Apple provides so many services for different parts of macOS that it’s hard to keep track of them. If you want to see a short summary, this article lists all service connections for enterprise network administrators, although it doesn’t detail which services use which servers, for example referring to “macOS updates” in many entries.

Many of you seem surprised to learn that Sequoia’s new XProtect updates come from iCloud, although Apple has been using iCloud for similar purposes for at least the last five years.

One good example that’s used every day on your Mac are the notarization checks sometimes run by Gatekeeper when macOS launches executable code, such as an app. In that case, com.apple.syspolicy processes the app’s notarization ticket
looking up ticket: <private>, 2, 1
by trying to fetch its record from iCloud using CloudKit. That’s followed by log entries indicating the network access required to connect with iCloud and check the ticket. Success is reported by com.apple.syspolicy in
CKTicketStore network reachability: 1, Mon Aug 26 09:15:45 2024
looking up ticket: <private>, 2, 0
and further lookups. I first reported those checks with iCloud back in Catalina, in 2019.

A simple way to illustrate the differences between this and using the general softwareupdated service is to compare what happens in the log when you ask if there are any updates available.

softwareupdate

When SilentKnight does this, it uses the only supported method, the softwareupdate tool, as used to keep XProtect up to date in all versions of macOS prior to Sequoia. That command hands over to the softwareupdated service to run the check. That in turn uses components of com.apple.SoftwareUpdateController to summarise the update state of that Mac, connect to the Software Update Server, check all the current versions and build numbers of macOS and its ancillaries, and arrive at a list of updates required. This is even more complex than it sounds, as com.apple.SoftwareUpdateController has to check key settings such as whether the root volume is sealed or not.

You can trace this through several thousand log entries, and after around 4.4 seconds and multiple network connections, softwareupdate finally informs SilentKnight that there are no updates available.

xprotect

Running the command
sudo xprotect check
in Sequoia is far simpler and quicker, as it checks for just one component’s updates through iCloud. The command connects to XProtectUpdateService in the XprotectFramework private framework in macOS, which in turn fires up CloudKit to connect to iCloud. That fetches a database record and returns the result to XProtectUpdateService, and so back to the xprotect tool as its result. Total time taken is 0.5 second.

As Apple’s intent in changing the management of XProtect and its data appears to be to facilitate more frequent and macOS-specific updates, iCloud is an ideal platform to host this on.

Pinniped with tusks

There is, though, one last thing: what is the walrus? As that might seem an odd question, read these two log entries encountered when browsing what happened with the xprotect check command:

12:08:00.919841 com.apple.cdp XPC Error while fetching walrus status: Error Domain=NSCocoaErrorDomain Code=4099 "The connection to service named com.apple.cdp.daemon was invalidated: failed at lookup with error 3 - No such process." UserInfo={NSDebugDescription=The connection to service named com.apple.cdp.daemon was invalidated: failed at lookup with error 3 - No such process.}
12:08:00.919845 com.apple.cloudkit CoreCDP reports that walrus is undetermined for the logged in account. Error: Error Domain=NSCocoaErrorDomain Code=4099 UserInfo={NSDebugDescription=<private>}

The prospect of an undetermined walrus that can’t be fetched from inside my Mac might seem worrying

Following the conundrums of the group portraits of the first of these two articles, this shows some that appear more straightforward, although they still need to be approached by asking who, where and when.

Raphael’s Portrait of Pope Leo X with Cardinals Giulio de’ Medici and Luigi Rossi (1517-19) groups its three figures closely together. The Pope sits not on a throne, but more informally, a magnificent illuminated book (thought to be the ‘Hamilton’ Bible from about 1350) open in front of him and a magnifying glass in his left hand.

Augustin Théodule Ribot’s Breton Fishermen and Their Families (c 1880-85) is a gritty collection of nameless faces from the coast of the north-west of France. Their features are as hard as the weather that they must have faced.

