John Gruber, writing about the iPhone Duo via Transformers:
It always bothered me that, as toys, Transformers were clearly compromised in both states. Folded up, they weren’t good cars / trucks / fighter jets. They had obvious seams and folds. In the cartoons — and the subsequent live action films decades later — the Transformers’ disguised states are seamless. In real life with the actual toys, the disguised states were about as convincing as a pair of Groucho glasses. A regular toy car looked like a real car, and stayed together no matter how hard you played with it. A Transformer car never quite looked like a real car and would come apart when played with. Unfolded, they looked like robots, yes, but they had obvious compromises. And it was kind of a pain folding them back into vehicles. My recollection is that we played with them a lot more as unfolded robots than as folded vehicles.
I was all smiles and nods reading this. I too grew up with Transformers, and while we all liked them, they weren’t as fun as other toys with playing with friends. As Gruber pointed out, they were inferior as action figures to toys like GI Joe and other figures around the 3.75” range. And as vehicles, they didn’t look as cool as Matchboxes or Hot Wheels (or Stompers). And contrary to the spirit of cooperative play, transforming a Transformers could take a few seconds to a few minutes. (In fact, challenging conversions can be a selling point.) But you don’t want to sit around and watch your ten-year-old friends fumble from robot to truck and back again in the middle of a plot.
When we had kids, though, they both got into the Transformers of the day, starting with figures from around 2005 and up. One thing I immediately noticed with their Transformers were the degree of articulation in their robot modes. They were, generally speaking, robot humanoids that moved like action figures.
I say again: the summer is not actually the best time to drive a convertible. I’ve been treated to a full week of glorious 50+ degree weather, and I’ve been top down for most of it. I think 50 degrees is the bellwether; if it’s 50 or above, and it’s not raining, the top goes down.
It’s spritzes and cheese here at home as the chicken thighs roast in the oven. I’m lucky to be sitting here, feeling pretty blissed out, assembling a list of things that delight me, and sharing them with you.
iPhone Duo Apps
Stephen Robles created a curated site of applications that are ready for the iPhone Duo. If you, like me and Aaron, are on the long wait list for the new iPhone, you can prepare for delivery by checking out if your most trusted apps are ready for the new form factor.
I had no idea that WriteRoom was going to reemerge, but I was pleasantly surprised to see that it has. WriteRoom was one of the two Markdown-specific apps I started using when Markdown was getting a lot of traction in the nerd space. The other was Byword, which I generally preferred due to the fact that I could post to my Tumblr blog directly from the app (I think it also supported tables first, which I needed when deciding to use Markdown for my report writing at work). But as with TaskPaper, I always appreciated Jesse Grosjean’s attention to detail and style, so I always kept WriteRoom and updated it when the new versions came out.
And hey! WriteRoom 4 is in beta. You can get a steep discount on it during the beta, too, which is exactly what I did. Some observations:
Typewriter noises: WriteRoom sounds like a clicky mechanical keyboard when you type. You can turn it off, too. I found myself browsing keyboards at Best Buy this afternoon after typing on WriteRoom for a spell.
Themes: You can set different themes in WriteRoom, depending upon your preferences. The default is a DEC terminal monitor, with screen bend and everything.
Heading overview mode
Number Headings: I’m not familiar with this feature from other Markdown apps I’ve used, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t any out there. In WriteRoom, headings and their children can be numbered automatically, so rather than having “##” as a an H2 heading in our document, you can see “1.2” or whatever level it would be. It looks great and it’s useful.
There’s more I could say about WriteRoom, but Sunday Serial isn’t the place for a big review. I hope you take a look at it if you’re a Mac user who writes in Markdown, however often that might be.
nvALT Resurrected
Speaking of writing in Markdown, Brett Terpstra has updated his fork of Notational Velocity and made it available for download again. This is to tide Markdown purists until the relaunch of nvUltra, which has been in the works for some time now.
WriteRoom, Lettera, and MarkEdit are three document-based Markdown apps that I’ve used over the years; there are more, including BBEdit and TextMate. Ulysses, which is how I write most of my posts for this site, is a database-based Markdown app.
