Sunday Serial: Elgato Stream Deck, Today RSS Reader, and Standard Ebooks

Wow is it snowing out there! The snow is coming down as the forecasters have promised. Rhonda and I met my former boss, Teri, for some wine and snacks at Bellview Winery yesterday. It was a really nice time catching up. I met another former boss this past week for phô for lunch earlier this week. I often reflect that I’m lucky that I get to keep in touch with all of the great mentors I’ve had over the years. We nipped out for some Indian later that night. Rhonda’s got some bolognese on the range for dinner tonight.

Elgato Stream Deck

Way back in the early OS X days, I had a peripheral called the Griffin PowerMate. I was a nice heavy silver knob that you plugged into your Mac and used to control your volume, brightness, and anything else you wanted it to do. It was a great mute button, too. I still have it, in fact. Sure, you can do everything with your mouse or keyboard, but sometimes it’s hand to have a physical button or switch. It looks like you can get it running on the Mac, too.

The Streamdeck is a similar device. I have a cool little 15-button keypad with colorful icons that I can configure to do all kinds of things.

UsingOmniFocus URL Schemes to switch between focus perspectives in macOS.
Opening Google Meet in Chrome (not Safari)
Built-in actions: triggering screenshots and screen video recording, audio muting, unmuting, and adjustments, as well as changing screen brightness.
running Applescripts, such as hiding all active application windows and exposing the desktop, and Shortcuts.

Elgato Steam Deck

I like it so much that my original plan–to set it up and then take it to work–is probably going to change such that I’ll want one for work, too. Yeesh.

Today: An RSS Reader

Today is an RSS reader for the Mac (and iOS) with a “touch of AI.”

I exported my RSS feeds from Feedbin and imported them into Today. The import took a while, and Today discarded the categories I had set up in Feedbin. I exported the OMPL back out and I can fix it; you can recategorize the feeds in Today, but it’s a feed-by-feed affair (and I have like 300 or so).

Today uses your Mac’s on-device AI to generate a daily newspaper for you, which can span your feeds or by category. You can ask other questions, too; I tried “Any recipes for a cold day?” And something about a camera, but I got five recommendations that had nothing to do with my prompt, and they were the same five recommendations both times. Today will read articles to you, too.

It’s got a tasteful, simple design. Excited to see how Today evolves.

Standard Ebooks

Standard Ebooks was mentioned on a recent episode of a podcast I was listening to. It’s a great source of free ebooks for a variety of devices, all beautifully typeset.

Ebook projects like Project Gutenberg transcribe ebooks and make them available for the widest number of reading devices. Standard Ebooks takes ebooks from sources like Project Gutenberg, formats and typesets them using a carefully designed and professional-grade style manual, fully proofreads and corrects them, and then builds them to create a new edition that takes advantage of state-of-the-art ereader and browser technology.

I downloaded a couple of Herman Hesse novels, and my first-ever Tarzan book, Tarzan of the Apes.

I didn’t go to Standard Ebooks with the intention of searching for Tarzan books, but I happened to see the collection by Edgar Rice Burroughs, and it peaked my interest. When I was a kid, there was a Tarzan cartoon on Saturday mornings, visually similar to the Lone Ranger cartoon that aired at the same time. I really liked it a lot, but as a kid, of course, I lacked the historical knowledge of Tarzan’s genesis. Like Conan the Barbarian, my first brush was a cartoon adaptation of a much older series of books. You can read all of Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories with this collection, but they, too, are available on Standard Ebooks.

I’m hot to watch the Tarzan movie from the 80s (not the risqué one), Graystoke: the Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes. I remember watching it, and it wasn’t an action movie that I probably expected. It hews more to the original novel.

A Tale of Two Malls

Rhonda and I are children of the 80s, and so hold a place in our hearts for malls. Of course I know that a revitalized downtown with mom and pop shops–New Urbanism–is the principled stance. Maybe it’s inertia. Or the fact that we don’t have much New Urbanism down here in our remote post in South Jersey.

