cal-heatmap with more than 6 heatmap ranges

By default cal-heatmap supports 5 ranges of values for the heatmap colors, so this config:

[10,20,30,40]

will give you the ranges:

  • 0 to 10
  • 11 to 20
  • 21 to 30
  • 31 to 40
  • > 40 (the 5th range)

If you attempt to define more than 5 ranges, cells in the 6th range and above will just have a default background color. In my www.spotviz.info app I tried to create 6 ranges, so the darkest color is for > 6000. On 9/28 and 9/29 (and the other blank dates in October in the screenshot below) have values more than 6000 but are showing as the default color:

The config I had for this was:

legend : [10,100,2000,4000,6000]

The ranges I was expecting from this config was:

  • 0 to 10
  • 11 to 100,
  • 101 to 2000
  • 2001 to 4000
  • 4001 to 6000
  • > 6000

Changing this to 4 values configuring 5 ranges fixed this issue:

legend : [1000, 2000, 4000, 6000]

MacOS 10.15 Catalina fails to burn bootable cdroms from ISOs

Not likely to impact most people, but occasionally I use an external USB dvd burner to make bootable disks for installing various OSes on older computers.

Previously before Catalina I would right click an ISO and select “Burn Image to…’ and this would work as it has for the past several MacOS releases. Now though when I click this option the menu disappears and nothing happens. A tip here suggested to double click this iso to mount it, and then right click the mounted disk and select “Burn Image’. While this does work to burn to a blank cdrom, the disk is not bootable, it appears to only copy the files to the cdrom and not burn it as a bootable disk, even if the iso is from a bootable disk.

Reading through the above post on the Apple site, this sounds like a bug in Catalina and has been logged.

Useful Sun OpenBoot Prom (OBP) commands

At power on: (useful reference)

Stop-A : stop the boot process, takes you to OBP ok prompt

Stop-N : reset to default NVRAM values

From go prompt (from article here):

  • to enable POST diags, not sent to monitor but sent via serial connection to a terminal or terminal emulator
setenv diag-switch? true

Turn off again with false

  • Turn off configured boot drive:
setenv auto-boot? false 

true to enable again

  • Manually boot from given device:
boot disk
boot cdrom

where disk and cdrom are device aliases that you can view with

devalias