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.

   

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.

I rolled up to New Brunswick to pick up Aaron Thursday afternoon, and we made it back home in very good time. His little Mini Cooper is a blast to drive, and feels solid on the turnpike at speed. How come no-one understands how to drive on multi-lane highways? I spend the whole ride up bobbing and weaving.

Winterfest 2025

The holiday software deals continue apace, and Winterfest is here again. Many of the stalwart apps are back this year, including Tinderbox, Scrivener, and BBEdit are there, along with some others I’ve been curious about. I’m test-driving Cotypist now.

Trickster for macOS

Speaking of Winterfest, Trickster was on sale, so I purchased a license. I’ve tried Trickster out before, and really liked the app. It’s kind of a Finder smart folder on steroids.

One of the features I discovered is that, when you invoke Trickster, with a click of the mouse, you can restrict the filter results to only show the application you’re working in. Sometimes, you want to see all of the files you’ve worked on in the last 24 hours, but you can restrict the filter to just Word docs, for example. I created a filter to show me all of the Bike and OmniOutliner files I’ve been working on.

I’d love to see support for Safari tabs in Trickster, although I don’t think that’s its intended use.

One critical limitation is that Trickster can’t help you with apps that store files within their own database. For example, you can’t see documents you’ve been working on in Ulysses, or notes in Notes, or maps in MindNode Next. You can see those applications, though.

And: Integrations with Hookmark and Launchbar!

The Week Between, or TWB25

I’ve adopted the naming scheme that I use at work to designate projects and reference materials to the Week Between, one of my favorite times of the year. For matters pertaining to the school year, I’ve been doing “SY26” for this fiscal year, and projections for the next year using SY27.

I like to list things to do for the week between, unsurprisingly, in various software pockets; OmniFocus is an obvious place for list making, but I started last year farting around with MindNode a bit, and I cracked open my plans from last year and updated. MindNode is very much a mind mapping tool, but the overlap between it an a classic outliner is significant; you could easily use it as one of the prettiest outliners around and never venture into mind map mode.

I find OmniFocus is a great place to get a list of things together as they come to mind, but then I use MindNode to organize the activities and ideas I have into specific days of the week. It’s not a hard and fast schedule, but it keeps me from letting the days laze by without any purpose. Not that those kinds of days aren’t rewarding, too.

As is the case with baseball, I have intended to learn about photography for a while now. Since upgrading my Olympus E-PL5 with an OM Systems E-M10 Mark IV, and then subsequently finding a new use case for my E-PL5, I’m starting to pay more attention to gear and technique.

The E-PL5 came with a kit lens, an M.Zuiko zoom that shoots from 14mm to 44. I understood that this was some kind of zoom lens, which to a budget-minded buyer dipping a toe into the prosumer world of digital cameras, makes a lot of sense. I had, in short order, added a 17mm Panasonic Lumix 1.7 pancake lens to the E-PL5, and that was pretty much curtains for the kit lens.

For the rare instances when I might need some serious magnification, I purchased a cheap Olympus 40-150mm 1:4–5.6 Zoom Lens.

The kit lens, though, is neat in that you can switch between focal lengths that equal 35mm and 50mm, a lens shooting at which is referred to as a “nifty fifty.” And having researched lenses a bit, the kit lens actually is well regarded. It is, however, plasticky.

I decided to order a used Panasonic LUMIX G 25mm f/1.7 off of eBay in the interest of experimenting with this length. I have nothing but praise for the 17mm wide angle LUMIX, but the temptation of a “nifty fifty,” with its lifelike perspective, was too irresistible to bear.

I forgot to include this pic in last night’s duck post. We grabbed a growler of Bellview’s Demeter Friday. It’s a dry red, blended from their San Marco, Merlot, Chambourcin and Petit Verdot. Paired nicely.

I mentioned OmniOutliner 6 in a recent Sunday Serial. It’s a great Mac app, incredibly powerful if you need it, and a simple outliner if that’s all you need, too. I harbor a great affection for OmniOutliner; it came bundled with my some of my earliest Macs from the heady early days of OS X, and in those days, there was a dearth of software. OmniOutliner was a NeXT app that moved over to the Mac, and will always have a place in my heart–and my SSD.

