The origin of the umbrella is lost in the mists of time. They have certainly been around in some form for a couple of millennia, but didn’t start to become popular in Europe until the eighteenth century. They have ecclesiastic relations in what’s known as an umbraculum, a small canopy placed over someone like the Pope to indicate their importance.

Although often indistinguishable, umbrellas can be used either to shelter from rain or to cast shade in strong sunlight, while parasols are intended only for the latter purpose. This article concentrates on those used in rain, and its sequel next week will examine those for the sun.

Being more recent, umbrellas don’t appear to have featured in classical or religious narratives, and are seldom involved in those more contemporary.

In Edmund Blair Leighton’s A Wet Sunday Morning from 1896, a well-dressed man is sheltering a young woman under his umbrella as they walk away from church in the rain. There’s a little more depth to this simple story, with two young women enthusiastically watching the couple from the top of the church steps, although no one seems to care about the old widow left to walk behind the couple, alone and without any shelter.

Edgar Degas’ superb narrative pastel painting Waiting (c 1882) shows two women sat side-by-side on a wooden bench in a corridor or waiting area within the ballet of the Paris Opera. Sat to the right of the dancer is a woman wearing black street clothing, holding an unrolled black umbrella, and with black walking or working shoes. Degas here invites the viewer to speculate in constructing their own narrative.

As umbrellas are notoriously hard to handle in strong wind, they may be used to tell the viewer how windy it is.

Christian Krohg’s The Umbrella from 1902 is an unusual one-off: a view looking down from the window of a building on a lone woman. She’s walking up a rough earth track, strewn with rocks, in windy weather, and her umbrella has been blown out by a fierce gust.

The post-Impressionist Maurice Prendergast uses this jostle of multicoloured Umbrellas in the Rain (1899), seen here in Venice, for their visual effect in forming a brilliant arc across the painting.

The great majority of umbrellas seen in paintings simply tell the viewer that it’s raining.

It might not be immediately obvious whether the umbrellas in Louis-Léopold Boilly’s Pay to Pass, from about 1803, are intended to provide shelter from rain or sun. However, the family shown are just about to pay the man at the far left, so they can walk across the muddy street on the comfort of the wooden plank on which they’re standing. This spares them and their clothing a coating of mud from the street, and seems to have been common practice at the time.

Umbrellas grew steadily in popularity in Paris, and the painting below, Paris Street, Rainy Day from 1877, is probably the first masterpiece to show them in such widespread use. Gustave Caillebotte’s study for that finished work below has survived and is shown above.

As the rain continues to fall, all the larger figures in the painting are shown holding umbrellas, most of which are regulation black.

Realist artists like Jean Béraud painted street scenes in the French capital, in his case forming a Paris chronicle. Out in the provinces, painters like Nicolas Sicard were doing the same. Sicard’s Entrance to the Guillotière Bridge in Lyon (1879) captures the scene at rush hour on a wet day, as many are rushing around under the canopies of their umbrellas. Note how even the cab drivers are sheltering under umbrellas: those operating open cabs normally provided them for their passengers too.

Just before the Norwegian Naturalist Christian Krohg went to Grez-sur-Loing in France, he seems to have visited Normandy, where he painted this view of a Village Street in Normandy (1882). Its curved recession of umbrellas with disembodied legs is striking.

Jules Bastien-Lepage’s brilliant protégé, the tragically short-lived Marie Bashkirtseff, featured an umbrella in this, one of her best portraits, The Umbrella (1883). This girl’s tenacious stare at the viewer quickly becomes quite unnerving, an effect enhanced by the severe black background of the umbrella that she carries.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s The Umbrellas from about 1881-86 is packed not only with people, but also their umbrellas. In parts they are so crushed together that the taller pedestrians are raising them high, to avoid bumping into others. Together they form a dark blue-grey band between the people below and the grey sky above.

My final painting of umbrellas used to shelter from rain is one of Nikolai Astrup’s early works, Farmstead in Jølster (1902). Two women, sheltering from the rain under their black umbrellas, are walking up a muddy path threading its way through the wooden farm buildings, guiding a young girl.

If you used a Mac before 2017, you’ll be accustomed to running First Aid in Disk Utility as part of your routine housekeeping. Now all recent versions of macOS start up from a boot volume group in APFS, you might wonder whether that practice is still needed, and how it should be done.

Reliability of APFS

Like any file system, APFS can still acquire errors, but it’s designed to be as reliable as possible, particularly when used on SSDs.

Its file system uses Fletcher 64 checksums to ensure its integrity, although it doesn’t use checksums or hashes to check the integrity of file data. When each partition (container) is mounted, APFS finds the superblock with the most recent transaction identifier, and checks that it and its contents are valid. Each volume then has a quick check run by fsck_apfs (called by Disk Utility to perform First Aid) before it’s mounted. APFS also performs a Trim on each volume during the mount process.

APFS was designed to be the file system for Apple’s devices, including iPhones, where self-maintenance and reliability are essential, and users can’t perform routine maintenance on the file system.

Boot volume group

All Macs now start up from a boot volume group, consisting of the Signed System Volume (SSV), and a conjoined Data volume. Since Big Sur, the SSV is a read-only snapshot of the system that’s sealed using a tree of hashes to verify the integrity of its entire contents. As a snapshot, it’s read-only, and its hierarchy of hashes is checked progressively as its contents are accessed. Any error found in its hashes will normally result in the volume being reinstalled and a fresh snapshot made.

Although Disk Utility will attempt to check the Data volume while it’s still ‘live’, you should avoid that whenever possible. If you want to run First Aid or fsck_apfs on the Data volume, then it’s best to do so in Recovery mode, so the volume can be properly unmounted for checking. Safe mode is no substitute, though, neither does Safe mode perform any more thorough checks than normal user mode.

Time Machine backups

All Time Machine backups are made as read-only snapshots. Local snapshots are also made at the same time to each volume being backed up, and those too are read-only. Local snapshots are routinely deleted when they’re 24 hours old, although you can delete them manually before then. As Time Machine uses the most recent local snapshot when making the next of its backups, avoid deleting that if possible.

Indications for First Aid

The most reliable indicator of a problem with a file system is an alert reporting a file system error. Severe errors may be responsible for a kernel panic, although that’s now unusual unless a disk is in the process of failing altogether.

Running First Aid is no longer recommended as a routine practice in the way that it was when using HFS+. macOS updates are performed with the Data volume unmounted for much of the time. They update the files on the System volume (which is unmounted during normal running), make a snapshot of it, and build the hash tree to verify its contents. When that’s completed, the top-level hash is hashed again to produce the SSV’s signature, which is then compared with that set for the specific version of macOS. If there is any discrepancy, macOS has to be reinstalled and the process of creating the SSV repeated.

Warnings or errors?

Both First Aid and fsck_apfs may report warnings as well as errors, which are distinguished by the term given in the report. Warnings are almost invariably benign, and not a call to take any action. For example
warning: inode (id 1234567): Resource Fork xattr is missing or empty for compressed file
doesn’t normally require any repair, as it’s a warning of a condition that may be normal.

First Aid may refer to performing “deferred repairs”; those appear to be repairs to errors that APFS has already decided it needs to make, but did’t at the time. Sometimes they and other errors require “full space verification”, normally performed when you run First Aid on that container rather than the volume. In that case, when you check and repair the container, any error should be fixed.

Sequence

Apple recommends that check and repair using First Aid or fsck_apfs is performed first on each volume within a container (partition), then on the container itself, and finally on the disk. This sequence may differ from that used on HFS+ and other file systems.

Run First Aid on the Data volume

If you have evidence suggesting that there’s an error affecting your Mac’s Data volume, start it up in Recovery mode, select Options, click Continue underneath it then select Disk Utility in the window and click Continue.

Set its View tool to Show All Devices, then select the Data or Macintosh HD – Data volume in the boot group you want to check, and click First Aid.

Once that’s complete, select the container above that Data volume, and click First Aid.

Finally select the disk above that container, and click First Aid.

When you need to run First Aid on an external disk, you should be able to follow the same sequence when running in normal mode, rather than in Recovery. If First Aid complains of an error because one or more volumes are mounted, select the volume in the list at the left and click the Unmount tool. Once that volume has unmounted, select it again, and try First Aid. If that also fails for the same reason, select the disk itself, click on Unmount and then First Aid again. If you don’t have any joy, start your Mac up in Recovery and work from there instead.

Summary

• Run First Aid in Disk Utility, or fsck_apfs, when there has been an error or incident that makes you suspect there may be an error in the file system.
• Check and repair volumes in your current boot group in Recovery.
• Set View to Show All Devices so you can see containers.
• Run First Aid on volumes first, then containers, then disks last of all.
• If any fail because they’re mounted, select the volume or disk, unmount it, and try again.
• Warnings aren’t errors, and are likely to be normal.

Lovis Corinth’s art and career reached their peak once he had joined the Berlin Secession, and in the Spring of 1903 had married his former student Charlotte Berend. Although their early family and social life had reduced the number of paintings he produced, their quality remained consistently high, and he was living up to his reputation as ‘the painter of flesh’.

The Childhood of Zeus (1905-6) shows Zeus, senior god in the Greek pantheon, as a young boy at its centre. According to various myths, he was the son of the Titans Cronus and Rhea. Cronus swallowed his other children, so to save Zeus from the same fate, Rhea gave birth to him in Crete, and handed Cronus a rock disguised as a baby, which he promptly swallowed.

Rhea then hid Zeus in a cave, where he was raised by one or more of a long list of surrogates, including Gaia, a goat, a nymph, and others, several of which appear in this raucous painting. Corinth adds Dionysus to provide an abundant supply of nourishing grapes, and lend a little ironic humour.

In 1906, he took his wife Charlotte to his home village of Tapiau and the city of Königsberg where he had started his training and career, and the following year they travelled to Florence, where he copied frescos using pastels.

Following his earlier paintings of the Deposition, Corinth came even closer to harsh reality in The Great Martyrdom from 1907. He takes the example of an ordinary man being crucified, then secularises the image and places it in a vivid context, making clear the vicious inhumanity of crucifixion.

In The Capture of Samson (1907), Corinth revisited another of his favourite subjects, whom he had painted in 1893 in company with Delila, and again in 1899 in a related scene of his capture. Here, with some simple props including an eclectic and anachronistic range of headgear, he shows the chaotic brawl that resulted in Samson’s bondage. Corinth places himself as one of Samson’s captors in the left foreground, and Delila kneels, naked, at the top centre.

From 1907, he led formal teaching sessions in life classes in Berlin.

To celebrate his fiftieth birthday in 1908, Corinth painted several canvases, including Nakedness reflecting his fleshly reputation. This was completed over a few days at the end of March that year, and the following month was delivered to the Secession’s exhibition, where it was well received.

Bacchante Couple (1908) is another self-portrait with Charlotte, with the couple apparently enjoying their wild lifestyle at the time. This may have been another birthday celebration.

Female Half-Nude by a Window (1908) is one of the popular sub-genre of ‘woman at the window’ scenes, and a less roughly hewn nude shown in delicate lighting.

Corinth’s second painting of The Temptation of St Anthony after Gustave Flaubert from 1908, shown below, demonstrates how his style had changed over a period of just a decade, compared with his first painting (above) from 1897 when he was in Munich.

This second version is based on Flaubert’s account La Tentation de Saint-Antoine, and focusses on a scene in which the Queen of Sheba appears in the saint’s visions. Shown with her is a train consisting of an elephant, camels, and naked women riding piebald horses. This new Saint Anthony is far younger, and surrounded by this outlandish circus of people and animals. In his left hand he holds a heavy chain, and there’s a skull in his right hand.

According to later recollections of the artist’s son Thomas, Corinth painted this from professional models in his studio on Berlin’s Handelstraße. Charlotte modelled only for the arm and hand of the Queen of Sheba. Together with Nakedness, this must have been completed by the end of March 1908, and was shown at the Secession’s exhibition from April to June. It was also among Corinth’s works representing Germany at the thirteenth Venice Biennale in 1922, and was the basis for an etching he made in 1919.

