A one-time colleague of mine recently put me onto Tailscale, a rather nifty product that allows you to wrangle all of your computers, phones and more into a single, secure and Internet-spanning virtual private network (VPN). I decided to give it a try and I’m very impressed with its performance and ease-of-use — the latter very important for someone like me who’s not a network guru.
T’other week, I wrote about my work on building a Raspberry Pi RP2040-based I²C host device and some macOS client software to control it. I mentioned that I might get the latter running under Linux too. I now have, and it does.
Version 1.3.0 of PreviewMarkdown has just been released. Its key new feature: you now have the option to view YAML front matter in Markdown file previews. This is really handy if, like me, you use a static site generator and use YAML to record content metadata at the top of your Markdown page files.
Let the great Homebrew migration begin. Yes, Homebrew now has native support for Apple’s ARM64-based M1 chip. The latest version, 3.0.0, released 5 February, will run nicely on your Apple Silicon Mac. There’s a catch, of course. Well, several catches: first, not all of the tools you can install using Homebrew are M1 native yet and, second, Homebrew doesn’t offer explicit migration instructions, that I could find at least.
When you’ve used Serial Wire Debug (SWD) to help you correct the C or C++ code running on your Raspberry Pi Pico, you’ll never want to go back to USB and the UF2 file system again. I don’t — no more messing about unplugging and re-plugging cables for me.
Last week I tried the Raspberry Pi Pico with MicroPython. The Raspberry Pi Foundation would be sufficiently commended for providing only this level of programming support. MicroPython leverages the Python skills of the many Raspberry Pi users out there and is accessible to plenty of others too. But the Foundation has also provided a C/C++ SDK, and this opens the Pico up to serious embedded-system developers too.
On Thursday morning I awoke to the news that the Raspberry Pi people have entered the microcontroller board market with a new product, the Raspberry Pi Pico. Before I’d even got out of bed, I ordered a couple. Well, at £3.60 a pop, why not? I’ve now had a chance for a quick play, and here are my findings.
You have to take your hat off to Apple: it knows how to transition from one processor architecture to another, completely incompatible one. It did it in the mid-1990s with the switch from the Motorola 680×0 series to PowerPC, then again a decade or so later when it put Intel inside new Macs. Now we get ARM.
The package manager I use on macOS is Homebrew, Brew for short. This is a great open source tool for installing command-line apps and utilities, and keeping them up to date. It’s essentially the Mac version of the Raspberry Pi’s apt. So much of the software I use on a regular basis — the nano text editor, Node.js, Python 3, the shellcheck shell script linter, the hugo website builder, the sass CSS wrangler and a whole load more — were added and are maintained using Brew.
Another day, another update. This time it’s PreviewMarkdown, my macOS utility for providing QuickLook file previews and icon thumbnails in Finder. It runs under Catalina and above, and this version makes some adjustments to support Big Sur.
You can read more about using PreviewMarkdown — just run it once to register its app extensions, and that’s it — it the product page here. You can download PreviewMarkdown from the Mac App Store.
smittytone messes with micros 