Monthly Archives: November 2025

MacOS RAR via Finder Quick Actions Extension

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(This is a guest post from Antoni Sawicki)

I have been using the MacOS CLI version of RAR for a very long time. I have a bunch of aliases and shell wrappers but every so often I just want to right right click on a file or folder in the Finder and create a RAR archive from there without dealing with the terminal.

There are a bunch of apps like Keka, BetterZip, Unarchiver that can extract .rar files. The app store is littered with a bunch of shady “rar extractors”. But nothing can create a rar archive. I think Keka did have support but it was removed.

As a stop gap I have been using an Automator Quick Action RAR script. This sort of works for basic stuff but falls apart pretty quick. Firstly you can’t specify any options, secondly there is no progress bar or any output from rar binary so you dont know if this thing worked, failed or even still running. I experimented with various options but nothing worked to my satisfaction.

Claude Code to the rescue I vibe coded a more complete extension in Swift UI:

It allows to specify options and parameters, but most importantly the rar command output is printed in a window so you can see it running.

I admit this overall is pretty lame but it works better than any alternative I tried so far.

You can download from https://github.com/tenox7/rarext

Feedback, issues and PRs welcome!

OmniOS / Illumos / Solaris / SunOS / ARM64 / AARCH64 on QEMU

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(This is a guest post from Antoni Sawicki aka Tenox)

Ever since inception of Illumos I always wanted to get it working on ARM / AARCH64. But being under development it was somewhat difficult task. I previously tried building arm64-gate but there always was something not quite right. Turns out OmniOS has a ready to run image that one can boot under QEMU!

Download file from here: https://downloads.omnios.org/media/braich/

They also have a run shell command: https://downloads.omnios.org/media/braich/run

This is mine:

qemu-system-aarch64 \
        -nographic \
        -machine virt \
        -accel tcg \
        -m 3G \
        -smp 2 \
        -cpu cortex-a53 \
        -bios u-boot.bin \
        -netdev vmnet-shared,id=net0 \
        -device virtio-net-device,netdev=net0 \
        -device virtio-blk-device,drive=hd0 \
        -drive file=braich-151055.raw,format=raw,id=hd0,if=none \
        -device qemu-xhci \
        -device usb-kbd \
        -device usb-tablet \
        -semihosting-config enable=on,target=native

I hope they continue development and at some point I will be able to run this on my home server / NAS !

MIPS RISC/os on MAME

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(This is a guest post by Antoni Sawicki aka Tenox)

This is a very lazy post. I didn’t do anything here… I don’t exactly remember where it came from but I had this HDD dump of a pre-installed RISC/os 4.52 for MIPS Systems RC2030 lying around. It might have came from bitsavers and/or here? I was recently contacted by Enrique Tejeda Canobbio who managed to convert the image into a chd format and boot it up on MAME which has MIPS support!

MIPS Systems RC2030 on MAME

It turns out the disk image had some non trivial password set for the root account, but with help of hashcat and a decent GPU we got it cracked in 20 minutes or so. Here for your viewing pleasure is the fully working OS:

MIPS RISC/os 4.52 running on RS2030 on MAME

The system comes with a working C compiler and there are known some ports of various applications, also X11R5. I will post an update once I add some more stuff to the base image. For now just wanted to get this out in to the wild!

Download from here! Login root/root. The root password for the original image is Wivvle1!

Please post comments or ping me on Discord if you get networking or X11 working!