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.
Technology
Sunday Serial: Staying Sharp, Hold My Notes, Unread RSS v5
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.
Staying Sharp
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.
Hold My Notes
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 RSS v5
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.
Sunday Serial for Labor Day 2026: Bellview Winery’s Saperavi, Cotypist iCloud Sync, and Newsairy RSS Reader
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.
Bellview Winery’s New Red Wine: Saperavi
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 Sync
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.
Newsairy RSS Readers for iOS + iPadOS
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.
SummerFest 2026
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.
Designed in California: System 7 to OS X
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.
Sunday Serial: TMOG, Escape from Duckov, and ExtraBar Launcher Mode
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.
Sunday Serial: Bellview Winery’s Mixtape Blanc, Clues by Sam, and IndieBlog
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.
Bellview Winery’s Mixtape Blanc
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.
Clues by Sam
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.
IndieBlog
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.
Punk Rock Blogging
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.
Sunday Serial, Vacation Edition: Control, SteelSeries Nimbus+, and Errata
I’m coming off of a week-long vacation, or staycation, if you will: we didn’t go anywhere in particular, save for the overnight in New Brunswick. I just made salads and boiled eggs for the week ahead. Of course there’s some Sunday scaries, but not too bad.
We did a lot of floating in the pool during the day. I’d usually have something for breakfast and then skip lunch, and then we’d have some cured meats and cheese and other pickings (peanuts, pipits) phon the deck or in the house while we cooked.
I follow Ina Garten’s hummus recipe, which I often make when we get together with friends. This is exactly what I did Wednesday after we got home from New Brunswick before meeting some friends at the Blue Rascal for drinks. I made a second batch on Thursday because it was so good, and we finished that one off by the pool yesterday while enjoying some spritzes. Rhonda’s at the store now getting some more ingredients so I can make another batch. It really comes out creamy and smooth. I’ve read that you have to remove the chick peas from their shell or skin, but this recipe doesn’t call for doing so, and everyone seems to like it.
Game On
Vacation is a good time to play a game or two; the work week doesn’t leave a lot of time for that, although I did enjoy Dredge earlier in the summer. I’ve been meaning to play Icewind Dale on the iPad for a while now, but I never end up getting around to it.
I’ve been gaming on an Apple computer for many years. We had the original Castle Wolfenstein on the Apple II, and a few other games to boot: Dig Dug, Sea Wolf, and many others.
My first Mac was Color Classic, and I enjoyed the hell out of playing Prince of Persia, Spectre, and Wolfenstein 3D. I eventually played through the original Doom and Doom 2, but my all-time favorite franchise is the Marathon series. I still have them installed on my Mac. Halo was a worthy successor, but Marathon always brings me back to my youth as a college student. We’d sneak into the bio lab on campus and install the demo on the networked PowerPCs on the lab tables and have a frag fest. What a blast.
There are lots of games over the years that I’ve sunk many hours into, not just on the Mac. I could never name them all, here’s a list of some notables:
- Legend of Zelda (NES)
- Metal Gear (NES)
- Marathon (Mac)
- Oni (Mac)
- Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 (Mac)
- Metal Gear Solid (PSP)
- Ocarina of Time (N64)
- Halo (Mac)
- Mario Galaxy (Wii)
- Breath of the Wild (Switch)
I’m forgetting a ton of games for sure. I played a lot of Quake and Unreal Tournament on the Mac. Giants:Citizen Kabuto was a strange and wild standout. I’ve played through Max Payne a bunch of times, and the first-person shooter Star Wars games, especially Jedi Knight II, many times as well.
I have a nice little library of Steam games that I can play on the Mac. I watch for sales on wishlist items and buy them when they come up at an irresistible price. Outside of Metro Exodus and Firewatch (a game I’ve played through several times), most of them as started but unfinished, or not played at all. I likewise have been meaning to play Warcraft 3 for about 24 years now. It’s installed and ready to go. I purchased it on CD back in 2002 at the Marlton Apple Store, and I still have it installed via Battle.net. I really need to play it.
