It’s a hot mid-September weekend here in the Garden State. We notionally equate September as heralding the start of the fall, with the season’s attendant chilly nights, crisp days, and changing foliage. But September to me has always been a hot month. I went to a small Catholic school as a child, and back then, in the 80s, there was no air conditioning, and the boys’ uniforms mandated navy blue pants, which were thick and most unwelcome in hot weather. My high school experience was only marginally better: gray pants, but pants nonetheless, and no air conditioning. And like most schools, both were surrounded by parking lots and no shade.
So yeah: I’m a Gen Xer slowly gaining an appreciation for our generational toughness. Maybe it’s due to thermal conditioning.
Whatever Sundays are for, they are always a day to prep for the week ahead. For me, that means pre-packing my lunches and breakfasts, ironing shirts, and other quotidian tasks.
Staying Sharp
One not-so-quotidian task includes occasionally sharpening our kitchen knives. We have two German steel knives that we’ve had for over two decades: a Henckels chef’s knife, a Santoku knife, and a paring knife.
German steel knives are (in)famous for their soft steel, which means they are easy to sharpen, but also easily dulled. I’ve sharpened them using a few different methods over the years: an electric sharpener with two stages, a Lansky set of hones, and an oil stone I purchased at a local hardware store.
The electric sharpener does a nice job on the chef’s knife and my cheap cleaver, but not so much on the Santoku and paring knives. Unfortunately, the electric sharpener is wearing away the chef’s knife’s blade, but not the bolster, so I’m slowly creating a knife that’s not useful across its entire length.
I’ve watched a bunch of videos about sharpening knives using whetstones, and I’ve planned, for a long time, to eventually get a set of Japanese water stones and learn how to use them.
Curiosity got the better of me once again, and I found myself this weekend trying out the old oil stone I got at Ace Hardware years ago. I’ve rehabbed some beat up old pocket knives with it, much to my delight, but I haven’t used it on the kitchen set in a very long time.
I made a cheap 25-degree spacer out of an index card to check the angle of the knife on the stone, and got to work. I tested the results on one of Rhonda’s amazing garden tomatoes, and the results were great.
Hold My Notes
The software universe is rife with notes apps, and the Apple ecosystem boasts some fine choices for all tastes. I’m currently an Apple Notes user, largely because I love taking handwritten notes, and Notes’ Smart Script blows me away. If Apple made Smart Script available in, say, Notability, I’d probably migrate over to it, but I’m generally happy with Notes (more on that later in a different post that I’ve been working on).
There is a place, however, for other Notes on the Mac. I’ve enjoyed Tot, for example, with its very opinionated focus on a specific number of notes. I’ve used other menu bar-centric apps in the past to keep Mac-specific info at my fingertips, such as MailMate’s search modifiers; one great example is FiveNotes.
Apps like Bartender highlight the complication that comes with adding items to your Mac’s Menu Bar: too many icons in the menu bar likely results in not seeing anything there at all, or expending some cycles trying to figure out what you’re looking for up there. And keyboard commands? Useful for sure, but contrary to the visual advantages of having a graphical user interface.
Consider Apple’s longstanding Stickies app: it’s a Mac app. It’s only a Mac app. It hasn’t changed much over the years. It’s a full GUI affair, with rich text support. It migrated from the Mac’s Classic OS to OS X/macOS, and continues to come pre-installed on every Mac to this day. I still use it.
Outside of the Menu Bar, the edges of the Mac’s screen are a common place to add UI elements. Yojimbo, a great digital junk drawer, has long allowed users to drag all kinds of content to a shelf on the edges of the screen. And Yoink, one of my must-have infrastructural apps, lives on the left side of my screen.
Hold My Notes is a new app that takes advantage of the Mac’s edge-of-the-screen UI. In a landscape of plain-text notes apps, it’s a full-on GUI affair, with fetching tabs and pop-out card views. You can turn note contents into checklists, and change the background color of the note. You can pin a note to the screen to keep it in view, and archive notes that you don’t need to see. And the hover animation is absolutely delightful.
Despite the app’s visual richness, though, it doesn’t support rich text: dragging links to a note produces a plain-text link, which I don’t like at all. It is, in a sense, a Markdown note editor with a thoughtful GUI. To my mind, pulling a URL out of Safari and dropping it into Hold My Notes should behave the same way as Stickies: create a rich text note link, not a plain-text one. I want to drag a link or a screenshot to a note and have it appear just as it does in the system.
Hold My Notes supports iCloud syncing, and license costs less than a sawbuck for up to three Macs.
Unread RSS v5
Unread is one of my favorite RSS readers; it’s unique (to me) in that it’s fabulous on the iPhone and Mac, but not so great on my 13” iPad. On the Mac, it supports amazing themes and FeedBin, while on the iPhone, it presents your feeds in a most device-forward (and thoughtful) way. It is singular in its design on the iPhone.
Unread’s version 5 isn’t a redesign, but features welcome and meaningful improvements.