Ahem. On our last visit to see Aaron, we hit the Menlo Park Mall in Edison, New Jersey, It’s a very nice mall, with an Apple Store, Barnes & Noble, Old Navy, and a couple of stores that sell the kinds of collectible that Joey and Aaron love. On Sunday morning, after a ride through the Italian mountains, courtesy of the Marriott’s Peloton bike, I scoured maps and Yelp for some places to eat and shop, should that be our wont. I noticed that the Short Hills Mall was nearby, and remembered from a visit back in the early 2000s, when my best friend Kevin and I went to the Apple Store there. He ended up working there for a while after grad school, no less. So I suggested we check it out.

I don’t remember the Short Hills Mall being quite as shwanky as it was; Aaron called it bougie. There were Tiffany, Fendi, Rolex, and Versace stores with low-key security guards. The cars parked in the concourse were Bentleys, Porsches, and a very covetable Audi RS3. We didn’t recognize many of the stores at all.

It’s hard to put the feeling of being in a retail world you can’t quite comprehend into words. Outclassed and out of place for sure. We walked the mall from end to end and back again, and then lit out for the more approachable Menlo Park Mall. That joint has an Old Navy. There are Hyundais and Nissans along the concourses. And hey–the Apple Store is bigger than the Short Hills store.

Sunday Serial, Valentines Day Edition: Tramonti Vineyards and Dashen Ethiopian Restaurant

Aaron was born on Valentines Day, so we usually swap out celebrating a Hallmark holiday for his birthday. In that spirit, we drove up yesterday to see him. I’d have three things for tonight’s post but I didn’t get any good food pics at Fernandez Steak House in the Ironbound section of Newark. Aaron has always liked Chima in Philly, so I figured one of the Portuguese places in Newark would be a nice birthday dinner since he’s so close to Newark. Marriott upgraded our room to a studio, which has a kitchenette and a separate seating and TV area. But Fernades does the Rodizio thing, with the meat shaved off table-side in a succession of salty ribbons of protein.

Tramonti Vineyards (née Iron Plow)

Our intention was to hit Stokelan Estate Winery on the way up to visit Aaron yesterday, but they were all booked up. It’s not the kind of place you just chance by on a Hallmark holiday. The same was true for Valenzano. We thought we’d go to Working Dog, as the only thing they had on the calendar was a cupcake pairing in the evening, but I remembered seeing Iron Plow on Apple Maps when I was scouring for places to visit.

It’s not Iron Plow anymore; as the labels on the rosé and sauvignon blanc show, but Tramonti. We were offered a number of tastings before making a selection; we had the rosé in the tasting room, with our own snacks that I packed, and took the Sauvignon Blanc with us. The rosé has a deep flavor that I didn’t expect; it’s made from four different grapes, one of which is Cabernet Sauvignon.

Dashen Restaurant and Bar

A former colleague noted on an earlier Facebook post that we should check out Dashen, an Ethiopian restaurant in New Brunswick. It’s within walking distance of Aaron’s dorm, and right around the corner from the Indian Place we tried when we visited for Parents Weekend last fall.

I’ve never had Ethiopian before. It was served with injera, which is a fermented-tasting crêpe or thin pancake. The meat and vegetable sides are all very stewy and you eat them using the the injera instead of silverware. It was a lot of fun and we all loved our dishes.

Firehouse Roses

A local firehouse sells roses at a good price every year for Valentine’s Day. It’s a straight-up dude solution: a firehouse, plastic tubs with bunches of roses; a cash register from Staples, cash only. You file in, select one or more pre-wrapped bunches, and shuffle out. No special requests. You want some? Buy them. If you don’t? Don’t. I left the Mustang running while I got mine.

It’s funny: Rhonda and I were never really Valentine’s Day people. It’s a good day to avoid crowds. We choose to have Aaron delivered then, peripheral to his due date. We have, paradoxically, been frustrated that we couldn’t take Aaron out for dinner on his birthday, because restaurants are artificially crowded.

The Quiet Math of Longevity

Herman Martinus, via Hey Dingus:

That means that over a lifetime, one full year of exercise leads to 10 full years of extra life. That’s a 1:10 return on investment! So even without any of the additional benefits (which I’ll get into later), this is still one of the best investments you can make.

“One full year of exercise” is Martinus’s calculation of exercising for 45 minutes four days per week. So effectively giving up that time to exercise yields a longer lifespan. It’s an interesting way to think about it.

