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xattred

Knowing what not to back up, and how

T T Read More

Don’t clutter your backups with files you’d never want to restore. Here are five methods to exclude items from Time Machine backups to keep them leaner.

August 3, 2021 Macs, Technology

How WordPress comments and Property Lists can trip you up

When you write a comment to an article here, or edit a Property List, you’re editing XML. Two or three characters won’t work properly.

May 22, 2021 General, Language, Life, Macs, Painting, Technology

Extended attributes as a vulnerability

Thirty years ago, many Macs were hit by the Wdef virus, which exploited a vulnerability which remains today: it travelled in an extended attribute. Should we be worried now?

November 7, 2020 Macs, Technology

Controlling metadata: Tricks with persistence

Unlike file data, metadata has varying persistence. Some is ephemeral, others sticky. macOS has inbuilt mechanisms for managing the persistence of extended attributes.

November 2, 2020 Macs, Technology

Quarantine and the quarantine flag

Most quarantine flags in your Mac aren’t on apps but documents. Details of how they’re added, what info they contain, and what they do.

October 29, 2020 Macs, Technology

cmpxat, a command tool to compare extended attributes, now a Universal binary

The equivalent of cmp, only it works on extended attributes rather than file data.

September 3, 2020 Macs, Technology, Updates

Quarantined documents, Pratique and Sandstrip

Some documents can’t be opened with apps which should be able to edit them. These tools address problems with their metadata.

August 29, 2020 Macs, Technology

xattred version 1.3 is now a Universal App

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Fixes a minor bug, and now runs on all Macs, Intel and Apple Silicon, including Big Sur betas.

August 5, 2020 Macs, Technology, Updates

Another batch of Universal Apps, and a fixed version of Ulbow

Nine more free apps available as Universal binaries, from Cirrus to xattred.

July 7, 2020 Macs, Technology, Updates

Metadata editing made easy with Metamer version 1

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Supporting 16 different types of metadata, from Authors to Version, you don’t need to know how they are stored, etc.

May 19, 2020 Macs, Technology

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