I have divided narrative forms in painting into the following categories:

• instantaneous, where the image is intended to show what was happening at a single moment in time, even though it’s likely to contain references to other moments in time;
• multi-image, where a series of separate images (paintings) is used to tell the story;
• multiplex, where a single image contains representations of two or more moments in time from a story;
• multi-frame, where two or more picture frames are used to tell a story, as in comics or manga;
• polymythic, where a single image contains two or more distinct stories.

The previous article showed examples of each apart from multiplex narrative, the subject of this sequel.

Multiplex

In more recent years, multiplex narrative has become considered by many narrative painters as being too complex for modern viewers. Given its popularity in ancient times and during the Renaissance, this appears curious.

Immediately on looking at this Roman painting of Perseus and Andromeda, you can see the duplicated images of Perseus: one flying in from the left, the other being congratulated at the right. If intended to be a literal telling of the story, Cetus the sea monster wouldn’t appear until after Perseus had freed Andromeda from her chains. It therefore contains at least two different moments in time, but isn’t divided into frames, and is therefore multiplex narrative.

Masaccio’s fresco in the Brancacci Chapel of The Tribute Money (1425-8) contains three images of Saint Peter, and two of the tax gatherer, carefully set and projected into the same single view. Although each is spaced apart from the next, no pictorial device is used to separate them into frames.

His literary reference is to the Gospel of Matthew, in a story in which Christ directs Peter to find a coin in the mouth of a fish so that he can pay the temple tax. In the centre, the tax collector asks Christ for the temple tax. At the far left, as indicated by Christ and Peter’s arms, Peter (shown a second time) takes the coin out of the mouth of a fish. At the right, Peter (a third time) pays the tax collector (shown a second time) his due.

Masaccio demonstrates how important space and layout are in successful multiplex narrative.

In Piero di Cosimo’s Andromeda freed by Perseus (c 1510-15), Perseus appears three times: flying down from the top, stood on Cetus about to kill the monster, and in the subsequent party at the bottom right. Andromeda also appears at least twice. These separate events are combined in its multiplex narrative.

The five different sets of Adam and Eve shown in Lucas Cranach the Elder’s The Garden of Eden (1530) are set within the representation of the garden as a whole, making this multiplex narrative.

Following the Renaissance, multiplex narrative was largely forgotten, until its more recent revival.

At the centre of Camille Corot’s painting, Diana and her attendant nymphs are bathing in a stream, and soaking up the sunshine. At the right, Actaeon with one of his hunting dogs is just about to run straight into them. Diana, appropriately crowned, stands pointing to the distant figure at the left, which is again Actaeon, antlers growing from his head as she transforms him into a stag.

Actaeon appears twice in spatially separate scenes, with Diana and her group being part of both. In the first, they are simply bathing and larking about, but in the second Diana stands, points, and transforms Actaeon.

In the early twentieth century, Lovis Corinth’s Ariadne on Naxos (1913) combines two separate events into a single image: the abandonment of Ariadne by Theseus on the left, and the arrival of Dionysus/Bacchus to be her future husband on the right. He does this without any duplication of actors, and it’s multiplex narrative.

At the centre of Thomas Hart Benton’s Achelous and Hercules from 1947 is Hercules, stripped to the waist and wearing denim jeans, who is about to grasp the horns of Achelous, shown in the form of a bull. Immediately to the right, Deianira is shown in contemporary American form, with a young woman next to her bearing a laurel crown and seated on the Horn of Plenty. To the left of centre, Benton shows a second figure of Hercules holding a rope, part of a passage referring to ranching and cowboys, and further to the left to the grain harvest. To the right, the Horn of Plenty links into the cultivation of maize (corn), the other major crop from the area.

This narrative technique is by no means confined to Europe, as shown in the next two examples.

This detail of Krishna Storms the Citadel of Narakasura (c 1840) contains two near-identical representations of Krishna, making it multiplex narrative.

My final example of multiplex narrative is that of the Heiji Monogatari Emaki (Sanjo Scroll) (late 1200s), in which time advances from right to left, and there is duplication of actors.

Of all the features of our Macs, the one we most take for granted must be time. From the moment it starts up, we expect its clocks and timekeeping to be accurate, whether it’s the clock at the far right of the menu bar, or times recorded in its logs. This article explains how to ensure that works, and what to do when it doesn’t.

Settings

Unless your Mac is one of the few that isn’t connected to the Internet, set it to check time and clocks by syncing with Apple’s Time Server over the network. Standard settings for doing that are located in the Date & Time section of General settings.

Time and date are set automatically using time.apple.com as the source, and where possible the time zone is set automatically using your Mac’s current location.

In some cases, a local network time server may be preferred by setting the source to a different network address. This can be useful within active local networks, where it’s important that all network devices are synchronised to the same source, although that should work just as well using Apple’s time service. Some computers allow you to specify multiple time servers, in case some of them aren’t reachable. macOS only uses one, and if you do provide a list of NTP servers, only the first will be used.

The most common problem arises when the time zone can’t be set automatically using Location Services. This is buried more deeply, in Location Services in Privacy & Security settings. Click on System Services, and ensure you have allowed access to Setting time zone, and that Location Services is enabled.

One common situation where this doesn’t work is in Virtual Machines, which normally aren’t able to get an accurate location as they can’t access Wi-Fi directly. You’ll then have to set the time zone manually.

Like daylight savings or summer time, time zones don’t change the time of the system clock, but are corrections applied to times read from that and presented in localised form for you to see.

Importance

Accurate system clock time is of considerable importance in many respects, as it’s used for the timestamps of files and directories, and can have implications for security. APFS uses transaction identifiers (XIDs) to keep track of the order of events within its file systems, so isn’t reliant on timestamps, but other features may not have such an independent mechanism. Backups are an obvious example, where decisions can be confused by contradictory file creation and modification times.

Sometimes users deliberately change the system clock and disable its online updates to run a Mac using past time, for example to work around an expired security certificate. Although that may work well at the time, it can lead to strange problems resulting from disordered time sequences, and should be used with caution.

NTP service

Accurate and synchronised time has been required since long before the Internet, and is available using other means. Navigation and other systems have been using radio time signals for many decades, and most recently GPS satellites provide highly precise time. The disadvantage to these is that they require special radio receivers that aren’t built into Macs, although most of Apple’s devices now include GPS receivers. Another way to get accurate time is from a local atomic clock, but they’re beyond our budget.

The alternative is an NTP server like time.apple.com, but that poses another problem, as the server has to be polled over the network, and that takes time in both directions. To account for that, macOS has to calculate a time offset as the difference in absolute time between its clock and that of the NTP server, and the round-trip delay for the whole request. It can then estimate how much it needs to adjust the Mac’s clock time to be in sync with the server.

Because time offset and round-trip delay vary in each check with a server, macOS may perform several checks and use those to derive best estimates.

One important confounding factor here is anything that leads to long delays in connecting with the NTP server, and the most common cause of those is using a VPN service. Routing NTP connections through your VPN service can cause inaccurate local clock times.

timed

As far as I’m aware, prior to macOS 10.13 High Sierra, macOS used an ordinary NTP client to connect to NTP servers and correct its clock time. Apple then replaced that with a new and proprietary service timed, described thus:
timed maintains system clock accuracy by synchronizing the clock with reference clocks via technologies like NTP. Inputs are merged inside of timed, where it calculates uncertainty to facilitate scheduling proactive time jobs. timed is also aware of power/battery conditions.

This is run as a LaunchDaemon, found at /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.timed.plist. The time server used is set in /etc/ntp.conf, and is normally time.apple.com. timed relies on three property lists in a locked-down directory /var/db/timed/. These are:

• com.apple.timed.plist containing its cached state, with values for TMLastNtpFetchAttempt, TMLastRtcTime, TMSystemTimeSet and more, and binary data for STF and TDTF;
• Library/Preferences/com.apple.preferences.datetime.plist with a single key-value pair for timezoneset, which should be true;
• Library/Preferences/com.apple.timed.plist with two key-value pairs for NtpUseServicePort and TMAutomaticTimeOnlyEnabled, both set to true.

SNTP

macOS 11.0 Big Sur brought two additions to support basic SNTP:

• sntp is a simple NTP client claimed to be able to set or slew the system clock if it’s out of sync;
• sntpd is a basic SNTP server daemon that can be launched through /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.sntpd.plist, and stores header data in /var/sntpd/state.bin.

Neither appears to be run or used routinely in macOS, as it prefers to handle this through timed and the com.apple.timed subsystem.

It’s sometimes suggested to use sntp to adjust the system clock using the command
sudo sntp -sS time.apple.com
Although this runs and reports offsets from the NTP server, it requires sudo if it’s to perform clock adjustments using adjtime, and it’s not clear what effect it has on timed.

Log

timed and clock adjustment occurs relatively late during the boot process, as it requires timed to be running with access to network connections. However, you may be confused by a pair of prominent Boundary entries that appear before synchronisation:
02.452702045 Boundary === system wallclock time adjusted
02.524229049 Boundary === system wallclock time adjusted
where the initial system boot entry was made at 00.0 seconds. Those are only internal adjustments.

timed and com.apple.timed subsystem start entries after those, first giving the version and build of timed, then announcing its start
02.741880893 com.apple.timed cmd,start

timed‘s cached state is then read from disk, and TMTimeSynthesizer is used to set system time
03.421952009 com.apple.timed Setting system time to Tue May 20 08:24:04 2025 from TMTimeSynthesizer

Initially, without a network connection, timed has to wait to sync with the NTP server
03.476943969 com.apple.timed We want time and don't have network! Keeping timed alive until network comes up, since we are beyond our wanted threshold.

Eventually, the NTP server is reachable
04.200660943 com.apple.timed Fetching NTP time.
04.249860048 com.apple.timed Received time Tue May 20 08:24:05 2025±0.01 from "NTP"

Another three time estimates are obtained from APNS
07.982021093 com.apple.timed Received time Tue May 20 08:24:09 2025±35.00 from "APNS"
13.667812108 com.apple.timed Received time Tue May 20 08:24:14 2025±35.00 from "APNS"
14.488466024 com.apple.timed Received time Tue May 20 08:24:15 2025±35.00 from "APNS"
leading to adjustments to system time. I don’t think that the APNS referred to here is Apple Push Notification Service, could it be Apple Primary Name Server, perhaps?

Slower is better

As a general principle, correcting the clock backwards to an earlier time would be bad news, as it would confuse anything that relies on time order. This can be seen, for example, in the autumn/fall when daylight savings or summer time ends in many countries, and localised clocks are set back in time. This ensures that for a period of roughly an hour, localised times duplicate those from the previous hour, and is particularly difficult to handle in log extracts.

If the system clock is going to err, then it’s better for it to be slightly slow, which allows adjustments forward in time that can’t result in duplication of timestamps.

Summary

• Unless your Mac isn’t connected to the Internet, set its time and date automatically using time.apple.com as the source, and enable it to set its time zone automatically through Location Services.
• Virtual Machines that can’t use automatic time zone settings should have their time zone set manually.
• A local network time server may be a preferred source, but macOS will only use one NTP server.
• Deliberately backdating a Mac’s clock can have untoward effects, and should be used with caution.
• Use of a VPN can delay syncing with the NTP server, and can cause clock problems.
• From macOS 10.13, macOS relies on timed to sync time.
• Using sntp to force sync clock corrections is still available, although it isn’t clear whether it’s effective.
• Trace timed activity in the log using the subsystem com.apple.timed.

References

NTP in Wikipedia

Apple has just released an update to XProtect for all supported versions of macOS, bringing it to version 5298. As usual, Apple doesn’t release information about what security issues this update might add or change.

This version adds new rules for MACOS.ADLOAD.CODEP, MACOS.ADLOAD.BYTE.B and MACOS.PIRRIT.OP.OBF, and amends the rule for MACOS.PIRRIT.BM.OBF.

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_15-5298.

Sequoia systems only

This update has already 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 5298 but your Mac still reports an older version is installed, you may be able to force the update using
sudo xprotect update

I have updated the reference pages here which are accessed directly from LockRattler 4.2 and later using its Check blog button.

Telling a story, narrative, in a painting is one of its most common purposes, and greatest challenges. A landscape painting shows a view at a moment in time, but doesn’t normally tell a story, as that requires a minimum of two states, with the story linking them. So, although we might speculate what’s going in that countryside, without an indication of what went before, or what happened afterwards, there’s no story there.

