Software

After the first part dedicated to installing and configuring Jekyll, this second part of these annotated notes dives into developing a Jekyll site using a pre-existing theme. On the other hand, developing a theme for Jekyll from scratch is far beyond my expertise, but those who can do it don’t need to read these notes.

This post is not meant to be a detailed guide on installing and configuring Jekyll; for that, there are excellent guides listed below.1 Instead, this post is a commented collection of notes I took while developing melabit.com/posts/en. They are the result of days and days of trial and error, changes in direction, and research to find the right command. These notes were useful for me to remember what I had done and how I had solved the issues that arose from time to time. They might be useful for you to get everything done more quickly and smoothly.

– Image generated by Microsoft Designer AI. In the past few months, I have written four posts about macOS Sonoma bugs (a complete list is at the end of this post) because I found it unbelievable that this macOS version was released with such glaring issues in the Finder and in disk management.

– Source: Jametlene Reskp on Unsplash. As I mentioned in my last post, leaving the WordPress comfort zone wasn’t easy at all. Going from focusing solely on writing something interesting – while a team of system administrators and web programming experts handled everything else – to having to do it all by myself was a massive leap.

– Image generated by the Microsoft Designer AI. Eleven years ago, when I started writing in this personal space, I never imagined I would stick with WordPress.com for so long. WordPress.com is a convenient and reliable blogging platform, but it has always been ill-suited to my way of working. Over time, I learned to live with these limitations, but the idea of changing platforms never left my mind.

– Source: Apple Support. Experimenting can sometimes lead to issues. That’s exactly what happened to me after a failed macOS installation, which resulted in a big question mark with a prompt to visit the Mac restore page. For some years now, when a Mac is unable to boot macOS and cannot even run macOS Recovery to repair or reinstall the OS, the only way to bring it back to life is to enable DFU Mode (Device Firmware Upgrade). This mode is stored in ROM and cannot be erased under any circumstances.1

– Image generated by Microsoft Designer AI. Sonoma’s bugs never fail to surprise, and here I describe a fresh one, which luckily has been fixed in Sequoia. Take a new MacBook Air or Pro, where you’ve just installed Sonoma, or a MacBook where you erased the startup disk before installing Sonoma (what happens when simply updating from a previous version might be different).

– Source: Jonas Jacobsson on Unsplash. Medium is arguably the best online publishing platform, where anyone can publish articles of any length on any topic, ranging from advanced science and technology themes to journalistic reports and personal life stories. The platform’s vastness requires personalization according to your preferences, so you can view only relevant content and ignore the rest. But even following only what interests you can be demanding: the newsletter Medium sends me every morning always contains at least 4-5 articles I can’t help but read and often share with colleagues or friends.

– Image generated by Microsoft Designer AI. A couple of months ago, I listed some more or less serious bugs in Sonoma that I noticed while getting familiar with the latest version of macOS, first on the new Mac Studio M2 Ultra and then on the household Mac Mini M1. At that time, I was using macOS Sonoma 14.3, which I soon updated on the Mini to version 14.3.1. With this minor release, Apple fixed a couple of the bugs I described, specifically the one about emptying the Trash into a random Space and the issue that prevented giving decent names to PDF files generated by the Print function.

– Image generated by Microsoft Designer AI. Sonoma is still raw and comes with a fair number of bugs, but fortunately, there is something good here too. As far as I’m concerned, I like that Screen Sharing has finally gained its rightful place on the Mac, taking its spot in the Utilities folder within Applications, instead of being relegated to /System/Library/CoreServices/Applications, as it had been until now.