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Sequoia introduces pinning to iCloud Drive

One of the unannounced features in macOS Sequoia is, for many who use iCloud Drive, one of its most important, as this upgrade introduces the ability to pin files and folders to ensure they remain downloaded and don’t get evicted. This article explains how to use this feature, exactly what it does, and how it works.

Pin an item in iCloud Drive

Assuming that your Mac is connected to iCloud Drive and you have enabled Optimise Mac Storage, so that files in iCloud Drive can be evicted from local storage, you can use pinning to ensure that designated files aren’t evicted, and remain downloaded and synced with iCloud Drive. This is an important advance for anyone who needs certain files to be kept in local storage, so remaining accessible even when connection to iCloud isn’t possible, such as when you’re travelling.

pinning1

Select the file or folder in the Finder and Control-click to bring up the contextual menu. You’ll see a new item there, Keep Downloaded. Select that.

pinning2

That adds a new icon to the pinned files, with a white downward arrow on a circular grey background. This indicates that file is to be kept downloaded or pinned locally.

pinning3

To unpin an item, select it and bring up the contextual menu. The Keep Downloaded item will be ticked. Select that command, and that toggles the setting off, unpinning the item so it can be evicted from local storage once again.

Pinning only works if your Mac’s iCloud Drive has Optimise Mac Storage enabled, which puts it into non-replicated FileProvider mode, and allows you and macOS to Remove Download or evict files. Its effect is to prevent that from occurring. Pinned files will remain downloaded to your Mac all the time, just as if iCloud Drive were in replicated FileProvider mode, with Optimise Mac Storage disabled.

A file’s pinning setting travels with it if you move that file within the same volume, and may be preserved when it’s moved away, for example by transferring the file by AirDrop. It’s preserved when you make changes to that file, but not when it’s copied, and pinning settings are specific to a local Mac, and not transferred to other Macs or devices connected to the same iCloud Drive.

How it works

Pinning is set by macOS attaching an extended attribute (xattr) named com.apple.fileprovider.pinned to each file that’s pinned. That normally contains a single byte, the character 1 as the single byte 0x31, although changing that to 0 works just as well, so it appears it’s the xattr that’s important, rather than its contents.

pinning4

When a com.apple.fileprovider.pinned extended attribute is attached to a file, it ceases being eligible for eviction, and is kept downloaded, just as if it were in a replicated FileProvider. Unpinning the file strips the xattr.

Xattr flags

I have recently summarised the features of extended attributes, and explained the system of flags they use to determine how those are copied. In addition to adding the com.apple.fileprovider.pinned xattr to those encountered in Sequoia, Apple has changed the xattr flag system to cope with this new xattr. These flags are appended to the xattr name, after a # character, and pinning xattrs are actually named com.apple.fileprovider.pinned#PX to determine when they should be preserved during file copy operations. The X flag is new to Sequoia, and can be used for other xattrs.

This brings the table of available xattr flags to six. Flags can be upper or lower case letters C, N, P, S, B or X, and invariably follow the # separator, which is presumably otherwise forbidden from use in a xattr’s name. Upper case sets (enables) that property, while lower case clears (disables) that property. The properties are now (as of 15.0):

  • C: XATTR_FLAG_CONTENT_DEPENDENT, which ties the flag and the file contents, so the xattr is rewritten when the file data changes. This is normally used for checksums and hashes, text encoding, and position information. The xattr is preserved for copy and share, but not in a safe save.
  • P: XATTR_FLAG_NO_EXPORT, which doesn’t export or share the xattr, but normally preserves it during copying.
  • N: XATTR_FLAG_NEVER_PRESERVE, which ensures the xattr is never copied, even when copying the file.
  • S: XATTR_FLAG_SYNCABLE, which ensures the xattr is preserved during syncing with services such as iCloud Drive. Default behaviour is for xattrs to be stripped during syncing, to minimise the amount of data to be transferred, but this will override that.
  • B: XATTR_FLAG_ONLY_BACKUP, which keeps the xattr only in backups, including Time Machine.
  • X: XATTR_FLAG_ONLY_SAVING, which keeps the xattr only when saving and in backups, including Time Machine (introduced in macOS 15.0).

These must operate within another general restriction of xattrs: their name cannot exceed a maximum of 127 UTF-8 characters.

This new flag doesn’t change the macOS default flags set for different types of xattr, which remain as:

  • com.apple.quarantinePCS
  • com.apple.TextEncodingCS
  • com.apple.metadata:kMDItemCollaborationIdentifierB
  • com.apple.metadata:kMDItemIsSharedB
  • com.apple.metadata:kMDItemSharedItemCurrentUserRoleB
  • com.apple.metadata:kMDItemOwnerNameB
  • com.apple.metadata:kMDItemFavoriteRankB
  • com.apple.metadata:* (except those above) – PS
  • com.apple.security.*S
  • com.apple.ResourceForkPCS
  • com.apple.FinderInfoPCS
  • com.apple.root.installedPC

(* here represents the wild card.)

Until Apple releases the source code for Sequoia’s open source components, the table of copy intents remains unchanged at

  • XATTR_OPERATION_INTENT_COPY – a simple copy, preserves xattrs that don’t have flag N or B
  • XATTR_OPERATION_INTENT_SAVE – save, where the content may be changing, preserves xattrs that don’t have flag C or N or B
  • XATTR_OPERATION_INTENT_SHARE – share or export, preserves xattrs that don’t have flag P or N or B
  • XATTR_OPERATION_INTENT_SYNC – sync to a service such as iCloud Drive, preserves xattrs if they have flag S, or have neither N nor B
  • XATTR_OPERATION_INTENT_BACKUP – back up, e.g. using Time Machine, preserves xattrs that don’t have flag N

as documented in man xattr_name_with_flags. Once I have been able to check the new source code, I will confirm any changes to the intents table.

Summary

  • If you have Optimise Mac Storage turned on for iCloud Drive, you can now pin files so that they aren’t evicted from local storage.
  • To pin a file or folder, use the Finder’s contextual menu (Control-click) and select the Keep Downloaded item.
  • To unpin a file, toggle the Keep Downloaded item off (unticked).
  • Pinning works by adding an extended attribute to each pinned file.
  • A sixth xattr flag has been added, X, to keep that xattr only when saving and in backups.

Apple has just released an update to XProtect

Apple has just released an update to XProtect for all versions of macOS from El Capitan or so, bringing it to version 5273.

Apple doesn’t release information about what security issues this update might add or change. This adds Yara definitions for MACOS.DOLITTLE.CT, MACOS.SHEEPSWAP.CT and MACOS.SOMA.CT using a new format of rule, with each rule given a UUID and listing SHA256 hashes of file size.

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_15-5273.

If you’ve upgraded to Sequoia and are still stuck at a version number of 0 or 5272, you can either leave macOS to catch up with this in its own good time, or you can force an update by typing into Terminal
sudo xprotect update
then entering your admin password.

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

I maintain lists of the current versions of security data files for Sonoma on this page, Ventura on this page, Monterey on this page, Big Sur on this page, Catalina on this page, Mojave on this page, High Sierra on this page, Sierra on this page, and El Capitan on this page.

Apple has released macOS 15.0 Sequoia and security updates to 14.7 and 13.7

As promised last week, Apple has released the upgrade to macOS 15.0 Sequoia, together with security updates to bring Sonoma to version 14.7, and Ventura to 13.7. There should also be Safari updates to accompany the latter two.

The Sequoia update is around 6.6 GB for Apple silicon Macs, and 14.7 is around 1.6 GB. For Intel Macs, 15.0 is around 4.9 GB as an ‘update’, and 14.7 is around 860 MB.

Security release notes for Sequoia list around 77 vulnerabilities addressed, including two in the kernel, none of which Apple is aware may have been exploited in the wild. Release notes list 36 vulnerabilities addressed in Sonoma 14.7 here, and there are 30 listed for Ventura 13.7 here.

iBoot firmware is updated to version 11881.1.1, Intel T2 firmware to version 2069.0.0.0.0 (iBridge 22.16.10353.0.0,0), and Safari to 18.0 (20619.1.26.31.6).

After completing the upgrade to 15.0, you are likely to see that the installed XProtect version is 0, in other words that there is no XProtect data. You can leave your Mac to automatically download the required data from iCloud, or manually force it using the command
sudo xprotect update
then entering your admin password. That will normally ‘activate’ the XProtect data previously installed, and set the version to 5272, although that will then need to be updated to 5273 separately. Don’t be surprised if you end up repeating the trip to Terminal to get this to work.

Last updated 1900 GMT 16 September 2024.

Changing Paintings: 37 The fall of Icarus

The architect and artificer Daedalus had been introduced by Ovid in his account of the death of the Minotaur, and the next myth in Metamorphoses tells of the tragic end to Daedalus’ stay on the island of Crete, where he and his son Icarus had effectively been imprisoned since the construction of the labyrinth that had confined the minotaur. Much as Daedalus yearned to leave the island and King Minos, there was no hope of him departing by sea, so he decided to take to the air.

Daedalus built two sets of wings made from feathers held together by beeswax. Once they were completed, he tested his by hovering in the air. He then cautioned his son to fly a middle course: neither so low that the sea would wet the feathers and make them heavy, nor so high that the heat of the sun would damage them. He also told Icarus to follow his lead, and not to try navigating by the stars.

Daedalus fitted his son with his wings, and gave him further advice about how to fly with them. He shed tears as he did that, and his hands trembled. Once they were both ready, Daedalus kissed his son, and flew off in the lead just like a bird with its fledgeling chick in tow.

lebrundaedalusicarus
Charles Le Brun (1619–1690), Daedalus and Icarus (1645-46), oil on canvas, 190 x 124 cm, Hermitage Museum Государственный Эрмитаж, Saint Petersburg, Russia. Wikimedia Commons.

Towards the end of his career in Rome in 1645-46, the great French painter Charles Le Brun painted Daedalus and Icarus. This shows the master artificer fastening wings made of feathers and wax on his son’s back, prior to their escape from Crete.

sacchiicarus
Andrea Sacchi (1599–1661), Daedalus and Icarus (c 1645), oil, 147 x 117 cm, Musei di Strada Nuova, Genova, Italy. Wikimedia Commons.

Andrea Sacchi’s Daedalus and Icarus (c 1645) shows Daedalus at the left, fitting Icarus’ wings, prior to the boy’s flight. Icarus has his right arm raised to allow the fitting, and looks intently at his new wings. Daedalus is concentrating on adjusting the thin ribbons passing over his son’s shoulders, and may be explaining to him the importance of flying at the right altitude.

vandyckicarus
Anthony van Dyck (1599–1641), Daedalus and Icarus (1615-25), oil on canvas, 115.3 x 86.4 cm, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Canada. Wikimedia Commons.

Anthony van Dyck’s Daedalus and Icarus (1615-25) shows Daedalus giving his son the vital pre-flight briefing. From the father’s gestures, he is here explaining the importance of keeping the right altitude.

leightonicarus
Frederic, Lord Leighton (1830–1896), Icarus and Daedalus (c 1869), oil on canvas, 138.2 × 106.5 cm, Private collection. Wikimedia Commons.

Frederic, Lord Leighton’s Icarus and Daedalus (c 1869), shows the pair on the roof of a tower overlooking the coast. Daedalus is fitting his son’s wings, and looks up at Icarus. The boy holds his right arm up, partly to allow his father to fit the wings, and possibly in a gesture of strength and defiance, as the two will shortly be escaping from Crete. Icarus looks to the right, presumably towards their mainland destination, and Daedalus is wearing a curious scalp-hugging cap intended for flight.

landonicarus
Charles Paul Landon (1760–1826), Icarus and Daedalus (1799), oil on canvas, 54 × 43.5 cm, Musée des Beaux-Arts et de la Dentelle d’Alençon, Alençon, France. Wikimedia Commons.

Charles Paul Landon’s (1760–1826) Icarus and Daedalus (1799) shows the moment that Icarus launches into flight from the top of the tower, his arms held out and treading air with his legs during this first flight. Daedalus stands behind, his arms still held horizontally forward from launching his son.

The pair flew over a fisherman holding his rod, a shepherd leaning on his crook, and a ploughman with his plough, amazing them with the sight. They flew past Delos and Paros, and approached further islands, but Icarus started to enjoy the thrill of flying too much, and soared too high. As he neared the sun, the wax securing the feathers in his wings softened, and his wings fell apart.

As Icarus fell from the sky, he called to his father, before entering the water in what’s now known in his memory as the Icarian Sea, between the Cyclades and the coast of modern Turkey. All Daedalus could see were the feathers, remnants of wings, on the surface of the water.

rubensicarus
Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640), The Fall of Icarus (1636), oil on panel, 27 x 27 cm, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels. Wikimedia Commons.

Rubens’ initial oil sketch of The Fall of Icarus (1636) above, was presumably turned into a finished painting by his apprentice Jacob Peter Gowy, below. Icarus, his wings in tatters and holding his arms up as if trying to flap them, plunges past Daedalus. The boy’s mouth and eyes are wide open in shock and fear, and his body tumbles as it falls. Daedalus is still flying, though, his wings intact and fully functional; he looks towards the falling body of his son in alarm. They are high above a bay containing people with a fortified town at the edge of the sea.

gowyicarus
Jacob Peter Gowy (c 1615-1661), The Fall of Icarus (1635-7), oil on canvas, 195 x 180 cm, Museo del Prado, Madrid. Wikimedia Commons.
blondelicarus
Merry-Joseph Blondel (1781-1853), The Sun or the Fall of Icarus (1819), mural, 271 x 210 cm, Denon, first floor, Rotonde d’Apollon, Musée du Louvre, Paris. By Jastrow (2008), via Wikimedia Commons.

Merry-Joseph Blondel’s spectacular painted ceiling showing The Sun or the Fall of Icarus (1819) combines a similar view of Daedalus flying onward, and Icarus in free fall, with Apollo’s sun chariot being driven across the heavens.

demompericarus
Joos de Momper (II) (1564–1635), Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (c 1565), oil on panel, 154 x 173 cm, Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, Sweden. Wikimedia Commons.

Joos de Momper’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (c 1565), above, show Icarus’ descent within a much bigger landscape, including some of Ovid’s finer details:

  • an angler catching a fish with a rod and line,
  • a shepherd leaning on a crook,
  • a ploughman resting on the handles of his plough.

To aid the viewer, de Momper has painted their clothing scarlet.

De Momper may also have made the copy, below, of Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s famous Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. Here, Brueghel makes the viewer work harder to see the crucial elements of the story: all there is to be seen of Icarus are his flailing legs and some feathers, by the stern of the ship at the right. Daedalus isn’t visible at all, but the shepherd leaning on his crook is looking up at him, up to the left. As in de Momper’s own version, Brueghel also shows the ploughman and the angler.

bruegelicarus
Pieter Brueghel the Elder (1526/1530–1569), Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (copy of original from c 1558), oil on canvas mounted on wood, 73.5 × 112 cm, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels. Wikimedia Commons.
bukovacicarus2
Vlaho Bukovac (Biagio Faggioni) (1855–1922) The Fall of Icarus (panel of diptych) (1898), oil, dimensions not known, National Museum of Serbia, Beograd, Serbia. Wikimedia Commons.

Vlaho Bukovac (Biagio Faggioni) (1855–1922) painted two different versions of Icarus reaching earth: in The Fall of Icarus (1898), one panel of a diptych about this story, he shows Icarus on the seabed, as he drowns, the remains of his wings still visible.

bukovacicarus1
Vlaho Bukovac (Biagio Faggioni) (1855–1922) Icarus on the Rocks (1897), oil on canvas, dimensions not known, Moderna Galerija, Zagreb, Croatia. Wikimedia Commons.

His earlier Icarus on the Rocks (1897) departs from Ovid’s account and has Icarus crash onto rocks; his posture is similar in the two paintings.

drapericarus
Herbert James Draper (1863–1920), Lament for Icarus (1898), oil on canvas, 182.9 x 155.6 cm, The Tate Gallery, London. Wikimedia Commons.

Finally, Herbert Draper’s (1863–1920) Lament for Icarus (1898) shows an apocryphal and more romantic view, in which three nymphs have recovered the apparently dry body of Icarus, and he is laid out on a rock while they lament his fate to the accompaniment of a lyre. Perhaps influenced by contemporary thought about human flight, Draper gives Icarus huge wings, and those are shown intact, rather than disintegrated from their exposure to the sun’s heat.

Daedalus was full of remorse, and buried his son’s body on the nearby island. As he was digging his son’s grave, a solitary partridge watched him from a nearby oak tree. The partridge had originally been Daedalus’ nephew, who had been brought to him as an apprentice. As the nephew’s skills and ingenuity grew, Daedalus became envious of him, seeking to kill him and pretend it had been an accident. When Daedalus threw him from the roof of her temple on the Acropolis, Pallas Athena saved the apprentice by transforming him into a partridge in mid-air. The bird still remembers being saved from its fall, and to this day won’t fly far above the ground.

Solutions to Saturday Mac riddles 273

I hope that you enjoyed Saturday’s Mac Riddles, episode 273. Here are my solutions to them.

1: Resign, stop and almost quite is final.

Click for a solution

Quit

Resign (quit a job), stop (quit) and almost quite (it’s quite without the last letter) is final (it’s the last command).

2: Almost all round opens a window first.

Click for a solution

About

Almost (about a number) all round (about a location) opens a window (it opens the About window) first (it’s the first command).

3: Past preferences when celestial bodies sink below the horizon.

Click for a solution

Settings

Past preferences (what it used to be called) when celestial bodies sink below the horizon (when the sun/moon/planets/stars set in the sky).

The common factor

Click for a solution

They are all standard commands in the app menu.

I look forward to your putting alternative cases.

