Sunday Serial: iPhone Duo Apps, WriteRoom 4, nvALT, and the Avoiding the Slings and Arrows of Outrageous Fortune with a Portable Jump Starter

I say again: the summer is not actually the best time to drive a convertible. I’ve been treated to a full week of glorious 50+ degree weather, and I’ve been top down for most of it. I think 50 degrees is the bellwether; if it’s 50 or above, and it’s not raining, the top goes down.

It’s spritzes and cheese here at home as the chicken thighs roast in the oven. I’m lucky to be sitting here, feeling pretty blissed out, assembling a list of things that delight me, and sharing them with you.

iPhone Duo Apps

Stephen Robles created a curated site of applications that are ready for the iPhone Duo. If you, like me and Aaron, are on the long wait list for the new iPhone, you can prepare for delivery by checking out if your most trusted apps are ready for the new form factor.

WriteRoom 4 Releases

I had no idea that WriteRoom was going to reemerge, but I was pleasantly surprised to see that it has. WriteRoom was one of the two Markdown-specific apps I started using when Markdown was getting a lot of traction in the nerd space. The other was Byword, which I generally preferred due to the fact that I could post to my Tumblr blog directly from the app (I think it also supported tables first, which I needed when deciding to use Markdown for my report writing at work). But as with TaskPaper, I always appreciated Jesse Grosjean’s attention to detail and style, so I always kept WriteRoom and updated it when the new versions came out.

And hey! WriteRoom 4 is in beta. You can get a steep discount on it during the beta, too, which is exactly what I did. Some observations:

Typewriter noises: WriteRoom sounds like a clicky mechanical keyboard when you type. You can turn it off, too. I found myself browsing keyboards at Best Buy this afternoon after typing on WriteRoom for a spell.
Themes: You can set different themes in WriteRoom, depending upon your preferences. The default is a DEC terminal monitor, with screen bend and everything.
Heading overview mode
Number Headings: I’m not familiar with this feature from other Markdown apps I’ve used, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t any out there. In WriteRoom, headings and their children can be numbered automatically, so rather than having “##” as a an H2 heading in our document, you can see “1.2” or whatever level it would be. It looks great and it’s useful.

There’s more I could say about WriteRoom, but Sunday Serial isn’t the place for a big review. I hope you take a look at it if you’re a Mac user who writes in Markdown, however often that might be.

nvALT Resurrected

Speaking of writing in Markdown, Brett Terpstra has updated his fork of Notational Velocity and made it available for download again. This is to tide Markdown purists until the relaunch of nvUltra, which has been in the works for some time now.

WriteRoom, Lettera, and MarkEdit are three document-based Markdown apps that I’ve used over the years; there are more, including BBEdit and TextMate. Ulysses, which is how I write most of my posts for this site, is a database-based Markdown app.

You can use nvALT to search, create, and edit Markdown documents; you point it at one folder on your Mac, and nvALT lists them in a single window. It’s a great way to employ Markdown files instead of a notes app. Your files are portable, and you can send them to other apps as you see fit. I was a big user of Notational Velocity, and later nvALT, for all of my note taking for years.

Portable Jump Starters

I stopped by our local ShopRite this morning for a couple of things, and there was a woman stranded in the parking lot with a dead car battery. I gave her a quick jump from my car and went on with my day, but it got me thinking about our family’s challenges with car batteries, and the simple solution of a portable jump starter.

It’s an inevitable part of owning a car, having a dead battery. It might happen after a chilly night, when you head out for work after the first frost of the season. It might happen completely out of the blue. I’ve had to drive home suddenly to jump Rhonda’s car, when she got stuck at the vet’s office, and I’ve had to ask for a jump from a coworker in the parking lot at work, apropos of no previous issues with my car.

Once, all four of us were in the waiting line to get onto the Cape May-Lewes Ferry, and when I tried to start the car to board, the battery was dead. I had charged it the night before we left using a trickle charger, but there we were: stuck, and embarrassed. A patient ferry employee came to our rescue with a portable jump starter, and I resolved to get one for myself.

