Cannot trigger AWS Amplify to re-build without pushing a new commit.

We've been using AWS Amplify for some deployments. What's been annoying is that the build process gets triggered automatically based on diff'ing the latest commit with previous commits.

This gets pretty annoying when you want to do things like bounce your service to pick up new environment variables or modify your build configs.

We were using a temporary solution of pushing empty commits to trigger the re-build. An ugly solution that just feels plain dirty.

Solution

Create a webhook for the AWS Amplify project and trigger builds by hitting the webhook with an HTTP request. Just copy the webhook command and paste it into your terminal.

BOOM. Problem solved.

Solution was nestled deep within the bowels of this GitHub issue is the solution. https://github.com/aws-amplify/amplify-console/issues/1140

If you've run into a problem where you have some audio plug-ins that are not working on Catalina after copying them over to the respective folder (e.g. vst/, vst3/, component/, etc), then you can run the following commands in the terminal to allow your DAW to read the plug-in.

The following content is taken from a Reddit comment on this post.

How to remove "unidentified developer" warning

The biggest culprit of plugins by "unidentified developer" is Apple's quarantine flag that prevents the execution of plugins in DAWs. Here is what I typically do:

• download example.vst plugin file or unpack it from package installer
• open terminal
• copy the .vst into /Library/Audio/Plugins/VST (requires admin password)sudo cp ~/Downloads/example.vst /Library/Audio/Plugins/VST
• navigate to /Library/Audio/Plugins/VSTcd /Library/Audio/Plugins/VST
• check for extended attributesxattr -lr example.vst
• delete quarantine and mac ACL attributes and any other attributes the plugin may havesudo xattr -rd com.apple.quarantine example.vstsudo xattr -rd com.apple.macl example.vst

To double-check your work, when in /Library/Audio/Plugins/VST directory the following command should produce no output

• xattr -lr com.apple.quarantine example.vst

Restart your DAW and rescan for plugins and you should see your new plugin. If not then go ahead with restarting your mac, sometimes they don't appear before system restarts.

The same process applies to AU and VST3 plugin formats just with respective paths.

Why does this happen?

Gatekeeper is a security feature of the macOS operating system by Apple. It enforces code signing and verifies downloaded applications before allowing them to run, thereby reducing the likelihood of inadvertently executing malware.

If the creator of the plug-in has not registered with Apple as a developer the warning will be enabled by default.

So I noticed that my blog was down earlier today. My blog is a self-hosted Ghost instance on an AWS EC2 server. After connecting via SSH onto the server, I noticed that when trying to do bash completion or even editing a file using vim, I was getting the following error:

Cannot create temp file here for document. No space left on device

My search led me to this Stack Overflow post: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/41321954/amazon-ec2-instance-cannot-create-temp-file-for-here-document-no-space-left-o

Check disk space using df -h

df -h is a command that displays disk space in a readable format. I ended up seeing something like this:

udev            2.0G     0  2.0G   0% /dev
tmpfs           396M   41M  355M  11% /run
/dev/xvda1      7.8G  7.4G     0 100% /
tmpfs           2.0G     0  2.0G   0% /dev/shm
tmpfs           5.0M     0  5.0M   0% /run/lock
tmpfs           2.0G     0  2.0G   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
tmpfs           396M     0  396M   0% /run/user/1000

Looks like I'm out of disk space for real. Here's I resolved the problem.

List files using the most disk space with du

You can list the files that are taking up the most space using the following command:

sudo du -x -h / | sort -h | tail -40

For me, I ended up seening a bunch of files that had "linux-aws-headers" in it. These are files that are remnants of automatic updates.

266M  /usr/src/
115M  /usr/src/linux-aws-headers-4.15.0-1035
115M  /usr/src/linux-aws-headers-4.15.0-1032
19M   /usr/src/linux-headers-4.15.0-1035-aws
19M   /usr/src/linux-headers-4.15.0-1032-aws

Safely remove linux-aws-headers

I safely removed these files by running the following two commands:

sudo apt-get -f install
sudo apt-get autoremove

This cleared up the bulk of the space on my EC2 instance.