Self-portrait, Painting shows the artist at work in 1909 when he was 51. He has signed his name using Greek letters, and on the right side has inscribed aetatis suae LI, meaning his age 51.

Another of his most popular paintings from this period is his group portrait of The Artist and his Family (1909). All dressed up for what may have been intended to be a more formal group portrait, Charlotte sits calmly cradling daughter Wilhelmine, then just five months old, as the artist seems to be struggling to paint them. Their son Thomas, aged five years, stands on a desk so he can rest his hand on mother’s shoulder. I suspect this was aided by a photograph.

References

Wikipedia.

Lemoine S et al. (2008) Lovis Corinth, Musée d’Orsay & RMN. ISBN 978 2 711 85400 4. (In French.)
Czymmek G et al. (2010) German Impressionist Landscape Painting, Liebermann-Corinth-Slevogt, Arnoldsche. ISBN 978 3 89790 321 0.

I hope that you enjoyed Saturday’s Mac Riddles, episode 312. Here are my solutions to them.

1: Border lake claims it’s both 10 and 1A.

2: Clearly a new material comes with concentricity.

3: Patented in 1876, it’s finally on its way to our Macs.

The common factor

I look forward to your putting alternative cases.

There are several well-known methods for excluding items from Spotlight search. This article details one that, as far as I can tell, has remained undocumented for the last 18 years since it was added in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, when Spotlight was only two years old, and can still catch you out by hiding files from local Spotlight search. This was discovered by Matt Godden, who has given his account here.

Well-known exclusions

There have been three general methods of excluding folders from Spotlight’s indexing and search, although only two of them still work reliably:

• making the folder invisible to the Finder by prefixing a dot ‘.’ to its name;
• appending the extension .noindex to the folder name (this earlier worked with .no_index instead);
• putting an empty file named .metadata_never_index inside the folder; that no longer works in recent macOS.

Additionally, System Settings offers Spotlight Privacy settings in two sections. Search results won’t normally prevent indexing of those items, but does block them from appearing in search results. Spotlight’s indexing exclusion list is accessed from the Spotlight Privacy… button, where you can add items that you don’t want indexed at all.

Extended attribute

Matt Godden investigated repeated failure of Spotlight search to find some images in his large media library, and discovered that the extended attribute (xattr) named com.apple.metadata:kMDItemSupportFileType was responsible. Images that weren’t returned in a search of that library all had that xattr attached, and when that was removed, those images were found reliably.

According to Apple’s documentation, that xattr was available in Mac OS X 10.5 and has since been deprecated. No further information is given about its function or effect, nor does it appear in an older list of Spotlight metadata attribute keys.

Search of previous mentions of this xattr reveal that it has been found with either of two values, iPhotoPreservedOriginal as described for Matt’s images, and MDSystemFile used with several apps that have proved equally inaccessible to Spotlight search. Images that have this xattr attached appear to have originated in old iPhotos libraries, which may have been migrated to Photos libraries. Searches for files with this xattr suggest that even old collections of images seldom have the xattr present, in my case on only 9 files out of over 800,000 checked, and the MDSystemFile variant wasn’t found in over 100,000 application files.

The mere presence of this xattr is sufficient to exclude a file from Spotlight search: setting its value to the arbitrary word any, for example, was as effective as setting it to either iPhotoPreservedOriginal or MDSystemFile.

Strangely, the method used to search is important: files with the com.apple.metadata:kMDItemSupportFileType xattr can’t be found when using Local Spotlight search in a Find window, but can be found by Mints using a standard search predicate with NSMetadataQuery.

Detection and removal

The simplest way to detect whether your Mac has files with the com.apple.metadata:kMDItemSupportFileType xattr is to use the Crawler tool in my free xattred, with Full Disk Access. Open its window using the Open Crawler… command in the Window menu, paste the xattr name into the Xattr type box. Click on the Scan button and select the volume or folder to check. xattred then crawls the full directory tree within that and reports all files with that xattr.

The xattr can then be removed by dragging the file onto one of xattred’s main windows, selecting the xattr, and clicking on the Cut button. That change will be effective immediately, and the file made available through Spotlight search within a few seconds.

If you have more than a handful of files with the xattr, use xattred’s Stripper to remove them all. Paste the xattr name into the Xattr type box. Click on the Strip button and select the volume or folder to process.

Recommendations

• If your Mac is likely to search old images that might have the com.apple.metadata:kMDItemSupportFileType xattr attached, search for and remove all such xattrs to ensure those files aren’t excluded from search.
• Whether this behaviour is intentional or not, it’s clearly an undesirable legacy, has been deprecated for many years, and should be removed from Spotlight search.

I’m extremely grateful to Matt Godden for his painstaking research and keeping me informed.

With the Napoleonic Wars concluded, many hoped that Europe could look forward to a period of peace, and its peoples would be spared involvement in battles and their resulting fires. Instead, the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries brought even more devastating conflagrations, many of which were witnessed by artists and committed to canvas.

The city of London had seen its last immense fire in ‘the Great Fire of London’ of 1666, but like many cities was no stranger to more limited destruction.

In about 1826, when he was staying in Hampstead overlooking London, John Constable painted this marvellous oil sketch of Fire in London, Seen from Hampstead.

It was on 16 October 1834 that Constable had his greatest opportunity, when fire completely destroyed the Old Palace of Westminster, the seat of the English parliament at the time.

When the old Palace caught fire, most of London turned out to watch the flames. John Constable was in a cab, stuck in a jam on Westminster Bridge, from where he painted this Fire Sketch (1834), showing the north end of the building ablaze. He did not, apparently, try to develop it into anything more substantial.

With his arch-rival Constable stuck in a cab on Westminster Bridge, JMW Turner was still on the ‘south’ bank, at the far end of that bridge. From there, or rather later, he painted one version of The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, 16th October, 1834 (1834-5) in oils. The two prominent towers seen behind the fire are those of Westminster Abbey.

Turner’s other canvas shows a view from near what is now Hungerford Bridge, still on the ‘south’ bank of the Thames because of the traffic jam, but that was before the construction of what might have been a convenient means for Turner to have crossed the river. In this view, Westminster Bridge is silhouetted against the flames, instead of being lit by them, and the massive towers of Westminster Abbey appear ghostly in the distance.

Turner capitalised successfully on this spectacle, although these paintings aren’t the atmospheric sketches they might appear to be. A lot of the oil paint has been applied wet on dry, showing that Turner must have worked on each for several weeks, at least, in the studio.

In 1837, the French landscape painter Pierre Marie Joseph Vernet was working in Saint Petersburg, Russia, when the Winter Palace, the official residence of the emperor, caught fire. Vernet’s Fire in the Winter Palace, 1837 is a studio painting showing that spectacular event, based on observations and sketches he made at the time of the fire.

It’s not only man’s buildings that burn. When dry prairies are struck by lightning, they too can catch alight, and that’s the scene that Charles Deas narrates so well in his masterly painting of Prairie on Fire from 1847.

A bolt of lightning, at the far right, tells us how the prairie came to be aflame. From this low viewpoint, the fire itself appears unimpressive, but is dangerously close behind these three people riding two horses in their flight. On the nearer white horse is a young man, facing behind and away from the viewer, looking back at the fire. His left arm is wrapped around a young woman, who appears to have swooned away.

Behind is a black horse, with an older, bearded man in the saddle. He points to the left, exhorting the others to head that way to safety. The tension results from implication: that the unimpressive flames at the right represent a much larger and imminently threatening danger, and that it’s progressing rapidly to the left, chasing the horses and their riders.

Even when you’re on an idyllic Pacific island, as this anonymous painting of The Burning of the Harbor Master’s House, Honolulu (1852) reminds us, the dangers of fire are never far away.

Johan Christian Dahl’s Burning Windmill at Stege (1856) adopts contemporary style and use of colour, but is fundamentally a brandje in the Golden Age tradition of Egbert van der Poel of two centuries earlier. Although painted well before Impressionism, Dahl echoes the red of the flames in the field and trees to the left of the windmill, and even in his signature.

Jules Breton’s The Burning Haystack from 1856 shows a minor blaze, but an important change in the approach to fire. Here the people of Courrières are making frenetic but co-ordinated efforts to extinguish a fire that has broken out in one of their grainstacks. Each of its multitude of figures is playing their role as part of the whole, working from an unseen script.

My next group of paintings show the devastating fire that struck Frederiksborg Castle, near Hillerød in the north of Zealand (Sjælland), Denmark. Set in a huge deer park, the castle was used as King Frederick VII’s residence during the 1850s. When he was resident on the night of 16 December 1859, the weather was bitterly cold, prompting the king to ask for a fire to be lit in a room; because its chimney was being repaired, this allowed the fire to spread. It was so cold that the moat around the castle was frozen, preventing any serious attempts to control the fire, and allowing it to spread rapidly to most of the buildings. Thankfully the king’s collection of more than three hundred paintings were saved.

This anonymous painting of Frederiksborg Castle on Fire (1859) was probably made in the relative comfort of a studio shortly afterwards.

Another anonymous view of Frederiksborg Castle on Fire (1859) appears to be a quick oil sketch made at the height of the fire during that night.

Ferdinand Richardt’s The Castle on Fire, 1859 (1859) was clearly a more protracted work from his studio, probably made from the artist’s contemporary sketches and notes.

There is no question that Nikolai Dmitriev-Orenburgsky’s detailed realist depiction of Fire in the Village (1885) was painted entirely in the studio. Its emphasis on people and their loss and suffering is characteristic of Naturalism. Most significantly, Dmitriev-Orenburgsky lived and worked in Paris between 1875-85, during the height of Jules Bastien-Lepage’s success; the latter had only died a few months before Dmitriev-Orenburgsky completed this painting.

William A Coulter had been born in Ireland, and travelled to the USA as a seaman. In 1869, he settled in San Francisco, trained in Europe as a marine artist, then from 1896 worked on the art staff of the San Francisco Call newspaper. He witnessed and painted the San Francisco Fire of 1906, which remains his only well-known work. It was clearly made in the studio, presumably from observation and sketches.

My final painting is one of the best-documented: Edvard Munch’s The House is Burning! from 1927. On the morning of 31 August 1927, the maids working in a manor house close to Munch’s studio were using an electric vacuum cleaner when fire broke out in that room. They and the occupants of the house fled. Munch and other neighbours helped the owners rescue many of their possessions.

The local fire brigade attended promptly, and the fire was soon brought under control. Although there have been claims that Munch set his easel up during the fire, this painting is more probably based on a photograph published in a newspaper the following day, carefully recomposed and augmented to heighten its drama. The witness is now a photograph rather than a painting.

Quick Look is one of those unsung heroes that have transformed our Macs and workflows. What used to require a specialist app can now be accomplished in the Finder using a combination of Quick Look and Gallery view to browse collections of images.

This started back in Classic Mac OS, when apps created thumbnail images and attached them as ICN# resources to the original files for display in the Finder. It wasn’t until Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard in 2007 that Apple added Quick Look to perform this automatically using cached thumbnails and previews. Since then our Macs have worked hard to ensure that, wherever we want them, we can see faithful miniatures, at least until macOS 11 Big Sur.

Although the redesign brought by Big Sur in 2020 was generally well received, one feature I complained about at the time was its effect on Quick Look thumbnails and previews, in rounding their corners to conform to its design style. But style triumphed over fidelity, and for the last five years Quick Look has been forced to tell lies in every image thumbnail and preview.

By now you’ll have guessed I’m no fan of Apple’s new-found obsession with rounding every right angle in sight. I have yet to see any objective evidence that this has any purpose beyond aesthetics. If you’ve seen screenshots of the first developer beta-release of macOS 26 Tahoe, then you’ll surely have noticed that, rather than restoring fidelity to Quick Look, this fiction has grown and only become more prominent. I demonstrate this in a series of four screenshots showing the same image that have been rescaled to similar display sizes.

