macOS kernel programming bounty to revive SmoothMouse (PAUSED)

The discontinuation of SmoothMouse seems to have upset many people. Now that the pointer lag is fixed in the newer versions of macOS, I was hoping our users would find other 3rd party mouse drivers more useful for they provide more acceleration controls than SmoothMouse. Some switched without any complaints—others, however, hated everything they tried. (Probably a minority, but as a someone from a minority of those who complained about the lag before SmoothMouse came out, I can relate).

Like I’ve said before, we can’t just move things here and there to make SmoothMouse work in macOS Sierra. I mentioned that Apple had deprecated IOHID system calls, but it’s actually just a tip of the iceberg. We’d have to throw away a lot of essential code, yet we’d have nothing to replace it with. When you need to do something like getting raw coordinates from a mouse, you end up in uncharted waters—there’s no documentation, no code samples, nobody knows anything. The only way out is to find someone who can dig deeper than we can imagine. Namely, a genius hacker.

Hackerman from Kung Fury

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Posted in SmoothMouse | Tagged | 18 Comments

Beware, fraudsters: Chrono Informatique

I’ve been recently scammed by a French e-shop called Chrono Informatique (chrono-informatique.com) from Agen, France. They sold me a dead power supply for Synology NAS 2413+ and refused to refund after I sent it back, claiming that I opened and damaged it myself. Continue reading

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A brief note on BizonBox 2 + GTX 980

BizonBox is a Thunderbolt enclosure for PCIe videocards, assembled by Russian company Bizon specialising in selling Hackintoshes and hardware upgrades for Macs. I had a chance to get my hands on one of these devices. Continue reading

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On macOS Sierra support and the future of SmoothMouse

⚠️ 2023 update: finally, macOS Sonoma has an option to disable pointer acceleration ⚠️

Long story short. Continue reading

Posted in SmoothMouse | 123 Comments

XQuartz.pkg stalls at “verifying” in El Capitan

I don’t know why OS X El Capitan sometimes fails to verify XQuartz 2.7.9 package (the process just gets stuck despite “Allow apps downloaded from anywhere” on “Enabled”). What I know, however, is that you can still install it via Terminal as easy as:
sudo installer -pkg ~/Desktop/XQuartz.pkg -target /

Posted in Solutions | Tagged | 17 Comments

SmoothMouse does not work in macOS Sierra

Do not install macOS Sierra if your productivity depends on SmoothMouse, currently it  does not work on it. We’ll be investigating the problem soon. Update: sorry, we won’t support Sierra.

Posted in SmoothMouse | 21 Comments

Run Django dev server with Gulp

This is basically an extract from this excellent article by Caktus Group’s Calvin Spealman. Continue reading

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About the author

My name is Eugene, but on the Internet I often go by Dae. Welcome to my personal technical blog.

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I’m an IT professional, web developer and producer/investor who works with small teams and SMEs in Europe in various roles involving IT, management, marketing and design. I’m passionate about helping small businesses achieve big goals with the help of cost-efficient and non-bloated technology.

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Django: add i18n template tag to built-ins

Django 1.9 allows you to load template tags globally, i.e. without having to include {% load %} statements at the top of each template. The new option is called builtins and you can set it in your settings.py like so (in the example, I’m loading the i18n tag library). Continue reading

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librsvg 2.40.11 breaks resizing in rsvg-convert

rsvg-convert 2.40.11 calculates SVG bounds incorrectly resulting in an empty or cropped image. (See my comment in Homebrew repository and the bug report).  Continue reading

Posted in Bugs | Tagged | 1 Comment