you can of course plug in an usb keyboard with numpad 
i’d suggest starting with installing Surge, it’s free. https://surge-synthesizer.github.io
Little snitch seems to be essential really - it’s 60 dollars … is there anything free that will just do the basic stuff to stop my older mac being exploited or altered?
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Youre absolutely right, I could just get a numpad USB or keyboard with numbad and plug it in. I must get used to working without it though because the exciting thing about just using this little 13" macbook is that it’s like having a really good polyend tracker on your lap
the bits that you’re really gonna miss are the insert + delete.
i mapped insert to § (the key on the left of 1)
and delete to shift-backspace.
it helps a bit
Similar to LittleSnitch (though not as full-featured), and free:
If you want to be extra pro-active before installing software you’ve downloaded you should check app signatures with GPG where possible, or run shasum in the terminal to compare a hash if that’s available instead. Also keeping an eye on what’s been activated in the Privacy settings in Preferences, and setting the firewall to block all incoming network connections if you don’t need them, though this can break many features which use the local network (it’s easy enough to turn off when needed though).
Another thing to look at is the Sharing settings (again, in Preferences). I usually deselect everything, though blocking incoming connections disables all of them as well. But it’s best to have them off in case you forget to turn blocking back on.
Here’s a good guide to ‘hardening’ the OS, though you probably wont need to do most of it:
LittleSnitch is a must have TBH - so amazingly useful to keep spookiness out of the computer.
Watch out for the built-in notarisation/trust system on Catalina (which they helpfully backported to Mojave as well, thanks Apple!), if you have an active network connection, but your internet is down, or running slow, programs may become very sluggish to open, or not run at all until you disconnect from the network in which case the OS will fall back to using local cached authorisation.
I hate modern Apple with a passion but am stuck using their computers because they are still the best for music production (IMO).
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