Over the centuries, even millennia, since humans have been painting, several techniques have developed for telling a story with more than one timepoint shown in paintings. Although the terms used have varied, in general those fall into the following categories:

• instantaneous, where the image is intended to show what was happening at a single moment in time, even though it’s likely to contain references to other moments in time;
• multi-image, where a series of separate images (paintings) is used to tell the story;
• multiplex, where a single image contains representations of two or more moments in time from a story;
• multi-frame, where two or more picture frames are used to tell a story, as in comics or manga;
• polymythic, where a single image contains two or more distinct stories.

In this article and tomorrow’s sequel, I show examples of each of these.

Instantaneous

Nicolas Poussin’s Rinaldo and Armida from about 1630 draws its narrative from one of his favourite literary works, a then-popular epic poem by Torquato Tasso (1544-1595) titled Gerusalemme Liberata (Jerusalem Delivered), and published in 1581. I have written a series of fourteen articles showing paintings and telling its story, which start here. This particular episode is detailed here.

The sleeping knight is Rinaldo, the greatest of the Christian knights engaged in Tasso’s romanticised and largely fictional account of the First Crusade, who has stopped to rest near the ‘ford of the Orontes’. On hearing a woman singing, he goes to the river, where he catches sight of Armida swimming naked.

Armida, though, had an evil aim, in that she had been secretly following Rinaldo, intending to murder him with her dagger. As the ‘Saracen’ witch who is trying to destroy the crusaders’ campaign, she had singled out its greatest knight for this fate. Having revealed herself to him, she sings and lulls him into an enchanted sleep so that she can thrust her dagger home.

Just as she is about to do this, she falls in love with him instead, and that’s the instant, the twist or peripeteia (to use Aristotle’s term), shown here. A winged amorino, lacking the bow and arrows of a true Cupid, restrains her right arm bearing her weapon. Her facial expression and left hand reveal her new intent to enchant and abduct him in her chariot, so he can become infatuated with her, and forget the Crusade altogether.

This is a single moment in time, in which Poussin has ingeniously incorporated references to the past and future. Provided that you’re familiar with Tasso’s story, it’s a superb example of instantaneous narrative, as practised throughout the history of painting across all continents and cultures.

Jean-Léon Gérôme’s Cleopatra before Caesar (1866) also depicts a single instant, but again has references to prior events, particularly the screwed up carpet, used by Cleopatra to gain entry. Her dreamy look towards Caesar also anticipates her affair with him. It therefore has instantaneous narrative.

Sometimes paintings with instantaneous narrative can make quite small and subtle references to other events in the story, and confirm their narrative nature. In Edward Burne-Jones’s Cinderella (1863) the only such reference is the missing slipper on Cinderella’s right foot.

Although Édouard Detaille’s Le Rêve (The Dream) (1888) contains two images, these aren’t in fact linked by normal narrative, but the dream image shown in the clouds could be considered as a form of analepsis, or flashback, making it instantaneous narrative.

Multi-image

I’ll be brief with these, as I have covered more examples here and here.

In 1856, Arthur Hughes told the story of The Eve of St Agnes in this triptych, read from left to right. At the left Porphyro is approaching the castle. In the centre he has woken Madeline, who hasn’t yet taken him into her bed. At the right the couple make their escape over drunken revellers.

Akseli Gallen-Kallela’s triptych showing the Aino Myth (1891) contains three separate images telling one of the stories from the Kalevala myths. It is therefore multi-image narrative, within which each image is itself conventional instantaneous narrative.

Multi-frame

Multi-frame paintings are by no means uncommon, but most usually adopt rectangular or square form. Indeed many of the more spectacular frescoes are in effect multi-framed, where there are several images on a single continuous surface. This is similar to the more recent development of comics/BD/graphic novels.

Gaudenzio Ferrari’s Stories of The Life and Passion of Christ (1513) arranges twenty frames covering the life of Christ around a central frame with four times the area of the others, showing the Crucifixion. The frames are naturally (for the European) read from left to right, along the rows from top to bottom, although the Crucifixion is part of the bottom row. This is a layout which is commonly used throughout graphic novels too, of course, and is a superb example of multi-frame narrative more than three centuries before Rodolphe Töpffer started experimenting with comic form.

The four separate episodes forming Hans Sebald Beham’s Scenes from the Life of David (1534) are arranged in a square, so that each occupies a triangular frame, clearly separated from the others, and quite different from a normal linear layout. The snag with this is that the panel is really only suitable for viewing when laid flat on a table, otherwise only one of the frames is correctly orientated. Beham clearly liked the symmetry afforded by this layout, and enhanced it in his composition of the two frames shown here at the top and bottom.

Frans Francken the Younger’s The Crucifixion of Christ, with Scenes from the Life of Jesus (1600s) puts the Crucifixion scene at the centre of a rectangle, around which are twelve scenes from the life painted in either normal or brown grisaille. Unfortunately those peripheral scenes are difficult to differentiate from one another, thus to identify, but they appear to be read in a clockwise direction from the upper right, rather than linearly.

Polymythic

Although linked, and often told together, the stories of Echo and of Narcissus can be separated, and it’s therefore feasible to classify John William Waterhouse’s Echo and Narcissus (1903) as being unusual in showing polymythic narrative.

A few paintings appear even more complex: Velázquez’s Las Hilanderas (The Spinners) may contain one narrative in the foreground, a second in the background, and a third in the painting of The Rape of Europa shown in the far background. This would make it polymythic narrative at the very least.

Now we’ve got LogUI to give us the times of log entries down to the nearest nanosecond, it’s time to see whether that’s any improvement over other tools. Given that Mach Absolute Time resolves to nanoseconds (10^-9 seconds) in Intel Macs, and just under 42 nanoseconds in Apple silicon Macs, can we now resolve times of events better than when using microseconds (10^-6 seconds)?

Methods

To test this out, I used my command tool blowhole that can run a tight loop writing entries in the log as fast as possible. To do this, it uses the code
for index in 1...number {
os_log("%d", log: Blowhole.gen_log, type: type, index)
}

I then wrote loops of 20 to the log of an iMac Pro (Intel Xeon W CPU), M3 Pro and M4 Pro, and extracted the resulting log entries using LogUI with its new nanosecond times.

Results

Plotting these times against loop number resulted in unexpected patterns.

In this graph, results from the iMac Pro are shown in black, those from the M3 Pro in blue, and the M4 Pro in red. Although less well-ordered in the first to fourth loops, from the fifth loop onwards there were linear relationships between time of log entries and loop number. Linear regression equations are shown in the legend, and demonstrate:

• on the iMac Pro each loop takes 1.0 x 10^-6 seconds, i.e. 1 μs;
• on the M3 Pro each loop takes 5.6 x 10^-7 seconds, i.e. 0.6 μs;
• on the M4 Pro each loop takes 4.6 x 10^-7 seconds, i.e. 0.5 μs.

which perhaps isn’t surprising.

However, the patterns of individual points are quite different. Apart from loops 4 and 5, subsequent loops on the iMac Pro are evenly spaced in time. Those on the Apple silicon chips are grouped in pairs or, for loops 14-16 on the M4 Pro, in a triplet, where two or three loops are assigned the same time in the log.

Looking at time differences, a clear pattern emerges, that log times are incremented in steps of 954 ns. For the iMac Pro, each loop occurs one step later, while for the M3 Pro and M4 Pro steps between pairs and triplets are also 954 ns. In a few cases, the step difference is slightly greater at around 1192 ns instead of 954 ns. Apple silicon chips are faster on average because each step includes two or more loops, while the iMac Pro only manages one loop per step.

Explanation

If log entry times had been given in microseconds rather than nanoseconds, the same patterns would have been seen. But without the additional precision in their times, it wouldn’t have been clear that multiple log entries were being written with identical times, down to the nanosecond.

One likely explanation is that macOS only writes log entries approximately every microsecond, and the entry time recorded for each is that of that writing. Writing log entries must occur asynchronously for the M3 Pro and M4 Pro to be able to send pairs or triplets to be written, rather than having to wait for each writing process to complete.

Thus, the time resolution of log entries is approximately 1 μs, or 954 or 1192 ns to be more precise, and that’s the same regardless of whether macOS is running on a recent Intel Mac or the latest Apple silicon chips. Although a time resolution of 1 μs is sufficient for general purposes, if you want to dig deeper, as I have done here, access to the finer resolution provided in nanosecond times is essential.

Conclusions

• Times written in log entries are incremented every 954 or 1192 ns on both Intel and Apple silicon.
• Faster Apple silicon chips can write more than one entry in the same time increment.
• Although expressing the time of log entries in microseconds is sufficient for general purposes, using nanoseconds can confirm which have occurred simultaneously.

The Music of Time

So what is a Dance to the Music of Time? It’s one of Nicolas Poussin’s most brilliant paintings, that inspired a series of twelve novels written by Anthony Powell. While I wouldn’t attempt to summarise those, here’s the painting to enjoy.

Poussin’s Dance to the Music of Time (c 1634-6) shows four young people dancing, who are currently believed to be Poverty (male at the back, facing away), Labour (closest to Time and looking at him), Wealth (in golden skirt and sandals, also looking at Time), and Pleasure (blue and red clothes) who fixes the viewer with a very knowing smile. Opposite Pleasure is a small herm of Janus, whose two faces look to the past and the future. Father Time at the right is playing his lyre to provide the music, and an infant seated by him holds a sandglass, to measure time periods. Above them in the heavens, Aurora (goddess of the dawn) precedes Apollo’s sun chariot, on which the large ring represents the Zodiac, thus the passage of the months. Behind the chariot are the Horai, the four seasons of the year.

Ovid’s fifteenth and final book of his Metamorphoses continues his account of the early rulers of Rome, making its way steadily to reach the Emperor Augustus. Following the apotheosis of Romulus, the next to feature is his successor Numa, who becomes the narrator for an overview of the Metamorphoses in terms of Pythagorean philosophy.

Fame nominates Numa as successor to Romulus as the ruler of Rome. Numa had left Cures, the town of his birth, to travel to Crotona (Crotone), in the far south of the Italian peninsula, where he visited Croton, its ruler.

This is the cue for a story about Myscelus, who founded Crotona. Hercules appeared to him in a dream, and told him to travel to the river Aesar, despite his being forbidden from leaving his native land of Argos. Driven by dreams of Hercules, Myscelus tried to leave but was accused of treason, and appealed to Hercules to save him from the mandatory death penalty. At that time, trial juries voted by casting black or white pebbles into an urn; being undoubtedly guilty, all those cast in Myscelus’ case were black when they were placed in the urn. But when the urn was emptied they had all changed to white, and Myscelus was saved, and able to sail to found Crotona on the River Aesar.

After he had fled Samos, Ovid tells us that Pythagoras lived in exile at Crotona, and this leads to a long discourse on his doctrines and philosophy. Having assured us of Pythagoras’ diligent observation of the world around him and careful analysis of what he saw, Ovid starts with an exhortation to vegetarianism.

Within this discourse, Ovid makes reference to preceding sections and themes of Metamorphoses. Pythagoras’ words hark back to the Golden Age covered in the first book. Pythagoras lays claim to reincarnation too, saying that in a previous life he had been Euphorbus, who had been killed by Menelaus in the Trojan War. This leads Pythagoras to discussing change and transformation, the central theme of these fifteen books.

Pythagoras sees change in the waves of the sea, in the sequence of day and night, in the four seasons, in the ageing of humans, and in the transformation of the elements (earth, air, water, and fire).

Pythagoras then illustrates this constant change with a long list of places whose geography had changed in recorded history, and of places that cause change in those who visit them. After those, he returns to the theme of change in animals, telling the legend of the Phoenix reborn from the ashes of its parent. This leads on to consideration of some great cities that have fallen, and the chance to point out that Troy never fell completely, as it reached its destiny of founding the city and empire of Rome. Pythagoras concludes by exhorting vegetarianism by looking for harmless food rather than killing other animals.

In his magnificant fresco in the Palazzo Apostolico, The School of Athens painted in about 1509-11, Raphael includes Pythagoras at the lower left corner.

