I have a new Mac Mini (yay!). My old one was running OS 10.12 (Sierra); the new one is running 11.6 (Big Sur). Some things are different and some parts of the transition were just bizarre,¹ but it wasn't as jarring as I thought it would be.

Except for installed applications. Back in Catalina (what was that, 10.15?), 32-bit applications stopped working. I don't know of a way to take inventory (one of several reasons I didn't update the OS on that machine). I used Migration Assistant to bring my existing stuff over to the new machine and then walked through the applications to see which ones would still run. Some, like Emacs and Paintbrush, I needed to download new copies of. Some I would need to buy new copies of (but nothing important enough to do so). Some are just plain dead -- no 64-bit version is available. In this last category are Trope Trainer, which I already had reasons to abandon that I should write about separately, and Encore, the music-typesetting program I use(d). The latter came as a surprise.

Solving the Encore problem isn't urgent but it is important. I'm not doing a lot of music composition and arrangement these days, but I have years' worth of files in Encore's native binary format, or in that of its predecessor, Rhapsody. (Encore reads both.) I would like to not lose those source files. Encore can export MIDI, but exporting MIDI and then importing it into something else produces poor results, plus you lose all the typesetting cleanup and text.

This is the problem with closed file formats. If only one program (or suite) can read a format and that product line goes away, you're stuck.

I already re-bought Encore once, when I moved from Windows to Mac ages ago. I reluctantly checked their site to see what it would cost to get a modern version, and found that they punted with Catalina -- their site says "don't upgrade to Catalina if you want to run our software", which was practical advice a few years ago but isn't now. So Encore is dead, it looks like.

(And this is one of the reasons I don't make major OS updates on machines I care about. Had I updated the old machine to Catalina back when everybody was pushed to do so, I'd have been left hanging with no rollback option short of a brute-force recovery from backup.)

I don't know what my recovery options are for not having to do a lot of typesetting by hand again. I will of course export those MIDI files on the old machine (better than nothing), but I hope I can find something else that reads Encore format and can then be saved as something more portable (MusicXML?).

I can, of course, continue to use the old machine. As with the last time I migrated to a new machine, I've set up the old one with remote desktop. As with the last time, I suspect that will work for a while but not forever.

Edited to add: I was wrong; Encore does export MusicXML, so that should give me a path forward. (I was looking in the wrong place.)

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¹ For example, my browsers retained their state, including tabs, but Chrome-based browsers (Chrome and Brave) lost their extensions. I had to look them up and reinstall them and then reconfigure them (and reauthorize all my userscripts). Firefox, on the other hand, brought its extensions over with no problems. All of this is data on disk; does Chrome actively disable migrating with extensions?

I got a new monitor to use with my Mac Mini, after confirming that the product spec says all the right things about connections (and a couple other things I care about). Tonight I tried to connect it. Easy, right? You've got a bunch of cables that each fit in one place, and hieroglyphics that come with the monitor besides. (Actual words, not so much -- presumably because of internationalization concerns.)

It came with an HDMI cable and a display port cable that fits the Thunderbolt connector on the other end. (Q&A confirms that's what you're supposed to do with it.) I assume I'm supposed to choose one. I tried each on its own and then tried them together; in all cases I got "no cable detected" on the monitor even though all connections are tight. I tried the HDMI connection with Dani's laptop; same result. I was using the HDMI connection on my old monitor. (Not HDMI on the monitor's end; there's some sort of adapter. But HDMI on the Mac end.)

It seems unlikely that both cables are bad, though I'll try to borrow other cables from work tomorrow to swap those out. Could something be broken in the monitor such that it would power up and produce its splash screen but then not detect either connector? I am really not a hardware person... What should I do next to try to get a working monitor?

It has USB ports and the diagram shows plugging a keyboard into one. I guess that only works if I can connect USB to USB on the computer? The package didn't include a USB cable. Or is HDMI some sort of magic that transmits other signal too? (It did include a cable I can't identify that doesn't fit into any connections on my Mac.)