Clean up docker containers and images

In addition to this, I also cleared up unused docker containers and images. Check out the docker image ls -a and docker container ls -a commands to see what images and containers you're no longer using. For me, I was able to reclaim about 1GB of space just be pruning these unused items.

Hope that was helpful. Cheers!

This is a documentation of the steps I'm taking in order to upgrade my Hackintosh from High Sierra to Mojave. I'll be following this guide:

https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/update-directly-to-macos-mojave.260654/

First I opened my Clover Configurator. It always takes me a few minutes to remember exactly what I'm doing in here.

Click on "Mount EFI" under the "Tools" section on the left side. The EFI partition on a disk is where the bootloader lives. It gets the computer to boot into the OS properly.

Next, mount the EFI partition that you boot from. For me, it's on my primary disk where OS X is installed. Click "Mount Partition". After it mounts, "Open Partition" will enable, and you can click that to open it in a Finder.

The first line of the tonymacx86 guide says to make sure your Clover is at least r4515. That's a check for me after looking in the Clover_Install_Log.txt file. At the top, it confirms that I'm on r4558.

I like to backup my disk before I start the upgrade just in case my computer bricks. I use Carbon Copy Cloner. This creates a bootable clone of your drive, and if the OS X upgrade fails, you'll be able to boot into a clone of your system.

Downloaded Clover v2.5k-5103 and ran the PKG file to upgrade.

Download OS X Mojave 10.14.6 installation. Under Step 4, there is a link to open the App Store page for the Mojave installer.

At this point, my EFI boot drive was botched. Apparently you need to update a bunch of kexts for Mojave, but I did not do these steps. I got around this by creating a bootable USB drive with Mojave.

Under Option 2 at the bottom, there is a prepared EFI folder. Replace the EFI folder on your main drive with this one. I backed up my previous EFI folder by renaming it.

Now you should be able to boot into your old OS by using the UEFI boot partition on your USB drive, which will bring up a clover boot menu that lets you select the appropriate boot option. For some reason, I'm only able to boot into the system by enabling the verbose (-v) flag. You can enable this by pressing space after highlighting your desired boot option, selecting verbose, and then selecting "boot with the selected options".

I also had to disable my serial port in the BIOS after running into an error where everything was hanging at "STUCK at Forcing CS_RUNTIME for entitlement : com.apple. rootless. Install"

https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/help-stuck-at-forcing-cs_runtime-for-entitlement-com-apple-rootless-install.269177/

After disabling the serial port, I was able to boot into the "Install Mac OS" boot option on my main disk. After restarting about 5 times and continuously booting into this option with the verbose flag on, I was finally able to install Mojave successfully.

My thunderbolt connections stopped working. I'm going to be trying my old guide of https://bigendians.com/2019/08/20/hackintosh-thunderbolt-activation/ to see if I can get it working again...

OK so also, Preview on JPG files stopped working. Looks like there is a fix here:

https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/solved-jpg-quick-preview-not-working-in-mojave.262415/

Installing Windows--

https://superuser.com/questions/1385264/boot-camp-assistant-fails-to-create-the-usb-installer-from-the-windows-10-octobe

References

• https://hackintosher.com/guides/how-to-make-a-macos-10-14-mojave-flash-drive-installer/
• https://hackintosher.com/guides/updating-your-hackintosh-to-mojave-10-14/
• https://hackintosher.com/guides/mac-os-mojave-hackintosh-clover-walkthrough-10-14-install/

Back with another Hackintosh post. Haven't been here since January! Dayam.

I recently upgraded my audio interface from a Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 to an Apollo Twin Duo MKII Thunderbolt. Quite the upgrade - I'm super happy with it so far. I track a lot of vocals and guitar (both electric and acoustic), and I was starting to have some pops with my Scarlett when recording. Super annoying.

I'm feeling lazy to make this post good. Just wanted to add some notes for posterity's sake. Thunderbolt was not working with my current set up. My motherboard is GA-Z97X-UD7-TH.

Steps to get things working:

1. Make sure Thunderbolt is disabled in the BIOS
2. Boot into Windows (Yes, unfortunately you need to have dual boot w/ windows ready)
3. Install the drivers for Thunderbolt in Windows
4. Reboot and enable Thunderbolt in the BIOS
5. Boot back into Windows and install the software for the Apollo Twin
6. Once it works in Windows, reboot back into OSX and it should work!