Moving towards the end of the nineteenth century, and to the artist’s colony of Skagen at the northern tip of Jutland in Denmark, we come to PS Krøyer’s magnificent group portrait of many of the Nordic Impressionists who gathered there each summer. From the left, moving around the table, this shows: Martha Møller Johansen, Viggo Johansen, Christian Krohg, PS Krøyer, Degn Brøndum, Michael Ancher, Oscar Björck, Thorvald Niss, Helene Christensen, Anna Ancher, and Helga Ancher. While this may appear a spontaneous record of an actual event, in fact it was over four years in the painting, and it seems unlikely that this group ever met in these circumstances.

The French Naturalist artist Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret was technically one of the most brilliant of all Cabanel’s students. He could achieve realism of photographic quality, as shown appropriately in this Wedding at the Photographer’s from 1879. Here is a painted group portrait of a couple and their family being photographed for their group portrait.

Many of the greatest portrait painters also created fine group portraits.

Some of Sir Godfrey Kneller’s many portraits of the British gentry include children or groups, such as The Harvey Family, painted in 1721.

In Sir Joshua Reynolds’ portrait of Lady Elizabeth Delmé and Her Children (1777-9) his brushwork becomes painterly for their clothes and in the background.

Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun painted more than thirty portraits of Marie Antoinette (1755-1793), wife of King Louis XVI, who was guillotined on 16 October 1793 during the French Revolution. This family portrait from 1787 shows Marie-Antoinette de Lorraine-Habsbourg, Queen of France, and Her Children. Vigée Le Brun started work on this on 9 July 1786, her sitter choosing a red dress fit for a queen. With her are Marie-Thérèse, the Duchess of Angoulême, Louis-Charles, who was to become Louis XVII of France, and Louis-Joseph, who became the Dauphin. The empty cradle was for Marie-Sophie-Béatrice, who died on 19 June, shortly before she would have been one.

My final paintings are all by artists of their families.

Benjamin West’s group portrait of The Artist and His Family from about 1772 gives insight into his peculiar circumstances. It shows, from the left, the Wests’ older son, Benjamin West’s wife Betsy, cradling their newborn second son in her lap, Benjamin West’s brother Thomas, and father John (who had been born in England), and standing in his lavender gown, holding palette and maulstick, is the artist himself.

Often compared with a traditional Nativity scene, it was described at the time as a “neat little scene of domestic happiness”. But looking at the directions of gaze, and the extraordinary detachment of Thomas and John West, who are staring into the distance, domestic happiness seems far away.

The short-lived Philipp Otto Runge painted this group portrait of We Three in 1805, the year after he had finished his Academy training, and shortly after his marriage. This shows his older brother Johann Daniel on the left, with the artist and his bride Pauline. This may have been painted after the couple had moved back to Hamburg later that year, although they soon returned to live with his parents in Wolgast.

During the summer of 1867, Frédéric Bazille started work on Portraits of the *** Family also known as The Family Gathering, which he didn’t complete until January 1868. This seems to have been one of his most carefully composed paintings, and he devoted a series of sketches to getting the arrangement of the figures and the terrace just right.

The figures include the artist, squeezed in last at the extreme left, an uncle, Bazille’s parents seated on the bench, Bazille’s cousin Pauline des Hours and her husband standing, an aunt and Thérèse des Hours (model for The Pink Dress) seated at the table, his brother Marc and his partner, and at the right Camille, the youngest of the des Hours sisters. This painting marked a special version of a regular summer meeting, as Pauline des Hours and Bazille’s brother Marc married the partners shown in the late summer of 1867.

At the time, such group portraits were exceptional in French art. It was exhibited at the Salon in 1868, and remains one of Bazille’s finest and most innovative works.

By contrast, Michael Peter Ancher’s family portrait on Christmas Day 1900, completed in 1902, looks funereal. A family bible is open on the table as they gaze grimly away from the magnificent triptych of waves behind them. I believe that the woman at the far right is Anna Ancher, then aged 40; she wears a distinctive necklace with an anchor, the Danish for which is anker.

One of Lovis Corinth’s most popular paintings from the early years of the twentieth century is this group portrait of The Artist and his Family (1909). All dressed up for what may have been intended to be a more formal group portrait, the artist’s wife Charlotte sits calmly cradling their daughter Wilhelmine, then just five months old, as the artist is struggling to paint them. Their son Thomas, aged five years, stands on a desk so that he can rest his hand on mother’s shoulder.