This detail shows Pythagoras writing in a large book, with a chalk drawing on a small blackboard in front of his left foot. Others are looking over his shoulder and studying what he is doing.

Peter Paul Rubens collaborated with Frans Snyders to paint Pythagoras Advocating Vegetarianism in about 1618-20. The mathematician and philosopher sits to the left of centre, with a group of followers further to the left. The painting is dominated by its extensive display of fruit and vegetables, which is being augmented by three nymphs and two satyrs. One of the latter seems less interested in the food than he is in one of the nymphs.

Today, Pythagoras is best known for his geometric discoveries, rather than the doctrines detailed by Ovid. Fyodor Bronnikov’s painting of Pythagoreans Celebrate Sunrise from 1869 is perhaps more in keeping with the Classical perception. These followers are decidedly musical, holding between them four lyres, a harp, and a flute, and worshipping the rising sun.

After Numa had learned the doctrines of Pythagoras (an historical impossibility, as Numa lived between about 753-673 BCE, and Pythagoras between about 570-495 BCE and lived in Croton from about 530 BCE), he returned to Rome and established its early laws and institutions.

Numa’s success depended on his wife, the nymph Egeria. Although Ovid isn’t explicit, other sources make the couple’s meeting a key step in the development of Rome, as Egeria was said to have dictated the first set of laws of Rome to Numa.

Nicolas Poussin’s Numa Pompilius and the Nymph Egeria from 1631-33 is thought to have been painted for his long-term friend and patron Cassiano Dal Pozzo (1588-1657), a scholar and patron of the arts, who was secretary to Cardinal Francesco Barberini.

It shows the meeting of King Numa, at the right, with Egeria, at the left, as she was being entertained by a young man with a lute, who may signify the Muses who apparently inspired Egeria to provide the laws of Rome. However, Numa hasn’t come equipped with any means of recording them, suggesting that this wasn’t the occasion on which Egeria dictated those laws.

Felice Giani’s much later painting of Numa Pompilius Receiving from the Nymph Egeria the Laws of Rome (1806) shows that process of dictation in full swing, with Numa working through scrolls, which are then transcribed onto the tablets of stone seen at the left. The nymph is the one sat on a throne, and is clearly in command, wagging her index finger at the King of Rome.

Ulpiano Checa’s The Nymph Egeria Dictating to Numa Pompilius the Laws of Rome (c 1886) offers a similar account, with King Numa sat writing down the laws on scrolls of paper using a reed pen. Egeria is quite different, though, and appears a simple and very naked nymph.

Inevitably, Numa grew old and then died. His wife Egeria was heartbroken: she left the city of Rome, and went deep into the forest, where her moaning disturbed those at the nearby shrine built by Orestes to Diana. Sister nymphs tried to comfort her, but couldn’t help. They told Egeria the tragic tale of Phaedra and Hippolytus, but that didn’t ease her grief either, and she dissolved into tears to be transformed by Diana into a spring.

The only accessible painting showing Egeria’s grief following the death of Numa is Claude Lorrain’s Landscape with the Nymph Egeria Weeping Over Numa from 1669.

Unfortunately, confusion has arisen over the true nature of this painting, as two images of details have been published on the internet purporting to be quite different and complete paintings. Claude’s painting itself is something of a puzzle too, and the result is that many of the images shown online of this work make no sense at all.

The full painting, above, shows a group of people and dogs in the left foreground, set in an idealised classical landscape on the coast.

The detail, shown below, reveals the five women in that group. Second from left is most probably the figure of Egeria, although there is nothing to show her profuse weeping or grief. One of the three women to the right of Egeria is Diana, with her spear, bow, arrows, and hunting dogs. It is unclear whether she is on bended knee, or stood behind holding the leash of one of the dogs.

More puzzling is the gesture of the woman (Diana or nymph) who is kneeling on one knee. Her left hand points towards Egeria, and her right is pointing away, towards the buildings down by the water. Her meaning is obscure in the context of the story of Egeria.

Whether this painting by Claude shows the story of Egeria and her grief over the death of Numa must surely be in doubt, and the evidence bears careful re-examination.

I hope that you enjoyed Saturday’s Mac Riddles, episode 308. Here are my solutions to them.

1: One of two of the three at the start, he left for 12 years with the successor before returning for one more thing.

2: Writer for Bannister and Crun who originated and named it without a mouse.

3: First to copy and paste, then changed Pascal and Newton, but was always modeless.

The common factor

I look forward to your putting alternative cases.

Macs keep time exceedingly precisely, although there are important differences here between Intel and Apple silicon models. Their most precise record of time is given in Mach Absolute Time (MAT), the number of ‘ticks’ since an arbitrary start. In Intel Macs, each tick occurs every nanosecond (10^-9 second), providing high resolution, but ticks are less frequent in Apple silicon chips, occurring once every 41.666… nanoseconds instead.

You can test this on an Apple silicon Mac using my free utility Mints, which has a convenient button to display Mach timebase information. Run Mints in native mode, the default as it’s a Universal App, and it reports the Arm values; force it to launch as an app translated by Rosetta, and it will give the same timebase as an Intel Mac.

Although entries in the log are recorded in MAT’s high resolution, most methods of accessing log entries lose much of that precision. The datestamps provided by the log show command, for example, round time to the nearest microsecond (10^-6 second), although it’s capable of delivering a field in MAT’s nanoseconds. The bundled Console app is similar, but lacks any option to display MAT. My Ulbow app can display both datestamps with microseconds and MAT, but until now LogUI has been limited to displaying only time in milliseconds (10^-3 second).

To put these into context, in each microsecond the P core in the CPU of an M4 chip can complete execution of over 1,000 instructions, and in a millisecond that becomes more than a million instructions.

LogUI has been constrained by the formatted output available using Date and DateFormatter in the macOS API, which appear to be incapable of generating time any more precisely than milliseconds. After several earlier unsuccessful attempts, I’m now able to obtain time in nanoseconds, using Calendar and DateComponents in the API. For example, to obtain a formatted string containing the nanosecond component of a Date variable named date:
let nanoSeconds = Calendar.current.component(.nanosecond, from: date)
let nsTime = String(format: "%09d", nanoSeconds)
The string nsTime can then be spliced into a formatted date string.

I have incorporated this into a new build of LogUI, which also has extended information about the log display in its Help book. LogUI 1.0 build 48 is now available from here: logui148
and from its Product Page.

Tomorrow I’ll consider whether these more precise times are of use, and what we can learn from them.

Nicolas Poussin’s pure landscape paintings developed from settings of myths. The other French founding father of landscape painting, Claude Lorrain (1604/5–1682), drew from art imported from Northern Europe to Italy in the early seventeenth century. One of the key figures in this change in the south was the Flemish artist Paul Bril, who moved to Rome around 1582. Although he found plenty of demand there for mythological scenes, he also painted some pure landscapes.

Bril’s superb View of the Roman Forum from 1600 shows livestock wandering across what had been the very centre of life in classical Rome, with the remaining columns of the temples of Castor and Pollux, and Hadrian’s Basilica. The figures are lifelike, and engaged in everyday activities, excellent staffage bringing the whole view to life.

His panoramic View of Bracciano from about 1622 is strongly Italianate, but a painting ahead of its time. It’s a fairly faithful depiction of a real place, with all sorts of fascinating little scenes within it, like the young boy doffing his hat to the passing dignitary in their coach with an armed guard.

Bril balances this view between its subject on the left, and the deep view over the town’s volcanic lake on the right, where there’s greater foreground action in the form of the approaching coach. This asymmetric and less formal balance helps make it look more faithful to reality, and less an artificial construction.

It’s thought that one of Bril’s pupils when he was in Rome was Agostino Tassi, who in turn taught Claude Lorrain, whose original family name was Gellée. Claude may have been orphaned, although that’s disputed, and travelled to Italy in his early teens, where he ended up being employed in Tassi’s household as a servant and cook.

During his employment with Tassi, the artist taught Claude to draw and then paint, and moved him from the kitchen to his busy workshop, then very active making frescoes in palaces. Altogether, Claude probably worked there between about 1622-25. After further training, perhaps back in the Vosges, then part of the Duchy of Lorraine, Claude returned to Rome to paint in his own right in about 1626 or 1627, just after Paul Bril had died there.

One of Claude’s early paintings shows an almost uncanny link with Bril: Capriccio with Ruins of the Roman Forum from about 1634. Compare that with Bril’s View of the Roman Forum from over thirty years earlier. Claude opts for repoussoir only on the right, and lights his version richly, otherwise his composition is similar.

By the end of the 1630s, Claude’s reputation was made. Like Poussin, he drew and sketched in front of the motif, a practice he showed in An Artist Studying from Nature (1639). This is another asymmetric and informal view, reversing the composition of Bril’s View of Bracciano, putting the castle on the right to balance the foreground and distance on the left. Once again, Claude bathes it with rich golden light.

Of course paintings like his Landscape with Nymph and Satyr Dancing (1641) weren’t made outdoors, but assembled from his library of sketches which had been made in front of the motif. This is a good example of van Mander’s principles of composition at work, with the group of figures in the centre foreground, low so that they don’t distract from the more distant view along the coast of an estuary.

Claude does seem to have tipped his hat in the direction of his master Tassi in his maritime paintings, such as the Embarkation of St Paula. This follows the format for which Claude is most famous: a view along a river opening out to the distant sea, with towering classical buildings on both banks, giving it great depth and drawing the eye from its foreground figures to the low sun. Unlike the majority of landscape paintings, Claude orientates his canvas into the ‘portrait’ mode to accommodate the buildings.

Nearly two centuries later, the English landscape artist JMW Turner was a great admirer of Claude’s work.

In 1817 Turner painted his Claudean Decline of the Carthaginian Empire looking straight into the setting sun.

Many of Turner’s paintings are similarly contre-jour, such as this view of The Harbour of Dieppe from about 1826. Turner’s landscapes were firmly rooted in the many sketches he made in front of the motif, but he faced similar challenges to those of both Claude and Poussin in painting finished works in the studio.

For many, the significance of macOS 16 won’t lie in its additions, but in its potential removals: will it support any Intel Macs, and if so, which? For such a contentious issue, speculation has been disappointingly limited in the run-up to the anticipated announcement at the start of WWDC next month.

I have seen popular but unfounded assertions that Apple supports Macs with its current version of Mac OS for a period of five years. There are different interpretations as to whether that time should run from a model’s date of first release, or when it was discontinued. As many Macs have been offered for sale for over a year, that can make a big difference. As I demonstrated yesterday in my latest brief history, previous transitions haven’t followed any consistent rules.

History

The last 68K Mac was available up to October 1996, but with the transition to PowerPC Macs, Classic Mac OS dropped support for 68K models in October 1998, after only 2 years support.

The last PowerPC Mac was offered by Apple over a brief period between October 2005 and August 2006, but support for it was dropped from Mac OS X after exactly 3 years in August 2009. Even if you start the clock when that G5 model was first released, any five-year rule would have required it to be supported by current Mac OS X for at least another year.

Late Intel Mac models are more complicated, as the last volume sales of Intel iMacs ceased in March 2022, but Apple continued to offer the Intel Mac Pro until June 2023. If Apple did have a five-year rule it would now be committed to maintaining full macOS support for some Intel Macs until the autumn/fall of either 2027 or 2028, even if by then most of them had been replaced by Apple silicon models.

Savings

Other opinions claim that Apple will continue to support just some remaining Intel Macs beyond macOS 16, but others currently running Sequoia will be dropped. The flaw in that is cost, as significant reductions in cost would only be achieved by eliminating all Intel support.

If macOS 16 were to support a single Intel Mac, then there would be little change in its cost. It would still need to consist largely of Universal binaries, there would still need to be kernel extensions to support Intel chipsets and old graphics cards, and most of all those would need to be included in every update to macOS 16 until it ceases security updates in the summer of 2028.

There’s also the question of continuing support for Rosetta 2, together with all its supporting Intel dyld caches; they alone account for around 1 GB of every downloaded update for Apple silicon Macs. Apple has ensured that, unlike Rosetta in transitional versions of Mac OS X, Rosetta 2 can be dropped with Intel support in macOS, as it will remain available in lightweight virtual machines running previous versions of macOS, for the rare cases it’s still needed.

