Computers for the rest of us?

I don't want to appear reactionary about some of the recent system changes forced upon us. There was the Blogger change that means editing a post is more cumbersome now. They have made it more like how one would edit on a smartphone.

If I edit in text mode it won't take the picture formats directly, but then when I switch to HTML mode I can see the vastly over-populated HTML that has been generated. 

It's just annoying and takes my 10-minutes per post regime up to 20 minutes. Not cool. I then have to break up my writing to create extra line numbers so that I can add the pictures to the post.  I suggest 'computers for the rest of us' needs to be re-launched.

I understand that everything has to be done in millenial-friendly 'blocks' now - which is what WordPress introduced via Gutenburg some time ago, but the effect is to add another layer of machinery between my thoughts and getting them recorded. I decided to use Divi to get around that in WordPress, but have not found something similar for Blogger.

I suppose everything is converging on the dumb formatting of Facebook, which runs everything into a single paragraph by default. It's all about the monetization isn't it?

Anyway, Mac Catalina attempts to protect from some of the worse excesses of sneaky developers, but it means that there's a few new safeguards that kick in. One is the Verification, which it will re-run on Excel and other Microsoft products after every update. I'm guessing it is a subtle way to remind us that there's serviceable word processors and spreadsheets in the native Mac Apps too, but sometimes MS Office compatibility has to be a 'given'.

Another new feature is the aggressive permission management by Apple. I noticed it first in Lightroom (I'm one of many) and to fix it I had to resort to command-line terminal and use of back-ticks (That's the key next to the Z on UK English keyboards). I looked at the lengthy fixes described in some of the posts and thought 'Nope, too many steps.'

Only by typing in the Terminal shell :  diskutil resetUserPermissions `id -u`  command could I get past the two error messages at the start of Lightroom. 

Some time ago I plonked all of my discovered weird start key sequences into a single document, which I keep in a plastic folder in a desk tray for that emergency use.

Here it is:

And I've added two actual Terminal commands now, just in case. The second one, to disable verification, is a blunt instrument - not recommended.