The continent’s parlous economy and ascendant far right foretell a grim future.

© Patrick Zachmann/Magnum Photos

The continent’s parlous economy and ascendant far right foretell a grim future.

Officials have said that the death toll in Mayotte, currently at 35, could end up in the thousands. But in the capital, there were no scenes of public mourning and little talk of searches for missing loved ones.

© Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times

But many European leaders say that with no sign that Russia is interested in peace, it is too early to discuss the presence of peacekeeping forces.

© Mauricio Lima for The New York Times

A visit to the Indian Ocean islands of Mayotte, which were struck by Cyclone Chido last weekend, reveals the devastating toll of the storm on an impoverished territory that belongs to France.

© Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times

With Germany and France both in political turmoil, the new administration of Donald J. Trump will begin at a time of instability for the continent.

© James Hill for The New York Times

The government’s fall shows the strength of the far right.

This article describes one change that has caught out some using macOS Sequoia, and considers what has changed in Sequoia Virtual Machines (VMs).

periodic has been removed

After many years of deprecation, the periodic scheduled maintenance command tool has been removed from macOS 15.0. In its heyday, periodic was responsible for running daily, weekly and monthly maintenance and housekeeping schedules including rolling the system logs. Over that time, macOS has been given other means for achieving similar ends. For example, logs are now maintained constantly by the logd service, and aren’t retained by age, but to keep the total size of log files fairly constant. I don’t think that Sonoma performed any routine maintenance using periodic.

If you use periodic, then the best option is to use launchd with a LaunchAgent or LaunchDaemon. If you’d prefer to use cron, that’s still available but is disabled in macOS standard configuration.

Sequoia VMs: AI

Sequoia VMs created from an IPSW image of Sequoia (rather than upgraded from Sonoma or earlier) running on Sequoia hosts are the first to gain access to iCloud features. Now that 15.1 has been released with AI, I’ve been trying to discover whether that can also be used in a VM. So far, my 15.1 VM has sat for hours ‘preparing’, but AI still hasn’t activated on it. I suspect that, for the present, AI isn’t available to VMs. If you have had success, please let me know.

Sequoia VMs: macOS builds

My test 15.1 VM has also behaved strangely. It was originally created in 15.0, updated successfully to 15.0.1, then to 15.1, where it was running build 24B83, the version released generally on 28 October. Later that week Software Update reported that a macOS update was available, and that turned out to be a full install of 15.1 build 24B2083, released on 30 October for the new M4 Macs. This VM is hosted on a Studio M1 Max!

Installation completed normally, and that VM now seems to be running the new build perfectly happily, although it hasn’t proved any help in activating AI.

Don’t be surprised if your 15.1 build 24B83 VMs behave similarly. If anyone can suggest why that occurred I’d be interested to know, as it’s generally believed that build 24B2083 has been forked to support only M4 models.