You can use nvALT to search, create, and edit Markdown documents; you point it at one folder on your Mac, and nvALT lists them in a single window. It’s a great way to employ Markdown files instead of a notes app. Your files are portable, and you can send them to other apps as you see fit. I was a big user of Notational Velocity, and later nvALT, for all of my note taking for years.
Portable Jump Starters
I stopped by our local ShopRite this morning for a couple of things, and there was a woman stranded in the parking lot with a dead car battery. I gave her a quick jump from my car and went on with my day, but it got me thinking about our family’s challenges with car batteries, and the simple solution of a portable jump starter.
It’s an inevitable part of owning a car, having a dead battery. It might happen after a chilly night, when you head out for work after the first frost of the season. It might happen completely out of the blue. I’ve had to drive home suddenly to jump Rhonda’s car, when she got stuck at the vet’s office, and I’ve had to ask for a jump from a coworker in the parking lot at work, apropos of no previous issues with my car.
Once, all four of us were in the waiting line to get onto the Cape May-Lewes Ferry, and when I tried to start the car to board, the battery was dead. I had charged it the night before we left using a trickle charger, but there we were: stuck, and embarrassed. A patient ferry employee came to our rescue with a portable jump starter, and I resolved to get one for myself.
I ordered one on the ferry ride to Delaware, and we picked it up at an AutoZone or Advance Auto Parts on our way to the hotel. We kept it in the trunk of our 2016 Subaru WRX for the rest of its life, as the car was plagued with some battery issues, the cause of which we never figured out. It has come in handy many, many times. In fact, we’ve gotten by without replacing the battery in our Husqvarna riding lawn mower for the past couple of years, relying on the jump starter to get it running. (I can be weirdly cheap about some things.)
I don’t mind relying on the kindness of strangers if I have to, but it’s my preference to be able to help myself.
Nicholas Magand on the unshakable attraction of the kitchen as the social hub of a party:
To summarise, the living room was the familiar place to sit and chat with people you already knew: it was a great way to spend time with friends. The kitchen was the crowded space to talk and meet new, weird, interesting people: it was the social network lubricant. Both rooms managed to coexist, and in many ways were codependent.
Our house has been in my wife’s family for its entire existence, and was, for a couple of generations, the hub of family gatherings. She said when she was a a kid, everyone gathered in the kitchen. That pattern persisted into our ownership of the house. We even tried a couple of times to encourage people to sit in the living room, because it’s huge and cooking was difficult with everyone gathered in the kitchen.
Vonnegut never provided an etymology for granfalloon, but it’s not too hard to follow his logic. “Proud”? That’s the gran-. “Meaningless”? Possibly the -loon. This splendidly useful word is so puffed up, so grandiose, so silly — compare buffoon, lampoon, and the Bugs Bunnyism maroon — that it can only mean what it sounds like.
Via Kottke, fnnch on making a living as an artist:
When you turn an avocation (hobby) into a vocation (job) you have to do new things you do not enjoy. Emails, events, meetings, accounting, and more. These are not only a drag but can actually strip the joy from the rest of your art practice.
This intersects with Arthur Brooks’s writing on leisure, which I’ve written about here and here.
Is that judgement we make of ourselves really real? Can we stop being performative to ourselves like we often are for others? Should we stop giving a fuck about what we think of us, too?
But it wasn’t the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis earlier this year that finally cost Noem her job today, making her the first ousted Cabinet secretary of Trump’s second term. Instead, it was her self-promotion.
Robert Greene, in The 48 Laws of Power:
“Always make those above you feel comfortably superior. In your desire to please and impress them, do not go too far in displaying your talents or you might accomplish the opposite—inspire fear and insecurity. Make your masters appear more brilliant than they are and you will attain the heights of power.”