This week’s two articles about reading paintings consider some of the more famous and unusual depictions of the likenesses of three or more people. Individual portraits have long been popular, and for many artists have brought in the income they’ve needed to paint as a career. Painting three or more portraits in a single image presents greater challenges, and in many cases complicates their reading considerably. Among the paintings included in today’s article are some of the hardest of all to read, that remain controversial.

The first and key step in starting to read a group portrait is to discover who, where and when. For some, a little digging around in contemporary historical records may be sufficient.

When Lavinia Fontana was in Rome, she painted the remarkable family Portrait of Bianca degli Utili Maselli with six of her children (1604-5), showing this nobleman’s wife, five of her sons, and her daughter Verginia, whose image is labelled to distinguish her from her brothers. The mother died in September 1605 after giving birth to her nineteenth child. Their lapdog was a sign of fidelity, and Fontana’s depiction of clothing exquisite.

In 1617, Michiel van Mierevelt and his son Pieter, specialists in portraiture, painted The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Willem van der Meer, one of the earliest portraits of a social group from the Dutch Golden Age. The members of this group are all ignoring the cadaver in front of them, preferring to look at the painter, and are thought to be members of the Surgeons’ Guild of the city of Delft, who commissioned this work.

Rembrandt painted his Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp in 1632, as an early commission soon after his arrival in Amsterdam. It’s a group portrait of distinguished members of the Surgeons’ Guild in their working environment. Most remarkable is the fact that its principal, Dr Tulp, and most of his colleagues aren’t looking at the dissected forearm.

A decade later, Rembrandt’s vast group portrait of The Night Watch (1642) is perhaps the most famous of them all, although it’s more correctly titled Militia Company of District II under the Command of Captain Frans Banninck Cocq. It features the commander and seventeen members of his civic guard company in Amsterdam, and took the artist three years to complete from his first commission to paint this for display in the great hall of the guards.

Captain Frans Banninck Cocq (in black with a red sash), followed by his lieutenant Willem van Ruytenburch (in yellow with a white sash) are leading out this militia company, their colours borne by the ensign Jan Visscher Cornelissen. The small girl to the left of them is carrying a dead chicken, a symbol of arquebusiers, the type of weapon several are carrying.

Portraits of royal families have been regular commissions for their court painters. The best of these have greater artistic merit. Diego Velázquez’ Las Meninas, translated as The Maids of Honour, from about 1656-57 is another well-known example of a group portrait. In what is overtly a depiction of eleven people and a dog in a room in the Alcázar Palace, he uses composition and gaze to tell us more. Much depends on what we believe most of the figures are looking at. Reflected in the rectangular plane mirror on the far wall are King Philip IV and his wife Queen Mariana of Austria.

There has been dispute over whether the reflection shows the royal couple stood where the viewer is, or the mirror is reflecting their painted images on Velázquez’s canvas. How their images were generated is probably of secondary importance, as either way the gaze of most of the other figures is clearly directed not at the viewer, but at the King and Queen, who may be getting up to leave after sitting for Velázquez to paint them. In this reading, the most important people not in the painting only appear in reflection and the gaze of others.

In April 1800, Francisco Goya was commissioned by King Carlos IV to paint a family portrait, which proved to be the last of his royal commissions before the war with France, and his most important. It’s often said that Goya’s inspiration for his large canvas of Carlos IV of Spain and His Family (1800-01) was Las Meninas, but what he has painted is different in almost every respect other than the fact that the artist has taken the opportunity to include a self-portrait of himself painting the painting, as it were. Goya captures a moment of optimism when Spain and France were allies, and portrays his royal figures in stark reality.

In the mid-nineteenth century Gustave Courbet’s Painter’s Studio proved a turning point. One of the most unconventional group portraits, it influenced successors including Henri Fantin-Latour.

The Painter’s Studio from 1855 is one of the great ‘problem paintings’ that has been extensively analysed and ‘explained’ as allegory. Those classical approaches have recently been challenged by Herbert, who argues that trying to determine whether it is allegorical or realist is asking the wrong question.