I ordered one on the ferry ride to Delaware, and we picked it up at an AutoZone or Advance Auto Parts on our way to the hotel. We kept it in the trunk of our 2016 Subaru WRX for the rest of its life, as the car was plagued with some battery issues, the cause of which we never figured out. It has come in handy many, many times. In fact, we’ve gotten by without replacing the battery in our Husqvarna riding lawn mower for the past couple of years, relying on the jump starter to get it running. (I can be weirdly cheap about some things.)

I don’t mind relying on the kindness of strangers if I have to, but it’s my preference to be able to help myself.

Every single time.

The Party is Always in the Kitchen

Nicholas Magand on the unshakable attraction of the kitchen as the social hub of a party:

To summarise, the living room was the familiar place to sit and chat with people you already knew: it was a great way to spend time with friends. The kitchen was the crowded space to talk and meet new, weird, interesting people: it was the social network lubricant. Both rooms managed to coexist, and in many ways were codependent.

Our house has been in my wife’s family for its entire existence, and was, for a couple of generations, the hub of family gatherings. She said when she was a a kid, everyone gathered in the kitchen. That pattern persisted into our ownership of the house. We even tried a couple of times to encourage people to sit in the living room, because it’s huge and cooking was difficult with everyone gathered in the kitchen.

We could never get it to stick.

The kitchen is only the cool spot because you’re in it

Traverse: OPML Outliner for the Mac (and iOS)

Mac nerds love two things: RSS readers and outliners. I spent well over a year using Windows 11, and a lot of that time searching for native RSS readers and outliners for the OS.

The Mac is an embarrassment of riches in these two categories.

OmniOutliner is the GOAT of macOS outliners, and it remains one of the best apps I use, full stop. I love Bike, too, and use it all the time. And I’ve tried (but not purchased) Kosshi. Zavala, of course, is another great (and free) option across the Apple ecosystem. Long ago, there was Folding Text… which is back! Another great outliner is MindNode, which reveals the structural similarity between mind maps and outlines.

Outliners are classically a top-to-bottom affair, with parents and children that you can focus on or hoist to narrow your view. Traverse takes a different approach, offering one view (of several) that show parents to children left to right, or horizontally. Think of Column view in macOS. This is a great use of space on widescreen displays, which is pretty much all of them these days.

Traverseis another player in the outliner space from Outliner Software, and I’m well impressed. Traverse uses OPML files. You can export to Markdown as a list or file, CSV, or even stream to Marked. It supports links to nodes within an outline, but Hookmark works in the app, too.

There’s a lot going on in Traverse’s inspector pane; you can convert nodes to to-dos, mark the node with a color, or add a note (one of my favorite OmniOutliner features).

Traverse offers three distinct views: Outline, Writer, and Column views. Outline view shows each line as a visually distinct node, with a round-rect drawn around the node. Writer view is a simpler mode, with reveal arrows to expand and collapse nodes. Column view is the most interesting, with nodes spilling left to right across the screen. While the first two modes are standard fare for an outliner, column view is a neat twist on the presentation of an outline.

There’s an iOS version of Traverse is there, but the app is a limited or companion version of the Mac’s (it’s also free). You can open and edit OPML files in iCloud, but it uses a folder on iCloud, where the Mac version’s defaults to a location in your home library (you can change the location on the Mac if you want to share Traverse’s Library. On iPadOS, Traverse’s Column view isn’t available on the iPad. I’d say that’s the central feature of this app, and hence a notable omission.

Where OmniOutliner, Bike, and Folding Text are document-based apps, Kosshi, MindNode, and Zavala are database-based apps. Traverse looks and acts like a database app despite using OPML files, which you can reveal in the Finder by right-clicking on the document’s title in the app’s library pane. This allows you to round-trip between other applications, sure; Traverse will prompt you to import external files to the app’s library, though.