I mentioned Arthur Brooks’ article on leisure in the Atlantic a while back, and prior to that, my nagging sense of guilt when doing “not work”:
I’ve long felt a nagging sense of guilt about doing non-work things, because there’s always work hanging out there. The benefit of many years of work experience includes seeing other people who you respect professionally struggle with the same things you do: too much to do, too little bandwidth, material restrictions, etc.
He retells his article on his podcast, Office Hours, and it’s a good listen.
That means that over a lifetime, one full year of exercise leads to 10 full years of extra life. That’s a 1:10 return on investment! So even without any of the additional benefits (which I’ll get into later), this is still one of the best investments you can make.
“One full year of exercise” is Martinus’s calculation of exercising for 45 minutes four days per week. So effectively giving up that time to exercise yields a longer lifespan. It’s an interesting way to think about it.
Another interesting take: exercise doesn’t make you happier, but it does reduce negative emotionality.
No one tells you how parenting changes. At first, it’s all beginnings. First steps. First words. First days of school. You’re trained to look forward, always forward. And then, without warning, life quietly starts handing you endings instead. Not loud ones. Soft ones, often unannounced.
That’s the thing about these moments. The anticipation is always worse than the act. Your brain builds a wall of reasons not to do something, and every single one of them evaporates the moment you start moving. It’s a pattern I recognise now, having gone through it week after week in marathon training blocks. The dread arrives, I entertain it for a bit, then I go out and run anyway. Afterwards, I wonder what I was so worried about.
If we want to keep reading from going extinct, then the best thing we could do is tell young people what so many great writers readily admit: Literature doesn’t make you a better citizen or a more successful person. A passion for reading can even make life more difficult. And you don’t cultivate a passion for the sake of democracy. You do it for the thrill of staying up late to read under the covers by flashlight, unable to stop and hoping no one finds out. Reading is a Vice
We were fixing to take Aaron back up to New Brunswick today, but the snow in the forecast is forcing us to wait until tomorrow. I am thankful for the all-wheel drive on the WRX. Our original plan was to roll up to New Brunswick yesterday and spend the night; I found a Marriott in Somerset and a nice little French bistro, Sophie’s. Aaron preferred getting in another day at home, though, so I cancelled the reservations and we hung around. He was hard at work on a model for his fraternity yesterday. We did the required errands and had cheese and salami at home with a growler of rosé. Rhonda and I have off from work tomorrow, so it’s no trouble either way.
Bellview Boreas Red Wine
It would be easy to let the merriment surrounding Bellview’s release of their new rosé overshadow a new dry red blend, but ahem: I draw your attention to their new Boreas. They describe it thus:
A medium bodied dry red blend of Cabernet Franc and Regent with an herbal taste on the tongue and a long, lasting finish.
Bellview Boreas
It’s pretty fruity up front, with a nice dry finish. We got a 500 ml growler last weekend and it was really good with dinner last week.
Hookmark Pal: Hookmark for iOS
Hookmark is a fascinating utility for the Mac. In short, it allows you to copy links from one file or application to another, and it is invaluable if you spend a lot of time managing various bits of data across applications on your Mac.
I’ll give you a simple example: Here’s my “Car Maintenance” project in OmniFocus:
OmniFocus Project
You can see in the project’s notes field, there’s a link to a folder on my Mac, “Maintenance.” There are lots of different files in that folder that I might need access too, including some how-tos, reference materials, and maintenance logs.
Similarly, you can link to files (even blocks of text in PDFs) using Hookmark. Here’s a screenshot of some specific files I linked (I linked the project to the files); invoking Hookmark shows the files I’ve linked to the project.
Hookmark Links
I can link emails from MailMate to tasks or projects, link Google Suite links to projects and tasks, and more. You can even send links to Instapaper. It’s a great service for keeping yourself organized, and I’m not sure I’m even scratching the surface of what it can do.
One of the central frustrations of being a Mac user who likes to use an iPad, though, is that many of the utilities that make the Mac so great aren’t available on the iPad. And that was a central limitation of using Hookmark until very recently, when CogZest introduced Hookmark Pal.