Another interesting take: exercise doesn’t make you happier, but it does reduce negative emotionality.

The ROI of exercise

Soft Endings

Howard Luks, presaging one last snowman:

No one tells you how parenting changes. At first, it’s all beginnings. First steps. First words. First days of school. You’re trained to look forward, always forward. And then, without warning, life quietly starts handing you endings instead. Not loud ones. Soft ones, often unannounced.

The Last Snowman

Sunday Serial: Bookmark Managers!

Wow is it cold out there! Rhonda and I stayed in yesterday after running a thousand errands and taking Moscato to and from the groomer yesterday (they did a very nice job on her). We guzzled some of Bellview Winery’s 2024 Chardonnay and Rosé from the growlers I filled while out and about once we settled in and had some cheese. It’s spritzes and burrata time before the Super Bowl.

Bellview Winery’s 2024 Chardonnay and Rosé

I finally got the Mustang unstuck from the ice in the driveway. It’s hard to imagine that such a powerful vehicle could be rendered helpless by a few blobs of ice, but there you have it. I was able to drive Aaron’s Mini Cooper all week, so there’s nothing to complain about. It’s fun to drive different cars and have an appreciation for their differences. I get to drive the WRX on the weekends and when we travel, and the Mustang to work most days. Driving the Mini is a neat change of pace.

Bookmark Managers!

Why use a dedicated bookmark manager? In addition to the features that each one brings, the main reason is that it’s a great way to indulge in trying out different browsers, if you’re just browser curious, or if you actually need to use different browsers depending upon what you’re doing. I have long used both Safari and Chrome, because both of the last two school districts in which I’ve worked were Google shops, and Chrome is a better fit for Google suite apps. So with a bookmark manager, you can hop between different browsers but keep all of your bookmarks in one place. This is especially helpful if you switch between operating systems and browsers, and your manager supports multiple platforms.

Raindrop.io

Raindrop.io is exactly what I just mentioned above: a multi-platform bookmark manager. Getting bookmarks into Raindrop is dead simple, and it supports a number of organizational features, including folders, tags, and pile of filters. It is organized like an email app, such that new bookmarks show up in an inbox, and you can organize them for later use.

Raindrop.io recently added an LLM feature for paid users, which will organize your bookmarks, suggest tags, and excise broken links. This is an exciting feature that perfectly envisions what AI should be doing for us: making our lives easier by removing the drudgery of organizing and maintaining data by leveraging our practices and preferences.

ExtraBar + Shiori

I found ExtraBar when Louie Plummer posted about it on Amerpie. I tried it out, thinking that it might be a replacement for Bartender, which has gotten a little wonky since Tahoe came out. It is decidedly not a Bartender replacement, and appeals to uses who enjoy employing links across macOS in apps that support them.

There’s a lot you could write about ExtraBar, and maybe if the utility finds some traction in my life, I’ll do so, but for now, I’m just going to focus on Shiori. It’s a paid plugin for a paid app, which I find a little odd, but maybe the developer is on to something. You invoke ExtraBar as you normally would, but can then jump into Shiori, where you can search your bookmarks. You can include specific folders to in ExtraBar’s presets, so that you could have a preset for work, and another for home, for example, and only show the links you want to see depending upon the context. The animations are whimsical and fun, to boot.

URL Manager Pro

URL Manager Pro has been around for a long time; my dad has always used it on his Macs, even back in the class Mac OS days, prior to NeXT’s acquisition of Apple. I never really got into it, but for the purposes of this post, I downloaded it and gave it a spin. It’s available for the iPhone and iPad, too, which is not something you can say about ExtraBar + Shiori.

URL Manager Pro, bookmark manager for the Mac

Door #2 Please

Matthew Weber on changing notes apps:

I have almost 1400 directories and an untold number of notes. That’s just here, so there are more on other platforms. The way I see it, I can do two things:

I can spend the next year of my life (probably) going through these notes, taking out the ones that can be tossed and then properly organizing them into a directory structure that makes sense.

Or, I can make an old notes directory, shove everything in there, and start the fuck over.