There are a couple of reasons for this, but primarily it’s because I don’t want to sit in front of my computer at night after we’ve cleaned up from dinner. That’s our chance to watch a little TV and maybe fart around with my iPad. Plugging into a game for real is more of a vacation thing.
Which happened to be this past week!
Control
I purchased Control on Steam a while back, but didn’t get far at all. I decided to pick it up for iOS yesterday, as it was only five bucks. I’ve played a couple of hours on the iPad and have been really enjoying it, except for that I think there was a bug that caused me to start the game over from the beginning. I wasn’t too far in to make that a big deal.
Just for kicks, I started it up on my Mac on Sunday through Steam. The graphics look a bit more detailed on the Mac, and as I expected, I love the keyboard and mouse compared to the touchscreen on the iPad.
It’s a third-person shooter, with a theme involving a government agency that’s investigating a mysterious power that possesses people. You play as Jesse Faden, whose brother’s disappearance is linked to the agency. It puts me in mind of Max Payne, where it’s a shooter, but the additional combat feature opens up heroine Jesse’s ability to pick up and throw objects. It makes for a cool 1-2 punch feature, a la Booker’s Vigors in Bioshock Infinite.
So I’m playing it simultaneously on the iPad and the Mac in such a way that progress on one device has no bearing on the other. I could download Control from the App Store onto an external hard drive (which is where I have my Steam library), but I would need to make some room on the drive. Or… get another drive. Hmmm.
One discovery I made is that Apple’s newish Games app shows not just your installed games from the App Store, but your Steam and Blizzard games, too. Pretty cool.
One thing about gaming on a computer is my mousing situation. I’m a left by birth, but I mouse right handed due to some RSI that I was developing years ago. Despite this, I can’t WASD+mouse with my right hand; I have switch back to left-handed mousing.
A lot of mice are designed to be ambidextrous, with sides that are symmetrical. My preferred mouse of choice, however, is the Logitech MX Master, which is made for right-handed users.
To this end, I not only have to swap my mouse to the left of the keyboard, I have to swap the mouse itself. I have a Logitech G300 for gaming. It’s cheap but it works.
SteelSeries Nimbus+
I am largely sports-avoidant: I just don’t watch them. I have, however, enjoyed a handful of sports games over the years, most of which I have never played the analog version of. NHL ’93 and ’94, a basketball game called Hoops on the Nintendo, and even a baseball game on the Sony PSP. I recently saw Madden 27 pop up for Apple Arcade, and I figured that, too, might be a fun game for a sport I don’t watch.
I suspected that Madden might be more of a controller based game than a touchscreen game. I’ve been thinking about getting a controller after trying one of the boys’ older Playstation controllers to play some games, like Gear Club:Stradale on the Mac (another sport, car racing, that I don’t watch but enjoy video games of). I had the original Nimbus controller for our Apple TV, and while it still pairs with my Mac, it’s definitely missing some features that make me think it’s outdated.
I found a refurbished Nimbus+ on Amazon for $35 bucks.
Sunday Serial: Television Time, Retropia Lens, and PowerAgent for the Griffin PowerMate
Last week, I mentioned that I had been wrestling with our lawn tractor. It’s a Husqvarna from the mid-2000s—it’s been in service for a long time. I’ve changed the belts, the blades, the oil, and filters to keep it running. The deck (the metal shell that houses the blades) has taken a beating over the years, and a bracket that holds the belt pulleys had broken free from the shell. Rhonda and I combined forces on Tuesday afternoon after our getaway to Philly, and completed what I learned is called a “field repair.” It seems to be working now!
After thinking I’d fixed it several times before Tuesday (Wednesday actually), this repair reminds me that success and failure are often within a few inches of each other. Every win starts off as a potential loss. It’s an argument for adversity maybe: too many serial wins can lead to feeling a failure as catastrophic.