Demand

Like many other business decisions, termination of support is largely driven by marketing and cost. Apple appears to have continued supporting 2019 iMacs as the last Intel models without T2 chips largely because of Enterprise customers who have continued using them in their large fleets. On the other hand, it dropped support for the 2013 Mac Pro, sold for six years up to December 2019, after macOS 12 Monterey was replaced by Ventura in 2022, less than three years after the last of that model was sold.

Decision time

Without knowing the demand from Enterprise users for continuing support of Intel Macs in the next major version of macOS, and the number of Intel Macs that have been upgraded to run Sequoia, it’s anyone’s guess as to what Apple has decided. We won’t know that for a couple of weeks yet, but I’ll guarantee that either way there’ll be disappointment. If macOS 16 doesn’t support any Intel Macs, there’ll be those who are upset because they won’t be able to upgrade, and if it does there’ll be those who are upset at its features that are only available on Apple silicon Macs.

But if it does turn out to be Arm-only, perhaps the biggest losers will be those who hope for OpenCore Legacy Patcher (OCLP) support to enable their cherished Mac to continue running the current macOS. If macOS 16 is no longer Universal, then it will simply never run on any Intel Mac. Apple could see that as a good way to convince those who have been sitting on the fence that it’s time for a new Mac.

This weekend I look at two founding fathers of European landscape painting, both of them French expatriates in Italy. Today I trace the story of Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665), who took three attempts to get to Rome, where he transferred from painting myths to idealised landscapes. Tomorrow I look at Claude Lorrain (1604/5–1682), who developed his distinctive style from imports from Northern Europe, also in Rome.

On Poussin’s first attempt to travel to Rome in 1617 or 1618, he got as far as Florence, where he suffered some sort of accident, and was forced to return home. On his second attempt in 1622, he only got as far as Lyon before turning back. When he finally arrived there in the Spring of 1624, it must have been with a great sense of relief.

The new Pope, Urban VIII, wanted Rome to remain Europe’s artistic capital, and the Academy of Saint Luke was led by another French artist, Simon Vouet, who provided Poussin with accommodation. Although Rome had a thriving art market at the time, Poussin needed patrons, particularly those with good connections, and must have been even more relieved when he was introduced to Cardinal Francesco Barberini, who happened to be the Pope’s brother. The next few years were troubled, though: the Cardinal was made papal legate to Spain, so left Rome, and Poussin fell ill with syphilis. It was only through the assistance of a chef that he was able to convalesce, and once he was well again in 1630, he married the chef’s daughter, which demonstrates how little was known about syphilis at the time.

Although it was Cardinal Barberini and his associates who paid Poussin’s bills, by far the most important of his patrons in Rome was the Cardinal’s secretary, Cassiano dal Pozzi (1588-1657), who was of noble birth, had been raised in Florence and educated at the University of Pisa. He was appointed secretary in 1623, and like his master was a member of the Accademia dei Lincei, one of Europe’s earliest scientific societies.

Dal Pozzi was an obsessive collector. He was fascinated by natural history, antiquities, and curiosities of all kinds. He met and corresponded with Galileo, and, as much as his modest means allowed, was a patron of the arts. He bought paintings by Simon Vouet, Artemisia Gentileschi, Pietro da Cortona, even the renegade Caravaggio, but most of all Poussin’s.

Cassiano dal Pozzi lived with his younger brother Carlo and Carlo’s wife Teodora in a palace in the Via Chiavari, which steadily filled with their museum, to which they added other collections of scientific instruments, and a huge library. He employed young draughtsmen to make copies of Rome’s many antiquities, which he bound together in more than 23 volumes, in what was probably the first attempt to document the remains of the classical city.

Following dal Pozzi’s return from Spain in late 1626, he employed Poussin to make some drawings of antiquities, and to paint life-sized pictures of birds such as eagles and ostriches. Sadly, all those ornithological paintings by Poussin have vanished without trace. In return, Poussin was paid, and learned a great deal about Rome, natural history, and other subjects that fascinated his patron. In a fairly short time, the Cardinal’s secretary had assembled a collection of more than fifty of Poussin’s paintings, and it was he who encouraged Poussin to paint scenes from the the artist’s most enduring literary source, Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered.

With the support of dal Pozzi, Poussin became well-read and erudite, and composed each of his paintings with exceptional care and thought. One of his central concepts drew from modes in music, in which adoption of a tonal mode set the mood of the work.

In his early career, Poussin was an outstanding figurative painter who specialised in classical narrative, such as his famous Abduction of the Sabine Women (c 1634-35). It’s set against the historical background of the Capitoline Hill and the Tarpeian Rock, because of their importance in the narrative. As the bearded figure of Romulus stands overseeing the abduction, the hill and its precipitous cliffs dominate the distance.

In Landscape with a Man Scooping Water from a Stream (c 1637) Poussin has painted a landscape dominated by trees, most probably his lifelong favourite, oaks, in this case the Holm Oak, Quercus ilex. Each is carefully constructed from the trunk and branch anatomy, and their canopies, although dense, are clearly formed from leaves rather than solid masses. The distant view is that of an idealised Roman campagna, which was to reappear in his later works.

Landscape with Saint John on Patmos (1640) shows another idealised landscape, probably based on the western Italian coast rather than Patmos in the Dodecanese, in the eastern Aegean. Instead of placing trees at the edges, Poussin sets them further back; again these have the look of oaks. There is a richer variety in the middle distance, breaking the more regular lines of ancient ruins.

In Landscape with the Funeral of Phocion from 1648, the narrative figures in the foreground are small, and mixed with others who are part of its non-narrative background. Among that staffage are some who recur in his later landscapes: the shepherd with his flock, and the horseman. Deciding which are intended to be part of the narrative isn’t always obvious, and part of the fascination of Poussin’s paintings.

It was dal Pozzi who commissioned Poussin’s magnificent Stormy Landscape with Pyramus and Thisbe (1651). Here the classical tragedy of the deaths of the lovers is being played out against one of Poussin’s most exciting landscapes. The lioness from that story has escaped into the middle ground and is attacking a horse, as everyone else is fleeing from the imminent thunderstorm. The mode is impending catastrophe.

Landscape with a Calm from about 1651 is one of his late pure landscape paintings, of a view that never existed except in the artist’s imagination, although there’s something familiar about each of the elements within it. Like an Advent calendar, it contains scattered scenes which the viewer is tempted to try to construct into a coherent narrative, but are probably just part of the painting’s mode.

In the foreground is a herdsman with his dog, tending to a small flock of goats grazing erratically at the borders of a track that meanders down to the lake. The only distinctive feature of the man, and indeed of this whole passage, is how non-descript he is. He has nothing that could be interpreted as an attribute, and gives no clue as to his identity. Just above his head is the distinctive arrowhead of broken water in the otherwise mirror-like surface of the lake, but there is nothing else of remark.

The most prominent feature of the painting is its large Italianate villa. In front of its outermost earthworks, two herdsmen tend a flock of sheep and cattle. The man on the left is playing bagpipes. There are figures scattered just outside and within the grounds of the villa, and two visible at its ground floor windows. There’s nothing that appears to be out of the ordinary here either.

The greatest human activity in the painting is at the left, where there are two horses with riders, and another horse visible within the outbuilding. One horse and its rider are just galloping off to the left; the other horse, its rider still mounted, is drinking from a trough under a portico at the end of the building. Above that horse’s hindquarters is an inscription that is illegible.

Among the background details there are bonfires. One burns vigorously with bright orange flames, and their smoke wafts erratically into the air, indicating the calm.

All the clues which the artist gives us point towards the mode of calm and peace in this landscape. Its one small burst of activity is a galloping horse. The air is so calm that the lake reflects like a mirror, and one tiny patch of broken water stands out.

It was Poussin who made the transition from painting mythological stories set in the countryside, to pure landscapes, albeit idealised composites assembled from quotations of reality.

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

1: One of two of the three at the start, he left for 12 years with the successor before returning for one more thing.

2: Writer for Bannister and Crun who originated and named it without a mouse.

3: First to copy and paste, then changed Pascal and Newton, but was always modeless.

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.

Macs have undergone three major hardware architectural transitions over the last 41 years, and it may well be that this year sees the completion of the last of those. I’ve previously given a brief account of those changes in CPUs; this article summarises when and how those transitions have taken place.

Classic Macs used Motorola’s 68K series of processors until the Spring of 1994, when the first transition to PowerPC processors started.

PowerPC 1994-98

Apple had originally intended to launch its new range of Power Macs on the tenth birthday of the Mac in January 1994, but its first three models, the 6100, 7100 and 8100, weren’t ready until March, when they came with System 7.1.2 and a PowerPC ‘enabler’. Much of the system was still in 68K code, so to enable its continuing use, and to allow the running of existing 68K apps, it came with a built-in 68K emulator. That was surprisingly mature, as it had first been developed by Gary Davidian for use in experimental RISC-based Macs during 1990, as part of the Cognac project to identify a successor for the 68K.

Mac OS supported both PowerPC and 68K architectures from March 1994 to Mac OS 8.1 in January 1998. Support was dropped from 8.5 in October of that year, although the 68K emulator remained until the final version of Classic Mac OS, 9.2.2, released in December 2001. The last 68K Macs were the LC 580, produced between April 1995 and April 1996, and the PowerBook 190cs, discontinued in October 1996.

Thus, the transition period to PowerPC processors lasted from March 1994 to October 1998, a period of 4.5 years.

Apple System Profiler here shows details of a Power Mac G3 Blue and White from 1999.

TattleTech reveals that it was the first model to be officially assigned a name in the new series, as a PowerMac1,1, or 406 in the old Machine ID numbering.

Running a Windows PC in emulation using VirtualPC, seen here in July 1999, was useful but hardly performant.

PowerPC processors reigned for just over a decade before Apple switched a second time, to Intel CPUs.

Intel 2006-09

Moving to a well-established architecture was anticipated to be quicker, and when Apple announced the change at WWDC in 2005, Steve Jobs expected the hardware transition to start by June 2006, and to be completed by early 2008. In fact, the first Intel Macs shipped in January and February 2006, the iMac and Mac mini respectively. The last Power Mac G5 was produced between October 2005 and August 2006, and by the end of that year the full range of Intel Macs was complete.

Mac OS X came with initial Intel support in 10.4.4, installed on the first iMacs. The last version to run on PowerPC processors was 10.5.8 in August 2009, and in the same month Mac OS X 10.6 was Intel-only.

Rather than opting for another software emulator to run PowerPC code on Intel processors, Apple licensed code translation technology named QuickTransit from Transitive Corporation, an extension of Dynamite technology developed by the University of Manchester, England. This version of Rosetta could translate G3, G4 and AltiVec instructions, but not those specific to the PowerPC G5 processor. This was bundled in Mac OS X from 10.4.4 in January 2006, until it was discontinued in 10.6.8 in July 2011.

The transition period to Intel processors lasted from January 2006 to August 2009, a period of just over 3.5 years.

Apple silicon 2020-?

Apple’s third transition has been distinguished by its lengthy and staged preparation, and the fact that its goal was the first Mac that has been completely designed and developed by Apple. Its roots go back to a partnership with the British microcomputer manufacturer Acorn Computers in the 1980s that led to the development of the Acorn RISC Machine using an early RISC processor, and the origin of the name ARM. During the 1990s Apple, through Larry Tesler, was a major investor in ARM, who provided the processor for Apple’s Newton handheld devices launched in 1993. Although the Newton was a commercial failure, it was the germ for the first iPhone in 2007, and the iPad three years later.

Another landmark in the preparations for Apple silicon Macs was the incorporation of the T2 Arm-based ‘security chip’ in Intel Macs from December 2017 onwards, although Apple didn’t incorporate that into a regular iMac model until as late as 2020.

Apple announced this transition at WWDC in June 2020, and the first Apple silicon Macs shipped in November that year, Mac mini, MacBook Pro and MacBook Air models. This was less than a year after the release of the last Intel Mac, the delayed Mac Pro of December 2019, which continued in production until June 2023, and the more popular 27-inch iMac made between August 2020 and March 2022. First Apple silicon Macs came with macOS 11.0, and both architectures remain supported as far as macOS 15 Sequoia, from 2024.