A Mess of Notes

It’s Not the Heat, It’s the Humidity

Greg Morris, on running:

That’s the thing about these moments. The anticipation is always worse than the act. Your brain builds a wall of reasons not to do something, and every single one of them evaporates the moment you start moving. It’s a pattern I recognise now, having gone through it week after week in marathon training blocks. The dread arrives, I entertain it for a bit, then I go out and run anyway. Afterwards, I wonder what I was so worried about.

It’s true about so many things.

A correlate: discipline beats motivation.

The Fear Was Real But Pointless

Lightroom, Darkroom, Pixelmator, Photomator, and Creator Studio

I’ve been excited to see what was going to come of Apple’s acquisition of Pixelmator. I’ve been a Pixelmator user for a very long time, and really love editing photos, especially on the iPad, with it. It has great Apple Pencil support.

For a long time, my wish was to have a polycarbonate MacBook in Black with a DSLR and Apple’s own Aperture. I never got the DSLR, and the serial improvements of the iPhone camera decreased my desire for a DSLR. Aperture was eventually shuttered, but the Photos app has gained a lot of its functionality. I’m not really in that headspace anymore, though; I very much enjoy taking pictures with my Olympus and OM System cameras and the small but engaging collection of glass that I’ve accumulated. And so my interest in some “prosumer” photo editing has remained.

I was reading Joe Rosensteel’s article on Six Colors about the acquisition, and he brought up a great point: What about Photomator? That app was a lot of fun to use, and I realized that it’s effectively a Lightroom competitor. Rosensteel thinks that it could end up being a prosumer add on to Apple’s Photos, which sounds like a smart idea, especially to the degree that it would add a subscription revenue stream. I could see Apple bundling it into their Creator Studio, too, such that if you subscribe to ACS, you get the Photomator features in Photos. That’s my predication and hope, anyway.

Peripheral to the holiday, I picked up Darkroom on sale. It works like Photomator, and I like it a lot. I suspect it’s a familiar experience for Lightroom users. Photomator is 30 bucks a year, and while I have it on my iPad from a long time ago, I’m not inclined to subscribe just yet. Hopefully something will come out of the Creator Studio integration soon; I don’t need many of those apps, but I do intend to keep supporting Pixelmator’s development. I like how both of the applications work by exposing your Photos library, allow you to make edits, and then replace or copy the edited image back into your library.

OmniOutliner To The Rescue

Speaking of the snow, Rhonda and I found ourselves unable to put in an order at ShopRite for pickup last weekend due to the impending snow. She put in a fair bit of effort construction the order, and it was a pisser to learn that we couldn’t actually order anything for days. Talk about poor user experience.

Anyway, we needed what we needed for the week, and the internet connection in the store can be flakey, so I logged into the account on my Mac, copied the order, and pasted it into Kagi Assistant, which I asked to strip out everything except the items.

This list went into OmniOutliner, and I was able to pull it up on my phone while we shopped. It’s the simplest version of OmniOutliner use there is, but it’s still magical to me all these years later. It’s a great app.

Sunday Serial: Quick Soulver, Breathe Right Strips, and Aeronaut

My poor Mustang is stuck in the driveway; there’s really no amount of snow so minuscule that won’t stop it from moving. It’s crazy making. I tried to rock her out of her spot yesterday, but to no avail: she remains stuck.

I bring this up because it’s still terribly cold out, and even this week’s predicted 30+ degree temps are pretty cold by South Jersey standards. I’m hoping for a thaw soon to get rid of the treacherous sheet of ice that we all have to shuffle across like drunken retirees on a s cruise ship every morning and afternoon.

Quick Soulver

Chris Bailey joined David Sparks on Mac Power Users last week and mentioned how he binds Soulver’s Quick Soulver feature to a keyboard shortcut, namely alt-space. I’ve been a Soulver user for a very long time, and this was not a use case I’d ever considered. Launchbar, of course, has a built-in calculator feature that I use, but this is a cool application. The problem I have is that the excellent Calcbot is no longer available for the Mac, and I have some serious muscle memory to break when I need to do some math on my Mac.

Breathe Right Strips

I’m pretty sure I have a deviated septum. I learned this because I noticed that one of my nostrils is significantly narrower than the other. I did a high scientific test by pulling the skin on each side of my nose outward and inhaling, and the effect was noticeable. Fun fact: I’ve always been a bit of a mouth breather, a habit Rhonda has pointed out mirthfully to me.

