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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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You have presumably seen the storm in a little red cup over Elon Musk's offer to send about $6 billion to the World Food Program if “WFP can describe on this Twitter thread exactly how $6B will solve world hunger”. Of course the Director of the WFP pointed out that the headline misrepresented him, natch, and that $6 billion “will not solve world hunger, but it WILL prevent geopolitical instability, mass migration and save 42 million people on the brink of starvation.”

And he has now come up with an itemised budget.

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