Tong Family

OK, this should work for most systems and after a year, I’m shocked at how well everything works. It took me a weekend to update the scripts that I have for installation as there are a few differences, but it is incredible how well it really works:

1. If you are using a dotfile repository (which you should really do, it is so convenient to have a repo with your dotfiles and then just has symlinks to them from your home directory. Then, any change you make in one machine gets reflected in another). You can also try to use this new tool dorothy which says it does alot of this. It would be so great to get rid of all this handbuilt tooling for shell scripts that I have.
2. The main change you will have to make is that with Homebrew, with Intel, the brew --prefix is set to /usr/local for Intel packages and to /opt/homebrew for M1 (aka ARM64) packages. So going through all the .profiles changing this is pretty easy, but takes a little work.
3. There are some things that don’t work. For instance the biggest problem are certain python packages like h5py which is not on M1 yet.
4. Finally, the Intel apps seem to just work. For instance, Divvy is Intel only and when I installed it, it just noted this and it runs fine. Nice work.

Strange gotchas with the Anne Pro 2 keyboard

The only really strange problem I’ve heard, by the hardware btw works pretty flawlessly with the new Razer Thunderbolt 4 dock (I really recommend expensive docks like the CalDigit TB3 or this new one) vs an el-cheapo dongle and Logitech BRIO cameras and all the Bluetooth stuff.

The main gotcha is that with the Anne Pro 2 keyboard which I dearly love, it is a 60% keyboard and is small enough to take anywhere, they have a trick they call TAP which means that if you quickly tap the FN, FN2, Right SHIFT or CTRL key it acts like arrow keys. That’s super handy but didn’t work with the M1 Mac.

The trick it looks like is that the timing is off, so if you load the ObinsKit and connect it to your AnnePro 2 (kudos btw for now allowing Bluetooth programming for this and not just wired, it is much more convenient. The first thing you will see is that non-Apple devices will now show their battery state which is really nice. You used to need Akku to do this, but now it is built in. Nice!

But, the TAP time is not long enough. The default is that the tap has to be less than 100ms. At least for me, this was too short to ever register the quick tap. I switched it to 150ms and it works much better. The settings in General> Tap > Sensitivity and you might as well select Tap Key combination so you can do things like ⌥ and the arrow keys for some apps.