If you are using a Wacom tablet as your primary means of controlling your Mac, you may have noticed that you can’t access your Keychain any more – when something wants access to it and pops up the “type your keychain password” dialog, the ‘always allow’ and ‘allow’ buttons give you absolutely no response when you press them.

If you bring up the Console and try doing this, you’ll notice an error popping up when you try to press ‘allow’:

11/4/15 1:24:02.755 PM SecurityAgent[893]: Ignoring user action since the dialog has received events from an untrusted source

This is because Apple has added means to prevent applications creating “synthetic clicks on keychain prompts” to get access to your keychain without your authorization. Which is all well and good. Except it would be really nice if they would, you know, pop up an error dialog saying that this has happened, and which program provided the offending clicks, instead of silently doing absolutely nothing when you press the ‘allow’ button.

Sadly, the latest versions of Wacom’s drivers do not fix this. I tried both the latest drivers for the Intuos3/4/5 (I have a 3 on my desk and a 4 in my travel bag), and the higher-numbered latest ones for the “current Intuos Pro”; neither of them solved this issue. Nor did visiting the Security and Privacy pane of the system prefs and manually adding /Library/Applcation Support/Tablet/WacomTabletDriver.app to the list of apps allowed to control my computer.

So I guess now if I want to do anything involving the Keychain, I need to reach around my desk and open up my computer to use the trackpad to click on those buttons. Fun!

(When I’m at my desk, the computer is closed and plugged into an external monitor, you see.)

Anyway. Mostly I am documenting this so that someone else with the same problem can have some hope of figuring it out faster; I blew most of my morning on tracking this down.

And as a side note – holy shit there are way too many Wacom drivers on their driver download page. There are seven categories of drivers that all have the exact same version number (6.3.15-1), and I have a strong suspicion that same driver will actually work with pretty much anything that connects via USB – supposedly I should be using a different one with a lower version number (6.3.11w3), but I’m using the 6.3.15-1 just fine now. What the hell guys, consolidate that shit.

Edit. 28-Dec-2015: There’s a new version of the driver, 6.3.15-3. It’s still not a trusted input source.

It’s daylight savings time! Cue grumbling about how much it sucks.

Given: The abrupt shift of an entire hour is discombobulating and stressful.

Given: We would still like to shift our schedules to have more daylight in certain parts of the workday.

Given: An increasing percentage of our timekeeping devices have enough smarts to keep track of the time of year, and apply daylight savings without human intervention.

Thus, a modest proposal:

Why don’t we spread that hour-long shift out over a month or two? Every day in September and October, we lose a minute – the clocks leap directly from 12:59 to 1:01. Every day in February and March we gain a minute, with the clocks going from 12:59 to 12:60 to 1:00. Maybe we could even add in a little more now and then to get rid of leap years. Or at least leap seconds.

Shifting every day like this would be incredibly onerous in the era of mechanical timekeeping devices you can only change in one direction. But this is the digital age. Mechanical clocks and watches are increasingly becoming an expensive bauble that denotes prestige. Hordes of people don’t even wear a watch, preferring instead to rely on their smartphone to tell them what time it is.

The obvious problems: luddites who still vastly prefer mechanical clocks, and the need for a Y2K-sized effort to change all timekeeping software.

I am not sure if I am joking, or if I am entirely serious here. I know I’m not stoned yet this morning. Let me work on that while I go change the clocks on the stove and microwave.

The most important part of making comics is coming back to them. Comics are big projects. A short one will take at least a few days. A long one? Well, I spent 4.5 years on Rita.

Some days were good days. I’d have easy, fun pages to do next and I’d tear through it. Other days? Complicated pages, or distractions, or winter depression could cut sharply into my output. There were times I get nothing drawn for several days in a row.

I didn’t berate myself when it happened. And if all I got done on the comic was a half hour’s work? That was still a half hour of progress that wasn’t there when I woke up. And I felt good about that.

Solo comics are a Sysiphean effort. You will have to figure out ways to keep on coming back to them. Especially if you are a distractable slacker like me.

Of course, there are lots of other important parts. Learning how to tell a story, learning how to draw, how to promote it, how to get it printed, all kinds of stuff. But the biggest thing I had to learn was how to just keep on working on it.

Some people will tell you to set a schedule and stick to it. Me? I set one of “aim for two pages a week, don’t fret if life gets in the way”.

Oh yeah. And never draw apologies for being late with a page. If you only have a half hour to work, put it towards the next page instead of to drawing a pretty “sorry no page today”. People who care enough to subscribe to the rss/twitter/fb/tumblr feed will see new pages when they happen with no work on their part; the days when you had to train people to check your site themselves are long gone. If your time and energy is ultra limited, spend it on something that counts. 

It’s gotten to be that time of the year where all I want to do is sleep for a few months. Nothing sounds interesting; everything feels like an unsurmounable amount of work.

This is pretty normal for me now. I’ve lived in Seattle for several years now, and I know it’s due to the lack of sun. I’ve gotten around it in the past: there’s turning up the heat at night so the bedroom is warm enough for getting out of bed naked to not feel like a deadly mistake, there’s the giant sun lamp, there’s vitamin D supplements. There’s weed. And there’s finding excuses to go somewhere warmer for a few weeks.

But my best excuse – visiting my mother around Christmas – is gone now. And my mailbox is a regular reminder of the fact that she’s gone. And that makes me feel even more like shit.

And that little voice that suggests ‘suicide’ as a solution to this overall problem keeps on popping up in the back of my brain. It can fuck right off. I got over my father’s death without listening to that idea, and I’ll get over my mother’s death too. But it sure doesn’t help my overall mood to have to regularly roll my eyes at the part of my brain that thinks this is a good plan.

Another little voice keeps on saying “upgrade your computer” but really it’s not time yet, my tricked-out 2013 Air does everything I need. The only things I’d want are a higher-res display and a bigger HD, and I’d have to switch to a heavier Pro for that. I also know that consuming isn’t going to make me any happier.

And then there are the little self-reinforcing loops like the way being depressed means I’m much more likely to eat something cheap and pre-packaged that’s lacking in all kinds of nutrients and vitamins my body needs to keep working well, which leads to me feeling mopy and useless and depressed.

Upon reflection, maybe I need to plan some kind of trip somewhere warm, even if it’s just me going down to LA for a week or something. Get some sun.