An outline can be a project map, a writing structure, a research database, a decision tree, a study plan, a product roadmap, or a way to take apart an idea until you can see what it is made of.

Traverse leans into that. It is not trying to be a full task manager, a notes archive, a mind-mapping canvas, or a document editor. It is focused on helping you build, browse, reshape and export structured information.

Traverse blog

I took a PDF of a chapter of New Jersey’s Administrative Code that I reference a lot for work, and used Microsoft’s Copilot to create an OPML file that contains the full text of the chapter. I pulled that into Traverse to get a sense for how it would handle a large document with many nodes. The color coding for levels is a nice touch.

Traverse uses Apple Intelligence on your local machine, but you can also add other models to employ agent skills.

NetNewsWire Themes

Holy Crap… I j Netnewswire themes make feeds yours 2026 10 22. ust discovered these NetNewsWire Themes. Lots of fun and tasteful choices.

The French Fold

I’ve watched a pile of YouTube videos in search of omelette mastery. I’ve only ever had diner-style omelettes at restaurants, and while I liked them plenty, it turned out that there was a world of omelette-making techniques to explore. The version I love the most bears little resemblance to the diner-style omelette, but that doesn’t dampen my appreciation for the diner-style omelette when I eat at a diner.

Rhonda and I met up with Aaron last weekend, and we got to talking about omelette-making. It occurred to me that since buying the Blackstone, I haven’t made many omelettes indoors. And quite frankly, while the Blackstone makes a fine omelette, they don’t compare to the ones I developed a proficiency for using our stainless steel skillet.

The skillet is a challenge because it is not non-stick, at least not in the technical sense of the word. You can absolutely make an omelette in a stainless steel skillet, but you have to hew to a couple of rules:

Temperature: slowly heat the pan to at least 175°F. An infrared thermometer is an indispensable tool here.
Butter: use about 15 grams of butter for a three-egg omelette.

That’s mostly it. You should watch some videos if you’re not ready to break some eggs, but otherwise, just give it a shot. It’s a dish worth perfecting, however aspirational perfection may be in the fiddly world of protein, but entirely edible no matter how it comes out. In the worst case, you have a nice meal; in the best case, you’ve perfected a fussy culinary technique.

Sunday Serial: Traverse Outliner for macOS, Sarti Spritz, and Coco Larkin’s Soft-Boiled Eggs

CARROT Weatheris predicting some cool temps for the week ahead. I’m ready for it! It’s been kinda hot lately. I have learned that 50 degrees Fahrenheit is just fine for top-down driving.

Today’s installment of Sunday Serial features 33% software, and 66% epicure. Enjoy!

Traverse Outliner

Mac nerds love two things: RSS readers and outliners. (Not exclusively. Just extensively.) I spent well over a year using Windows 11, and a lot of that time searching for native RSS readers and outliners for the OS.

The Mac is an embarrassment of riches in these two categories.

Outliners are classically a top-to-bottom affair, with parents and children that you can focus on or hoist to narrow your view. Traverse takes a different approach, offering one view (of several) that shows parents to children left to right, or horizontally. Think of Column view in macOS. This is a great use of space on widescreen displays, which is pretty much all of them these days.

Traverse uses OPML files. You can export to Markdown as a list or file, CSV, or even stream to Marked. It supports links to nodes within an outline, but Hookmark works in the app, too.

Sarti Spritz

Rhonda and I love an Aperol Spritz any time of year, a fact about which I’ve spilled a fair amount of digital ink. There’s a great riff on the classic that swaps out the Aperol for Sarti. Sarti is a bit more fruity and less herbal than Aperol, but the blood orange flavor is great and keeps the drink from being too sweet. Looking forward to having these in the summer.

This particular mix is made with Autumn Lake’s excellent (if price) Boujee Pet Nat, a sparkling wine that’s perfectly dry and loosely effervescent.

Coco Larkin’s Soft-Boiled Eggs

Rhonda turned me on to Coco Larkin’s quick and easy recipe for soft-boiled eggs. You mash them up in a cup or bowl with a nub of butter. Enjoy with toast if you like, but I can see myself having these at the office san carbs.