The upshot is that your Hookmark links work on your iOS devices. It’s called a “pal,” I suppose, because it’s not a universal app that works across all of your devices; Hookmark Pal gets you some of the features you depend on, without the full experience of using Hookmark on your Mac. It’s a welcome addition for sure.
All religions, all political movements and national identities, all business ventures, all charitable activity and all artistic pursuits are nothing but “immortality projects ,” desperate efforts to break free of death’s gravitational pull.
Oliver Burkeman, The Antidote
And yes, I did put the comma inside the quote, because that’s where it belongs.
Do we hope to capture these moments… these ephemera… to avoid forgetting them? In the hopes that we’ll see them again one day and remember them fondly? To think that we are, somehow, casting the shadow of our mortality just a bit longer than its natural demarcation?
I mentioned last weekend that I was trying to replace the flushing components in the toilet upstairs. The problem I ran into was that I couldn’t spin the nuts off of the bolts in water tank; the metal used in the bolts was softened by all those years of submersion in water, I guess, and not even some strategic spritzes with Liquid Wrench helped.
I mentioned it to our superintendent at work (who was in the process of installing his own bathtub, which made my problem seem tiny), and he suggested using a hacksaw. I ended up using just a hacksaw blade, over a couple of sessions, to cut the bolts between the base of the commode and the tank.
It wasn’t fun but it’s done! We have a freshly refurbished can upstairs. I did the same for the downstairs bathroom years ago. So I can log another home repair to my spreadsheet. Regarding said spreadsheet, I just started it today to keep track of when I service or repair something so I can remember how long it’s been since I tangled with a wary structure, appliance, or some other thing that awaits my attention.
I do a lot of these things in part to save a buck, and to avoid the hassle of trying to find someone to come out and do them for me. I feel like most of my home repairs have a very imperfect version of doneness, as I’m not the handiest of fellas, and always have something in mind I’d rather be doing. But you can’t argue with feeling a sense of accomplishment having fixed something yourself.
Next Friday is another visit to New Brunswick to visit Aaron. I found a host of places to try for dinner, including some intriguing Portuguese joints. I’m second guessing not trying one of those spots (not that it’s too late) because I met a couple at a party last night, and she was from Sayreville. I not a teleologist but I do find such moments of serendipity intriguing. I think we’ll enjoy the Metuchen Inn, though. Looking forward to the visit and the inevitable stop (stops?) at Stokelan Winery.
Do I have to tell you that we’re enjoying some spritzes in this fine fall weather? Rhonda is toasting up some nachos to accompany them using some leftovers from the week.
Nachos
I hope you’re doing something that resonates with you from toes to dome. We only have this moment: the past is gone, and the future lies, uncertainly, in the moments, days, and years ahead.
Kagi Search
I’ve been curious about Kagi search since reading about it on Daring Fireball and listening to an interview with one of the developers. I’ve been using Duck Duck Go for a while, and Google, too, and the AI results I get with the latter really have started to bother me. I decided to try Kagi’s trial tier, and while not exciting by any stretch, I found myself very happy with the results I was getting, and when the generous demo bank of searches wore out, I couldn’t see myself going back. It seems a little wild to pay for a search engine, but as with RSS readers, the value proposition is hard to resist.
Path Finder
I’ve been trialing the Finder replacement Path Finder by Cocoatech for years now, but I never found a reason to purchase a license. It popped up on Bundlehunt so I bought a few for my Macs. It’s an interesting twist on the Finder. One of the features I really like is how it displays labels in a window; it’s much less subtle than the Finder, which I like, especially in looking at a folder organized using the Johnny.Decimal system, which I’m currently half-assing. I also really like the Path Navigator feature. Tahoe’s Finder enhancements have been welcome, though. I has a great Yoink-like feature, called the Drop Stack, that lets you move files without opening multiple windows.
Path Finder’s Labels
How Andre Agassi Beat Boris Becker
Andre Agassi was a rock star American tennis player who was divisive in terms of his fan base, but was always fun to watch. He evolved, from tennis rebel to statesman, during his career. This video is great, from the tennis angle and from the how-do-I-get-better angle.
