Michael (Biscuit) Thomas biscuitehh

macOS Internals

Understand your Mac and iPhone more deeply by tracing the evolution of Mac OS X from prelease to Swift. John Siracusa delivers the details.

Starting Points

How to use this gist

You've got two main options:

How to Defang macOS System Protections

If you want to change things on the root drive of a Mac you will need to take some steps to disable the built in security of the system. Most of these steps are the same regardless if you are on Intel or Apple Silicon. If there is a difference it is noted.

Note that all of these things put a Mac into an unsupported and less secure state.

Make sure you either perform these steps in a VM or that you reset the protections after you are done poking around

Protections and Terms

(This list is not exahustive on the details of each. Check the links at the end for more info.)

Steam Download Speed is so slow on Linux

Oh boi, here I give you the solution for that. This document is based on these links:

TLDR

My solution seems to be deprecated, there are other solution from the comment on this Gist, that actually works. So, please use that instead, it's way much simpler, and it works.

My Time Machine Notes

Migration from External HDD to Samba

Create Samba share using a combination of the following references:
1. https://kirb.me/2018/03/24/using-samba-as-a-time-machine-network-server.html
2. https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/83vkaz/howto_make_time_machine_backups_on_a_samba/
Reviewed the following references for ideas on how to migrate Time Machine backups from external HDD to Time Capsule:
https://jason-townsend.blogspot.com/2008/08/how-to-transfer-local-time-machine.html

	// Get crazy and hook MobileGestalt in a Swift Playground!
	//
	// If you are a LONG time Mac developer you know that the Gestalt system
	// used to be a way to get info about your Mac. These days it's a private
	// thing that Apple locks away and you shouldn't really touch. Most of the info
	// that you need can probaby be found in IOKit, but some values, like
	// the provisioningUDID are not avaliable any other way.
	//
	// That said, it's a fun exercise to see how to do some various things in Swift.
	// Things like loading a dylib or calling private C functions.

	// This playground shows you a few different ways to get device info via IOKit.
	// If you want to explore IOKit and look for interesting data I would download
	// the Additional Developer Tools from Apple and use the IORegistryExplorer app.
	// It makes it super easy to poke around in the IOKit planes.

	import IOKit
	import Foundation

	// For convient access we can make a computed getter for the PlatformExpert.
	// Traditionally this has been where you go to find all sorts of data about the

	#!/bin/bash
	#set -euo pipefail
	#IFS=$'\n\t'

	# https://stream.lib.utah.edu/index.php?c=browse&m=results&q=Mac+Admins&sort=newest
	# https://macos-defaults.com/
	# https://ss64.com/mac/defaults.html
	# https://real-world-systems.com/docs/defaults.1.html
	#
	# https://babodee.wordpress.com/2016/04/09/launchctl-2-0-syntax/

	PurpleSystemAppPort
	PurpleSystemEventPort
	UIASTNotificationCenter
	com.apple.ABDatabaseDoctor
	com.apple.AppSSO.service-xpc
	com.apple.AuthenticationServicesCore.AuthenticationServicesAgent
	com.apple.CARenderServer
	com.apple.ClipServices.clipserviced
	com.apple.CoreAuthentication.daemon
	com.apple.DeviceAccess.xpc

	#ifndef respring_h
	#define respring_h

	void respringBackboard(void);
	void respringFrontboard(void);

	#endif /* respring_h */


	/**
	* MacEditorTextView
	* Copyright (c) Thiago Holanda 2020-2025
	* https://bsky.app/profile/tholanda.com
	*
	* (the twitter account is now deleted, please, do not try to reach me there)
	* https://twitter.com/tholanda
	*
	* MIT license