More Apple weirdness

Amphetamine is one of those neat little things that sits in your menu bar and does something useful and does it well.  It keeps your Mac awake for as long as you need. Hence the name.

 

Apple claims that it will lead users to start consuming drugs and alcohol but I have been using it for years and do not consume drugs or alcohol.   Perhaps Apple may be mistaken in their silly assessment.

Curiously asking the iPad to Look Up Amphetamine it suggests the app (and a film)…

 

You can sign a petition to support the developer. If you own the app you can give the app a 5 star rating on the App Store if not you can get it from the App Store. It’s free.

Mac Bravery

And so here we are again. With a new MacOS version imminent I contemplate erasing the hard drive and starting afresh – again. Alas I have not been brave enough to do it for many years and so a new version just updates the old version amidst all the accumulated crud. And when I occasionally buy a new computer the hard drive size will be enormous compared to the old one so everything gets copied over, because there is so much space in there, and we carry on. The oldest file on here dates back to 2007.

How many versions of GHC does a chap need?

ghc versions

But this is a whole new era and we are moving from iterations of macOS 10 to the all new and shiny macOS 11 and so I will definitely be doing it this time. Deep down I know that something is going to get screwed up – like that account for something or other that I use daily and set up 10 years ago which will now require a password which I will not have saved anywhere – or more frustratingly I will have saved it but cannot now find it anywhere.

I did a full back up yesterday and a mere 13 hours later it had copied all of the 4.5 million files.. did I mention the crud?

So I am planning on using a blank partition on an external drive and booting from that with a fresh install to see what happens and if I can produce a functioning system. If that works then the big red ERASE-AT-YOUR-PERIL button will be clicked and we will be crud free – for at least a week.

Blog tweaking

The current SemPress theme places the Header image between the title and the start of the articles…

…which may be what was intended but I wanted it behind the title text so it was time to do some more CSS tweaking. Having moved the image I coloured the text from the cloud’s colours, used the darker blue corner of the sky both as a shadow under the title and as the background colour behind the articles. I rounded the corners of some images and the article’s panels.

Of course the moved image was screwed up on smaller screens so it is no longer shown on mobile devices – although some tablets will show it in landscape mode but not in portrait mode.

The amendments, which override the default CSS, now look like this:

As I’m sure there will be more to come I leave this here as an Aide-mémoire.

Yadit #100DaysToOffload

Too many distractions

On TV quiz shows one frequently see old people explaining that now they are retired there is so much to do they wonder how they ever found time to go to work. Despite my best intentions to spend my retirement catching up with all the stuff I have never really got to grips with – half understood software, half learnt programming languages, books that were purchased but never read etc. – the torrent of new stuff continues to overwhelm. I should draw a line and say no more… but

The update to Logic looks exciting and Arturia’s extended free licence for Pigments and Analog Lab shouldn’t be wasted. And I am already way behind on the Tidal training sessions. Not to mention the endless opportunities to explore the musical backwaters available to stream.

And then I am about to throw out the sourdough starter I started a few days ago when the weather was warm but abandoned when the weather turned colder – my home is not warm enough ordinarily to sustain the beast, but, I think, ‘it does smell like a good starter’, so I gave it a feed and a drink and it has been bubbling away all day; so the weekend will be spent cultivating some bread.

Not to mention being on fox cub watch…

There is no time for this 100 day nonsense…

Yadit #100DaysToOffload