The figures in the painting show individuals who had influence over Courbet’s life and artistic career. At the right are the artist’s friends and admirers, including his first patron Alfred Bruyas, critics Champfleury and Baudelaire who had been so positive in their reactions to his work, and others. At the left, a man with dogs has been interpreted as an allegory of the Emperor Napoleon III. Behind him are figures who were long assumed to be allegorical, but Hélène Toussaint has identified them as contemporary people, most of whom had been supporters of the Emperor’s regime.

Following a long series of studies, Henri Fantin-Latour’s first group portrait Homage to Delacroix was completed almost ten years later, in 1864. Its figures include two, Champfleury and Baudelaire, who had appeared in Courbet’s Painter’s Studio, together with those who Fantin rated as the brightest and best among modern painters, including his friends Whistler and Manet. Inevitably he included himself among such distinguished company.

But Fantin neither poses the puzzle of Courbet’s allegory, nor the social gathering of Manet’s Music in the Tuileries. Instead we have seven men looking at the viewer, and three gazing somewhere else. It almost looks like a ‘real’ group portrait, but lacking interactions between the figures, it’s clear that it’s eleven individual portraits, including that of Delacroix.

Fantin pressed on with his unusual group portraits, here in Studio at Les Batignolles from 1870, showing his friend Manet painting with a small group of friends peering over his shoulders. Its debt to Courbet is palpable. The figures were identified by the artist as:

• Otto Schölderer (standing, left),
• Pierre-Auguste Renoir,
• Émile Zola,
• Edmond Maître,
• Frédéric Bazille,
• Claude Monet (standing, right),
• Édouard Manet (seated, left)
• Zacharie Astruc (seated, right).

As a window into history, this is unique, showing Manet, Renoir, Zola, Bazille (who was to die that November in the Franco-Prussian War) and Monet in a fictional snapshot; it also inspired Bazille to paint a response and seems to have struck a chord with both artistic circles and the critics of the day. Although Fantin has integrated his figures better than in earlier paintings, this begs many questions such as what they’re all doing together, and whether the painting is about homage to Manet, who was still very much alive, or the meeting of an imaginary gentlemen’s club.

The sixth and last of Fantin’s group portraits, Around the Piano from 1885, shows members of a Wagner fan club in Paris at the time. They are each gazing at something different and not interacting in the least. Emmanuel Chabrier is playing the piano without looking at its keyboard or the music, and its other figures (bar one) appear distracted.

Maurice Denis was one of the few artists to take a deep interest in the late paintings of Paul Cézanne, and in 1900 paid his respects (although Cézanne didn’t die until 1906) in this Homage to Cézanne. The artist to whom this group of Nabis are paying their respects is represented by a painting, Cézanne’s Fruit Bowl, Glass and Apples. Although not entirely cohesive as a group, there are clear interactions taking place, and gazes reflect that, with Odilon Redon at the left and Paul Sérusier (foreground, at the right edge of the painting) clearly engaged with one another.

In 1902-03, Félix Vallotton painted a smaller group of Nabis in his Five Painters. Only Édouard Vuillard and Ker-Xavier Roussel seem to be joined in discussion, and there’s a strange array of hands around the centre of the canvas.

Tomorrow I’ll look at more conventional group portraits, including some featuring the families of artists.

偶然发现，思源字体的繁体字库文件，无法显示一些简体字。而思源的简体文件，似乎可以显示全部的繁体字？于是把常用的字体文件拆开，看看分别都能涵盖多少简繁汉字。

直接说结论：

• 简体字的字体，如「思源简体」，包含了中国大陆 GB18030-2000 编码标准的全部汉字，是能够同时显示几乎所有的常用繁体字的，因为这个 GB18030 标准，也涵盖了所有的早期台湾 big5 编码的繁体字；
• 反之，通常专门的「繁體 / 正體」字体，如「思源繁體」，很多简体字是不能显示的。因为相关的台湾汉字编码 CNS11643-1986（第 1 & 2 版面），只能覆盖 70% 的常用简体字。

首先，在最常用的几个字体中，

• 微软雅黑 和 思源简体 基本一致
• 思源繁体 和 思源香港 基本一致

两两之间的差别，只是少许生僻字、异体字、以及历史遗留的制作中文编码时的重复或疏忽。具体差别的内容，放在文末了。所以，这里主要对比「思源简体」和「思源繁体」，就可以了。

