My own card’s limit wasn’t high enough, so I applied for an increase. Three payslips required. I don’t resent the due diligence.

It was the middle of the night. The payslips were on my work Mac, not the iPhone in bed (where a disturbingly high number of my significant purchases happen). It could wait until morning.

First thing next day, I logged into payroll for the payslips. Error. Tried again. Error. Tried again half an hour later. Error. Slack confirmed I wasn’t alone; someone had already been told to raise a case.

I save support cases for real emergencies, like the time I spilled water on my laptop mid-trip, the night before a big presentation. This wasn’t that. I raised one anyway.

Acknowledged. Then nothing. By end of day, still nothing, and Slack was full of grumpy people confirming it was a system-wide outage. Fine. Tomorrow, then.

That was June 25 (in Au). That outage cost me about AUD $1,700, or it would have, if I could have justified it. No new Mac. Back to my trusty M2, three years old now: possibly the longest I’ve ever kept a personal laptop. More irony.

Epilogue. Payroll came back the next morning. I downloaded everything, submitted it, and — just to make the joke complete — the credit increase came through within the hour.

tl/dr

As a quick start, this is what I need to do if I have an empty repository in Github and a folder of files locally that I want to sync.

git init -b main
git add .  
git commit -m "message"  
git remote add origin https://github.com/your-username/your-repo.git  
git push -u origin main

Might need this if this error is returned ‘fatal: the remote end hung up unexpectedly’:

git config --global http.postBuffer 524288000

Setup

GIT gets installed with Xcode command line tools, otherwise it can be installed with Homebrew.

git version
brew install git

Working locally

Folder with existing files

A new folder can be initialised using git init. This creates a hidden subfolder (.git). See this for an explanation of what’s included in this folder.

The Mac appears to default to calling the branch name “master” and Github used “main”. This can cause complications when syncing. To avoid this ensure the local branch is called ‘main’.

When initialising use:

git init -b main

If you forget, change the branch name via: `git checkout old-name git branch -m new-name git branch -a

All existing files in the folder are untracked at this time. If the local folder has files to be included, use git add .. This adds the existing files to the index but nothing is committed yet (there is no snapshot of the files).

Initial commit

To commit changes locally

git commit -m "message"

New (untracked) files

If a file is added to the folder, it is untracked until added to git. The file is added to git by git add <filename> and becomes tracked.

Syncing to GitHub

To sync an existing local folder to GitHub, create an empty repo on GitHub (no need to initialise with README):

git remote add origin https://github.com/your-username/your-repo.git

git push -f origin main

Note: GIT needs to be configured with a user name and email.

git config --global user.name "Your Name"
git config --global user.email "your-email@example.com"

If it happens that the remote git repo with content is created first, git clone "URL" will create a copy of the repository on GitHub inside the current folder. It gets messy to merge to two.

• If a remote repo already has content, it’s best to clone it first rather than starting a local folder separately.
• If you already have a local folder with content, instead of cloning, add the remote and pull first:

git remote add origin https://github.com/your-username/your-repo.git
git pull origin main --rebase  # Ensures local and remote sync

References

Git Basics

Tutorial on Medium

Apps from Andrew’s list:

• Mail Client: Apple Mail & Outlook
• Mail Server: Microsoft Exchange & IMAP
• Notes: Apple Notes, iA Writer
• To-Do: Reminders & Due
• iPhone Photo Shooting: Camera.app
• Photo Management: Photos.app
• Calendar: Calendar and Outlook
• Cloud file storage: iCloud & OneDrive
• RSS: Reeder with FreshRSS
• Contacts: Contacts.app
• Browser: Safari & Edge
• Chat: Signal, WhatsApp, Messages, Messenger, Discord
• Bookmarks: GoodLinks
• Read It Later:
• Word Processing: iA Writer
• Spreadsheets: Excel
• Presentations: PowerPoint & Keynote
• Shopping Lists: Reminders
• Meal Planning: Crouton
• Budgeting & Personal Finance: Excel
• News: NYTimes
• Music: Spotify
• Podcasts: Overcast
• Password Management: 1Password

Other apps important to me:

• Coding: VS Code
• PDF: PDF Expert
• AI: ChatGPT & Claude
• Virtualisation: VMWare
• 2D Graphics & Design: Figma & Inkscape
• 3D Graphics: Rhino
• Backups: Backblaze, Time Machine & Carbon Copy Cloner
• Automation: Alfred,Shortcuts, Keyboard Maestro, Better Touch Tool & Hazel
• Screen Capture and Recording: Camtasia & SnagIT
• Data Visualisation and Analytics: Tableau, PowerBI, Python