Television Time
I’ve been using an app called Sofa for a while now to track television shows and movies that I might like to watch. It’s a great iPhone and iPad app, and it runs on the Mac as well. It has evolved to include books, podcasts, restaurants, and video games. I like it a lot, but it has lacked a central function that I wanted in such an application: moving a show to an “actively watching” list or state. (I’ve never used it for books, which is a topic for another post.) Version 5.2 of Sofa now lets you track shows, generating a list of episodes and providing the user a way of checking off episodes.
Jason Snell recently highlighted Television Time on an episode of MacBreak Weekly, and after a few years of trying the free version of Sofa (I find the subscription a little pricey for my needs), and also trying Casey Liss’s Callsheet for the same purpose, I decided to give Television Time a spin.
Television Time is TV-specific; you can’t add movies or any other kind of media. This is a good thing. You can research shows, and add them to your “To Watch” list when you’re ready. There’s no intermediate resting place for a show, though, which I would like. Television time includes notifications for upcoming episodes, and a wealth of data about an episode, including original air date. It will also monitor the time you spent watching TV if you check off what you’ve been watching. And like Sofa, Television Time shows you where you can watch a show.
Television Time is only 9.99 for a yearly subscription.
Retropia Repurposed Disposable Film Camera Lens
I’ve written a fair bit about my TT Artisans 18mm f/6.3 UFO Lens here on Uncorrected. It’s primary appeal to me when I found it was both its tiny size and its low price, and while both of those remain attractions, it’s not a lens that I’d recommend for someone outside of understanding what a strange thing it is.
Shortly after I purchased the lens, I started seeing adds for repurposed disposable film camera lenses, one of which is the Retropia. I thought it might be duplicative at least, or less functional, than the TT Artisans, so I bought one for Aaron to use with his Nikon D3100. It turns out that he also purchased one, so I’m going to return the one I bought for him.
It’s a tiny lens that weighs almost nothing. It’s more of a lens cap than a lens. It makes the TT Artisans feel heavy.
You have to fire the camera in manual mode to use the Retrotopia; it doesn’t support any kind of autofocus or aperture priority. With a fixed aperture of f/11, it needs plenty of light to work. I would normally avoid taking pictures in the midday sun, but the Retrotopia is perfect for such shooting.
I took this picture of my Miata with the Retrotopia. It has that greasy, smeary look that you might get from a cheap disposable camera. I don’t love it, but it’s kinda fun. The TT Artisans takes much sharper pictures, and that’s not saying much for the UFO.
PowerMate Agent
I still have an ancient Griffin PowerMate around that I haven’t used in forever. I stumbled upon the PowerMate Agent application recently, which revives the peripheral. It scrolls and mutes! Pretty cool.
Sunday Serial: Outliner Edition
I’ve spilled plenty of pixels here on Uncorrected about outliner applications. I’m a big user of OmniOutliner and Bike, and OmniFocus certainly has its roots in the former application. But there are many more, and even a website dedicated to outliner software. Enjoy!
Kosshi Outliner
macosxguru featured Kosshi on Bicycle for Your Mindrecently, so I downloaded the trial. Kosshi reminds me of Workflowy, but Mac-native without the need to constantly log in. (Speaking of Workflowy, I just logged in again recently and was met with a lengthy captcha ordeal that reminded me at least partly why I stopped using Workflowy).
Unlike Bike and OmniOutliner, Kosshi’s back end is a database rather than individual files. There are positives and negative to this approach; database apps allow for some neat features, including linking to your own notes and content in the app. Drafts, Ulysses, and Apple Notes are all examples of this approach, well-implemented.
