macOS Time Machine is usually set up to work in the background and not overly affect anything that’s going on in the foreground while the user is working. Under normal circumstances, this is desirable behaviour. It is not desirable when you try to take one last backup of a failing SSD before it keels over completely. Which was the unfortunate situation I found myself in.

In a previous post I mentioned that I upgraded my homebrew install of Emacs after Emacs 26.2 was released, and noticed that I had lost its GUI functionality. That’s a pretty serious restriction for me as I usually end up with multiple frames across my desktop. I did end up installing the homebrew Emacs for Mac tap which restored the GUI functionality. It had have one niggling problem for me, though. My muscle memory says that I use Shift-Meta-7 (aka Meta-/ ) for keyword expansion as I use…

I finally got around to upgrading my OS X installation from Mojave to High Sierra - my OS update schedule is usually based on the old pilot wisdom of “don’t fly the A model of anything”. As part of the upgrade, I ended up reinstalling all homebrew packages including Emacs to make sure I was all up to date. That proved to be a big mistake as I suddenly had a GUI-less Emacs. Of course I found the post on Irreal about the Emacs homebrew package being broken on Mojave after, well,…

As I’ve mentioned before on this blog, I still have one of the “cheese grater” Mac Pros around. It’s a 2009 that I upgraded somewhat with SSD, 6 core Xeon and a few other small goodies. As I split my time between Linux, Windows and macOS, I like having it around but can’t really justify getting a newer machine.

Update 2019-05-07: The java8 cask is affected by recent licensing changes by Oracle. There’s a discussion over on github about this. I’m leaving the post up partially for historic context, but the java8 cask is no longer available, at least at the time of writing.