I caught this segment of an interview with Mel Robbins where she describes the three “pillars” of friendship: proximity, timing, and energy. The first, proximity, really rung my bell.

When I was in college, I’d usually accompany a select group of friends to a brew pub or low-key bar with good beer and shoot the shit. Often, it was just me and Mike, a friend I haven’t seen in decades. We lost touch shortly after college. He hiked the Appalachian Trail, joined the peace corps, and became a mountain hiking guide.

I remember remarking to him one night back in 1992 or 1993 over pints something almost identical to Robbins first pillar: that friendship is determined by proximity. After we lost touch, I got to feeling bad that maybe it was more my perspective on the matter than any sociological phenomenon that influenced it.

I guess Mel would have agreed with me.

You can use LaunchBar to search Marginalia alongside other engines. Using LaunchBar’s Search Templates feature, you can add the following:

https://marginalia-search.com/search?query=*

Last Sunday, inspired largely by interest in how fucking intensely I experience the cold these days, I wanted to know what my body fat percentage was. I looked around a while ago (from the sofa) for where and how to do that, but it appeared to require a drive to Philly or Central Jersey. A simpler solution emerged in the Withings Body Smart scale, which was on sale on Amazon.

I’ve been weighing myself on our old bathroom scale, which works just fine. I manually logged my weight in the Health app on my iPhone. The app shows you the changes over time, and you can vary the scale. It’s been a useful companion.

This version of data tracking is anachronistic compared to the rest of my life. With the Apple Watch and iPhone, I can track multiple data points, including workouts, without much, if any, effort on my part. The most analogous task is entering my food data in Foodnoms. With this app, I manually log what I eat, although I have some pre-set items (like Manhattans) that I follow to make logging easy.

So! No longer. With the Withings, you sync your scale with the Withings app on your phone. The Withings app collects data from your weigh-ins, but also analyzes data from other sources, too (if you give it permission to access your health data). It has a lot to say about the quality of my sleep, for example, using nothing more than the same data that Apple Health collects.

The Body Smart measures your weight, but also reports “body composition” data as well. This apparently disaggregates your fat mass, reported as a percentage, from your muscle mass. It further reports visceral fat, lean mass, and bone mass. So you can see what you’re lugging around each day in your bag of bones.

This scale also reports a heart rate, but it’s always higher than what my watch reports, so I don’t trust the number. Maybe I’m excited to be stepping on Darrh Vader’s scale.

And about the body fat: I’m gonna be cagey. But let’s say I loosened the reigns a bit.

Here’s this week’s list of things to check out. This is a special sportsball edition of Sunday Serial:

Readkit

Where Windows is a barren wasteland of RSS readers\<1>, the Mac and iOS are a bounty of riches. Readkit has been around for a long time, but its most recent incarnation is the fastest and best version yet. I love how it handles showing and hiding the feed list on an iPad rotated to portrait orientation. It’s a cheap subscription and worth it even if you hop between readers (as do I).

Grinder

I am prone to rising at the same time every morning on the weekends (vacations are an exception, when the mornings slowly unfurl into something more organic). I am likewise the earliest riser in the house on any given morning, because those meters aren’t going to row themselves. As such, there are occasions when I need to grind coffee, but am loathe to engage the burr grinder and wake my slumbering brood. To remedy this, I ordered a cheap-ish manual burr grinder, which arrived this morning. Aaron and I both made cups of AeroPress, and it was delicious. For emergencies only, of course.

Human Graciousness

Thank you.

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\^1\ Using Windows, for the end user, is like using a Chromebook.

I wrote about xSearch here on Uncorrected around Christmas, and I still think it’s a neat utility. One thing that I was curious about, orthogonally related to xSearch, was alternative search engines. I use Google and Duck Duck Go all the time and generally find the search results useful, but one thing that I did observe was that many of the most interesting posts that I’ve read, especially in the software/tech nerd realm, are from small, independent blogs and sites. Google and Duck Duck Go generally show me results from larger sites, and there’s a lot of SEO bullshit and listicles and things of questionable quality that come up in search results. To remedy this, I started poking around the web for alternatives to some of the big dogs.

Marginalia Search “prioritizes non-commercial content,” according to Marginalia. I’m just dipping my toes into the engine so I can’t say much about the results, but it does sport a “Blogs” filter.

It’s a simple trick to add Marginalia to xSearch:

LaunchBar next!

I set my Mac and phone to military time probably 12 or so years ago. That’s a conspicuously nebulous timeframe for remembering when a person decided to complicate his life.

My adoption of military time nearly bit me today; I almost made a rez at the Maplewood for 4:30 pm, because 1630 is 4:30 for civilians. My intention was a quiet table for two at a beloved local spot: at 6:30. Which is 1830.

Fun, right?

If you don’t know how military time works

But the other side of this is… I had to solve a little problem. It was a few seconds, and probably good for my brain.

Always nice to see. Let the deluge commence.

I want to be gracious in my hypothesizing about why using OneDrive might be required to use Copilot on the Mac in Office, but it smells like Enshirtification. They do this kind of thing on Windows, too.

Here’s this week’s list of things to check out:

Blk Shp

This is a small plates/tapas-style joint in quaint Swedesboro. There was a sports ball game on, so it was empty. Cocktails, wine, and good nummies abound. We tried pork “wings,” hanger steak, tacos, brie flatbread, and more. You should definitely go.

Micro.blog

I set up a micro.blog a while back but didn’t see the point in continuing. I’m not sure if I was even posting regularly here on Uncorrected at the time. But I’ve wanted recently to post more photo-only stuff, but I really don’t want to fuck around with Instagram anymore. Indieweb, anyone? Anyway, I’m back.

SimpleScan

From the creator of the must-have iOS/macOS Drafts comes SimpleScan. Scanning to your iPhone or iPad is way simpler than ever, and SimpleScan delights knowledge workers even more. Scan to the Files app, an email, text, or elsewhere.

Connor Beaton on the Modern | Wisdom Podcast:

Grief is the Natural Way We Honor What Love Misses

There’s much more to this episode, including the connection between grief and success. Worth a listen.

Modern Wisdom #890 – Connor Beaton – A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings

I noticed that I got a copy of Steven Sinofsky’s latest Hardcore Software Substack post in my inbox, and realized that I hadn’t moved it over to Feedbin. After doing this, I wondered: could I just email myself something at my Feedbin newsletter email address and have it show up in my feed?

Lo and behold, you can indeed. I’m not sure how much I’ll use this, but it’s a cool feature. A didn’t see that it was documented, but I guess the mechanism is the same.

I made an unschedule for today just to build the habit. I should have made one for tomorrow but bed calls.