This first is taken from a small, almost thumbnail-size, image in the Finder’s Gallery view. As this has been scaled up, it’s pixellated. I draw your attention to the upper corners, where trees have been cropped at what once would have been right angles.

Seen here is the same image in a larger Gallery view. The extent of the cropping at the upper corners is now apparent, where this contains details that were removed from the smaller image above.

When opened in Preview, the upper corners are no longer rounded, and show the full extent of the image, but the lower corners remain cropped by enforced rounding, apparently to make them ‘concentric’, as is the vogue.

To see the whole image rendered faithfully, I had to resort to a third-party app, here GraphicConverter 12, which has the honesty to display all four corners without cropping.

One of the cornerstones of the Mac from its earliest days is expressed in the principle of WYSIWYG, what you see is what you get. It enabled the ‘desktop publishing revolution’ that convinced so many to pay the premium for Classic Macs, and ever since has guided the development of Mac OS. Without it there would be no purpose to Quick Look in its efforts to render images faithfully.

That doesn’t merit mention in the principles expounded in Apple’s latest revised Human Interface Guidelines. Three are given there, hierarchy, harmony and consistency, but not fidelity. Rounding corners of rectangles is included there under the principle of harmony: “Align with the concentric design of the hardware and software to create harmony between interface elements, system experiences, and devices.”

I can live with concentricity in windows and controls, even with app icons forcibly constrained within rounded rectangles. What I simply can’t accept is a Macintosh, of all computers, cropping every thumbnail and preview for the sake of aesthetics, however harmonious that might seem. For without fidelity, the Mac fails.

It wasn’t until 14 May 1842 that wood engravings of news stories were first published, in The Illustrated London News, a weekly collection of illustrated reports of wars, accidents, fires and other news. Towards the end of that century, magazines were starting to include colour images of newsworthy events.

Enterprising painters had anticipated public demand for colour images of catastrophes like fires since the early seventeenth century, and in the Dutch Golden Age these were known as a brandje, showing a major fire, usually at night. This weekend I show a selection of these, but exclude depictions of fires that the artist clearly didn’t witness, such as the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, the sack of Troy, or the burning of Rome.

Among these are some of the earliest examples of what the Impressionists specialised in, depictions of the transient effects of light, often painted en plein air.

Frans de Momper’s A Fire in Antwerp was probably painted around 1640, and shows a large fire occurring at night in the centre of the major city of Antwerp. De Momper not only shows the crowds of people bringing ladders and tools to help, and the bright white light of the fire itself, but the huge pall of black smoke rising over the city.

In mid 1652, Jan Abrahamsz Beerstraaten seems to have witnessed the destruction by fire of part of the centre of Amsterdam, which formed the basis of his studio painting of The Old Town Hall of Amsterdam on Fire, 7 July 1652 (1652-55). Local inhabitants are walking in orderly queues to boats, in which they escape from the scene.

De Momper and Beerstraaten didn’t specialise in brandjes, though. Egbert van der Poel did, and probably painted more than any other artist in history. Van der Poel moved to Delft in 1650, and four years later was a victim of the massive explosion in a gunpowder store there on 12 October 1654. That killed one of his children, and he moved again to Rotterdam.

It has been thought that most of van der Poel’s Fire of a Church with Staffage and Cattle from 1658 is a carefully-composed composite of his experiences. A small church at the edge of a village is well ablaze, and the inhabitants are abandoning it, taking all the possessions they can, including their horses and livestock, and leaving the fire to burn itself out.

Van der Poel’s undated A Fire at Night shows a similar scene and composition, set this time on the bank of a canal.

One established exception to this is van der Poel’s Fire in De Rijp of 1654, completed in 1662. This shows a fire that worked its way through more than eight hundred buildings in the town of De Rijp during the night of 6 January 1654. This left only the northern section of the town standing and inhabitable, and resulted in more casualties than did the more famous explosion in Delft at the end of that year.

Doubt is cast on this received account of van der Poel’s work by sketches such as this, of The Fire in the Nieuwe Kerk, Amsterdam, in 1645, made in front of the motif using washes with touches of pen and brown ink. Perhaps he was the first ‘ambulance chaser’ who travelled out to sketch fires, from which he later painted his famous brandjes in the studio.

Adam Colonia and Philip van Leeuwen were followers of van der Poel who specialised in brandjes, although both also painted other nocturnes, or maneschijntjes (moonshines) as they were known at the time.

In 1720, the cathedral in Rennes caught fire, and burned from 22-30 December. The scene was painted in this View of Notre-Dame de Bonne Nouvelle (1720-21), shown here in a copy by Jean-François Huguet, which is claimed to be in watercolour on canvas. As with some earlier depictions of burning churches, the patron is shown watching the scene from the heavens.

In the winter of 1789, Venice’s oil depot at San Marcuola caught fire. Although Francesco Guardi was 77 at the time, he painted the scene in his Fire in the San Marcuola Oil Depot, Venice, 28 November 1789. This is one of three versions of his painting; this is believed to be a copy made between 1789-1820, and is now in the Rijksmuseum, the others being in the Alte Pinakothek, and the Gallerie dell’Accademia.

During the Napoleonic Wars, between 1803-15, civilians living in European cities were dragged into battles as their homes came under bombardment, and buildings were set alight. One example of this is the Second Battle of Copenhagen, in which the Royal Navy attacked the Danish fleet in Copenhagen harbour. This brought much of the city under bombardment, causing serious fires.

The Danish painter Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg was a student in the city at the time, and painted several works depicting the effects of the bombardment, including The Terrible Bombardment of Copenhagen (1807), showing the Church of Our Lady well ablaze.

In Copenhagen, the night between 4 and 5 September 1807 seen from Christianshavn (1807), Eckersberg gives a broader impression of the effects on the port area during the height of the bombardment.

When Napoleon’s army approached Moscow in the summer of 1812, most of the city’s residents fled. As the French army was entering the city on 14 September, following their success at the Battle of Borodino, on the orders of Count Rostopchin, the few remaining Muscovites set fire to some of its major buildings before fleeing. By the following day, a massive fire was burning in Kitay-gorod, at the heart of the city, and that didn’t burn itself out until 18 September.

There are many paintings showing different views of this catastrophic fire, but A. F. Smirnov’s Fire of Moscow on 15-18 September, 1812, after Napoleon takes the city (1813) is probably one of the best.

It’s thought that two-thirds of all private dwellings, most shops and warehouses, and more than a third of all churches, in the city of Moscow were destroyed by the fire over those four days, and 12,000 bodies were recovered.

Here are this weekend’s Mac riddles to entertain you through family time, shopping and recreation.

1: Border lake claims it’s both 10 and 1A.

2: Clearly a new material comes with concentricity.

3: Patented in 1876, it’s finally on its way to our Macs.

To help you cross-check your solutions, or confuse you further, there’s a common factor between them.

I’ll post my solutions first thing on Monday morning.

Please don’t post your solutions as comments here: it spoils it for others.

A cynic might summarise the history of Mac OS in four eras:

1. rebuilding the Desktop (Classic Mac OS)
2. repairing system permissions (Mac OS X to OS X 10.10)
3. resetting Home permissions (OS X 10.11 to macOS 10.15)
4. cursing privacy protection (macOS 11 onwards).

There is slight overlap between the last two, in macOS 10.14 and 10.15.

Rebuilding the Desktop

Classic Mac OS built its Desktop illusion using hidden databases that associated types of document with icons set by the apps that created them. This was based on two four-character codes in every file to specify the file’s type and creator. Periodically, those databases became damaged and this association stopped working, with the result that all documents were displayed with the same generic icon.

Rebuilding those Desktop databases was initiated by restarting the Mac while holding the Command and Option keys until the dialog was shown. Mac OS then checked through all installed apps to reconstruct their associations with document types.

This had to be repeated for each volume in turn as it was mounted by Mac OS. If there wasn’t sufficient free space on a volume, the process failed. The price of some utilities like TechTool Pro was often justified by the tools they provided for assisting in this process.

Mac OS X ended that reliance on Desktop databases, leaving this to die with Classic Mac OS.

Repairing system permissions

Since its first beta-release, Mac OS X suffered from ill-defined and pervasive problems thought to result from corruption of files used by the system. Until the introduction of System Integrity Protection (SIP) in 10.11 El Capitan, those generally resulted from files within the system acquiring incorrect permissions. Various reasons were proposed for this, including installer scripts that overstepped their bounds.

To address this, Disk Utility had a feature whereby it could check and repair permissions of all major parts of the system, based on information contained in BoM files for system updates and installations. Repairing permissions in this way became one of the main panaceas in older versions of Mac OS X and OS X, and was an important feature in Disk Utility.

Although chiefly intended to provide better security protection, one of the benefits of SIP was that it largely prevented system files from gaining incorrect permissions, and the feature to repair them was removed from Disk Utility. In any case, because of SIP it was no longer possible for Disk Utility to change the permissions of files protected by SIP.

Resetting Home permissions

When macOS 10.12 Sierra was released, a different problem appeared, in which permissions apparently became set incorrectly not in system files generally, but in the user’s Home folder, and specifically in ~/Library/Preferences. To address this Apple added a new verb to the already complex command tool diskutil, resetUserPermissions, and described how to use this in a support note. It’s perhaps no coincidence that this new problem appeared at about the same time that cfprefsd took on the management of those preference files.

At that time, the following problems were attributed by Apple to incorrect permissions in ~/Library/Preferences:

• changes to preference settings, particularly those for System Preferences, do not ‘stick’;
• changes made to the Dock do not ‘stick’;
• you are asked to authenticate when trying to move or alter some folders in your Home folder;
• when trying to save, you are told that the file is locked, or that you don’t have permission;
• Preview, TextEdit, and App Store apps (which are sandboxed) may crash when opened;
• alerts appear warning that the startup disk has no more space available for app memory;
• Safari or SafariDAVClient use large amounts of resources (memory);
• the Mac runs very slowly;
• iTunes cannot sync a device;
• there are problems with Photos or iPhoto libraries, including inability to import into the library, or forgetting the library each time the app is opened.

Most if not all of those could be attributable to problems arising from bugs in cfprefsd.

Apple later changed its recommendations to include running a new tool repairHomePermissions in Recovery mode, then re-installing macOS. Shortly afterwards, in June 2020 when Big Sur was in beta, Apple withdrew that support note and all reference to repairing permissions, although the tool is still available in Recovery mode even on Apple silicon Macs.

Cursing privacy protection

Prior to macOS 10.14 Mojave, privacy protection had been limited and largely unobtrusive. We then began to discover that our favourite apps were being locked out of accessing files in many of our working folders.

Thus the era of adding apps to the Full Disk Access list started, and we came to curse the blessing of privacy protection.

Even better, Apple later added extended attributes that could prevent apps perfectly capable of editing documents from being able to save them just when we needed that most. And protected the extended attribute using SIP.

Maybe rebuilding the Desktop databases every couple of months wasn’t so bad after all?

With his move to Berlin and the success of his painting of Salome, Lovis Corinth was reaching the peak of his career. Corinth formally joined the Berlin Secession in 1901, and quickly found himself involved with its direction. He relished his new-found reputation as ‘the painter of flesh’, and was now at the centre of Germany’s vibrant city of modern arts.

In 1902, he opened a painting school for women, and among his first pupils was Charlotte Berend (1880-1967), then just twenty-one and the daughter of a rich textile merchant.

The Family of the Painter Fritz Rumpf (1901) is a wonderfully informal family portrait, sadly omitting Fritz Rumpf (1856-1927) altogether, but Corinth painted him separately. The mother, at the right, is Margarethe née Gatterer, and all six of their children are included.

In the summer of 1902, Corinth painted Charlotte Berend for the first time, and the couple travelled to Pomerania together. That autumn they became engaged. By this time, Charlotte had already become Corinth’s muse and preferred model, as she was to remain for the rest of his life. That year, Corinth also visited Paris, Anvers, and the Netherlands.

Self portrait with Charlotte Berend-Corinth (1902) is his earliest double portrait with his fiancée. Its original title in German means self-portrait with his wife and a champagne glass although the glass that he’s holding clearly doesn’t contain champagne. This refers to Rembrandt’s Self-Portrait with Saskia (The Prodigal Son) (1636), below, in which Saskia is sat on Rembrandt’s lap, and he raises a large fluted glass of beer in his right hand. Charlotte, in the role of Saskia, looks quiet and calm, against Corinth/Rembrandt’s alcohol-fuelled mirth.

Swimming in Horst – Ostsee (1902) shows swimmers in the Baltic Sea at what was then known as Horst, and is now the Polish resort of Niechorze.

Presumably Paddling (1902) shows Charlotte’s turn to take to the waters there.

Charlotte Berend and Lovis Corinth married in the spring of 1903. He was 44, she was only 22. In the autumn of the following year, their first child, Thomas, was born, and in 1909 their daughter Wilhelmina.

Self-portrait with Model (1903) is the couple’s second joint portrait, and the first after their marriage. This time her pose refers to the classical images of muses by Rubens and Ingres, alluding to the story of Pygmalion.

Corinth appears to have painted with his left hand, so this image hasn’t been painted directly from a mirror, but he may well have used photographs instead.

Max Reinhardt moved to Berlin at the same time as Corinth, and in 1902 his Little Theatre staged what I think was the German premiere of Oscar Wilde’s play Salome. Richard Strauss saw the play there, and it inspired him to write his opera of the same name the following summer.

Corinth painted this wonderful portrait of its star and title role, Gertrud Eysoldt as Salome (1903). This makes an interesting contrast with his 1900 painting of the story. Although during this period he painted fewer mythical and other narrative works, the next painting is one of his most vivid stories.

Ulysses Fighting the Beggar (1903) shows a story from book 18 of Homer’s Odyssey, before the slaughter of the suitors (painted much earlier by Gustave Moreau, but never completed).

Odysseus/Ulysses has finally returned to his home city of Ithaca and is now determined to kill the many suitors to his wife Penelope. As he plans this, he goes around disguised as a beggar. This fragment of the elaborate story starts with the arrival of a real beggar named Arnaeus or Irus, who most unwisely picks a fight with Odysseus, who promptly floors the beggar, and stops just short of killing him.

Corinth captures the fight as Odysseus (centre) is getting the better of Irus (left of centre), with various suitors and bystanders watching. Although painted loosely, the artist has taken care to give each face its own expression, ranging from amusement to apprehension. The end result is a raucous collage of human emotion.

Corinth seems not to have taken this study of abduction, Frauenraub (1904), any further, and I don’t know its narrative context.

Landscapes are relatively infrequent over these years, but I could not resist including this delightful Blooming Farm Garden from 1904.

Corinth’s reputation as ‘the painter of flesh’ was maintained by two groups of nudes. The Harem (1904) uses an ever-popular ‘oriental’ setting for its abundance of female flesh, but has some distinctive touches too. The cat sat in the foreground ignores, in the way that only cats can, some sort of horseplay taking place behind, while a guard looks as bored as the cat. This isn’t the sumptuous silk and divan lounge shown in the nineteenth century, though. Indeed, it all looks rather tawdry.

In complete contrast, Charlotte Berend in a Deck Chair (1904) is a tender and intimate sketch of his wife relaxing away from their son, her wedding ring prominent on her left hand.

References

Wikipedia.

Lemoine S et al. (2008) Lovis Corinth, Musée d’Orsay & RMN. ISBN 978 2 711 85400 4. (In French.)
Czymmek G et al. (2010) German Impressionist Landscape Painting, Liebermann-Corinth-Slevogt, Arnoldsche. ISBN 978 3 89790 321 0.

Although there was no ambiguity in Apple’s announcement that later this year it will be releasing macOS 26 Tahoe, together with version 26 of its other operating systems, there have been claims that this might just be a ‘marketing version’ and not really the case. There is some evidence that could be misinterpreted as confirming that, where some of Apple’s developer web pages refer to macOS 16.

But others choose to differ.

Cast your mind back five years to macOS 11 Big Sur, when what had been expected to be macOS 10.16 but was announced as 11.0 instead. That had the potential to upset a lot of code and scripts that had become used to checking the minor but not major version number. Apple foresaw those problems, and devised an ingenious scheme that allowed Big Sur to be simultaneously both 10.16 and 11.0. It’s hardly surprising that has been implemented once again for Tahoe.

Rules

There are two fundamental rules provided by Apple:

• In compiled languages, the version returned by macOS depends on the SDK which the software has been built against. When built against the 15 SDK or earlier, Tahoe returns 16 for compatibility with previous numbering and all existing apps; when built against the 26.0 SDK, it returns 26.0 for forward compatibility.
• In scripted languages run within a shell environment, there’s an environmental variable to control the version number given. Set SYSTEM_VERSION_COMPAT=1 and Tahoe returns 16; leave that variable unset, or SYSTEM_VERSION_COMPAT=0, and it returns 26.

AppleScript

Move a script across to Tahoe, and it will be compiled in the 26 environment, so
system version of (system info)
returns 26.0, as will that code inside an AppleScript app built on Tahoe.

Scripts and other languages

One method commonly used to look up the macOS version number is to obtain the string value for the ProductVersion key in /System/Library/CoreServices/SystemVersion.plist. However, depending on the environment of the caller, Tahoe plays tricks with that file, which should return a version of 26.0. If the caller has set SYSTEM_VERSION_COMPAT=1, then the version number returned isn’t obtained from that property list at all, but its companion SystemVersionCompat.plist, which is 16.0.

You can test this at the command line, by entering the two commands
SYSTEM_VERSION_COMPAT=1 cat /System/Library/CoreServices/SystemVersion.plist
and
SYSTEM_VERSION_COMPAT=0 cat /System/Library/CoreServices/SystemVersion.plist

Which is it – 16 or 26?

macOS Tahoe is very definitely, and not just for marketing purposes, macOS 26, but depending on how you ask that question, it could pretend to be 16 if you wish.

Paintings of the interiors of cowsheds and barns haven’t been prominent, but provide a more continuous record than any other type of interior because of their role in genre paintings of every age after the Renaissance. Here are a few.

Gerard ter Borch put the milkmaid and her cow at the centre of this painting, A Maid Milking a Cow in a Barn from about 1652-54. As was universal at that time, milk was collected in a wooden bucket that would have been scrubbed thoroughly before use, but fell far short of modern standards of hygiene. At the upper right is a store of hay to supplement the cows’ diet during the winter.

David Teniers the Younger’s Barn Interior from about the same period shows a milkmaid pouring freshly collected milk into a large earthenware flask, through a muslin filter. This is taking place under the watchful eye of an older woman, probably the head of the domestic staff. Resting against a barrel is a well-worn besom that has seen good work keeping the floor clean.

In Franz Niklaus König’s Farmers, around the House;, or Farmer Family in the Barn from 1798, one of the early hand-cranked threshing machines is shown on the right, as the farmer is winnowing clouds of chaff from the grain it produced. Most barns were built with large openings at each end, to allow natural breezes to blow the chaff away and leave the denser grain in the large, shallow wickerwork trays used for winnowing. The farmer’s wife, two children and dog are keeping him company as he works.

The Shearers (c 1833-35) is the most ambitious of Samuel Palmer’s paintings from the 1830s. This shows the seasonal work of a shearing gang, in a sophisticated composition that draws the gaze to the brilliant and more distant view beyond. The curious collection of tools to the right was the subject of preparatory sketches, and seems to have been carefully composed. However, they have defied any symbolic interpretation, and may just ‘look right’ for a barn at the time.

Albin Egger-Lienz’s Farm in Grafendorf, from 1890, shows deeply rustic conditions on a dilapidated farm in Styria, Austria, as a young woman sits churning butter on a stone platform in a tumbledown barn. This isn’t the right environment for the preparation of food for human consumption.

Nikolai Astrup’s humorous painting of Early Courting from 1904 shows a young couple at the far left engaged in ‘clothed courting’ in the unromantic surroundings of a cowshed in a Norwegian valley. This couple have sought the privacy of the cowshed, out of everyone’s way, but the boyfriend appears unaware that they’re being watched by someone up in the roof. From the apparent direction of gaze of the girlfriend and the blush on her cheeks, she has just noticed the peeping tom or watchful relative. The setting is enhanced by the sunlight pouring through the far window, illuminating two rows of the back-ends of cows. The wood floor between the cows appears to be decorated with small sketches, but those are actually piles of cow dung. And that’s where I’d like to leave it.

Disk images have been valuable tools marred by poor performance. In the wrong circumstances, an encrypted sparse image (UDSP) stored on the blazingly fast internal SSD of an Apple silicon Mac may write files no faster than 100 MB/s, typical for a cheap hard drive. One of the important new features introduced in macOS 26 Tahoe is a new disk image format that can achieve near-native speeds: ASIF, documented here.

This has been detailed as a major improvement in lightweight virtualisation, where it promises to overcome the most significant performance limitation of VMs running on Apple silicon Macs. However, ASIF disk images are available for general use, and even work in macOS Sequoia. This article shows what they can do.

Apple provides few technical details, other than stating that the intrinsic structure of ASIF disk images doesn’t depend on the host file system’s capabilities, and their size on the host depends on the size of the data stored in the disk. In other words, they’re a sparse file in APFS, and are flagged as such.

Make an ASIF disk image

Currently, there are only two ways to create one of these new disk images, either in Tahoe’s Disk Utility, or using its diskutil command tool, as in
diskutil image create blank --format ASIF --size 100G --volumeName myVolume imagePath
to create an ASIF image with a maximum capacity of 100 GB with a single APFS volume named myVolume with the path and name imagePath. You can also use a from option to convert an existing disk image to ASIF format.

These are only good for Tahoe, as there’s no support for their creation in Sequoia 15.5 or earlier. Neither is there any access documented for the hdiutil command tool, more normally used to work with disk images, although its general commands should work fine with ASIFs.

Resulting disk images have a UTI type of com.apple.disk-image-sparse, in contrast to RAW (UDIF read-write) images of type com.apple.disk-image-udif, which can be used to distinguish them.

Economy

When first created, a 100 GB ASIF disk image took less than 1 GB disk space, but after extensive use and adding a second volume, its size on disk when empty again ranged between 1.9-3.2 GB. No attempt was made to compact the disk image using hdiutil, and its man page doesn’t make clear whether that’s supported or effective with this type of disk image.

Performance

Read and write performance were measured using Stibium over a total of more than 50 GB in 160 files ranging in size from 2 MB to 2 GB in randomised order. When performed using a 100 GB ASIF image on the 2 TB internal SSD of a MacBook Pro M3 Pro running macOS 26 beta, transfer speeds for unencrypted APFS were 5.8 and 6.6 GB/s read and write. Those fell to 4.8 and 4.6 GB/s when using an APFS encrypted volume in the disk image.

Although there’s currently no way to create an ASIF disk image on a Mac running Sequoia, I compressed the disk image using Apple Archive (aar) to preserve its format and copied it to a Mac mini M4 Pro running macOS 15.5, and repeated the performance tests on its 2 TB internal SSD. Unencrypted APFS there attained 5.5 and 8.3 GB/s read and write.

Use

Apple recommends switching from the previous RAW (UDIF read-write) disk images used for the backing store of VMs to ASIF for their greater efficiency in file transfer between hosts or disks. As the disk image in a VM is created when the VM is first made and installed, this awaits implementation in virtualisers. Because the only access provided at present is the diskutil command tool, apps will need to consider creating an ASIF image where that’s available, in macOS 26 Tahoe.

Although ASIF appears to be supported by Sequoia 15.5, the danger with a VM based on an ASIF image is that it may not be compatible with older versions of macOS. Apple hasn’t yet revealed which of those can mount and use this new format.

Previous tests on different types of disk image demonstrated that, prior to ASIF, the best performance was achieved by sparse bundles. The following table compares those with ASIF.

