A Geek Goes Flying

I have a desk in my bedroom that started out life as a slab of GLASHOLM glass held up by a pair of ARTUR trestles , though each trestle was eventually replaced by a sturdy two drawer vertical filing cabinet (like this ). It’s not my preferred place to work but sometimes the dogs are there and it just fits, y’know? It doesn’t get higher end stuff the living room workstation gets, but it’s more than usable. It’s kind of a Ship of Theseus situation, pieces get constantly changed out - is it the same workspace? How it started (circa 2020)   Intermediate setup, with pole mount and 15.4" MacBook Pro The chair I settled on is the generally very comfortable and supportive Branch Ergonomic Chair ($370 brand new), to which I added a pair of Aloudy Ergonomic Memory Foam Office Chair Armrest Pads (which don’t work nearly as well on the Branch as they do on the Aeron, but, they’re still more comfortable than the stock arm rests, by far). There’s no dedicated computer for this setup, though a...

Two things came up using my Thunderbolt 2 dock with my MacBook Air M2 running macOS 14 Sonoma. The first, I noticed it was using my spotty ‡ WiFi connection instead of the faster, reliable wired interface in the dock. Today I learned you can Set Service Order and configure the order in which macOS tries network interfaces (VPN connections are always at the top of the list and tried first, apparently): Network Systems Settings page with Set Service Order... selected Huzzah. Next, every time I connected the Thunderbolt hub, I was getting a pop-up I had to clear, which was annoying: Pop-up Under Privacy & Security, scroll down to Security and find the "Allow accessories to connect" setting, and tweak to taste: Accessory connection security setting Running smoothly now.

I found a good deal on an almost maxed out Intel MacBook Air 2020 (Core i7-1060NG7 @ 1.20GHz, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD) and set it up today. I figured, since it’s fully supported, I’d start this one off on Ventura (macOS 13) from day one. It came wiped to a fresh install of Monterey (macOS 12). First I tried to do the ⌘⌥R restore method to install the latest operating system, but every time after about a half hour or so I’d get an error -2005F error and could go no further. (A little digging suggests that that error is WiFi related ? Wireless here isn’t awesome, I see 49 networks sitting in my living room, 21 of then 2.4 GHz, 28 in the 5 GHz band; there are no channels free from interference.) Tried both 2.4 and 5 GHz networks before giving up and completing the setup for Monterey, and then using Software Update to install Ventura. This was a mistake. I had the same issue this user had , where most of the .pkg files I tried to install (e.g., OpenJDK8U-jdk_x64_mac_hotspot_8u345b01.pkg ), ...