But this post isn’t about OmniOutliner. It’s about Bike.

Bike launched nearly twenty years after I found OmniOutliner, from the great developerJesse Grosjean, who operates Hog Bay Software. Hog Bay has always made fascinating writing apps: WriteRoom, one of the earliest Markdown writing apps available for both the Mac and iPad, FoldingText, TaskPaper, and most recently, Bike.

Digression Alert: TaskPaper

I have always loved Hog Bay’s TaskPaper, even though I don’t use it. I have a license, because I want this app to thrive. It’s a simple, text-based task manager, and there’s nothing about it I don’t like. My professional life and its attendant needs don’t scale to its parsimony, but that’s not TaskPaper’s fault. It is, in spirit and function, essential–not in the sense that it’s a must-have, but that it’s born of a pure, distilled focus. It could not possibly attract any kind of casual fan base; the person who downloads, uses, and purchases TaskPaper is a rare bird.

What’s beautiful about TaskPaper is what’s beautiful about html: you type plain text, but the interaction you have with what you typed is decidedly–magically– rendered. In the same way that modern Markdown writing applications render your Markdown syntax on the fly, TaskPaper recognizes particular formatting characters, and render the results in a functional way that harness the power of the Mac’s GUI.

Mac Nerds Only

Hog Bay’s wares are pretty much Mac only. You can open most of their file formats on your iPad or iPhone, but it’s not a simple multi-platform affair a la Notes, OmniFocus, or OmniOutliner.

Again, this isn’t so much Hog Bay’s hangup as mine. As I need the complexity of OmniFocus, I want to hop between Mac, iPad, and iPhone.

I do, however, like to imagine myself as the inevitable old duffer I’ll become, with simpler needs than I have now, using TaskPaper for imposing a modicum of order to what will surely be an inordinate amount of farting around.

Bike

Back to Bike! I found myself this week needing to write a summary for our legal counsel, and in a fit of indecision, prevaricated on which text app to write up my thoughts. BBEdit? Notes? Drafts?

And the thought seized me: Hey! Bike!

You can easily cobble together a simple outline in Bike. It tis built for outlining. But it’s a great rich text editor, too, so you can use it that way. It’s less intimidating than an IDE or text editor like BBEdit, but it’s dead simple to use. It’s markdown friendly, but boasts its own file format, which you can render simply by changing the file suffix.

At the office, I tried to format some text, and Bike prompted me to upgrade my license, which had lapsed. I didn’t need to–but I wanted to. I want Bike around. I want it around for a long, long time. Just like TaskPaper.

It’s on sale for Black Friday. Check out Bike!

My process for Sunday Serial involves taking some notes in Ulysses during the week, scanning my “Grist” and “Drafts” collections in said app, and browsing pics I took during the week for content. I was nervous yesterday prepping for this week’s post, because I didn’t have much going on. Fortunately, Saturday and Sunday yielded some fruit, enumerated below for your reading enjoyment.

Need I saw its spritzes and apps before we have some shrimp later on?

Aaron’s coming home Wednesday for Thanksgiving, so we’re both looking forward to that. I imagine I’ll have plenty of grist for next week’s post, and curating today’s left me some future grist for this particular mill. Best to you and thanks for stopping by!

OmniOutliner 6

OmniOutliner version 6 is currently in beta. Like its more famous offspring, OmniFocus, version 6 brings a unified architecture to all of Apple’s platforms. OmniFocus sprang from the venerable outliner, inspired by Ethan Schoonover’s Kinkless GTD. Kinkless was a set of AppleScripts that enabled OmniOutliner mavens a way to automate a GTD-style productivity system. I’ve used OmniOutliner for all kinds of things, and still do. I love the new color-swapped black and orange icon.

Cedar Rose Winery

The ladies in the office were very kind in gifting me a certificate to Cedar Rose, a local winery across town that we haven’t been to yet. Rhonda and I were put off by the gray cold Saturday and Bellview’s lack of torches last week, so we opted to burn up the gift certificate and try something new. Fun fact: when I was at Vineland Public Schools, the winery’s founders participated in an advisory board for an agricultural tech program the district was exploring. They were local high school grads who had gone to school together for agricultural science, and then came back home to found one of the many local burgeoning wineries in the Outer Coastal Plains.

