OSX – optixx

Bildschirmtext (BTX)

Published 2021-11-06 by Administrator

Being a kid from the 80ies, i never came around using the german Bildschirmtext service. Luckily I found a recent implementation of the BTX protocol with some pages from the late 80ies and early 90ies.

Run the BTX server

brew install socat
git clone https://github.com/bildschirmtext/bildschirmtext
cd bildschirmtext
python3 -m virtualenv env
source env/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt
cd server
socat TCP-LISTEN:20000,reuseaddr,fork 'exec:python neu-ulm.py'

Compile and run the client

brew install sdl2
git clone https://github.com/optixx/btx_decoder
cd btx_decoder/sdl
make
./btx_sdl 127.0.0.1:20000

Usage

The guest user (user 0, co-user 1) has an empty password, so you can log in as a guest by pressing “#” 3x at startup (or DCT once). You can define your own users by creating files in users/ and secrets/.

*00#: Retransmit page (in case of transmission errors)
*09#: create page again (or reload from database)
*#: return to the previous page
*page number#: navigation to a specific page
[0-9] and #: navigation to a following page
**: deletes the input
*9#: logs off the user

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Revisited an old MacOS Application

Published 2019-09-18 by Administrator

8 Years ago when the App Store for MacOS Apps was quite new i develop a little utility app for managing clipboard contents. The app was definitely inspired by Linux apps that i used all the time and was i really missing such a tool on MacOS.

For me it was the first time writing an OSX App using Objective-c. Took me a couple of weeks to get everything working how i wanted it. I went all in and setup an Twitter account and Blog for it to do some Marketing. Some i had the crazy to ask money for the app 🙂 And it never took off, i have maybe sold 50 Apps. After a year the Apple developer account subscription ran out. Which i never renewed and so the app got removed form the AppStore. But i also kept using the tool and i gave to co-workers in my company.

For me it was interesting to revisit this project after 8 years and make it work on Mojave and Xcode 10.3. First of all i have to say it took me like 5 minutes to get back into Xcode. I mean they must have added quite a lot of features to it over the the years but still it feels and works the same.

To make it compile, I had to fix a couple of build settings regarding OS versions and arch. I did re-build of one external framework that i was unable to link with current Mojave built app.

It took me a couple of hours to make this app release ready again. I spent the most time to enroll into the developer program, where i was struggling with the DUNS number for my company, that includes non roman characters which are not allowed for the company name in the Apple developer program signup form. So I had to go thru the customer support to sort that out.

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AspeQt for OS X El Capitan

Published 2016-02-14 by Administrator

I updated and compiled AspeQt with QT 5.5.1 and made a build for OS X El Capitan. This has been requested for a while, but i never came around to install latest QT and get it working again. So here we go….

Download for OS X

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Bake that Book

Published 2014-04-13 by Administrator

Last Summer i gave my old Macbook Pro 15″, Late 2011 with 8GB and 160GB SSD to a friend, since i got a Retina upgrade. I think the old one was still decent, since the SSD gave it that boost to make it usable, even if the laptop was 2 years old at that time. Unluckily the old Macbook Pro didn’t last long, it just died after 3 month. Wouldn’t turn on anymore. As i predicted, after bringing it to the Apple Store, they said the logic board was fried, which always means its totaled. We bought a new Macbook and moved on.

Now i got the broken Macbook back to my place and i thought i would at least sell the display, case and reuse the SSD. But i remembered reading all the Macbook baking blog articles. I already disassembled a few Macbooks down to the logic board and also did some reflow stuff for side projects. Also knowing that a friend of mine has good experience with baking old Nokia phones, i though i give it a try.

Go to ifixt.com and look up the tutorial to change the logic board
Disassemble the laptop, collect screws and parts in separate containers
Be becareful with all the ribbon cable connectors, there are a lot and some are tricky
Get the logic board out, remove heat pipes, ram and speakers
Preheat oven to 180c
I cleaned the board with isopropyl alcohol
Set board on tin foil legs on a baking tray
Put in the oven for 7 minutes
Let it cool fast at a open window
Clean fans and case from the inside
Assemble, make sure to get all cables connected
Boot that Book

I hoped that i had a 50/50 chance that it will work. I was confident, that i don’t mess the laptop during disassemble and assemble phase, i wasn’t sure what the result was after baking. I remembered that the laptop got quite hot while working, so there were some odds that this permanent heat would have altered the setup of the parts of the pcb. And it turned out to be worth the work, the Macbook booted up nicely.

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AspeQt for OSX

Published 2014-03-03 by Administrator

2 years ago i started to transfer my old Atari 800 XL software from the 28 years old “5,25 disk to ATR images on my laptop. But i was never happy with the setup using a windows program in a vm to do the transfer. I found [AspeQt](http://sourceforge.net/projects/aspeqt/) which is opensource, but it did not support OSX. So i started to add an serial driver with OSX support to it. And then forget about it. Till recently when i got an email from the AspeQt maintainer Ray who asked about the state of my [github repo](https://github.com/optixx/aspeqt). Since i want OSX support in the mainline, i picked the lastest version of AspeQt to update my repo, which already got a little stale. Then i found out that is a pain in the ass to run QT4.8 on Maverick, there is no offical package and building from source you end up in patch hell.

So i decided to move my branch of AspeQt to QT5.2, which was pretty straight forward.

QtCreator is not a great editor but does the job