TinyApps.org

For the longest while I wanted a portable e-ink display for outdoor use (just something good enough for terminal, text editing, maybe some light browsing), but sadly nothing ever really materialized. There are larger panels available [1] but require enough low level work that nothing's ever really materialized.

There's one Chinese company that's shipping a 13.3" USB display ($1300 for the first gen [2] or $799 to pre-order a second-gen product [3]) and surprisingly enough, 10" Pixel Qi screens are also being sold, with some support for about $400 [4] or for about $150 from random Chinese retailers. [5]

Currently, the easiest/most cost effective options for getting a large e-ink display showing content are either buying a used 9.7" Kindle DX (around $150-200) and hacking VNC onto it [6] or doing running VNC on the 13.3" Onyx BOOX MAX (~$650, in short supply, it runs Android 4.0 and has wifi, BT and a pressure sensitive touchscreen/stylus so has some potential) [7]

[1] https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=45&t=84926

[2] http://www.solcomputer.com/sol-cvs-e-ink-monitor.html

[3] http://the-digital-reader.com/2016/05/26/dasung-paperlike-e-ink-monitor-up-for-pre-order-on-indiegogo-799/

[4] http://www.solcomputer.com/pixel-qi-display-2.html

[5] https://www.google.com/search?q=pixel+qi+display&oq=pixel+qi+display&tbm=shop

[6] https://tinyapps.org/docs/e-ink-monitor.html

[7] http://www.onyx-international.com/index.php/en/boox-products/max

For the better part of a decade there was a challenge put out on the internet and put to every recovery company on the planet for a very standard 80GB drive that contained a standard FAT32 filesystem and a few Megabytes worth of files to be recovered after it had been written with zeros from /dev/zero on linux using DD. The challenge offered $10k for recovery of the files. Once the process had been explained not a single commercial company in the entire world believed they could recover that file and no one took up the challenge and it finished up about a decade ago.

People have been doing some really extreme things to clear out drives including 5+ passes and using true random sources but the fact is it is well beyond commercial means to recover data on a drive that is simply set to all zero just once. Maybe a state actor somewhere could read the edges of the data or the theoretic differences of zeroing and its state before that 0 was written but so far no one in the past 2 decades has shown it happen. If you are destroying a drive that is highly secret that another nation might want then sure be paranoid, but otherwise there is no reason for anyone to do anything but zero out a drive and that includes almost every single company.

Most drives these days come with a secure wipe and that is the fastest way to clear them. Use that or just zeros, anything else is not making the (ex) data more secure its just taking…

Sure! It's not very well organized (and may be out of date) but here's what I have:

### Commands

- Disable GateKeeper: `sudo spctl --master-disable`
- Disable Library Validation: `sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.security.libraryvalidation.plist DisableLibraryValidation -bool true`
- Remove app from quarantine: `sudo xattr -rd com.apple.quarantine [path to the app]`

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/64842819/cant-run-app-because-of-permission-in-big-sur

`sudo chmod -R 755`

`codesign --force --deep --sign - /Applications/$app.app`

The following commands must be executed from recovery mode:

- Disable SIP: `csrutil disable`
- Disable Apple Mobile File Integrity: `nvram boot-args="amfi_get_out_of_my_way=1"`

### Articles

https://www.naut.ca/blog/2020/11/13/forbidden-commands-to-liberate-macos/

https://tinyapps.org/blog/202010210700_whose_computer_is_it.html

https://eclecticlight.co/2020/06/25/big-surs-signed-system-volume-added-security-protection/

https://twitter.com/EBADTWEET/status/1275834759759818752

There's a few solutions:

LittleSnitch 4 can continue to work (with the kext) on Big Sur following this: [1]

LittleSnitch 5 can block all protected MacOS processes by following this: [2]

Murus can use PF and block IPs for Apple services: [3]. This isn't per process, and is really just a UI for the built-in PF process.

If you'd like to block the notarization check, you can block trustd (/usr/libexec/trustd) access to ocsp.apple.com (on both system and user process ownership in LittleSnitch).

Hope this helps. It's really not as bad as you think, there's a few solutions depending how thoroughly you want to block things.

[1] - https://www.obdev.at/support/littlesnitch/245913651253917

[2] - https://tinyapps.org/blog/202010210700_whose_computer_is_it.html

[3] - https://www.murusfirewall.com

> It's a real shame there's nothing like Wine for the late PPC/early Intel era of OS X. That entire galaxy of apps basically just no longer have anything to run on.

PPC apps run great in QEMU/UTM on Apple silicon:

Run Tiger, Leopard, or any Mac OS X PowerPC version on M1 https://tinyapps.org/docs/tiger-on-m1.html

Intel emulation works too, but is not nearly as performant at present:

Virtualizing OpenCore and x86 macOS on Apple Silicon (and even iOS!) https://khronokernel.com/apple/silicon/2021/01/17/QEMU-AS.html

Emulating Windows XP x86 under M1 Mac via UTM & QEMU https://tinyapps.org/blog/202105220715_m1_mac_emulate_x86.html

Yes according to this [1] there is a way to remove the whitelist entries. It doesn‘t seem practical and it‘s a big turn off for me. I was thinking about switching to an ARM Mac when the second or third generation comes out, depending on how they perform. But now I‘m thinking I probably won‘t switch. Especially with things like this and how stuff like this is enforced on other platforms.

How can I know that the option to edit the whitelist won‘t be removed as fast as the default entries were added to the whitelist?

1: https://tinyapps.org/blog/202010210700_whose_computer_is_it.html