Looking ahead to Sequoia’s updates

Later today, Apple is expected to release macOS Sequoia 15.0. For those interested in planning their immediate or delayed upgrade, these are my forecast dates for its minor versions over the coming year. Like all the best weather forecasts, this is most accurate for the next 5 days, and those for further into the future are likely to be decreasingly reliable.

Minor version release dates for Sonoma have been broadly similar to those of others since Big Sur:

  • 14.0 – 26 September,
  • 14.1 – 25 October,
  • 14.2 – 11 December,
  • 14.3 – 22 January,
  • 14.4 – 07 March,
  • 14.5 – 13 May,
  • 14.6 – 29 July,
  • 14.7 – 16 September.

Ventura differed mostly because it had a later start date to its cycle, in October, resulting in the delay of 13.1 until December. Subsequent versions thus trailed Sonoma by one, for example with 13.5 on 24 July, against 14.6 on 29 July. Although Apple is believed to have some flexibility in the release dates for minor updates, the timetable for the cycle appears to be fixed well in advance, and is probably already at least pencilled in for Sequoia.

Most minor updates bring new versions of firmware, the kernel and key kernel extensions such as APFS. In between those may be patch updates to fix serious bugs or security vulnerabilities that can’t wait for the next minor version, such as 14.3.1 on 8 February, two weeks after 14.3 and a month before 14.4.

According to Apple’s release notes, the current release candidate for 15.0 has no significant bugs that remain unfixed, and we hope that remains the case.

15.1: October 2024

Apple has already announced that this first ‘minor’ update will bring its AI features, including most significantly Writing Tools. Although those have been in beta-testing for almost as long as 15.0, in terms of changes, the step from 15.0 will in many ways be greater than that from 14.6 to 15.0. However, that only applies to Apple silicon Macs that support AI.

For all Macs, this is likely to bring fixes for some more substantial bugs, although because of the short interval between 15.0 and 15.1, few are likely to be addressed until 15.2.

This update is likely to coincide with new Mac products launched at an as-yet unannounced Mac event in October, where Apple is expected to promote its new M4 Macs as being ‘made for AI’, much in the way that it did last week with the iPhone 16 range.

15.2: December 2024

Turnaround time fixing even straightforward high priority bugs makes it likely that most in 15.0 will be addressed not in 15.1 but 15.2, before Christmas. This will also catch the first fixes and any additional enhancements required by AI, so may well be one of the more substantial updates this cycle. The aim is to give engineering teams a chance to catch up with the vacation without leaving too much to await their return in the New Year.

15.3: January 2025

This update is largely constrained by the effects of the Christmas vacation, but should enable most issues arising in 15.0 and 15.1 to be fixed, leaving Sequoia running sweetly.

15.4: March 2025

This is the major mid-cycle update, that is most likely to contain new and enhanced features, often making it the largest update of the cycle. Apple also seems to use this to introduce initial versions of new features intended to become fully functional before the end of the cycle. One example of this was XProtect Remediator, released on 14 March 2022 in Monterey 12.3, but not really functional until June that year.

Unfortunately, these enhancements can also cause problems, and this update in March has a track record of sporadic more serious bugs, including the occasional kernel panic.

15.5: May 2025

A month or so before the first beta-release of the next major version of macOS, this normally aims to fix as many remaining bugs as possible, and progress any enhancements introduced in the previous update. If you’ve reported a bug before April, then if it’s going to be fixed in this cycle, this is the most likely time; any new bugs reported after this update are most likely to be carried over to the next major release.

15.6: July 2025

This really is the last chance for fixes and feature-tweaks before the next major version is released in September. If all is working out well, this should be the most stable and bug-free release, although in some years late changes have turned this update into a nightmare, and Sonoma required a patch update in early August to address those.

When best to upgrade?

If third-party software, hardware and other compatibility requirements don’t apply, there’s no way to predict which is the best version to choose as an upgrade from previous macOS. Every version contains bugs, some of them may be serious, others may be infuriating and intrude into your workflows. But those aren’t predictable. If you’re unsure, wait a few days after a minor update, or even 15.0, check around with others, and decide then. If you’re really cautious and have an Apple silicon Mac, I suggest you might like to consider upgrading a week or two after the release of 15.1, by which time most of any major issues with 15.0 and AI should have come to the surface.

For myself, I already have my designated beta-testing Mac, a MacBook Pro M3 Pro, running 15.1 beta, and my other three Macs (iMac Pro, Mac Studio M1 Max and MacBook Pro 16-inch 2019) will all be running 15.0 by midnight tonight, I hope. I’ll let you know how I get on.

Laundresses in a landscape 2

In the first of these two articles celebrating the work of generations of women who washed clothes and linen outdoors, and have been featured in landscape paintings, I covered the period up to the end of the 1870s, when Impressionism was at its height. This account resumes at about 1880, and moves on to the early twentieth century.

haverswasherwomen
Alice Havers (1850–1890), Washerwomen (date not known), oil, dimensions not known, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, England. Wikimedia Commons.

Alice Havers’ Washerwomen, which given her tragically brief life must have been painted around 1880, shows a wide range of ages, working together, some repairing the clothes, others talking. On the other side of the river, the fruit trees are in blossom.

boudinwasherwomenbyriver
Eugène Boudin (1824–1898), Washerwomen by the River (c 1880-85), oil on panel, 26.2 × 36.2 cm, Israel Museum מוזיאון ישראל, Jerusalem, Israel. Wikimedia Commons.

Later in Eugène Boudin’s career he painted Washerwomen by the River (c 1880-85), above, and Laundresses on the Beach, Low Tide, Aval Cliff, Étretat (c 1890-94), below. The latter painting is remarkable for its rough facture, and for the number of women gathered by one of the most recognisable landmarks on the Normandy coast, the arch of Étretat.

boudinlaundressesonbeach
Eugène Boudin (1824–1898), Laundresses on the Beach, Low Tide, Aval Cliff, Étretat (c 1890-94), oil on panel, 20.4 × 34.9 cm, location not known. Wikimedia Commons.
curranbreezyday
Charles Courtney Curran (1861–1942), A Breezy Day (1887), oil on canvas, 30.3 x 50.8 cm, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA. Wikimedia Commons.

Early in his career, the American artist Charles Courtney Curran painted a series of works showing young women at work outdoors, among which the most successful, A Breezy Day (1887) won the Third Hallgarten Prize for Oils from the National Academy of Design the following year.

Vincent van Gogh, The Langlois Bridge at Arles with Women Washing (1888), oil on canvas, 54 x 65 cm, Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo. WikiArt.
Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890), The Langlois Bridge at Arles with Women Washing (1888), oil on canvas, 54 x 65 cm, Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo. WikiArt.

Painted when Vincent van Gogh was at Arles, one of his best-known groups of works includes The Langlois Bridge at Arles with Women Washing (1888). This is one of four oil paintings, a watercolour, and at least four drawings he made of this motif, with the aid of a perspective frame he had made for himself. This shows a traditional wooden drawbridge, one of several over the canal running from Arles to Bouc. Built in the early nineteenth century, it was sadly replaced by concrete in 1930.

gauguinwasherwomen
Paul Gauguin (1848–1903), Washerwomen of Arles I (1888), oil on canvas, 75.9 x 92.1 cm, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY. Wikimedia Commons.

In the same year, Paul Gauguin painted a group of women hard at work near Arles in his Washerwomen of Arles I (1888).

renoirlaundress
Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919), The Laundress (1891), oil on canvas, 46 × 56 cm, Private collection. Wikimedia Commons.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s The Laundress (1891) sets a single, quite well-dressed woman doing her washing in one of his sumptuously soft-focus landscapes.

ekenaeslaundrythroholeinice
Jahn Ekenæs (1847–1920), Women Doing Laundry Through a Hole in the Ice (1891), oil on canvas, 67 × 108 cm, Private collection. Wikimedia Commons.

The Norwegian painter Jahn Ekenæs teaches us that, even in the bitter Nordic winters, the washing still had to be done: his Women Doing Laundry Through a Hole in the Ice (1891) seem to have the toughest job of all. Note that only one of them is wearing anything on her hands.

monstedlaundryday
Peder Mørk Mønsted (1859–1941), Laundry Day (1899), oil on canvas, 24.5 × 16.5 cm, location not known. Wikimedia Commons.

Peder Mørk Mønsted’s Laundry Day (1899) shows kinder conditions during the summer, when doing the washing would surely have been a more popular task.

garciarodriguezwhiteblack
Manuel Garcia y Rodriguez (1863–1925), White and Black. Andalucian Landscape. Laundresses in the River Guadaíra (1903), further details not known. Wikimedia Commons.

In common with many of these paintings, Manuel Garcia y Rodriguez uses the white of the linen heightened in sunshine to generate contrast, in his White and Black. Andalucian Landscape. Laundresses in the River Guadaíra from 1903.

As indoor domestic water supplies became widespread during the twentieth century, washing clothing and linen in the countryside died out, and vanished from the landscape.

Last Week on my Mac: 15.0 or wait for 15.1?

It’s strange to think that, as we’re wondering whether and when to upgrade to Sequoia, Apple’s engineering teams are already at work on macOS 16. While they’re thinking out what we’ll chew over next summer, you may well be asking if you should upgrade to 15.0 next week, wait for the AI features coming in 15.1 next month, or leave your decision until 2025?

For those with Macs and iPhones that can both be upgraded, iPhone Mirroring is probably the most obviously attractive new feature. It completes the integration of Continuity, and could transform your workflows. Fortunately for such a key feature, it should work with all supported Macs, not just Apple silicon models. There’s one small and temporary disappointment, though, as drag and drop between Mac and iPhone isn’t expected in 15.0, but in an update “later this year”.

The new Passwords app should spare you from wanting to pay for a third-party password manager. This is much more than just shelling out the existing Passwords feature from Safari and System Settings, and at last gives full control over passkeys and other shared secrets in your Keychain in iCloud.

Although some see Sequoia’s new dislike for apps that aren’t notarized (or from the App Store) as an unnecessary burden, for most of us this will raise the bar against running malware and increase our margin of safety. It has been some time since any malicious software has been successfully notarized, and most of the current epidemic of stealers aren’t even signed with a Developer certificate. Instead, they usually prompt the user to open them using the existing Finder bypass, something that no longer works in Sequoia without explicitly and individually giving permission to that app in Privacy & Security settings.

It will be interesting to see how malware developers respond to this challenge, as trying to give the user detailed instructions as to how they can be run without being blocked by Gatekeeper should now arouse the suspicion of even the most careless and inattentive.

While we’re on the subject of security, remember that Sequoia is now the only version of macOS that gets full security updates over the coming year. While Sonoma and Ventura will still get some, if you want the lot then you’ll need to upgrade. Monterey, of course, now gets none at all. This gets more brutal when considering other bugs that aren’t relevant to security: those will only be fixed in Sequoia, not even in Sonoma.

For those who virtualise macOS on Apple silicon, support for Apple ID gives VMs access to iCloud Drive at last, although it stops short of enabling the App Store or its apps, so isn’t as useful as it should have been. There are two important restrictions to this:

  • Apple ID can only be used in a Sequoia guest running on a Sequoia host, and
  • the Sequoia VM has to be built from a Sequoia IPSW file, and can’t be upgraded from a Sonoma or earlier VM.

As long as your Mac stays with Sonoma, you won’t be able to use Apple ID in any of its VMs, including Sequoia. This still leaves us with the paradox that Apple wants us to buy and run apps from its App Store, but VMs are the one place where you can’t use them.

Among the less prominent improvements that have caught my attention are a timed messaging feature of Send Later in Messages, and a batch of improvements in Freeform. If you’ve come to like that relatively new app, you should find Sequoia worth the effort. I’ve also been impressed to see one of the oldest bugs remaining in the Finder has finally been addressed in macOS 15. I’ll be putting the bunting out in celebration after I’ve upgraded on Monday.

As with Sonoma, some of the most important new features haven’t been documented even for developers. Among those are changes to XProtect in terms of its updating and management, and speculation as to how that might affect its function. As I have explained, XProtect’s detection rules have grown enormously over the last few months, and it’s likely that Apple intends improving how XProtect can apply its Yara rules, and making their updating more efficient.

Finally, Sequoia is almost certainly going to be delivered as if it were an update, and won’t download its installer app unless you’re upgrading from a significantly older version of macOS, just as has happened in all recent macOS upgrades. Remember that upgrading macOS these days comes with a one-way ticket: changing your mind afterwards will cost you a lot of time and messing about to step back to Sonoma. However, accidental upgrades shouldn’t be feared. For instance, if you inadvertently click the Install all updates button in SilentKnight and want to reverse that for a macOS update, let the download complete, shut down, start up in Safe mode, wait a minute, then restart in normal mode.

Whatever you choose tomorrow, I hope it works well for you. And in case you’re wondering, if you’ve got an Apple silicon Mac, you’re going to love 15.1.

Laundresses in a landscape 1

Until well into the twentieth century, running water was what came through the roof when it rained, and didn’t come from a tap. Although only the rich could afford to wear clothes for short periods and expect them to be laundered, soiled clothing and linen still had to be washed, normally in the nearest outdoor body of water. This weekend I’m celebrating the many centuries that women washed clothes outdoors, and were painted as part of the landscape. This first article covers the period up to the height of Impressionism at the end of the 1870s, and tomorrow’s resumes in 1880 and concludes in the early twentieth century.

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Pierre-Salomon Domenchin de Chavanne (1673–1744), Landscape with Washerwomen (date not known), oil on canvas, dimensions not known, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rennes, France. Image by Caroline Léna Becker, via Wikimedia Commons.

Pierre-Salomon Domenchin de Chavanne’s Landscape with Washerwomen, probably from around 1700-20, shows a common sight, as do many early landscapes: a small group of women have taken sheets and clothes in large wicker baskets to a small lake, and are washing them as well as they can.

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Alessandro Magnasco (1667–1749), Landscape with Washerwomen (1710-20), oil on canvas, 73.2 x 57.8 cm, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX. Wikimedia Commons.

Alessandro Magnasco’s Landscape with Washerwomen (1710-20) shows a similar scene, the women having walked down from the town glimpsed in the distance. At the lower left is a man out hunting with his dog and gun.

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Louis-Gabriel-Eugène Isabey (1803-1886), The Town and Harbour of Dieppe (1842), oil on canvas, dimensions not known, Musée des beaux-arts de Nancy, Nancy, France. Image by Ji-Elle, via Wikimedia Commons.

On a grey day of showers in 1842, the major French landscape artist Eugène Isabey caught laundresses at work above The Town and Harbour of Dieppe. There’s a second group at the extreme left edge whose washing looks in danger of being blown away over the town below.

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Henri Harpignies (1819–1916), A View of Moulins (c 1850-60), graphite and watercolour on heavy wove paper, 31.7 x 51 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY. Wikimedia Commons.

Henri Harpignies had initially learned to paint in oils, but from 1851 also took to watercolour. He painted this dawn View of Moulins in watercolour between about 1850-60, close to the dead centre of France. This looks over the Allier River, past the line of washerwomen on its far bank, towards the spires and towers of the town whose linen was being cleaned in that river.

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Johan Jongkind (1819–1891), Le Pont de la Tournelle, Paris (1859), oil on canvas, 143.5 x 219.1 cm, The Legion of Honor, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, San Francisco, CA. Wikimedia Commons.

By this time, in northern France, the move towards Impressionism was just starting. The landscape painter Johan Jongkind returned to Paris in 1859, where he painted this view of Le Pont de la Tournelle, Paris (1859), with a small group of washerwomen at work by the water’s edge.

The bridge shown here had been built in 1654, to replace a series of predecessors from the first in 1620. It connects the city to the south with the Île Saint-Louis, which had originally been two smaller islands close to the Île Notre Dame, on which the cathedral stands. Jongkind isn’t interested in the market for topographic paintings, though, and his attention is on the washerwomen and the old bridge.

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Martín Rico (1833–1908), Washerwomen of Varenne (1865), oil on canvas, 85 x 160 cm, location not known. Wikimedia Commons.

By the late nineteenth century, with the growth of towns and cities, laundry had became more organised, as shown in Martín Rico’s Washerwomen of Varenne (1865). A group of fifteen women, some with babies and children, are on the bank of the local river, most of them probably performing this as a commercial service, as it was one of the few occupations open to women of the lower classes. For Rico they transform his landscape with their activity and the rhythm of their figures.

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Eugène Boudin (1824–1898), Washerwoman near Trouville (1872-76), oil on panel, 27.6 x 41.3 cm, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Wikimedia Commons.

Working women are also featured in some of Eugène Boudin’s painterly oil sketches made in front of the motif, such as this of Washerwoman near Trouville from 1872-76. This laundress appears to be beating her washing with a mallet to drive the dirt out.

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Berthe Morisot (1841–1895), Hanging the Laundry out to Dry (1875), oil on canvas, 33 × 40.6 cm, The National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Wikimedia Commons.

In the early years of the Impressionist movement, Berthe Morisot’s Hanging the Laundry out to Dry (1875) shows a communal drying area at the edge of a town. The women have a large black cart to transport the washing, and are busy putting it out on the lines to dry in the sunny spells. Next to that area is a small allotment where a man is growing vegetables, and in the distance are the chimneys of the city.

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Alfred Sisley (1839–1899), Washerwomen near Champagne (1879), oil on canvas, 60 by 73 cm, location not known. Wikimedia Commons.

While most of Alfred Sisley’s landscapes are relatively unpopulated, he also experimented with introducing more figures into the foreground of some, including this riverside view of Washerwomen near Champagne from 1879. They appear to have brought their washing down to the water in wicker baskets, on an ancient wheelbarrow.

Saturday Mac riddles 273

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

1: Resign, stop and almost quite is final.

2: Almost all round opens a window first.

3: Past preferences when celestial bodies sink below the horizon.

