Alain de Botton of School of Llfe fame was on the Modern | Podcast most recently. In his discussion about “rupture and repair” he mentioned
Kintsugi, the craft of repairing broken pottery in a way that honors its original form while celebrating the flaws.

Modern | Wisdom #898 – Alain de Botton – How To Fix Your Negative Patterns

Here’s this week’s list of things to check out. Last week was a hell of a week!

Sagamore Rye

Rhonda and I had this rye in Rehoboth Beach one night during a family vacation, and have been keen to get a bottle. She spied a bottle on sale last weekend, and we’ve been enjoying our manhattans with it all week.

Brew Ratio

Brew Ratio is a great coffee nerd app. You adjust your coffee, water, or ratio variables, and Brew Ratio adjusts everything else, to help you make a great cup of Joe. There’s a timer, too. I prefer when my scale has a timer, but my current scale doesn’t, so I’ve been using my Apple Watch when I need to set a timer.

Tally

Tally, by Agile Tortoise, is a focused tally tracker by the maker of the essential Drafts. It’s dead simple but immediately useful. Behaviorists take note.

Neil Strauss’s advice–that not voicing expectations will likely yield to resentment–is usually applied to relationships. I take this to mean that, for example, if you don’t ask the kids to take out the trash or bring in the cans, but expect them to do so unbidden, you’re going down a path to resentment.

An avoidable path.

And hey: dinner and drinks work this way, too. By way of example, Rhonda and I often nip out to a joint around the corner, the Greenview Inn, for dinner and a cocktail. We have, on occasion, gotten a martinis or manhattans that were entirely too dry for our tastes. I make our Martinis at about a 6:1 ratio of gin to vermouth, and manhattans closer to 3:1. Rueing the prospect of slugging down another poorly made cocktail¹; for reasons both epicurean and nutritional, I piped up: “Can you make that about 3:1?” The bartender reacted with surprise, remarking, “Oh, really sweet!”

“If you say so,” I replied.

He made them to our specs and they were fantastic.

I haven’t consistently adopted this strategy, but I have been trying to when I can. We had another chance last night, while dining at the Savoy (another local favorite, in part due to its proximity to our house). Rhonda had attended a farewell party for a colleague a few days before, and had been served an entirely-too-dry gin martini. I, too, had ordered their pork chop about a month ago, and after being serially treated to succulent chop after chop in our local haunts, the Savoy served me a bone-dry version of the same one night while we were out on a date nite.

I wanted to try the pork chop again last night at the Savoy; a number of non-steak options were tempting me, but the glory of a juicy chop on a cold January night?

Irresistible.

When TJ, our server, came over to ask about ordering dinner, I decided to speak up about my expectations, lest they fester into resentment. I told him that I’d ordered the chop once before, and why it wasn’t to my liking. He said he’d let the chef know how I liked it.

The chop arrived, an exemplar of the dish.

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¹ The popularity of dry vodka martinis–a boring if respectable standard cocktail–has unduly influenced people’s taste for properly balanced drinks.

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.