This was the announcement this week that I was most curious about. Would the new MacBook replace the MacBook Adorable, a Mac I used for a number of years at work? It was not the fastest Mac I’ve used by a mile, and it suffered some pretty serious limitations, but its size? It was perfect.
My Retired MacBook Adorable
The Neo is a great release, and I can’t wait to see one in person. I’m disappointed that it still has a 13” display, because the Adorable’s screen, while small, created a uniquely portable device whose size limitations were, of course, addressed at your desk with an external display. On the other hand, it is a 13” display, while the Air–the next smallest MacBook–is 13.6.” It’s a bit thicker than the Air, but weighs the same, and offers both smaller length and width .
The colors are great, too.
The Adorable was not the cheapest Mac in the lineup by a stretch, so while the Neo (barely) offers the smallest overall footprint of Apple’s MacBook lineup, it’s not a successor to the Adorable. Alas.
The Neo does, however, place the Air back into its role in the lineup as the mid-tier Apple portable–the Air was initially an aspirational device, a more expensive option for those craving the smallest possible MacBook, with some tradeoffs. The Adorable assumed this spot when the Air shifted to the lowest-end Mac for a time, offering a featherweight MacBook (true, there was an 11″ Air at the time) and a better screen than the air–but at a price.
Burst Notes, from publicspace.net, makers of the excellent A Better Finder Rename, adds the deliciousness of a command palette, as you might see in Obsidian or Raycast, to your Mac for munging Markdown files.
Burst Notes lets you add any number of Markdown documents to the utility. With a click of command-shift-b, you are greeted by a handsome palette:
Burst Notes
Burst Notes displays all of the headings in your markdown file and lets you quickly append text, a to-do, code block, or list of text to your specified file. If you have a “Today” or “Todo” file on your desktop that you append throughout the day, Burst Notes is a clever, tasteful way to add data to your file without stepping out of your level of focus.
I have often tried the Today.md file trick as a place to add some quick information on my Mac, most recently trying Sindre Sorhus’s Scratchpad, and then keeping a Bike file on my desktop for quick reference. As noted on Burst Notes’ webpage, though, you can skip the step of switching to the application you’re using and editing via Burst’s panel. It’s a fully keyboard-centric mode of interaction, allowing you to keep your fingers on the keyboard if you like.
And hey: Bike handles markdown files with style (and grace), so Burst Notes is a win in my book.
It was a beautiful day yesterday, hitting 50 degrees for the first time since I can remember. It’s been a cold winter and a lot of snow for South Jersey. We go some years with none. Might see 70 degrees next weekend!
Another book I’m planning to read is A World Appears by Michael Pollan. In doing some “mesearch,” I discovered Sam Harris’s book Waking Up, which was not the direction I expected to go into. (I’ve got a series of posts in the works on consciousness and meditation, but I think I’ll inhale Pollan’s book first.) I don’t wince at the concept of mindfulness or the practice of meditation like I once would have, and I deeply interested in the subject of human consciousness as a result.
This week’s Serial is wholly comprised of apps I’ve been digging lately. Enjoy!
Quick Exposé
Quick Exposé is a utility that improves the Exposé feature in macOS. I’m incline to command-tab to switch between apps in macOS, but sometimes you want to see all of the windows open in a specific app. Among other tweaks, Quick Exposé lets you option-hover over an icon in the Dock to show an application’s open windows. I realized I liked it enough when one of my Macs wasn’t running it, and I couldn’t figure out why the mouse gesture wasn’t doing what I wanted it to do.
Quick Exposé
Textovert
Developer Howard Oakley describes Textovert as “a drag-and-drop wrapper for text conversion using the command tool textutil and for converting text and Rich Text content of PDFs.” You drag a file onto Textovert’s main window, specify your output format, and bingo: you’ve got an editable text, rich text, Word, or other file format to work with.
Textovert
Gestimer
Brett Terpstra mentioned Gestimer in a recent episode of the Overtired podcast. It’s a clever little app that lets you set a timer by dragging a slider out of your Mac’s menu bar. It helpfully adds the timer to the Reminders app, which in my case, means it shows up in OmniFocus, too.
