What's it all about, Alfie?

I just got back from getting my Moderna 6-month COVID booster, and I was a touch nervous - the Walgreen's website made it seem like all the data collection and ID verification was going to be done before I got there - but things rarely turn out as well as that. So when I got there, and needed to do some paperwork, I wasn't really surprised.

Still... it wasn't too bad, and it didn't take long for the pharmacist to take care of the gal before me in line, and then me. Pretty standard stuff. Given that Thanksgiving is this week, and I'm going to be visiting family in Indy, it seems smart to get it before going, as opposed to after. Sure, it'll not have generated the maximum antibodies, but it's a start, and every little bit helps.

With the update to macOS Monterey, the previous macOS command-line program for generating UUIDs, uuid, has been replaced with uuidgen. I'm not at all sure why the change, but I was glad that a little investigation with ls /usr/bin revealed something that turned out to be the winner.

With this, one of my favorite aliases is now:

alias uupb="uuidgen | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]' | tr -d '\n' | pbcopy"

which generates a new UUID, lower-cases all the characters, removes the trailing new-line, and then puts it into the paste buffer for pasting in an editor, or on a form... as many times as you need.

I don't know if there are even release notes about the changes at this level of macOS, but they usually get figured out - one way or another. 🙂

It looks like my new MacBook Pro is Out for Delivery today, and it could be a good day. 🙂 I'm planning on using Migration Assistant to move my User files and Settings, but not anything in /usr - which I have done in the past, but this time, I'm going to leave Homebrew installed on my Intel machine, and I'll just install the ARM-version of Homebrew once I get the laptop all set-up.

When I get it set up, I'll then install the ARM Homebrew, and then:

  $ brew install --cask temurin
  $ brew install leiningen
  $ brew install jq

And from there, I can set up nodenv and rvm... and then just work my way to getting back to running everything I need. Should be an interesting day or two... 🙂

I knew it was coming... they warned me with macOS 11 Big Sur... but it was still a bit of a surprise this morning to reconfigure Apache 2 to use userdir, which macOS Monterey doesn't enable by default, and undoes if you have it already configured. That's OK, it's not a huge deal to turn it back on, but the big news was the complete loss of PHP.

I haven't used it in many years, but it was the one tool that shipped with macOS that I could talk to Postgres, and script, but hey... things change, and they did warn me. 🙂

I guess it would be nice to have something like Node automatically handled, but then that would likkely clash with the Node devs and the nodenv installs, etc. So I'll live with Apache 2, and the userdir, and then just serve up static content on port 80, and leave the other stuff for the development environments.

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.

This morning I was looking to visualize some time-series data from a Plaid Asset Report, in preparation for some work at The Shop, and I thought that it would be a perfect opportunity to use the xkcd Chart package. I like the way it's clearly trying to be a little less serious, and it seems like just the thing to try out for this visualization.

The data from the endpoint I created is returned as a sequence of tuples:

{
  accounts: {
    'Checking': [
      [ '2021-09-05', 115.4 ],
      [ '2021-09-06', 115.4 ],
      [ '2021-09-07', 110 ],
      [ '2021-09-08', 110 ],
      [ '2021-09-09', 110 ],
      [ '2021-09-10', 110 ],
      [ '2021-09-11', 110 ],
      [ '2021-09-12', 110 ],
    ],
    ...
  }
}

these are really the closing balances for each date for the account, and I just wanted to be able to visualize them so that any calculations can be validated by looking at the data.

The graph turned out pretty well:

This is just exactly what I'd hoped for. 🙂

Apple is doing something interesting with the iPhone 13 orders this year. In the past, they used to open up ordering at midnight, Pacific Time. This meant that it was 2:00 am local time for me, and I get up early to run, so it wasn't horrible - and given that the new iPhones sell out in a matter of a few hours, it was the only way to get one of the first batch.

Then in the last few cycles, they moved the starting time to 5:00 am Pacific Time, so that meant a 7:00 am start time for me - not bad at all. But there was still the load on the Carrier's APIs, and there would be issues with that, and all manner of other things, so this year they have again, changed things up.

After the Apple Event the Apple web site allowed for a sort of Pre-order, Pre-Order... You can go through all the steps of buying the new iPhone - selecting the size, color, capacity, communicating with the carrier, payment method - everything right up to the point of actually buying it. And then you wait for 5:00 am PT on Launch Day, and you simply finish the order. The iPhone is in your "Bag", and you just need to pay for it.

This gets around a lot of the surge of orders because no one can buy one until Launch Day, and it's the same starting time, but all the communication with the Carrier, etc. is now much more spread out in the days leading up to Launch Day. They haven't started shipping anything, and I don't believe they have even reserved units for sale - but they have done all the work needed to verify that you are who you say you are, and all your selections, so on Launch Day, there is much less to do.

Clever. 🙂 I like it a lot. I've got my phone on pre-order, pre-order, and on Launch Day, tomorrow, I just need to login and click once, and it's in the Pre-Order queue. Nice.

In the last few months there seems to have been a lot of changes in the IRC world. Freenode had what has been called a hostile takeover by some, and a good number of high-profile projects left that network and went to Libera, which was started by some ex-Freenode folks. All this was probably a lot more traumatic for those immediately involved, and I feel for them. It also meant that for the IRC channels and projects I do follow, it meant that many went dark for a bit.

It happens. We adapt.

When the projects popped up on Libera, I was able to get on there, and see that they were as popular and active as ever. Sure, it's a little more diffuse than before because some didn't move, but my IRC Client on macOS - Textual, allows for multiple server connections, so that I can have Freenode and Libera connected, and the side-bar has all the channels - some on Freenode, some on Libera, and it works just fine.

I never expected that it had multiple server connections - I just never needed them... until I did. And when I did, I was so very glad that it handled it as nicely as it did.

In the end, to me, it looks very much like nothing changed, but I know quite a lot did.