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

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

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

A brief history of QuickTime

We all know about the Desktop Publishing revolution that the first Macs and their PostScript LaserWriter printers brought in the late 1980s, but many have now forgotten the Desktop Video revolution that followed in the next decade. At its heart was support for multimedia in Apple’s QuickTime.

QuickTime isn’t a single piece of software, or even an API in Classic Mac OS, but a whole architecture to support almost any media format you could conceive of. It defines container and file formats for multiple media types, forming the basis for the MPEG-4 standard, extensible encoding and decoding of a wide variety of media using Codecs, and more.

QuickTime development was initially led by Apple’s Bruce Leak, who first demonstrated it at the Worldwide Developers Conference in May 1991 before its release as a separate set of components for System 6 and 7 in December that year. Initially it came with just three Codecs, supporting animated cartoons, regular video and 8-bit still images. Cinepak video and text tracks were added in QuickTime 1.5 the following year, when high-end Macs were capable of playing 320 x 240 video at 30 frames/s, which was groundbreaking at the time.

By the mid-1990s QuickTime was starting to flourish. Hardware support included Apple’s new PowerPC Macs in 1994, and MIDI devices, PCs running Windows, MIPS and SGI workstations. QuickTime VR (for Virtual Reality) allowed the user to navigate the virtual space within panoramic images. QuickTime media were being licensed and distributed on CD-ROMs, innovative games such as Myst depended on it, and the QuickTime project brought in revenue to Apple at a time that it was most needed.

That period also brought conflict. Apple had contracted San Francisco Canyon Company to port QuickTime to Windows, but Intel also hired them to develop a competing product, Video for Windows. Source code developed for Apple ended up in Intel’s product, resulting in a lawsuit in 1994, finally settled three years later.

QuickTime was enhanced through the late 1990s, with version 5 the first to support Mac OS X, and just over a year later, in 2002, that was replaced by version 6. The following year, QuickTime 6.2 only supported Mac OS X, with a slightly older version for Windows.

qtprefs2002

QuickTime was one of the more used parts of what was then named System Prefs, here seen setting the MIME types to be handled by the QuickTime Plug-in, in 2002.

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For most Mac users, bundled QuickTime Player was the standard way to play most types of video, as seen here in 2002.

imovie2002

Apple built apps like iMovie on the strengths of QuickTime. First released in 1999, iMovie is seen here in 2002.

QuickTime version 7 was both the first and last to use the QuickTime Kit (QTKit) Framework in Cocoa.

qtplayercodecs2005

fcphd2004

Apple’s flagship movie editing suite Final Cut Pro started as KeyGrip by Macromedia, but was first released by Apple in 1999; this ‘HD’ was actually version 4.5 in 2004.

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Streaming movies in those days (here 2005) had to cope with a range of relatively low transfer rates, down to 56 Kb/s over a fast dial-up connection with a modem.

qtplayerpro2007

Users had to pay a small fee to upgrade QuickTime Player to the Pro version, unlocking more features including extensive transcoding options, here in 2007.

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Mac OS X Server included a QuickTime Streaming Server, and a separate app, QuickTime Broadcaster (seen here in 2007), could be used to deliver real-time audio and video over a network.

QuickTime X for Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard in 2009 marked the start of its slow decline, with the removal of support for some media formats, most noticeably MIDI. Internally, it had been converted to a Cocoa framework, AVFoundation, with modern 64-bit audio and video Codecs. This anticipated discontinuation of all support for 32-bit code in macOS Catalina. The impact on Codecs that were never ported to 64-bit is still felt today. While QuickTime is still alive in the AVFoundation framework, it’s very different now from its heyday in the opening years of this century.

qtplayer2011

By 2011, QuickTime Player was a shadow of its former self, and a far cry from its earlier Pro version.

qtprefspanther2015

Its pane in System Preferences, here in Panther of 2015, didn’t reflect the inner changes.

imovie2011

This is iMovie in 2011.

Further reading

Wikipedia, good on version details
AppleInsider, long and detailed account by Prince McLean in 2007
Computer History Museum, good background from Hansen Hsu, with a link to YouTube video from three of the creators of QuickTime.

Emily Carr’s paintings: First totems 1892-1911

Few of us ever get to visit the Pacific North-West, but one painter, more than anyone else, has defined its ‘look’. She’s also one of a very few prolific women artists for whom there are sufficient good images to justify a short series of articles: she is Emily Carr (1871–1945), one of the major painters of North America.

She was born in Victoria, British Columbia, in 1871, to parents who had emigrated from England. Their large family was quite affluent thanks to her father’s business dealings, but her mother died of tuberculosis when Emily was only fourteen, and her father died two years later. Thanks to her guardian, Carr started studies at the California School of Design in San Francisco in 1890, but in 1893, when family finances became tight, she had to return home.

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Emily Carr (1871–1945), Melons (1892), oil on canvas, dimensions not known, Provincial Archives of British Columbia, Victoria, BC. The Athenaeum.

Her still life of Melons dates from those years as a student in California, in 1892.

Back in Victoria, she started teaching art in her studio, enabling her to save up enough money to study abroad again.

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Emily Carr (1871–1945), Cedar Cannibal House, Ucluelet, BC (1898), watercolour, 17.9 x 26.5 cm, Provincial Archives of British Columbia, Victoria, BC. The Athenaeum.

In 1898, she travelled to Ucluelet, on the west coast of Vancouver Island, where she stayed among the Nuu-chah-nulth (‘Nootka’) people, her first exposure to First Nations culture. Cedar Cannibal House, Ucluelet, BC (1898) is a watercolour made during that visit. This group of tribes had early contact with European settlers; they had suffered badly from epidemics of infectious disease, and at the time that Carr visited, their population had probably fallen to around 3,500.

The following year, Carr travelled to London, where she studied at the Westminster School of Art. She found the teaching there was too conservative, and didn’t cope well with conditions in the sprawling city, so left there in 1901 to visit Paris, and later the Saint Ives art colony in Cornwall. She stayed there through the winter, being taught in the Porthmeor Studios by Julius Olsson (1864-1942) and his assistant. She later studied further in Hertfordshire under John Whiteley.

Carr then became unwell, and in 1903 entered the East Anglian Sanatorium with a diagnosis of hysteria. She was unable to paint there, and managed to return to Canada in 1904. She resumed teaching, this time in Vancouver. However, she didn’t get on well with society women who attended her classes, and they complained of her behaviour of smoking and swearing at them in class.

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Emily Carr (1871–1945), Breton Church (1906), oil on canvas, dimensions not known, Private collection. Wikimedia Commons.

Carr’s Breton Church (1906) is a puzzle, as she was back in Canada at that time, and didn’t paint in Brittany until after 1910. This image also suggests that it’s high in chroma, which would have been more likely during or after her time studying with Harry Gibb there, when her style became overtly Fauvist.

In 1907, Emily and her sister Alice travelled to see the sights of Alaska, where she was enthralled by the totem poles of Sitka. It was here that Emily Carr first resolved to document the totems and First Nations villages of British Columbia, which may have been influenced by Theodore J Richardson (1855-1914), an American artist who spent years documenting in his paintings the peoples of Sitka and Alaska more generally.

carrskagway1907
Emily Carr (1871–1945), Skagway (1907), watercolour, 26.4 x 35.7 cm, Provincial Archives of British Columbia, Victoria, BC. The Athenaeum.

One of the places that she visited was Skagway (1907), painted here in watercolour. Then a bustling small city, it was the port of entry to the south-east ‘pan-handle’ of Alaska. It had expanded greatly with the gold rush of 1897 onwards, but by the time that the Carr sisters visited that was long since over, and the economy was in sustained decline.

carrtotemwalksitka1907
Emily Carr (1871–1945), Totem Walk at Sitka (1907), watercolour on paper, dimensions not known, Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, Victoria, BC. The Athenaeum.

The sisters also visited Baranof Island, where they saw the famous Totem Walk at Sitka (1907), shown in this watercolour. These totems were made by the Tlingit and Haida peoples, but had been removed from their original locations for display at the St Louis World’s Fair in 1904. Following that, they were moved again into this newly constructed National Park.

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Emily Carr (1871–1945), Arbutus Tree (c 1909), watercolour on paper, 54.7 x 38 cm, Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, Victoria, BC. The Athenaeum.

Carr’s fascination with trees in the landscape developed early during her career. Her Arbutus Tree (c 1909) is a sophisticated watercolour portrait of one such tree, probably painted near Vancouver.

carrbeaconhillpark1909
Emily Carr (1871–1945), Beacon Hill Park (1909), watercolour on paper, 35.2 x 51.9 cm, Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, Victoria, BC. The Athenaeum.

Beacon Hill Park (1909) is a watercolour in Impressionist style, showing a small corner of this 200 acre park in Victoria, on Vancouver Island. This overlooks Juan de Fuca Strait, and is shown here with the flowers of late spring or early summer, with arbutus trees in the distance. The Carr family home bordered on this park.

carrwoodinterior1909
Emily Carr (1871–1945), Wood Interior (1909), watercolour on paper, 72.5 x 54.3 cm, Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, BC. The Athenaeum.

Carr also started painting distinctive works showing the dense trunks of a Wood Interior (1909), here lit powerfully by rays of low sunshine. This was to remain a recurrent motif throughout her career.

carralertbay1910
Emily Carr (1871–1945), Alert Bay (1910), watercolour and graphite on paper, 76.7 x 55.3 cm, Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, BC. The Athenaeum.

Alert Bay (1910) is another watercolour, showing a small village on Cormorant Island, at the opposite (north) end of Vancouver Island from Victoria. Home to the ‘Na̱mg̱is nation of the Kwakwaka’wakw, this illustrates her rapidly developing interest in documenting the totems of the north-west coastal area.

In 1910, Carr returned to Paris with her sister Alice, for a further year of study. Again she found living in a big European city was stifling, and spent time in a spa in Sweden. She studied with Harry Phelan Gibb (1870-1948) at Crécy-en-Brie just outside Paris, and in Brittany. This was her first exposure to Fauvism, and proved a major influence on her style.

carrautumnfrance1911
Emily Carr (1871–1945), Autumn in France (1911), oil on board, dimensions not known, National Gallery of Canada / Musée des beaux-arts du Canada, Ottawa, ON. Wikimedia Commons.

I suspect that Carr’s already high chroma has been further exaggerated in this image of her famous painting of Autumn in France (1911), representing her Fauvism at its height. She uses bold and confident brushstrokes rich with raw colour to show the countryside of Brittany in brilliant summer sunlight.

Two of Carr’s paintings were accepted for the autumn Salon in Paris in 1911. She returned to Vancouver in 1912, and promptly exhibited her Fauvist work in her studio there. She then set out on her project to document the First Nations peoples of the north-west coast, as I’ll relate in the next article in this series.

References

Wikipedia.
Lisa Baldissera (2015) Emily Carr, Life & Work, Art Canada Institute. ISBN 978 1 4871 0044 5. Available in PDF from Art Canada Institute.
Ian M Thom (2013) Emily Carr Collected, Douglas & McIntyre. ISBN 978 1 77100 080 2.

From quarantine to provenance: how xattrs are copied

In the previous article, I outlined what extended attributes do, and how they work in macOS. I also started to explain how some are considered ephemeral, while others are persistent. This article continues from there, by documenting how macOS decides what to do with them when a file containing xattrs is copied.

Although Apple does now explain a little about this in the context of the FileProvider framework and syncing with cloud services, the only useful documentation is provided in man xattr_name_with_flags, and two source code files that are part of the open source copyfile component.

In 2013, as part of its enhancements for iCloud in particular, Apple added support for flags on xattrs to indicate how those xattrs should be handled when the file is copied in various ways. Rather than change the file system, Apple opted for what’s perhaps best seen as an elegant kludge: appending characters to the end of the xattr’s name.

If you work with xattrs, you’ve probably already seen this in those whose name ends with a hash # then one or more characters: that’s actually the flags, not part of the name, what Apple refers to as a ‘property list’. To avoid confusion I won’t use that term here, but refer to them as xattr flags. A common example of this is com.apple.lastuseddate#PS, which is seen quite widely. In recent years, Apple has added one flag, B, and there’s another to come with Sequoia.

Xattr flags

Flags can be upper or lower case letters C, N, P, S or B, and invariably follow the # separator, which is presumably otherwise forbidden from use in a xattr’s name. Upper case sets or enables that property, while lower case clears or disables that property. There are currently (macOS 14.6.1) five properties:

  • C: XATTR_FLAG_CONTENT_DEPENDENT, which ties the flag and the file contents, so the xattr is rewritten when the file data changes. This is normally used for checksums and hashes, text encoding, and position information. The xattr is preserved for copy and share, but not in a safe save.
  • P: XATTR_FLAG_NO_EXPORT, which doesn’t export or share the xattr, but normally preserves it during copying.
  • N: XATTR_FLAG_NEVER_PRESERVE, which ensures the xattr is never copied, even when copying the file.
  • S: XATTR_FLAG_SYNCABLE, which ensures the xattr is preserved during syncing with services such as iCloud Drive. Default behaviour is for xattrs to be stripped during syncing, to minimise the amount of data to be transferred, but this will override that.
  • B: XATTR_FLAG_ONLY_BACKUP, which keeps the xattr only in backups, including Time Machine (added recently).

These operate within another general restriction of xattrs: their name cannot exceed a maximum of 127 UTF-8 characters.

Defaults

macOS provides a standard ‘whitelist’ of default flag settings for different types of xattr. These aren’t contained in a configuration file, but are baked into the xattr flag code, where as of macOS 14.6.1 the following default flags are set for different types of xattr (* here represents the wild card):

  • com.apple.quarantinePCS
  • com.apple.TextEncodingCS
  • com.apple.metadata:kMDItemCollaborationIdentifierB
  • com.apple.metadata:kMDItemIsSharedB
  • com.apple.metadata:kMDItemSharedItemCurrentUserRoleB
  • com.apple.metadata:kMDItemOwnerNameB
  • com.apple.metadata:kMDItemFavoriteRankB
  • com.apple.metadata:* (except those above) – PS
  • com.apple.security.*S
  • com.apple.ResourceForkPCS
  • com.apple.FinderInfoPCS
  • com.apple.root.installedPC

Copy intents

Also contained in the source code is a table of intents, that explains how different types of copy are affected by different combinations of xattr flag. Currently, those are:

  • XATTR_OPERATION_INTENT_COPY – a simple copy, preserves xattrs that don’t have flag N or B
  • XATTR_OPERATION_INTENT_SAVE – save, where the content may be changing, preserves xattrs that don’t have flag C or N or B
  • XATTR_OPERATION_INTENT_SHARE – share or export, preserves xattrs that don’t have flag P or N or B
  • XATTR_OPERATION_INTENT_SYNC – sync to a service such as iCloud Drive, preserves xattrs if they have flag S, or have neither N nor B
  • XATTR_OPERATION_INTENT_BACKUP – back up, e.g. using Time Machine, preserves xattrs that don’t have flag N

Use

If you want a xattr preserved when it passes through iCloud, you therefore need to give it a name ending in the xattr flag S, such as co.eclecticlight.MyTest#S. Sure enough, when xattrs with that flag are passed through iCloud Drive, those xattrs are preserved even if the default rule would treat them differently. Similarly, to have a xattr that is stripped even when you just make a local copy of that file, append #N to its name.

There’s a further limit imposed on xattrs synced by FileProvider, including those for iCloud Drive, that strips all individual xattrs that are larger than a certain size. Apple gives that as “about 32KiB total for each item”, and my measurements performed in the recent past put that at about 32,650 bytes, slightly less than 32,767.

In itself, this information is valuable if you ever use any metadata stored in xattrs. It’s used in my intergrity-checking utilities Dintch, Fintch and cintch to ensure the xattr containing a file’s hash isn’t stripped by passage through iCloud Drive, for instance. On Tuesday morning next week, once Sequoia has been released, I’ll explain how Apple has extended this system to achieve something that many have been wishing for.

The Real Country: 4 Gleaning

Once a cereal crop had been harvested and gathered for threshing, the fields might then be scavenged for any remaining grain, a process known as gleaning. Although this has been described since Old Testament times, there’s uncertainty as to who gleaned, and where they were able to glean. This article shows a selection of paintings from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries showing gleaning, to see if they cast further light on those questions.

Biblical accounts establish that gleaning was then a means for the poorest in society to acquire their own free supply of grain, and was a right of the poor. Some assume that the same practice continued, under the same right, until it fell into disuse in the late twentieth century. That ignores complex changes in land ownership and rights, and national law, and makes assumptions about rural economies that may not be correct.

The majority of those living in the country between 1500 and 1800 had little need for money. Almost everything they required in life was grown or made locally, and there were few if any consumer goods that they would need to purchase. Most lived in two sets of clothes: working dress, which was handed down, patched and repaired until it was unwearable, and a Sunday outfit worn when attending church, similarly inherited. Furniture was scant, made from local wood, and handed down through generations. Food and other goods that the family couldn’t supply itself would normally be obtained by barter with a neighbour. While those with more land and animals could sell them at market, and use the proceeds to buy luxuries, that remained out of the reach of the majority. It appears to have been that majority who gleaned the fields after harvest.

Although some countries in Europe retained gleaning rights on the strength of Biblical law, as land was enclosed and brought into increasingly complex systems of private ownership and rights, some land owners challenged that ancient right, and in 1788 a notable English legal case set the precedent that there was no universal right to glean, no matter how poor you might be. Nevertheless, many landowners continued to allow gleaning on their land, and in some areas these were celebrated alongside the harvest itself. Gleaning, like much else in the country, thus varied from country to country, and by region and village, but wasn’t confined to the poorest by any means.

One pitfall in looking at paintings of gleaning is that some are retelling the Biblical story of Ruth and Boaz, rather than depicting contemporary gleaning.