Assuming I get that far, if I get a choice between HDMI and DisplayPort/Thunderbolt, which do I want? Ideally I'd like to send sound to the monitor too (it claims to support that) and get rid of the crappy falling-apart external speakers I have now.

Argh. This is the part about computers I hate -- getting the pieces of hardware to all play nicely. I wish I could get someone to come by tomorrow night and make it all happy. :-(

Dear Brain Trust,

Years ago I bought the iWorks office suite for my Mac. This consists of Pages, Numbers, and Keynote. When I got a new Mac, the applications didn't transfer correctly; they're there, but they crash on startup. I don't know if this was because of the new machine itself or because of the OS change. (The old machine ran 10.6. The new one ran 10.8.5 when I migrated, and I've now upgraded it to Sierra.)

I had assumed that I would just have to buy the suite again (or replace it), though today I found a two-year-old article that said that it comes with new Macs. Not mine, it didn't. I looked in the App Store and I don't see the bundle any more, though I can buy the applications individually for $20 each.

I'm not heavily invested in these particular tools, but I need some way to occasionally edit Word documents and spreadsheets. (I've never edited a slide deck on my Mac.) I don't want to spend a lot on this because it's in that aggravating niche of "occasional need, but important when it happens". The old Mac is still on the network because my very-rarely-needed scanner doesn't work with the new Mac either (drivers, I assume), and also the old one has a CD drive, but I'd rather edit documents locally than via remote desktop.

Any recommendations?

Day 0: Receive newer machine (yay!), discover it needs a video connector I don't have. Oops; should have noticed that in the specs.

Day 1: Get cable, start Migration Assistant. It announces this will take 16+ hours because, despite being plugged into the LAN and wireless being turned off on the other machine, it's using wifi. Oh well.

Day 2: Migration hangs; aborted around the 24-hour mark. Connect the two machines directly via ethernet and make sure wifi is turned off on both. This time Migration Assistant says 1.5 hours.

Day 3: Hung at "4 minutes remaining" for 12 hours. Since the previous day I've been attempting to get support online; at this point I wait through the support phone queue, spend an hour or so with a first-level technician who can tell me nothing new, and finally get escalated to the next level, where we spend another hour debugging. He convinces me to try again even though we've changed no settings ("but isn't it deterministic?", I asked) and I wait up for the completion -- or, rather, the hang at 3 minutes remaining. By the time this happens that second-level support person has gone home for the night. I leave voice mail, to which he never responds.

Day 4: It always hangs when migrating apps. What happens if I migrate everything except apps, and I'll try to solve that separately? That works. Migrating apps by themselves still hangs (but it only takes about 15 minutes to get to that point now). I ask a question on Ask Different which, like my previous attempt to go to the elves for counsel, has not gotten much traction. (Actually, that's not fair; last time my question was completely ignored; this time somebody answered to say "it depends". Progress.)

Later in the day I try to copy individual files in the Applications folder directly (using a network share). The copy operation says no to Firefox, claiming the file is corrupted (err, works just fine on the source machine); upon trying to do a fresh installation I learn that Firefox has dropped support for my OSs (both). Huh, Chrome gave me notifications when that got close; Firefox never breathed a word. I will be upgrading the OS on the new machine, but I'm not going to do that mid-move. I find a Firefox download that's still available and, oh glorious day, when I start it up it has my state from the other machine! I didn't have to use sync or anything! So I still don't know where user application data is stored on a Mac, but apparently the migration got it. Yay.

Most applications can be copied but a few fail, claiming permission problems (even though the permissions are fine). The iWork suite copies fine but does not run; might be an OS incompatibility. Shabbat arrives.

Day 5: Shabbat. After, I learn that the files that couldn't be copied across a network share can be copied just fine using a USB drive. No idea why that makes a difference. I begin testing whether applications actually run. Spend way too long finding an activation code from the original CD packaging for one of them. Note to self: add activation codes to the file of important information you'd be sad to lose.