在思源字体 CJK 的说明文件里，写出了不同国家字体文件的字符数量，和需要支持的标准。可以看到，简中字体文件打包的字符，比繁中多了一万多个（这里的 Glyphs 不仅是中文，也包括西文、特殊符号、甚至一些 emoji）。

简中字体需要支持的标准，主要是

• 大陆 2000 年颁布的《GB18030 标准简体中文字符集》，包含 27,533 个汉字。当然，是否能做到 100% 符合，思源的设计方也表示，编码标准比较复杂，不好说……
• 2013 年颁布的《通用规范汉字表》，包含 8105 个汉字。其中有 199 个，不在 GB18030 的范围内。

繁体字体需要支持的标准，主要包括

• 台湾 1986 年颁布的《CNS11643 通用汉字标准交换码》，包括 13051 个汉字，和早年的「big5 大五码」相同。最初只有 1 2 两个字面（Panel），后来逐渐扩展，现在 1~7 字面都已经被 ISO 纳入 Unicode 体系，但思源繁体里，只支持 1 2 字面。
• 《HKSCS 香港增补字符集》，是香港从 1995 年开始，对台湾 big5 编码的补充，到 2016 年，收录汉字 5033 个。

从台湾的官网上，可以下载到目前最新的 CNS11643 – Unicode 之间的对应情况；大陆这边没有找到类似的官网资料，搜到的几个 GB18030 – Unicode 编码表，都是 PDF 格式（掀桌……）。但可以在 python 里把字符 encode，得到相应的编码，也可以变相确认，某个字符是否在某个编码里。

>>> print('劍'.encode('gb18030'))
b'\x84\xa6'
>>> print('劍'.encode('gb2312'))
报错
>>> print('劍'.encode('big5'))
b'\xbcC'
>>> print('劍'.encode('raw_unicode_escape'))
b'\\u528d'

实测结果，所有的 13053 个繁体 big5 汉字，也就是台湾最初规定的，最常用的繁体字，都包含在大陆的 GB18030 编码，也包含在思源简体的字体文件里。包含在思源繁体，而不在思源简体中的汉字，只有 1711 个（详见文末，——如果你觉得其中哪个字不够生僻，那么通常是历史遗留下来的编码重复、或者异体字。譬如，现在 Unicode 里，至少有 10 个各种形态的「龟」字了。

• 简体「龟」 – U+9F9F、U+2EF2、U+2EF3
• 繁体「龜」 – U+9F9C、U+2EF1、U+2FD4、U+F907、U+F908、U+FACE
• 日文「亀」 – U+4E80
• 还有 emoji 的 U+1F422 、埃及象形文的 𓆉 U+13189

相对的，包含在思源简体，而不在思源繁体中的汉字，有 11856 个之多。这其中，包括了非常多的常用简体字。以大陆最常用的 6763 个汉字（也就是 1980 年大陆发布的 GB2132 汉字编码集）为例。在这些汉字当中：

• 包含在 1986 年台湾 big5 编码中的汉字：4383 个
• 没有被 big5 收录，但是包含在「思源繁体」中的：482 个
• 「思源繁体」中也不存在的：1898 个

具体字符清单见文末。可以看到，思源繁体字库中，不能显示的常用简体字，接近 30%，尤其是部首本身就有简繁体之分的，如：讠纟艹饣钅车马鱼鸟页……使用了这些简体字部首的字，有很大概率，在繁体字库里无法显示。

当然，这样的差异，不一定代表着台湾那边的汉字编码工作不力、或者对简体字的傲慢。无论是 GB18030 还是 CNS11643，都早已有了更新更全面的版本，在 CNS11643 2004 年的版本中，包含了 GB2312 的全部 6763 个汉字，而整个思源简体的三万多字符，也只有 500 多个不在其中。所以，还是一些神秘的历史差异，导致——

