Yes, I got side-tracked. Well and truly.

The MacBook arrived and, first things first, wow! It’s an absolute flying machine. I was bemoaning the Apple fanbois (of which I’m one) a couple of weeks ago – with their endless chasing of the next iteration of “M”. However, I can honestly say that the M4 is making this M1 Mini look a little sluggish. Admittedly – as you can never have too much of it – I went for 25G of RAM, rather than the 16G on this Mini, but it’s still a buttery smooth piece of kit.

There is a slight gotcha, in that the KVM that I use doesn’t want anything to do with it. If I plug the DisplayPort to USB-C straight into the Mac and monitor, then all is fine. Trying the same through the KVM just has the display settings on the Mac flickering between the internal and external display – with nothing making it as far as the monitor.

That could be down to the fact that the KVM is a whole year old now – and I’m using it slightly differently to what it was probably designed for – but it seems a little weird. It has three inputs – all with either HDMI or DisplayPort – with a USB output to the host machine. It then has two outputs – one DisplayPort, and one HDMI – to the external monitor(s). This monitor has three inputs – two DisplayPort, and one HDMI and I figured that swapping between input 1 and 2 (the two DisplayPort ones) would update the DisplayPort output on the monitor (DisplayPort 1). The original DisplayPort to DisplayPort from the Alienware R16 gets picked up fine, but the USB-C to DisplayPort on switch 2 doesn’t.

I tried replacing the D-D (I can’t be arsed typing the whole name again) with the USB-C to D but, again, no luck.

Tried switching the KVM off/on, and rebooting the MacBook – but, no.

If the KVM were expecting two separate monitors for it’s outputs – as opposed to the switching input sources that I do at the moment – then the initial set-up wouldn’t work. (And it wouldn’t have three inputs either).

(Hang on. Quick test)

That didn’t work. I tried taking the USB feed out of the KVM and replacing it with the USB-A to C on the MacBook – and no luck there either.

My suspicion is that it’s something to do with the MacBook having Thunderbolt 4 ports – which probably hadn’t been a thing when the KVM was out (it’s since been retired from sale).

Never mind.

In other news, it’s still raining.

And in other news, the side-effect of still being on the wagon is that I’m being driven to consume sugar from food instead – which is proving pretty hard to resist. I could also quite happily take a “wagon-break” at the moment – which is odd, as there was no issue with that in the first month. Maybe it’s the weather, or simply that the tangible benefits are no longer a “new thing”. Perhaps a session – with the inevitable sluggish start the day after – might reinforce the message.

Who knows?