I saw an add for some kind of magnetically actuated nostril dilator, and I thought that I should try it immediately. Then the next instagram reel loaded and that was the end of that. But you know when the universe is trying to counsel you when the thing you were about to impulse purchase pops up in conversation on a podcast.

Instead of the magnetic device, though, I got a pack of Breathe Right Strips from Amazon and have been using them for sleep and morning exercise. I forgot to apply one Friday night, and I woke up with a major dry mouth. This is all highly unscientific, but I’m here in the spirit of inquiry, and am happy to share my selfless experimentation with you.

Aeronaut

Aeronaut is a very nice Mac app for Bluesky. I’ve been waiting for Tapbots re release something for Bluesky; their Ivory client for Mastodon is excellent and checks all the boxes that Tweetbot did for so many years.

Leaning Into It: iPad usage Notes

Considering today’s anniversary of the iPad, I thought I’d cobble into a post some notes I’ve been keeping regarding my iPad usage in Ulysses. My affinity for the device has always been at once a sine qua non of my tech nerdiness, and a source of vexation about why, exactly, I find it so appealing.

On the Weekly Review in OmniFocus

Weekly review in OmniFocus… lack of keyboard can be painful when you know how easy it would be on the Mac. But… the position, the posture. It doesn’t eliminate the friction on a Sunday night, but it’s nice.

Note to self: don’t do this on Sunday nights!

I would argue that one of the greatest use cases for the iPad is a weekly review, if you’re a GTD and OmniFocus user. OmniGroup has done such a great job with the iPad versions of their apps.

On the Lack of a Clipboard Manager and History

Copy and pasting links…. it’s painful cause no clipboard history. Maybe the worst part. On a Mac, you can copy all kinds of stuff and use whatever clipboard manager (or managers) you like. For me, it’s most often Launchbar, but I like Pastebot a lot. It reminds me of Windows excellent clipboard plus that comes with PowerToys.

On Having Too Much of a Good Thing

Don’t take it everywhere I thought I might (mini with cell)

On the Extravagant Keyboard

From 2022:

What the iPad Pro got right, among other things, is the expensive keyboard. If you’re sitting or lounging on the sofa, the keyboard pushes the naked robotic core towards you, in a way that is so useful.

Not Using the iPad for Work During COVID

I don’t use my iPad very much for work, which I kind of miss; however…

I was really getting back into a desktop Mac setup at home.

Thoughts on Working from Home

High Hopes Pre-COVID

The iPad is nanometers away from replacing laptops for so many users. I could probably walk away from a computer myself save for specific work tasks.

iPads Pro

A “Third Category of Device”

As quoted by John Gruber in an article on how many Apple users have an iPad:

Phone remains the most dominant product, with 94% of recent Apple customers owning one. iPads are next, with 78% owning one. Mac computers have much smaller penetration, at 36% of recent customers.

This surprised me; I’d think that the next obvious step would be from iPhone to Mac. The iPad sits in the middle and is in my mind the third least-essential of the trio. That’s increasingly less true for me, but remains so. I’d miss having an iPad sorely if I didn’t have one, but I’d miss having a Mac more.

The iPad can feel like work, but it doesn’t. Sitting on the sofa, iPad on my lap, I just accept the tradeoffs of using the touch-driven interface and accept that I’m going to move a bit more slowly, but it’s intimate and casual feeling in its way. I still use the hell out of my Mac, especially for work, but I do love the iPad. It’s pretty great just as it is.

It’s the perfect device for reading news and RSS feeds.

I still want a clipboard manager, though.

For as fast as I am on the Mac, I love using gestures. I can be pretty fast with those too.

iPad: 16 Years and Counting

MacRumors:

Jobs unveiled the first-generation iPad at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco on January 27, 2010. Designed to fill the gap between smartphones and laptops, the original iPad featured a 9.7-inch LED-backlit multitouch display, Apple’s first custom designed chip, a 30-pin dock connector, and up to 64GB storage. With a starting price of $499, it offered users a new way to browse the web, read eBooks, watch videos, and interact with Apple’s growing app ecosystem. Jobs described it as “a magical and revolutionary device.”

I managed to wait until September of 2010 before buying my first iPad, and I have some photos of it on my desk at work from the time.