Houdashspot

I’ve been perennially curious about HoudahSpot, despite how good I’ve found Spotlight to be over the years. The Siri+Spotlight combo has rankled me since it came out; so much of Liquid Glass has made interface elements bigger than I’d like, and Spotlight is no exception. Looking forward to writing up a more fulsome review, but for now, I’ve enjoyed creating some saved searches in HoudahSpot.

CleanShot 2026-10-17 at 4.52.41 PM@2x.

Sunday Serial: New Brunswick Edition

Rhonda and I drove up to New Brunswick yesterday to visit Aaron. The plan was to stop at Stokelan Estates Winery on the ride up, then Dinner with Aaron,, after which we’d retire to a nearby Marriot. Sunday would be some shopping with Aaron before heading back home. I am taking a vacation day tomorrow to take the Sunday Scaries out of robbing some joy from the occasion.

Our attempt at sharing a bottle and a flatbread at Stokelan was foiled by other people with the same idea. We stopped there, but they had no seats. We tried nearby Iron Plow/Tramonti, but they were closed for a private event. We figured we’d just high-tail it to New Brunswick, scoop up Aaron, and check in at the hotel.

We had stopped at Bagliani’s for salami and Gran Padano cheese, so we thought that we could grab a bottle of wine to take back to the hotel with us. We drove straight past Aaron’s house to a corner liquor store called Peters. The joint was full of students, and lots of them coming and going. Aaron was calling me on the phone while I was shopping; he saw us roll by in search of Peters.

Casa Ragazzi

Casa Ragazzi is a trendy Italian restaurant in downtown New Brunswick. I was excited to try it after I saw the menu, which appeared to offer the formal Italian dinner sequence: apps, followed by a small pasta course, and then a secondo, or meat course. We ordered this way and the waiter was surprised. That set off alarm bells; the arrival of both courses at once confirmed our suspicions. Our cocktails were great, though, and the food, while arriving at too-quick-of-a-pace, was delicious. Aaron and I split a T-bone florentine, and I finally had a chance to try guanciale.

Ruby Ke Kitchen Se

This week on Designed in California, Jason Snell interviewed Ron Johnson, the guy who created Apple’s retail stores. Johnson recently released a book about his career, including his long tenure at Apple. One thing that struck me is how Johnson talked about brick and mortar retail: he loves it. He talks about the opportunity to see things, to interact with aspirational purchases. He even posits a kind of communal effect of mall-shopping.

I don’t know about all of that, but as a kid of the 80s, I’ll always have fond mall memories. Sprinting between the anchor stores and stopping by KB to check out action figures, later shopping for acid-wash jeans, and countless slices of pizza. In that spirit, we often find outselves at the Menlo Park Mall when we visit Aaron.

It’s a nice mall, much nicer than our local malls, and they have an Apple Store. So we popped in to check out the 18 Pro, from the new colors (that burgundy is really dark!) to the aperture controls on the camera.

Between all of the walking and the 30-minute Peloton ride this morning, I was starving. We all agree to Indian for a late lunch/early dinner, and Yelp helpfully pointed us to Ruby Ke Kitchen Se, a quaint spot in nearby Edison. We had no recommendation save for Yelp’s, so we dodged the rain and ran inside.

Ruby Se Ktichen Se proved to be a revelation. We ordered a couple of chaat appetizers, including an Indochinese version of fried paneer. The sauce invoked both Thai and Chinese likenesses, and we were all well impressed.

The gentleman who served us (I’m guessing he’s the owner) shared a number of enlightening details. He talked about the Chinese cultural influences in the cuisine due to Chinese immigrants in India. Similarly, when we remarked about the difference in color between Aaron’s goat Korma and Rhonda’s chicken korma–Aaron’s was a darker, richer color, while Rhonda’s had more of a red, tomatoey aspect–he offered that making the same sauce and just swapping out the protein isn’t true to the cuisine, and hence the differences.

