Tag: 3366ff

retirement, year four

whbeebe2 Comments

I’m 70 now. It is with something akin to shock that I realize it has been four full years since I entered into retirement. Paradoxically, I’ve done a lot and yet not enough in the areas that needed something to be done. I’ve lived along with everyone else in the world through the COVID pandemic, the lockdown, the lockdown aftermath, and finally, all the political sturm and drang produced by the inflated Orange One to arrive in the year of our Lord 2024.

The year 2023 was a real personal shock on a very personal level. My father passed away along with an aunt on my mother’s side. Three more deaths rounded out the year, one of them both a co-worker and engineer as well as a great friend who I met back in 1985 at a local computer club meeting in downtown Orlando. His small company was critical to me surviving a layoff that lasted essentially from June until October of 1989; he hired me as a consultant to help write some important embedded software for a system used on draglines, one of them a machine in central Texas I helped him work on. Many memories, many projects. In the end he seemed to slip away.

My wife is also experiencing some serious medical issues. In May, the day before Mother’s Day, she wound up heading to the hospital in an ambulance. Right before the ambulance came I injected her with an epinephrine pen because she was “presenting” all the symptoms of anaphylactic shock. The head of the ER where she was taken stated I probably saved her life with that action. While I’m certainly glad I did, it still shook me up quite a bit to realize how close she might have come to her own death. That in turn forced me to consider what to do if she were to pass from me, and ways to watch and prevent the May episode from happening again. I’ve been thinking of it ever since.

She spent a week in hospital. We still don’t know what happened to her in May. The medical system here in Florida has messed up one critical test after another, and let one important opportunity after another slip by. We’ve traveled to specialists all over, one down in Fort Lauderdale, and she’s scheduled to see another at the University of Miami mid-January. She’s found one local doctor who is actually sympathetic and is trying to get to the bottom of what is happening, and just doesn’t dismiss her out of hand.

I’ve also lined up two different work opportunities I hope open up this year. To be blunt I need the additional income. Expenses have come up that need to be taken care of, and there are more in the future. The idea that retirement is some golden paradise is a farce, especially for mere mortals such as Judy and I.

The good news is that I don’t have the genetic predisposition for Alzheimers, and my health habit (I never drank nor smoked, and was never a “recreational” drug user) also bolster my health and considerably lower the chances of my developing Alzheimers. There’s also a report out now showing a strong link between gingivitis and Alzheimers, as the bacteria P. gingivalis is found in the brains of many who have died of Alzheimers. The amyloid buildup in the victim’s brains was a symptom, not the cause, and was the brain’s way of trying to trap the bacterial invaders. I go to a dentist every six months and my mouth health is in very good shape. I have all my teeth and no cavities.

This year is a major election year with the Orange One running again on the Republican ticket and threatening democracy everywhere in this country. Now’s not the time to shrink into a hole and pull it in after me. I need to take a more alert, and if possible, a more politically activist stance.

A lot of challenges face me to be sure. This coming year won’t be boring, that’s for sure.

Links

Scientists May Have Found the Cause of Alzheimer’s Disease—And How to Reverse It — https://www.thehealthy.com/alzheimers/common-disease-can-actually-kickstart-alzheimers/

enabling powerline status with iterm on macos 14.2.1

whbeebe

Unlike many, I do not move all my macOS settings from machine to machine unless the new machine is a complete replacement for the old machine and the old machine is on its last legs. I’ve done that exactly once, from my 2015 MBP to the 2019 MBP. After that transfer I spent a fair amount of time weeding out items that did not make sense on the new machine as well as items that were a good idea at the time, but time later proved to be a bad choice.

I made the decision after that one full transfer between MBPs to carefully curate all software before installing anything on the new machine. One of the choices I tried on the older MBP was Powerline. It didn’t work, and I almost skipped it entirely on the new MBP, but I decided to install it anyway and try once more to make it work.