Allowing for the differences in chips, ASIF is clearly faster than both UDRW read-write and UDSP sparse images, whether plain or encrypted. It’s also likely to be significantly faster than sparse bundles, and has the advantage that it uses a single file for its backing store.

Conclusions

• Where possible, in macOS 26 Tahoe in particular, VMs should use ASIF disk images rather than RAW/UDRW.
• Unless a sparse bundle is required (for example when it’s hosted on a different file system such as that in a NAS), ASIF should be first choice for general purpose disk images in Tahoe.
• It would be preferable for virtualisers to be able to call a proper API rather than a command tool.
• Keep an eye on C-Command’s DropDMG. I’m sure it will support ASIF disk images soon.

The scales of justice are of ancient origin. In ancient Egypt, the heart of a dead person was weighed against the feather of truth in the judgement of their soul. That transferred to the Greek goddess of justice Dike, who judged using a set of scales, and so into the personification of justice in ancient Rome, Iustitia, and her modern descendant Lady Justice, whose statue is mounted on many courts of law.

This triple allegorical portrait of The Virtues: Justice, Charity, and Prudence (Wisdom) (1664) is one of Elisabetta Sirani’s more complex works. This shows Charity nursing children, Justice brandishing a sword and holding a set of scales, while Prudence draws attention to their own images.

Elihu Vedder’s most prominent and lasting achievements are the murals in the Lobby to the Main Reading Room of the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. Among them, Corrupt Legislation (1896) is an elaborate composition looking at the consequences of poor government. The central figure is more floozy than goddess, holding a set of scales in her left hand. At the right of the painting, and on that left hand, is a lawyer, with an open book labelled The Law. At his feet, banknotes fall out of an urn, there are small sacks of grain, and a small portable ‘safe’. At the left, apparently pleading with the central figure, is a young girl holding any empty distaff and bobbin for spinning. Behind her are shards from a broken pot, and a broken-down wall.

George Frederic Watts’ Time, Death and Judgement (1900) evolved over a series of versions first started around 1870. Surprisingly, he retained the same composition in all of them, and they differ only in small details. The figure of Time is at the left, holding the traditional scythe; unusually, Watts depicts Time as a young and muscular man, rather than the more conventional ‘Father Time’ with white hair and beard. At the right, Death is a young woman, the lap of her dress containing fading flowers. Time and Death are linked by holding hands. Behind, and towering over them, is the figure of Judgement, holding the scales of justice in her left hand, and brandishing a fiery sword.

Although justice is generally taken to be secular, the concept of weighing the souls of the dead has passed down into some paintings of Christian paradise.

This huge painting of Paradise in the Palazzo Ducale in Venice is seven metres (almost twenty-three feet) high and twenty-two metres (over seventy feet) across, and was probably designed by Jacopo Tintoretto and largely entrusted to his son Domenico and their workshop to paint. In conformity with the rules of the commission, its composition focusses on the Coronation of the Virgin, inspired by Dante’s Paradise, as shown in the detail below.

At the top, the Virgin Mary, behind whom is her traditional symbol of the white lily, stands with Jesus Christ, in their matching red and blue robes. Between them is the white dove of the Holy Ghost, and all around are cherubic heads of infant angels. To the right are the scales of justice, also for the weighing of souls.

This reappears three centuries later in Léon Frédéric’s polyptych All Things Die, But All Will Be Resurrected through God’s Love, painted over the period 1893-1918. Three panels at its right represent Heaven, a pastoral landscape densely packed with a multitude of naked mothers and children. A pair of women in priestly clothing stand at the wings. The figure on the right is holding a stone tablet on which a single word appears: LEX (law), and near her children are playing with the scales of justice. Near the woman at the left two children are swinging censers to generate the smoke of burning incense. Above them all is a double rainbow, and floating in the air the figure of Christ, his arms reaching out over still more figures of children, this time clothed in white robes.

Scales occasionally play a part in legendary history, including the siege of Rome by the Gauls. Conditions drove the Romans trapped in the Capitol to make peace with the Gauls besieged in the rest of the city. Rome was to pay the Gauls a thousand pounds of gold, but even there the Gauls cheated the Romans and tampered with the scales. While this was going on, Camillus entered Rome as its appointed leader, and told the Gauls to quit without any gold, as Rome delivered its city with iron instead.

Francesco de’ Rossi shows this in composite form in his fresco of the Attack on the Gauls who Sacked Rome. In the foreground, the Gauls and Romans are still arguing about the weight of gold, as Camillus’ forces start to take possession of the ruins of what had been Rome.

Finally, scales can appear in their everyday role for weighing out produce in shops and markets.

Léon Augustin Lhermitte’s detailed painting of an Apple Market, Landerneau, Brittany from about 1878 shows sellers ready with their scales in this quiet country town.

Just before the start of WWDC, I released an update to my log browser LogUI adding support for accessing logarchives. I promised that there was more support for logarchives on its way. LogUI 1.0 build 65 dedicates a whole window to them, in its Logarchive Tool.

There are many situations where you can’t access the active log, and you can’t create a logarchive using the log command tool or a sysdiagnose. These include:

• When you only have access to the contents of the Mac or device’s storage, particularly in forensics, or following hardware failure.
• When you want access to the logs in a backup. Time Machine backups normally include full log files, for example.
• When you don’t have ssh or similar access to a remote Mac.
• When the log records may be incomplete or damaged.

Provided that you can copy two folders from the hidden /var/db folder on that Mac or device, LogUI can turn those into a browsable logarchive.

Create a logarchive from folders

On your Mac, create a folder somewhere convenient such as ~/Documents. As this method doesn’t use the log command, this can be on an external disk if you wish.

From the source Data volume copy the folders at /var/db/diagnostics and /var/db/uuidtext to your folder, so it looks like this.

Open LogUI, and from its Window menu open its Logarchive Tool. This offers you four tools and two checkboxes. Click on the Create Logarchive tool and first select the folder you created, containing the log folders. Then give the new logarchive a suitable name and save it somewhere convenient.

LogUI should then inform you in its window that creation has completed. As this is performed using undocumented code for an undocumented format, it may not always work correctly. If there are any problems, repeat the same with the Debug checkbox ticked, and it will give you a detailed commentary of what it does, which should help you understand what went wrong.

Getting info about a logarchive

The trickiest part of accessing logarchives is knowing what they contain, more specifically the time periods for which they have log records. LogUI’s Logarchive window provides two aids to provide you with that information, in its Catalogue and Analyse tools.

Catalogue simply lists all the tracev3 files in the logarchive, giving the datestamps each was created and last modified, together with the period between those, and the file size.

Leave that open as you browse that logarchive, to guide your way through its entries.

Analyse goes further, in telling you about the entries in each of the persist tracev3 files in the logarchive. It tells you the most common processes that wrote the entries in each of those files, allowing you to hone in on which are of most interest. If you want to extract that information for analysis in a spreadsheet, tick the CSV checkbox and it will be shown ready to import into your favourite spreadsheet.

Finally, to save the contents of the current window as a text file, click on the Save Text tool at the right.

I have now checked LogUI’s compatibility with the first developer beta of Tahoe, and found and fixed one obscure bug in the Logarchive Tool before this new build. LogUI should now be fully compatible with macOS 14.6 and later, including Tahoe. It’s available now from here: logui165
and from its Product Page.

Enjoy!

The golden rule with any pre-release version of macOS is never to install it on a production Mac, one that you rely on for doing anything important to you. Although even developer betas are generally fairly robust and shouldn’t cause data loss, sometimes they can be catastrophic and require putting your Mac into DFU mode and restoring it from scratch.

Rather than compromise and run Tahoe from a bootable external disk, which only reduces the risk, why not run it in a VM, where it should be safely isolated from the rest of your Mac? Provided that you have an Apple silicon Mac running Sequoia 15.5 and a little time, this is easy to set up. Its major disadvantage is that your VM won’t be able to run the great majority of apps in the App Store, as that still isn’t supported in lightweight VMs. But your VM can have full iCloud access, and its Data volume can be protected by FileVault as well.

Before you try installing your VM, you’ll need to install a software enabler. This can be Device Support for macOS 26 beta, available from Apple’s developer site alongside the IPSW image file for Tahoe, or you can install the beta-release of Xcode version 26 instead. If you do neither, when you try to run your Tahoe VM you’ll be warned, and invited to download the enabler, but that isn’t likely to work, leaving you with an unusable VM.

Then download the IPSW file from Apple’s developer site, or via Mr. Macintosh’s link to Apple, install that and run your VM.

I’m grateful to Joe for letting me know an alternative route, by upgrading an existing Sequoia VM. For that you’ll need the full installer, again through Mr. Macintosh’s link, so you can install that in the VM and run it from there.

These should work with all virtualisation apps, including commercial products like Parallels Desktop, and free apps including my own Viable and Vimy, which also appear fully compatible with Tahoe hosts.

Happy virtual Tahoeing!

Apple has just released an update to XProtect for all supported versions of macOS, bringing it to version 5300. As usual, Apple doesn’t release information about what security issues this update might add or change.

This version modifies an existing rule for MACOS.a6d7810, whatever that might be.

You can check whether this update has been installed by opening System Information via About This Mac, and selecting the Installations item under Software.

A full listing of security data file versions is given by SilentKnight and SystHist for El Capitan to Sequoia available from their product page. If your Mac hasn’t yet installed this update, you can force it using SilentKnight or at the command line.

If you want to install this as a named update in SilentKnight, its label is XProtectPlistConfigData_10_15-5300

Sequoia systems only

This update has just been released for Sequoia via iCloud. If you want to check it manually, use the Terminal command
sudo xprotect check
then enter your admin password. If that returns version 5300 but your Mac still reports an older version is installed, you may be able to force the update using
sudo xprotect update

Updated 2215 10 June 2025 with iCloud release information.

Lovis Corinth didn’t just spend his years in Munich drinking red wine and champagne, but experimented in his painting and evolved his mature style. In 1897, he moved studio within Munich, and started making increasingly frequent visits to Berlin, where he was able to obtain lucrative commissions for portraits. Corinth was among the founding members of the Berlin Secession in 1898, and by 1900 was renting a studio in Berlin. In the autumn of 1901, he closed his studio in Munich and moved fully to Berlin.

He had no shortage of attractive young women, like Ellÿ (1898), to paint, but he pressed on with his campaign to improve his style and technique.

Reclining Nude (1899) is usually considered to mark the peak of Corinth’s nudes, and was painted during one of his visits to Berlin. Its brushwork is so painterly that it has sometimes been mistakenly supposed that it was made well into the twentieth century, but is now securely dated to the end of his time in Munich.

Morning (1900) shows another very modern nude in personal and intimate surroundings.

In Max Halbe’s Garden (1899) shows a group of friends in an informal setting, chatting as they eat fruit next to the washing line. Max Halbe (1865-1944) was a German playwright with a growing reputation at the time, and is seen to the right of centre, with his wife at the right.

Portrait of Mother Rosenhagen (1899) most probably shows the mother of one of Corinth’s friends in Munich.

In addition to single-person portraits, Corinth was commissioned to paint a few group portraits, including this of The Lodge Brothers from 1898-99. He modelled this after Rembrandt’s smaller group portraits, placing the Master of the Lodge in the centre, where his gaunt face stares up to the heavens.

In these last few years in Munich, Corinth worked on a series of two paintings exploring the story of Salome and John the Baptist’s execution. He seems to have started this work with a drawing in 1897, which eventually led to one of his greatest paintings.

The original narrative is biblical, and straightforward: the unnamed daughter of Herodias (subsequently identified as Salome) performed a dance at a birthday feast thrown by King Herod. The dance so pleased Herod that he offered her anything that she wanted, up to half his kingdom. She asked not for riches, but for the head of Saint John the Baptist, the earthly messenger sent to announce the birth and ministry of Jesus Christ. Herod reluctantly agreed, John was beheaded in prison, and his head brought to her on a plate, which the dancer gave to her mother.