To enable its new Macs to run apps built for Intel x86 processors, Apple returned to code translation in Rosetta 2, bundled in macOS 11 and later, but downloaded and updated separately. To accelerate the launching of x86-64 apps, this uses both ‘just-in-time’ translation at the time of launch, and ahead-of-time (AOT) when an x86-64 single-architecture binary is installed. In contrast to its earlier emulator and even the first version of Rosetta, this performs spectacularly well.

The transition to Apple silicon thus started in November 2020, and appears likely to end with the release of macOS 16 in the autumn/fall of 2025. That would be a period of almost 5 years, even longer than the first transition to PowerPC. This time we’re better prepared for the future, as Apple silicon Macs offer excellent virtualisation of macOS, allowing the latest chips to run macOS as old as Monterey from 2021, together with full support for x86-64 apps using Rosetta 2 in the virtual machine.

Further reading

The PowerPC Triumph, 1997-98, by Andy F Mesa
Mac 68K Emulator on Wikipedia
Rosetta on Wikipedia
Transition to Intel on Wikipedia
Transition to Apple silicon on Wikipedia

Due to an attack by a comment spammer, I regret that I have suspended all commenting to posts here.

I hope to resume them later, when the spammer has poked off to annoy someone else.

Update 1900 GMT 18 May:

I have now opened up comments again on recent articles, and they no longer require you to be logged in. For the moment, though, I will moderate all comments before they appear here, to ensure no more spam is posted. This may lead to slight delays: please don’t send multiple copies, though. Any that are posted overnight (roughly 2300-0600 GMT) will have to wait until I’m awake the following morning. I apologise for this, and will continue to ease restrictions as much as possible.

Thank you for your patience and support.

Since the dawn of civilisation in the cities of the Fertile Crescent in what’s now the Middle East, epidemics of infectious diseases have been a curse of those concentrations of people, as well as in armies. In classical times, both Athens and Rome were struck by epidemics of what’s likely to have been bubonic plague.

Michiel Sweerts’ painting of Plague in an Ancient City from about 1652-54 is believed to show Athens during one of these epidemics. The moribund and the dead litter the streets, and normal life has collapsed.

The pandemic known as the Black Death that started in about 1338 was different, though. Changing climate in the grasslands of Asia led to the movement of rodent populations into cities, and those rodents brought with them fleas carrying highly infectious diseases for humans, notably Yersinia pestis, the cause of bubonic plague.

Doubt has been cast that Boccaccio’s description of the Black Death in Florence was based on his personal experience, but few alive at the time could have escaped witnessing its deadly consequences. Much later, in the early nineteenth century, Luigi Sabatelli made this undated engraving to illustrate an edition of the Decameron, in The Plague of Florence in 1348.

Venice was particularly prone to outbreaks of plague, and developed procedures and establishments for coping with cases. In Tintoretto’s painting of Saint Roch Heals Plague Victims from 1559, those suffering from plague have been brought to this small chapel, where the saint is healing them. The dark room is already collecting a disarray of bodies, some seemingly close to death. Without the miraculous work of the saint, this would quickly have become the waiting room for hell. There were twenty-two outbreaks of plague recorded in Venice between 1361-1528, and a single epidemic in 1576-77 killed almost a third of its population.

Goya’s painting of a Plague Hospital from his disturbing series The Disasters of War (1808-10) shows management of an outbreak that occurred during the Peninsular War of 1808-14.

Arnold Böcklin reminds us that the spectre of death is never far away in The Plague, painted in 1898. This coincided with the late stage of a pandemic that had started in China in 1855, and in the last years of the century was circulating through different ports around the world, in Hong Kong in 1894, and Mumbai in 1896. That reached San Francisco in 1900-04.

As plague became less of a problem in the cities of Europe and North America in the nineteenth century, so other diseases took hold, including cholera, influenza and tuberculosis. Six pandemics of cholera swept cities across the world in the century from 1817. Spread largely in drinking water contaminated by human faeces, improvements in sanitation introduced by redevelopment of cities like London and Paris were decisive in bringing it under control.

Carlos Schwabe’s painting titled Crepuscule in the French original is more likely to refer to Dawn rather than dusk. This giant female figure of “dawn, shivering in her green and rose garment, was moving slowly along the deserted Seine”. This was an illustration for a 1900 edition of Les Fleurs du Mal (Flowers of Evil) by Charles Baudelaire.

Edvard Munch completed two versions of Hearse on the Potsdamer Platz in 1902. These depict a horse-drawn hearse in this famous square in the heart of Berlin. Amid its bright hues is the hearse, covered in a black pall, and drawn by a single black horse. Munch’s father was a doctor, and both his mother and older sister died of tuberculosis during the artist’s childhood in Oslo.

Finally, here’s a glimpse of one of the obsessions of the nineteenth century: the fear of being buried while still alive.

After his mother’s death, the eccentric artist Antoine Wiertz became increasingly obsessed with death. Premature Burial (1854) visits a not uncommon dread in the nineteenth century: that of being presumed dead, buried, then recovering to find yourself in a coffin.

This did happen, particularly during cholera epidemics, as indicated by the lettering on the opening coffin. The profound shock resulting from choleric dehydration could make the pulse and breathing so feeble as to escape detection; with hundreds or thousands of dead, many were dumped hurriedly into mass-produced coffins and so into mass graves. And a very few managed to survive.

Coffins were designed with bells which could be rung by a recovered person. Wiertz’s victim is left with the nightmare scenario of trying to make it back to the land of the living.

It has been a long time since I last compared performance between CPU cores in Intel and Apple silicon Macs. This article compares six in-core measures of CPU performance across four different models, two with Intel processors, an M3 Pro, and an M4 Pro.

If you’re interested in comparing performance across mixed code modelling that in common apps, then look no further than Geekbench. The purpose of my tests isn’t to replicate those, but to gain insight into the CPU cores themselves, when running tight number-crunching loops largely using their registers and accessing memory as little as possible. This set of tests lays emphasis on those run at low Quality of Service (QoS), thus on the E cores of Apple silicon chips. Although those run relatively little user code, they are responsible for much of the background processing performed by macOS, and can run threads at high QoS when there are no free P cores available, although they do that at higher frequencies to deliver better performance.

Methods

Testing was performed on four Macs:

• iMac Pro 2017, 3.2 GHz 8-core Intel Xeon W, 32 GB memory, Sequoia 15.3.2;
• MacBook Pro 16-inch 2019, 2.3 GHz 8-core Intel Core i9, 16 GB memory, Sequoia 15.5;
• MacBook Pro 16-inch 2023, M3 Pro, 36 GB memory, Sequoia 15.5;
• Mac mini 2024, M4 Pro, 48 GB memory, Sequoia 15.5.

Six test subroutines were used in a GUI harness, as described in many of my previous articles. Normally, those include tests I have coded in Arm Assembly language, but for cross-platform comparisons I rely on the following coded in Swift:

• float mmul, direct calculation of 16 x 16 matrix multiplication using nested for loops on Floats.
• integer dot product, direct calculation of vector dot product on vectors of 4 Ints.
• simd_float4 calculation of the dot-product using simd_dot in the Accelerate library.
• vDSP_mmul, a function from the vDSP sub-library in Accelerate, multiplies two 16 x 16 32-bit floating point matrices, which in M1 and M3 chips appears to use the AMX co-processor;
• SparseMultiply, a function from Accelerate’s Sparse Solvers, multiplies a sparse and a dense matrix, and may use the AMX co-processor in M1 and M3 chips.
• BNNSMatMul matrix multiplication of 32-bit floating-point numbers, here in the Accelerate library, and since deprecated.

Source code for the last four is given in the appendix to this article.

Each test was run first in a single thread, then in four threads simultaneously. Loop throughput per second was calculated from the average time taken for each of the four threads to complete, and compared against the single thread to ensure it was representative. Results are expressed as percentages compared to test throughput at high QoS on the iMac Pro set at 100%. Thus a test result reported here as 200% indicates the cores being tested completed calculations in loops at twice the rate of those in the cores of the iMac Pro, so are ‘twice the speed’.

High QoS

User threads are normally run at high QoS, so getting the best performance available from the CPU cores. In Apple silicon chips, those threads are run preferentially on P cores at high frequency, although that may not be at the core’s maximum. Results are charted below.

Each cluster of bars here shows loop throughput for one test relative to the iMac Pro’s 3.2 GHz 8-core Xeon processor at 100%. Pale blue and red bars are for the two Intel Macs, the M3 Pro is dark blue, and the M4 Pro green. The first three tests demonstrate what was expected, with an increase in performance in the M3 Pro, and even more in the M4 Pro to reach about 200%.

Results from vDSP matrix multiplication are different, with less of an increase in the M3 Pro, and a reduction in the M4 Pro. This may reflect issues in the code used in the Accelerate library. That contrasts with the huge increases in performance seen in the last two tests, rising to a peak of over 400% in BNNS matrix multiplication.

With that single exception, P cores in recent Apple silicon chips are out-performing Intel CPU cores by wider margins than can be accounted for in terms of frequency alone.

Low QoS

When expressed relative to loop throughput at high QoS, no clear trend emerges in Apple silicon chips. This reflects the differences in handling of threads run at low QoS: as the Intel CPUs used in Macs only have a single core type, they can only run low QoS threads at lower priority on the same cores. In Apple silicon chips, low QoS threads are run exclusively on E cores running at frequencies substantially lower than their maximum, for energy efficiency. This is reflected in the chart below.

In the Intel Xeon W of the iMac Pro, low QoS threads are run at a fairly uniform throughput of about 45% that of high QoS threads, and in the Intel Core i9 that percentage is even lower, at around 35%. Throughput in Apple silicon E cores is more variable, and in the case of the last test, the E cores in the M4 Pro reach 66% of the throughput of the Intel Xeon at high QoS. Thus, Apple appears to have chosen the frequencies used to run low QoS threads in the E cores to deliver the required economy rather than a set level of performance.

Conclusions

• CPU P core performance in M3 and M4 chips is generally far superior to CPUs in late Intel Macs.
• Performance in M3 P cores is typically 160% that of a Xeon or i9 core, rising to 330%.
• Performance in M4 P cores is typically 190% that of a Xeon or i9 core, rising to 400%.
• Performance in E cores when running low QoS threads is more variable, and typically around 30% that of a Xeon or i9 core at high QoS, to achieve superior economy in energy use.
• On Intel processors running macOS Sequoia, low QoS threads are run significantly slower than high QoS threads, at about 45% (Xeon) or 30-35% (i9).

My apologies for omitting legends from the first version of the two charts, and thanks to @holabotaz for drawing my attention to that error, now corrected.

Some of our most popular furniture is primarily intended for storage and display. This article looks at paintings of cupboards, and their specialist relatives sideboards and (Welsh) dressers. Although of ancient origins, cupboards reached a peak during the Dutch Golden Age, when the middle classes became highly acquisitive. Dressers have been traditional in some areas, including Wales, and Brittany in France, while sideboards came of age in the nineteenth century dining room.

The cupboard standing behind Jean-Baptiste Greuze’s Laundress (1761) was commonplace in many European households, and is here in the dilapidated servants’ area, probably in a cellar, where this provocative and flirtaceous young maid is washing the household linen. This was painted for Greuze’s patron, Ange-Laurent de La Live de Jully, when the artist was enjoying great success at the Salon. His reputation faded after 1780, and he lost everything in the French Revolution, dying a pauper.

Edward Burne-Jones’ Cinderella from 1863 shows her reverted to her plain clothes after the ball, but still wearing one (the left) glass slipper. She is seen in a scullery or similar area, with a dull, patched, and grubby working dress and apron. Behind her is a densely packed display of blue crockery in the upper section of a large dresser.

A decade later in New York, the American genre artist Eastman Johnson painted an open narrative work that only makes any sense when you know its title of Not at Home (c 1873). This apparently shows the interior of the artist’s home, where there’s a small dresser in the parlour with a more modest display of plates and mementos.

Briton Rivière’s Cupboard Love, from 1881, is a visual and verbal pun. The phrase refers to affection in return for gain, shown well in the two dogs whose interest lies in the food which the young woman is about to produce from the heavy wooden cupboard behind them.

William Merritt Chase’s many paintings of his studio became something of a shop window for prospective customers. In his Studio Interior from about 1882, a fashionably dressed young woman is glancing through a huge bound collation of Chase’s work, sat by a grand carved wooden sideboard, decorated with almost outlandish objects including a model ship, a lute, and sundry objets d’art.

