Weeknotes 109

I’ve switched to my new laptop.

To upgrade, I dragged over my .ssh, .gnupg, Work, Projects and Music directories as well as 23 years of photos and videos from a Time Machine backup on an external SSD. Everything else was installed via Homebrew and, while I have a Brewfile, I went through the ritual of brew installing everything individually.

I’ve only run into three issues so far:

1. The Heroku CLI uses a non-Apple Silicon native build of Node.js so it requires Rosetta 2 which you can install via softwareupdate:

   $ softwareupdate --install-rosetta
   

2. Similarly, older versions of Terraform aren’t compiled for arm64 on macOS so trying to install them with asdf will fail unless you explicitly tell it to install the amd64 version:

   $ ASDF_HASHICORP_OVERWRITE_ARCH=amd64 asdf install
   Downloading terraform version 0.11.14 from https://releases.hashicorp.com/terraform/0.11.14/terraform_0.11.14_darwin_amd64.zip
   

3. Homebrew installs to /opt/homebrew for Apple Silicon and not /usr/local so any paths in .zshrc, .gnupg/gpg-agent.conf, etc. need updating.

E recommended I listen to the “Unfocus” episode of BBC Radio 4’s The Digital Human:

We’ve all had experiences of our attention wandering, usually at those moments when we most need to concentrate.

But, in our productivity-driven society, are we placing too much emphasis on paying attention and failing to recognise the benefits of more unstructured thought processes? After all, focus comes at a cost. With numerous demands on our attention, it’s all too easy to experience burnout. Unfocus can recharge our batteries and allow us to be creative by making connections and connecting with other people.

In this episode, Aleks Krotoski explores some of the different modes of attention we can switch between and asks whether, perhaps, we should be awarding our unfocus equal status to our focus.

I put some blinds up in a bay window but drilled some of the holes too big. Thankfully, someone tested 11 different methods for securing loose wall plugs revealing a solution that is obvious in retrospect: use a second wall plug to secure the first.

Every Sunday, I take C to swimming lessons at the local grammar school. Each lesson culminates in a brief bit of free time where he hopes to play with one of two watering cans. However, he is currently full of cold and feverish, occasionally calling out “I need a cuddle”.

A combination of parenthood and moving out of London means we rarely get to eat out but we’ve been occasionally using Dishpatch to have date nights at home. They can be quite involved but mean a change from our usual routine.