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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
We’re no strangers to prolific, year-round grilling since forever. A succession of Weber kettle grills–I’d say two over the last 30 years–have served us through sweltering summers and cold dark winters. This weekend is no exception.
Last night, we had my parents over to celebrate Labor Day, for which I cooked a picanha roast, a Brazilian steakhouse cut of beef. I cooked it in a sous vide tank for about four hours at 129°F before searing it on the grill. Picanha is a roast cut from the top sirloin, with a layer of fat on top. So in the tank and on the grill, it bastes itself sorta-kinda.
I had some apple wood from the last time we smoked ribs, and I decided to throw some on the fire yesterday. I can’t say that I noticed a difference (apple wood being a mild smoke), but I’m using the same technique, such as it is, with tonight’s dinner.
Today we’re having a growing grill staple recipe featuring chicken thighs. These always come out great and require such little attention. The local corn is still in season, and we have a complement of long hot peppers from the garden. Oh, and some heirloom tomatoes from the garden as well.
I made this habanero relish today: chopped habaneros, a sprinkle of kosher salt, and a dash of apple cider vinegar.
My cheeky title portmanteaus two similar, but distinct, methods of outdoor cooking. The roast was a straight-up grill: high heat and a short cook time. The chicken thighs were cooked low and slow over a couple of hours over indirect heat, and benefit a great deal from the smoke flavor. This brings my inner pedant great joy.
It’s a Sunday that feels like a Saturday!
I managed to replace the faucet in the upstairs kitchen; it was leaking a bit at the handle, and my previous attempt to remove the handle only made the leak worse. I put the repair off long enough to replace my basin wrench, which had gone missing.
I got the wrench and summoned the gumption to replace the faucet yesterday after coffee. I did not, in turns out, need the basin wrench; the design of the faucet is such that it includes the hot and cold water lines in the unit. It’s the second faucet I’ve replaced that came from the factory this way, but I forgot that it was a thing. So while removing the old faucet was a bit of a pain, once removed, the new installation was a breeze.
It’s a feeling of accomplishment to get something like that done. I always worry a bit with plumbing stuff that a supply pipe will break when I’m working on a faucet or another fixture, but happily, this was a quick and easy job. Special thanks to vice grip pliers and a can of Liquid Wrench for making it happen.
I stopped by Bellview Winery in Landisville, NJ, on Friday to pick up a couple of bottles of wine, and they had their new Saperavi on tap, which often precedes bottling at the winery, but is sometimes their way to test a new wine before going whole hog.
It’s a dark and luscious red, with notes of blackberry and black pepper. There’s a ton of berry up front before the tannins weight in. It’s a tart wine for sure.
I have a Picanha in the sous vide tank that’s going to pair nicely with this wine.
A new dry red grape coming soon to Bellview Winery. This red has notes of blackberry and black pepper. Fans of Syrah or Malbec should stop in and give this wine a taste.
Cotypist version 2026.4 adds a feature that I was hoping for: iCloud Sync across your Macs. I have an M1 Studio at home, and a MacBook Air for work, and I use both enough that a shared base of autocomplete behavior would be very much appreciated in Cotypist.
One of the privacy-forward virtues Cotypist has always extolled is its on-device storage model: all of the processing happens on your Mac. In addition to not switching context to a chatbot, you use the app you need while Cotypist scaffolds your writing.
And now, we have encrypted sync across devices via iCloud.
Developer Enrico Bonaldo recently released his take on an RSS reader for iOS. Having too many RSS readers to choose from is a good problem to have; I serially switch between Unread, Reeder Classic, NetNewsWire, Current, and Fiery Feeds; I love each of them for the unique features that define their character.
Newsairy has a crisp look and feel. There are a number of settings to tweak to customize your reading experience. And Newsairy supports Feedbin, among other aggregators.
Bloody hell: The SummerFest software site is go! Cotypist and Hookmark are easy endorsements for just about anyone, and Scrivener is a must-have for writers. I’ve got my eye on Mellel: the unresolved grief over Nisus Writer’s demise, and a lingering reluctance to even open Microsoft Word, has found me kicking Mellel’s tires once again.