IPad 16 years my first.

I get a kick out of seeing an old iPod in the background, attache to the Altec Lansing speaker dock I used at work. I wrote about my experience with it here.

The first iPad was a good bit of fun, although if you think feeling hamstrung by the OS is a limitation now, the original was really just a big iPod Touch. The criticism at the time was that it was just a “consumption” device, and couldn’t be taken very seriously because you couldn’t get much done with it. I got plenty of writing and email done with the first iPad, and every one after that, too, but it was not a laptop replacement. Things have gotten better, of course, but iPad’s still not a Mac.

The original iPad lasted me until the iPad 3 came out, which was a heavier device thanks to the Retina display. The original had, for me, been so RAM constrained that just reading a web page in Safari would often cause the app to crash. And unlike the Mac, the system didn’t give you a reason why.

I got the original Mini when it came out, too. Here’s a pic from the parking lot when I bought it, still in the box.

I’ve had a rotation of iPads since then: the original Air, a few pros, 10″ and 11″ and even 13″ models. While they’ve never been able to replace my Mac, I have always found a lot of use for them.

Sunday Serial: CoTypist, Witch for macOS, and Typinator Extensions and Sets

There’s some stormy weather out there today; when I got up, I’d say we had about 4” of snow already. It’s still coming down, too. Rhonda and I both did some sweeping and shoveling to keep up on things, and I wanted to lift the windshield wiper arms on the cars up so they don’t get frozen to the windshields. We could’t even put in an order for groceries for store pickup yesterday; we had to drive over and prowl the aisles at Shop Rite like animals. We’re both off work tomorrow, too.

Aaron sent a picture from campus:

Stay safe and warm, and I hope you don’t have to do any driving today. Rhonda made a bolognese sauce yesterday while we were home, and we’ll be having that for dinner.

CoTypist

CoTypist is a macOS app that suggests words and sentences based on what you’re writing. It uses AI to learn your style and make suggestions. I found it during one of the Mac app bundle deals earlier this year. It’s in beta, so it’s free right now. It’s pretty interesting to try out; a trail of suggestions follow your cursor as you type, and you can accept words or sentences as they appear.

You can opt to let CoTypist learn from you as you accept suggestions, which (the app says) is stored locally on your Mac. Like TextExpander, it calculates the time you’ve saved using CoTypist. I ran into an issue where CoTypist’s default behavior–expanding suggestions as you type using the tab key–conflicted with OmniFocus’s behavior of using the tab key to move to the next field. Thoughtfully, though, you can exclude CoTypist from any app you want, or just disable the tab key per app.

Witch vs TabTab

I wrote about Witch in a previous Sunday Serialpost. It’s a utility for the Mac by Many Tricks that extends the default command-tab keyboard shortcut to let you switch between apps, yes, but also documents and browser tabs. As Many Tricks describes Witch, it lets you “command-tab everything.”

One of my favorite features is the ability to search for open documents or Safari tabs. I’ve been using TabTab for a while and I love it, but there’s been an issue with the license manager and it thinks I’m using all of the seats I purchased (when I should have one seat left).

So I’ve been using Witch on my desktop Mac, and having to fart around with it a bit made me realize how useful (and customizable) Witch is. I set it up so that the keyboard shortcut I would normally use to invoke TabTab is now a shortcut to Witch. Once invoked, I tap the s key to search for browser tabs or documents. It’s really handy.

Typinator Extensions and Sets

For no particular reason, I replaced TextExpander with Typinator a while back. It’s in the same class of app or utility, but I find it a little more Mac-like, which breaks my heart a little because TextExpander started out as a really simple, light Mac-only utility.

I installed the version 10 beta today, and setting things up, starting poking around their “sets” feature and the web page dedicated to their collection. I love the Dates 1.0 set. There’s a cool emoji set, too; as with so many other things, though, I’m very used to using Launchbar for emoji.

Ergonis is coming out with an iPhone version of Typinator soon. One of the pain points of relying on utility apps like this is their either total absence on the iPhone or iPad, or in this case of text expansion apps, they’re available as keyboard applications. I don’t find the act of switching keyboards on the iPhone to worth the effort, so I don’t generally use them.

Uncorrected

By Alex Nonnemacher