Week of 25 March |

Short week this week on account of Easter. It's been super crazy at work these last few weeks, so the 4 days off is incredibly welcome.
Renovations are continuing at the new place, all of the plaster has come off the walls and almost all of it has been carted away to be disposed of. Now that the plaster is off, we can assess the amount of work that's needed to improve the energy efficiency of the place, as well as work out if we need to do any work on the wiring or plumbing. So far, there is 0 insulation in the walls (other than whatever insulation happened to land there from the ceiling by accident). The wiring is pretty good, only a couple of strays that lead to nothing. And the plumbing needs some work. The piping itself is fine, just there is a bunch of water damage around the fittings and under some of the wet areas. We kind of expected the water damage, given the age of the house and the small signs of it we saw when removing the older flooring. What we didn't expect though, was the wall cavities being filled with leaves and elm seeds (the same elm we're trying to remove) and a few parts of the frame having suffered ant damage. Some of the wiring is still exposed post-plaster-removal, so we can't get back in to clean with a vacuum, but looking froward to it once we can safely turn the power back on!
I had the good fortune of needing to use Apple's "password manager" this weekend to work with a bunch of old passwords. A bunch of old passwords from test accounts were being flagged as insecure, so I wanted to clean those out to make sure actual insecurities weren't being lost in the noise. On one hand, I am glad that Apple is delving in to the password manager space, and on the other I am hoping that this is not their final offering. I needed to work through ~100 passwords, deleting many, but also wanting to change a few. The settings app would often (every 10 or so passwords) get stuck in a weird state where without any interaction from me, throw up the info dialog of a password I had worked with maybe 5 minutes ago. Any attempt to close the dialog failed, and all I could do was force quit the settings app and start again. This is just the latest annoyance in the rewrite of the settings app in SwiftUI. My one hope for macOS 15 is that the settings app gets the love that it deserves (and that maybe passwords get their own app).
A couple more updates this week to the blog, namely the ability to give posts a thumbs-up. Rather than writing a reply a quick 👍 is now also an option!
I had occasion to boot up my previous MacBook this afternoon to airdrop some things off of it. I have been so spoiled by the M-series macs. With nothing running, and just previewing a handful of images and PDFs, the fans were starting to crank up. Definitely thinner and lighter than my current mac, but I would not trade that for the performance and battery improvements ever.