Month: December 2022

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.

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:

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:

• 1Password https://1password.com/
• Alfred https://www.alfredapp.com/
• Coconut Battery https://www.coconut-flavour.com/coconutbattery/
  • This was my jam on my old computer when I was worried about my battery life
• Dash https://kapeli.com/dash
• Dropbox https://www.dropbox.com/
  • Used to have more utility but now it’s mostly used to sync dev settings between computers that don’t have a cloud mechanism
• Fantastical https://flexibits.com/fantastical
• iTerm2 https://iterm2.com/
• JetBrains https://www.jetbrains.com/
  • 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
• Keka https://www.keka.io/en/
  • Ended up repurchasing it but it’s inexpensive
• LICEcap https://www.cockos.com/licecap/
• Magnet https://magnet.crowdcafe.com/
  • This was to replace SizeUp, which I’ve used for years!
• Microsoft Edge https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/edge
  • Seriously tho, Microsoft Edge is actually good
• Muzzle https://muzzleapp.com/
• Pocket Casts https://pocketcasts.com/
• Postman https://www.postman.com/
• Secretive https://github.com/maxgoedjen/secretive
• Scroll Reverser https://pilotmoon.com/scrollreverser/
• Spotify https://www.spotify.com/
• Todoist https://todoist.com/

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