A popular story for religious paintings, Corinth decided to paint a scene close to that most commonly chosen, in which John’s head has been brought to Salome on a platter. This contrasts with the choices made by Gustave Moreau almost twenty-five years earlier.

The basic cast and arrangement of figures is the same in each version: the severed head of John the Baptist is at the centre, Salome leaning over and touching it with her right hand. Behind her are two women. The receptacle containing John’s head is itself on the head of a slave, who kneels at the feet of the executioner, who stands holding the bloodied sword in his right hand, facing Salome. To the lower right, three other figures are partly cropped out: the feet of John’s dead body, and another slave bent over them to look at the head of an older man.

Corinth’s first painting of Salome from 1899 shows the dancer dressed as a tart, her breasts hanging loose, her face sneering down at John’s face with contempt as she touches it. The young woman at the top right laughs as she looks towards the left, apparently detached from the gruesome scene in front of her. No gazes meet, thus the figures do not integrate into a whole.

His second Salome from the following year is less roughly worked and more finished to show finer detail. Although its figures haven’t moved, subtle changes have transformed the painting and its reading.

Salome has a more neutral facial expression, and is staring intently at the lower abdomen of the executioner. Her right hand is stretching open the left eye of John’s head, which appears to be staring up at her. The executioner and the young woman at the top right are laughing at one another, but the third woman beside her has a serious, almost sad expression, as she stands holding a large peacock fan. Visible at the top of her clothing, directly below her chin, is the small image of a human skull.

Corinth has also added detail to the cropped figures at the lower right. John’s legs are spattered with his blood, and possibly bear wounds or sores from his imprisonment. The two figures there are engaged in eye-to-eye contact, and there is also a profusion of hands there, as the older man appears to be raising John’s right arm.

The chain of gaze here is central to the painting’s narrative: John’s eye stares at Salome, who stares at the executioner’s crotch, who laughs at the young woman at the top right, who laughs back at him. Watching sombre and detached from behind is the figure of death.

Oscar Wilde’s one-act play Salome had been first published in French in 1891, and was soon translated into English and German. Banned from public performance in Britain, it received its premier in Paris in 1896, but wasn’t performed in public in England until 1931. Wilde had been influenced by Gustave Moreau’s paintings of Salome, and in turn influenced both Corinth’s paintings and Richard Strauss’s later opera (1905).

In Salome’s words at the end of Wilde’s play (he calls John the Baptist Jokanaan):
But, wherefore dost thou not look at me Jokanaan? Thine eyes that were so terrible, so full of rage and scorn, are shut now. Wherefore are they shut? Open thine eyes! Lift up thine eyelids, Jokanaan! Wherefore dost thou not look at me? Art thou afraid of me, Jokanaan, that thou wilt not look at me?
If thou hadst looked at me thou hadst loved me. Well I know that thou wouldst have loved me, and the mystery of love is greater that the mystery of death.

At the centre of Wilde’s play is the perversion of lust and desire in Salome, captured so well by Corinth in the chain of gaze.

This second painting was rejected by the Munich Secession, but welcomed by the Berlin Secession. As a result, Corinth was dubbed ‘the painter of flesh’, establishing his reputation and securing his future in Berlin.

References

Wikipedia.

Lemoine S et al. (2008) Lovis Corinth, Musée d’Orsay & RMN. ISBN 978 2 711 85400 4. (In French.)
Czymmek G et al. (2010) German Impressionist Landscape Painting, Liebermann-Corinth-Slevogt, Arnoldsche. ISBN 978 3 89790 321 0.

As expected, Apple announced the next major version of macOS and its other operating systems, on the opening day of WWDC yesterday. This followed a disarming vision of Craig Federighi sporting a forest of grey hair and racing a Formula 1 car around the roof of Apple Park. Mercifully, that turned out to be a promotion for a new Apple TV+ production titled F1, rather than anything about to happen to macOS. And he didn’t crash.

Previews of each new OS were prefaced by the promise of “big announcements for all of our platforms”, and inevitably opened with plans for Apple Intelligence and Private Cloud Compute. Language support is going to be further extended, and additional new features are going to be announced later during this cycle. Perhaps most important is the news that third-party developers are to be given access to on-device Large Language Models (LLMs) through a Foundation Models Framework. This looks highly accessible, and it will be exciting to see what that enables.

As widely forecast, these new major versions bring a redesign intended to harness the power of Apple silicon, with a look dubbed Liquid Glass. This features layers of translucent controls that adapt to your actions, for example moving out of the way when scrolling. Although this is harmonised across devices, fears that macOS will be ‘dumbed down’ to resemble iOS appear unfounded. Indeed, iPadOS is steadily moving closer to macOS with a more Finder-like Files app, and iPads will at last be able to run background tasks.

Some features of Liquid Glass appear visually stunning, for example when providing 3D effects of depth in lock screen photos. Overall, from the little that has been shown so far, it looks impressive without being obtrusive or irritating. To get the best out of Liquid Glass, apps will need to be rebuilt against the improved API, and their appearance tuned lightly. Some special visual effects may need access to new API features, though.

To get the best out of this new look, icons need to be layered, and adapted for new appearance options including transparent. Apple has provided a new Icon Composer app to support that. Although I doubt whether it will become as popular as ResEdit was in Classic Mac OS, I can see Icon Composer being used more widely than the rest of Xcode.

Hardware support

Surprisingly, four Intel models continue to be supported by Tahoe. The full list given by Apple reads:

• MacBook Pro 16-inch 2019, and 13-inch 2020 with four Thunderbolt ports,
• iMac 2020,
• Mac Pro 2019,
• all Apple silicon models from 2020 onwards.

Although those Intel models will be able to use many of the new features in Tahoe, they continue to be unable to access any Apple Intelligence.

This means that Tahoe will continue to be a large Universal binary, and could in theory be supported by OCLP, although that’s likely to be more challenging. Apple has stated explicitly that Tahoe will be the last major version of macOS to support Intel Macs.

Version numbering

As rumoured, Apple has changed the numbering of all its OSes, bringing them in synchrony to version 26. This even applies to the new beta-release of Xcode for Tahoe.

Although that might come as a surprise to some code and scripts, because it’s a higher major version number than Sequoia this should present far fewer problems than did macOS 11 Big Sur. You might still like to check anything of yours that does check version numbers to ensure it doesn’t trip up.

Details

In keeping with the redesign, improvements in folder and icon appearance were mentioned early. Easy folder customisation is coming, allowing the standard icon to be enhanced with the superimposition of symbols and emoji, and its colour changed. Icons can be tinted by the user, as well as being layered in Icon Composer.

Continuity features that integrate Macs with devices are being extended with support for Live Activities added to macOS. The Phone app will be added as well, in its improved form from iOS 26.

Shortcuts gains ‘intelligent’ actions, and will have direct access to LLMs in Private Cloud Compute. Spotlight has undergone a major update, but in Global Spotlight features rather than local search. From the Spotlight icon, there will be intelligent actions integrated with Shortcuts, quick keys abbreviations, and it will be contextually aware. To take advantage of these, third-party apps will need to use App Intents.

Games will be integrated into a new Games app, and gain translucent controls.

The powerful GPUs in Macs supported by Tahoe should also become more capable, with the introduction of Metal 4.

Finally, Tahoe is dropping full first run security checks on notarized apps, which should ensure they all launch blazingly fast. Although a few malicious apps have been inadvertently notarized in the past, running XProtect checks on them seem pointless, as the notarization process involves more extensive checks than those performed by XProtect. If malware has managed to sneak past Apple’s checks and become notarized, then nothing in macOS is going to detect it as being malicious.

Release dates

Apple has already released the first developer beta-test version of Tahoe and its sister OSes. The first public beta is promised for July, and full release of macOS 26.0 is due in the fall/autumn.

I’ve already started testing my own apps.

With Julius Caesar transformed into a star following his assassination, Ovid ends the last book of his Metamorphoses with praise of the contemporary Emperor Augustus, and expresses his own aspirations to immortality.

Jupiter foretells some of the accomplishments of Caesar’s adopted heir, Augustus, who was then still known as Octavius or Octavian. These include successes in battle, the fall of Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt, and the growth of the Roman Empire. Ovid then looks ahead to Augustus’ own future apotheosis, when he will become a god. Finally, the author wishes for his words to be read throughout the empire, and to live on in fame.

Cleopatra’s legendary beauty has been expressed in paint by several artists, among them Louis Gauffier, whose Cleopatra and Octavian of 1787 shows the young Augustus and Queen Cleopatra conversing under the watchful eye of Julius Caesar’s bust. Cleopatra allied herself with Antony, and was eventually defeated at the Battle of Actium, ending years of civil war in Rome. Antony fell on his sword, and Cleopatra is reputed to have killed herself with the bite of an asp.

It’s Jean-Léon Gérôme who reminds us of the great events that were taking place at the eastern end of the Mediterranean during the reign of Augustus, in The Age of Augustus, the Birth of Christ (c 1852-54). The emperor sits on his throne, overseeing a huge gathering of people from all over the Roman Empire. Grouped in the foreground in a quotation from a traditional nativity is the Holy Family, whose infant son was to transform the empire in the centuries to come. Sadly for Ovid, and even Virgil, Gérôme’s throng doesn’t appear to include distinguished poets from the Augustan age.

Several painters have, though, shown Augustus’ favourite Virgil at the emperor’s court. Jean-Joseph Taillasson’s Virgil reading the Aeneid to Augustus and Octavia from 1787 shows the poet at the left, holding a copy of his Aeneid, reading a passage to the emperor Augustus and his sister Octavia. Augustus has been moved to tears by the passage praising Octavia’s dead son Marcellus, and his sister has swooned in her emotional response.

Ovid was in no position to commit Augustus’ eventual death and apotheosis to verse, but this is shown in an exquisite sardonyx cameo known as The Great Cameo of France from the first century CE. Augustus is here being brought up to the gods at the top of the scene.

Although a fan of Virgil and a minor author in his own right, Augustus wasn’t a strong patron of the arts. Until 8 BCE, his friend Gaius Maecenas acted as cultural advisor to Augustus, and was a major patron of Virgil. Tiepolo’s Maecenas Presenting the Liberal Arts to Emperor Augustus from 1743 shows Maecenas at the left introducing an anachronistic woman painter and other artists to the emperor.

Ovid’s major patron was Marcus Valerius Messalia Corvinus, and is thought to have been friends with poets in the circle of Maecenas. But all this became irrelevant when Ovid offended Augustus, and in 8 CE was banished to Tomis, on the western coast of the Black Sea, at the north-eastern edge of the Roman Empire.

It is perhaps JMW Turner who has best captured this in his Ancient Italy – Ovid Banished from Rome, exhibited in 1838. In a dusk scene more characteristic of Claude Lorrain’s contre-jour riverscapes, Turner gives a thoroughly romantic view of Ovid’s departure by boat from the bank of the Tiber.

Ovid died in Tomis in 17 or 18 CE, and by a quirk of fate his banishment from the city of Rome wasn’t formally revoked until 2017, two millennia later.

But Ovid saw his road to immortality not by apotheosis, rather through his work being read, and living on in the minds of those countless readers. In that, he undoubtedly succeeded: his Metamorphoses and other poems continue to be read, both in their original Latin and in translation into many languages, and depicted in many great paintings.

I hope that you enjoyed Saturday’s Mac Riddles, episode 311. Here are my solutions to them.

1: Shines a beam of light into files and the web.

2: The detective who found for Apple from 1998.

3: His faithful assistant came from Karelia and went to Java.

The common factor

I look forward to your putting alternative cases.

Until now, LogUI has only been able to access the active log of your Mac, by reading it directly. There are occasions when you can’t do that, or want to preserve the log for future reference. You also can’t browse the log directly on any of Apple’s devices. In these cases, and others, the best solution is to make a logarchive, and browse that instead. I’m delighted to provide an update to LogUI that can browse logarchives, including those created in iOS, iPadOS, and on Apple’s other devices.