The Gleaning Field c.1833 by Samuel Palmer 1805-1881
Samuel Palmer (1805–1881), The Gleaning Field (c 1833), tempera on mahogany, 30.5 x 45.4 cm, The Tate Gallery (Bequeathed by Mrs Louisa Mary Garrett 1936), London. © The Tate Gallery and Photographic Rights © Tate (2016), CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 (Unported), http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/palmer-the-gleaning-field-n04842

In Samuel Palmer’s The Gleaning Field (c 1833), as in other accounts, gleaners appear to have been mostly women.

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Jules Breton (1827–1906), The Gleaners (1854), oil on canvas, 93 × 138 cm, The National Gallery of Ireland/Gailearaí Náisiúnta na hÉireann, Dublin, Ireland. The Athenaeum.

In 1854, Jules Breton returned to live in his home village of Courrières, not far from Calais in north-east France, and started painting agricultural workers in the local landscape. His style changed dramatically, and the following year he enjoyed success with his first masterpiece, The Gleaners (1854), which won him a third-class medal at the 1855 Paris Salon. Overseeing this gleaning is the garde champêtre or village policeman, an older man distinguished by his official hat and armband, who was probably an army veteran. In the background, behind the grainstacks that were later to be such popular motifs for the Impressionists, is the village church tower, surrounded by its houses.

Breton had started to plan this painting soon after his return. He made a series of studies, several of which survive, for its figures, but the view appears to be faithful to reality. The figure of the young woman walking across the view from the right (in front of the garde champêtre) seems to have been modelled on the daughter of Breton’s first art teacher, whom the artist married in 1858.

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Jean-François Millet (1814–1875), The Gleaners (1857), oil on canvas, 83.5 × 110 cm, Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Wikimedia Commons.

Jean-François Millet’s hope for the Salon two years later was his substantial painting of The Gleaners (1857), which is completely different in concept. The distant wagon, grainstacks, and village may appear common elements, as are the three women bent over to glean in the foreground, but that is as far as the similarities go.

Millet’s composition is sparse, concentrating on those three figures. There are no distractions, such as the garde champêtre to add colour or humour: it’s all about poverty, and smacked of socialism; unlike Breton’s painting it got the thumbs-down from both the rich and the middle classes who frequented the Salon. Millet had also been born and brought up in the country, in his case further west on the north coast of France, in the Normandy village of Gruchy, where he had worked on the land.

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Jules Breton (1827–1906), Calling in the Gleaners (1859), oil on canvas, 90 x 176 cm, Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Wikimedia Commons.

Breton’s Calling in the Gleaners (also known as The Recall of the Gleaners, Artois) (1859) is one of the treasures of the Musée d’Orsay. With the light now fading, and the first thin crescent of the waxing moon in the sky, the loose flock of weary women and children make their way back home with their hard-won wheat. At the far left, the garde champêtre calls the last in, so that he can go home for the night. Behind them a flock of sheep is grazing on the adjacent pasture.

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Eugène Burnand (1850–1921), Gleaners (1880), oil, dimensions not known, musée Eugène Burnand, Moudon, Switzerland. Wikimedia Commons.

Painted in 1880, Eugène Burnand’s Gleaners are set in high Alpine meadows, two girls with meagre gleanings. They are dressed in plain working clothes, but don’t appear particularly poor. Behind them a cart carries away the main harvest.

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Léon Augustin Lhermitte (1844–1925), Gleaners (1887), oil on canvas, dimensions not known, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA. Wikimedia Commons.

Léon Augustin Lhermitte’s most enduring expression of rural poverty was in showing four women salvaging the remains left in the fields after the harvest: the Gleaners, here his version of 1887. Lhermitte was another son of the country, this time Mont-Saint-Père in Picardy, inland in north-east France, although his father was a schoolteacher.

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Hans Andersen Brendekilde (1857–1942), Cowed (1887), media not known, 126 x 152.3 cm, Fyns Kunstmuseum, Odense, Denmark. Wikimedia Commons.

Cowed from 1887 shows gleaners at work in a field after the harvest in Denmark, but there’s much more to Hans Andersen Brendekilde’s story than that. The owner of the large farm in the left distance has gathered in their grain, and their harvesters have been paid off for their effort. Then out come the gleaners to scavenge what they can from the fields.

The family group in front of us consists of three generations: mother is still bent over, hard at work gleaning her handful of corn. Her husband is taking a short break, sitting on the sack in his large blue wooden clogs. Stood looking at him is their daughter, engaged in a serious conversation with her father, as her young child plays on the ground.

The daughter is finely dressed under her coarse gleaning apron, and wears a hat more appropriate to someone in service as a maid, or similar, in a rich household in the nearby town. She looks anxious and flushed, and is almost certainly an unmarried mother, abandoned by her young child’s father, and it’s surely she who is oppressed or ‘cowed’. Their difficult family discussion is being watched by another young woman at the far left, who might be a younger sister, perhaps.

Brendekilde took his name from the small village of Brændekilde, near Odense on the island of Funen in Denmark. The son of a clog maker, he lived with his grandparents for several years when a child, and at the age of ten made his living as a shepherd.

Camille Pissarro, The Gleaners (1889), oil on canvas, 81 x 65.5 cm, Kunstmuseum, Basel. WikiArt.
Camille Pissarro (1830-1903), The Gleaners (1889), oil on canvas, 65.5 x 81 cm, Kunstmuseum, Basel, Switzerland. WikiArt.

The Impressionists seldom seem to have painted controversial social issues. One of the few exceptions to this proved a lesson for Camille Pissarro in the practicality of Divisionism. He started work on his intensely sensory and idyllic painting The Gleaners in early 1888, using a squared-up study in gouache to finalise his composition. He found the painting hard, and wrote that he needed models so that he could complete its detail, which did the following year.

As Europe moved into the twentieth century, gleaning became increasingly unreal and romantic.

Gleaners Coming Home 1904 by Sir George Clausen 1852-1944
Sir George Clausen (1852–1944), Gleaners Coming Home (1904), oil on canvas, 92.7 x 122.6 cm, The Tate Gallery (Presented by C.N. Luxmoore 1929), London. Photographic Rights © Tate 2016, CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 (Unported), http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/clausen-gleaners-coming-home-n04486

Gleaners were still commonplace in the Essex grain fields at harvest time, trying to scrape enough waste grain from the ground to feed their families. In Sir George Clausen’s Gleaners Coming Home from 1904, swirling brushstrokes make the gleaners’ improbably smart clothes appear to move as they walk home in the evening sunlight.

The Gleaners Returning 1908 by Sir George Clausen 1852-1944
Sir George Clausen (1852–1944), The Gleaners Returning (1908), oil on canvas, 83.8 x 66.0 cm, The Tate Gallery (Presented by the Trustees of the Chantrey Bequest 1908), London. Photographic Rights © Tate 2016, CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 (Unported), http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/clausen-the-gleaners-returning-n02259

Clausen’s The Gleaners Returning (1908) is a marvellous contre-jour (into the light) view, again with swirling brushstrokes imparting movement in the women’s clothes, and no hint of their poverty.

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Léon Augustin Lhermitte (1844–1925), Gleaners Near Haystacks (1912), oil on canvas, 89.5 × 128.9 cm, Private collection. Wikimedia Commons.

Lhermitte’s Gleaners Near Haystacks (1912) shows a group of women gleaning, two of them almost bent double.

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Léon Augustin Lhermitte (1844–1925), Gleaning Women (1920), oil on canvas, 65.4 x 81.2 cm, National Museum of Western Art 国立西洋美術館 (Kokuritsu seiyō bijutsukan), Tokyo, Japan. Wikimedia Commons.

Even when he was well into his seventies, Lhermitte seemed able to find time and energy for just another painting of gleaners, in his Gleaning Women of 1920.

With the increasing depopulation of Europe’s rural areas and the introduction of mechanical methods of harvesting, gleaning seems to have died out by the middle of the twentieth century, only to reappear around 2000. It’s now an organised voluntary activity arranged with farmers, to recover crops unsuitable for mechanical harvesting, and other recoverable sources.

As with many other aspects of rural life, gleaning appears to have varied according to era and location. In some areas it seems to have been confined to those who were struggling to provide sufficient food for themselves, in the Biblical tradition. In others it was more general, and a normal phase of the harvest supplying most families with a free top-up of grain they could get ground by a miller to add to their supply of bread in the coming winter. It could also yield substantial amounts of grain: one report claims a widow and her three sons gleaned 325 kg (720 pounds) of wheat from one harvest. After all, if left in the field where it was, it would only have been ploughed back into the ground later in the autumn, and gone to waste.

Reference

David Hoseason Morgan (1982) Harvesters and Harvesting 1840-1900, Routledge ISBN 978 1 138 74476 9.

From quarantine to provenance: extended attributes

One of the innovative features in classic Mac OS was its use of resource forks, allowing structured metadata to be attached to any file. When Mac OS X merged that with the more traditional Unix approach adopted by NeXTSTEP, those were nearly lost. Classic Mac apps were restructured from storing most of their components, including their executable code, in their resource fork, when Mac OS X flattened those into an app bundle consisting of a hierarchy of separate files in folders, without any resources.

For the first four years of Mac OS X resource forks were reluctantly tolerated, until the solution came in 10.4 with the introduction of extended attributes, including one to contain what had previously been stored in the resource fork, which became an extended attribute or xattr with the name com.apple.ResourceFork.

All files in HFS+ and APFS (and other file systems) contain a fairly standard set of metadata known as attributes, information about a file such as its name, datestamps and permissions. Xattrs are extensions to those that contain almost any other type of metadata, the first notable xattr coming in Mac OS X 10.5, named com.apple.quarantine. That contains quarantine information for apps and other files downloaded from the internet, in a format so ancient that the quarantine flag is stored not in binary but as text.

The quarantine xattr provides a good demonstration of some of the valuable properties of xattrs: it can be attached to any file (or folder) without changing its data, and isn’t included when calculating CDHashes for code signatures. It can thus be added safely without any danger of altering the app or its code, although it does change the way in which macOS handles the code, by triggering security checks used to verify it isn’t malicious. Once those have been run, the flag inside the quarantine xattr can be changed to indicate it has been checked successfully.

Far from being a passing phase, or dying out as some had expected, xattrs have flourished since those early days. This has happened largely unseen by the user: few change anything revealed in the Finder’s Get Info dialog, although they’re used to store some forms of visible metadata such as Finder tags, and the URL used to download items from the internet. Editing xattrs is normally performed silently: you’re not made aware of changes in the quarantine xattr, and in most cases the only way to manage xattrs is to use the xattr command tool, or one of very few apps like xattred that can edit and manage them.

Examples

Among the well-known and important xattrs you can encounter are:

  • com.apple.quarantine the quarantine xattr, containing a quarantine flag
  • com.apple.rootless marks items individually protected by System Integrity Protection (SIP)
  • com.apple.provenance contains data about the origin of apps that have been quarantined
  • com.apple.metadata:kMDItemCopyright records copyright info
  • com.apple.metadata:kMDItemWhereFroms the origin of downloaded file as a URL
  • com.apple.metadata:_kMDItemUserTags Finder tags
  • com.apple.TextEncoding reveals text file encoding
  • com.apple.ResourceFork a classic Mac resource fork

Storage

In APFS and HFS+, xattrs aren’t stored with file data, nor with a file or folder’s normal attributes.

fileobjects

For smaller extended attributes up to 3,804 bytes, their data is stored with the xattr in the file system metadata. Larger extended attributes are stored as data streams, with separate records, but still separately from the file data. Apple doesn’t give a limit on the maximum size of xattrs, but they can certainly exceed 200 KB, and each file and folder can have an effectively unlimited number of them.

Persistence

Most file systems to which macOS can write either handle xattrs natively (HFS+, APFS), or macOS uses a scheme to preserve them, as in the hidden files written to FAT and ExFAT volumes. NFS is an important exception, and files copied to NFS will have all their xattrs stripped. Neither are extended attributes unique to Macs: most file systems used by Linux support them, and even Windows can at a push.

Because xattrs contain a wide range of metadata, some are treated as being ephemeral, others as persistent. Moving files with xattrs around within the same volume shouldn’t affect their xattrs, as that takes place within the same file system. Copying files to another volume, even if both use APFS, may leave some xattrs behind if they’re considered to be ephemeral.

iCloudDriveFileSummary4

The most complex situation is when a file with xattrs is moved to iCloud Drive. The Mac that originated that file is likely to retain most if not all of its xattrs, because the local copy remains within the same volume and file system. However, not all xattrs are copied up to iCloud storage, so other Macs accessing that file may only see a small selection of them. The rules for which xattrs are to be preserved during file copying, including in iCloud Drive, are baked into macOS, and the subject of the next article.

Reading visual art: 157 Hospitality in life

The previous article looked at paintings of three classical myths which extolled the principle of hospitality to strangers by warning people of the dire consequences of failing to respect it: Atlas was turned to stone, people were drowned in a flood, and others turned into frogs. There are also many examples of hospitality given in the Old and New Testaments, although these start to reflect changing values which perhaps anticipated more modern codes.

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Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859–1937), Abraham’s Oak (1905), oil on canvas, 54.3 x 72.7 cm, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC. Wikimedia Commons.

Henry Ossawa Tanner’s painting of Abraham’s Oak (1905) shows an ancient oak tree that died as recently as 1996. Tradition holds this to mark the place where three angels appeared to Abraham, or Abraham pitched his tent. The location is just southwest of Mamre, near Hebron, and its story runs that Abraham washed the feet of three strangers who appeared there, and showed them hospitality. They revealed themselves to be angels, and informed Abraham that his wife would become pregnant and bear him a son.

Perhaps the most revealing stories are those in the teachings of Jesus Christ, concerning Israelites whose origins were in Samaria, the Samaritans, who by that time had become shunned by the Jews, hardly in accordance with the ancient code of hospitality.

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Maximilien Luce (1858–1941), The Good Samaritan (1896), oil on canvas, 76.2 × 101.6 cm, Private collection. Wikimedia Commons.

In Maximilien Luce’s Good Samaritan (1896), for example, the artist combines a brilliantly colourful dusk landscape with a classical narrative painting, showing the well-known parable of the Good Samaritan from the New Testament, in which a Samaritan gives aid to a traveller who has been robbed and beaten up on the roadside. Jesus uses this to explain who your ‘neighbour’ is, a key point in the obligation of hospitality.

Less known is the story of Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well, told in the Gospel of John, chapter 4, verses 4-26, in which Christ arrived at a well in Samaria, tired and thirsty after his journey. A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus asked her to give him a drink. That surprised her, as at that time most Jews wouldn’t have spoken to a Samaritan like her. They then became involved in conversation, in which Jesus preached to her, and revealed himself as the Messiah.

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Henri-Jean Guillaume Martin (1860–1943), Le Christ et la samaritaine (Christ and the Samaritan Woman) (1894), oil, dimensions not known, Musée de Cahors Henri-Martin, Cahors, France. Wikimedia Commons.

Henri-Jean Guillaume Martin’s Christ and the Samaritan Woman (1894) depicts this using fine brushstrokes to build colour and form, and in places those strokes have become organised in the way that Vincent van Gogh’s rather coarser strokes did.

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Odilon Redon (1840–1916), Christ and the Samaritan Woman (The White Flower Bouquet) (c 1895), oil on canvas, 64.8 × 50 cm, Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Wikimedia Commons.

More startling still is Odilon Redon’s Christ and the Samaritan Woman (The White Flower Bouquet) from about 1895. In this unique interpretation, Christ appears to be holding a bouquet of white flowers for the woman. There are other adornments, such as the elaborate floral object between the two, and a bright blue object high above Christ’s head. Both the figures have their eyes closed.

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Jacek Malczewski (1854–1929), Christ and the Samaritan Woman (1911), oil on canvas, dimensions not known, Lviv National Art Gallery, Lviv, The Ukraine. Wikimedia Commons.

The brilliant Polish artist Jacek Malczewski cast himself in the title role of his Christ and the Samaritan Woman from 1911.

Hospitality to strangers has been a recurrent theme in the lives of many different saints.

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Bartolomé Esteban Murillo (1617–1682), Saint Thomas of Villanueva Dividing his Clothes among Beggar Boys (c 1667), oil on canvas, 219.7 × 149.2 cm, Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati, OH. Wikimedia Commons.

Bartolomé Esteban Murillo painted a particularly apposite scene in his Saint Thomas of Villanueva (Villanova) Dividing his Clothes among Beggar Boys from about 1667. This shows a story from the childhood of Saint Thomas of Villanueva de los Infantes (1488-1555), claiming that when he was a child, he often came home naked, having given all his clothing to poorer children. Thomas became a friar of the order of Saint Augustine, and was famed for his care of the poor when he later became the Archbishop of Valencia.

Thomas is the boy in the clean white shirt to the right of centre, who has just given his jacket to the boy to the left, who is dressed in dirty rags. It looks like Thomas is preparing to part with his trousers too.

Early paintings of hospitals also stress their original role in hospitality.

The sick have traditionally been cared for by their families. But for those without families, particularly anyone away from home, there have long been charitable institutions and others prepared to offer hospitality. They could have been slaves in the Roman empire, soldiers in mediaeval Baghdad, those returning from the Crusades in Europe, or refugees crossing mountainous areas through passes.

Few early hospitals provided much in the way of medical care, which was generally expensive and in any case ineffective. Most were little more than large inns, and any care staff were usually members of religious orders. A few took in cases of transmissible diseases which had become proscribed locally, conditions such as leprosy, and plague, in an attempt to confine the disease and prevent spread. The richer you were, though, the greater the chance and desire of being nursed at home.

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Jacopo Pontormo (1494–1557), Episode from Life in Hospital (1514), fresco, 91 × 150 cm, Galleria dell’Accademia, Florence, Italy. Wikimedia Commons.

