows where Twitter will go next? As I said, I’m surprised it’s still working, but this could be the pride before a fall. I certainly wouldn’t want to be someone who relies on Twitter for my main business operation.
Mysterious macOS shutdown
My trusty 2019 MacBook Pro decided it would be fun to shut down every night. I don’t remember telling it to do that, so my best guess is that it gained sentient thought after I bought the astonishing MacBook Pro M1 Max a year ago.
I kept the 2019 Core i9 device going as a daily-use laptop, simply because it has everything set up just so. I also use it as a platform on which I can install all sorts of third-party tools for testing. The M1 Max laptop, however, has been kept relatively pure. It has my favoured video- and audio-editing tools installed, and is an absolute monster for that sort of work. Nevertheless, this shutdown business was becoming annoying. Most of the time, it failed to complete, because I had some unsaved work in an app – usually a text editor acting as a short-term scrapbook. There used to be tools in the Battery settings to allow you to schedule a nightly shutdown, but this was removed some time ago. Clearly something had added an item to my system scheduler, but with no graphical UI for this, you have to drop to the Terminal window.
It’s a good reminder that underneath macOS sits a version of Unix, complete with an incredibly powerful command prompt. Most users won’t need to fiddle at
this level, but it’s important for techies such as us to know it exists.
The tool I needed was pmset. As you would expect, “man pmset” will display the documentation pages for this command. To set a shutdown time, you can use a command line of “sudo pmset repeat shutdown MTWRFSU 21:30:00”. Breaking this down, “sudo” means “run as administrator” and the system will ask for the password. “Pmset” is the tool itself. “Repeat” means this isn’t a one-off command, but we want it to repeat. “Shutdown” is the task; to shut the computer down. “MTWRFSU” means Monday through to Sunday: R is used for Thursday to distinguish it from Tuesday, and U for Sunday to separate it from Saturday. Finally, the time value is the point at which the system should run the command.
Clearing the setting is simple: “sudo pmset repeat cancel”. Having done this, my computer decided it didn’t need to shut down every night, and normal operation has returned.
My desktop Mac mini is still an Intel box as well. Again, it works, is reasonably high powered with a six-core Intel Core i7 processor,
64GB of RAM and an external Thunderbolt 10GbE adapter.
Like the Intel MacBook Pro, it has accumulated various layers of debris that needed cleaning up. This was especially true of system-level drivers for audio interfaces such as BlackHole and the various Rode virtual drivers.
Getting rid of these drivers isn’t too hard: just go into Library | Audio and look for the appropriate folders of driver extensions. Delete these, empty the recycle bin and reboot.
You will, of course, have a full Time Machine backup before doing anything like this, so any typing errors should be recoverable.
Apple M3 rumours
The new Mac mini ( see p60) looks very good value, starting at £649, but there’s a suggestion that the 256GB and 512GB versions suffer from the single-chip slower disk performance that we saw on the M1 models. Nevertheless, it’s the M2 Max processor in the MacBook Pro that caught my eye. At some 67 billion transistors, it’s a powerhouse, even though its battery life is going to be exceptional. And the availability of 96GB of RAM is eyepopping for a laptop, too.
It was the CPU design that intrigued me most, though. The M2 Max has eight performance cores (let’s call them P-cores like Intel does) and four efficiency cores (E-cores). A performance core is designed for maximum processing power, accepting that it will use more power. An efficiency core is tuned towards low power consumption, and is considerably less performant because of this.
But I have read that it is possible on the M2 Max for the P-cores to be run down to a zero hertz clock speed. In other words, to be effectively switched off. If this is true, then a forthcoming M3 Max processor might actually do away with the need for efficiency cores entirely. If it’s possible just to have performance cores, but run them down to almost no power consumption, then there’s no need for E-cores at all. I wouldn’t put it past Apple’s silicon wizards to make this happen.
Dishwasher Wi-Fi
Our dishwasher died, so it needed replacing. I did some digging around, looking at various reviews from trusted sources, and decided that the Bosch Series 6 SMD6ZCX60G would do nicely. It was ordered and fitted a couple of days later by a team from Curry’s, who did an excellent job.
Then I noticed an unexpected feature: this dishwasher has a Wi-Fi connection and an app. It seems that everything these days has an app. The app itself is moderately useful, being a tool called “Home Connect” that works with a wide range of different Bosch appliances. So the dishwasher appears as just one item among many if you’ve bought more devices from the same vendor.
I had a good poke around to see if it would support Apple HomeKit, but the online documentation was confusing. And it didn’t help that Bosch’s UK website tried to take me to the German site.
Of course, the first thing to do, having joined it to the network, was to hit it with Tenable Nessus Professional, my favoured tool for banging on the front door of an IP device and seeing what nasties it can find ( pcpro.link/343tenable).
I confess that I was surprised at the clean bill of health that Nessus reported. If I’m reading this correctly, there are no open services on the dishwasher itself. I suspect it’s connecting to the cloud service, and that any control from the app is done via that cloud service. Hence no need at all for any open ports.
It’s far easier to queue a washing cycle for 2am via the app than through the button controls on the dishwasher itself. And this morning I received a notification that the washing cycle had completed, and that it was going to need some more salt soon. When I next get my security consultant in the lab, we will rerun this security, and probably do
some Wireshark capture using the Allegro 500 too, just to see what the conversations are between the dishwasher and the cloud. I shall report back if anything untoward is found, but so far I am impressed. Oh, and the dishes are squeaky clean, too!
