Before the Pandemic, I once saw Chipzel play Bit Bash and it was phenomenal. Since I don’t really know much about writing chiptune music, I did some research and found out she uses Little Sound Dj (LSDJ) for some of her more recent stuff. And also a longgggg time ago I messed around MilkyTracker. So I don’t really know what the point of this post is other than to post some resources and reflect openly about how I want to write video game music. Should I compose it like I’d compose for a music theory class? Should I record some instrumental licks and go from there? I have no idea what I’m doing haha
I’ve had Alfred search issues on my M1 MacBook Pro when it came to trying to run applications installed by JetBrains Toolbox. I used the Alfred self-diagnostics tool to figure out what was going on with one of the apps, Rider, and received the output below:
Starting Diagnostics...
File: 'Rider.app'
Path: '/Users/bergren2/Applications/JetBrains Toolbox'
-----------------------------------------------------------
Check file cache database...
✅ File cache integrity is ok
-----------------------------------------------------------
Check if file is readable...
✅ Alfred has permissions to read this file.
Unix Permissions: 493
Underlying Type: NSFileTypeDirectory
Extended Attributes: (
"com.apple.macl",
"com.apple.provenance",
"com.apple.quarantine"
)
-----------------------------------------------------------
Check if volume '/' is indexed by macOS...
✅ Indexing is enabled on this drive
-----------------------------------------------------------
Check direct file metadata...
⚠️ Direct metadata is missing, this file is likely not indexed by macOS
Display Name:
Other Names:
Content Type:
Last Used:
-----------------------------------------------------------
Check mdls file metadata...
❌ macOS metadata missing essential items
kMDItemFSContentChangeDate = 2023-01-20 02:20:40 +0000
kMDItemFSCreationDate = 2023-01-20 02:20:40 +0000
kMDItemFSCreatorCode = ""
kMDItemFSFinderFlags = 0
kMDItemFSHasCustomIcon = 0
kMDItemFSInvisible = 0
kMDItemFSIsExtensionHidden = 0
kMDItemFSIsStationery = 0
kMDItemFSLabel = 0
kMDItemFSName = "Rider.app"
kMDItemFSNodeCount = 1
kMDItemFSOwnerGroupID = 20
kMDItemFSOwnerUserID = 501
kMDItemFSSize = 1
kMDItemFSTypeCode = ""
-----------------------------------------------------------
❌ Troubleshooting failed
The root of the issue was that the application wasn’t showing up in Spotlight, so I took to the Internet to search for a way to re-index or add the application. It led me to run this:
mdimport ~/Applications/
And while this seemed to do the trick, I was still getting the instance of Rider that exists in ~/Library/Application, but only in Alfred. And Alfred is supposed to ignore it! So knowing that Spotlight was correct — it was only showing the version in ~/Applications/ — I typed “reload” into Alfred to reload the cache and remove the extra instance.
I first became an Alfred user back when Spotlight wasn’t as powerful, and tools like it and Quicksilver were a must-have. Now? I’m not so sure. However Alfred has become a staple part of my workflow, even when it comes to generating GUIDs or quickly opening Jira links when I have ticket ID. And remember Ubiquity for Firefox? Most of that functionality is replicated just fine in Alfred, but I still dream about highlighting an address and seeing it pop up on a map. That was peak Late Aughts.
Edit: I ran into issues indexing core Mac apps — things like Mail.app and Messages.app weren’t showing in Spotlight. It turns out they aren’t actually in /Applications and are instead in /System/Applications — you can easily verify this in terminal using ls on the respective directories. The solution was to delete ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.spotlight.plist and restart, which I found out about through this guide. Now that I know that this file was being buggy, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was another buggy casualty of the transfer from my old MacBook Pro.
I’m learning more! I modified my first post to include more Instagram links and removed the “resources I want to try” (they didn’t pan out). Below I embed a few videos from creator Adam Tan that I enjoyed because they encapsulate the subtleties in learning Cantonese — things that I haven’t seen explicitly stated elsewhere, even in some of the resources I’m already using to learn.
As part of my MacBook upgrade, I directly transferred my old laptop’s data into my new one. So when I naively ran brew update I received the following:
/usr/local/Homebrew/Library/Homebrew/cmd/update.sh: line 37: /usr/local/bin/git: Bad CPU type in executable
Rather than try to debug this and countless other libraries not working because they were intended for Intel instead of ARM, I used the opportunity to uninstall Homebrew and start fresh. After reinstalling Homebrew and adding the recommended commands to my .zprofile to add Homebrew to my PATH, I was in good shape.
Hello Vim, my old friend
When checking my .zprofile for errors, I noticed Vim was yelling at me. That reminded me of my dotfiles repo, so I ran to its README to run the installation instructions. And they worked! So while Vim these days is used more for the occasional commit message edit and not my entire workflow, I’m still very grateful for having a good jumping off point for a fresh install. It also reminds me I should add things like fnm and gh if I want them to be part of my toolchain by default.
Speaking of Git
As soon as I finished that thought I ran into this error trying to commit:
error: gpg failed to sign the data fatal: failed to write commit object
Great! So now I need to figure out how to get my signing working again.
1Password CLI and SSH Signing
1Password has a CLI that can be downloaded directly or installed via brew install 1password-cli. I just had to check a few boxes and told 1Password to configure my ~/.ssh/config correctly.