References:
https://www.gigabyte.com/us/Motherboard/GA-Z97X-UD7-TH-rev-10/support#support-dl-driver

https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/thunderbolt-no-working-on-gigabyte-ga-z97x-ud7-th.149275/

https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/ga-z97x-ud7-th-build-install-guide.158748/

Wow, it's been a minute since I last posted! Have definitely been quite busy with school and work. I finally got around to assembling my trusty desktop again. I procrastinated for awhile because I forgot my motherboard I/O shield in Taiwan in my old case and ended up ordering a replacement for it from a random seller in China. Took about 3 weeks to ship here.

ANYWAY - for those of you who don't know, I'm running a Hackintosh build that I had just upgraded to High Sierra in June 2018 [previous post here]. With the upgrade, I also converted my filesystem to APFS, the latest and greatest proprietary Apple file system. In addition to this, I also encrypted my drive with FileVault because I was using my computer for work, and my company requires me to encrypt my drives.

Everything was working fine in Taiwan, but now that I've gutted and reassembled my computer, the rig decided to not boot anymore. After some sleuthing on the internet, I've narrowed the problem down to the FileVault encryption not playing nicely with Clover.

Problem

When you enable FileVault, there are problems that sometimes arise causing boot problems. I think this has to do with with Clover not being able to load the OS properly due to encryption. I found this article at tonymacx86 that started leading me in the right direction:

https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/solved-enabled-filevault-and-cannot-boot.195343/

In addition to this, since I'm using APFS, I needed to use different commands that they have in the steps for unencrypting your disk.

Solution

The solution to making your system bootable is to unencrypt your disk from the command line. You can do this by booting into the recovery mode, which should be on a separate partition, and then going to the Terminal under Utilities in the top menu.

Once you're in the terminal, you'll need to unlock and the decrypt the volume using diskutil by following the steps in this article:

https://derflounder.wordpress.com/2017/12/31/decrypting-an-apfs-encrypted-volume-using-diskutil-on-macos-10-13-2/

I'm still in the process of decrypting my drive, so will update with an edit when I can tell if the "solution" actually worked or not...

Here are some other articles that were helpful just as references:
- https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/solved-help-apfs-encrypted.239442/
- https://derflounder.wordpress.com/2017/12/31/decrypting-an-apfs-encrypted-volume-using-diskutil-on-macos-10-13-2/

It's been so long since I've posted - I'm sorry. I've been busy, but I haven't been slacking. At least not that much.

I'd like to start off this post by commemorating this folding chair that I purchased from Bed Bath & Beyond:

Back from Taiwan

I came back to the States at the end of September. Went straight home to my parents' house and I crashed for a few days. Went to SF and chilled with my peeps there, and then I packed a car full of belongings and drove down to LA where I got an Airbnb with Adi for 3 weeks. For week it was just me, and my parents decided to come stay with me for a few days - they flew over from Shanghai.

After my parents left, Adi flew in from NYC, and Fred also drove down from NorCal to scum with us a bit. There was a lot of consumption of delicious food, and we were definitely well on our way to obesity by the end of the trip. Regardless, it was super fun and productive.

Classes at Icon Collective started pretty much on October 4th (orientation), and the Airbnb that we got lasted until October 21st. I had about three weeks to find a new apartment. Ambitious, but possible. And I did indeed find an apartment! But... the move-in date wasn't available until November 1st. So I ended up getting ANOTHER Airbnb by myself for 10 days to hold me over until the lease started. Adi headed back to NYC on Oct 21st.

Bouncing around Airbnbs

So the next 10 days were chill. I ended up getting a shared room to save some money. It ended up working out quite well. Oh yeah, except for the fact that I'm an idiot and kept forgetting to move my car for street cleaning. I got fined $75 bucks twice for parking my car in the SAME EXACT SPOT on two Thursdays in a row. LOLZ! Oh well, you live and you learn. Or in my case, you don't learn and just pay parking tickets.