Some cupboards have highly specialised roles, such as that in Joaquín Sorolla’s Kissing the Relic from 1893. At the end of Mass in the church of Saint Paul in Valencia, close to Sorolla’s childhood home, the congregation have been invited to kiss a reliquary containing an alleged relic of a revered saint, drawn from the cupboard behind the priest.

Laurits Andersen Ring’s wife Sigrid sits reading the newspaper Politiken At Breakfast (1898), with a modern sideboard behind her. This houses a mixture of tableware and personal mementos rather than serving as a buffet.

Further north in Sweden, Carl Larsson’s wife Karin is Getting Ready for a Game (1901) as she prepares a tray of refreshments in her dining room. At the left is a tall glass-fronted display cabinet containing glassware, while at the right is a simple sideboard with separate shelving to display decorated crockery.

Free-standing cupboards are nothing compared to those you can walk into.

Félix Vallotton’s Woman Searching through a Cupboard (1901) uses its gloomy repoussoir to frame a woman crouching low over its contents. On the shelves above her are thick bundles of papers, such as those used in law and public administration.

A couple of years later, in his Interior, Woman in Blue Searching in a Cupboard (1903), Vallotton painted his wife Gabrielle from behind as she stood searching in a free-standing cupboard of books.

Elizabeth Nourse’s painting of a Breton Interior from about 1907 shows a well-stocked dresser beside this young girl’s bed. As dressers were unusual in bedrooms, this combination suggests the family home is very cramped, and the child has to sleep in the same room as the family eats.

In case you missed it, Apple has just announced that a “future version of macOS” will no longer support AFP, Apple Filing Protocol. This is included in the Enterprise release notes for macOS 15.5 Sequoia. This article looks at how that could affect those using network backups and shares, to Time Capsules, NAS and other Macs running old versions of macOS.

Network storage requires network file-sharing protocols like AFP and SMB to perform file transactions using packets transmitted over the network. AFP is one of the oldest, and originated in AppleShare back in Classic Mac OS System 6, in 1988. Version 3.0 was introduced in Mac OS X Server 10.0.3 Cheetah in 2001, and the latest is 3.4, from OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion in 2012. Because of its early popularity in Macs, it has long been available in third-party implementations including the open source Netatalk, and those have been widely included in NAS system software.

In OS X 10.9 Mavericks, Apple made SMB (Server Message Block) its primary file-sharing protocol, and AFP has been in decline ever since. When APFS was introduced in High Sierra, it wasn’t supported by AFP and has required SMB, although Time Machine backups have continued to work over AFP through their use of sparse bundles. Earlier versions of SMB haven’t worked particularly well with macOS, but in recent years SMB version 3 has improved substantially, and should be supported by all recent NAS systems.

Greatest problems come with Apple’s old Time Capsules, most of which are still used with AFP, as they can only support SMB version 1, not versions 2 or 3. If you’re still using a Time Capsule, or an old NAS that doesn’t support SMB version 3, then access to your network storage may well still be reliant on AFP.

Not yet

Apple hasn’t announced when AFP will no longer be supported, and when it does, it won’t apply retrospectively. This makes it almost certain that Macs running macOS Sequoia will be able to continue using AFP if they are currently doing so.

Given the timing of this announcement, it seems most likely that AFP will be dropped from macOS 16, to be announced early next month at WWDC and released this coming autumn/fall. If your Mac can’t or won’t be upgraded to macOS 16, then it shouldn’t lose AFP.

Time Capsules

Apple discontinued its last Time Capsule model in April 2018, just over seven years ago. If yours is still using its original hard disk, then it’s living on borrowed time, and needs replacement sooner rather than later. If you have recently installed a new hard disk inside an old Time Capsule, then this might be a good time to rehouse that disk in a more modern NAS or other enclosure if you want to continue to use it.

I’m regularly asked to suggest a suitable replacement for Time Capsules, incorporating both their Wi-Fi base station and NAS features. Although there are some products that come close, you’re better off separating those two functions, and getting a good NAS with Mac and SMB 3 support, and a separate Wi-Fi base station or router with support for the latest standards.

NAS

For other NAS, first check whether you can update its system software to a current version. If you can, that should give it a new lease of life, and full support for your Mac to run SMB 3 to it. If it’s no longer supported, then this is the best time to consider replacing it, or even moving to backing up to local storage instead.

Macs are now well-supported by most NAS manufacturers, among which my favourite is Asustor, whose products I regularly test and review. Together with other established products from Synology and QNAP, you shouldn’t go far wrong.

Summary

• A future version of macOS will no longer support AFP, but it’s not being removed from current or past versions of macOS.
• AFP could well be dropped from macOS 16 due for release later this year.
• Time Capsules only support AFP and version 1 of SMB, so need to be replaced.
• Older NAS that can’t support SMB 3 should also be replaced.

Parrots, parakeets, cockatoos and the humble budgerigar (a small parakeet) have long been popular domestic pets in Europe, and are featured in many paintings. In this second look at a selection of paintings including these birds, I start with still lifes from the Dutch Golden Age.

From the days of the Northern Renaissance, artists in the Low Countries had pursued the accurate depiction of optical effects in their paintings. Pieter Boel’s Still Life with a Globe and a Parrot from about 1658 continues that tradition, with its outstanding three-dimensional effects in the plate and goblet in the foreground.

The globe shows the Pacific Ocean and the north-west coast of America, with the ‘Dutch’ East Indies at its left edge. The bas-relief plate shows a scene from mythology, in which male and female deities are riding in a chariot. The two porcelain bowls at the far right appear Chinese, and there’s a white parrot or cockatoo, together with a small dog at the bottom left corner.

After Hungaro-British painter Jakob Bogdani (1658–1724) moved to London via Amsterdam in 1688, he painted several works featuring animals and birds. Those included Capuchin squirrel monkey, two guinea pigs, a blue tit and an Amazon Saint Vincent parrot with Peaches, Figs and Pears in a landscape towards the end of his career, in 1710-20.

Johann Amandus Winck’s Still life with a Parrot, Game Fowl, Guinea Pigs and Fruit must have been painted in the late eighteenth century.

Parrots also appear in some more curious contexts.

Painters have long been attracted to the spectacle of humans who look different. In Agostino Carracci’s case, he combined three strange examples in his Hairy Harry, Mad Peter and Tiny Amon, completed between 1598-1600, not long before his death. From the left are Tiny Amon (Rodomonte) the dwarf, Arrigo Gonzalez the hirsute (Hairy Harry) from the Canary Islands, and Mad Peter (Pietro the buffoon). Accompanying them are a large parrot, a couple of dogs, and two monkeys.

Since then, parrots and their relatives have continued to appear sporadically in paintings.

In 1876, Frank Duveneck and William Merritt Chase painted a young boy carefully posed with a parrot, in Chase’s Munich studio. Duveneck’s The Turkish Page, above, is technically brilliant, and an ambitious work for someone within seven years of starting their training. It was exhibited at the National Academy of Design in New York the following year, but had a mixed response. Viewers found its still life approach lost narrative, and were puzzled by the depiction of the child. By the time it was displayed at the Pennsylvania Academy in its 1893-4 exhibition, changing taste brought it acclaim, and it sold.

Chase’s version, below, was surprisingly different in many respects. I leave it to you to decide which you prefer, although I think the parrot seems happy with both.

Henry Tonks’ Summer (1908) is a dazzlingly rich and intricate view of the garden at Arfleet, near Corfe Castle, Dorset, England. Using a real mother and her son as models, the boy’s rocking horse and a cockatoo are unusual objects to see in an English garden in summer.

The expatriate New Zealand artist Frances Hodgkins painted Wings over Water during the winter of 1931-32. It shows a view from her rooms in Bodinnick, Cornwall. Carefully placed in the foreground is a still life consisting of three large seashells with floral and plant arrangements. Sitting on the fence in the middle of the view is her landlady’s parrot, beyond which is the expanse of the nearby River Fowey.

Finally, for Pierre Bonnard parrots came by chance. His Woman with Parrot is set in le Midi in 1910, with intensely bright and hot colours, against which the large blue parrot, some pots, and foliage make contrast. This was painted in Saint Tropez during Bonnard’s visit in September that year, and was based on an experience that the artist wrote about in a letter to his mother, in which he had passed a young dark-haired girl with an enormous blue parrot. As you do.

Apple pre-releases some of the components for the next major version of macOS in the previous version. For example, when macOS Monterey 12.3 was released on 14 March 2022, a new XProtect.app bundle appeared in /Library/Apple/System/Library/CoreServices, and passed almost unnoticed until it was updated to version 2 in macOS 12.4 on 16 May 2022. By June that was being updated frequently, and is now a significant part of macOS protection against malware.

This article looks back at versions of Sequoia that have brought new components to identify those we might see more of next month, when the first betas of macOS 16 reach developers.

Officially announced

One new feature that Apple has already made available in macOS 15.4 and later is privacy control of access to the pasteboard, described here. It’s likely that a new Pasteboard item will be added to Privacy & Security settings in macOS 16, allowing you a choice between:

• automatically allowing all pasteboard access without notifying the user (as previously);
• always denying all pasteboard access, unless the user explicitly chooses to access the pasteboard for pasting;
• asking the user for permission to grant pasteboard access, although that will automatically be granted when the user explicitly chooses to access the pasteboard for pasting;
• the default, to ask the user for permission when an app rather than the user seeks access to the General pasteboard; all other pasteboards would always allow access.

This appears complicated, and I expect may need simplification during beta-testing, or users could be baffled. Apple’s note details a default setting you can use to preview this behaviour in macOS 15.5 for individual apps in testing.

To celebrate the 40th birthday of its accessibility support, Apple has announced some new features we can expect in macOS 16. Among them is a Magnifier app that will use an iPhone running iOS 19 through Continuity Camera as a live video magnifier. Others include:

• Vehicle Motion Cues, already available in iOS and iPadOS;
• Braille Access, a full-featured braille note-taker;
• Accessibility Reader, to make text easier to read across a wide range of disabilities.

New apps

macOS 15.5 introduces a new app in CoreServices named Apple Diagnostics. This is currently non-functional, but appears to give access to some form of online diagnostic service in the future.

New kernel extensions

Three kernel extensions to watch for in macOS 16 are:

• AppleDisplayManager, introduced in 15.2, and still at version 1.0
• AppleAOP2, introduced in 15.4, and still at version 1.0; AOP is the Always On Processor in Apple silicon Macs;
• AppleProcessorTrace, introduced in 15.4, and still at version 1.0.0.

New public frameworks

Two were added to 15.4, and remain at version 1.0, for CLLogEntry which appears to be part of Core Location, and SecurityUI which hasn’t yet been mentioned anywhere.

New private frameworks

Many new private frameworks have been added by updates to Sequoia. Although most of these remain at their initial build of 1.0, some have seen surprising increases, including:

• AppSystemSettings, introduced in 15.2, now at build 3.3.5
• CryptexKit and CryptexServer, introduced in 15.4, now at build 493.120.7
• DeepVideoProcessingCore, introduced in 15.4, now at build 1.17
• various GameServices, introduced in 15.4, and already at build 819.4.46
• OSEligibility, introduced in 15.2, now at build 181.120.32.

Among the new private frameworks with intriguing names that remain at their initial version are: Bosporus, Morpheus and MorpheusExtensions, an OnDeviceStorage group, and most recently CodableSwiftUI.

Your guess is no doubt better than mine as to what these all do, but I expect some of them will appear in macOS 16, in one guise or another.

Apple has just released an update to XProtect for all supported versions of macOS, bringing it to version 5297. As usual, Apple doesn’t release information about what security issues this update might add or change.

This version adds a single new rule for MACOS.SOMA.L.

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, LockRattler 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, LockRattler, or at the command line.

If you want to install this as a named update in SilentKnight, its label is XProtectPlistConfigData_10_15-5297.

Sequoia systems only

This update has now been released for Sequoia via iCloud, as of 1930 GMT. If you want to check it manually, use the Terminal command
sudo xprotect check
then enter your admin password. If that returns version 5297 but your Mac still reports an older version is installed, you may be able to force the update using
sudo xprotect update

I have updated the reference pages here which are accessed directly from LockRattler 4.2 and later using its Check blog button.