I’ve been using Powerline on my Linux systems for some number of years now. I like what it does and how it looks and I try to install it anywhere I have a terminal and a command line prompt. It’s a bit counter-intuitive to want to have a sophisticated command line and terminal on a computer with a graphical user interface, but I keep a terminal environment active because I have decades of CLI experience that has served me admirably (once I was properly trained on how to use it). This post documents how I finally figured it out and what I did to get it to work. And it does work, both on the command line as well as within vi/vim.

Initial Environment

This machine has the following pre-installed:

  • macOS 14.2.1 Sonoma
  • zsh 5.9 (x86_64-apple-darwin23.0)
  • python 3.9.6

This is all you really need to get started. A lot of how-tos (all of them old to very old) insist you install Homebrew (brew), and then via the brew command install zsh. The version of zsh Apple currently uses is the latest stable release, a far cry from the ancient version of bash it used to use.

Installation

Installation needs three main pieces; iTerm2, the Nerd Hack font and the Powerline status software itself.

iTerm2 can be downloaded from here: https://iterm2.com. Once downloaded, unzip the downloaded file and start the binary. Once running, iTerm2 will pick up and use zsh and it will automagically ask you if you want to move iTerm2 into the Application folder of you Mac. Select yes when asked. From that point iTerm2 can be selected via Launchpad, and once launched, you can right click the resultant icon in the Dock and chose to have it stay in the Dock (right click | Options | Keep in Dock).

The font I installed is Hack and can be found here: https://github.com/ryanoasis/nerd-fonts/releases . Download Hack.zip and unzip it, then use Apple’s Font Book utility to install the fonts.

Not all of them will install due to issues with certain fonts, and rather than hassle with trying to resolve those issues I chose to skip them. Skipping the problematic fonts still allowed the fonts I needed to get installed, so no problems there.

Once the fonts are installed, open iTerm2’s Preferences and go to Profiles.

Select Hack NF as the Font, Regular weight. I chose to use a 15 point font size because the size of the 16″ display makes reading 15 point text in iTerm2 very easy. Even at 15 points a lot of text can still be seen in the terminal window.

With the terminal and font set up, install the Python package powerline-status using pip: pip3 install powerline-status.

Once installed execute the following command:

$ pip3 show powerline-statusName: powerline-statusVersion: 2.7Summary: The ultimate statusline/prompt utility.Home-page: https://github.com/powerline/powerlineAuthor: Kim SilkebaekkenAuthor-email: kim.silkebaekken+vim@gmail.comLicense: MITLocation: /Users/wbeebe/Library/Python/3.9/lib/python/site-packagesRequires:Required-by:

The line we’re interested in is the Location at line 9 in the listing. In this example, because I’m not running as root, the package is installed locally in my home directory, which it should be. Every home directory has a $HOME/Library directory. It’s underneath site-packages that you’ll find the site package for powerline. Here’s what we are looking for specifically:

$ ls -AlFh Library/Python/3.9/lib/python/site-packages/powerline/bindingstotal 24-rw-r--r--   1 wbeebe  staff 0B Dec 29 15:32 __init__.pydrwxr-xr-x   3 wbeebe  staff96B Dec 29 17:03 __pycache__/drwxr-xr-x   4 wbeebe  staff   128B Dec 29 15:32 awesome/drwxr-xr-x   3 wbeebe  staff96B Dec 29 15:32 bar/drwxr-xr-x   3 wbeebe  staff96B Dec 29 15:32 bash/-rw-r--r--   1 wbeebe  staff   9.8K Dec 29 15:32 config.pydrwxr-xr-x   3 wbeebe  staff96B Dec 29 15:32 fish/drwxr-xr-x   3 wbeebe  staff96B Dec 29 15:32 i3/drwxr-xr-x   6 wbeebe  staff   192B Dec 29 15:32 ipython/drwxr-xr-x   3 wbeebe  staff96B Dec 29 15:32 lemonbar/drwxr-xr-x   4 wbeebe  staff   128B Dec 29 15:32 pdb/drwxr-xr-x   4 wbeebe  staff   128B Dec 29 15:32 qtile/drwxr-xr-x   3 wbeebe  staff96B Dec 29 15:32 rc/drwxr-xr-x   3 wbeebe  staff96B Dec 29 15:32 shell/drwxr-xr-x   3 wbeebe  staff96B Dec 29 15:32 tcsh/drwxr-xr-x  11 wbeebe  staff   352B Dec 29 15:32 tmux/drwxr-xr-x   6 wbeebe  staff   192B Dec 29 17:03 vim/drwxr-xr-x   4 wbeebe  staff   128B Dec 29 15:32 wm/drwxr-xr-x   4 wbeebe  staff   128B Dec 29 15:32 zsh/

