I was the Tech Chair (aka Zoom Facilitator) at today’s Silver Tongued Cats hybrid meeting; I’ve done it before, and it’s usually easy to get set up.

Today, though, when I plugged in the USB-C to HDMI and USB-A minidock I needed to connect my webcam to my computer, I got a prompt asking me whether it was OK for the minidock to talk to the computer. I clicked “Yes” (or so I thought) and I went about the rest of the meeting setup (starting Zoom, calling it from the conference room phone for audio, and so forth). The HDMI connection worked fine, but Zoom couldn’t see my webcam.

I was puzzled. I was more puzzled when I fired up System Information and it didn’t even show the minidock on the USB device tree.

I thought we’d have to go through the meeting without the webcam (fortunately, our Toastmaster had set up his phone to show video of the lectern) until I plugged a power brick into the other USB-C port on the computer. Suddenly, I got another prompt asking about the USB minidock; this time, I was very careful to answer “yes”, and as if by magic, Zoom saw the webcam and all was well.

I guess I have to be more careful about what I click.

I kept looking for good ways to solve my problem of yesterday. One idea which came to mind was editing /etc/profile to be better behaved with regards to leaving my changes to the PATH alone, but I expected that my changes would be lost every time I installed a new version of Mac OS, so I didn’t try it.

But then Apple released Mac OS 13.5 with significant security fixes, and I needed to install it. I changed /etc/profile before doing the installation, and I was delighted to find my changes were still there after the update, so that may be a viable strategy.

I also looked at my Ubuntu systems to see what they did in /etc/profile – they’re even more brutal than Mac OS. Mac OS puts its preferred directories at the front of the PATH so they’re seen before whatever was in the PATH when /etc/profile is read; Ubuntu simply overwrites the PATH with its own version.

Oh, well; who said using a computer would be easy?