Updated 1940 GMT 13 May 2025

Parrots, parakeets, cockatoos and the humble budgerigar (a small parakeet) have long been popular domestic pets in Europe, and haven’t escaped the attention of artists. According to Richard Verdi, who has written a monograph on the subject, they appear in many paintings, often being symbols of the Virgin birth of Christ, or witnesses of the Fall of Man. In this week’s two articles considering the reading of paintings, I show a selection of works featuring these birds in different roles.

Parrots have been added to mythological paintings to supplement their original story.

In Tintoretto’s Leda and the Swan, from about 1578-83, there are two caged birds, a duck being taunted by a cat in the left foreground, and a parrot in the background. These allude to one of the most bizarre of Jupiter’s many rapes of mortal women, here in the form of a swan, resulting in his victim Leda laying eggs.

Tiepolo’s magnificent Death of Hyacinthus from about 1752-53 was inspired by an Italian translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses from 1561, where the fatal discus is replaced by what looks like a tennis ball, actually taken from the popular game of pallacorda. This classical story is told in the right foreground, with the pale Hyacinthus visibly bruised on his cheek, Apollo swooning above him, and Cupid to the right. Above that group is a grinning Pan in the form of a Herm, and at the top right a brightly coloured parrot, who appears oddly out of place.

Peter Paul Rubens’ version of The Fall of Man painted in 1628-29 changes Titian’s original depiction of Adam and adds a parrot as witness to Eve taking the apple from the serpent with a child’s head and body.

Alfred Stevens was an early enthusiast for Japonisme as it swept Paris, and provided insights into his life in his Psyché or My Studio from about 1871. The French word psyché refers to the full-length mirror seen in this apparently informal view of Stevens’ studio, the name deriving from the legend of Cupid and Psyche. For this painting, Stevens doesn’t use a genuine psyché, but has mounted a large mirror on his easel, suggesting that art is a reflection of life. A Japanese silk garment is draped over the mirror to limit its view to the model, and breaks up her form in an unnatural way. At the lower right, the artist indicates his presence with a cigarette, and there’s a small parrot who might imitate his speech.

The association between parrots and beautiful women has a long history.

Tintoretto’s Summer (c 1546) poses a reclining Titianesque nude before she removed her clothes against the summer harvest ripening behind her. She is joined by three birds, one an exotic parrot, with flowers of the dog rose, and hanging bunches of grapes.

In 1858, a popular translation of tales in Persian by Ṭūṭī-nāma of Żiyā’ al-Dīn Naḫšabī, who died around 751/1350-51, was published in Britain. Valentine Cameron Prinsep’s Lady of the Tooti-Nameh, or The Legend of the Parrot (c 1865) refers to that book, and was first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1865, where it must have caused quite a sensation with its fleshly glimpses inside the woman’s blouse. The parrot perched on her hand is a hint of the exotic, but couldn’t have anticipated the painting shown by Gustave Courbet in the Paris Salon the following year.

Courbet’s model for his erotically charged Woman with a Parrot from 1866 was Joanna Hiffernan. The structure behind and to the right is a perch and feeder for the bird. This inevitably brought scandal, but didn’t deter others from painting pretty women with parrots. Édouard Manet’s A Young Lady in 1866, nicknamed Woman with a Parrot, was shown at the Salon two years later, and Auguste Renoir’s Woman with Parakeet followed in 1871, although at least their models were decently dressed.

Henry Tonks’ early portrait of A Girl with a Parrot from about 1893 provides an intimate glimpse into the private world of a young girl.

A brilliant green parakeet with its bright red bill adds colour to John William Godward’s Dolce Far Niente from 1897.

Painted late in his career, Émile Friant’s The Birds (1921) is a brilliantly colourful and detailed erotic fantasy demonstrating his great technical skills, but has drifted far from his earlier Naturalism and social concerns.

APFS has several ways of creating copies or links to files that can be confused. These are:

• conventional copy, to create a completely separate file
• clone file, a separate file that has common data with the original
• symbolic link or symlink, that’s just a path pointing to the original
• hard link, that’s really exactly the same file in disguise
• Finder alias, a more complex bookmark pointing to the original.

Symlinks and Finder aliases are easy to distinguish, as their icons have an arrow superimposed, and Get Info tells you they’re an Alias. While symlinks take almost no space at all, Finder aliases take a bit more. But at first sight, copies, clones and hard links all look identical. This article explores how you can tell them apart without resorting to Terminal’s command line.

First, a warning of a longstanding problem in the Finder: it can’t tell them apart, and can’t account correctly for the space they take on disk. To see what I mean, create a folder and a chunky file inside it, which I’ll call MyBigFile.tiff. In Terminal, create five hard links to it, numbered 2-5, using commands like
ln MyBigFile.tiff MyBigFile2.tiff
Then for good measure, clone MyBigFile.tiff twice by duplicating it in the Finder to create MyBigFileclone.tiff and MyBigFileclone2.tiff.

Select all seven files, and press Control-Command-I or Option-Command-I to Get Info on multiple items, and you’ll see the Finder thinks each of those seven files takes the same space on disk, in my case totalling 70 GB, even though we know that there’s only 10 GB of data stored between them. This has been a persistent shortcoming in the Finder since long before the introduction of APFS, and applies to both clone files and hard links.

Conventional copy

When we make a conventional copy of a file, a new inode is created for it, and each of the items that make up that file are copied, including the data stored in its file extents. This requires the same amount of additional disk space as used by the original file, as there’s nothing in common between the two files.

Clone file

Instead of duplicating everything, only the inode and its attributes (blue and pink) are duplicated to create a clone file, together with their file extent information. You can verify this by inspecting the numbers of those inodes, as they’re different, and information in the attributes such as the file’s name will also be different. There’s a flag in the file’s attributes to indicate that cloning has taken place.

Hard link

In hard links, exactly the same file is accessed through two different file paths. Although other file systems may handle this differently, according to Apple’s reference to APFS, this is how it handles hard links.

When you create a hard link to a file (blue), APFS creates two siblings (purple) with their own IDs and links, including different paths and names as appropriate. Those don’t replace the original inode, and there remains a single file object for the whole of that hardlinked file. Inode attributes keep a count of the number of links they have to siblings in their link (or reference) count. Normally, when a file has no hard links that’s one, and there are no sibling files. When a file is to be deleted, if its link count is only 1, the file and all its associated components can be removed, subject to the requirements of any clones and applicable snapshots. If the link count is greater than 1, then only the sibling being removed is deleted.

Using Precize

As the Finder can’t tell us which are hard links and which are clone files, we can resort to a utility like my free Precize. Drop the file onto its app icon, and these are what you should see.

This is the original file, which has now got four hard links and has two clones as well. If you drop any of those hard links onto Precize, you’ll see they’re the same file, with the same inode number given at the top in the volfs path and FileRefURL, in this case 8513451. Look at the bottom, and their Ref count is given as 5, because all five are hardlinked together to the same file. Because we’ve also cloned this file, the Clone checkbox at the bottom is ticked.

This is one of the two clone files made from that original. Because this is a different file that just happens to point to the same data, it has a different inode number in the volfs path and FileRefURL. Its Clone checkbox is ticked, as it is a clone, but it only has a single Ref count, as none of the hard links point to this clone file.

The same goes for the second clone, with its own inode number, ticked as a Clone, and single Ref count.

Are they identical?

The final question you might ask is whether files are identical. In the case of hard links, the answer is simple: as they’re the same file in disguise, yes, they are absolutely identical.

Clones require a bit more work, as they will continue to be shown as clones even though their contents may be quite different by then. The best answer is to compute the SHA-256 hash of the file’s data, and compare that between two clones. If you’re interested in any of their metadata contained in their extended attributes, then you’ll need to check those as well.

The update to macOS Sequoia 15.5 is likely to be the last to include remaining enhancements and fixes before engineers are more committed to the beta-releases of macOS 16.0 from early June onwards. It’s therefore unfortunate that Apple chose to provide only limited information about what it addresses.

Correlating the general release notes with those for Enterprise results in a short list of:

• one new feature, that parents now receive a notification from a child’s device when its Screen Time passcode is used;
• large network shares should enumerate correctly in the Finder;
• the Pro Display Calibrator utility should work properly on M4 MacBook Pros, without causing a kernel panic;
• apps registering helper executables should now do so correctly.

Most important for many is that AFP is now deprecated and “will be removed in a future version of macOS”, according to notes for Enterprise.

Security release notes for Sequoia 15.5 are here, and list 46 vulnerabilities fixed, none of which are believed to have been exploited already. Eight of those vulnerabilities are in WebKit.

The macOS build number is 24F74. Firmware in Apple silicon Macs is updated to iBoot version 11881.121.1, while that in T2 Macs is updated to 2075.120.2.0.0 (iBridge 22.16.15072.0.0,0).

Version changes seen in bundled applications include:

• Books to version 7.5
• Freeform to version 3.5
• Music to version 1.5.5
• News to version 10.4
• Notes to version 4.12.6
• Passwords to version 1.5
• Safari to version 18.5 (20621.2.5.11.8)
• Stocks to version 7.3
• TV to 1.5.5
• Tips to 15.5
• Weather to version 5.1.

Those in /System/Library are more extensive, and include:

• Audio Plug-Ins HAL MacAudio driver to version 550.4
• In CoreServices, there’s a new Apple Diagnostics app at version 1.0, which currently doesn’t appear functional
• The XboxGamepad driver extension has a build increment
• AGX kernel extensions all have version increments
• AppleUSBAudio kernel extension has a version increment
• AudioDMAController kernel extensions have version increments
• APFS is updated to version 2332.120.31
• Most of the major public frameworks have build increments, with SwiftUI at version 6.5.4
• Many Private Frameworks are updated.
• A new Private Framework CodableSwiftUI has been added at version 1.0
• New Private Frameworks NDOAPI, NDOUI, SUDocAssets and SensorAccess have also been added at version 1.0.

The new Apple Diagnostics app looks particularly interesting, but appears to attempt a remote connection that is denied, so reports the error and does nothing else.

Overall, this appears to be a substantial update with many fixes included. It’s a pity that Apple hasn’t been prepared to tell us more in its haste to move on to 16.0.

Apple has just released the update to macOS Sequoia to bring it to version 15.5, and security updates for 14.7.6 and 13.7.6.

The Sequoia update for Apple silicon Macs is just under 3 GB in size, and just over 2 GB for Intel Macs.

Apple’s general release notes for Sequoia 15.5 only mention one new feature, that parents now receive a notification from a child’s device when its Screen Time passcode is used. Otherwise, it’s the usual “enhancements, bug fixes, and security updates”.

Security release notes for Sequoia 15.5 are here, and list 46 vulnerabilities fixed, none of which are reported as believed to have been exploited already. Those for 14.7.6 are here, and for 13.7.6 are here.

One important entry in the Enterprise release notes concerns the future of AFP: “Apple Filing Protocol (AFP) client is deprecated and will be removed in a future version of macOS.” I can hear the howls of anguish already.

Developer release notes claim three bugs are fixed:

• large network shares should enumerate correctly in the Finder,
• Pro Display Calibrator should work properly on M4 MacBook Pros,
• apps registering helper executables should now do so correctly.

The macOS build number is 24F74. Firmware in Apple silicon Macs is updated to iBoot version 11881.121.1, while that in T2 Macs is updated to 2075.120.2.0.0 (iBridge 22.16.15072.0.0,0).

Safari is updated to version 18.5 (20621.2.5.11.8), and there are 8 security bugs fixed in WebKit (15.5).

Last updated at 1845 GMT 12 May 2025.

After the delightful tale of Vertumnus and Pomona, King Proca dies, and Ovid’s narrative rushes through the founding of Rome by Romulus, so bringing Book 14 of his Metamorphoses to a close.

Ovid tells us that the walls of the city of Rome were founded on the feast day of Pales, 21 April.

Romulus yoked a plough with a bronze ploughshare to a bull and a cow, and drove a deep furrow around the city’s boundary. This is shown in Annibale Carracci’s fresco in the Palazzo Magnani of Romulus Traces the Boundaries of Rome (1589-92). The bronze ploughshare is at the left, being fixed to a wheeled plough, with Romulus at the right, ready to lead the bull and cow around the boundary.