Jacopo Pontormo’s fresco showing an Episode from Life in Hospital from 1514 shows nuns from a religious order caring for other women, perhaps the sick from their own convent.

The rise of social realism and Naturalism during the nineteenth century provides insights into contemporary society, and its attitudes to strangers and those outcast from society.

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Évariste Carpentier (1845–1922), The Foreigners (1887), oil on canvas, 145 x 212 cm, Koninklijke Musea voor Schone Kunsten van België / Musées Royaux des Beaux Arts de Belgique, Brussels, Belgium. Wikimedia Commons.

Évariste Carpentier’s The Foreigners from 1887 shows the arrival of outsiders in a close-knit community. At the right, sat at a table under the window, a mother and daughter dressed in the black of recent bereavement are the foreigners looking for some hospitality. Instead, everyone in the room, and many of those in the crowded bar behind, stares at them as if they have just arrived from Mars. Even the dog has come up to see whether they smell right.

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Augustus Edwin Mulready (1844–1905), Uncared For (1871), oil on canvas, 101 × 76 cm, location not known. Wikimedia Commons.

Although many of the paintings of vagrants made by Augustus Edwin Mulready appear over-sentimental or even disingenuous, and his models are invariably sparklingly clean and well cared-for, some had more worthy messages. His Uncared For from 1871 shows a young girl with exceptionally large brown eyes staring straight at the viewer as she proffers a tiny bunch of violets.

Behind her and her brother are the remains of posters: at the top, The Triumph of Christianity is attributed to the French artist and illustrator Gustave Doré, who illustrated an edition of the Bible in 1866, visited London on several occasions afterwards, and in 1871 produced illustrations for London: A Pilgrimage, published the following year, showing London’s down and outs.

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Jean-Eugène Buland (1852–1926), Alms of a Beggar (1880), oil on canvas, 117 × 89 cm, location not known. Wikimedia Commons.

Naturalists like Jean-Eugène Buland took on challenging motifs with challenging readings. In Alms of a Beggar (1880), a young woman dressed immaculately in white is sat outside a church seeking charity. Approaching her, a coin in his right hand, is a man who can only be a beggar himself. His clothes are patched on patches, faded and filthy, and he wears battered old wooden shoes. Yet he is about to give the young woman what is probably his last coin. And we don’t doubt that she accepted it.

macOS Sequoia ships next week; here’s a SilentKnight update for it

Apple will release macOS 15.0 Sequoia on 16 September, that’s next Monday, alongside iOS and iPadOS 18.0, and upgrades and updates for lesser mortals. Among the latter are Sonoma 14.7 and Ventura 13.7, as I’ll explain later. Sequoia introduces two important changes to security data checked and updated by SilentKnight, for which I have built and notarized another new version of that app, 2.11, which is essential for anyone intending to upgrade to Sequoia, and worthwhile for all running Catalina or later.

What’s coming next week

Apple has just provided release candidates for the following three new versions of macOS:

  • Sequoia 15.0, its first full release,
  • Sonoma 14.7, its first security-only update,
  • Ventura 13.7, the first of its security-only updates for its final year of support.

There’s not expected to be any update to Monterey 12.7.6, which is no longer supported, even with security updates.

The minor version numbers of Sonoma and Ventura will then be the same, the first time this has happened. In previous release cycles, the start of the first year of security-only updates has been with x.6, as it was with Ventura, and proceeded through the year with versions x.6.1, x.6.2, and so on. Over the coming year, we can expect 14.7.1 and 13.7.1, then 14.7.2 and 13.7.2, continuing until Ventura reaches the end of its third and final year of support in a year’s time.

Sequoia 15.1, the first release with AI support, is now expected in October, and continues in beta-testing, alongside AI-enhanced versions of iOS and iPadOS in versions 18.1.

TCC in Sequoia

The TCC database in /Library/Apple/Library/Bundles/TCC_Compatibility.bundle was introduced in Mojave (when it had a different location, of course), and has been updated with each new major version of macOS since. That has now vanished, and I can find no trace of it, nor any apparent substitute. If you run SilentKnight 2.10 in Sequoia, that will be reported as an error, so version 2.11 addresses that by omitting that result both from its display box and the text report below.

silentknight11

XProtect in Sequoia

Since it was first introduced many moons and versions of macOS ago, there has been a bundle named XProtect.bundle in CoreServices, most recently in the path /Library/Apple/System/Library/CoreServices/XProtect.bundle, that has provided data for XProtect scans of executable code and other security services. That bundle has been updated frequently in downloads labelled XProtectPlistConfigData. Although that can still be present in Sequoia, XProtect now uses a completely different source for its data, that is normally updated through iCloud’s CloudKit rather than Software Update.

The result is that your Mac can have an up-to-date XProtect.bundle in the normal location, but XProtect itself may not be up-to-date at all. For example, in fresh installs of Sequoia, XProtect.bundle is usually absent, and the new tool to check its version may report a number of 0.

SilentKnight versions 2.10 and 2.11 have been updated to cope with this major change, which Apple has apparently not seen fit to document (yet). They check the correct current version using a new command tool, and report that version number faithfully. At present, though, SilentKnight isn’t able to update this new form of XProtect. You can either leave macOS to do that itself in its own time, or you can run a command in Terminal to force the update immediately:
sudo xprotect update
following which you’ll need to authenticate with your admin user password.

I intend to address this more completely in SilentKnight version 3, but for the time being this is fully documented in SilentKnight’s Help book and Help Reference, in these latest versions.

SilentKnight, Skint, SystHist, LockRattler

SilentKnight version 2.11 is strongly recommended for anyone intending to update to Sequoia this year, and, as it also fixes a bug in reporting Studio Display firmware in VMs, is worthwhile for those remaining with Sonoma for longer. It’s available from here: silentknight211
from Downloads above, on its Product Page, and through its auto-update mechanism.

Thankfully, as Skint doesn’t check TCC, the current version 1.08 remains fully compatible with Sequoia. The current release of SystHist, 1.20, works well with Sequoia too, and usefully distinguishes between the two different types of XProtect update, XProtectPlistConfigData delivered through Software Update, and XProtectCloudKitUpdate the new one obtained through iCloud instead.

I don’t intend to update LockRattler for the time being. It won’t report the true version of XProtect, but does report that it can’t find TCC or the GKE data. Otherwise it should continue to function as expected in Sequoia.

More to come in Sequoia 15.0

These changes to XProtect are but one of the significant changes that Apple hasn’t yet mentioned. Once 15.0 has been released, I’ll be delighted to provide fuller details of others.

Summary

  • On Monday 16 September, Apple will release macOS 15.0, and security updates 14.7 and 13.7.
  • Monterey is no longer supported.
  • Download and install SilentKnight 2.11 if you’re intending to upgrade to Sequoia this year.
  • Skint and SystHist remain fully compatible with Sequoia.
  • Watch here for further news on Sequoia once it has been released next week.
  • Sequoia 15.1 with AI will be released next month (October).

Reading visual art: 156 Hospitality in myth

In the past, hospitality to strangers was high on the list of virtues expected of everyone, however rich or poor they might have been. To ensure that those living in the ancient world respected the code of hospitality, there were several myths to help guide the mind. Today I look at how paintings of those myths have communicated the need to be hospitable, and tomorrow’s sequel will look at more recent religious and moral teaching.

The first myth is brief, part of the saga of Perseus and Andromeda, but memorable.

burnejonesperseus6
Edward Burne-Jones (1833–1898), The Perseus Series: Atlas Turned to Stone (1878), bodycolour, 152.5 × 190 cm, Southampton City Art Gallery, Southampton, England. Wikimedia Commons.

After Perseus has beheaded the gorgon Medusa, he flies over the desert sands of Libya, the blood still dripping from Medusa’s head and falling onto the sand to form snakes. With dusk approaching, he decides to set down in the lands of the giant Atlas. He introduces himself to Atlas, including explanation of his divine paternity, and asks for rest and lodging for the night.

The giant, mindful of a prophecy that a son of Jupiter will ruin him, rudely refuses his request, and starts to wrestle with his spurned guest. Perseus responds by offering him a gift, then, taking care to avert his own face, points Medusa’s face at Atlas, who is promptly transformed into a mountain.

In Edward Burne-Jones’ Atlas Turned to Stone (1878) the giant has been turned to stone and now stands bearing the cosmos on his shoulders as Perseus flies off to Aethiopia.

The definitive classical myth stressing the importance of showing hospitality is the story of Philemon (husband) and Baucis (wife), as told in Ovid’s Metamorphoses Book 8. This pious elderly couple live in a town in Phrygia, now west central Anatolia, in Turkey. One day, two ordinary peasants walked into the town, looking for somewhere to stay for the night. Everyone else rejected them, but when they asked this couple, who were among the poorest inhabitants and had but a simple rustic cottage, they were welcomed in. Philemon and Baucis served their guests food and wine, and when they realised they were entertaining gods, the couple raised their hands in supplication and craved indulgence for their humble cottage and fare.

Revealing themselves as the gods Jupiter/Zeus and Mercury/Hermes, the guests told them to leave town, as it was about to be destroyed, together with all those who hadn’t offered them hospitality. The gods then took the couple out to climb a mountain, telling them not to look back until they had reached the top. Once at the summit, they turned to see the town obliterated by a flood; their cottage had been spared, turned into a temple, and Philemon and Baucis were made its guardians.

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Adam Elsheimer (1578–1610), Jupiter and Mercury with Philemon and Baucis (1609-10), oil on copper, 16.5 x 22.5 cm, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden. Wikimedia Commons.

Adam Elsheimer, in his small oil on copper painting Jupiter and Mercury with Philemon and Baucis (1609-10), shows Philemon (right) and Baucis (centre right) giving their hospitality generously to Jupiter (left) and Mercury (centre left), in their tiny, dark cottage. All four are depicted in more contemporary dress, although Mercury’s winged helmet is an unmistakeable clue as to his identity. Their modest stock of food is piled in a basket in the right foreground, and a goose is just distinguishable in the gloom at the lower edge of the painting, below Mercury’s feet.

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David Rijckaert (III) (1612–1661), Philemon and Baucis Giving Hospitality to Jupiter and Mercury (date not known), oil on panel, 54 x 80 cm, Private collection. Wikimedia Commons.

David Rijckaert, in his Philemon and Baucis Giving Hospitality to Jupiter and Mercury, gives what has become the most popular depiction: Mercury (left) and Jupiter (left of centre) seated at the table, with Philemon (behind table) and Baucis (centre) waiting on their every need, ensuring that they eat and drink their fill. Baucis has almost caught their evasive goose, and an additional person is shown in the background preparing and serving food for the gods.

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Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn (1606–1669), Baucis and Philemon (1658), oil on panel mounted on panel, 54.5 × 68.5 cm, The National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Courtesy of The National Gallery of Art, via Wikimedia Commons.

Rembrandt’s Baucis and Philemon (1658) shows Jupiter (looking decidedly Christlike) and Mercury (the younger, almost juvenile, figure) sat at the table of a very dark and rough cottage, lit by a lamp behind Mercury.

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Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn (1606–1669), Baucis and Philemon (detail) (1658), oil on panel mounted on panel, 54.5 × 68.5 cm, The National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Courtesy of The National Gallery of Art, via Wikimedia Commons.

Philemon and Baucis are crouched, chasing their evasive goose towards Jupiter. A humble bowl of food is in the centre of the table, and there is a glass of what appears to be beer. As is usual in Rembrandt’s narrative paintings, he dresses them in contemporary rather than historic costume.

The moral here doesn’t need to be spelled out any further: fail in your duty to offer hospitality to strangers and the gods may end your life. Another myth told by Ovid in his Metamorphoses isn’t quite as damning. Instead of death, you could be turned into a frog instead. So says Ovid’s account of the Lycians who shunned the goddess Leto when all she needed was a drink of water.

Fearing reprisals from the jealous Hera (Juno), when Leto (Latona) is about to give birth to her twins, she flees to Lycia, at the western end of the south coast of modern Turkey. This was a centre for Leto’s worship, but at some stage the goddess must have become scorned by those living in the country there.

When the twins, Diana and Apollo, had drunk Leto’s milk and she was dry and thirsty under the hot sun, she saw a small lake among marshes, where local peasants were cutting reeds. She went down and was about to drink from the lake when those locals stopped her. Leto told them that drinking the water was a common right, and that she only intended to drink and not to bathe in it.

The locals continued to prevent her, threatening her and hurling insults. They then stirred up the mud on the bottom of the lake, to muddy the water, incurring the goddess’s anger and causing her to curse them to remain in that pool forever as frogs. It’s this transformation that forms the basis for the many paintings of this myth.

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Annibale Carracci (1560–1609), Latona and the Lycian Peasants (date not known), oil on canvas, 90.6 x 78 cm, Arcidiecézní muzeum Kroměříž, Olomouc Museum of Art, Kroměříž, The Czech Republic. Wikimedia Commons.

Annibale Carracci’s Latona and the Lycian Peasants probably from 1590-1620 is the first truly masterly painting of this myth. Latona is here placing her curse on the locals, and behind them one appears to have already been transformed into a frog. Although the babies’ heads are disproportionately small (as was the case for several centuries), they and their mother are very realistically portrayed, and contrast markedly with the uncouth and obdurate locals.

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Jan Brueghel the Elder (1568–1625), Latona and the Lycian Peasants (1595-1610), oil on panel, 37 × 56 cm, Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Wikimedia Commons.

Jan Brueghel the Elder’s panel showing Latona and the Lycian Peasants (1595-1610) is one of the finest depictions. Set in a dense forest, surely inappropriate for Lycia, the locals are busy cutting reeds and foraging. Leto, at the bottom left, is seen remonstrating with a peasant, over to the right. As the detail below shows, the goddess is in need, as are her babies. The peasant closest to her, brandishing his fist, is already rapidly turning into a frog. There are many other frogs around, including a pair at the bottom left corner, near the feet of one of the babies.

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Jan Brueghel the Elder (1568–1625), Latona and the Lycian Peasants (detail) (1595-1610), oil on panel, 37 × 56 cm, Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Wikimedia Commons.
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David Teniers the Younger (1610–1690), Latona and the Frogs (c 1640–50), oil on copper, 24.8 × 38.1 cm, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, San Francisco, CA. Wikimedia Commons.

David Teniers the Younger’s Latona and the Frogs from around 1640–50 isn’t in the same class as Brueghel’s, but still tells the story well, and shows Lycians being transformed for refusing to help the goddess.

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François Lemoyne (1688–1737), Latona and the Peasants of Lycia (1721), oil on canvas, 77.5 × 97.8 cm, Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR. Wikimedia Commons.

François Lemoyne’s Latona and the Peasants of Lycia (1721) stops short of showing the metamorphosis or resulting frogs, but Latona and the peasants are clearly engaged in their dispute.

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Gabriel Guay (1848–1923), Latona and the Peasants (1877), oil, dimensions not known, Château du Roi René, Peyrolles, Provence, France. Wikimedia Commons.

The story survived in narrative painting well into the latter half of the nineteenth century, when Gabriel Guay, an eminent former pupil of Jean-Léon Gérôme, painted his Latona and the Peasants (1877). Leto and her babies now seem not just real but almost contemporary, minimising her divinity.

What performance should you get from different types of storage?

External storage is invariably sold with ‘up-to’ performance figures. In practice, you’ll seldom realise anything like some write or read speeds claimed. And when it comes to prolonged tasks like that first full Time Machine backup, no matter how fast you thought that drive would be, it always takes longer than expected.

Over the last few years I have tested and reviewed many examples of different types of external storage, from basic USB 3 hard drives, to the latest USB4 SSD enclosures, and NAS packed with fast SSDs. This article draws on all those test results to give you a better idea of what to expect when they’re being used with your Mac.

Results quoted here are typical for those tests performed mostly using a Mac Studio M1 Max, but unless otherwise indicated should be similar for recent Intel models. They’re summarised in this table.

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Write speeds are given for:

  • the single 50 MB write test performed by Time Machine before each backup;
  • 500 multiple concurrent writes of 4 KB each, performed in those same Time Machine tests;
  • calculated net write speed over a first full backup to APFS of at least 400 GB;
  • general write speed measurement using my app Stibium, which gives broadly similar results to other leading benchmarking apps.

General read speeds are also obtained using Stibium, and similar to other apps. All speeds are given as MB/s for consistency.

Before looking at individual types of storage, one obvious and important result is the effect of throttling by macOS on Time Machine backup performance. Considering Time Machine’s own tests, writing a single 50 MB file is performed consistently at around 200-225 MB/s to local storage of whatever type, and multiple concurrent writes of 4 KB files reach around 20-23 MB/s regardless of local storage type. Those hold good even when you back up to a fast Thunderbolt 3 SSD, and backing up to a NAS is little quicker unless it’s over 2.5GbE to an NVMe SSD. Local transfer speeds only differ more substantially in general tests, when they aren’t throttled as they are in Time Machine.

Hard disks

When writing to or reading from a local hard disk, performance varies substantially according to which sectors on the hard disk are being accessed. This is a well-known phenomenon, and the result of geometry, as sectors are faster at the periphery of the disk’s platter, and slower in the inner part. Ranges given here take that into account: the lower figure is for inner sectors, and the higher for outer ones. Some users compensate for this effect, and only ever use the outer half of a disk’s sectors to obtain better performance, but that reduces their available capacity, and effectively doubles their cost per TB.

SSDs

SATA SSDs may be cheapest, but they’re also slowest, and with Macs they generally don’t enjoy Trim or SMART health indicator support. Of the two, Trim support is usually the more important, as without that, they can accumulate blocks waiting to be erased and returned for further use, and as a result their write (but not read) speed can fall as low as 100 MB/s. Unless used for largely static storage, this is a significant risk.

