Linked List: December 17, 2023

Sunday, 17 December 2023

Flappy Dird: Flappy Bird Implemented in MacOS Finder 

Eieio:

I made a game. It’s called Flappy Dird. It’s Flappy Bird inside MacOS Finder.

It has instructions, high score tracking, and marquee banner ads. You double-click to start a game and select any file in the window to jump. It runs at 4 frames a second and can’t run much faster. It occasionally drops inputs for reasons that you’ll understand if you finish this blog.

There are two types of hacks I just love: those that are surprisingly useful, and those that are utterly useless but completely joyful. Pretty clear which type Flappy Dird is. Even better than the game itself is the detail Eieio puts into explaining how it works, including this gem of a sentence:

I was reluctant to do this because adding any amount of control flow to an AppleScript seemed hard — but I was also pretty excited to get to say “I rewrote it in AppleScript for speed.”

MacOS Tip: Quick Access to System Information 

Craig Hockenberry:

Do you hate how hard it is to get to System Information now? (System Settings… > General > About > System Report…)

Just hold down the Option key in the Apple menu…

This is actually a great meta tip: on the Mac, it’s an idiom that goes all the way back to the classic Mac OS era for additional menu items to be exposed by holding down the Option key. One common idiom — which you’ll notice in the Apple menu — is using Option as a modifier to skip a confirmation step. So the “Restart…” and “Shut Down…” commands — whose ellipses indicate that they require confirmation — turn into “Restart” and “Shut Down” while holding Option.

(Also: System Information is just an app, so you can launch it using Spotlight, LaunchBar, Alfred, Raycast, etc.)

Kolide 

My thanks to Kolide for sponsoring last week at DF. Getting OS updates installed on end user devices should be easy. After all, it’s one of the simplest yet most impactful ways that every employee can practice good security. On top of that, every MDM solution promises that it will automate the process and install updates with no user interaction needed. Yet in the real world, it doesn’t play out like that. Users don’t install updates and IT admins won’t force installs via forced restart.

With Kolide, when a user’s device — be it Mac, Windows, Linux, or mobile — is out of compliance, Kolide reaches out to them with instructions on how to fix it. The user chooses when to restart, but if they don’t fix the problem by a predetermined deadline, they’re unable to authenticate with Okta.

Watch Kolide’s on-demand demo to learn more about how it enforces device compliance for companies with Okta.