uhubctl VS Lunar

In my experience this support was rare. I had an issue a few years ago with multiple USB 3 cameras (Intel Realsense) on a mobile robot that would periodically freeze up and need to be hard-reset, and a power-controllable hub seemed like the least-bad way to hack around it. I found my way to this tool, with its convenient list of compatible hardware:

https://github.com/mvp/uhubctl

Of the USB 3 options on the list, several were EOL or impossible to find, and when I ordered one each of the remainder, there was only one I could get working, and it wasn't reliable about being able to reset a device that had frozen to the point where Linux no longer had sysfs entries for it.

We ended up instead using a hub with an internal jumper to disable bus power, and then putting the self power line through a separately-controllable relay.

Best you can tweak is to disable the WiFi / Bluetooth and possibly the USB ports (edit - USB look no go https://github.com/mvp/uhubctl)

There's an extremely useful feature called USB Per-Port Power Switching, that's somewhat rare because nobody knows about it. If you use a Unix-family operating system, then here's a C driver. Windows doesn't currently have this feature, but could add it in the future -- let's hope they do!

https://github.com/codazoda/hub-ctrl.c or https://github.com/mvp/uhubctl can be used if the hubs have "Per-port power switching". The second link also has a long description.

If you were using a USB-powered drive and Linux/Mac/Unix, you could use uhubctl with one of the (uncommon) hubs that support Per-Port Power Switching (PPPS).

Actually some of the Pi boards USB ports can be controlled by Uhubctl but you have to note the restrictions on the board you are using - mainly how many you effect and the "minor" fact of the USB also controls the Ethernet and WiFi power on some boards!

Agreed this is not the right sub for this, but you got me curious. Without diving too deep, check out https://github.com/mvp/uhubctl

I've also used Qlab on both ends to trigger USB led flashes via OSC using uhubctl. You'll need a usb hub for that.

It’s done in a similar way on macOS: a dylib is added to the bundle and an LC_LOAD command is added to the app binary. The dylib is the first thing that runs because of using the constructor attribute, like this: https://notes.alinpanaitiu.com/Injecting%20a%20DYLIB%20into%...

The nice thing is that a signed app will refuse to load a dylib that does not have the same signature. So crackers will be forced to change the whole app signature which can be easily detected in app code.

I have that kind of protection in Lunar (https://lunar.fyi/) and Clop (https://lowtechguys.com/clop) and it seems to be good enough as they have no recent cracks.

Pretty sure Lunar [0] can do this for you, and you can buy a lifetime license.

[0]: https://lunar.fyi/

I've had good luck with the Lunar app - it manages my Dell and LG monitors on an M2. (No affiliation) https://lunar.fyi

Wild! I am working on exactly the same thing now for Lunar (https://lunar.fyi), and I'm also calling it Night Mode ^_^ what a coincidence

I've been trying to make "white regions in dark backgrounds" less painful for months, but doing that at the system level on macOS is incredibly hard. I see you're doing it with CSS filters, which make sense in the limited scope of an article. But applying something like that on the whole macOS UI would cause confusion.

I already use something similar on the iPhone: I read on the Kindle app which has white text on black background, then I have a full red Color Tint filter on the Triple Back Tap shortcut which I use before reading. Very similar effect to your solution, although I don't have images in my books.

I was comparing anti-piracy measures with DRM, I don't have actual DRM in my app. I can't block users that really bought the app from using it (which is what DRM is notorious for).

But I do have a license verification for the Pro features (https://lunar.fyi/#pro), and that is what people are cracking in the app. I only added more protection around this verification.

Lunar

There's no Reduce White Point on Mac as far as I am aware. However, you can use the fantastic Lunar [0] app to achieve this, as it supports "Sub-Zero Dimming".

To use it, I think you just need to start Lunar, and then press the Reduce Brightness button on your keyboard until it goes below the minimum Mac allows.

[0] https://lunar.fyi

As the dev of a macOS app that breaks all the time because of external hardware, the tone of the article hits close to home. (I’m talking about https://lunar.fyi/ whose brightness control commands can be blocked by USB-C hubs, “smart” monitors, too long cables etc.)

I had to disable public GitHub issues on the app repo [1] because people seemed to fuel each other with spiteful comments and “why can’t you just!!” sentences.

The contact form still attracts many such “entitled” people and it hurts to wake up to such messages, but at least I can choose to ignore those if I can’t bring anything to the discussion. There’s no peer pressure.

These people are expecting too much from a handful of developers who are sharing a lot of free work and time that could have been spent better than hunting new IDs in URLs and updating regular expressions.

[1] https://github.com/alin23/Lunar

Last year I bought a second computer for my music studio. I wanted to use the same set of 2 monitors and wired keyboard + trackpad on both machines.

I wrote simple scripts to switch my monitor inputs with keyboard shortcuts (even simpler with Lunar, amazing new Mac app — https://lunar.fyi), which saved me from having to press annoying input-source buttons.

But I couldn't for the life of me find a simple, suitable software controllable KVM switch. That still requires the hardware button to be controlled, so frustrating.

Some people like the process of writing code, more than the end result. I had a few months of that feeling, but nowadays it’s rarely about writing for me.

Just the other day I used Copilot to explain the disassembly of macOS KeyboardBacklight code, so that I can turn off the keyboard lights when using Lunar’s Blackout (https://lunar.fyi/#blackout)

It even helped me generate the ObjC function signatures from assembly and use the right calling convention in Swift afterwards. It really feels like magic.

I would have no joy in writing that code, it’s mostly bridging and translation anyway. I just need it to do this thing so that people can take advantage of it.