 Okay, Python on hardware time. Okay, so in the hardware newsletter this week, there is a Halloween roundup. Yes. So check out all of these things. So many skulls. You can see all of the things made with CircuitPython. Yes, pumpkins. Pumpkins and candy-carrying devices, and you name it if it has sound or audio or whatever. I have a bunch of news, but this week we're going to focus on a very specific story which we have on our website, and it's called Uploading UF2 Files with macOS 13.0 Ventura. We tagged Apple, Microbit, Raspberry Pi. Everyone is having this issue. Raspberry Pi has a blog post about this. Microbit folks reached out to us. Lady, what's going on with this latest version of macOS? Because it seems like this happens every time there's a major version of macOS. Well, it's also happened, I think, with Microsoft. I think one of the first Windows 11 release candidate previews also had this issue. So basically, Microbit and Raspberry Pi and Adafruit, and everyone who's using our code, which includes Seed and SparkFun and more, we use UF2 and fake mass storage bootloaders to load code. And that's because it's really hard to get people to install things like ESPTool or to install Python. Sometimes you can't. If you have a Chromebook, they're locked down so you don't have access to command-line tools. Whereas mass storage is a universal interface for USB. And so having USB be the way that people program my controller boards has been revolutionary for the last five years, which is super awesome. So that's great. And it's been, you know, originally, there was bootloaders that used mass storage. But until Microsoft came around and developed the UF2 standard, it was really hard to do that reliably. And they actually did a very smart job of figuring out how to do it in a way that every major operating system, Linux, Mac and Windows, could write to these drives cleanly without errors, and it worked like every time. And that's been like for the last six, seven years or so. Like everyone's been using this. Again, Microbit's been using this technique. Raspberry Pi built it into their ROM bootloader. Adafruit's been using this. All of our boards that we can. We use UF2. It's been great. However, in the latest version of macOS 13 Ventura, the Finder, when you drag and drop files, it does some sort of like read back thing. We're not exactly sure. There's something that changed in 13 from 12 where it does not like these small, you know, fake mass storage devices. And there's no reason it should have this issue. And again, it's happened in multiple other operating systems. But it's just what's one of the things when you like get the latest beta alpha release of an operating system. Like this has happened before and sometimes, you know, it takes a couple months and then we get it fixed. And then it's fixed. And it's wonderful. So we're still, you know, trying to get in touch with Apple to be like, hey, you know, you, you decided to do something that's non-standard. And broke this way of, you know, when you drag and drop a file, you just write the file. It shouldn't try to do anything else. And that's how it's been for like 25 years, 30 years on computers. Please, please don't go back and do something different. Or you can always downgrade the system seven, which in my opinion was the best macOS. MacOS system version. On our blog posts, we have what you can do to help. And also Raspberry Pi does too. So if you go to raspberrypi.com and look at the post of insurance problem, they have instructions on how to report this to Apple using the feedback assistant. And that will actually be really good because to be honest, the more people who bring it up, it's not like, oh, like they're getting the complaints. It's they actually look at the volume. If they have a lot of people saying it's an issue, they know it's important and they'll fix it. And I know they'll fix it because this has come up before and they just need to find out. Does anyone care that this is broken? Yes. So be nice and everything. Just let them know. Hey, like, you know, this thing that we all use for especially kids learning electronics and coding with micro bits with raspberry pies with Adafruit stuff. You can use a feedback assistant. There is a feedback number, which is FB 117-25030. And then you can also check out the GitHub issue that raspberrypi has open. We have a summary of all this. There is a workaround where you can use like terminal. You can also use other things. There are a couple of things, but it really would be. That's probably not what most young folks are going to do when like the whole simplicity of how a lot of these things work is you just can drag and drop files instead of installing IDs and all that. So to be honest, you know, if you use UF2 a lot, if you're using micro bit, if you're using RP2040, I don't recommend updating to Ventura at this time. Unless you're comfortable using these command line tools. You know, Ventura is ultimate bleeding edge. You don't have to upgrade for security reasons. You don't have to upgrade for support reasons. In fact, you know, and people who run MacOS on the cutting edge like you know, it's whenever you get the latest version, a lot of stuff. I mean, your mouse stopped working once. Yeah, I had to. Did you email the mouse developer? Yeah, there's a lot of things that happen. So I have a production machine and then I'm a machine where I'm like, let me start to see what's going to break with this new OS. Ventura has been okay. There's a couple of things about it. If you're not, if you don't read all the things it does, it's like, huh, that's weird. So my, you know, computer was next to my phone or iPad and my mouse went from one thing to another. So my mouse went from my computer to an iPad. I'm like, whoa, that's a weird thing that I didn't expect to happen. Like why is my mouse on another device? It's cool. It's a cool thing. But you have to remember like, oh, turn this off. You know, I will say like, you know, there, it's a, because you know, I also have people like, we have people who are like still running Windows system seven, which again was a great system version for Windows, but really is, it's quite old. It's over 10 years old. You know, Microsoft has a bit of a thing where when you upgrade the Microsoft operating system, everything is backwards compatible because it's extremely important to them. Apple has a slightly different philosophy and there's no right or wrong philosophy, but they prefer to break things. They do not care about backward compatibility as much. And so I will say if you're doing, if you're a natural engineer and you're doing a lot of engineering development, if you're on Windows, I recommend always updating to the latest stable. But with Mac, I always wait. Move fast and buy iPhones. I wait on the Mac because this comes up so often. Well, hopefully someone at Apple will see all this too. And you know, this happens each time when there's a major OS update. So hopefully they'll check it out. So like I said, you can look at Raspberry Pi, get our site, you know, file a bug report with them. They make it pretty easy. And that's this week's Python Harbor news.