We had their rosé, which is dry and made with a locally common grape, Chambourcin. It’s intensely red compared to our other local favorites, maybe closer to Valenzano’s aspect than, say, Bellview or the Cape May rosés we’ve tried. It’s very good: sturdy, tart, and dry.

I ordered a glass of their orange wine as well; I almost never see orange wines on menus, and notably tried my first (and maybe only) orange wine at the excellent Vetri in Philadelphia. That particular glass was a revelation: a deliciously oxidized glass of wine, with terrific color. This orange wine was a bit too Kombucha for me, on the vinegary side.

Sidebar funny story: my first blush with kombucha came after I stopped at the Target in Marlton after a long afternoon, and I was parched. I saw a green tea kombucha in a bespoke glass bottle and figured it would be delicious. I got in the car, gave the bottle a vigorous shake, ripped off the cap, and took a swig. I nearly spit it right back out. I didn’t expect the light carbonation or the vinegary flavor at all.

Peripheral to this, people at work started drinking kombucha, by choice. I saw all manor of murky brown drinks with suspended mother detritus floating around in it. I even found someone selling gray market mothers in a nearby town. So weird.

Back to Cedar Rose: we also tried their barrel chardonnay, which was one of the two varietals they offered, the other being a lighter, more lemony take. I was surprised by the acidity in this wine as well; it struck me as less buttery than the description suggested. After repeated sips, though, I felt its groove and we both enjoyed it.

We tried a few menu items as well, including the melted brie, which came drizzled with honey and sprinkled with nuts. The dish would be better presented on a larger dish, but it was excellent. We also tried the calamari, which was crunchy and delicious, sprinkled with pickled pepper rings and tartar sauce. I think they should upgrade the sauce to something a little more contemporary, but I don’t have anything against tartar sauce. It just feels a little 70’s-crab shack-with-fishing-nets to me.

We also split the cheesesteak, which is a nice size for one (not too big), but also eminently sharable. It’s topped with fried onions and Cooper Sharp, the darling of the cheesesteak world these days, and comes with a side of their fries, which were the standout surprise of the night. The fries at Cedar Rose are of the exquisitely thin shoestring variety, crunchy yet supple, edible one at a time or by the handful. We will definitely be back soon for the fries. Sorry I didn’t get a pick of the sandwich.

A Kitchen Cleaver

I absolutely endorse the recommendation that you only need one good knife for cooking, kept sharp. I’d say a standard chef’s knife or a Santoku blade are both good choices, the latter especially if you have a mechanical sharpener (you do have a sharpener, right?).

Parsimony aside, I’d recommend a cheap cleaver just for shits and giggles. Compared to the Hencklels chef and Santoku knives I have, it’s a breeze to sharpen and tends to keep its edge longer. It’s a challenge for more detailed work when you need to get leverage on the tip of your blade, but for most things, I wield it just fine. I sliced up some raw breasts using it today for dinner tomorrow (see “Chicken Marinade” below) and it was smooth slicing for sure.

Cook’s Illustrated Chicken Marinade

I subbed our usual chicken marinade, the lime-soy one I posted about a while ago, for this Cook’s Illustrated version. It imparts much less overt flavor, but does kick otherwise delicate breast meat up to a more supple texture and gentle sweet, briny flavor. Fish sauce is just amazing. We’re having them again tomorrow for dinner, and I might marinate Tuesday’s pork chops in the same marinade, too.

Aaron exhumed this before heading off to school. I put a new SD card in it. So tiny.

Fall continues its inexorable march towards winter and the holiday season. We’ll be hosting Thanksgiving and Christmas again this year, which is fun to prep for. Dad is getting some bespoke meats from Pat LaFreida; we’ve had lots of good roasts from him, but this year I think we’ll be trying his turkey as well. We usually just get the freebie turkey from Shop Rite, which I brine, spatchcock, and smoke on the Weber Bullet smoker we’ve been using for probably a decade now. I have to remember to get some smoke wood. I guess that’s my prompt to start a Thanksgiving project in OmniFocus!

