Things That Don't Work on My New M1 Mac

by Trenton Henry

11/23/21

The keyboard on my old MacBookAir was so terrible (sticky keys, unresponsive keys, losing keycaps) that I ended up having to get a new MacBookAir. This one is an M1. So a number of older applications require Rosetta to run them. Some seem to run fine. Some don't.

Here is a list of those that don't, which I will update as I discover them:

BantamTools-1.2.2 is the latest version that works with my original KickStarter era OtherMill. Conveniently (for them) they no longer support it. It does run, but any attempt to load a file crashes it. It does seem to operate the BitBreaker Console still so I may be able to use that to send gcode. But for Eagle files and probably SVGs I will have to use my old machine with a BT keyboard.

Sync is a service I use to back up to the cloud and to synchronize all my machines. I used Migration Assistant to copy my files from my old computer, and that included the Sync folder. Somehow that confused Sync and it kept restoring deleted files and undoing my changes. Somehow it's time keeping was wack. So I renamed the folder and created a new one and let it sunc that and index it (which took all freaking day and into th enight sometime). After that the problems remaining seem to be the permissions on files causing git to think the unoverse was modified. So I used git config core.filemode false to ignore the permissions. So far so good, but I am remaining vigilent. Something will surely bite me in the ass.

Update - Apparently migration assistant copied the Sync folder and metadata and the computer id is stored in there somewhere. So it thinks the new computer is the old computer and whenever I make changes on the new computer it undoes them to make it look like the old one. I wrote to their support email and I have received zero help after 3 days. Starting to wonder if I need to anabdon Sync?

Updated update - a week later and still no response? Their tech support is abysmal. I took it upon myself to rename the Sync folder, uninstall Sync, then reinstall it, and set it back up. That seems to have fixed the confusion about which computer it is. But my git repos are still fubar. I cloned the repo to a new folder, deleted the borked local .git/ and replaced it with the .git/ from the fresh clone.  Aaaand ... remote: error: cannot update ref 'refs/heads/master': couldn't write '/Volumes/WIbbleData/git/zenmcu/./refs/heads/master.lock' So, still screwed.  I -think- that the Sync issue is resolved (no thanks to any help from Sync). But now I have to figure out how to fix my git repo (repos?).  Maybe this is a signal to switch to Fossil ...

Updated updated update - Another week has passed and Sync support has made no attempt to respond. Although I fixed the issue, which was not a Sync bug at all really, and 99.99% of the time it just works flawlessly, their horrifically bad tech support has caused me to start searching for an alternative/replacement. How hard can it be to reply to a freaking email?

Update^4 - Never heard from Sync, which is upsetting. However, I managed to get things working again by renaming the Sync folder, uninstalling Sync, reinstalling Sync, and then lettign it populate, then merging changes form the backup. So overall this was the suck, but it is working, so ... moving on. Still, if you know of a decent Sync replacement please let me know.

End