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.
Task Manager TMOG
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.
Escape from Duckov
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.
ExtraBar Launcher Mode
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.