So it’s spritzes now with some cheese and cured meats. There’s chicken in a marinade that I’ll be grilling shortly. Be well and thanks for reading.

Garden State Comics Fest at the Vineland Convention Center

That Vineland was hosting the Garden State Comics Fest somehow escaped my notice, but Joey and I rolled over there yesterday. I hated paying $30 a head to get in, but we both wanted to check it out (Joe especially). Aaron would have been keen to attend, but he was on a scavenger hunt with his pledge class in New York City, which is a decidedly more exciting experience for sure. YOLO.

The venue was Vineland’s recently rechristened Convention Center; it used to be an Amish Market, which is a regional trope in my opinion. They can’t possibly be truly Amish, and there are a lot of vendors that are local “English” hawking wares. The market closed in 2015, and has sat unused since. This was the first event to be hosted since it’s been turned into a convention center, and while I’m skeptical of anything downtown maintaining a foothold, I am hopeful that it will. Landis Avenue was once the crown jewel of a thriving city commerce center; it is long, wide, and boasts spacious sidewalk space. It’s a true shame that the downtown hasn’t witnessed the kind of revivals we see in nearby Camden County, but maybe there’s hope.

Joe and I walked around and checked out the vendors: there were lots of comic books, toys, and artsy/craftsy things available for purchase. There were some cosplay enthusiasts prowling around, including a notably awesome Darth Vader. It was small but fun.

Panasonic Lumix G 25mm f/1.7, a “Nifty Fifty” Lens

I took yesterday’s pics with a Panasonic Lumix G 25mm f/1.7 aspherical lens, which I found on eBay. I’m pretty sure I’ll purchase most of my photography lenses etc from eBay from now on; I’m not serious enough to need new gear, and what I’ve gotten so far has been in exemplary condition.

A 25mm micro fourth-thirds lens corresponds to a 50mm full-frame lens. It’s not terribly different from my 20mm Panasonic f/1.7 lens, but enough to look a bit different. 50mm approximates what we see with our eyes, uncorrected, so I thought it would be fun to shoot with. I still get great bokeh with this lens, but with a tighter field of view. So far, so good.

Black Stallion Chardonnay

Rhonda and I went to Five Points for parm and mussels last night, but we faced a 30-minute wait (and we were early diners). We said nah and continued on to another local favorite, the Savoy. While a long wait at one place often presages a long wait at another, we were relieved to be seated immediately. And Tommy’s house is a veal house, which is always a good thing. As an aside, the Savoy has been consistently excellent for a while now.

Anyway, we ordered a bottle of the Raeburn Chardonnay, which we had a glass of the last time we were there; it was recommended by the owner’s son, TJ, as a cost-adjacent but more interesting chard than the two house wines (Carmel Road and I can’t remember the other one). They didn’t have it on the menu, though, so I ordered a bottle of the Veltliner they had on the menu, which I figured we’d get into, since Bellview makes an excellent Grünner Veltliner and we have it from time to time.

The owner, Tommy, appeared within moments with a bottle in hand, and asked us, “Do you trust me?” He asked if we would consider the Black Stallion Chardonnay in his hand, and said of the Veltliner that we’d ordered, that the Austrians only make one wine, and it’s not that good. I pointed out that we had it at Bellview and loved it, but he said it’s different (which makes some sense, since we’re not in Austria). So we tried a sip and nodded our approval. It’s a bright, citrusy take on the varietal, less oaky. It was really good and I plan to shop for it when I need a bottle for a BYOB night. As it stands right now, we have a couple of bottles of Bellview’s rosé in the stash to ride out the lull between batches; they’re supposed to have a new vintage debuting in December, so we’ve a few weeks or so to sit on our hands and wait. I’m hoping they have it on tap again for growler fills.

Joe was inducted into Tau Beta Phi tonight. It was a secret ritual; he disappeared with his classmates and came back an hour later. We just mulled around until the students came out. Very proud! The engineering buildings at Rowan are beautiful.