Gestimer
Silt
I played Silt this week for the first time. It looked a lot like Limbo, which is a great game that even Aaron go into, so I couldn’t help but try it. It’s an undersea platformer, and combines platforming and puzzle solving elements with an angle cribbed from the excellent Ghost Trickgame from Capcom: possession. To make your way through the undewater mazes, you need to possess sea creatures to chew through obstacles and smash boundaries. It’s a lot of fun, and like Limbo, dark and moody.
Wow is it snowing out there! The snow is coming down as the forecasters have promised. Rhonda and I met my former boss, Teri, for some wine and snacks at Bellview Winery yesterday. It was a really nice time catching up. I met another former boss this past week for phô for lunch earlier this week. I often reflect that I’m lucky that I get to keep in touch with all of the great mentors I’ve had over the years. We nipped out for some Indian later that night. Rhonda’s got some bolognese on the range for dinner tonight.
Phô
Elgato Stream Deck
Way back in the early OS X days, I had a peripheral called the Griffin PowerMate. I was a nice heavy silver knob that you plugged into your Mac and used to control your volume, brightness, and anything else you wanted it to do. It was a great mute button, too. I still have it, in fact. Sure, you can do everything with your mouse or keyboard, but sometimes it’s hand to have a physical button or switch. It looks like you can get it running on the Mac, too.
The Streamdeck is a similar device. I have a cool little 15-button keypad with colorful icons that I can configure to do all kinds of things.
Built-in actions: triggering screenshots and screen video recording, audio muting, unmuting, and adjustments, as well as changing screen brightness.
running Applescripts, such as hiding all active application windows and exposing the desktop, and Shortcuts. Elgato Steam Deck
I like it so much that my original plan–to set it up and then take it to work–is probably going to change such that I’ll want one for work, too. Yeesh.
Today: An RSS Reader
Today is an RSS reader for the Mac (and iOS) with a “touch of AI.”
Today RSS Reader
I exported my RSS feeds from Feedbin and imported them into Today. The import took a while, and Today discarded the categories I had set up in Feedbin. I exported the OMPL back out and I can fix it; you can recategorize the feeds in Today, but it’s a feed-by-feed affair (and I have like 300 or so).
Today uses your Mac’s on-device AI to generate a daily newspaper for you, which can span your feeds or by category. You can ask other questions, too; I tried “Any recipes for a cold day?” And something about a camera, but I got five recommendations that had nothing to do with my prompt, and they were the same five recommendations both times. Today will read articles to you, too.
It’s got a tasteful, simple design. Excited to see how Today evolves.
Standard Ebooks
Standard Ebooks was mentioned on a recent episode of a podcast I was listening to. It’s a great source of free ebooks for a variety of devices, all beautifully typeset.
Ebook projects like Project Gutenberg transcribe ebooks and make them available for the widest number of reading devices. Standard Ebooks takes ebooks from sources like Project Gutenberg, formats and typesets them using a carefully designed and professional-grade style manual, fully proofreads and corrects them, and then builds them to create a new edition that takes advantage of state-of-the-art ereader and browser technology.
I downloaded a couple of Herman Hesse novels, and my first-ever Tarzan book, Tarzan of the Apes.
I didn’t go to Standard Ebooks with the intention of searching for Tarzan books, but I happened to see the collection by Edgar Rice Burroughs, and it peaked my interest. When I was a kid, there was a Tarzan cartoon on Saturday mornings, visually similar to the Lone Ranger cartoon that aired at the same time. I really liked it a lot, but as a kid, of course, I lacked the historical knowledge of Tarzan’s genesis. Like Conan the Barbarian, my first brush was a cartoon adaptation of a much older series of books. You can read all of Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories with this collection, but they, too, are available on Standard Ebooks.
I’m hot to watch the Tarzan movie from the 80s (not the risqué one), Graystoke: the Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes. I remember watching it, and it wasn’t an action movie that I probably expected. It hews more to the original novel.
Wow is it cold out there! Rhonda and I stayed in yesterday after running a thousand errands and taking Moscato to and from the groomer yesterday (they did a very nice job on her). We guzzled some of Bellview Winery’s 2024 Chardonnay and Rosé from the growlers I filled while out and about once we settled in and had some cheese. It’s spritzes and burrata time before the Super Bowl.