The two folders we’re interested in are line 19 (vim) and line 21 (zsh). Since we’re interested in zsh, let’s concentrate on that for the moment.

Underneath the zsh folder is one file we need:

ls -AlFh Library/Python/3.9/lib/python/site-packages/powerline/bindings/zshtotal 32-rw-r--r--  1 wbeebe  staff   5.4K Dec 29 15:32 __init__.py-rw-r--r--  1 wbeebe  staff   6.5K Dec 29 15:32 powerline.zsh

The file powerline.zsh is sourced inside the .zshrc file. But before we add this to our .zshrc file, we need to make one more change for the powerline script to execute. At the same level as the lib (library) folder is a bin (binary) folder. Here’s what that folder holds:

$ ls -AlFh Library/Python/3.9/bintotal 160-rwxr-xr-x  1 wbeebe  staff   263B Dec 29 15:32 pip*-rwxr-xr-x  1 wbeebe  staff   263B Dec 29 15:32 pip3*-rwxr-xr-x  1 wbeebe  staff   263B Dec 29 15:32 pip3.11*-rwxr-xr-x  1 wbeebe  staff   263B Dec 29 15:32 pip3.9*-rwxr-xr-x  1 wbeebe  staff34K Dec 29 15:32 powerline*-rwxr-xr-x  1 wbeebe  staff   624B Dec 29 15:32 powerline-config*-rwxr-xr-x  1 wbeebe  staff13K Dec 29 15:32 powerline-daemon*-rwxr-xr-x  1 wbeebe  staff   385B Dec 29 15:32 powerline-lint*-rwxr-xr-x  1 wbeebe  staff   928B Dec 29 15:32 powerline-render*

You need all the highlighted files for Powerline to work properly. For that, you’ll need to add the path to bin to your full path in .zshrc, for example;

export PATH=$PATH:$HOME/Library/Python/3.9/bin

before you add the following line to .zshrc;

source $HOME/Library/Python/3.9/lib/python/site-packages/powerline/bindings/zsh/powerline.zsh

Once all of that is completed then you should at least get the colorful powerline prompt as seen in the screen capture at the top of this post.

vi/vim Setup

First the bad news. The version of vi/vim supplied by Apple wasn’t built to support Python scripting, and you need that support for this to work. The good news is you can get a version that works, but you’ll have to install Homebrew and then use Homebrew to install that version of Python. First, go to the Brew site ( https://brew.sh ) and follow their directions to install it. Once installed you can install the “proper” vi/vim that will support Python scripting. Please note that you’ll need to add the location where Homebrew installs binaries (/opt/homebrew/bin) to your path in order to execute them. And this should be at the start of path, not the end, otherwise you’ll keep executing Apple’s version instead of the version installed by Homebrew.

For vi/vim, you need to add the following to your .vimrc configuration file;

set rtp+=$HOME/Library/Python/3.9/lib/python/site-packages/powerline/bindings/vimset laststatus=2set t_Co=256

Once that’s in your vi configuration file, the status line should look like the following:

There’s a lot more going on inside my vi config file, but the last three lines enable the bottom status line, and that’s what’s important here.