A couple of weeks ago, Rhonda and I visited Aaron at Rutgers for homecoming/parents weekend. We had a great time walking around campus and dining out. I took my camera bag so I could shoot with both the OM Systems E-M10 Mark IV and my older Olympus E-PL5. I kept the Lumix 20mm f/1.7 on the E-M10, and the whacky TT Artisans 18mm f/6.3 lens on the E-PL5. Knowing the TT Artisans took interesting pictures when there’s plenty of light, I thought it might be fun to try to grab some indoor shots where there was a stark contrast between dark and light zones.

Here are two pics I took from inside Zimmerli, looking up from the ground floor to the skylight:

You can certainly see some differences, but I was impressed by how much detail the TT Artisans picked up, and how similar the images are.

The next two pics show renderings of stained glass, which compelled me to shoot them, as they were in a dark hallway only illuminated by ceiling lights, but because they were strongly backlit, I thought they would make a nice study in contrast between the two lenses.

Here’s the TT Artisans:

And the Panasonic:

The Lumix lens grabbed way more detail for sure, but the ultra-cheap TT Artisans did a great job rendering the image because of the light.

I was inspired partly by this shot I took the day before at Working Dog Winery, where I snuck this pic of a bottle of their unoaked chardonnay while we were sitting on the patio.

There’s nothing terribly compelling about this image, and Friday’s waning sun under the roof of the porch didn’t leave as much room for pics as I’d hoped with the TT Artisans. But I was gassed when I saw the contrast between the lighted side of the bottle and the shaded size that opposed it. It captures neatly the amount of light that the f/6.3 needs… but also some creative potential for future shoots.

Rhonda and I agreed, just after our last visit to New Brunswick to see Aaron, that we’d trade in our annual visit to Rehoboth, Delaware, for another trip up to New Brunswick to visit Aaron. New Brunswick is peripheral to New York City, and represents the tip of the spear where New Jersey converts from bucolic and spacious to the stereotype of what most people associate with the Garden State: choked with cars and traffic, the Turnpike, jug handles, and road rage. Getting your bearings in Camden County is a good training ground for the asphalt jungle of central Jersey.

I had, until I graduated college, managed to exclusively experience the southern parts of Jersey, growing up in Cumberland County, and traveling north to my grandparents’ house in Milford, NJ, a sleepy bedroom town bereft of Wawas and McDonald’s and malls. The landscape transformed before my eyes as we lumbered up old Route 206 to Route 29 from flat farmland and pinelands into windy mountain roads, and later, up the fast but unscenic Route 55 to 42 to 295. Our route’s evolution went from slow but scenic to a blur of competing race car ya-yas, until the familiar undulations of the inevitable Route 29 found our tires.

One thing I learned about Camden County, a place I’ve worked in twice since graduating college, is not the density (which is there in spades), but the sheer variety of experience there. Moore Bros. Great restaurants. Revived downtowns, evolving from sleepy forgotten retails hubs forgotten by 80s mall culture into bespoke cafes, bakeries, and BYOBs.

New Brunswick, and the peripheral Brunswicks, and Edison, and Sayreville, and Newark, all offer bigger iterations on this theme: culturally diverse restaurants, long stretches of highway with every chain restaurant imaginable, and every tier of shopping mall, all within short drives of each other. On our trips, we pop, damp and happy, out of farmland wineries, into the dense traffic of a million souls piloting vehicles in an urgent rush to somewhere.

In a short 90-minute drive, we deliver ourselves from sleepy farmscapes to burgeoning cities, all clinging to the greatest city in the world.

OK Alex, Shut Up and Tell Me What You Ate

Our trips to Rehoboth always feature dinner at either new or favorite spots. We’ve eaten at Salt Air many times, because it’s a consistent favorite. We’ve dined at other memorable spots there, too, including Drift, Blue Hen, and Le Fable, and our stalwart lunch spot, Miyagi Ramen. We go off season, because we’re suckers for a quiet shore town.

And while the familiar, and small iterations thereof, are always enjoyable, Aaron’s decision to attend Rutgers offers our adventurous troupe many opportunities to try new places. So far, so good: The Frog and the Peach was a great dining experience, and we’ve had some of the best Asian food ever in Edison.

