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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My former self just reminded me that it is 10 years since Google dumped Reader, “likely,” as I surmised then, “to send us all scurrying to Google Plus”. Which, of course, it dumped a few years later.

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It is nice to know that some of my stuff is being read, and good to be encouraged too. Before I delve into histograms and the like, though, I think I need to play more with Python's split method. This may enable me to remove the front matter from each blog post, in order to get a more accurate picture of how long the actual content is. And it will not be difficult.

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As ever, it is much easier for me to learn things by doing. I’ve been mulling the idea of a topic-based index to this site, which will take a fair amount of doing, but as preparation I need to know which of the thousands of posts are worth including. Probably they’re going to be relatively long, maybe more than 500 words. There’s obviously no way I am going to open each one to check, so I need a little script. A fine way to learn a bit more Python.

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