Bellview Winery’s 2024 Chardonnay and Rosé
I finally got the Mustang unstuck from the ice in the driveway. It’s hard to imagine that such a powerful vehicle could be rendered helpless by a few blobs of ice, but there you have it. I was able to drive Aaron’s Mini Cooper all week, so there’s nothing to complain about. It’s fun to drive different cars and have an appreciation for their differences. I get to drive the WRX on the weekends and when we travel, and the Mustang to work most days. Driving the Mini is a neat change of pace.
Bookmark Managers!
Why use a dedicated bookmark manager? In addition to the features that each one brings, the main reason is that it’s a great way to indulge in trying out different browsers, if you’re just browser curious, or if you actually need to use different browsers depending upon what you’re doing. I have long used both Safari and Chrome, because both of the last two school districts in which I’ve worked were Google shops, and Chrome is a better fit for Google suite apps. So with a bookmark manager, you can hop between different browsers but keep all of your bookmarks in one place. This is especially helpful if you switch between operating systems and browsers, and your manager supports multiple platforms.
Raindrop.io
Raindrop.io is exactly what I just mentioned above: a multi-platform bookmark manager. Getting bookmarks into Raindrop is dead simple, and it supports a number of organizational features, including folders, tags, and pile of filters. It is organized like an email app, such that new bookmarks show up in an inbox, and you can organize them for later use.
Raindrop.io
Raindrop.io recently added an LLM feature for paid users, which will organize your bookmarks, suggest tags, and excise broken links. This is an exciting feature that perfectly envisions what AI should be doing for us: making our lives easier by removing the drudgery of organizing and maintaining data by leveraging our practices and preferences.
ExtraBar + Shiori
I found ExtraBar when Louie Plummer posted about it on Amerpie. I tried it out, thinking that it might be a replacement for Bartender, which has gotten a little wonky since Tahoe came out. It is decidedly not a Bartender replacement, and appeals to uses who enjoy employing links across macOS in apps that support them.
There’s a lot you could write about ExtraBar, and maybe if the utility finds some traction in my life, I’ll do so, but for now, I’m just going to focus on Shiori. It’s a paid plugin for a paid app, which I find a little odd, but maybe the developer is on to something. You invoke ExtraBar as you normally would, but can then jump into Shiori, where you can search your bookmarks. You can include specific folders to in ExtraBar’s presets, so that you could have a preset for work, and another for home, for example, and only show the links you want to see depending upon the context. The animations are whimsical and fun, to boot.
URL Manager Pro
URL Manager Pro has been around for a long time; my dad has always used it on his Macs, even back in the class Mac OS days, prior to NeXT’s acquisition of Apple. I never really got into it, but for the purposes of this post, I downloaded it and gave it a spin. It’s available for the iPhone and iPad, too, which is not something you can say about ExtraBar + Shiori.
I have almost 1400 directories and an untold number of notes. That’s just here, so there are more on other platforms. The way I see it, I can do two things:
I can spend the next year of my life (probably) going through these notes, taking out the ones that can be tossed and then properly organizing them into a directory structure that makes sense.
Or, I can make an old notes directory, shove everything in there, and start the fuck over.
I’ve been excited to see what was going to come of Apple’s acquisition of Pixelmator. I’ve been a Pixelmator user for a very long time, and really love editing photos, especially on the iPad, with it. It has great Apple Pencil support.
For a long time, my wish was to have a polycarbonate MacBook in Black with a DSLR and Apple’s own Aperture. I never got the DSLR, and the serial improvements of the iPhone camera decreased my desire for a DSLR. Aperture was eventually shuttered, but the Photos app has gained a lot of its functionality. I’m not really in that headspace anymore, though; I very much enjoy taking pictures with my Olympus and OM System cameras and the small but engaging collection of glass that I’ve accumulated. And so my interest in some “prosumer” photo editing has remained.
I was reading Joe Rosensteel’s article on Six Colors about the acquisition, and he brought up a great point: What about Photomator? That app was a lot of fun to use, and I realized that it’s effectively a Lightroom competitor. Rosensteel thinks that it could end up being a prosumer add on to Apple’s Photos, which sounds like a smart idea, especially to the degree that it would add a subscription revenue stream. I could see Apple bundling it into their Creator Studio, too, such that if you subscribe to ACS, you get the Photomator features in Photos. That’s my predication and hope, anyway.