Why are printer drivers so difficult? Apparently that's something that didn't come over in the migration. Spend an hour or so hunting the driver I need online after failing to find it on the source machine. (It's a driver. That means it's a file. That means I should be able to find and copy it, right?) Just as I reach the "it'd be less frustrating to buy a new printer even though this one works fine and meets my needs" point, I find the driver and print something.

Day 6 (today): Still haven't tested all applications, and I'm not touching the scanner before Rosh Hashana. Spend lots of time tuning video. I initially set up the new machine with a different monitor (so I could retain easy access to the old machine); when I couldn't get it tuned to a good balance of brightness, contrast, and color temperature I swapped monitors. And the old monitor is wacky too. So it's something in the OS, I presume. I spend lots of time in advanced calibration settings and reach a point that seems workable. It's not the same as the old one (Stack Exchange and LJ colors are slightly off, but not in a way I can fix in hardware or calibration), but presumably I'll get used to it. I now realize that I have no idea what the true colors of any web site I use are, because they look a little different on every device I use, including ones where I've never adjusted any display settings. Some day I should line up the two Macs, my work (Windows) laptop, my tablet, and my phone and have a show-down. (I used some photos to sanity-check all this.)

But, all that said, it sure is nice having a newer machine! I had not previously appreciated solid-state hard drives, and now I'm not resource-starved. I wish Apple had updated the product (they haven't since 2014), but I couldn't wait any longer and this used machine will do just fine.

Tonight begins Rosh Hashana. I will pick this up in a few days.

For the past couple weeks -- but not before then -- both Firefox and Chrome have been randomly seizing up on me on my Mac at home (running Snow Leopard). When this happens, first that application and then (about 10-15 seconds later) the entire machine become unresponsive, presenting the spinning beachball of doom. After a minute or so, but occasionally longer, things go back to normal. Sometimes I see a Chrome pop-up about an unresponsive site flash by. When this happens and I can watch in the Activity Monitor, neither CPU nor memory is pegged. Sometimes this happens once a day; sometimes it happens a couple times in an hour. It's becoming a pretty big usability problem.

All browsers are up to date (and not beta versions). This doesn't happen on my work machine (Win7). Dani says this happens to him on his brand-new iMac with maxed-out memory, but only with Firefox. (So he uses Chrome -- problem solved.) For me on my dusty old Mac Mini, it's happening with both browsers. I can't figure out what changed -- why is this happening now?

Googling told me that disabling the Flash player extension/addon/plugin/whatever could fix this, but it didn't. I've also looked through extensions and disabled anything I'm not actively using; it's pretty bare-bones. I do have several userscripts, none written by me, but I don't see anything glaringly suspicious in their code. I've already disabled the ones I can live without at least for a while, but a couple of them really are critical. I'm not finding any help on the Apple forums.

I've been thinking about upgrading my hardware anyway, as even before this started my Mac was starting to get sluggish sometimes. I bought it in something like 2009, so that's not too surprising. But the Mini hasn't been updated since October 2014, so this is the wrong time to buy -- something better should be coming before too much longer.

Meanwhile, I'd like to diagnose and fix this problem. But I'm out of ideas. :-(

Tonight I popped a DVD into my Mac Mini (Trope Trainer, because I needed to print something from it) and the machine declined to read it. On several tries with multiple discs I got either "can't read this; wanna eject?" or "hey, you gave me a blank disc" (um, no). Dani's iMac could read the original DVD just fine. Rebooting didn't change anything. So, off to the Internet for guidance.

I don't have a can of compressed air at home and advice was mixed about CD cleaning kits. One answer sounded unlikely, but it also seemed harmless so I gave it a shot.

And that is how I successfully cleaned my DVD drive with a microfiber cloth and a credit card. I should still get myself a can of air, though, because I probably only moved some dust particles around (and off the optic scanner). Nothing came out on the cloth, so whatever the problem was, it's still in there -- just, apparently, brushed aside.

