Yesterday, we held the third event in the “Data Driven Materials Design” series that Keith Butler and I have co-organised with sponsorship from the Thomas Young Centre. This session focused on machine learning force fields (MLFFs).

While LaTeX may not have evolved too much over the decades, interfaces and packages have modernised. My standard writing workflow is now to use Overleaf for collaborative LaTeX documents. It avoids having a working installation locally and you can auto-synch to Dropbox or Github for working offline if you prefer.

My first Apple laptop was a PowerBook running the PowerPC G4 processor. The transition to Intel x86 chips provided many opportunities, but they lost their edge over time to become efficient heat generators. So far, I am very impressed by the ARM M2 processor and its 20 billion transistors. It does take some effort to get everything nicely configured. I am running macOS Ventura 13.1.

Over the course of an academic career, you accumulate a variety of hats for different roles. My latest was becoming a journal editor, first for the RSC and then for the ACS.

One of my first online experiences was internet relay chat with the excitement of connecting from my bedroom in Ireland to random people around the world (a/s/l anyone?). There has been the rise and fall of countless internet platforms since then.

Will this be my final update for Intel Macs? Given the initial performance reports of Apple Silicon, I hope so. This is a refresh of previous posts covering a clean install of macOS 11.2.1 (Big Sur) on an iMac Pro in April 2021.