NVMe SSDs deliver twice the performance of SATA models, and generally enjoy Trim but not SMART indicator support. This makes them far better suited to general use, as their write speeds should be sustained from new throughout their working life.

USB 3.2 Gen 2, Thunderbolt 3, USB4

Translating commonly quoted transfer speeds for these three protocols into real-world speeds turns out to be complex. In practice, these are what you can expect to see:

  • USB 3.2 Gen 2 at 10 Gb/s is slightly less than 1 GB/s
  • Thunderbolt 3 at 32 Gb/s is up to 3 GB/s
  • USB4 at 40 Gb/s is up to 3.4 GB/s.

All recent models of Mac, both Intel and Apple silicon, should realise full performance over USB 3.2 Gen 2 and Thunderbolt 3, but support for USB4 is limited to Apple silicon. Unless a drive or enclosure specifically includes Thunderbolt 3 as a fallback, when connected to an Intel Mac, you should expect it to fall back to USB 3.2 Gen 2 at just under 1 GB/s, less than a third of the speed of USB4.

NAS

Although I haven’t made any systematic comparison between AFP and SMB network protocols, I can see no consistent difference in their performance, when used with the latest versions of macOS and NAS software. The latter, though, can be critical: older versions of NAS software can perform poorly when used over SMB with recent macOS. Keeping your NAS software up to date is important.

Throttling of Time Machine backup writing isn’t supposed to occur when backing up over a network, and there is some evidence here to support that, with significantly better results for 50 MB test files. However, those are only apparent when using NVMe SSDs in the NAS, with a wired Ethernet 2.5GbE connection to provide sufficient bandwidth.

Check TM performance

Provided that your Mac is running a recent version of macOS and backing up to APFS, it’s simple to read the two write performance tests that occur at the start of each Time Machine backup using my free T2M2. Alternatively, you can also read them using the Time Machine custom log extract in Mints. In T2M2 they should look something like:
Destination IO performance measured:
Wrote 1 50 MB file at 238.02 MB/s to "/Volumes/ThunderBay2" in 0.210 seconds
Concurrently wrote 500 4 KB files at 35.58 MB/s to "/Volumes/ThunderBay2" in 0.058 seconds

Check general performance

Although there are other apps that will do this, I developed Stibium for this purpose. Follow the ‘gold standard’ procedure detailed in its Help Reference to obtain the most accurate and reproducible results. Stibium can test any storage you can access in the Finder, including all local devices and networked systems such as NAS.

Further reading

Which external drives have Trim and SMART support?
How to evaluate an external SSD
You can read my reviews in MacFormat and MacLife magazines, available in the App Store.

Changing Paintings: 36 Theseus and the Minotaur

Book 8 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses resumes his account of King Minos of Crete waging war against the Greeks, and the hapless Cephalus who had inadvertently killed his wife Procris with his javelin. Cephalus and his party return to Athens, by which time King Minos is already laying waste to Megara, and attacking the city of Alcathous ruled by King Nisus. The latter has a lock of purple hair on his head, a talisman that ensures the safety of his kingdom.

Nisus’ daughter Scylla regularly watches the forces of Minos from her royal tower, and has got to know many of the Cretan commanders, including Minos himself. From her watching, she feels that she has fallen in love with him, and has an impulse to go to him to bring the fighting to an end, and to marry him. One night, she’s determined to act, so sneaks into her father’s bedroom, and cuts off his lock of purple hair to end the protection it had given his kingdom. She then makes her way out of the city, through the Cretan lines, until she meets King Minos. She tells him what she has done, and presents him with the lock of hair.

She’s shocked that, far from winning Minos’ love and hand in marriage, he calls on the gods to curse her, and refuses to let her enter Crete. Nevertheless, Minos conquers the city before setting sail once more in his ships. Scylla lets loose a long tirade of insults at Minos, and calls on her father Nisus to punish her for her treachery. With a final insulting reference to Minos’ wife Pasiphae and her mating with a bull, Scylla announces that she will cling to Minos’ ship and follow him over the sea. The gods had changed her father Nisus into an osprey, which then pursues Scylla, who is in turn transformed into a seabird, probably a shearwater.

Ovid then summarises the story of Minos and the Minotaur of Crete. He tells of Minos’ return, and his sacrifice of a hundred bulls to Jupiter. But he couldn’t escape the shame of his wife Pasiphae’s bestial adultery with a bull, resulting in the birth of the Minotaur, a beast with the head of a bull and the body of a man.

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Gustave Moreau (1826–1898), Pasiphaé (1880s), oil on canvas, 195 x 91 cm, Musée National Gustave-Moreau, Paris. Wikimedia Commons.

Gustave Moreau appears to have started to paint Pasiphaé in the 1880s but then to have abandoned it, probably because of difficulties it would raise in depicting her bestial relationship.

Minos had the architect and artificer Daedalus design and build a maze, within which the Minotaur was confined. Every nine years, the monster was fed on Athenian victims, but at the third such feeding, Minos’ daughter Ariadne helps Theseus kill the Minotaur.

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Maître des Cassoni Campana (dates not known), The Legend of Crete (detail) (1500-25), oil on panel, dimensions not known, Musée du Petit Palais, Avignon, France. Wikimedia Commons.

This detail of a wonderful painted cassone The Legend of Crete from around 1500-25 shows what has become a popular image of the labyrinth constructed by Daedalus. At its centre, Theseus has just decapitated the Minotaur, while Ariadne waits, holding the thread enabling him to retrace his steps to the exit.

The Minotaur 1885 by George Frederic Watts 1817-1904
George Frederic Watts (1817–1904), The Minotaur (1885), oil on canvas, 118.1 x 94.5 cm, The Tate Gallery (Presented by the artist 1897), London. © The Tate Gallery and Photographic Rights © Tate (2016), CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 (Unported), http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/watts-the-minotaur-n01634

George Frederic Watts was apparently driven to paint The Minotaur (1885) as a response to a series of articles in the press revealing the industry of child prostitution in late Victorian Britain; those referred to the myth of the Minotaur, so early one morning he painted this image of human bestiality and lust. His Minotaur has crushed a small bird in its left hand, and gazes out to sea, awaiting the next shipment of young men and virgin women from Greece.

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Gustave Moreau (1826–1898), Athenians Being Delivered to the Minotaur (1855), oil, dimensions not known, Musée de Brou, Bourg-en-Bresse, France. Wikimedia Commons.

Earlier in his career, Gustave Moreau painted this scene of Athenians Being Delivered to the Minotaur (1855). Wearing laurel wreaths to mark their distinction and sacrifice, the young men and women hold back while Theseus crouches, waiting to do battle with the beast, seen at the right.

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Henry Fuseli (1741–1825), Ariadne Watching the Struggle of Theseus with the Minotaur (1815-20), brown wash, oil, white gouache, white chalk, gum and graphite on moderately thick, moderately textured, beige wove paper, 61.6 x 50.2 cm, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT. Wikimedia Commons.

Henry Fuseli captured the dynamics of the situation, in his spirited mixed-media sketch of Ariadne Watching the Struggle of Theseus with the Minotaur (1815-20). Theseus appears almost skeletal as he tries to bring his dagger down to administer the fatal blow, and Ariadne looks like a wraith or spirit.

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Charles-Édouard Chaise (1759-1798), Theseus, Victor over the Minotaur (c 1791), oil on canvas, dimensions not known, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Strasbourg, France. Image by Rama, via Wikimedia Commons.

Theseus, Victor over the Minotaur (c 1791) is one of only three paintings by Charles-Édouard Chaise known to survive. With its crisp neo-classical style, it shows Theseus standing in triumph over the lifeless corpse of the Minotaur. He’s almost being mobbed by the young Athenian women whose lives he has spared. At the left, his thread rests on a wall by an urn, suggesting that the young woman by it may be Ariadne; she is being helped by a young man.

Ovid then races through the rest of the story, where Theseus abducts Ariadne and takes her to the island of Naxos, only to abandon her there. Ariadne meets the god Bacchus, who comforts and marries her. Finally, Theseus takes Ariadne’s wedding diadem and sets it in the heavens as the constellation Corona Borealis.

Solutions to Saturday Mac riddles 272

I hope that you enjoyed Saturday’s Mac Riddles, episode 272. Here are my solutions to them.

1: Used by courting birds with a haven for video and audio to replace the others.

Click for a solution

DisplayPort

Used by courting birds (a courtship display) with a haven (a port) for video and audio (it can carry both) to replace the others (intended to replace the answers to 2 and 3, as well as VGA and others).

2: 506 Romans can handle analogue and digital to display.

Click for a solution

DVI

506 Romans (DVI in Roman numerals = 506) can handle analogue and digital (has both DVI-I for analogue support, and DVI-D digital-only) to display (it’s for video output to displays and TVs).

3: With CTA-861, 19 pins and five connectors, it’ll carry all your media, even HDCP.

Click for a solution

HDMI

With CTA-861 (the standards it uses for video and more), 19 pins (in its connectors) and five connectors (it supports five different connectors now), it’ll carry all your media (it will), even HDCP (a form of DRM for use over HDMI).

The common factor

Click for a solution

They are all video interfaces that have been supported by Macs.

I look forward to your putting alternative cases.

Mastering Secure Boot on Apple silicon

Apple silicon Macs are the first Apple computers to feature fully secure boot processes as one of their fundamental design goals. Although similar in some ways to those in Apple’s devices and in Intel Macs with T2 chips, there are substantial differences. Unlike T2 Macs, secure Boot in Apple silicon is maintained even when starting up from external storage, a feature completely unsupported by devices. Non-standard configurations are also available to give greater flexibility with reduced security modes, which are absent from devices. This article explains how to manage Secure Boot on Apple silicon Macs.

Full Security

By default, Apple silicon Macs start up in Full Security, the mode recommended by Apple for normal use. That requires:

  • Following pre-boot stages, a Signed System Volume (SSV) is loaded from its snapshot, with its seal intact and signature verified.
  • The only kernel extensions loaded during boot are those supplied by Apple in macOS. No third-party kernel extensions can be loaded.
  • System Integrity Protection (SIP) is fully enabled.

Because they run outside the privileged space of the kernel and its extensions, third-party system extensions and their relatives can be loaded and used fully.

Booting in Full Security applies full control and verification of all components from the Boot ROM, through the Low-Level Bootloader (LLB) and iBoot ‘firmware’, to the kernel and its extensions in the SSV. If any part of that sequence fails to verify, the boot process is halted and, depending on where the failure has occured, the Mac is either put into DFU or Recovery mode for the user to address the problem. This not only ensures robust security throughout, but it also guards against potential conflicts such as those arising with third-party kernel extensions, and unintentional corruption of any component.

Changing security

Control over boot security is applied using Startup Security Utility when booted in paired Recovery (except in Big Sur, as explained below). Access this by starting the Mac up into normal paired Recovery with a single long hold of the Power button. When the first screen has loaded, click the Options button, then from the Utilities menu select the Startup Security Utility command.

bootsec1

You will then be prompted to select the boot volume group whose security policy will be set. Note that in macOS 12.0.1 and later this must be the same as that for the paired Recovery being used.

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By default that will already be in Full Security. Set the new policy as explained below, and click the OK button. To apply that policy, select the Restart command to exit Recovery and start up in normal user mode.

Startup Security Utility changes the LocalPolicy settings for that boot volume group; those are stored in the iSCPreboot volume on the hidden Apple_APFS_ISC container on the internal SSD of that Mac. Full details of LocalPolicy are given in Apple’s Platform Security Guide, and explained here.

Big Sur is a notable exception to the requirement to change security settings in the paired Recovery volume: it doesn’t have a paired Recovery volume, but boots into Recovery from a hidden container on its internal SSD, from where Startup Security Utility controls security settings for all mounted boot volume groups.

Fallback Recovery (frOS) is unable to change LocalPolicy, thus Startup Security Utility is unavailable when booted in frOS, its most distinctive feature.

Although the bputil command tool gives access to security settings, its use to modify them is hazardous, and shouldn’t be attempted unless you know what you’re doing and are prepared to have to restore that Mac in DFU mode. It is, though, sometimes useful as an aid to solving problems with LocalPolicy settings, as explained here.

Reduced Security

bootsec3

When reducing security settings, the only other option available is Reduced Security, which forms the gateway to Permissive Security as well. There are two other common reasons for selecting Reduced Security, though: to enable the loading of third-party kernel extensions, and to run older versions of macOS.

bootsec4

To enable the loading of third-party kernel extensions, Reduced Security must be set, and the upper checkbox ticked. Once this has been applied by a restart, installation and loading of the kernel extension can proceed using its installer and Privacy & Security settings. That doesn’t enable loading of the kext on demand, as in the past, as it has to be merged into a signed Auxiliary Kernel Collection, from where it can loaded during startup.

Although Apple states that Reduced Security is required to run older versions of macOS, that doesn’t appear to be required at present. Reduced Security differs from Full Security in that LLB and iBoot trust ‘global’ signatures that are bundled with macOS rather than using personalised signatures for iBoot and beyond. For many, this may appear to be an insignificant reduction compared with Full Security, although it does add the risks of loading third-party kexts when used for that purpose.

Permissive Security

Startup Security Utility doesn’t offer Permissive Security as an option until Reduced Security has been selected and an action has been taken to downgrade that to Permissive Security. The most likely reason for doing this is to partially or completely disable SIP using csrutil, and once that has been performed this third setting is shown in Startup Security Utility.

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Just as with Reduced Security, this offers two further options in checkboxes, including that to enable the loading of third-party kernel extensions.

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The main reason for using Permissive Security is to reduce SIP settings, and I have recently provided a guide to the controls available in csrutil. The normal sequence for changing those is to start up in paired Recovery, open Startup Security Utility, set that to Reduced Security and click on the OK button. Following that, open Terminal, run the appropriate csrutil command, then restart the Mac, which will automatically be in Permissive Security.

The security effects of Permissive Security are determined largely by changes made to SIP and other controls. Although signatures are still validated throughout the chain of boot stages, ‘global’ signatures are trusted for iBoot and beyond, as are boot objects signed locally by the Secure Enclave. At its most extensive, this allows the use of a fully untrusted kernel, such as a debug or custom version. The penalty is that some decryption keys are no longer available, and those restrict features available in macOS, such as Apple Pay, which is normally disabled.

Reversing Permissive Security requires fully enabling SIP using csrutil, undoing any other relevant security settings, then using Startup Security Utility to set a higher level of security. In some cases, that may entail installing a fresh macOS with its SSV. Apple also notes that, on Apple silicon Macs, SIP settings aren’t stored in NVRAM but in the LocalPolicy.

External Boot Volumes

With the notable exception of Big Sur, boot security settings are saved into the LocalPolicy for the boot volume group containing that paired Recovery system, although all LocalPolicy settings are saved to the internal SSD, never to an external disk. This relies on the concept of ownership, as explained here. This can bring its own problems, as explored here.

Summary

  • Unless there’s a good reason, leave boot volume groups in Apple silicon Macs in Full Security.
  • If your Mac needs to load a third-party kernel extension, run it in Reduced Security with those kernel extensions enabled.
  • Partially or completely disabling SIP requires Permissive Security, which brings significant penalties, and may require more extensive work to undo.
  • Use Startup Security Utility rather than bputil.

Reference

Apple’s Platform Security Guide

Heroines 15: Sappho and the ferryman

The little we know of Sappho is, like the little remaining of her poetry, scant and fragmentary. She was arguably the greatest classical Greek lyrical poet, a lesbian of renown, and was alleged to have thrown herself from a cliff when a male lover left her.

Dearth of information about her, and its apparent inconsistency, hasn’t stopped a wealth of speculative writing, and her appearance in a great many paintings, few of which are consistent with her sexuality. Here I’ll consider one text, the fictional letter written for her by Ovid in his Heroines, and a selection of those paintings.

Born around 630 BCE into a wealthy family on the Greek island of Lesbos, legend has associated her romantically with two men: a contemporary poet, Alcaeus, and Phaon a local ferryman. Her own name and that of her island have been associated with her sexuality since the late nineteenth century, and Ovid makes it clear that her love of women was well-known among Romans in his time.

Since around 300 BCE, there has been a legend that tells of her love for Phaon the ferryman, who plied the waters between Lesbos and the Anatolian mainland. Almost certainly illiterate and hardly a good audience for Sappho’s verse, Phaon’s redeeming feature was apparently the gift of great physical beauty. He was given this one day when he carried Venus/Aphrodite in his boat; the goddess was travelling in disguise as an old woman, Phaon didn’t charge her for the crossing, so she returned the favour by transforming his physical appearance.

Ovid’s description of Sappho’s affair with Phaon leaves little to the imagination, even down to their lovemaking.

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Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825), Sappho and Phaon (1809), oil on canvas, 225 × 262 cm, Hermitage Museum Государственный Эрмитаж, Saint Petersburg, Russia. Wikimedia Commons.

Among those who seem to have accepted the truth of this legend was Jacques-Louis David, in this painting of Sappho and Phaon from 1809. David was necessarily not as explicit as Ovid, showing the couple fawning over one another with their recently occupied bed behind them, and a post-orgasmic gaze on Sappho’s face. In case you haven’t got the message, Cupid holds her lyre, and two doves peck affectionately on the window sill.

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Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1836–1912), Sappho (and Alcaeus) (1881), oil on canvas, 66.1 x 122 cm, Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, MD. Wikimedia Commons.