Bad news: the furnace's pump is dead. Good news: it's under warranty. (Questionable news: it was that young and died anyway...) Bad news: the repair guy didn't have a replacement; try again tomorrow. Good news: we found this out now, so with luck it'll be fixed before the predicted lows in the lower 30s mid-week.

This afternoon the network hub in my office just up and died. I wasn't doing anything particularly taxing at the time -- not even streaming video. :-) There one moment, gone the next. For now I've moved the incoming network cable directly to my Mac; I rarely use the legacy PC anyway and no longer have a laptop that would benefit from being plugged in, but I'll probably get another small hub anyway just so I can use the PC if I need to. (The PC doesn't have a monitor and keyboard; when I use it I connect using VNC.)

While changing the cable on the Mac I knocked the video cable loose; it's one of those mini connectors that some Macs use, with an adapter to support a regular connector. When I plugged it back in, making sure everything was tight, the colors on my monitor were slightly off -- brighter and a little yellower. No amount of adjusting would fix it, but after a reboot it was fine. (I had a vague memory of that happening once before.) I do not have a mental model for this failure mode yet; why would anything software-side care about that cable being unplugged and replugged, and why would a reboot (with no further adjustment of the cable) make a difference?

My trusty iBook has died and the Apple Genius declared a hard-drive failure. Apple no longer sells those, though I could go looking for a third-party solution and that's not off the table yet. But maybe it's time to move to a machine that can support an OS newer than 10.4 and a Firefox newer than 3.6, so I'm considering other options too.

This is very much a secondary machine, for traveling, going to a class or meeting where I want computing power and not just paper, using in parts of the house other than my desk, and occasionally for taking to work if I need access to personal computing during the work day. I don't do a lot of that last, but it's happened. The iBook was also useful to me during a multi-day DSL outage; I could at least take the laptop to the library or bookstore for access. So I use the machine sporadically, but when I do use it it's important enough that I don't want to do without.

Apple's current laptop offerings are too pricy for me -- I'm sure they'd be great machines if I used my laptop all the time, but that's not my use case. It looks like used or refurbished Macbooks (just plain Macbook, the laptop Apple sold until 2010) could be an option; if you have experience with those, please tell me what gotchas lurk there.

I'm talking about Macs because that's what I have on my desk at home and some consistency of user experience (and software) is useful. (Among things, having the Soncino talmud/etc collection on my hard disk is useful. I bought that for Mac; I don't want to rebuy for Windows.) I'm willing to consider Windows options but I don't know that space yet.

Alternatively, tablets are appealing -- more portable and "instant-on" and just generally more convenient. I've used Dani's iPad and it's very nice. Just one problem: they don't seem to be designed for composing text documents and that's an important use case for me. For example, I often compose blog posts or other documents offline and then post/email/share them later. This calls for a text editor and access to the file system. If one is internet-connected then solutions might exist (SSH to a Unix shell was suggested to me recently), but we can't assume a network connection. (I actually don't know if there's an SSH application for the iPad.)

(The other problem with tablets is the keyboard, but there exist add-ons for that. And ok, a third problem is that everything these days seems to have a glossy display and I much prefer matte, but I think I'm doomed there.)

Dani commented that what I really want is a Linux tablet. Yeah, now that you mention it... is anybody working on that? Can Android tablets meet my needs? Which ones should I be paying attention to? (~10" screen rather than 7" required.)

So I'll be doing my Google research, but I'm also interested in hearing opinions from y'all. Thanks.

I got a Magic Mouse to use with my Mac Mini a few weeks ago. This is a Bluetooth multi-touch mouse, so it's a touch-sensitive mouse but not a trackpad. This is my first experience with multi-touch (beyond having used iPhones or iPads for perhaps five minutes total).

The mouse is physically shallow; while part of my hand rests on a normal mouse (leading me to be finicky about the size and shape of such mice), if you did that with a multi-touch mouse you'd get all sorts of unwanted behavior. While on a regular mouse the only relevant interfaces are the buttons (and scroll wheel if present), with this mouse the entire surface is responsive to taps and sweeps. Lay your hand across this and you might find yourself inadvertantly scrolling, perhaps at high speed.