What is a logarchive?

A logarchive is an undocumented package containing copies of all the files from the active log at the moment the logarchive was created. They can be opened and browsed by Console, Consolation 3, Ulbow, the log command tool, and now by LogUI. Because they contain all the files that make up the log, they can be large, and typically range in size from about 300 MB to over 1 GB. All the files containing log entries are stored in their original binary tracev3 format, proprietary to Apple, and again undocumented, although that format has been reversed in the past.

Create a logarchive

The easiest way to create a logarchive is to run a sysdiagnose, and that’s the standard way for saving a logarchive on one of Apple’s devices. Methods vary by device, and include:

• On a Mac, use the System Diagnostics… option in Activity Monitor’s Action tool, or press the Shift, Command, Control, Option and . keys at the same time, or run sudo sysdiagnose -f ~/Documents to save it to your Documents folder.
• On an iPhone or iPad, press and hold both volume buttons and the side or top button at the same time, for about 2 seconds. This combination may trigger other features, though. The sysdiagnose file will be made available in Settings > Privacy & Security > Analytics & Improvements > Analytics Data, from where you can transfer it to your Mac.

Unpack the .tar.gz archive resulting from that, and you’ll find a system_logs.logarchive inside it.

On a Mac, you can instead use the log collect command to create a logarchive directly. For example,
log collect --output ~/Documents/my.logarchive --last 5m
collects the last 5 minutes of log in the specified logarchive package. macOS security will block you from trying to save that logarchive on an external volume, though.

My free log browser Ulbow uses another method for assembling logarchives, and the next build of LogUI will incorporate that and other tools for working with logarchives.

Browse a logarchive in LogUI

This new build of LogUI has a seventh tool, to Use Logarchive. Click on that and you’ll be prompted to select the logarchive to open and browse.

Because the dates and times used in the logarchive will be different from current clock time, the LogUI window displays red warning text just to the left of the Start time. Set the date and time to a period within the scope of that logarchive, and use the Get Log tool as normal.

The log excerpt shown in the screenshot above is taken from the kernel boot sequence of my iPhone 15 Pro, to demonstrate how this all works.

If you want to return that window to browsing the active log, click on the Use Logarchive tool again, but this time cancel the selection. Other windows will of course continue to browse the active log unless you set them to use a logarchive as well.

Coming soon

Although browsing saved log entries in a logarchive is exactly the same as those of the active log, dates and times can be a pain. If you want to check when log files in a logarchive were written, use the Finder’s contextual menu to show their contents, scroll to the foot of the folders inside, select the Persist folder and check the file creation dates there.

This is made even easier in the forthcoming new build of LogUI, which features a Logarchive Tool to help you navigate logarchives, and learn which date and time ranges are appropriate.

LogUI 1.0 build 60 is now available from here: logui160
and from its Product Page.

I’ll be along with a new build in a few days, once I have tested and documented its Logarchive Tool. In the meantime, I hope you’ll find LogUI useful for studying the first beta-releases of Apple’s new operating systems.

This is the second of two articles looking at paintings of the Zealand countryside from the early nineteenth century up to the 1930s. I have reached the start of the twentieth century, and proceed with the landscapes of the two Andersens, Laurits Andersen Ring and Hans Andersen Brendekilde.

After LA Ring married Sigrid, daughter of the ceramicist Herman Kähler, the family settled in the village of Baldersbrønde, midway between what’s now the western edge of Copenhagen’s conurbation, and the city of Roskilde, on Zealand. By the Village Pond at Baldersbrønde from 1911 shows this village with its rutted mud track, in early Spring when the pollards are still bare of leaves.

The other painting Andersen of the day was LA Ring’s friend and contemporary originally named Hans Andersen, who adopted the surname of Brendekilde after the village of Brændekilde, on the island of Funen (Fyn), where he was born.

Brendekilde’s A Sower on a Sunny Spring Day at Brendekilde Church from 1914 shows Holme-Olstrup Church, near Næstved on Zealand. The sower, walking over poor soil with abundant stones, has been identified as Ole Frederik Jensen (1870-1953).

LA Ring later moved to the tiny rural island of Enø, linked to Zealand by a bridge at Karrebæksminde.

The Bridge at Karrebæksminde from 1912 must be one of Ring’s most intricately detailed works, showing the bridge connecting the large and populous island of Zealand with tiny Enø. This canal was dug in the early nineteenth century to connect Karrebæk Fjord with the waters of the Baltic, and has a strong tidal stream, as demonstrated here.

By 1911, LA Ring and his family had bought a caravan, which in those days resembled a railway goods wagon and usually weighed several tons. Most had to be towed by a truck or one of the traction engines still used on farms, and were barely mobile. The Artist’s Wife with the Family Caravan (1911) shows his wife Sigrid in a loose-fitting dress, under the shade of a parasol, enjoying a holiday amid sand dunes, somewhere on the Danish Baltic coast.

In the summer of 1913 Ring and his family holidayed again in their caravan. In his View of a Shore with the Artist’s Wagon and Tent at Enö, they are seen on the south-west coast of the island of Enø. They have spilled out into a tent, whose heavy guy ropes are being used to dry washing.

After the start of the First World War, LA Ring retired to a house built for him near the city of Roskilde, in the centre of Zealand. This was ideally situated in what was then the neighbouring village of Sankt Jørgensbjerg. Although generally flat and low country, the land rises to 40 metres (130 feet) above the water of Roskilde Fjord. Ring’s house and environs gave him fine views over the city, country, and the fjord itself to the north, that dominated his paintings during the final eighteen years of his life.

In the winter of 1916 he painted one of his finest landscapes, View of Roskilde from Sankt Jørgensbjerg. It’s a dull grey day, with the snow still lying on the ground. Although distant, the great cathedral dominates from its position at the top of the hill. In seemingly painting every single branch and twig on the barren trees, Ring has brought a fine, rhythmic texture to the foreground that extends right to the skyline. The detail below shows his rich vocabulary of textures in the trees, field, and buildings, which compensate for the muted colours.

Spring Day at Køge from 1931 was painted at this town to the south of Roskilde, on the coast opposite southern Sweden.

One of the last of LA Ring’s landscapes shows this View Over the Roofs at Sankt Jørgensbjerg, Denmark, from 1932. By this time, he was 78, still a superb artist with great precision in his detail of the leafless trees, and in the texture of the thatch. The church behind the trees is that of Sankt Jørgensbjerg, and this view is from the artist’s house.

The Swiss Army knife has fallen victim to unintended consequences. Once the dream of every schoolboy and pocketed by anyone who went out into the countryside, my small collection of Swiss Army knives and multi-tools now remains indoors and unused. This is the result of strict laws on the carriage of knives in the UK; although not deemed illegal, since 1988 carrying them in a public place has put you at risk of being stopped and searched, and one friend was subjected to that for carrying a mere paint-scraper.

Swiss Army knives have another more sinister danger, that they’re used in preference to dedicated tools. Over the last week or two as I’ve been digging deeper into Spotlight, I can’t help but think how it has turned into the Swiss Army knife of search tools, by compromising its powers for the sake of versatility.

At present, I know of four different Spotlights:

• Global Spotlight, incorporating local, web, and some in-app search, accessed through the Spotlight tool in the menu bar;
• Local Spotlight, restricted to searching files in local and some network storage, typically through a Find window in the Finder;
• Core Spotlight, providing search features within an app, commonly in the contents of an app’s database;
• Third-Party Local Spotlight, a more limited local search available to third-party apps.

Of those, it’s Global Spotlight that I find most concerning, as it’s the frontline search tool for many if not most who use Macs, and the most flawed of the four. It’s not even the fault of Spotlight, whose 20th birthday we should have celebrated just over a month ago. No, this flaw goes right back to Sherlock, first released in Mac OS 8.5 in 1998.

At that time, few Macs had more than 5 GB of hard disk storage, and local search typically dealt with tens of thousands of files. That was also the first year that Google published its index, estimating that there were about 25 million web pages in all. Apple didn’t have its own web browser to offer, but made Microsoft’s Internet Explorer the default until Safari was released five years later. Merging local and web search into a single app seemed a good idea, and that’s the dangerous precedent set by Sherlock 27 years ago.

The result today only conflates and confuses.

In the days of Sherlock, web search was more a journey of discovery, where most search engines ranked pages naïvely according to the number of times the search term appeared on that page. That only changed with the arrival of Google’s patented PageRank algorithm at the end of the twentieth century, and placement of ads didn’t start in earnest until the start of the new millennium, by which time Safari was established as the standard browser in Mac OS X.

Local search was and remains a completely different discipline, with no concept of ranking. As local storage increased relentlessly in capacity, file metadata and contents became increasingly important to its success. Internally local searches have been specified by a logical language of predicates that are directly accessible to remarkably few users, and most of us have come to expect Spotlight’s indexing to handle metadata for us.

The end result challenges the user with negotiating web search engines and dodging their ads using one language, confounded by the behaviour of Siri Suggestions, and hazarding a wild guess as to what might come up in the metadata and content of files. More often than not, we end up with a potpourri that fails on all counts.

As an example, I entered the terms manet painting civil war into Spotlight’s Global Search box and was rewarded with a link to Manet’s painting of The Battle of the Kearsarge and the Alabama from 1864, as I’d hope. But entered into the search box of a Find window, those found anything but, from Plutarch’s Lives to a medical review on Type 2 diabetes. In MarsEdit’s Core Spotlight, though, they found every article I have written for this blog that featured the painting.

To get anything useful from local Spotlight, I had to know one of the ships was the USS Kearsarge, and that unusual word immediately found an image of the painting, but no useful content referring to it. Had I opted to search for the word Alabama instead, I would have been offered 94 hits, ranging from linguistics to the Mueller report into Russian interference in the 2016 US Presidential election. Adding the requirement that the file was an image narrowed the results down to the single image.

Conversely, entering Kearsarge into Global Spotlight offered a neighbourhood in North Conway, New Hampshire, in Maps, information about three different US warships from Siri Knowledge, Wikipedia’s comprehensive disambiguation page, a list of five US warships of that name, and three copies of the image of Manet’s painting without any further information about them.

Spotlight is also set to change with the inevitable addition of AI. Already suggestions are tailored using machine learning, but as far as I’m aware local Spotlight doesn’t yet use any form of AI-enhanced search. Words entered into search boxes and bars aren’t subject to autocorrection, and although Global Spotlight may suggest alternative searches using similar words, if you enter acotyle Spotlight doesn’t dismiss it as a mistake for acolyte. It remains to be seen whether and when local Spotlight switches from Boolean binaries to fuzziness and probability, but at least that will be more akin to the ranking of web pages, and we’ll no longer need to be bilingual.

For the time being, we’re left with a Swiss Army knife, ideal for finding where Apple has hidden Keychain Access, but disappointing when you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for.

The island of Zealand (Sjælland) lies between Germany and Scania (Skåne) in southern Sweden, on the south-western edge of the Baltic Sea, and is the most populous of the Danish islands. The capital Copenhagen (København) is on its eastern coast, looking across Øresund, the strait separating it from Malmö in Sweden.

Like most European cities, Copenhagen grew rapidly during the nineteenth century, from a population of just over 100,000 to four times that in 1901. Many of those migrated from the surrounding countryside, where they had farmed the land. This weekend I show paintings of the Zealand countryside from the early nineteenth century up to the 1930s.

Although JC Dahl had been born in Norway, he painted for much of his early career in Copenhagen, and later returned to the Zealand countryside. In 1829, he painted this Winter Landscape at Vordingborg, showing barren trees and snowy fields near the town of Vordingborg, in the south of Zealand. Plenty of sinister crows in the air and on the ground help build the sense of grim foreboding.

In Dahl’s Copenhagen Harbour by Moonlight (1846), he shows many ‘fully-rigged’ sailing ships in this major port at the south-western end of the Baltic Sea.