Imagine my surprise and delight when I found that seven (seven!) episodes of Designed in California, the podcast on Relay FM from Jason Snell and Myke Hurley, dropped today… but most notably, that the arc of this segment highlights the evolution of macOS from System 7 to OS X. This was probably peak Apple for me, at least at the latter end of the throughline. I’d been using a Mac since System 7, when I came home from my senior trip to find a Mac Color Classic waiting for me to take to college. I wrote my salutatorian speech on it (with Wordprefect, no less), and played a lot of Prince of Persia. I went from a person who didn’t care about computers to a nerd overnight. It’s great to listen to Jason and John Siracusa recount the details, while Myke asks questions and adds commentary. Glad I backed this Kickstarter.
I’m often impressed, if not merely satisfied, by the quality of the food we enjoy at home. Rhonda and I both very much love going out to dinner, but it’s nice to not only know your way around the home kitchen, but also to be able to make such abiding memories.
One of the nice things about Rhonda being home in the summer is that she picks up some special groceries when she’s out. This week, she stopped at Marcacci’s, our most frequently visited butcher, and picked up two porterhouse steaks. She had them cut to order, with the idea that we’d attempt to recreate our visit to Osteria in Philly.
I cooked the steaks sous vide at 128 degrees for a few hours; I rub them with olive oil, salt, and black pepper before confining them in a vacuum bag. After a bath in the tank and a short rest at room temperature, I finished them on the grill: lots of lump charcoal = lots of heat.
Meanwhile, Rhonda made a potato gratin, as well as the pearl onions and mushrooms that adorned the preparation we enjoyed at Osteria.
The potato dish was something Rhonda saw on Facebook, and there wasn’t a recipe for it, so she had to wing it. It came out great, though. And boy does it make for good pictures.
We enjoyed some of Bellview’s Argento red with dinner. I’m having some right now, in fact.
On Saturday, I had a three-egg omelette myself, but I made one of these for Joe. It’s a Bays English Muffin, with two fried eggs (prepared in a ring mold on the Blackstone), three strips of bacon, and two slices of Cooper Sharp. Oh yeah: buttered the muffin, too.
The beginning of the 2026-27 school year is upon us! Summer is always a busy time at work, which most people don’t realize. There’s a lot of prep work that goes into the start of the school year. I will miss the shorter work days and longer weekends of summer, but it’s good to return to the routine as well.
Earlier today I washed the cars; I hit the Miata, WRX, and Joe’s Impreza with the foam cannon, and then gave the Miata a quick hand wash because of the hard water spots. Everything is looking good now!
There’s that hint of fall in the late afternoon air. I noticed it coming back in from the pool just now.
Leo Laporte mentioned TMOG on MacBreak Weekly last week, so I decided to give it a try. TMOG unifies some disparate utilities on your Mac (or Windows or Linux box) into a single app. You can see CPU and memory usage, GPU and disk activity, and even what your Mac’s Neural Engine is up to. There’s plenty more, including your status apps, running processes, and running services. TMOG doesn’t rest on its feature set, though; it has a customizable color palette and some unique visual tweaks to make it all your own.
It looks like there’s a pro mode in the works, too, but you can’t currently buy it.
This quirky extraction shooter harkens the name of another shooter, Escape from Tarkov, but you play as a duck who must marshal resources in order to escape from his egg-shaped planet. I was not initially interested in the game when I first saw it on the App Store, but something about it kept me coming back. I watched a few YouTube reviews and thought, despite the cutesy graphics, that it might be worth checking out.
There’s a crafting element and some resource management to keep the gaming interesting, and the combat is surprisingly deep.
App launchers are a solid genre of Mac utility apps, and there are many great choices, including LaunchBar (my favorite), Alfred, Quicksilver, and Raycast. I was surprised by an email from the ExtraBar team on Saturday announcing a launcher mode. I expected another take on an app launcher, but that’s not what it is. Instead, ExtraBar’s launcher mode is a way to invoke your active presets from a launcher menu, and you can type the name of the preset you want to run. It looks great and is a neat twist on this highly customizable utility.
If one of the limitation of ExtraBar is that your preset items can start to grow in number and hence occupy more screen real estate, the launcher mode is way to keep your config out of sight until you need it. I’m thinking this will be a great way to get more usage out of ExtraBar while keeping UI clutter to a minimum. Very cool.