Peripheral to the holiday, I picked up Darkroom on sale. It works like Photomator, and I like it a lot. I suspect it’s a familiar experience for Lightroom users. Photomator is 30 bucks a year, and while I have it on my iPad from a long time ago, I’m not inclined to subscribe just yet. Hopefully something will come out of the Creator Studio integration soon; I don’t need many of those apps, but I do intend to keep supporting Pixelmator’s development. I like how both of the applications work by exposing your Photos library, allow you to make edits, and then replace or copy the edited image back into your library.
Speaking of the snow, Rhonda and I found ourselves unable to put in an order at ShopRite for pickup last weekend due to the impending snow. She put in a fair bit of effort construction the order, and it was a pisser to learn that we couldn’t actually order anything for days. Talk about poor user experience.
OmniOutliner Shopping List
Anyway, we needed what we needed for the week, and the internet connection in the store can be flakey, so I logged into the account on my Mac, copied the order, and pasted it into Kagi Assistant, which I asked to strip out everything except the items.
This list went into OmniOutliner, and I was able to pull it up on my phone while we shopped. It’s the simplest version of OmniOutliner use there is, but it’s still magical to me all these years later. It’s a great app.
Jobs unveiled the first-generation iPad at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco on January 27, 2010. Designed to fill the gap between smartphones and laptops, the original iPad featured a 9.7-inch LED-backlit multitouch display, Apple’s first custom designed chip, a 30-pin dock connector, and up to 64GB storage. With a starting price of $499, it offered users a new way to browse the web, read eBooks, watch videos, and interact with Apple’s growing app ecosystem. Jobs described it as “a magical and revolutionary device.”
I managed to wait until September of 2010 before buying my first iPad, and I have some photos of it on my desk at work from the time.
I get a kick out of seeing an old iPod in the background, attache to the Altec Lansing speaker dock I used at work. I wrote about my experience with it here.
The first iPad was a good bit of fun, although if you think feeling hamstrung by the OS is a limitation now, the original was really just a big iPod Touch. The criticism at the time was that it was just a “consumption” device, and couldn’t be taken very seriously because you couldn’t get much done with it. I got plenty of writing and email done with the first iPad, and every one after that, too, but it was not a laptop replacement. Things have gotten better, of course, but iPad’s still not a Mac.
The original iPad lasted me until the iPad 3 came out, which was a heavier device thanks to the Retina display. The original had, for me, been so RAM constrained that just reading a web page in Safari would often cause the app to crash. And unlike the Mac, the system didn’t give you a reason why.
I got the original Mini when it came out, too. Here’s a pic from the parking lot when I bought it, still in the box.
I’ve had a rotation of iPads since then: the original Air, a few pros, 10″ and 11″ and even 13″ models. While they’ve never been able to replace my Mac, I have always found a lot of use for them.
There’s some stormy weather out there today; when I got up, I’d say we had about 4” of snow already. It’s still coming down, too. Rhonda and I both did some sweeping and shoveling to keep up on things, and I wanted to lift the windshield wiper arms on the cars up so they don’t get frozen to the windshields. We could’t even put in an order for groceries for store pickup yesterday; we had to drive over and prowl the aisles at Shop Rite like animals. We’re both off work tomorrow, too.
Aaron sent a picture from campus:
Rutgers in the Snow
Stay safe and warm, and I hope you don’t have to do any driving today. Rhonda made a bolognese sauce yesterday while we were home, and we’ll be having that for dinner.
CoTypist
CoTypist is a macOS app that suggests words and sentences based on what you’re writing. It uses AI to learn your style and make suggestions. I found it during one of the Mac app bundle deals earlier this year. It’s in beta, so it’s free right now. It’s pretty interesting to try out; a trail of suggestions follow your cursor as you type, and you can accept words or sentences as they appear.
You can opt to let CoTypist learn from you as you accept suggestions, which (the app says) is stored locally on your Mac. Like TextExpander, it calculates the time you’ve saved using CoTypist. I ran into an issue where CoTypist’s default behavior–expanding suggestions as you type using the tab key–conflicted with OmniFocus’s behavior of using the tab key to move to the next field. Thoughtfully, though, you can exclude CoTypist from any app you want, or just disable the tab key per app.