While I was tempted to revisit the Frog and the Peach, I found the Metuchen Inn while prowling Open Table, and I made a rez for our visit last Friday. The stately old house welcomed our eager party with dim incandescence on a dark and damp evening, and we were efficiently shuttled to our table. And since the rise and fall of our local and beloved Winfields in Millville, the “American Cuisine” moniker heartens me.

A very good first sign: our server didn’t bat an eyelash at my asking for our Tanqueray Martinis up with olives, mixed at a six-to-one ratio. The drinks were stellar; while Rhonda and I have taken to enjoying a Manhattan preprandial, we still enjoy a Martini as a treat at a nice restaurant.

Another encouraging sign: having a hard time picking out an appetizer. I was very close to ordering the Blue Point oysters on the half shell, wrestled with the mussels, but settled upon the clams with chorizo and black beans. I think there’s something about a clam I’ll always prefer to an oyster or a mussel, although in the former case, it’s a culinary crime to say so. I love the assertive brine of a clam, on the half shell or steamed. These littlenecks were steamed to perfection, with a tasteful appointment of firm black beans and small chunks of dried chorizo. Gilding shellfish with a greasy, smoky sausage is always a pro move.

Rhonda tried the lobster bisque, a dish she favors quite possibly due to serially excellent executions of the corn and crab chowder at the Knife and Fork. It was perfectly viscous, avoiding the gloopy texture you’ll find at a lesser establishment, and redolent of shellfish roasted into the stock.

Aaron tried the charred octopus, which I am always tempted by, but often avoid, having watched a lot of YouTube videos demonstrating how much smarter octopi are than, say, me. I tried a bite, and it was pleasingly soft, with a nice smoky chair.

For entrees, I went with the sea bass after wrestling with the wild boar tenderloin. Wild boar and I have a history: on our trip in 2000 to Sienna, Italy, wild board ragù was on every menu, often served with pici pasta, a long tubular noodle expressly designed for soaking up condimento. I recently found boar on a local eatery’s menu, but it had sold out before I tried to order it. I was similarly tempted by the pork osso bucco and the venison tenderloin; there is something about a chilly fall night that invites a curated meat dish, especially game. But I had sucked down my share of wine that afternoon, and future meals loomed in the horizon, so I went with the special.

This was a spectacular dish: perfectly crisp skin, tender, flaky flesh, all piled atop cherry tomatoes and asparagus. Not a carb in sight. It’s the kind of dish you can eat and lick clean and not feel bad about it.

Rhonda went for the lamb chops, which looked fabulous. Aaron, my adventurous counterpart in all things culinary, waited to hear what I ordered before pulling the trigger on the boar. Plated tastefully around a mound of mashed sweet potatoes and a pile of asparagus, it was a sous vide masterpiece, cooked to a perfect medium rare.

The service was attentive and brisk, with impeccable pacing. This all fell apart once dessert was ordered; it took a long time to come out, and we had to flag down a server to bring us our check. It had been a long day of driving, and we were keen to get back to the room for some rest. And maybe some more wine.

I would go back in a heartbeat. It is, to my taste, the perfect spot to celebrate with the ones you cherish the most on a chilly night. Or any night, I imagine.

We’re well into October but I’m in shorts and it’s pretty much summer outside (during the day at least). I did manage to wear a flannel shirt Friday, though. I’ll be grilling ribeyes shortly; they’re in the sous vide tank right now.

Not Your Desk

I see your desk: bespoke. the ultra-clean, organized set up. The RGB lights tastefully illuminating the cubbies. The small plastic potted plant with manicured pebbles. It makes a nice insta post for sure.

I don’t want your desk. I want my desk. My desk has a bunch of shit strewn atop it. I clean it up from time to time but I don’t obsess over it.

What’s this USB cable for? I don’t know. Do I need these headphones out all the time? Probably not. but they don’t get in anyone’s way. Black peripheral, white USB cable? Um, yeah. It’s what I had when the thunderbolt dock was delivered.

Unused laptop in a stand, not even charged? It is, in fact, pretty much unused. But hey! I know where to find it if I need it. I could put the sunglasses away in the drawer, but they’re right there, conveniently reminding me to wear them.