Painted in 1856, his Burning Windmill at Stege is an unusual brandje (a painting of fire) following a traditional sub-genre of the Dutch Golden Age. Although completed well before Impressionism, Dahl echoes the red of the flames in the field and trees to the left of the windmill, and even in his signature. Stege is a small town on an island in the south of the Zealand archipelago.

Laurits Andersen adopted his surname Ring from the village where he was born in the south of Zealand. His Young Girl Looking out of a Roof Window (1885) eloquently expresses the feelings of a migrant from the countryside when trapped in a garret amid the grey urban roofscape of Copenhagen.

His painting of Harvest shows his brother cutting what’s most probably rye rather than wheat, as a “monument to the Danish peasant”. He painted this during the summer of 1885, when his brother was working on his farm near Fakse on Zealand.

Erik Henningsen’s painted record of Farmers in the Capital from 1887 is one of the few contemporary accounts of migrants from the country. This family group consists of an older man, the head of household, two younger women, and a young boy. Everyone else is wearing smart leather shoes or boots, but these four are still wearing filthy wooden clogs, with tattered and patched clothing. The two men are carrying a large chest containing the family’s worldly goods, and beside them is their farm dog. The father is speaking to a mounted policeman, presumably asking him for directions to their lodgings. The large brick building in the background is the second version of Copenhagen’s main railway station, opened in 1864, and replaced by the modern station in 1911.

LA Ring’s Mogenstrup Church (1888-89) shows an elderly couple in their tattered Sunday best clothing, slowly making their way home after attending this church near his home village of Ring. The man’s shoes are still polished and his top hat also shiny, but like many country couples these two were no strangers to hunger or deprivation.

In 1891, Ring visited Herman Kähler’s ceramics factory in Næstved in the south of Zealand, and in the adjacent village painted this rural genre work, Conversation in the Countryside, Lille Næstved. It shows a mother with her two young children talking to an older boy, who sits on a doorstep staring at the viewer. Although the mother and family appear clean and fairly well-dressed, the boy’s clothing is worn out and tattered. Running behind them is the small stream that functioned as the dirt road’s main drain. Most of the cottages are small, and thatched, with the chimney of Kähler’s factory in the background.

The bog at Carlsminde in Søllerød, Zealand from 1906 is one of LA Ring’s finest landscapes, although perhaps more appropriate for pre-Impressionist painting in the middle of the nineteenth century. It shows a lake in the grounds of a Baroque mansion in Søllerød, to the north of Copenhagen. This estate had been bought by Isak Glückstadt in 1903, who expanded it and had it landscaped around this lake, with its stock of pike and tench. Glückstadt seems to have been eccentric, at one time keeping two Indian elephants here.

Here are this weekend’s Mac riddles to entertain you through family time, shopping and recreation.

1: Shines a beam of light into files and the web.

2: The detective who found for Apple from 1998.

3: His faithful assistant came from Karelia and went to Java.

To help you cross-check your solutions, or confuse you further, there’s a common factor between them.

I’ll post my solutions first thing on Monday morning.

Please don’t post your solutions as comments here: it spoils it for others.

Spotlight, the current search feature in macOS, does far more than find locally stored files, but in this brief history I focus on that function, and how it has evolved as Macs have come to keep increasingly large numbers of files.

Until early Macs had enough storage to make this worthwhile, there seemed little need. Although in 1994 there were precious few Macs with hard disks as large as 1 GB, networks could provide considerably more. That year Apple offered its first product in AppleSearch, based on a client-server system running over AppleShare networks, and in its Workgroup Servers in particular. This was a pioneering product that was soon accompanied by a local app, Find File, written by Bill Monk and introduced in System 7.5 that September.

Sherlock

The next step was to implement a similar architecture to AppleSearch on each Mac, with a service that maintained indexes of file metadata and contents, and a client that passed queries to it. This became Sherlock, first released in Mac OS 8.5 in 1998. As access to the web grew, this came to encompass remote search through plug-ins that worked with web search engines.

Those were expanded in Sherlock 2, part of Mac OS 9.0 from 1999 and shown above, and version 3 that came in Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar in 2002. The latter brought one of the more unseemly conflicts in Apple’s history, when developers at Karelia claimed Sherlock 3 had plagiarised its own product, Watson, which in turn had been modelled on Sherlock. Apple denied that, but the phrase being Sherlocked has passed into the language as a result.

Spotlight

Sherlock remained popular with the introduction of Mac OS X, but was never ported to run native on Intel processors. Instead, Apple replaced it with Spotlight in Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, in April 2005.

Initially, the Spotlight menu command dropped down a search panel as shown here, rather than opening a window as it does now.

A Finder search window, precursor to the modern Find window, is shown in the lower left of this screenshot taken from Tiger in 2006.

Spotlight was improved again in Mac OS 10.5 Leopard, in 2007. This extended its query language, and brought support for networked Macs that were using file sharing.

This shows a rather grander Finder search window from Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard in 2009.

Search attributes available for use in the search window are shown here in OS X 10.9 Mavericks, in 2014.

Spotlight’s last major redesign came in OS X 10.10 Yosemite, in 2014, when web and local search were merged into Global Spotlight, the search window that opens using the Spotlight icon at the right end of the menu bar. With Global Spotlight came Spotlight (then Siri from macOS Sierra) Suggestions, and they have been accompanied by remote data collection designed to preserve the relative anonymity of the user.

This Finder window in OS X 10.10 Yosemite, in 2015, shows a more complex search in progress.

This shows a search in Global Spotlight in macOS 10.12 Sierra, in 2017.

Local Search in the Finder’s Find window can now use a wide variety of attributes, some of which are shown here, in macOS 10.13 High Sierra, in 2018. Below are search bars for several different classes of metadata.

Over the years, Spotlight’s features have become more divided, in part to safeguard privacy, and to deliver similar features from databases. Core Spotlight now provides search features within apps such as Mail and Notes, where local searches lack access.

Spotlight’s indexes are located at the root level of each indexed volume, in the hidden .Spotlight-V100 folder. Those are maintained by mdworker processes relying on mdimporter plugins to provide tailored access for different file types. If an mdimporter fails to provide content data on some or all of the file types it supports, those are missing from that volume’s indexes, and Spotlight search will be unsuccessful. This happened most probably in macOS Catalina 10.15.6, breaking the indexing of content from Rich Text files. That wasn’t fixed until macOS Big Sur 11.3 in April 2021.

Over the last few years, macOS has gained the ability to perform optical character recognition using Live Text, and to analyse and classify images. Text and metadata retrieved by the various services responsible are now included in Spotlight’s indexes. From macOS 13 Ventura in 2022, those services can take prolonged periods working through images and file types like PDF that include images they can process to generate additional content and metadata for indexing.

Those with large collections of eligible files have noticed sustained workloads as a result. Fortunately for those with Apple silicon Macs, those services, like Spotlight’s indexing, run almost exclusively on their Mac’s E cores, so have little or no effect on its ability to run apps. For those with Intel processors, though, this may continue to be troubling.

In less than 30 years, searching Macs has progressed from the basic Find File to Spotlight finding search terms in text recognised in photos, in almost complete silence. Even Spotlight’s 20th birthday passed just over a month ago, on 29 April, without so much as an acknowledgment of its impact.

By 1890, Lovis Corinth was financially independent, had his own studio in Königsberg, the city near his home village, and was starting to become a successful artist. His Pietà from 1889, which was sadly destroyed in 1945, received an honourable mention at the Paris Salon of 1890; encouraged by that and the greater prospects of working in what was then the arts capital of Germany, he moved to Munich in 1891.

Corinth set up his studio in what was at the time the most bohemian and artistic district of Munich, and painted this quick sketch of the View from the Studio, Schwabing (1891). He realised that his progressive style of painting was at variance with both the Munich Academy and the critics, and in 1892 he took part in the foundation of the Munich Secession to bring change. The following year he co-founded the Free Association (Freie Vereinigung). He also expanded his skills, started etching in 1891, and lithography in 1894.

Much of his painting during his nine years in Munich was experimental, although modern critics accuse him of spending more time drinking copious quantities of red wine and champagne.

He painted this Self-portrait with Skeleton in his Munich studio in 1896, and shows in his face the effects of his high life in Munich.

In the 1890s he started to take landscape painting more seriously, including this Landscape with a Large Raven painted in the late autumn of 1893. As in Vincent van Gogh’s late landscapes, ravens, crows, and other similar black birds are taken as harbingers of death. In this otherwise deserted countryside, with the winter drawing close, this painting could be read as indicating Corinth’s bleak melancholy. Although he certainly suffered feelings of mortality and had episodes of depression, those aren’t part of the received image of his social life, nor of many of his paintings.

This shows the beautiful fishermen’s Cemetery in Nidden (1893) on the Kurische Nehrung, a long sand spit near the southern border of Lithuania, on the shore of the Baltic not far from Königsberg. During the 1890s, Corinth travelled from Munich to visit his home village, and went as far afield as Italy.

Like some of the Masters before him, most notably Rembrandt, he painted a series of studies In the Slaughterhouse (1893). As the son of a tanner, Corinth was familiar with such scenes.

The Deposition (Descent from the Cross) (1895) was one of his major paintings from this time in Munich, and won a gold medal when exhibited in the Glaspalast in Munich that year. It shows the traditional station of the cross commemorating the lowering of the dead body of Christ from the cross, attended by Joseph of Arimathea and Mary Magdalene.

This work is a thoroughly modern approach to its traditional theme, in its framing, composition, and faces. Its close-in cropped view suggests the influence of photography, and the faces shown appear contemporary and not in the least historic. These combine to give it the immediacy of a current event, rather than something that happened almost two millennia ago. Corinth returned to the subject of the Deposition, and the theme of the Crucifixion, in many of his later paintings.

Autumn Flowers (1895) is a delightful full-figure portrait of a girl, her dress held out in front of her to carry her collection of flowers, which also decorate her hair and the background.

A Forest. Flooding on Lake Starnberg (1896) was one of the landscapes that he painted in the countryside near Dachau, and shows a flooded stand of birch trees at the edge of the lake, probably in the spring.

Bacchanale (1896) is the first of his series of paintings of the wild and licentious antics of worshippers of Bacchus. These provided the opportunity for him to compose some of his many studies of nudes into grander paintings, although this one is non-narrative.

He returned to the theme of meat and animal carcasses in his Butchers in Schäftlarn on the Isar (1897), painted in this Bavarian town not far from Munich.

He painted this portrait of Fräulein Heck (in a Boat on the Starnberger See) (1897) on this picturesque lake near Dachau. This form of portrait, of a woman carrying a parasol in a boat, was popular at the time.

Corinth continued to paint figure studies, such as his Nude Woman (1897), for their value in his more substantial figurative works.

The Temptation of Saint Anthony (1897) visits another traditional religious theme, well-known for encouraging inventive and sometimes highly imaginative paintings. As with his earlier Deposition, Corinth shows the saint surrounded by modern temptations, in a real style. There’s a wealth of detail here, from the bright eyes of the owl in the top left corner, down to the sinister flick of the snake’s tongue at the lower right, demonstrating the history painter’s eye for detail and Corinth’s own Symbolist leanings in narrative.

The Witches (1897) is more subtle than it looks, as this isn’t a depiction of sensuous rites taking place in a coven. Instead, the women are preparing a younger woman to attend a masked ball. Their subject has just got out of the wooden tub in the foreground, has been dried off, and is about to don the fine clothes laid over the chair at the left, including the black mask.

Although Corinth undoubtedly drank more than his fair share of red wine and champagne while painting in Munich, his technique and style were maturing fast. The best of his paintings from this period are the equal of better-known works from later in his career. The stage was set for his first truly momentous painting.

References

Wikipedia.

Lemoine S et al. (2008) Lovis Corinth, Musée d’Orsay & RMN. ISBN 978 2 711 85400 4. (In French.)
Czymmek G et al. (2010) German Impressionist Landscape Painting, Liebermann-Corinth-Slevogt, Arnoldsche. ISBN 978 3 89790 321 0.