At first, and not having thought through all that, the low profile seemed like it would be a problem. However, it is low enough, and otherwise sized appropriately enough for my hand, that to move it I just put my thumb on one side and last two fingers on the other and go. I wouldn't have expected this, but it feels pretty natural.

Even with the touch interface it does support conventional left- and right-clicks (with actual motion and a clicking sound). It does not have buttons; you just press on one side or the other near the end (where buttons would be). Occasionally my attempts to right-click have mis-fired as left-clicks, but that's been decreasing over time so I guess I've learned to get past whatever problem I was having.

The main use of the multi-touch interface (out of the box) is scrolling. I can just sweep a finger along the mouse to zoom whatever web page or document I have open at the time. In fact, I don't have to keep my finger on the mouse; I can touch, give a quick swipe, and lift my finger and the zoom will go an appropriate amount (past when I lifted my finger) and slow down to a stop about when I expected it to. Somebody put some significant thought into that behavior (velocity modeling seems like it would be hard) and it's pretty cool. The faster you move your finger, the faster the scrolling. No documentation told me this, but before too long I learned that I could stop a scroll in progress by just tapping my finger; otherwise this would be too hard to control and I'd stick with paging. And, unlike a scroll wheel, finger-based scrolling works horizontally. Since web pages with horizontal scroll bars are the bane of my existence (accessibility rant redacted), this is a big win for me. But I bet it'll be useful in fundamentally-horizontal applications (editing audio files comes to mind); haven't tried yet.

One surprise from the scrolling: it applies to whatever window the mouse is currently over, rather than the active application. That's a little weird and I hope there's a preference I can set for that.

There is one big problem with the Magic Mouse: tracking. I was finding that sometimes it would move freely in one direction but not another, or that it would suddenly slow down a lot, and was otherwise unpredictable. I had the tracking speed maxed (unlike with my previous mouse) and there was no problem with the batteries, yet this problem persisted, intermittently. That's unforgivable in a mouse, but the multi-touch was cool so I looked for a solution. Google led me to a two-part solution: first, if behavior is erratic, pick up the mouse and blow across the sensor because of dust or cat hair (!). And second, MagicPrefs is a software add-on that not only speeds up tracking quite nicely but also allows you to program all sorts of other multi-touch gestures (which I have not played with yet). With those two changes I am satisfied with the tracking.

Using this mouse is a different experience from what I was used to, but overall it's been pretty positive.

Via _subdivisions_:

1. What’s one thing that made you happy today?

After spending hours on porting item #1 to our new software version, item #2 took about 15 minutes. Yay for learning curves! (Ok, also bug fixes -- it's a pre-release version. :-) )

2. What’s one thing that drove you crazy today?

Having my Mac seize an audio CD and refuse to eject. 45 minutes and half a dozen reboots later it finally coughed up. Sheesh! For future reference, the trick is to hold down the left mouse button while booting, but it has to be a wired mouse. Um, what?

(Number 3 was redacted for complete irrelevance.)

4. Is there a TV show you never miss? What is it?

Historically, Babylon 5 and, later, LOST (the last 10 minutes of which does not exist in my world, thankyouverymuch). Of shows currently on the air, The Big Bang Theory. Though an important distinction: B5 always got watched on broadcast night; the others get/got watched within the week.

5. How do you get to work?

I drive via local roads (no parkway, yay).

6. Rake in the fall, or leave ‘em ‘til after the thaw?

Rake in the fall. I left them till spring once, thinking they would just turn into mulch and cease to be a problem. That didn't work so well.

7. What’s your favorite cheese?

I like rich, soft cheeses of the Brie/Camembert/etc family. I've had some excellent specimens that I can never find again (nor remember the names of) after the encounter. Oh well.

8. Who’s your favorite muppet?

I haven't watched any muppets since I was a kid, but I remember thinking that Oscar the Grouch got a bum rap and was clearly misunderstood. :-)