1Password Developer configuration screen
After I imported my old key to 1Password it prompted me to set-up commit signing with SSH — I didn’t know that was a thing! So after adding my SSH key as a signing key (instead of as an auth key — it was already added as such), I was able to see the fruits of my labor:
My latest dotfiles repo commit, in all its verified goodness
Because the new MacBook has a fingerprint reader, I can easily add that as an additional check whenever I need to sign my commits. Maybe not the most necessary given what I do day-to-day, but I think it’s neat and glad it was so easy to use.
I finally caved and upgraded my 2015 MacBook Pro to a 2021 M1 Pro MacBook Pro. I had toyed with upgrading the battery on the 2015 MBP because that was the major pain point (couldn’t really go anywhere unplugged), but I also missed having more screen real estate and the fan would kick on for the simplest tasks. Now that my data transfer is complete, I’m taking inventory of the applications I use and figuring out which ones are worth keeping around. So far, here is my list:
After re-installing the Toolbox, if I click on an application from the dropdown I launch the app, but if I click the app in the Applications directory I get prompted to install Rosetta. Will debug later but at least I have a path forward
Most of these apps “just worked.” The few that didn’t I just had to redownload the M1 image and I was fine — all of the data was preserved, and at most I just needed to re-login.
Annoyances
I had to rebind Caps Lock to Esc
Edge didn’t sync some settings, such as default search engine or remembering passwords 🙄
Next Up
JetBrains silliness listed above
Fork is crashing on launch, so will need to figure that out
Homebrew updates, key updates, etc
Because I transferred my old MacBook directly to my new one, there’s seven year’s worth of cruft I need to work through
Howdy! Since the pandemic I’ve put a little more effort into learning Cantonese. I didn’t learn growing up but was surrounded by it on my mom’s side. This first table is the resources I’ve found so-far that are pretty helpful:
Good for vocab, learning characters and hearing pronunciation
So far I think the trick with a lot of these apps is a) making sure I’m using vocabulary and phrases that a native Cantonese speaker would use, and b) learning in such a way that I can write both by hand and by typing. The former comes with any language, and the latter comes with the day and age we live in. A big part of learning anything at a later age is getting over making mistakes and trying to be a perfectionist, so it helps me to write out these challenges explicitly so I can hopefully overcome them as obstacles.
Also to address the former, I follow a bunch of creators, many of whom I found via CantoTok. Here are some of the ones I could easily find:
I haven’t been blogging a lot — since the pandemic, really — and my posts have been more focused on the technical rather than on the details of my life. But given the recent collapse of Twitter, I revisited the notion of self-publishing. This blog post made the rounds on Mastodon (yes, I’m on Mastodon), and I resonated with the following:
You are pouring your words into increasingly closed and often walled gardens. You are giving control – and sometimes ownership – of your content to social media companies that will SURELY fail.
As if the Universe wanted to reward me for scratching that itch, I recently regained access to my Flickr account that had all of my old blog photos, and I found my blog backups that in theory should date back to 2005 — the year I started this blog.
Now that I’m older, I know I don’t have the same appetite for “being online” like I did when I was 16. But I want to attempt to re-unify all of the parts of my online presence, even if it’s just gathering the pieces for myself and not publishing them back out to the world.
Growing up, New Year’s Eve used to be an annual tradition of code updates to my blog. I don’t have the same drive that I did back then, but I did get a chance to update my list. Below are the fifty resolutions I want to tackle in 2022:
My list is currently at 32 — when I get to 50 I’ll make sure I don’t have any repeats and then probably rank them or something.
One of those items is to give this blog more attention. I’ve written even less in 2021 than I did in 2020, so 2022 could be a great time to turn it around. And even just knowing that I’ll probably use this space to write more tech posts instead of the emo posts of yesteryear — totally fine by me. If anything, it’s a perfect example of narrative documentation that can later be compiled into something more… expository? Is that one of the writing forms we learned in middle school? I swear most of the crap we learned growing up we had to unlearn later because it was taught incorrectly or without the correct context or nuance. Or it was just flat-out racist. (There’s all the obvious “X was omitted from history class” ones but check out just how many tunes you know are actually minstrel songs you never learned the full history of!)
I have the next few weeks off so might do a follow-up post before the end of the year. But if I don’t, have a good rest of 2021 and see you in 2022!
I bought David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) oh so many years ago (I think when I bought my first Kindle!), but I never finished it. I’m sure a big part of it was getting distracted — there’s no denying that — but I think I’m also a bit hesitant to revisit it. “Productivity” is a scary word for me, and I think part of that is its abuse within the framework of capitalism.
I think I’m ready to revisit it now. When I was learning from Manager Tools, I was just beginning my drift even further leftward from my already liberal identity. During that time, I was cognizant of the primary audience being business owners, managers and stakeholders — not the stumbled-into-managerial-role I had at the time. I have a feeling that something similar will hold for GTD, and therefore I need to have a similar approach to learning from it.
So I’m deciding to try out the audiobook version of GTD, which will give me the guide rails I need and also give David Allen’s updated version a chance. I don’t expect him to even mention capitalism, but I do expect a bit more self-awareness. Probably Elizabeth Warren-levels of awareness.
I think my own environment and context has changed significantly enough that the concepts I’m currently tackling — productivity, equity, mental health, neurodivergence, Left ideologies — are driving me to unify them in some way or another. I don’t expect something neat and tidy here, but — in the tradition of Grace Lee Boggs — I think exploring how they’re related will push me to a greater understanding of how we can continue to evolve and push for change.