Once November 1st came rolling around, I bounced from my second Airbnb and "moved in"! I went to IKEA the day of and bought a bed. Ordered a mattress online a few days before, and it got delivered in the evening. I also set signed up for an AT&T internet appointment for that day. I actually had internet set up before I had a place to sleep. Priorities are definitely in the right place.

Anyway, I was furniture-less until last week other than a folding chair and a bed. Those were some rough times. I would just use my laptop on the kitchen counter while standing. When I got tired, I would sit down on the chair and use my computer on my lap. That definitely made it hard to be productive.

Finally got my stuff shipped down from NorCal, and I got settled in at last. I really like my apartment.

My Apartment

Icon Collective

So while this was all happening, I was still going to school and also working part-time! Been super busy. Icon has been great. It took a few weeks to settle in, but I think I'm finally in a groove now. The community is really awesome and energetic. My absolute favorite class has been Studio Techniques. We also get assigned a mentor for the semester, and my mentor has been a huge inspiration.

Overall I'm really liking things so far. I just need to be more organized about my schedule and carve out more time to sit down and just produce.

Happy Thanksgiving

Gonna wrap things up here - it's getting late. And I have to drive up to Stockton to hang with my fam for Thanksgiving in the early morning.

Will try to be back sooner this time.

Happy Thanksgiving, y'all.

So I decided to look into renewing my car registration in California today, and it's just ridiculous how expensive it is. If you use the most convenient (and widely promoted method on the Cali DMV), I get charged a whopping $444.86 dollars.

One thing I've never really understood is the reasoning behind charging a "convenience fee" for filing paperwork online. There is absolutely no f'ing way that submitting a form online creates more work than mailing something via Snail Mail, or showing up at your office with a bunch of papers.

Also, while I'm on this complain train, check out the amazing line item for my DMV Fees:

Wow - that's so informative! Can't you at least give me a breakdown of why I'm dishing out $400 dollars? If it was a reasonable number, it wouldn't matter as much. But $400 bucks is a lot of money. If you choose to use the less fancy version of online renewal processes, the price looks similar:

I dug a little deeper to look for what exactly I'm being charged for, and what's worse is the numbers don't add up. The DMV gives you a calculator tool for figuring out what renewal fees should be. But this tool makes it seem like I'm being charged ~22% more money for absolutely no reason. Why $400 when this states $326?

Now the question is this - is my investment of time in figuring out why I'm being charged an extra $74 worth it?

While I'm currently still in this rage-induced state, the answer is obviously YES.

Stay Tuned.

It's been a trip. A ton of traveling. I've spent the past two weeks just trying to gather myself, but I think I'm over the hump now.

Attended two beautiful weddings in Michigan and in California in August. Next, flew straight to Beijing to meet Jess, and we explored The Great Wall, The Forbidden City, and then David and Wen Wen flew over to meet us a few days later. After, I went to Shanghai and chilled with my parents for about a week. Just got back to Taipei a bit ago.

Since coming back, I've been dealing with Travel PTSD, which seems to be a very real thing. I thought I just coined that term, but apparently it's a thing already.

Busy planning my move out. Searching for housing. Getting ready for Ultra Taipei 2018 (Day 1). Cleaning the apartment. About to ramp up with Spruce Health. Mentally prepping for Icon.

Finally fixed my blog too - ran into some problems with the previous setup that I had. Everything is on AWS now and running happily on Docker.

Woohoo!

Just submitted an entry in a remix contest.

A slower, indie / chill / ambient feeling track. Tried to put a darker and moodier vibe on the track, since lyrically it's sad - a breakup gone wrong now resulting in an unrequited love.

Didn't have enough time to finish some parts or mix/master, but this is as close as it will get before the submission deadline! I plan to put some more touches on the track and upload it to my SoundCloud once finished!

So I've fallen victim to some of my vices for these past maybe two weeks - sleeping in and playing video games. Remember when I included a cute little picture of my favorite Arena of Valor hero, Mganga? Yeah, that was a red flag. Who the fuck cares about who your favorite hero in Arena of Valor is? LOL! For the record though, I'm a beast with him.

Look at this sick hard carry

Pulled myself out of the rut though, since when addiction comes knocking at least I can recognize who's at the door now. Limiting myself to 4 matches a day so I can optimally scratch my gaming itch while still getting shit done.