• 简体字体支持大陆 2000 年的标准，而
• 繁体字体只支持台湾 1986 年的标准

但目前我们在网上浏览，或者文字排版时，如果用统一的字体，且需要考虑简繁体的兼容性的话，还是使用满足 GB18030 的 “简体” 字库吧。

思源字体（黑体和宋体）在 github 上的原始下载版本，分成了

• Variable OTCs – 五个地区的合集（中国、台湾、香港、日本、韩国）
• Language-specific Variable Fonts – 不同语言的合集
• Region-specific Subset Variable Fonts – 适配不同地区的版本

本文之前分析的，都是 Region-specific 版本之间的区别。而更大一级的 Language-specific 的中文字体，无论是简体繁体，都收录了四万多个字符，大约是大陆和台湾编码标准的合集，甚至更多，推荐大家去使用这个。但 Github 的界面流程，对于非专业人士来说，还是过于复杂了。而 Google Fonts 上提供的下载版本，就只有 Region-specific 的版本。

附——

最近几个月 Ai 绘画这个话题很火，但基本上大家都只是看个热闹，跟普通人的生活没多大关系。或者说，大家感觉不到它和自己有什么关系。只有相关从业者，感受到了巨大的生存压力和身份危机。

但和当年支付大战的春晚红包类似，能让普通人都参与进来、玩起来的场景可能才能让大家感受到：Ai 绘画意味着什么，能做什么。

尽管众多以文生图的 Ai 工具已经大幅度降低了创作门槛，但是在那之前，各种咒术、法门终究是拦住不少普通人接触 Ai 绘画的一块巨石。我自己也曾在用过某些 Ai 工具后，在一条展示初次接触的创作成果的视频里提醒大家，不要忽视它，但也不要过分害怕它。它一定会给我们的生活带来巨大的变化，只是目前还没积累到那一刻，仅此而已。

如果说有什么场景，类似发红包那样简单明了，人人都可以参与，我觉得有一个非常合适的应用场景，那就是用 Ai 生成定制头像。对于不具备绘画能力、不懂念咒语、不会使用绘图软件的大多数人而言，Ai 画头像就是各类修图美容软件一级的场景，既有尝新和娱乐，也有充分的社交属性，和红包非常相似。

最近试用了一下漫镜，一个感觉是，神情抓得不错，风格也足够多，用它来探索自己不同造型的可能性，还是挺有启发的！因此中途我想到一件事，如果这类产品的效率再高一些，跟各大连锁发型屋合作，预约时就上传几张照片，生成几套发型方案，人到了现场就让托尼老师根据效果图来剪，这不是非常好的体验升级么？谁说 Ai 必然逼得人失业呢？还得是看人怎么用。

除了头像，你觉得还有哪些场景，适合普通人体验 Ai 绘画呢？

欢迎收听荒野楼阁 WildloG，这里是设计师苏志斌的个人播客。作为第 0 期，我会与你分享一下做这个播客的动机、这个播客的主题会是什么、起这个名字的缘由、本期封面和播客 Logo 的设计想法，以及后续的节目计划。

在这一期，你会听到：

—- 我是谁？从我家的动物园，工作和话剧的经历，聊到我二十多年的写作习惯。

—- 我对于视频内容的态度？为什么那么久没更新《设以观复》系列？

—- 原本并不想做播客，为什么转变想法呢？动机是什么？

—- 这个播客的主题：一个外星人

—- 荒野楼阁 WildloG 这个名字是什么意思？因为生机勃勃啊！

—- Why not 和 WildloG

—- 封面设计：隐秘的荒野和兔子王国

—- 以两类节目为主：一个人捡树枝，两人以上一起捡树枝

—- 要停更视频？

｜登场人物｜

苏志斌：工业设计师，车联网智能硬件产品经理/联创，《设以观复》作者

｜相关链接｜

若你所使用的播客客户端未能完整显示插图，或遇网络问题未能正常播放，请访问：

荒野楼阁 WildloG 的地址：https://suithink.me/zlink/podcast/

阅读设计相关的各类文章：https://suithink.me/zlink/idea/

｜其他社交网络媒体｜

苏志斌 @ 知乎｜SUiTHiNK @ 即刻 / 微博

苏志斌SUiTHiNK @ Bilibili / YouTube / 小红书

｜联络邮箱｜

suithink.su@gmail.com

欢迎在 小宇宙、Spotify、YouTube、Apple Podcast 收听本节目，期待你的留言。