This week I have another group of four little utilities whose windows have been overhauled, and have new app icons to meet the requirements of macOS Tahoe. Each of these new versions requires macOS Big Sur or later.

Finder aliases

If you have old Finder aliases that need to be checked and repaired, Alifix will do that job with you. Use it to scan a folder containing those aliases, and it will warn you which can’t be resolved any longer, and can rewrite those that need to be updated.

Alifix version 1.4 is now available from here: alifix14
and from its Product Page. As it seldom needs updating, it doesn’t use the auto-update mechanism.

APFS sparse and clone files

As you can tell by its name, Sparsity started off as a means of creating APFS sparse files for test purposes. In addition to that, it has a valuable scanning feature that will detect and report details of all sparse, clone and purgeable files in a selected volume or folder. Information reported includes both the nominal and actual size of each file, so you can see which sparse files are saving the most space on disk.

Sparsity version 1.4 is now available from here: sparsity14
and from its Product Page. It too doesn’t use auto-update.

UTI file types

Give UTIutility a filename extension and it will tell you its Uniform Type Indicator (UTI, also UTType), traditional Mac OSType, MIME type, Pasteboard type, and a list of UTIs it conforms to. You can also find the same information from those other properties. This too has a crawler that will search through a volume or folder and compile a list of all the UTIs it encounters there. Its Help book contains an extensive reference to UTIs to help you get the most out of them.

UTIutility version 1.4 is now available from here: utiutil14
and from its Product Page. It doesn’t use auto-update.

Natural language

For many years, macOS has had built-in features to handle and parse natural languages including French, Spanish and German. Nalaprop uses these features to analyse text files, or text pasted into the left view in its main window. That text can then be parsed by downloadable linguistics modules supplied by Apple, and each word displayed in colour according to that word’s part of speech or grammatical type. From that it can automatically construct dictionaries or concordances of words used in that text, arranged by part of speech, and giving word frequency for each.

Nalaprop comes with a multilingual demonstration file to show how well it copes with language transitions.

Here it has parsed and coloured the text in the middle according to part of speech, for two languages, English and French. To the right of those is the dictionary it has compiled, ending verbs and starting the list of nouns. At the far right is a colour key for parts of speech.

In this demonstration, Charles Dickens’ novel David Copperfield has been parsed, a total of nearly 360,000 words. Currently such large documents are analysed in the main thread, so you’re likely to see a spinning beachball during parsing, but can still switch freely to other apps when that’s taking place. Those with Apple silicon Macs will see that analysis is performed in a single thread running on one P core, so all the other P cores remain free to run other tasks. I was hoping to use different threads for this, but it proved too complicated to incorporate in this particular version.

Nalaprop version 1.4 is now available from here: nalaprop14
from its Product Page, and via its auto-update mechanism.

Enjoy!

Here are the 21 icons for those of my apps so far ported to be compatible with Tahoe.

You don’t have to collect all in the series, though.

看《波斯语课》，犹太人阴错阳差，靠着教德国军官波斯语来活命，但他完全不会波斯语，于是硬编了一门语言出来，每天编出一些单词让德国人背，犹太人自己也拼命背，忽悠了两年都没穿帮。

这听起来不太可能，当然电影里也做了很多铺垫，譬如犹太人声称自己也不懂读写，只是单纯教口语。在那个信息不流畅的时代，人们对如何学习一门外语的认知，也和我们如今相差甚远。总之，这只是电影里的设定，借此体验剧情就好。

电影的情节，让我想起萨苏说过一个段子：抗战时期的冀中八路军，冒充日本兵去刺探情报，他们只是跟着亲中的日本人学了一阵子口语，就能练到，让日本人听不出是 “外国人在说日语” 的程度。

你们现代人学不好外语，就是少挣俩钱儿。我们学不好的，都牺牲了。

萨苏《尊严不是无代价的》

想象如果换作是我，或者，如果是几个我脑中浮现出的，日常就有压力和情绪状况的朋友，面对这样的情境，这种一旦露馅就会死的巨大压力，能不能蒙混搞定？

大概有人真的会直接选择死亡吧？相比之下，虽然我也焦虑，但默认的思考方向，仍然是先去试试，再大不了一死。虽然自认是语言天赋很糟糕的人，但也存在着微小概率，拼命学外语，然后蒙混过关？——某种意义上，我觉得自己并不是因为面对压力而焕发了斗志，而是，没有经历过这种必须拿命学外语的样子，作为一种体验，有些好奇？

从文化决定论的角度，这些不同的状态，和环境、和文化，有很大的关系。但究竟有多大的关系？古代和如今的环境，对人的影响到底差异在哪里？我并不清楚。甚至，这样的人的比例，古今是否真的不同，现在是否变得更多，我也不清楚。也许他们之前只是没有显现。

以及，我第一次意识到「有的人会在面对巨大生存压力时，直接选择去死」这件事，大概是《大逃杀》里，那几个直接跳崖的学生。