Spoiler alert: it didn’t.

I have been happily using a Logitech MX Master 3S on my Mac for the last 2 years. A few months ago, an intermittent problem emerged: when I hit the menu bar drop down to adjust the volume, the mouse froze completely. Hitting the button underneath to cycle through the different machines it was connected to was the only way of kicking it back into life.

A couple of weeks ago, I upgraded the machine in question – an M2 Mac Mini with a baseline spec – to Tahoe, and I hit a showstopper: the redrawing fell off a cliff. The lag was so bad that it made the machine unusable.

Some initial digging with the activity monitor didn’t immediately suggest the computer was struggling under load. Plugging in an old school USB mouse made the problem go away. Googling revealed a pitchfork wielding mob having the same issue with the 3S on their Macs.

I did a few other tests like forgetting and repairing in case it was BlueTooth interference, and reducing some of the resolution settings. Nothing worked, and as the 3S seemed to be the smoking gun, I bought a KeyChron M8 which fixed… precisely nothing.

Some more digging allowed me to at least identify what was going on. This command:

log show --predicate 'process == "WindowServer"' --last 15m | grep -i error

…returned results that looked like this:

WindowServer: (QuartzCore) [com.apple.coreanimation:Cursor] Cursor disabled: failed set_cursor_surface

The Window Server process is reporting a transient failure to redraw the pointer position on the screen because it is resource bound. What has proven more elusive is identifying the root cause.

Googling (in the context of this problem) suggests that WhatsApp is particularly resource hungry. I think this is actually something that dates back to when it was written in Electron. I run it all the time and killing it alleviated the lagging issue a little bit.

Digging into the load, WhatsApp isn’t that resource hungry and, as it didn’t fix the problem outright, it’s more likely to be a cumulative load on the Window Server.

I’ve had pretty good mileage out of the M2 but I think its days are numbered. A gradual slowdown in performance I can live with. Not being able to use the mouse is like pulling teeth.

No matter what smartwatch you decide to buy, I expect a significant proportion of non-athletes fall into a similar pattern with them: initial and continued usefulness from reading and responding to notifications; some initial interest in sleep tracking that trails off after a couple of months; and the occasional messing around with things like timers. And steps – 10,000 steps…

I got the first Apple Watch release, then after abandoning it as a solution to a problem I didn’t have I decided to try again about 5 years ago.

While I liked being able to leave my phone on silent all the time – something I adopted, and stuck with right from Day One – it was a pretty low ratio of utility relative to charging needs. After the battery performance started to drop off, I couldn’t find a daily pattern for charging it that suited me, so I decided to abandon ship for a Garmin Solar 2. Perfectly acceptable in terms of what I wanted, but with a 22-ish day battery life.

However, the LCD screen real estate is tiny and in the last 18 months I’ve found myself having to reach for my glasses to read the notifications.

This set me on a long drawn out, low-intensity piece of research: what about having something screen-less, but with a super long battery life. This was kicked off by looking at a Whoop. I have quite a high barrier for entering into subscription contract #643 in an apparently infinite series, so I abandoned that after about 30 seconds.

What I eventually stumbled on just before Christmas was something called a ‘Yanmis’ tracker. Amazon had a protracted shipping estimate (from China probably), so I had a look on eBay and found one for £14. It also has an estimated 40 day battery life.

The design is… compromised: in what is probably an attempt to look like a Whoop, the strap only attaches to one side. The app (QWatch Pro) appears to be generic, and used by a bunch of cheap fitness trackers. The documentation it came with was free of detail and – well, pretty much any useful information whatsoever. I migrated to Android and haven’t really looked into the permissioning model that closely. I’ve basically set the bare minimum, at least for notifications to work.

It’s still ticking all the right boxes for me. It also means that I can wear my mechanical watch again (or at least not feel like an idiot hiding two watches with long sleeves.)

There are probably tens of millions of people contemplating what to do with their PCs once Windows 10 goes end of life and, up until a couple of months ago, I was one of them. I had originally thought about upgrading the CPU on my 7ish year old machine to something that supported Windows 11. This, in turn, would have necessitated a new motherboard. I was estimating about £700 for it. I decided against it, partly because I nearly wrecked the motherboard fitting the heatsink when I built it, but mainly because my usage has evolved. It is to all intents and purposes a file server.

What clinched it for me was discovering that there is now full read / write support for NTFS on Linux. The last time I looked at it (probably more than a decade ago) it was read-only. This allowed me to shuffle multiple copies of data like photos while I did the install (the machine has a couple of M.2 SSDs and a fairly large HDD), and I can still use Grub to boot back into Windows for occasional emergencies.

I was really impressed with the NTFS support: it worked absolutely seamlessly… for a while. But it is a little glitchy over the longer term. I made a couple of knuckle-headed mistakes like managing to crash the default file manager on Debian (Thunar). It appears to be single-threaded for at least some operations, so trying to close its windows during file copies can have unhappy consequences.

After a while the volume auto-mount began to fail and then start working again for no apparent reason; then undeletable files started to appear in directories I was using frequently. I reiterate, this is undoubtedly down to me just not paying attention every now and then – but the warning signs were there.

It’s fine to get you over the line – so is read-only, for that matter – but I wouldn’t plan to use it for the long term.