Weeknotes 275

Updates to Full Disk Access in macOS – I, for one, am looking forward to another permission dialog. But we clearly need something.

I sacked off the old rack, returned it, and replaced it with a cabinet instead. With a cabinet the rack posts sit inset from the cabinet housing allowing access all the way around (sort of, but not everywhere due to where it is installed near a wall). I originally went for an “open” rack because this whole mess will eventually be enclosed in a nicer looking cupboard, so there would be no need for a cabinet inside a cupboard. However, given our progress with the house, that will be some time away, so I will deal with that problem in the future, if ever. For now, it will look like less of a mess and hopefully do the job. I over-specified the size of the thing, it’s an affliction.

The new cabinet was far easier to install because it doesn’t rely on 4 perfectly aligned holes like the old one. Instead there is a steel hanging plate which you screw to the wall and the whole thing hangs from that. So apart from the heaving it up onto the wall stage, the rest was straightforward enough.

Honestly, I thought this part was going to be a sort go grown up Meccano, but I was very wrong about that. Hopefully this will be it now.

I do not feel like a programmer anymore

Once I had the new rack cabinet installed I decided to move the location where Ethernet cables come down from the ceiling. I choose the original location slightly randomly when I first brought the cables down as I wasn’t sure where they needed to go at the time.

I only moved them about 20cm away but that allowed me to route the cables more tidily in the loft too and I printed a hole grommet to cover up the messy hole.

2026 in LLMs (so far) – a good recap in 32 minutes.

Due to needing to house my non-rack mount networking gear in aforementioned rack the 3D printer is back in action and I’m printing with PETG for the first time. Not just a change of material either, but also, of manufacturer. I’ve only ever printed with Bambu PLA up to now because 3D printing is overwhelming enough without throwing all the different materials and manufacturers into the mix.

I’m using PETG because it is more heat resistant than PLA and the UniFi switch I want to house gets pretty warm, and also because PETG comes in a carbon fiber version which makes it stronger, and frankly, cooler looking.

PETG is a different beast though. It requires drying before use as it absorbs moisture which can affect prints. I happen to have a filament dryer already (really just a fancy name for a plastic box which gets warm) so that was covered. The dryer is extremely low tech to the extent that I couldn’t figure out how to get it to come on. Some mashing of buttons later made it work and I continue the mash every time I come to use it. Then I sat and waited for 8 hours.

You are not supposed to use PETG-CF from the AMS Lite for some reason. Fortunately the dryer has a small hole through which you can thread filament so you can print directly from the dryer box itself. It’s a much more precarious setup than using the AMS Lite and I’m not sure that I’ve got this set up in a satisfactory way in order to prevent snagging yet. It’s currently propped up on two cardboard boxes. A work in progress.

My initial test print with the PETG-CF was very nice. However, I tried again a couple of days later and it had lost its clean lines so it seems PETG really likes to be dry. I topped it up with another couple of hours drying and it was back to looking good.

Rowbird

Run SQL queries on a schedule and deliver the results, as CSV, Excel, PDF, JSON or a table in the message, to email, Slack, Telegram, Discord, webhooks, Uptime Kuma and S3. Add a condition and the same report becomes a data alert. Self-hosted, one binary, no telemetry.

RemoveMacAI

Turn off Apple Intelligence on macOS 27 and get its disk space back. One command, fully reversible.

Here you go.