Kosshi supports Markdown; imbedding images, videos, and PDFs; @ and # tags; internal linking; and bookmarking. It’s fast and stable in my testing as well. Some Workflowy features that I would miss would be duplicating and mirroring items, and there’s now way to grab a link to an item or note in Kosshi so that you can reference it from another application. No support for Hookmark, at least not yet, either.
There are a number of pre-programmed keyboard shortcuts that allow you to move items within the app, which is a great way to keep you hands on the keyboard while you’re working.
Outliner Software (website)
From the Bicycle for Your Mind post on Kosshi Outliner I referenced above, I learned about the existence of the Outliner Software website. It’s a forum for outliner and note-taking application nerds. Discussions about Drafts, Ulysses, Bike, and other writing apps abound.
MojoPad
MojoPad is not strictly an outliner, but it’s a modern recreating of Gus Meuller’s VoodooPad. I used the lite version of VoodooPad a while back, and have, from time to time, found myself searching to see if the app was still available (and it is!).
MojoPad, like Kosshi, keeps its data in a database, and uses the concept of a wiki for its pages. CamelCasing words creates links, so you can keep adding information to your pages and linking (and creating) as you go. It supports rich text, plain text, and Markdown.
MojoPad is a great-looking app, and retains the spirit of VoodooPad. No iOS support, though.
MindNode Next
Mind maps are a thing… just not really my thing. I’ve used MindNode for a while now, at first mostly to try to understand mind maps and mapping, and to create a few flowcharts when I needed them.
MindNode has a toggle to switch between mind map and outline views, and this feature cleanly illustrates the indelible relationship between mind maps and outliners. The first time I tried the toggle, it was like a facepalm moment: Mind maps are outlines, and outlines are mind maps.
MindNode Next represents an evolution from the original MindNode. One very notable change is Next’s internal database structure, whereas the original MindNode stored its data in individual files. Next’s database structure allows for linking between maps, which can be helpful.
Even if you don’t use mind maps, MindNode is a fantastic outliner. It’s quite possibly the prettiest outliner I’ve used.
Sunday Serial: Mister Plimsoll, DaisyDisk, and Kagi Assistant
Happy Fourth of July! We celebrated the holiday with a barbecue at our house; I smoked both spareribs and baby back ribs. My parents came over, as did Joe’s girlfriend, and even Teri, my former boss from Vineland, joined us. We all drank a bunch of white wine too. I didn’t get any good pictures of the ribs, because I was hustling to get them done, but Aaron and I nipped out to get some red, white, and blue pictures of our stable of cars. I was hoping to get out there for these shots closer to the golden hour, but it was a bit later than I wanted.
Mister Plimsoll
Longtime Apple tech writer Glen Fleishman recently launched a utility for the Mac called Mister Plimsoll. It’s a free utility that will alert you to when a drive on your Mac is about to run out of space, name for the Plimsoll line on a ship’s hull1. I’ve struggled with my Mac Studio running dangerously low on space, and my attempts to understand why, exactly, have found me staring at DaisyDisk and noticing that my Time Machine snapshots are growing out of control. Mister Plimsol doesn’t help you deal with storage issues, but it its helpful in updating you that things are getting tight. I missed two Arq backups because of Time Machine snapshot hoarding last week. I set up Mister Plimsol to send me a text message when my Mac’s free space dips below 10% of the drive’s capacity.
Indirectly related, I found that my Spotlight index was larger than it should be, so I rebuilt that using a strategy that Kagi Assistant recommended (removing the boot drive from indexing in System Settings, and then adding it back after a pause). I used DaisyDisk to delete some of the Time Machine snapshots, which were taking up over 70 GB of space.
DaisyDisk
As I mentioned above, DaisyDisk is a great tool for visualizing your Mac’s storage. It helped me narrow down what was taking up the most space on my Mac, especially when I compared the internal storage to that of my MacBook Air. That was the first clue that something was up with my Mac Studio’s Spotlight Index: the Air had almost no data in its Spotlight Index, according to DaisyDisk, while the Studio was taking up gigabytes of space. I knew that I was using a fair amount of disk space for both MailMaven and MailMate, because I’m not content to use Gmail’s web interface, but DaisyDisk helped me see beyond what I already knew.
