The abiding delight of methodically re-publishing posts from previous blogging machines has been to rediscover things I enjoyed and had forgotten. On this day 18 years ago, for example, I first wrote about Dunstan Orchard’s amazing website. He explained, with just the right amount of detail, how t...

I listened to three scary podcasts last week. And you know what they say about “coincidences” that come in threes.¹

Without a doubt, the big news of the month was the arrival of my new computer, an M1 iMac. OK, so it took more than a week to get it going properly, largely because I was in too much of a hurry at the start, but I’m loving it now. At the end of the month I flew in a plane, again.

One of the bigger self-induced headaches of moving to a new computer was getting passwordless login to my server working properly. Only after getting rid of all the remnants of my former existence as a User with the same name did this finally become possible. That cleared the way to a slightly smaller headache; restoring to good health the various scripts that copy various thing from my server to a local machine.

I used to use cron to do this, even though Apple had deprecated cron some little while ago. I had seven little scripts, each of which cron recited at the requisite interval, and everything was good, but even after login was working just fine, cron wasn’t. I got no joy from cron itself and logs, nor from a fancy-dancy thing called cronitor. I had, a while back, looked at Apple's alternative launchd, and deemed it too difficult. But needs must.

My new M1 iMac has now been operational for a whole week, which seems worthy of note. The very good news is that it is blindingly fast. I sometimes have the feeling that it knew what I was going to do before I did. Getting to this point, however, has not been plain sailing and, to mix a metaphor, I am not out of the woods yet.