Car CanBus
My ten-year-old Audi hasn’t been getting up to running temperature correctly recently. It’s the 2-litre turbo diesel, and has some 85,000 miles on the clock. Clearly it doesn’t owe me anything, and it’s a perfectly pleasant way to trundle around. It still does around 600 miles on a tank of diesel, and servicing at a local independent is cheap enough. The roads, even here in Fenland, are sufficiently blocked by other traffic that “making progress” is mostly an exercise in futility. Which is why I moved over to motorbikes a decade ago.
With the temperature gauge, it rarely goes above 60°C even when on a long run. Logic suggests it might be a faulty thermostat valve that’s stuck open, so the engine is being overcooled when being driven down the road. But there was a possibility that the sensor is correct, the thermostat is working properly, and that the fault is in the dashboard feeding the temperature gauge.
To check this, I dived onto a well-known online vendor and bought a Veepeak OBDCheck BLE+ Bluetooth OBD II adapter for £34.
This plugs into the OBD2 port on the car. The OBD2 port is a standardised onboard diagnostics system built into all cars since the mid-1990s. There’s a set of standardised protocols that cars use to transmit data, and each vendor can add in its own specific items, too.
In the case of my Audi, I simply wanted to know the water temperature of the cooling system. So armed with the Veepeak plugged into the OBD2 port under the dash, I fired up the app called OBD Fusion on my iPhone; it found the Veepeak quickly and without fuss. Now I have access to a range of default information panels, but I decided to build one myself specifically for the current water temperature, and a graph of temperature over time. Using this, it’s simplicity itself to do a proper data log of driving information that I can give to the garage tomorrow, and hopefully save them some time (and me some money) on the diagnosis of the underlying issue.
It’s worth remembering that this sort of technology exists, and it really is almost trivially priced to gain significant insight into what the car is doing.
Why no Tesla or equivalent? Well, we were going to fit battery packs, probably Tesla Powerwalls, at home along with a set of solar panels. Then Covid happened, and everything went on hold. The Audi A3 is in perfect condition, and is hardly worn out. So we decided to hang on to it for the time being. It’s certainly going to be the last combustion engine car that we own, and when it dies it will be replaced by an EV. Until then, I prefer to keep on top of the servicing, and tools such as this OBDreading system are invaluable in my toolkit.
End of Windows 10 purchase
Microsoft has finally stopped selling Windows 10. This is actually quite annoying, because Windows 10 has been a very solid platform for many. Despite its limitations and somewhat awkward bolted-together feel, it does a good job. I confess that
Windows 11 simply hasn’t engaged with me as well. Now, the fact that Microsoft has stopped selling Windows 10 doesn’t mean that it has finally gone. You can still buy keys or USB sticks from the various online stores, but please don’t fall for those scammers that try to sell licence keys at an incredibly low price. It might work, it might not. But I can’t be doing with that sort of hassle, preferring to use the PC Pro store ( store.pcpro.co.uk), where Windows 10 Pro costs £70. Don’t forget that Windows 10 stops getting mainstream support on 14 October 2025, so there are a couple of years of useful working life ahead if you want to stay with 10.
Oracle Java licensing
Oracle has a somewhat aggressive approach to licensing its software to its customers. This isn’t news; it’s been going on for decades. After all, you don’t get to have that number of yachts and planes by being polite and respectful to your customers.
I am reading that Oracle is attempting to strong-arm a change to the Oracle Java runtime licensing. Until now, you paid for the number of staff members using Java. From 23 January 2023, there’s a new Java SE Universal Subscription that “replaced the now legacy Java SE Subscription and legacy Java SE Desktop Subscription” (read all about it at pcpro.link/343oracle).
The change is to the number of licences you have to pay for. “The
Java SE Universal Subscription is sold by an employee-based metric based on the number of employees that support the internal business operations of the customer.” So you pay according to your staff count, not the number of users who utilise the software.
What happens if you don’t want to move to this? Well, the documentation says:
“You don’t get to have that number of yachts and planes by being respectful”
“Your Java SE Advanced, Java SE Advanced Desktop, and Java SE Suite licences and related support offerings will continue as usual. Existing licensees do not need to do anything related to this new product offering. If your business is growing, and you desire to expand your current desktop, server/cloud licensing, please contact sales for assistance.” So it seems that you’re all right providing you don’t want to increase your licensing count. And at that point you have to contact Oracle and presumably get strong-armed into moving to the new licensing model.
Fortunately, there are alternatives to Oracle’s Java, and apparently companies who will provide the necessary support capabilities, too.
The moral of the story: licensing will bite you. The only question is when, and by how much. And that will depend on the voracious appetite of the supplier and its willingness to trample on its customers. Don’t forget, Oracle is hardly alone in this practice.
User error
Remember that four-hour Microsoft cloud outage in January? As I predicted on the PC Pro podcast that week, it was a router configuration error.
Microsoft has reported that: “As part of a planned change to update the IP address on a WAN router, a command given to the router caused it to send messages to all other routers in the WAN, which resulted in all of them recomputing their adjacency and forwarding tables.
“During this re-computation process, the routers were unable to correctly forward packets traversing them. The command that caused the issue has different behaviours on different network devices, and the command had not been vetted using our full qualification process on the router on which it was executed.”
Now a simple WAN port error is unlikely to cause routers to recompute “their adjacency and forwarding tables”. Maybe it was a configuration failure that caused the networking fabric to wobble. And note the comment about the wrong command being used on this particular piece of equipment.
You can automate everything, but sometimes human error trumps all.