To Kill a Mocking Daemon

I have a couple of old Macbook Pros, from 2012 and 2015. They work better than when I bought them, thanks to new batteries from Ifixit. However, there are some OS issues - processes that do not work well on older two core processors. The photoanalysisd daemon is one of the useless things that saps all available processing power and killing it doesn't work - something always starts it up again.

My simple solution is to delete a bad daemon. If it isn't there, then it cannot run.

However a recent security update, restored it. So after more than a decade of bliss, I had to delete it again, which is a little bit of an annoyance, due to the system integrity protection. You cannot simply sudo and rm it. You got to reboot a couple times.

Deactivate SIP:
Turn off the Macbook
Hold down Command-R and press power button
Wait to boot into Utilities
Click Utilities, Terminal
# csrutil disable
# reboot

Delete photoanalysisd:
# su
# mount -uw /
# rm /System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.photoanalysisd.plist
# rm /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/PhotoAnalysis.framework/Versions/A/Support/photoanalysisd

Activate SIP: 
Turn off the Macbook
Hold down Command-R and press power button
Wait...
Click Utilities, Terminal
# csrutil enable
# reboot

Note that newer OS versions have a different method to get into the Recovery mode.

Another old app that doesn't work anymore and just sits there consuming all spare CPU power, is the NewsToday2 app which lurks in the never used drop down widget on the right of the top menu bar. That one is easy to fix - just remove it by clicking Edit and clicking the little minus sign.

La voila!

Herman

Comments

OpenEMS with Octave and SciLAB

I wanted to do some advanced RF antenna development work and needed an electromagnetic field solver that is a bit more up to date than NEC2 . Commercial solvers from Matlab , Ansys and others are hideously expensive (in the order of $20,000 to $50,000) and do not fit in the wallet of a hobbyist or a small consulting company. Recently, openEMS became available and it fills the niche with a capable free tool. In general, openEMS is a solver - a Finite-Difference Time-Domain (FDTD) numerical engine. You interact with it through Octave , which is almost identical to Matlab . You can watch a good video by Thorsten Liebig here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=ThMLf0d5gaE Getting it to work is a little painful, but it is free, so bear with it - then save a backup clone, or a zipped copy of the whole virtual machine directory and NEVER update it, to ensure that it keeps going and doesn't get broken by future updates, right when you are ...

Parasitic Quadrifilar Helical Antenna

This article was reprinted in OSCAR News, March 2018: http://www.amsat-uk.org If you want to receive Satellite Weather Pictures , then you need a decent antenna, otherwise you will receive more noise than picture. For polar orbit satellites, one needs an antenna with a mushroom shaped radiation pattern . It needs to have strong gain towards the horizon where the satellites are distant, less gain upwards where they are close and as little as possible downwards, which would be wasted and a source of noise. Most satellites are spin stabilized and therefore the antenna also needs circular polarization, otherwise the received signal will flutter as the antennas rotate through nulls. The helical antenna, first proposed by Kraus in 1948, is the natural solution to circular polarized satellite communications. It is a simple twisted wire - there seems to be nothing to it. Various papers have been published on helix antennas, so the operation is pretty well ...

Yagi Antenna for 900 MHz ISM Band

I like tinkering with wire antenna designs, since they are simple and cheap to make. Mr Yagi invented his antenna about 100 years ago, but there are still some things left to learn about it. 900 MHz ISM Band Yagi The 900 MHz ISM band ranges from 902 to 928 MHz. Covering the whole band with a single Yagi antenna is difficult, since they are inherently narrow band devices. Consequently some tweaking is required and the result below is a desensitized design that can be built and replicated quite easily, but you need a network analyzer - "To Measure, is to Know!" A Yagi generally consists of a Reflector, Radiator and one or more Director elements, arranged on a boom. For a small Yagi, a wooden ruler works a treat, since one can easily mark the position of the wires. The wire elements are fastened to the bottom of the ruler with hot glue. The wire elements are made from straightened out jumbo size paper clips. The balun, is tw...

Aeronetworks sro - Airborne Linux

Search This Blog