Next Ovid mentions war with the Sabines led by Tatius, and the Vestal Virgin Tarpeia’s infamous betrayal of the citadel itself. The intruders entered through a gate unlocked by Juno, which Venus couldn’t secure because gods aren’t allowed to undo what other gods have done.

Naiads living next to the shrine of Janus tried to block the intrusion by flooding their spring, but the torrent of water sent down to the open gate didn’t help. So they put sulphur under the spring, and turned it into a river of smoking, molten tar, holding the intruders back until Romulus was able to attack. After a bloody battle, the Romans and Sabines agreed peace, but their king Tatius died (in a riot at Lavinium) and Romulus thus came to rule over both peoples.

Even in Ovid’s time, war with the Sabines and the rape of the Sabine women were controversial, and not a subject that his Metamorphoses dwelt on.

Jacques-Louis David’s The Intervention of the Sabine Women (1799) is unusual among depictions of the episode of the Sabine women in showing its resolution, rather than the seizure of the women that brought the conflict about.

After the overwhelmingly male population of the nascent city of Rome had seized the wives and daughters of their neighbours the Sabines, the two groups of men proceeded to fight. David shows Roman and Sabine men joined in battle before the great walls of Rome, with the Sabine women and their children mixed in, trying to restore peace. Looming over the city is the rugged Tarpeian Rock, from which traitors and other enemies of Rome were thrown. Named in dishonour of the treacherous Tarpeia, she wasn’t its first victim: she was crushed to death by the shields of the Sabines she had let into the citadel, and is reputed to have been buried in the rock.

Highlighted in her brilliant white robes in the foreground, and separating two of the warriors, is the daughter of the Sabine king Tatius, Hersilia, whom Romulus married. The warriors are, of course, her father and her husband, and the infants strategically placed by a nurse between the men are the children of Romulus.

David started this painting when he was imprisoned following his involvement in the French Revolution. He intended it to honour his estranged wife, who had continued to visit him during his incarceration, and to make the case for reconciliation as the resolution of conflict.

Guercino’s Hersilia Separating Romulus and Tatius (1645) concentrates on the three figures of Tatius, Hersilia, and Romulus, and tucks the rest of the battle away in the distance behind them.

The time came for Romulus to hand on the new Roman state to his successor; Mars therefore called a council of the gods, and proposed that the founder of Rome should be transformed into a god, which Jupiter approved. With that Mars descended to the Palatine hill in Rome, where he found Romulus laying down laws for the city. The body of Romulus dissolved into thin air and he was carried up to the heavens to become the Roman god Quirinus.

Only Jean-Baptiste Nattier painted the apotheosis of the founder of Rome, in his Romulus being taken up to Olympus by Mars from about 1700. Mars is embracing Romulus, with the standard of Rome being borne at the lower left, and the divine chariot ready to take Romulus up to the upper right corner, where the rest of the gods await him.

When his queen Hersilia mourned the loss of Romulus, Juno sent Iris to invite her to join her husband. Hersilia then rose with a star to become the goddess Hora. This sets the stage for the opening of the fifteenth and final book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

I hope that you enjoyed Saturday’s Mac Riddles, episode 307. Here are my solutions to them.

1: Workshop exhibition with thunder and lightning from the A13 in 68.58 cm.

2: First person seed vessel contact takes music wherever.

3: Notes of brief communication from a pioneering mathematician.

The common factor

I look forward to your putting alternative cases.

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m sceptical of AI, and seldom use ChatGPT or Writing Tools. One of the conditions imposed by the magazines that I write for is that none of my contributions use AI in any way, either to research topics or to manipulate the text. Besides, I’d far rather all the mistakes I make are mine, and not introduced by AI. But I am impressed by Writing Tools, and think you might find them useful when trying to extract information from and understand the log, when using LogUI.

I’m therefore delighted to announce a new build of LogUI that gives access to summarisation features in Writing Tools to analyse and clarify log entries.

Most obviously, this build reworks the interface by promoting the button commands to its toolbar. From the left, these are:

• Get log extract (circular arrows).
• Gloss (magnifying glass on document page).
• Save as Rich Text (downward arrow and box).

Following those is the popup menu to select the field to be used for search, and at the right end the Search box itself.

A more subtle change is aimed at making it less confusing when using multiple windows and search criteria on log extracts from the same time. The title shown in each window now appends any search term in use. That’s shown in the window, and in the Window menu, but isn’t included in the default file name if you save the extract in Rich Text.

Currently, LogUI supports two ways of moving log extracts to other apps: you can save the whole extract as a formatted Rich Text file, or copy the most important fields in selected entries as text. Build 46 adds a third as the bridge to Writing Tools, in what I term a gloss. This is generally used for words added to a text, either in between its lines or in the margin, that explain words in the main body of that text, and can be gathered together in a glossary. In LogUI this functions as a special pasteboard and plain text editor, the Gloss window.

The message field of some log entries is very large, containing a lot of information some of which may be of importance. The example I use here gives the registration details of an app being launched through RunningBoard. To copy those into a Gloss, select that log entry and click on the Gloss button in the toolbar. The contents of the selected message field(s) are then displayed in the Gloss window, a basic text editor, where you can manually format them if you wish, copy and paste the contents into a text document in another app. This works fully on all Macs running macOS 14.6 or later.

As this window contains a SwiftUI TextEditor view, you can also use Writing Tools on any selection you make within its text (Apple silicon Macs only). Select all using Command-A, hover the pointer over the selected text and you’ll see the Writing Tools blue button appear to the left of the window. Click on that, or use the contextual menu on the selected text, and you can now apply any of those Writing Tools to the contents.

If you try to use a Writing Tool that can’t cope with the text contents, you’ll see the error Writing Tools Unavailable.

In that case, open the contextual menu and try a different tool that can cope. Some log messages don’t contain much English, and in those cases Writing Tools might try another language such as German before reporting that the language isn’t recognised or supported.

Text in that Gloss window persists, and is saved into LogUI’s preferences. Only one Gloss window is available, and it contains the text from those entries selected the last time you clicked on the Gloss button. When you do that, the new gloss replaces the old. If you want to save the previous gloss, copy and paste it before clicking on the Gloss button.

Writing Tools can’t interpret log entries or diagnose problems from the log, but its summaries can make complex lists more comprehensible, and sometimes provide additional information that can be helpful. Always check its output against the original, as it can make mistakes.

To illustrate how this might help, here are examples taken from an original RunningBoard registration for the Pages app, starting
'app<application.com.apple.iWork.Pages.6871230.6871236(501)>' Constructed job description:
<dictionary: 0x910d117a0> { count = 23, transaction: 0, voucher = 0x0, contents =
"Platform" => <int64: 0x94ab1b6b9872cd77>: 1
"ProcessType" => <string: 0x910c2dc20> { length = 3, contents = "App" }
"EnableTransactions" => <bool: 0x1fb02aba0>: false
and running on for many more lines after those.

Writing Tools’ Summary reads:
The job description for the Pages application is provided. It includes details about the platform, process type, environment variables, and more. The description also specifies the program arguments and the path to the Pages executable.

Key Points start:

• Application Name: com.apple.iWork.Pages
• Application Bundle Identifier: com.apple.iWork.Pages
• Application Platform: 1
• Session Types: “Aqua”, “LoginWindow”
• Initial Task Role: 2
• Environment Variables: Includes variables like `__CF_USER_TEXT_ENCODING`, `TMPDIR`, `SHELL`, `HOME`, `SSH_AUTH_SOCK`, `LOGNAME`.
• User Information: USER: hoakley, HOME: /Users/hoakley

List starts:

• The job description is for a constructed application.
• The application is identified as ‘app<application.com.apple.iWork.Pages.6871230.6871236(501)>’.
• The application is running on a platform with an ID of 1.
• The process type is “App”.
• Transactions are not enabled for the application.
• The application is managed by “com.apple.runningboard”.
• The bundle identifier for the application is “com.apple.iWork.Pages”.
• The application is part of a resource coalition with an ID of “app<application.com.apple.iWork.Pages.6871230.6871236(501)>”.
• Pointer authentication is disabled for the application.

I think the first item there is a minor misreading, as I would understand that the text reports that a job description has been constructed for the application, not that the application is somehow constructed. However, other items listed appear to be faithful to the contents of the original message.

In some cases I have seen Writing Tools spell out an abbreviation, and in most it lays out the contents of long lists and dictionaries more accessibly. Try it out and see what you think.

LogUI 1.0 build 46 is now available from here: logui146
and from its Product Page.

Enjoy!

From the opening to the public of the Museo Nacional del Prado in November 1819, it has drawn a steady succession of aspiring painters to Madrid to study the works of Hieronymus Bosch, El Greco, Peter Paul Rubens, Titian, Diego Velázquez, Francisco Goya, and others. This weekend I show a small selection of landscape paintings made of the interior of Spain by visitors and natives, and in this second article have reached the start of the twentieth century.

The founder of the School of Fine Arts at Yale University, John Ferguson Weir, had studied in Europe, and his brother Julian Alden Weir was a student at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Later in his career, John Ferguson Weir returned to Europe on several trips, and in about 1901 painted this fine view of The Alhambra, Granada, Spain.

As far as I can tell, Laurits Tuxen was the first Danish artist to paint a View of the Alhambra. He did so in 1902, the year after marrying his second wife. He was one of the leading members of the Skagen painters, Nordic Impressionists, and completed this en plein air on 4 May, in wonderfully fine weather.

James Dickson Innes, a painter from Wales who was a member of the Camden Town Group, visited Spain in 1912-13, where he painted this Spanish Landscape in oils on a wood panel.

Innes had a particular affection for dusk, as seen in his Deep Twilight, Pyrenees, painted in 1912-13.

Muñoz Degrain’s view of the Alhambra from Albaicin District is remarkable for the rhythm established by the poplar trees around its base, which become an integral part of the fortified ridge.

His View of the Alhambra is one of my favourite paintings of this motif, for its intriguing foreground details, and the poplars lit as white-hot pokers in the fiery light of sunset.

Joaquín Sorolla, best known for his figurative works, also painted fine landscapes. This undated view of Albaicin looks down from one of the Alhambra’s towers at the bleached white buildings below.

In 1917, when he was exhausted after completing fourteen large murals for the Hispanic Society of America building in Manhattan, Sorolla recovered by painting landscapes. In his Sierra Nevada, Granada, the mountains dominate, with patches of cloud adding uncertainty to their forms.

This canvas by the Spanish artist Enrique Simonet shows a thoroughly Spanish motif: Autumn in the Dehesa, a type of landscape characteristic of southern and central Spain and Portugal, where it’s known as montado. This is a traditional mixed, multifunctional environment providing grazing for cattle, goats, sheep and pigs, mixed trees centred on oaks, and support for many endangered species such as the Iberian lynx and Spanish imperial eagle.

Simonet’s La Moncloa Landscape from 1918-20 shows another rural area, with its ancient woodland and open plains. There may also be a pun intended, as the term La Moncloa can be used to refer to the central government of Spain.

Most of Simonet’s later paintings, such as Reflections on the River (1918-23), are pure landscapes.

During 1921-22, Simonet was director of landscape painting courses held in El Paular, to the north-west of Madrid. There he painted some of the finest of these late works, such as his El Paular Landscape from 1921.

His Hiruela Waterfall (1921-23) is set in dense woodland to the north of Madrid.

Around 1920, the Japanese artist Torajirō Kojima appears to have visited Spain, where he painted the Alhambra, and this wonderful view of a mountainous Landscape in Spain スペインの風景.

Late in his distinguished career, when he was teaching Winston Churchill to paint, the British painter, print-maker and illustrator Sir William Nicholson travelled to Andalucia in Spain. There he met the novelist Marguerite Steen (1894-1975), and she became his companion for the remaining fifteen years of his life. She had a passion for bullfights, and Nicholson found himself working up a study of the Plaza de Toros, Malaga into a major painting. This finished version shows his distinctive use of colour as a result of the intense light in southern Spain. This was exhibited in London the following year.

La Malagueta, as this bull ring is known, was a lifelong inspiration for Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), who was born and brought up in the city. Unlike Picasso, though, Nicholson’s interest was more distant, in the bullring’s form and position, rather than the thrill and spectacle of bullfights.