A little deeper into Victorian prudery, Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s Sappho (1881) shows Sappho resting on a lectern and staring intently at Alcaeus, who is playing a lyre. She’s supported by her ‘school of girls’, one of whom rests her arm on Sappho’s back. The artist’s hints at a lesbian interpretation are necessarily subtle: the marble benches bear the names of some of her female lovers.

solomonsapphoerinna
Simeon Solomon (1840–1905), Sappho and Erinna in a Garden at Mytilene (1864), watercolour on paper, 33 x 38.1 cm, The Tate Gallery (Purchased 1980), London. © The Tate Gallery and Photographic Rights © Tate (2016), CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 (Unported), http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/solomon-sappho-and-erinna-in-a-garden-at-mytilene-t03063

Yet nearly twenty years earlier, Simeon Solomon was far more open in his watercolour of Sappho and Erinna in a Garden at Mytilene (1864). Sappho is shown on the right, her dark hair and complexion in accordance with Ovid’s description. Although Erinna, another woman poet of the time, might have joined Sappho in her community of young women on Lesbos, she is now thought to have lived on the island of Telos, and slightly later.

Solomon’s career was all but destroyed by his own sexuality: a brave pioneer of homosexual themes in his painting, he was arrested for homosexual offences in 1873, and was shunned thereafter.

Ovid’s fictional letter from Sappho to Phaon was written after the legendary ferryman moved to Sicily. It’s unusual among his Heroines for depicting a real, historical figure, albeit in this legendary story.

The letter can be read in at least two ways. It could, in spite of its multiple clear references to Sappho’s lesbian lifestyle, be just another male denial of female homosexuality. This seems unlikely for many reasons, not least of which is the gross implausibility of everything about the letter. This has led some to doubt that Ovid even wrote it, an issue that remains hotly debated. Ovid shows profound and progressive insights into human sexuality; if this letter was written by him, it comes over as an excellent debunking of the legend of Phaon, and a witty and irreverent commentary on the life and loves of another great poet.

The story of Sappho and Phaon has, however, stuck. Its climax, when the broken-hearted Sappho throws herself from the top of the Leucadian Cliff, became an extremely popular motif in nineteenth century painting.

guerinsappholeucadiancliff
Pierre-Narcisse Guérin (1774–1833), Sappho on the Leucadian Cliff (date not known), oil on canvas, 188 x 114 cm, The State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg. Wikimedia Commons.

Pierre-Narcisse Guérin paints a portrait of Sappho looking in sad reflection, her head resting on a symbolic lyre. There is little to indicate that she is on the top of cliffs, apart from the title, and no narrative references.

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Théodore Chassériau (1819–1856), Sappho Leaping into the Sea from the Leucadian Promontory (c 1840), watercolour over graphite on paper, 37 x 22.8 cm, Musée du Louvre, Paris. Wikimedia Commons.

Théodore Chassériau’s watercolour of Sappho Leaping into the Sea from the Leucadian Promontory (c 1840) shows her clutching her lyre, her arms braced across her chest, as she steps off the edge of the cliff.

Sappho’s suicide became something of an obsession for Gustave Moreau, who painted her repeatedly between about 1870 and 1893.

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Gustave Moreau (1826–1898), The Death of Sappho (c 1870-2), oil on canvas, 81 × 62 cm, Private collection. Wikimedia Commons.

Moreau’s Death of Sappho was probably in progress when the Franco-Prussian War broke out, and wasn’t completed until after order was restored to Paris the following year. It shows the poet moments after she had thrown herself from the cliff, her body lying in peaceful repose, her lyre beside her, and a seagull in mourning. The contrast between the elaborate decoration of her body, clothing, and lyre and the stark rocks and gloomy sea and sky couldn’t be greater.

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Gustave Moreau (1826–1898), Sappho (1871-72), watercolour on paper, 18.4 x 12.4 cm, Victoria and Albert Museum (Given by Canon Gray in memory of André S. Raffalovich), London. Image courtesy of and © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Sappho (1871-72) was his second painting of her, this time a richly-detailed watercolour. Here she is swooning over her lover shortly before flinging herself to her doom. Her lyre is slung over her shoulder, and to emphasise her status as a great poet, Apollo’s gryphon is shown on a column behind her. Her elaborately decorated clothing and pose were taken from a Japanese woodcut, Genji taking the air in summer on the Sumida by Utagawa Kunisada (Toyokuni III), that Moreau had bought in Paris.

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Gustave Moreau (1826–1898), Sappho at the Leucadian Cliff (c 1885), watercolour on paper, 33 x 20 cm, Private collection. Wikimedia Commons.

Moreau returned to his consideration of Sappho’s suicide in this watercolour of Sappho at the Leucadian Cliff (c 1885), showing her clinging to her lyre as she falls to her death on the rocks below. This is lit by one of Moreau’s saturnine suns.

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Gustave Moreau (1826–1898), Sappho (c 1893), oil on canvas, 85 × 67 cm, location not known. Wikimedia Commons.

In Moreau’s late oil painting of Sappho from about 1893, she is seen stepping off the cliff, with the sun setting behind her.

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Jules-Élie Delaunay (1828-1891), Sappho Embracing her Lyre (date not known), further details not known. Image by Rama, via Wikimedia Commons.

During this period, those influenced by Moreau also painted the poet. Jules-Élie Delaunay’s undated Sappho Embracing her Lyre shows her at the top of the cliff holding her lyre close, as if it were her lover.

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Ary Renan (1857–1900), Sappho I (1893), oil on canvas, 56 x 80 cm, Museo Ernest Renan, Tréguier, France. Wikimedia Commons.

Ary Renan painted Sappho at least twice. The first from 1893 appears influenced by Moreau’s paintings. Sappho reclines underwater amid a fantastic and deep layer of vegetation, her lyre some distance from her head, at the right edge.

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Ary Renan (1857–1900), Sappho II (date not known), oil on canvas, 120 x 100 cm, Musée de la Vie romantique, Paris. Wikimedia Commons.

Renan’s later painting shows her just as she has stepped off the top of the cliff, and is about to plunge to her death. She holds her lyre aloft in her left hand, as a surprised seagull flies past.

Ovid’s letter, written two millennia ago, shows wittily how absurd the legend of Sappho and Phaon is. Yet so many artists since have continued to depict it in paint, perpetuating its naïve denial.

Last Week on My Mac: M what?

If you’ve become blasé with the tail end of the summer’s sport, Olympics and Paralympics, events next week should make compulsive viewing. Apple starts with its regular September launch of iPhones, and a day later we’ll be enthralled by the first TV debate between the two main contenders in the US presidential election. My money is on the iPhone 16 to win.

With those new iPhones comes the next major version of iOS, and hot on its heels macOS Sequoia 15.0. Without its AI features, that might seem the least exciting announcement of the week, but it prepares the ground for the next batch of Macs to be announced most probably in October, for shipping the following month. All commentators seem agreed that they will come not with M3 chips, but will be the first Macs to use the M4 family.

By now, different M-series chips are becoming blurry, so I’ll try to draw distinctions between them, and suggest why Apple has rushed through the M3 as if it might have been better-named the M2.5.

M1, November 2020

Skipping silently over Apple’s Developer Transition Kit from the summer of 2020, Apple silicon Macs started at a leisurely pace, as the four members of the M1 family rolled out over nearly 18 months. Their CPU cores ranged from the base version with 4 P and 4 E cores, 4P+4E in short, up to the impressive Ultra at 16P+4E. There was little separation, though, between the Pro and Max versions, which both came with 8P+2E, and only really differed in their GPUs. Thus, in the M1 there only two fundamentally different CPU core configurations, 4P+4E and 8P+2E, each with up to four cores in a cluster. Both core types used Arm’s instruction set architecture (ISA) from 2018, designated ARMv8.5-A.

M2, July 2022

Some of us assumed that first cycle would prove the model for its successors, but we were wrong and getting wronger as time progresses. After a break of just four months, Apple leaped into the M2 cycle, which it shortened to just a year from the 4P+4E M2 base version in July 2022. This cycle Apple bumped the number of E cores in the higher versions, taking the Ultra to 16P+8E, but still leaving little distance between the Pro and Max versions, both with 8P+4E, and two fundamental core configurations and clusters of four.

What might have appeared at the time to be small change, an increment in the ISA to ARMv8.6-A from 2019, brought enhancements in matrix maths, support for bfloat16 numbers to help with AI, and additional virtualisation capability. Although the M2 series appeared evolutionary in performance, it has also proved more capable.

M3, November 2023

Introduction of the M3 came again after a brief break of around four months, in November 2023. This time there was no phased release, gradually building up through Pro and Max to Ultra. The lesser three all came together, and put more distance between Pro and Max versions. The base M3 stuck with the proven combination of 4P+4E, the Pro scaled up to 6P+6E, then the Max nearly doubled that at 12P+4E, making three fundamental core configurations. That was over nine months ago, and there’s still no sign of any doubled-up Ultra version. To match the M3 Pro and Max core counts, they now form clusters of up to six cores, a significant advance on the two previous families.

While the M3 kept to Arm’s ARMv8.6-A ISA, Apple redesigned the GPU to support Dynamic Caching, Mesh Shading, and hardware-accelerated ray tracing. There’s one oddity, though: as this is the same ISA as the M2, with its enhanced support for virtualisation, Apple has stated that nested virtualisation coming in Sequoia requires not an M2 chip, but the M3, with its identical ISA. I have yet to see an explanation for that requirement.

M4, May 2024

In the absence of any M3 Ultra, Apple caught us off-guard when in May of this year (only six months after the M3) it launched new iPad Pros with what we must assume is the base M4 version of 4P+6E, and the next Arm ISA of ARMv9.2-A from 2020. That enhances vector and matrix maths, and brings support for 1 GHz timers, enabling nanosecond time resolution. In addition to the GPU features added in the M3, those in the M4 now also have hardware accelerated AV1 decoding.

There have, of course, been many other changes between M1 and M4, including higher operating frequencies for CPU cores, growth in the capability of the neural engine (ANE), and better support for external displays in the base version.

M1 to M4

Assuming that we’re soon to be treated to a range of Macs running members of the M4 family, the pace of change is accelerating. Landmarks along the route so far include:

  • Increased E cores and ARMv8.6-A ISA in the M2.
  • Three core configurations, clusters of six cores, and extended GPU hardware support in the M3.
  • Increased E cores, ARMv9.2-A ISA and extra GPU hardware support in the M4.

For those who have whetted their appetite for Apple silicon with an M1 or M2, the leap up to M4 should prove exhilarating. Bring on the M4 Mac Studio, please, no matter who ends up as President.

Postscript and non-apologia

A few have commented to me, either below or by email, that they find this article somehow “offensive” for its references to the US Presidential Election, specifically for “belittling” it. If you have reached the end of this article and feel that to be true, then once you have finished reading this postscript, please go back and read its first paragraph again, slowly and without imagining words or meanings that simply aren’t there.

The introductory paragraph is what is known in American (but not, yet, British) English as a lede, and introduction. It establishes that there are two important events taking place early this coming week: Apple’s Event, which is the link to the main body of the article, and the televised debate between “the two main contenders in the US presidential election”. I hope we all agree that those are both important events.

I deliberately refer to the latter as enthralling, a word whose implications appear not be understood by many. A thrall is literally a slave, someone in bondage, and the word has ambiguous connotations of both being fascinating and attention-holding (its more common usage today), and enslaving mentally or morally. I simply cannot think of a more appropriate word to describe that hugely important debate, and cannot understand how anyone could construe that as in any way belittling.

The sentence at the end of that lede, “my money is on the iPhone 16 to win” is a reference to the unpredictability of elections (don’t forget that we in the UK had our own General Election just two months ago), and for those who have deeper insight into events a reference to gambling. As any American knows, betting in the US on the outcome of the Presidential Election is illegal, although betting on events such as the date of the next general election, or its outcome, remains perfectly legal in the UK. However, there were several scandals in the UK concerning people close to the former Prime Minister who placed successful bets on that date, and the hidden reference here is to those scandalous events still under investigation.

The final para in the article then refers back to the lede, a common technique when rounding off articles. In no way does it dismiss the importance of the election, but is an expressed wish that whatever disaster might or might not take place, there are many of us looking forward to Apple’s future M4 Macs, in my case specifically a new Mac Studio M4. Yes, it is a little light-hearted, after all this article is more of an editorial, as I’m sure you’re aware.

If you still find this offensive, then I’m sorry, but you really do need to read what is written, and not what you wish to imagine it’s saying.

Heroines 14: The crime of faithfulness

Stories of the abduction of women and their enforced marriage have persisted for an extraordinary length of time. One of the most popular, and still much-loved, musicals is Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, a successful movie in 1954, and as late as 1982-83 it was remade for television. It tells of seven ‘shotgun’ marriages, and was based on a short story The Sobbin’ Women, which in turn was a parody of the story of the rape of the Sabine women in about 750 BCE.

As popular in classical Greek and Roman times was an equally disturbing myth concerning Hypermnestra and her sisters the Danaïds, which was largely forgotten after the Middle Ages, only to be revived around the start of the twentieth century. It was told by Hyginus, Apollodorus, Aeschylus, and Horace, and referred to by many others.

Danaus and Aegyptus were twin brothers who lived in North Africa. Aegyptus was a mythical king of Egypt who had fifty sons, and his brother had fifty daughters, from their polygamous relationships. When Aegyptus decided that his sons would marry his brother’s daughters, Danaus fled with those daughters to Argos, in Greece, where the reigning king generously handed over his throne to him.

Aegyptus and his sons were not to be put off so easily, joined Danaus and his daughters in Argos, and pressed ahead with the plans for the weddings. The couples were assigned by lot, apart from two matches between Hypermnestra and Lynceus, and Gorgophone and Proteus, deemed necessary because of the rank of their mothers, who were princesses.

On the day of their weddings, Danaus equipped his daughters with swords, and told them to murder their husbands in bed that night. Once those drunken grooms had fallen asleep, the daughters each followed their father’s instructions, except for Hypermnestra: by the morning, of the fifty brothers only Lynceus survived.

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Artist not known, Hypermnestra, Lynceus (or Linus) and the Danaïdes (1473), hand coloured woodcut from Giovanni Boccaccio’s De mulieribus claris, translated by Heinrich Steinhöwel and printed by Johannes Zainer at Ulm c 1474, Penn Libraries call number: Inc B-720, Philadelphia, PA. Image by kladcat, via Wikimedia Commons.

This story was told in the fourteenth of Giovanni Boccaccio’s De Mulieribus Claris (Concerning Famous Women), published in 1374, and illustrated as Hypermnestra, Lynceus and the Danaïdes (1473) in this hand coloured woodcut from the translation by Heinrich Steinhöwel. Four of the brothers are seen, their throats cut in bed, but the helpfully labelled figures of Hypermnestra and ‘Linus’ are still in a loving embrace.

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Robinet Testard (fl. 1470-1531), The Danaides Kill Their Husbands (c 1510), miniature in Héroïdes ou Epîtres, by Ovid, translated by Octavien de Saint-Gelais, Bibliothèque nationale de France (Français 874, Folio 170v), Paris. Wikimedia Commons.

Robinet Testard shows a similar scene in The Danaides Kill Their Husbands (c 1510), his miniature for Octavien de Saint-Gelais’ translation of Ovid’s Heroides. Hypermnestra’s sisters have each dutifully cut the throats of their new husbands, and sit holding their swords. At the left, though, Hypermnestra and Lynceus sit together on their marriage bed, unharmed.

Danaus was furious with the disobedience of Hypermnestra, who was dragged to a dungeon by her hair to await her fate. It’s at this point that Ovid set his fictional letter from Hypermnestra to Lynceus, the fourteenth letter in his Heroines.

Ovid’s Hypermnestra makes it clear from the outset that she has been charged with the crime of faithfulness, which should surely be praised, not condemned. She reveals the quandary that she found herself in, as she held her father’s sword at the neck of Lynceus and agonised over whether she should kill him or not. Three times she raised the sword in preparation for his murder, and three times her love for Lynceus overpowered her, and spared his life.

Hypermnestra was not summarily executed by her father, but brought before a court, which acquitted her of any wrongdoing. Lynceus (sometimes erroneously named Linus) then killed Danaus, and succeeded him as the King of Argos with Hypermnestra as his queen.

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Francesco Xanto Avelli (c 1487–1542), Hypermnestra Watching Lynceus Take Her Father’s Crown (1537), earthenware plate with tin glaze (maiolica), 2.3 × 25.5 cm, Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, MD. Wikimedia Commons.

This maiolica plate painted by Francesco Xanto Avelli in 1537 shows the later scene of Hypermnestra Watching Lynceus Take Her Father’s Crown. Lynceus (labelled here as ‘Lino’) has taken Danaus’ crown, and is about to put him to the sword. Hypermnestra stands at a window, most probably not that of a dungeon. Below its lintel is a Cupid bearing the famous saying omnia vincit amor – love conquers all – which actually comes from Virgil’s last Eclogue and is unrelated.

In the end, while Lynceus and Hypermnestra lived happily ever after, the other forty-nine sisters were punished in Hades for the sin of murder. They were given an impossible task, of filling a large container with water; as that container had holes in its bottom, they now spend the rest of eternity carrying water to the container and pouring it in.

Unlike the hapless Sisyphus, who was condemned to push a hefty rock up a steep hill in his Sisyphean task, the Danaïds haven’t been commemorated in figurative language, but have appeared in a surprising number of paintings.

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Martin Johann Schmidt (1718–1801), The Labour of the Danaides (1785), oil on copper plate, 54.5 × 77 cm, Narodna galerija Slovenije, Ljubljana, Slovenia. Wikimedia Commons.

The murderous sisters don’t seem to have had much of a showing in art until Martin Johann Schmidt painted The Labour of the Danaides (1785) on copper. He makes the allusion to Danaïds also being known as water-nymphs, like Naiads, by placing a river god at the left.

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John William Waterhouse (1849–1917), The Danaides (1903), oil on canvas, 111 × 154.3 cm, Private collection. Wikimedia Commons.