My parents had a sailboat when I was a kid, from maybe when I was in sixth grade to into my adulthood. Until I was old enough to work or stay home alone, we used to go down to the marina on the Eastern Shore of Maryland to sit in the boat. I say sit in the boat because, while the summer seems like the obvious season for sailing, it’s not a great time for it. The summer in on the Chesapeake Bay is notable for lots of heat and humidity, but not much wind.
Convertibles aren’t that different, a fact I learned when I had my 2000 Toyota MR2 Spyder. It was great to drive with the top down on the way into work in the early mornings, but not so great on the ride home, when temps often flirted with a high of 100 degrees.
I bring this up because this week has been punctuated by chilly morning commutes and glorious evening cruises home. I wore a hoodie in to work this morning, but my five pm drive was about perfect, weather-wise. I’m hoping to enjoy top-down driving for the next two months before buttoning up the car for the winter. So while a convertible is notionally a summer vehicle, the best drives bookend the hottest of seasons.
I’ve been saying for years that there’s not much I need in a car outside of the basics: Bluetooth, electric windows, and a manual transmission. That’s understating the case, of course; there’s a lot more to a “basic” car than that.
But the Miata purposefully doesn’t push the creature comforts. I do have lane departure warning, for example, but it’s hella more conservative than my son’s Impreza, for example, and the nanny-state features on the WRX are entirely absent. (The WRX yells at me to keep my eyes on the road when they very much are on the road, and even to take a break once in a while.)
Outside of some seriously niche rides, the Miata is pretty close to the definition of simplicity.
This is not a fast car. But that’s not the point, and everyone who drives one or reviews one says so. But there are a few things to consider:
I sold my MR2 Spyder because we had kids and I needed backseats. I also needed to drive to work in crummy weather. The Spyder had to go when my VW Golf beater left our employ. I don’t have to worry about backseats anymore; my “kids” both drive, and are legal adults. And Rhonda and I have a practical car: the WRX. (I consider myself lucky to call the WRX our practical car.)
Interestingly, this brand-new MX-5 costs less to ensure than the 2013 Mustang GT that preceded it. And not that you can count on such a deal, but I got free lifetime oil changes from the dealership.
The Miata is a sheer delight to drive. A handful of little things make it so, beyond the aforementioned characteristics:
Aaron is off to Rutgers for his second year of college. We rode up with him while I was on vacation to help get his apartment set up, and we briefly considered driving up with him yesterday for the same reason, but he was able to get everything in his car, and seemed confident that he’d be fine making the trip solo. So we white knuckled our Saturday afternoon while he made the journey, and then relaxed at Bellview for some wine and snacks. You never know when you’re doing too much, too little, or just enough. But we are definitely missing him today.
I stopped by Bellview Winery Thursday after work to fill up a growler with their Gemini blend, which I’ve been enjoying very much. Sadly, they were out, and there was no other dry white on tap. One of the staff members suggested that I try their Mixtape blend, which is blended using their Gruner, Traminette, and Viognier grapes. It’s soft and fruity, perfectly dry. We had a bottle yesterday, too. I grabbed a bottle of their Leo, too, which we had last year at their 25th anniversary party. It’s more tart than the Mixtape, redolent with grapefruit flavors.
The New York Times’ Melissa Kirsch recently shared an online game, Clues by Sam. It’s a grid-based puzzle game where you have to identify the criminals in the array based on clues provided. It’s pretty challenging, but you can take your time with it.
Andreas Gohr’s love letter to blogging isn’t a post about blogging; instead, it’s a service that connects you to a random post at a personal blog. It’s a great alternative to doom scrolling social media, and is a guaranteed way to find something interesting to read. The site even reminds you of the last six posts you’ve seen, with links to their Mastodon and RSS feeds.
There’s hummus and veggies and salami too.
Via Manton Reece:
The IndieWeb works the same way. Nobody’s waiting for permission to have a website. You don’t need a “content strategy.” You don’t need a niche. You need a place that’s yours, and the nerve to hit publish.
11 years ago yesterday I brought home my first WRX, a red 2016 model. I wasn’t looking for a red WRX at the time, but they were kinda tricky to find in my area. My original notion was to buy a silver one, but the dealership had a red one in stock in the trim I wanted, so I went for it. It was a great car and the color ending up being most fetching.
On the wall at Osteria in Philly:
