This blog is for future me and for anyone else wanting to understand some iBooks structure.  It’s not an attack on Apple - I know I’m an extreme case.

Some of you may know my fondness for books.  A habit that led to me buying so many books when the iPad came out I actually broke the iBooks app (too many books to display on the “purchased” screen) which took a year to fix.  Fast forward several years..

It’s been an unexpected few days of technical support. Rumour is that Apple will be changing the iBooks app in an upcoming release and that always makes me nervous.  I buy around 30 books a month and have 3859 on my iPad and iPhone.  Probably about 60/40 iTunes and Amazon.  Losing my books would be equivalent to someone who cares about music losing all their music or a gamer losing all their games.  It would be bad.  Give her space. Don’t try and talk to her. Back away slowly. Bad.

I carefully backup (and have to remove DRM to do it) about once a month.  Why?  Because Apple may decide to drop iBooks at any time and then where would I be with 4000 (or at least 2000) unreadable books?

So I needed to backup and since upgrading to High Sierra that’s been impossible.  The technology I used only worked up to  Sierra.  That’s OK, I use Parallels , can download Sierra at no cost from the App Store and create a VM running Sierra. Of course I had to authorise that VM with my iTunes account so it could read the books which meant deauthorising everything else first since I was at 5 devices. Top tip, if you buy new kit, make sure you deactivate iTunes before flattening the old kit.

Step 1: Getting the books into my VM

In theory because I sync my books to the cloud I should be able to just launch iBooks and auto redownload. Unfortunately that didn’t happen. The books display as in the cloud but have to be manually downloaded.   Understandably selecting nearly 4000 books and telling iBooks to download them all caused it to crash. Repeatedly.  So I needed a better way.

Step 2: Why not just copy the books from my laptop which is the host machine for the VM?

Some digging uncovered that my epubs are stored in

~/Library/Containers/com.apple.BKAgentService/Data/Documents/iBooks/Books

so surely I can just copy them over from one machine to another?  Why yes I can and when I launch iBooks they all display - kind of.  They can’t be read and most of the covers are missing but otherwise.. great! Some more digging later and I realised that although I had copied over the books.plist (which is a preferences file containing and index of all the books iBooks knows about), I didn’t get the SQL database that iBooks uses that is in ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.iBooksX.  

So that isn’t going to work. A few hours of trying to get covers to appear or books to be readable and I realised I needed to take a step back.  

Step 3: Maybe I was overthinking this. iBooks builds the index when you add books to the app by choosing “add to library” or just drag and drop them so why not drag the 4000 epubs into iBooks.  I knew they were already there but I tested and it does prompt you with the option to “Replace” all books that are already there instead of creating duplicates (of course what I could really do with is “Skip” rather than “Replace” but I get i’m in a niche situation).

So - drag 4000 books to iBooks and choose “Replace” and wait.  There’s no progress bar. Nothing.  The only way I can see that anything is happening is by launching activity monitor and noting that bkagentservice was consuming 80+% CPU.  Eventually “lots” of books appear.  This is the point where I realise there’s no way to count how many books are in iBooks.  I knew “lots” wasn’t all because I got this dialog “<epub filename> couldn’t be opened because you don’t have permission to view it”

I click OK and got another, and another and another. Eventually having to Force Quit iBooks and restart.

Fair enough.  Maybe when copying over the files from host to guest the permissions came with them and my new guest account doesn’t have permissions.  I spend some time making sure all permissions are OK, applying my new account as well as “Everyone” to that folder and all files contained in it.  I finally test by dragging and dropping individual files into iBooks that work with no error so I decide that error is a red herring - it’s more a “gah! iBooks can’t handle you doing that and has tripped over itself - try adding fewer books”

So now I have a new problem.  What books are missing?  If I knew what books were  missing I could manually add them.   Unfortunately not only do I not know what books are missing,  I don’t know if it’s 10 books or 2000.

Step 4: The search for the missing books

Those filenames aren’t terribly helpful but I know what books I have so I search in iBooks for certain book titles and discover some that aren’t there that should be (and are in my iBooks on my host machine).  How do I find the filename that matches the book title if I know I have the epub in the correct directory?  Here we head to terminal.  In the directory

~/Library/Containers/com.apple.BKAgentService/Data/Documents/iBooks/Books

I type grep “some phrase” ./*.epub -r

Step 7: An afternoon with Excel

Running the agent twice against the host and guest books.plist gives me the data I need.  The host machine plist gives me 3789 entries and the guest machine 5443 entries. It appears every time I attempted to drag and drop a file in the guest copy of iBooks it created a new plist entry.  I enjoy data manipulation in Excel and after cleaning things up and playing with INDEX/MATCH I discover…. it’s not going to work.

The problem is that the plist filename is only updated when the books are added to the library so there was an unreliable mismatch between the guest and host plists.

Step 8: Take a step back and try playing by Apple’s rules

I take a copy of the iBooks directory into another folder (“movedbooks”)then I launch iBooks itself and (making sure iCloud is completely disabled on the guest machine so there’s absolutely not syncing to any device) I remove every.single.book from within iBooks.  Several scary minutes later iBooks is empty and so is the iBooks folder and the plist file.

Meanwhile I still have a copy of all the books in “movedbooks” - I know iBooks didn’t like me dropping 4000 books in but at this point I’m prepared to meet it half way.  After some trial and error, I copy the books in 250 or so at a time.  I verify they are added correctly by checking the books count that appears in the iBooks folder.  It takes about an hour but when I’m done, the iBooks folder is 170 items smaller than the movedbooks backup.

GAH

Step 9: The search for the missing books

I now need a tool to compare the contents of the movedbooks folder to the ibooks folder and tell me which files re present in the first but missing in the second i.e. are missing from iBooks.  A free app called “Compare Folders” does that for me nicely.  Unfortunately it won’t let me export the list but at list I can see the list of missing files.

Step 10: The final piece

170 is a manageable number so now, one by one, I find the missing files and drop them into iBooks.  That works and I end up 3849 books in iBooks and in the directory.  If you’ve spotted that’s 10 less than I should have then congratulations, that’s not a typo.  10 books completely resisted being added to the guest, no error, nothing, they just won’t add.  Even weird when I check my Excel spreadsheet and decide I don’t care about those 10.  But I make a note in case in care in the future.

So that’s it.  I shouldn’t need to do this again as I can add books in small numbers as I buy them and never again have to add all books I’ve bought.  In theory.

A final note.  If you have a Mac , buy yourself a copy of DiskWarrior, but that’s a story for another day.

This week someone I care about very much was scammed out of thousands of pounds.  I am just getting past my anger over it and have spent the past few days trying to work out what I could have done to prevent it happening. I work in security, I believe I have told everyone I care about how to protect from the most basic things but Apple introduced a layer of obfuscation that I hadn’t told anyone to look for, because I hadn’t fully noticed it myself.

So what happened?  This person received an email from someone they knew (let’s say “Gabriella Davis’) with a simple “Good morning” type one liner.  They read the email on their iPad and replied to “Gabriella”.  Several back and forths later this conversation turned into a request to move some money.  In this business situation it wasn’t that unusual a request.  Obviously the “Gabriella” turned out to be a fake email address and the transferred money sent to “Aviva Insurance Ltd” (a valid company) was actually sent to an account owned by someone else and quickly extracted and closed down.

Why didn’t the person who was contacted check that the email they received was from the right Gabriella Davis?   They did.  It is one of the most basic things I teach people, always verify and dig into the email address.  However on iOS the email address was shown incorrectly.  Say the email was from “Gabriella Davis <fakeaddress@gmail.com>” and my real address is “Gabriella  Davis <gabriella.davis@turtleblog.info”> well Apple kindly matched the “Gabriella Davis” phrase part with a contact (me) in his contacts and showed not only my photo on the email as the sender but also - when clicking on it - filled in the gabriella@turtleblog.info address.

Even though the reply actually went to fakeaddress@gmail.com,  there was no way to see that from iOS.  

The person concerned took Apple’s representation of my contact information and my photo on the email as validation that it came from me and he was talking to me.  He wasn’t.  The same email opened in both Notes and Outlook immediately showed the fake address and the fake address was obvious when choosing reply from those clients.  it simply would not have happened if he hadn’t been using iOS.

My instructions to always check the sender address hadn’t been spoofed and always check you are sending to the right person turned out to be the worst possible advice in this case because the contact information Apple prefilled in gave a layer of confidence to the email that otherwise wouldn’t have been there.  “Of course it’s Gab, Apple are even showing me her picture and her email”.

I will probably not open comments on this entry as it isn’t entirely my story to tell and there is lots more information I am not prepared to share publicly.  If you know me and have a specific question you can reach out and I may be able to answer.  Otherwise please warn people you know.

1. Never reply to important emails on an iOS device
2. If in doubt , even a tiny bit of doubt, always forward and re-address
3. Any sense of urgency in an email should be a red flag regardless of anything else
4. There is no replacement, and always time,  for verbal verification

Recently a friend’s wife was diagnosed with kidney failure. Although she is on dialysis,  she is also on a registry hoping for a donor kidney.  After a few discussions and some internet research, I realised how little I know or understand about donating a kidney. How doing so could add years to a loved ones or a strangers life with little risk to myself.  When someone is on dialysis and waiting for a donor kidney, they need strength and they need hope.

Here’s a few things I didn’t know and I want to share because maybe you didn’t know them either.  I apologise in advance for my ignorance which may be exclusively mine. 

1. It’s not true that the most best match will be from a family member.  Genetic compatability is one aspect but with improved anti rejection medicines it’s very possible and often common for a friend or even a stranger to a donate. 

2. Anonymity is maintained throughout the process if you wish and the recipient may never find out that you tested or if you were a match.  You can start the testing process anonymously and choose not to proceed at any point.

3. The first step in finding out if you’re a match is simply to see if your blood type is a match. If it is you can move onto the next step which is a DNA match test.

4. You can choose to be tested to match for a specific person or to be added to a paired/pooled registry where your kidney will be given to someone you match with and the person you wanted to donate to will get prioritised higher on the match registry or even add your details to a general registry which commits you to nothing.

5. The path for potential donors involves not just ensuring you are physically able to donate a kidney but also emotionally prepared to do so. After you are a match you will often be assigned a counsellor to work with you on the decision to donate and the process itself.  Again if you decide to stop at any point, that is entirely confidential and anonymous

If you want to know more about kidney donation and what’s involved then please take a quick look at these sites http://www.giveakidney.org/ and https://www.kidneyresearchuk.org/health-information/living-donor-transplantation

To register as an organ donor or a living kidney donor in the UK please read this NHS site https://www.organdonation.nhs.uk

Watches are gone or going the way of the dodo right? I mean actual watches that just tell time not watches that try and be supercomputers.  Everyone tells the time on their devices now so you don’t get a watch to do just that.  Right?

I don’t wear a watch.  I haven’t worn a watch since I was a child, I think my last watch memory was seeing 1979 click over to 1980 on my casio digital watch at new year’s eve (yes even as a child I knew how to party).  I stopped wearing watches as a child because I kept losing them.  As I got older I didn’t want a watch because I felt that paying too much attention to time was unhealthy and stressful.  I think I have a good internal clock and I can always tell when a kitchen alarm i’ve set is about to go off about 5 seconds before it does :-).  On top of that, working with computers taught me to stop wearing anything on my wrists - it slows me down, irritates me and I end up taking bracelets off and - yes - losing them.

So this is a long way of saying, today I bought a watch.  Not an expensive one.  Just a swatch but I finally decided a watch is what’s missing from my life. You see I get very little “down” time.  When I do get downtime I know I have a set window to relax before I have to get some more work done.  That means I have to keep picking up my phone to check the time.  When I pick up my phone to check the time, I see mail notifications or text messages or am reminded of 1000 other things I should be doing in that moment instead of just sitting and reading.

The devices that tell me the time are also now inextricably linked with “work” and therefore “stress”.  A watch is now the easiest and least stressful way to actually tell the time.  It’s an interesting full circle and I wonder if it’s just me.