All the leaves are green.

And the sky is blue.

I’ve been at my desk.

With screenshot play…

(To be fully truthful, it’s currently raining cats, dogs, kittens, and puppies. But it’s lovely here in the high desert.)

With my newly updated workflow creating the following GIF took about a minute maybe from start to post. The secret? QuickTime Screen Recording (bless you ⌘-Shift-5) and “gifify” courtesy of Homebrew. Set record, demo, stop, convert, drop into WordPress:

I love how easy it is to invoke screen recording these days with macOS’s updated capture interface. It’s especially nice how the optional delay time allows me to get into the zone before recording actually starts.

Back to installation, the blocker was getting homebrew to get itself into position to fully support Catalina. I had to apply homebrew update and homebrew upgrade and homebrew doctor a number of times. Not only did I get gifify installed, but ffmpeg is finally back to working and I once again have emacs for all my git needs.

I’ll spare you how bad the emacs transition was other than to say if you have to disable system integrity and mount read-write by hand, you’re probably doing it the wrong way.

With ffmpeg, it was the dependent libraries including the ones already installed into macOS (like openssl ). Homebrew refused to link:

Warning: Refusing to link macOS provided/shadowed software: openssl@1.1

I wish I had known early about the update/upgrade/doctor approach applied multiple times by the way, not just once, until everything stops complaining and the doctor says “Your system is ready to brew”. Because at that point, installs are a breeze. Installing before then, when the configuration seemed irreparably broken was probably a bad choice.

I spent a bit of time after removing my current bandaid symbolic links. It seems to have helped that I ended up granting separate privileges to ruby in Security & Privacy a while ago. I don’t remember why I did but it’s in there and I vaguely remember going through the process while cursing Cat.

June’s almost here and I wonder if Catalina.successor() will be better or more of the same. It hasn’t been a good Cat year for me.