A Gap Between the Posts

I took a break from posting last week, because the two topics I wanted to cover were my 23andMe results and my recent experiments with Debian 12 + XFCE on a spare laptop. The former perhaps reveals a little too much personal information about my family and I, and the latter crosses the line into being work-adjacent, which is something I'm trying to avoid with these diary style updates.

A mistake I often see bloggers make is writing for the sake of writing, but it takes more self-control, in my view, to hold back from writing when you don't have something interesting to say. As a result, I'm not going to be hard on myself ongoing if I miss a week here or there as I progress through 2024.

The other mistake I often see bloggers make is apologising for not posting. If the written work that they're producing isn't their primary source of income, or they're not happy with the result, then they shouldn't feel guilty. They're metaphorically handing out free slush puppies (or "snow cones", if you're American), and most rational adults understand that it's greedy and selfish to tax someone else's generosity to the point that it becomes an intolerable burden and they're unable to continue.

Time For a Mac Attack

This week we saw the 40th anniversary of the Apple Mac. My earliest memory of those machines was coveting my high school friend's G3 iMac and "clamshell" MacBook. We played multiplayer LAN games of Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds on them, and iTunes felt much better to use than Windows Media Player. I didn't own either machine myself until I developed a retro computing hobby around 13 years later, but I had a lot of fun tinkering with them. My collection also includes an Apple Macintosh LC II that runs System 7 from a SCSI2SD adapter, an upgraded iBook G4 that briefly ran OpenBSD before I reverted it back to Mac OS X 10.5.x "Leopard", and an iMac G5 on which I have played many long games of The Sims 2.

The first Apple Mac that I bought was a 2010 model Intel Mac Mini. They look identical to the 2011 model; However, they still have optical disk drives, and the latest version of macOS that they can run is 10.13.x "High Sierra". I originally bought it to develop and sell iOS 4 applications for the iPhone, as I was taking an elective module on that subject at university. It was a perfectly serviceable machine for the task, until Apple released iOS 5 and decided that newer versions of XCode couldn't run on that hardware. Suffice to say, I was disappointed by that decision! Regardless, I kept that Mac Mini for five years, sold it, then missed it so much that I bought an identical machine from eBay a couple of years later and then used it mostly as a home theatre PC. I finally replaced it with a more power-efficient Raspberry Pi during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns, but I still have that Mac Mini in my garage, and it still works.

Today, I have a blue 24" iMac M1 that's proven to be a great general purpose home computer. It feels really pleasant to use, and I have also been using it to learn the Swift programming language so that I can update the knowledge I acquired from that elective module I mentioned earlier and write some apps for my own iPhone.

I also recently bought a 15" MacBook Air with an M2 chip and "midnight" case, in anticipation of a part-time master's degree that I'll be starting either later this year, or sometime next year, depending on how my personal finances shake out. The subject of that degree is likely to be non-technical, so sadly I don't think I can safely assume that I'll be able to complete and turn in assignment work from a three-year-old Dell XPS 13 that's often running Debian instead of struggling to cope with the system requirements of Windows 11. That will probably be the machine on which I finish writing future posts for this blog as well.

Most of my gaming nowadays happens on a Nintendo Switch or an iPad, and the PC games I normally play either run on emulators or have Mac ports, so I've accepted that I'm a casual gamer. As such, I'm dismantling my gaming PC and selling off the parts, after which the only Windows install left on my home network will be inside a Parallels Desktop VM on my iMac.