I’ve been using tmutil via the Terminal for years to manage my Time Machine snapshots when things got out of hand, but those instances were few and far between. Something with the Studio is amiss, though, and it accumulates a large collection snapshots.
If you purchased DaisyDisk on the Mac App Store, you can swap your license for a standalone license which enables you to delete snapshots. Probably worth it.
Kagi Assistant
Central to solving the Spotlight Index and the Time Machine snapshot problems I was trying to solve was Kagi Assistant. Sure, I’ve used ChatGPT and Claude, and I use (weirdly enough) Microsoft’s Copilot a lot, but Kagi comes bundled with Kagi Search, which is why I initially signed up for a subscription. I’ve come to rely upon Assistant as my go-to chatbot.
- The Plimsoll line is the point to which the vessel can be legally and safely submerged in water under various conditions. ↩
Lettera
The makers of the excellent Bear note-taking app for macOS have released a new app called Lettera. Check out that domain name! It’s a fork of Panda, which was their text engine for Bear, and which they released some time ago as a beta.
Lettera is Bear minus the database for note storage; its a markdown editor that uses standalone markdown files. This is hot if you like individual, portable documents, and even more so if you’re fiddling with your system by having an AI assist you.
Bear has always looked great and has been awesome to use; Panda, for me, was a great alternative once I’d given up on Bear as the best note-taking app for my usage. It’s at once nerdy and elegant; straightforward and stylish.
I’m happy to see that Panda has borne fruit (bamboo?) in the form of Lettera. I’m hoping that we’ll see an iPadOS version too.
Sunday Serial: macOS Golden Gate Developer Beta, Theming OmniOutliner , and My 2026 Mazda MX-5 Miata ND3
Another Father’s Day! Joe got me this cute little He-Man minifig at a nearby toy show.
We’re not really doing much since Aaron has to work and won’t be home until close to seven tonight. The pool and some spritzes beckon, though. I cooked a nice picanha roast last night for our dinner after he got home after a lengthy soak in the sous vide tank.
macOS 27 “Golden Gate” Developer Beta
iPad is usually where I’m OK installing a beta OS: I need my Mac to do work, and I need my phone because it’s my phone. iPads are ancillary (which doesn’t mean I don’t love using them for everything), but they are a third category and a third rung on the needs vs wants list.
But I have an older M1 MacBook Pro from work, and while it has taught me that a Mac can, in the era of Apple Silicon, last you a long time, it’s not my main machine, and is ripe for usage as a beta testing machine.
I have modest needs as a computer user, but the things that I was excited to see in Golden Gate are the visual tweaks to Liquid Glass. First up: the layered side panels. Here’s notes in Tahoe:
And then Notes in Golden Gate:
Golden Gate fixes the unnecessary side panel crowding in Notes (and other apps).
Things are still a bit crowded, even on the generous display on this MacBook Pro. Liquid Glass looks a lot less horsey on a 32” display, but this isn’t a setup for most MacBook owners; the OS should look tighter and smaller than it does now. Even in Golden Gate, I find application toolbars ugly. Going text only (where available) looks weird, contrary to macOS pre-Tahoe.
I’m still on the waiting list for the new Siri. Everything I’ve heard sounds great, and I’m looking forward to something more intelligent. If it can see OmniFocus, Notes, and Fantastical, as well as files on my Mac, I think Siri AI will be very interesting.
Theming OmniOutliner
I’ve been using OmniOutliner since it was bundled with my PowerBook G4 in the early 2000s. There’s a lot to love about OmniOutliner, if you love (or even just like) outliners. (I find it funny to this day that when teachers suggested that outlining was a good way to start a paper, and required the class to create outlines, I would absolutely bristle). These days, I almost think in outlines; I reach for Bike or OmniOutliner the moment something comes up and I need to take notes. And if I’m writing, as I often do, in Notes, I follow a loose outline style/format.
