Macos

When was the latest truly memorable WWDC? I’d say in 2020, a year that was already memorable in itself, when Apple unveiled the new Macs with Apple Silicon processors, capable of outperforming their equivalent Intel-based models. I don’t know if what was presented at this year’s WWDC will be just as memorable, but there’s no doubt that Apple has came up with some interesting innovations.

– Source: Scott Rodgerson on Unsplash. As promised (or threatened?) in the last post, this post is dedicated to exploring the available options for hosting a Jekyll-based website (or any other static site generator), whether for a personal blog like the one you’re reading, a professional studio, or a small business website.

As noted in the last post, Jekyll does not have a built-in commenting system, but its themes often allow comments to be managed by connecting to third-party services such as Disqus and similar platforms. The problem with these services is that they can stop working overnight (as happened last year with Muut, which no longer even has a website), or they have opaque usage policies and user data collection practices.

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: 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).

– 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.

– Source: Viktor Forgacs on Unsplash. The transition is complete: since a few days, all the computers I use for work are running on Apple Silicon ARM processors. This includes a Mac Studio M2 Ultra, which I’ve already talked about extensively and which sits on my office desk; a Mac Mini M1 with 16 GB RAM and 1 TB SSD – previously neglected on a shelf for reasons I won’t go into here – now in my home office; and a very basic MacBook Air M1 (just 8 GB RAM and 256 GB SSD, half the specs of my wife’s) for light use and when I’m on the go.