Tally, Shortcuts, and Drafts for Logging Calories

I wrote a while back about how I use Tally to track my calories when I’m not ready to enter them into FoodNoms (for example, out at our beloved Bellview Winery). Weighing your food and tracking it with an application like FoodNoms can be a cumbersome process, but one which will help you lose weight if you stick with it. It’s also a great way to learn about how much you’re eating, as we’re all prone to magical thinking about food and drink. And at the very least, tracking carefully in controlled situations helps you estimate portions when you’re out and about.

We once had one of the owners/waitresses at a local restaurant tell us how one guy comes in with a micro scale and weighs his sushi. She was befuddled by this behavior, but I could totally understand it. How many grams in a slice of salmon sashimi? It’s hard to know without a frame of reference.

Anyway, I started using Tally to track my calories when I’m out, and while it’s not as accurate as weighing my food, it’s better than completely guessing. I have a Tally set called “Food Log“ and I refill it with the kinds of food I’m likely to eat and drink when I’m out. It’s not comprehensive, but it’s a good alternative to trying to log every bite of asiago and sip of wine in FoodNoms.

Most of my Tallies represent portions of favorite foods and drink in grams; in some cases, the entries increment by 1 gram, while others are in higher increments (wine, for example, in 100-gram increments).

Tally has great Shortcuts support, as does Drafts.

Normally, I have to manually reset my Food Log Tally set to zero when I need to use it; the entries from my last usage are still there. I learned that Tally has a reset Shortcut.

I realized at one point that I could export my Tallies to Drafts, which I realized was a good idea: rather than nuke a set I forgot to log, I could export the set and save it in Drafts for later logging to FoodNoms.

I got to thinking: can I automate the process of exporting my Tallies to Drafts? I peeked at Shortcuts and realized that yes, I could.

It’s a pretty simple workflow:
– get the contents of the Tally set “Food Log”
– create a draft in Drafts from the Tally set
– append the current date to the draft
– reset the Food Log Tally set

That was pretty easy to do, and then I thought, can I automate it so that every night, right before midnight, the Shortcut would run? Once again, the answer was yes.

I created a new Shortcut, called Run Reset Tally Set Nightly, which, at 11:59 9pm, fires the Tally to Drafts Shortcut.

The only thing left to do is to figure out how I can export the Tally set data to FoodNoms.

I don’t use Shortcuts much, but when it works, it’s great.

Shortcut to Log Tally Set Data to Drafts

I have the list archived in Drafts each night, and it looks just like it does in Tally.

Tally Data from Yesterday, Archived in Drafts

Sunday Serial: Wandering Rose Grill and Café, Coco Larkin Cooks, and Bellview Winery’s Gruner Veltliner

It’s been a quiet weekend here in rural East Vineland. I was in a fine mood all day Friday, buzzing with weekend anticipation. Next Saturday we’re going up to New Brunswick for a quick overnight visit with Aaron. We’re going to dine out at Casa Ragazzi before he heads out for social activities. I’m looking forward to taking some pictures and having a nice dinner with him. It’s a three-day weekend for us next weekend, so that will make Sunday a nice treat, too. We can push off the scaries for a day and enjoy the weekend.

Wandering Rose Grill and Café

We recently found that a former Chinese restaurant in town, which was briefly a Jersey-style diner, is now a Turkish restaurant. This got my antennae up right away: we’ve never had a Turkish restaurant in town, and I’ve never had Turkish food. Upon our first investigation, I was pleased to see entirely unfamiliar dishes on the menu, as opposed to a dinner-adjacent menu with a few Turkish dishes. (There are plenty of American-style items, too.)

We’ve been a handful of times, and the food has always been good. We’ve tried the Mezze table appetizer a bunch of times, which is a collection of small dishes to share, including hummus and baba ghanoush. Joe has tried the pide a few times, while Rhonda is serially drawn to the Köfte. I’ve wandered around the menu, and Friday night I tried a special, which was a kind of beef stew over a creamy version of their baba ghanoush.