I’ve never found theming to be terribly accessible in OmniOutliner, though, and my earliest forays into crafting my own were fraught with difficulty, such that I never really made any. I was farting around with version six and was delighted that the small bit of experience I’ve gained with styles allows me to facilely create some nice-looking outline templates.
One of the Drafts styles I like is called “Six Colors,” referencing of course the original Apple logo, and Jason Snell’s post-MacWorld website and sundry digital goods. I thought that something like the Six Colors theme would make for a nice OmniOutliner template.
I started off with a blank white canvas and added text color stylings, but then I thought it might be fun to create a theme where the rows are colored, too.
After that, it was off to the races! I found a website, Figma , with 100 thoughtfully crafted four-color designs, and started cobbling together some more templates. Happily, OmniFocus stores themes in iCloud if you’re using it, so they sync across devices.
Mazda MX-5 Miata ND3
My mind is not to be trusted. I wrote about some test drives I’d done when thinking about trading in my 2013 Mustang GT last week. I had notionally settled on keeping the mustang and repairing the things that ailed it; meanwhile, I found myself continually researching cars, car prices, and engaging Copilot in a lengthy discussion about my “perfect” car. (The answer was the BMW 2 Series, more specifically the 230, which confusingly sits price wise and procedurally above the BMW 228. The 228, I learned, is actually a Mini Cooper, and sold as a 1 series in Europe. Copilot did not recommend the 228 for me, although it does have the JCW engine in it. It seems to be a car reviled by BMW purists, but for a person for whom the JCW seems like a great car, I was kinda into the idea. But: no manual.
You can now very easily draw a small circle around the new cars you’d buy if you just factor in two data points: cost and transmission. Do you want a car that costs around 40k and has a manual transmission? Your options get narrow fast. You can cast a wider net by ignoring price constraints, but if price is your cardinal factor, then it gets pretty easy. For me, it was WRX, BRZ/G86, Miata, or something used.
I had conceded to myself that I was going to have to consider non-manual options if I were in fact to purchase a BMW 230, but the prices are so high that I abandoned the idea.
I have loved the MX-5 Miata since it came out. My Dad, an inveterate namer of four-wheeled things whilst driving, always exclaimed “Miata!” back in the late 80s and early 90s when we’d see one on the road. I remember thinking that if he was enthusiastic about something, it was suggestion that he’d buy one. Once, we went to a Nissan dealership where his college roommate worked, and checked out a moon glow yellow Nissan 300 Z. I was sure we were there to buy one. We were not. But that car changed my opinion about yellow cars, and made me want a Z to this day.
Anyway, the decision to buy a new car vs repair the Mustang was complicated for me. There are a couple of truths about the Mustang: I never considered one in any previous car-buying situation; the platonic ideal that the mustang is chasing is not a part of my lexicon. When last I shopped for a car, in 2015, I had narrowed my search down to a Ford Focus RS, Subaru WRX, or a GTI. The AWD in the WRX was the final selling point.
That I got to drive a GT for the last 10 years was a gift, though, materially and spiritually. Just because you wouldn’t normally consider something doesn’t mean you wouldn’t end up enjoying it. And the experience of the GT was an eye-opener. Yes, it was big and heavy, but it was fast and stable at highway speeds. The aftermarket exhaust sounded like a dream, and the car was a heard turner on noise alone. I loved that car, and I can now say that I absolutely enjoy a big American muscle car, borne from a decade of experience.
But we all have preferences and notions. If I had to plant my flag, I’d want this car:
- 2-dour coupe or roadster
- Naturally aspirated six-cylinder engine
- Manual transmission
- Low body weight
That car doesn’t actually exist anymore outside of the Porsche 718 Cayman and Boxter, which Porsche isn’t taking orders for anymore.