John William Waterhouse revived them for two paintings, of which this, The Danaides, was the first, and completed in 1903. He made a second slightly more complex composition in 1906, now hanging in Aberdeen Art Gallery in Scotland. Rather than a battered and leaky barrel, Waterhouse has the Danaïds filling an ornamental cauldron.

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Walter Crane (1845-1915), The Danaides (date not known), further details not known. Wikimedia Commons.

I have been unable to find a date for Walter Crane’s version, The Danaides, which was probably for a triptych painted between 1890-1915 and shows a remarkably similar cauldron.

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John Singer Sargent (1856–1925), The Danaïdes (c 1922-25), oil on canvas, 335.28 x 632.46 cm, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA. Wikimedia Commons.

Towards the end of his life, John Singer Sargent painted this vast canvas to show The Danaïdes (c 1922-25), now decorating the entrance to the Library of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

Of all the accounts of this unusual myth, yet again only Ovid looks deep into the relationships involved. He explores the situation of a woman who didn’t commit a crime at her father’s behest, but stayed true to her morals and to her love for Lynceus: a real heroine whose virtue was, for once, rewarded.

Saturday Mac riddles 272

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

1: Used by courting birds with a haven for video and audio to replace the others.

2: 506 Romans can handle analogue and digital to display.

3: With CTA-861, 19 pins and five connectors, it’ll carry all your media, even HDCP.

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

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

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

A brief history of Time Machine

In the days before Mac OS X, Apple didn’t provide a serious backup utility, and by the time we were starting to move up from Classic Mac OS the standard choice was normally Dantz Development’s Retrospect, first released in 1989 and still available today in version 19.

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Time Machine wasn’t the first utility in Mac OS to back up local storage. In 2004, Apple’s first cloud subscription service .Mac included a Backup app that backed up local files to iDisk in the cloud, something that still isn’t supported today with iCloud.

In the following years, AirPort Wi-Fi systems flourished, and Apple decided to launch a consumer NAS incorporating an AirPort Extreme Base Station with a 500 GB or 1 TB hard disk. Software to support that was dubbed Time Machine, and was released in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard on 26 October 2007, 17 years ago. The first Time Capsule was announced in January 2008, and shipped a month later.

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Time Machine’s pane in System Preferences changed little until Ventura’s System Settings replaced it.

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The application’s restore interface featured a single Finder-like window, much like today’s. Internally, Time Machine scheduled its backups using a system timer and launchd, making backups every hour regardless of what else the Mac might have been doing at the time.

The initial version of Time Machine was both praised and slated. Unlike Mike Bombich’s rival Carbon Copy Cloner, it couldn’t create bootable backups, and there were problems with FileVault encryption, which at that time could only encrypt Home folders, rather than whole volumes. Despite those, its introduction transformed the way that many used their Macs, and made it more usual for users to have backups.

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From its release, Time Machine was dependent on features of the HFS+ file system to create its Finder illusion. Every hour the backup service examined the record of changes made to the file system since the last backup was made, using its FSEvents database. It thus worked out what had changed and needed to be copied into the backup. During the backup phase itself, it only copied across those files that had been created or changed since the last backup was made.

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It did this by using hard links in the backup, and Apple added a new feature to its HFS+ file system to support this, directory hard links. Where an entire folder had remained unchanged since the last backup, Time Machine simply created a hard link to the existing folder in that backup. Where an existing file had been changed, though, the new file was written to the backup inside a changed folder, which in turn could contain hard links to its unchanged contents.

This preserved the illusion that each backup consisted of the complete contents of the source, while only requiring the copying of changed files, and creation of a great many hard links to files and folders. It was also completely dependent on the backup volume using the HFS+ file system, to support those directory hard links.

Without directory hard links, backups would quickly have become overwhelmed by hard links to files. If you had a million files and folders on the backup source volume, every hourly backup would have had to create a total of a million copied files or hard links. Directory hard links thus enabled the efficiency needed for this novel scheme to work.

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Apple later introduced what it termed Mobile Time Machine, intended for notebooks that could be away from their normal backup destination for some time. In around 10,000 lines of code, Mac OS X came to create something like a primitive snapshot, only on HFS+.

When macOS introduced its new DAS-CTS scheduling and dispatch system for background activities, in (about) Sierra, Time Machine’s backups were added to that. That proved unfortunate at the time because of a bug in that system, which failed on Macs left running continuously for several days, when backups could become infrequent and irregular.

When Apple released the first version of APFS on Mac OS X in High Sierra, its new snapshot feature was immediately incorporated into Time Machine to replace the earlier Mobile variant. Initially, APFS snapshots were also used instead of the FSEvents database to determine what should be backed up. Since then, making each backup of an APFS volume has involved creating a snapshot that’s stored locally on the APFS volume being backed up. In High Sierra and Mojave, the structure of backups themselves didn’t change, so they still required an HFS+ volume and relied on directory hard links.

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Catalina introduced a more complicated scheme to replace snapshots as the usual means for determining what to back up. This was presumably because computing a snapshot delta had proved slow. As the backup destination remained in HFS+ format that could’t use snapshots, it continued to rely on directory hard links.

Big Sur and its successors with Signed System Volumes (SSVs) retained the option to continue backing up to HFS+ volumes, but added the ability to back up APFS volumes to APFS backup storage at last.

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When backing up to APFS, Time Machine reverses the design used in High Sierra: instead of using snapshots to determine what needed to be backed up before creating a backup using traditional hard links, most of the time Time Machine determines what has changed using the original method with FSEvents, then creates each backup as a synthetic snapshot on the backup store. Unlike earlier versions, in Big Sur and later Time Machine can’t back up the System volume.

Once Time Machine has made a detailed assessment of the items to be backed up, it forecasts the total size to be copied. The local snapshot is copied to an .inprogress folder on the backup volume, and backup copying proceeds. Where possible, only changed blocks of files are copied, rather than having to copy the whole of every file’s data, an option termed delta-copying that can result in significant savings. Old backups are removed both according to age, and to maintain sufficient free space on the backup volume, in what Time Machine refers to as age-based and space-based thinning.

Data copied to assemble the backup on the backup volume is formed into a synthetic snapshot used to present the contents of that backup both in the Time Machine app and the Finder. Those snapshots are presented in /Volumes/.timemachine/ although they’re still stored on the backup volume.

Although modern Time Machine backups to APFS are both quicker and more space-efficient, the structure of backup storage poses problems. Copying backup stores on HFS+ was never easy, but there are currently no tools that can transfer those on APFS to another disk.

Behind the familiar interfaces of its app and settings, Time Machine has come a long way over the last few years, from building an illusion using huge numbers of hard links to creating synthetic snapshots.

Harriet Backer’s Nordic Light: 1890-1932

The early years of Harriet Backer’s career saw her progress from early Salon-ready realism to the more painterly and colourful style of her personal interpretation of Impressionism. Her landscapes captured the intensity of the Norwegian summer, and she had been exploring the play of light indoors in interiors. By 1890, her career was established, her art recognised and increasingly appreciated, and she had started teaching. She now turned her attention from the play of natural light to that of lamplight.

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Harriet Backer (1845–1932), Syende kvinne ved lampelys (By Lamplight) (1890), oil on canvas, 36 x 44 cm, Galleri Rasmus Meyer, Bergen. Wikimedia Commons.

Syende kvinne ved lampelys (By Lamplight) (1890) reverses the lighting of her previous interiors. Now the view through the window is the blackness of night, and the interior is lit by a kerosene lamp on the table inside. The play of light is changed into the play of shadow, with the woman’s shadow magnified on the wall behind her.

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Harriet Backer (1845–1932), Aften, interiør (Evening, Interior) (Reading) (1890), oil on canvas, 54 x 66 cm, Nasjonalgalleriet, Oslo. Wikimedia Commons.

Her Aften, interiør (Evening, Interior) (Reading) (1890) takes this further, and shows the influence of Japonisme, particularly in the scarlet lampshade at the right. Backer shows how the harsh directional light casts strange shadows with the effect of altering our reading of facial features, the folds in clothing, and magnifying the shadow on the wall. Although the light doesn’t create the woman and the objects around her, by determining how we see her, it transforms our perceptions and interpretation.

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Harriet Backer (1845–1932), Kone som syr (Woman Sewing) (1890), oil on canvas, 33 x 41 cm, Private collection. Wikimedia Commons.

Kone som syr (Woman Sewing) (1890) takes us back to more familiar daytime lighting, as a woman (a wife in the Norwegian title) sits at her sewing. This appears to have been a quick oil sketch, with its gestural depictions of potted plants, table, and chair, going beyond Impressionism.

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Harriet Backer (1845–1932), Pike ved vinduet (Girl by the window) (1891), oil on canvas, 54 x 67 cm, Private collection. Wikimedia Commons.

In her Pike ved vinduet (Girl by the window) (1891), the girl looks out from the sunlit interior to a world we cannot discern, beyond the miniature internal world of chair, stove, and potted plants.

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Harriet Backer (1845–1932), Inngangskoner (Churching) (1892), media not known, 90.5 x 112.5 cm, Private collection. Wikimedia Commons.

Inngangskoner (Churching) (1892) shows a traditional ceremony in which a woman who has just completed the confinement following the birth of her child is received back at church, where she gives thanks for the survival of her baby and herself, and prays for their continuing health. This is believed to show the sacristy to the left of the altar in Tanum Kirke, in Bærum, Norway. Backer marks this important moment in a mother’s life with the light of hope, as emergence from the suffuse light of the nursery.

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Harriet Backer (1845–1932), Barnedåp i Tanum Kirke (Christening in Tanum Church) (1892), oil on canvas, 109 x 142 cm, Nasjonalgalleriet, Oslo. Wikimedia Commons.

The next event in the life of mother and baby is shown in her Barnedåp i Tanum Kirke (Christening in Tanum Church) (1892), one of Backer’s most sophisticated paintings. Again she places the viewer inside, looking now both outward and inward.

The left of the canvas takes the eye deep through the church door to the outside world, where a mother is bringing her child in for infant baptism. The rich green light of that outside world colours the heavy church door, and its inner wood panelling, and the floorboards and perspective projection bring the baptismal party in.

At the right, two women are sat in an enclosed stall waiting for the arrival of the baptismal party. One has turned and partly opened the door to their stall in her effort to look out and see the party enter church. Backer controls the level of detail and looseness to brilliant effect, ensuring we always see just what she wants us to, enough to bring the image to life, but never so much that our attention becomes lost in the irrelevant.

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Wilhelm Leibl (1844–1900), Drei Frauen in der Kirche (Three Women in Church) (1882), oil on mahogany wood, 113 × 77 cm, Kunsthalle Hamburg, Hamburg. Wikimedia Commons.

This painting of the ages of woman is believed to have been influenced by Wilhelm Leibl’s (1844-1900) Three Women in Church (1882), which Backer had seen when studying in Munich. She considered this to be her greatest painting, and it was favourably received when exhibited at the World’s Fair in Chicago in 1893.

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Harriet Backer (1845–1932) Gamlestua på Kolbotn (Old Living Room at Kolbotn) (1896), oil on canvas, 61.5 x 83.5 cm, Nasjonalgalleriet, Oslo. Wikimedia Commons.

Gamlestua på Kolbotn (Old Living Room at Kolbotn) (1896) is an intimate view of the living room of a farm in Østerdalen, Norway. Friends of the artist Hulda and Arne Garborg are seen sat at the table, Arne holding his fiddle. Behind them are paintings, among them two landscapes painted by Backer’s friend Kitty Kielland. Kielland, Backer and the Garborgs had first met in Paris in 1885.

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Harriet Backer (1845–1932), Einundfjell (1897), oil on canvas, 80 x 131 cm, Bergen Kunstmuseum, Bergen. The Athenaeum.

Backer hadn’t abandoned landscapes, but they too had moved on from regular Impressionism. Einundfjell (1897) shows her skills in capturing the more subtle light and colour of twilight. The bright surface of the distant lake separates the dark hills behind from the more colourful meadows of the foreground.

backerlibrarythorvaldboeck
Harriet Backer (1845–1932), Thorvald Boecks bibliotek (Thorvald Boeck’s Library) (1902), oil on canvas, 94.5 x 89 cm, Nasjonalgalleriet, Oslo. The Athenaeum.

Thorvald Boecks bibliotek (Thorvald Boeck’s Library) (1902) is one of Backer’s few interiors devoid of people, here replaced by books from floor to ceiling. The intricate detail of their many spines, furniture, and other decorations contrasts markedly with the bare floorboards in the foreground.

In 1907, Backer had her first solo exhibition in Oslo. During that first decade of the twentieth century, her interiors switched away from the intimacy of the rural home, to those of Norway’s country churches.

backeruvdal
Harriet Backer (1845–1932), Uvdal Stave Church (1909), media not known, 115 x 135 cm, location not known. Wikimedia Commons.

Of the many wonderful later paintings that she made of church interiors, the finest must be Uvdal Stave Church (1909).

Stave churches were once numerous throughout Europe, but are now only common in rural Norway. Their construction is based on high internal posts (staves) which give them a characteristic tall, peaked appearance. Uvdal is a particularly good example, dating from around 1168. As with many old churches, its interior has been extensively painted and decorated, and this has been allowed to remain, unlike many painted churches in Britain which suffered removal of all such decoration.

Backer’s richly-coloured view of the interior of the church is lit from windows behind its pulpit, throwing the brightest light on the altar. The walls and ceiling are covered with images and decorations, which she sketches in, again manipulating the level of detail to control their distraction. Slightly to the left of centre the main stave is decorated with rich blues, divides the canvas, but affords us the view up to the brightly lit altar. To the left of the stave a woman, dressed in her Sunday finest, sits reading outside the stalls.

This is an expression of Backer’s own deep religious beliefs, her career-long exploration of lit interiors, and her profound love of her native country and its people.

In 1912, the year that she retired from teaching, she was awarded the gold King’s Medal of Merit, and in 1921 was made the State Laureate in Painting (Statens kunstnerlønn), an appointment previously held by Henrik Ibsen and Edvard Grieg. She was the first woman to be so appointed. She is known to have completed about 180 paintings in all before she died in Oslo on 25 March 1932, and the grand old age of 87.

References

Wikipedia (English), Wikipedia (Norwegian).
Many of her best paintings are in Nasjonalmuseet, Oslo, where they’re viewable online.

Which version of SilentKnight and other apps do you need?

Every autumn/fall, the current version of macOS changes, and with it there are changes great and small that can affect the apps we run. If you use any of the free apps that I provide here, now is the time to check that you’re running the correct version to support both your current macOS, and any that you might aspire to in the coming months.

SilentKnight

Although most of my apps have auto-update mechanisms that inform you when their updates are available, there are some notable pitfalls that can lull you into a sense of false security. Most importantly, SilentKnight was upgraded to version 2 two years ago to ensure its compatibility with Catalina and later. Every few days I come across someone who is still using version 1 with a newer release of macOS and seeing incorrect results. If you use SilentKnight in any version of macOS from Catalina onwards, then please ensure that it’s updated to the current version 2.10:
SilentKnight 2.10 (Universal App for Catalina to Sequoia)

This is particularly important if you intend upgrading to Sequoia, because of the changes it brings in how XProtect is updated. If you’re still running 2.9 or earlier, then SilentKnight will give you incorrect versions for XProtect, and at worst could report a version of 0 (zero) as it might not be able to find XProtect at all.

Skint and SystHist

For the same reason, Skint should be updated to version 1.08:
Skint 1.08 (Universal App for Monterey, Ventura, Sonoma and Sequoia only)

systhist1181

SystHist lists full system and security update installation history, a task that invariably requires an annual update to cope with the quirks of the new version of macOS. If you’re aiming for Sequoia at some stage, ensure that you have updated it to version 1.20:
SystHist 1.20 (Universal App for High Sierra, Mojave, Catalina, Big Sur, Monterey, Ventura, Sonoma and Sequoia)

Writing Tools

Although Apple isn’t intending to release any of its new AI features in the initial version of Sequoia, 15.0, but is delaying them for 15.1, you might like to prepare for that by updating my rich text editor and PDF viewer in advance. Their latest versions should prove fully compatible with Writing Tools when they’re released.

DelightEd4

DelightEd is a Rich Text (RTF) editor with special Dark Mode features and support for interlinear text, and version 2.3 should work fully with Writing Tools:
DelightEd 2.3 (Universal App for High Sierra, Mojave, Catalina, Big Sur, Monterey, Ventura, Sonoma and Sequoia)

podofyllin20

Podofyllin is a lightweight PDF viewer (without any editing capability, so it can’t alter original PDF files) and shows source code and more. Version 1.3 should work fully with Writing Tools:
Podofyllin 1.3 (Universal App for High Sierra, Mojave, Catalina, Big Sur, Monterey, Ventura, Sonoma and Sequoia)

XProCheck, Nalaprop, Precize

Other recent updates you might have missed include the following.

XProCheck to check on XProtect Remediator scans completed and reported in the log:
XProCheck 1.6 (Universal App for Catalina, Big Sur, Monterey, Ventura, Sonoma and Sequoia)

Nalaprop for multilingual natural language parsing, now compatible with Writing Tools:
Nalaprop 1.3 (Universal App for Mojave, Catalina, Big Sur, Monterey, Ventura, Sonoma and Sequoia)

Precize, which looks deep into files, bundles and folders to show their full size including extended attributes, provides macOS Bookmarks and volfs paths as enduring file references, and detailed information contained in Bookmarks and Aliases:
Precize 1.15 (Universal App for High Sierra, Mojave, Catalina, Big Sur, Monterey, Ventura, Sonoma and Sequoia)

Key points

  • For Catalina or later, particularly Sequoia, use SilentKnight 2.10.
  • For Sequoia in particular, use Skint 1.08.
  • For Sequoia in particular, use SystHist 1.20.
  • Older versions of those apps will give incorrect results when run in more recent versions of macOS.

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