Monthly Archives: March 2018

This is a great primer on iOS privacy from the team behind Halide. I didn’t realize you could use the Share Extension to publish to Instagram without granting them access to your photos!
A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Cookies

Python Homebrew Follow-up (continued)

The Homebrew team has reverted their previous decision to force python to point to python3. What a confusing mess.

According to PEP 394, python should point to python2, for consistency across Unix-like systems, so this restores compatibility.

I just ran into this macOS Apple Pay bug. It’s getting tedious to keep hitting edge cases:

Unable to add Apple Pay wallet after restoring a Time Machine Backup

I knew we got a lot of snow, but I didn’t realize it was 21”!

Worcester snowfall — 21.8 inches — sets record for date

Finally giving Taskmator a try — I’ve been meaning to download this forever.

Python Homebrew Follow-up

A quick update on the Python/Homebrew situation; it looks like node-gyp has been updated to correctly find Python 2.7.x.

With that change, I’ve now removed Python 2.7.x from my .bash_profile. I’m still leaving python@2 linked via brew (brew link python@2 --force), so that I can can run python2 for access to a Python 2.7.x environment.

I bought my iMac in 2013 and sprung for a Thunderbolt cable so I could use Target Display Mode. Today, with a forecast of 12-18” of snow, is the first day I’ve worked from home and gotten Target Display Mode working. It’s glorious.

Transporter Desktop on High Sierra

If anyone out there is still using the File Transporter system, there’s a compatibility issue with High Sierra. The last version available via the official update channel is 4.2.12, but there’s a patch for version 4.2.18 available from their support site. This restores access to the Transporter Library.

This issue reminded me that support for this system ended in September, 2017, so I’m on borrowed time. I just upgraded to the 2TB storage plan on iCloud, so I may test migrating the data I have on the File Transporter into iCloud… but that seems risky.

Python 2.7 via Homebrew

I missed the memo, but back in January Homebrew announced that as of version 1.5, python would be upgraded to use Python 3.x. This change went live on March 1, and I noticed it over the weekend while tinkering with Homebridge.

While I was rebuilding Homebridge with the latest version of Node.js, I kept banging into node-gyp errors having to do with using Python 3.x. I’m not alone, though there is already a pull request to fix this issue.

For the time being, I’ve made two changes to please node-gyp:

Forced a link of the new python@2 keg¹:
```
brew link python@2 -f
```
Added the following to my ~/.bash_profile, so that python will point at python2:
```
export PATH="/usr/local/opt/python@2/libexec/bin:$PATH"
```

I think I’ll revert the second change once the node-gyp issue is resolved, to begin forcing myself to use Python 3.x.

This puts python2 into /usr/local/bin/, effectively adding it to my path. ↩

A literal garbage truck fire in Auburn, MA.