The Miata is pretty close, though, looking at that list. It’s only strike is the four-cylinder engine. Yet, after the first test drive, I thought, “I can’t daily this car.”
But as I continued to research, Copilot did make one comment that resonated with me: You’ll think it’s too small for a week. And that was my experience with the Toyota MR2 Spyder that I bought back in 2003 and drove for about four years before having to trade it in on a more practical family car, as we had two small children. I was driving the Spyder home on the day of the purchase, barreling down route 55 with the top up, all the crap that I’d been carting around in my more capacious Ford Contour that I’d just traded in for pennies piled up on the seat beside me, the front end bouncing up and down like an exuberant kangaroo, and I thought: what did I just get myself into? It was so small, so light, and utterly unfamiliar to me.
But the next day, the car unburdened by the weight of my hoardings, zipping up to the dealership to drop off my old car’s title, top down, I realized that I was having a blast–an experience in a car I’d never had before.
The Spyder only had 138 horsepower. It was not a fast car, but any metric. But it was a true mid-engine runabout, with variable valve timing that kicked in pretty high up in the rev range. I remember one time Dad and I went out for a drive in his new 5-liter Pontiac GTO, and he let me take the wheel. After a long cruise in rural south Jersey and a couple of beers at a friend’s house, I got back into the Spyder and drove it back home. The contrast was striking–the Spyder felt like the tiny toy car that it was. That did nothing to dampen my enthusiasm for the car, but it did put its proper place in the pantheon of cars I’ve driven.
In time, I came to see the Spyder as a kind of automotive albatross, uniquely ill-suited to my current needs as a family man. I replaced it with a Subaru Legacy with a manual five-speed. It was fine. It was what I needed at the time.
But I always missed the Spyder, and serially lined up replacements in my mind, should the time ever come when I might want something like that again.
That time has come, and the Miata fits the bill. Like a glove.
A driving glove.
Sunday Serial: Test Driving Cars, Andy Ihnatko’s New Website, and Hector Simpson’s Dynamic Wallpapers for the Mac
The last couple of weeks before the end of the school year are always hectic. Joey and Sorayah went on a business trip to Kentucky for her work, and are back now. We’re celebrating my Mom’s birthday this weekend, and Father’s Day a week early, with some BBQ chicken thighs and sides.
Test Driving Cars
I test drove a couple of cars this week before dropping the Mustang off for service; I wanted to feel out if I would rather have a new car or keep the GT, anticipating some costly repairs. I drove a yellow Subaru BRZ, and a Mazda MX-5 Sport (a Miata, of course).
I loved the BRZ; it wasn’t loud in the way the Mustang is, but it’s small and quick and tight. I don’t think the four-banger would ever knock my socks off, but it was a great ride. I think I could live with one of these.
The Miata was a lot of fun, too, but it immediately sounded like a toy when the salesman started it up, and it did nothing on the test drive to make me think it wasn’t. Fun to drive? Absolutely. A daily driver? Not for me.
I was surprised by my impression of the Miata: I once owned a Toyota MR2 Spyder, which was a mid-engine roadster and a Miata competitor. I know what these little cars feel like.
Andy Inhatko’s “Loitering at tech’s intersections”
Andy is a self-described “beloved tech pundit” who wrote for MacUser and MacWorld, and is a regular contributor to MacBreak Weekly. It’s great that he’s launched a new website, and I’m looking forward to reading more of his writing. Andy knows a lot about tech, photography, and cinema.
Hector Simpson’s Wavēy and XIV Cosmos and Horizon Wallpapers
Most days, I fire up the Dizzypaper app and select a wallpaper that suits my mood. I added Hector’s Wavēy and XIV Cosmos and Horizon wallpapers to my collection this weekend, because the collections are beautiful and fit my preferenceph for wallpapers: vector graphics, tasteful colors, and clever masking.