What's it all about, Alfie?

I did a little digging over the past few days to see what's new in the latest release of Blink (v14.0.2) - the terminal/shell for iOS and iPadOS. It's a nice tool - has even more features than I initially thought. It's really a nice subset of a Unix shell without needing to connect to any other hosts. But that's not really the point of this dig... I was hoping that they had implemented SSH Agent Forwarding in mosh connections so that I'd be able to use git on the remote machines. If you don't forward the SSH key, then you have to have them on the remote hosts, and ssh-add them there. That's not ideal for me, as it opens up the location of the key to a somewhat untrusted host.

I read the release notes and it seems they have re-written the SSH Agent component, and yet they didn't get very specific about the Mosh improvements, so I did a little more digging on the mosh-client code itself, and it seems that there's a bit of a disagreement about including Agent Forwarding in mosh due to security reasons. The conveneince of using git and SSH keys for git operations means that most folks want to have the key forwarding. And you can do it in simple ssh connections.

But for mosh, eventhough it's built on ssh, it seems they don't want to add it. Odd. But hey... it's their code, it's their choice, and that's why I have the workflow where I do the commits on my iPad, and use Blink with mosh just to run the code. It would be nice to have SSH Agent Forwarding, but the durability of mosh trumps the need for agent forwarding... so I'll just stick to what I have now.

But it sure would be nice... maybe they'll figure it out.

I started preparing for the new MacBook Pro by making sure that I had Universal Binary versions of all the apps I use on a daily basis. A lot of them were simple updates - and the latest versions would run natively on the Apple Silicon chips. But a few need a little help.

There are a few where I simply need to download the Apple Silicon version of the app:

• Docker
• GitHub Desktop
• Google Chrome
• Zoom

and a few I read are in the process of creating native Apple Silicon versions:

• Adium
• CodeRunner
• VoodooPad

and a few I've sent off support requests for to see if they are planning on delivering an Apple Silicon version of the app:

• Base
• PDFelement 7

One that I was a little surprised about was Dropbox. They have iOS, and iPadOS clients, but not a Universal Binary client - or even one that's specific to the Apple Silicon architecture. Seems odd that being the case, but it was a chance for me to drop my usage of Dropbox, not renew my $120/yr subscription, and just move all the files to iCloud+. After all, I'm already using iCloud, and with the upgrades to iCloud+, and the cost being less, it seemed like a good move.

So I moved all the files, let them sync up to iCloud, and then removed the files from Dropbox. Then I simply logged out of each device, and then my laptop, and finally cancelled by subscription on the website. It was interesting that they wanted to keep me at the Free Tier, so it seems there's no easy way to really wipe out your Dropbox account, but this is good enough. It's off my machines, and I won't have to worry about the emulation on the new laptop.

In all, not bad... most are converted. In order to update Homebrew, I think I'm going to uninstall the complete Intel Homebrew install, and then start by putting back only those packages that I need - Postgresql, Node, and AdoptOpenJDK. I think that will be far easier than trying to migrate all the Homebrew tools I have now, most of which I really no longer need.

It's going to be an interesting transition. 🙂

UPDATE: Some news about Homebrew and Apple Silicon. I did a little digging to see what the status was on the support for Apple Silicon for the packages I needed to have on Day 1. It's in interesting mix.

• Java - it seems that AdoptOpen JDK has been renamed to Temurin, and the only ARM version is JDK 17. This means no more backward support for JDK 8 or JDK 11. This is going to then mean that I need to make sure everything is working OK, but I'm hoping it won't be bad.
• Postgresql - the latest is Postgres 14, and it's ready to go on ARM. Good. 🙂
• Leiningen - it appears to be OK, as it's just a script, so I think it's fine.
• jq - this is ready to go on ARM. Good. 🙂
• nodenv - this is ready to go on ARM. Good. 🙂

I'm sure there will be more support as the Mac machines all move to Apple Silicon, but it looks like I'll have only a few questionable apps on Day 1.

Today, at Apple's Event, they introduced their newest MacBook Pros - based on the M1 Pro and M1 Max chipsets. They are pretty spectacular: great display, more ports, better thermal design... I have been hoping they would be this good, with the same basic RAM and SSD that I have now in my current MacBook Pro - and they did not disappoint. 🙂

The news I've received from folks with the original M1 Mac Minis is that they are amazingly fast, and quiet, and as the M1 Max is going to be even better than the M1, things are only going to improve. A little after the event ended, I ended up ordering one - should arrive the first week of November.

It'll be great to migrate things over and see how some of the apps perform on the new hardware. I'm betting it'll be exceptional.