Hours

Been counting hours of my work, shooting for 40 work hours toward music every week. Haven't been close to hitting it yet, but at least it's being tracked now. I think I hit 25.5 hours last week. Splitting my time between producing, learning, and trying to formulate a longer term strategy for everything that needs to be done outside of the actual music-making (which is debatably equally or more important than the music you make).

Also, I'm going to try and actually improve at guitar from a technical standpoint. I'm going to try and spend one hour everyday going through a music theory for guitarists book. Will let y'all know how that goes.

Other News

Life is cranking along. Got a decent amount of traveling to do in the next 2 months. Then I'll be moving to LA. Making moves to get back into programming as well.

Oh, I've been growing my hair out for about 9 months now. It's in a stage where I look 100% like a total ass clown, but I'm already past the point of no return - never grown it this long before. Need to keep going. One of the things I actually need to figure out is how I'm going to have my hair during the two weddings I'm attending in August LOL.

Some Interviews I Enjoyed

Been doing a lot of browsing around and research about people in music that I really like and respect. Here are two notable ones - Jai Wolf and Mike Gao.

Finished a new track recently.

Lots of things that can be improved, but I'm just going to keep chugging along.

This track came together very quickly because I focused solely on arrangement before composing. All-in-all, it was a much more efficient process, and it always felt like I had a game plan for where I was going next.

This was originally a slightly punk-rock type song that I've had in my head for awhile, and the main melody that keeps repeating was a guitar played over palm-muted chords. The chorus that I had in mind before had a line about catching a last train home, so I just kept that as the title.

Anyway, that's it for now. New stuff soon!

So I sit down at my desk yesterday all hyped to upgrade to the latest version of Ableton Live 10. Once I'm ready to launch the app and see if it works, I get this error message.

Depression! Of course this would happen to me. Since I run a Hackintosh on a custom build, upgrading my OSX is always somewhat of a perilous adventure. I built this computer in January 2015, and getting it up and running as a Hackintosh took a ton of work.

Just finished setting up my first #Hackintosh! Super stoked. Thanks to the @tonymacx86 community for #UniBeast + #MultiBeast!

— Michael Hwang (@terranmoccasin) January 22, 2015

The Upgrade Process

Some quick specs since YMMV

CPU
Intel i7 4790k

Graphics
ATI Radeon R9 280x

RAM
32GB
Motherboard
Gigabyte GA-Z97X-UD7-TH

Hard Drive
Intel 730 Series 2.5" 480GB SATA 6Gb/s SSD

0. Backup!

I always run a full backup by cloning my disk before starting on upgrades because something always goes terribly wrong. This time was no exception, as I didn't copy some drivers over correctly on the first attempt and was unable to boot to my original system for a few hours. I had to boot into my backup and do some sleuthing before things were up and running smoothly. So long story short, always backup!

I used Carbon Copy Cloner. The free trial should be fine.

Took me about an hour.

1. Update Clover

So I'm already running on the Clover bootloader, which allows for a pretty easy OS upgrade. The first thing I did was upgrade to the latest version by downloading the Clover Configurator and using the Update tab on the left.

And follow the install prompts...

Once Clover was successfully updated, I rebooted to make sure I could still boot into my machine.

2. Update Mac Model

So unbeknownst to me, I was using a super old Mac Model number for my setup. Ideally, you find the model that has the closest specs to your machine starting from the CPU. I was set on some old Mac Pro from 2008 (I just picked it randomly when I first built this machine). Now, since Macs from 2008 and earlier aren't supported on Sierra and above, I was forced to update. I followed this guide about updating SMBios on Tonymacx86 after finding the correct Mac Model at Every Mac.

Tonymacx86 SMBios Upgrade Guide

https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/guide-how-to-configure-your-systems-smbios-correctly.198155/

Every Mac for model lookup

https://everymac.com/systems/apple/imac/specs/imac-core-i7-4.0-27-inch-aluminum-retina-5k-late-2014-specs.html

I went with 14,1 since it matches my ATI video card and i7 4790k CPU.

3. Upgrade to Sierra 10.12

I decided to take the safer route of upgrading to 10.12 Sierra first before going to 10.13 High Sierra.