And that USB-powered tire pump? Why have that on your desk? Because I can charge it up using an mis-color-matched USB cord, that’s why. It’s not like I have a garage.

Your desk? Looks great. But I still like mine.

Touch: the AppleScript

I have a thousand reasons why I like to drop a test file into a location. Unix is a beautiful construction, where there’s a solitary app for most things. macOS does the same thing, it follows the same path, and the best macOS apps the Mac assed Mac apps all shine when developed in this way.

Sometimes I just want create a text file. Touch is a handy Unix app that I often turn to in such circumstances.

But let’s be honest: I’m not hanging out in Terminal all day. Or ever, really. Are there people out there who are? Seriously? If you say so.

Years ago I wrote a simple AppleScript to create a markdown file for me. It’s easy to fire it off with Launchbar, too. I gussied it up a bit using Copilot yesterday.

try     
    tell application "Finder" to set currentFolder to (folder of the front window as alias) 
    on error    
        set currentFolder to path to desktop folder as alias 
end 
try  
    set baseName to "new" set extension to ".md" 
    set counter to 0 set fileExists to true  repeat while fileExists    
    if counter is 0 then        
        set fileName to baseName & extension    
        else        
        set fileName to baseName & " " & counter & extension  
    end if  
    set currentFile to POSIX path of currentFolder & fileName   
    set fileExists to (do shell script "test -e " & quoted form of currentFile & "; echo $?") is "0"  
    set counter to counter + 1 end repeat  
    do shell script "touch " & quoted form of currentFile  
tell application "Finder"     
    select file fileName of folder currentFolder 
end tell

Logitech MX Master 4

Have you met a keyboard person? They will drop 200 bucks on a keyboard sight unseen if the kickstarter description hits all the right notes. How do I know? I’ve been one. We have rights.

The MX Master is something of a legend in the peripheral world. It merits its own reviews, and iterations are hotly anticipated It’s a big, heavy mouse that appeals to the same types of users. I’m one of them.

The MX Master 4 has more software affordances than ever before. It’s got more thunk and chunk than the 3S that preceded it. It is absolutely worth a spin if you enjoy using a Mac with a mouse, especially with a desktop Mac or a laptop in clamshell mode. And for me, that’s the best way to use a Mac.

The newest physical feature of the MX 4 is the Sense Panel with haptic feedback. From MacWorld’s review:

But, of course, it’s the haptic feedback features that are the star of the show, and the thumb rest now has a haptic ‘Sense Panel’ that sits right under the tip of your thumb. This is a button that you can program to perform a variety of functions, but it also provides tactile haptic feedback in the form of a brief ‘click’ sensation – similar to the haptic feedback on Apple’s Magic Trackpad – in response to a variety of actions or commands.

The update to the LogiOptions software includes their take on a radial launcher:

For home users or ordinary office workers, the Logi Options+ app provides another new feature, called the Action Ring, which is activated by pressing the Sense Panel button. The Actions Ring appears on screen when you press the Sense Panel, and displays a circular menu with additional commands that you can select. By default, the Action Ring displays a set of standard commands, such as launching the Notes app on a Mac or instantly locking your Mac.

LogTech is trying to Sherlock Pieomter.

Brown Loafers

They are almost always the best choice.

The Blog of Random on the split-brain experiment:

The split-brain experiments show the incredible ability of the human mind to adapt in any situation that it is placed in. They also show that all of those quizzes about being “left-brained” or “right-brained” due to being more “artsy” or “sciency” are completely false. In reality, both hemispheres are equally important to function as a normal human being, and tests have shown that both hemispheres are used equally in most situations, whether you’re painting or solving a math problem.

Sam Harris, in Waking Up:

What is most startling about the split-brain phenomenon is that we have every reason to believe that the isolated right hemisphere is independently conscious.

It is amazing to consider the outsize impact our left hemisphere has on our conscious perception relative to its importance. We live with a silent self that knows quite a lot about its chattier half–and that interest seems exclusive.

I might argue, too, that our left hemisphere is responsible for a considerable amount–if not most–of our suffering.