Needless to say, we take a couple of bottles of Bellview wine with us on our visits to the Wandering Rose.

Coco Larkin Cooks

Rhonda discovered Coco Larkin Cooks on social media, and she was inspired to try a few of her recipes. Many of her recipes skew French, so there’s some heavy cream and butter involved. Rhonda has made her chicken thighs au poivre for dinner a few times, and it’s been a hit (and an unexpected one at that; I wouldn’t have thought that chicken thighs au poivre would be a thing).

My TikTok and Instagram feeds are full of comedians and guys doing dumb shit, but Coco Larkin Cooks is a welcome addition to the mix.

Bellview Winery’ Gruner Veltliner

Speaking of wine and Bellview, since they don’t have any dry whites on tap, I’ve been picking up a couple of their reds on tap. Last week, I got a small growler of their Chambourcin, which is a dry, more acidic red. They blend it in all kinds of things, but they have it straight up on tap right now (I think it’s almost gone). Their Cabernet Franc recently replaced their excellent Saperavi on tap, the latter of which is being bottled. After comparing the Chambourcin to the Cab Franc, I can definitively say that I prefer the Cab Franc.

Anyway, a lack of on-tap dry white options has been trying bottles that I haven’t tried in a long time. I’ve been enjoying their Mixtape blend for a while, and that one holds up over repeated tastings. I eyeballed the bottle yesterday while we were having some salami and cheese with some wine on prem at the winery, and realized it’s about 50% Gruner. A couple of recent bottles of the Gruner proper have cemented it as a favorite, which explains why I like the Mixtape blend so much.

Their Traminette is also featured in the Mixtape blend, and so I tried that a few weeks ago. Alas, it’s “off-dry” or “semi-sweet,” and hence not a go-to for my tastes. Their Pinto Grigio is excellent, I’ve learned over repeated tastings, and a tasty companion for dinners out.

But boy do I love their Gruner.

Mazda Miata MX-5 Tight LInes

Sunday Serial, Update Edition: SoundSource 7, Dell S2725QC, and Mellel

Finding new and exciting applications and hardware is fun. But sometimes, you just have to update some infrastructure.

SoundSource from Rogue Amoeba

SoundSource from Rogue Amoeba has been invaluable for me, especially during the pandemic, when I spent a lot of time on Google Meet calls. It allows you to select the sound outputs for different applications, rather than the system-wide setting. It sits in the menu bar, allowing for quick and easy changes to your Mac’s sound output. Version 5 wasn’t updated for macOS Golden Gate, so I updated to version 6 this weekend.

Dell S2725QC 4k Display

Dell Dell - S2725QC 27" IPS LED 4K UHD 120Hz 8ms FreeSync Premium Monitor with HDR (HDMI, DisplayPort, USB) - Ash White — Dell Dell – S2725QC 27″ IPS LED 4K UHD 120Hz 8ms FreeSync Premium Monitor with HDR (HDMI, DisplayPort, USB) – Ash White

I’m going to write up something more fulsome about this display, but this has replaced the Samsung 27” G7 curved display that I’ve been using at the office. The Samsung runs at 2560 × 1440, which isn’t a resolution macOS treats kindly, and the 109 PPI makes macOS look a bit fuzzy and blown up.

The Dell S2725QC display is a 4k display, which runs at 3840 × 2160 and offers 163 PPI. It looks super sharp when plugged into my MacBook Air M4. The oldish M1 iMac on my desk at work still boasts a tighter display, but only at 24”.

I’ve been so happy with my Samsung 32” 4k display at home that I had a hard time imagining that a 27” display would be a good fit for me. At home, my Samsung U32J59x runs at 3840 × 2160, but the 138 PPI makes the OS chrome look a bit more blown up compared to the Dell. I’ve always looked at the 32” Samsung at home as a treat after a day at the office staring at the 27”, but the Dell is putting the Samsung to shame.

Mellel

I have tried, where I can, to avoid using Microsoft Word. That’s partly because it’s been a crappy Mac app in the past. I don’t think that’s the case now, but I also don’t really care for it that much (Excel is a different story). I used Nisus Writer Pro for years, back when I was writing psychological reports for a living. I liked it a lot, and it felt like a Mac app. It seems dead, though, which is a shame.

In the meantime, Mellel has been offering a Nisus Writer to Mellel crossgrade. I tried Mellel back in the Intel Mac days, and while I liked it plenty, I settled on Nisus Writer Pro. I’m glad to see that Mellel is still in business, and taking advantage of the gap in the market by offering this crossgrade.

It opens the rtfd files that I’ve created over the years in Nisus Writer Pro, and seems capable of handling Word files, depending upon the complexity of the formatting in the file.

Sunday Serial: Snouts and Stouts Brewing, Mochi Type, and Colori

I just got back inside after washing the cars. I learned a trick from Aaron to avoid swirl marks on the paint when he washed his Mini Cooper after trialing the foam cannon this past summer: I noticed he was drying the surface after hand washing in a straight up and down motion, rather than in a circular motion. I’ve tried it a few times since, and I can’t argue with the results. I hand wash that way now, too.

It’s a very satisfying thing, to learn something from your kids.

Snouts and Stouts Brewing in Hammonton, NJ

We had a family dinner at the excellent Rocco’s in Hammonton last night to celebrate Rhonda’s birthday, which is tomorrow. We left home early so that we could stop at Bagliani’s for some of their salami and cheese, as well as a few other things. We had some time to kill before our 6pm reservation, so we drove over to Snouts and Stouts Brewingto have a a beer. Rhonda had an Newfie IPA, which is a hazy brew made with Citra, Mosaic, and Nelson hops. I’m not familiar with Nelson hops, but we’re both big fans of Citra. Glasstown Brewery in Millville makes a unique brew called Mosaic Man, which is hopped exclusively using Mosaic hops and has endeared me to Mosaic. I had a hard time choosing which beer to try, as they had a kolsch, a German pilsner, and an Oktoberfest on tap. I ended up trying a Marzen, which had a great malt-to-hops balance. We can’t wait to go back.

Mochi Type

When I was in high school many years ago, the recommended sequence of courses for college-bound students was to take four years of a foreign language–in my case, French. Owing to the small size of my high school, taking four years of French was incompatible with taking a typing elective.

My mom, thoughtful person that she is, signed me up for eight weeks of typing lessons with a teacher from our local public high school after school. I drove to her house during the fall of my senior year, where she taught me the QWERTY keyboard layout and how to type on an electric typewriter. Due to this experience, I am able to touch type at a reasonable speed.

Learning how to type has come in decidedly more useful than French in the intervening years.

I found Mochi Type on the latest Bundlehunt sale, and it’s a gorgeous typing tutor. There are a plethora of color schemes, including the default Dracula-based theme. Mochi will teach you the basics, if you don’t know them already, but if you do, you can jump right in and practice. Error rate and words per minute are calculated after each one-minute practice session, and it shows your progress over time.

Colori

I’m not a designer, but I do like to view color palettes for setting up styles in applications like Ulysses and OmniOutliner. Colori offers 800 five-color palettes to inspire your design. It’s a satisfying digital version of the paint chips you’d find at a hardware store.

Zoom Zoom and the Cost of Gas

I reluctantly traded in my 2013 Mustang GT for a 2025 Mazda MX-5 Miata Club. I haven’t regretted it yet, although I do miss the Mustang’s throaty roar. One inducement: Siri AI calculates that I’m saving about $100 a month on gas. All that and having a top-down blast.

Field Notes Hometown Series: Portland

Having exhausted my supply of the Chicago-design Field Notes, I ordered a new set of Field Notes from the Portland series. These look great. I got some super-gooey gel pens with 1.0mm tips just for fun.

Uncorrected

By Alex Nonnemacher