Automating Mac Maintenance

Try driving your car daily for four years without changing the oil or aligning the tires. I'm no mechanic, but you'll experience a slew of problems. I could draw the same analogy with a dentist or a doctor, but you get my drift.

By the same token, it's essential to perform regular maintenance on your computer. Yes, I have just stated the obvious, but I routinely meet folks oblivious to basic tech upkeep. (My favorite line: “I didn't know that they made viruses for Apple devices.”)

After more than 40 years using a computer pretty much every day, I know how to properly care for my MacBook Pro. This means:

• Properly installing and removing software.
• Regularly updating it,
• Clearing caches.
• And the like.

Against this backdrop, I was shocked the other day when Mole returned the following information:

In a word, ick.

I eschew the current version of Microsoft Teams, never mind its antecedent. In a different era, I would set a reminder to manually run this cleanup job every week. The better, more contemporary approach involves creating a simple launchd job that runs early in the morning every Monday.

Lots of wasted space on programs that I no longer use.

Thanks to my bestie Claude Code, I was able to do just that.

Have at It

I'm releasing this little time-saver as a public repo on GitHub.

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Simon Says

If you can think it these days, you're probably able to build it. What a fantastic time to be a citizen developer.