I was running OSX El Capitan 10.11.15, and I followed this guide to upgrade directly to Sierra (for Clover users).

Tonymacx86 guide for upgrading from El Capitan to Sierra

https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/direct-update-to-macos-sierra-using-clover.201465/

Since Sierra is pretty old now, you have to download it from a special link provided by Apple Support.

Download Sierra from the App Store

https://support.apple.com/en-us/ht208202

The only thing I had to do that wasn't mentioned in the Tonymacx86 guide is copy over my custom kexts from my 10.11 installation. For me, these were kept on my EFI partition at /EFI/CLOVER/kexts...

So 10.12 would be used for Sierra, and 10.11 is what I'm currently on. I didn't copy these at first and I ran into a kernel panic on boot. The stack trace showed that AppleIntelE1000e.kext was probably the culprit.

Kernel Extensions in backtrace:
com.apple.lokit.IONetworkingFamily(3.2) ...
com.insanelymac.driver.AppleIntelE1000e(3.3.3) ...

So to fix this, I booted into my cloned backup, mounted the EFI partition of my main disk, and then copied over the kexts I mentioned above into the folder of my new OS version number (10.12 for Sierra).

Was a real relief when this worked.

Sierra was working fine after.

4. Upgrade to High Sierra

Similar process as above - follow the guide, copy the kexts, and upgrade directly from the App Store!

Tonymacx86 guide for upgrading from Sierra to High Sierra

https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/update-directly-to-macos-high-sierra.232707/

Note: I did the APFS method, which upgrades your file system to a newer format. You should only use this if you're using an SSD and not a HDD.

Everything was up and running fine afterwards. I think onboard audio doesn't work out of the box, but it's not a problem for me since I use a USB audio interface. There's a post here that talks about installing audio drivers.

5. Boom

Now I'm happily on High Sierra, and I just installed Ableton Live 10.

Thought I'd do a quick check-in since it's been awhile since I've posted consistently. Back to the good ol' Week End Reviews!

Got back from Shanghai last week. This week was pretty much a blur - I was pretty lazy and bummed around a lot. I think the the post-EDC recovery is finally complete. Not that I felt physically unwell or anything, but it's been a challenge to get back on track since coming back to Taipei. Especially with my return to the US looming over me in a few months. I guess here's a short summary of what's going on...

I'll be attending Icon Collective in Burbank, CA starting in October!

Flying back to the States yet again the first week of August to attend two weddings, one in Michigan (Johnny and Ploy), and one in LA (Justin and Philia). Congratulations to both couples! Really looking forward to the weddings. My suits are at my parents house in NorCal, so it's going to be an ordeal to get them mailed to Michigan. Hopefully my parents go to the house before the weddings happen. After the wedding in LA, I'll be flying back to Taipei to prepare moving out.

Need to figure out if/how I'm going to be shipping a lot of my gear back to the States. Or, another option is just to leave it at my parents' place in Shanghai, or at my grandparents' place in Taipei. Or I could sell it I guess.

Anyway, tomorrow I'm going to flip on the productivity switch again. This time going to try to do hour-tracking to make sure I get 40 hours of work in every week.

Going to try and start working on my Asia Trip posts again... I think the last one I did was the leg in Seoul!

Music Stuff

Music-wise, I started on my fourth track, but I'm not liking how it's turning out. Also lost momentum in the middle once again. Going to put it on the back burner for now and start a new one. This time, I'll use a reference track and plan out the whole structure before diving in.

Here are some of the songs I've been listening to recently - some new some old.

Right On Time - Chris Lawyer

Ease My Mind (feat. Niki and the Dove) - Jai Wolf Remix

Calvin Harris & Dua Lipa - One Kiss (Jauz Remix)

Arena of Valor

Oh yeah, I picked up a new bad habit in the form of an amazing mobile game called Arena of Valor. It's basically DotA for mobile devices. I think it's a direct port of the super popular Chinese version, and it's owned by Tencent. Anyway, my favorite character is this clown mad scientist called Mganga. He's a boss. Here's a cute drawing of him that an artist in Thailand, Meimo, drew of him.

Apparently Mganga is a Swahili word for African Witch Doctor.

ANYWAY, that's it pEACE OUT.