CoTypist Statistics
Witch vs TabTab
I wrote about Witch in a previous Sunday Serialpost. It’s a utility for the Mac by Many Tricks that extends the default command-tab keyboard shortcut to let you switch between apps, yes, but also documents and browser tabs. As Many Tricks describes Witch, it lets you “command-tab everything.”
One of my favorite features is the ability to search for open documents or Safari tabs. I’ve been using TabTab for a while and I love it, but there’s been an issue with the license manager and it thinks I’m using all of the seats I purchased (when I should have one seat left).
So I’ve been using Witch on my desktop Mac, and having to fart around with it a bit made me realize how useful (and customizable) Witch is. I set it up so that the keyboard shortcut I would normally use to invoke TabTab is now a shortcut to Witch. Once invoked, I tap the s key to search for browser tabs or documents. It’s really handy.
Typinator Extensions and Sets
For no particular reason, I replaced TextExpander with Typinator a while back. It’s in the same class of app or utility, but I find it a little more Mac-like, which breaks my heart a little because TextExpander started out as a really simple, light Mac-only utility.
I installed the version 10 beta today, and setting things up, starting poking around their “sets” feature and the web page dedicated to their collection. I love the Dates 1.0 set. There’s a cool emoji set, too; as with so many other things, though, I’m very used to using Launchbar for emoji.
Typinator
Ergonis is coming out with an iPhone version of Typinator soon. One of the pain points of relying on utility apps like this is their either total absence on the iPhone or iPad, or in this case of text expansion apps, they’re available as keyboard applications. I don’t find the act of switching keyboards on the iPhone to worth the effort, so I don’t generally use them.
John Gruber, writing about Google’s “Personal Intelligence” feature:
But a big one for me — an inveterate note-taker — would be my notes app. I’d rather have an AI assistant know everything in my notes app than everything in my email.
I’m eagerly awaiting AI on the Mac/iPad/iPhone to be able to look at my files, calendar events, tasks in OmniFocus, and notes to provide assistance with traversing my day and synthesizing my collected knowledge. My version of the library in the Knowledge Navigator video is the driver seat of my 2013 Mustang GT, but pretty much everything else is aspirational.
I’ll go a step further and say that I’d like to for Notes to itself turn into a kind of chatbot. I created a Shortcut that uses Apples Private Cloud Compute to take a query and copy the results to the clipboard. I had originally set it up to create a new note in Notes.
And that’s partly how I think it should work: You open a new note in Notes, ask a question, and you can keep the whole conversation in the note, adding metadata later.
Another neat application of Private Cloud Compute is featured in a the new version of OmniOutliner, which is version six. One of the automations you can add to Outliner is to create an outline from your clipboard. My shortcut is perfect for getting an outline started on a new topic.
I’ve tried a number of different ways to harness automation to logging expense. Drafts has, for a long time, been the place I went for this kind of thing: I’ve used Drafts to log my rowing sessions, blood pressure, and activities while I was taking classes and completing internships. Drafts excels at this kind of thing.
Dan Moren at Six Colors wrote a post about how he updates a Numbers spreadsheet using a Shortcut, and thought it might make a good starting place for this task. My struggle with Drafts is inputting the information in the correct order; I wanted to record the transaction total, account I charged it to, the date, and a brief description of the purchase. The problem with that on Drafts for me was recalling the order of the fields, and inserting commas (it went to a CSV file).
Shortcuts is perfect for this kind of thing, and of course it works on all of my devices. I’m very likely to be out and about when shopping, such that my phone is the obvious place to capture an expenditure. But I do like having this on my Mac, too, because I often do purchase things while using it.
The modal dialog boxes prompt me for the correct input field, reducing the friction of logging an expense. Best of all, I can fire the shortcut after searching for it using Spotlight on any device.
One of the central improvements that computers bring to us is the ability to automate repetitive tasks. As a school psychologist, I did a lot of cobbling together applescripts and templates using merge features to automate some of my writing of reports, and to reduce the likelihood of mistakes. TextExpander similarly helped me with the massive writing burden of the job as well.
My job as a manager requires much less repetitive writing, although I still rely on a text expansion utility (currently Typinator) for a lot of repetitive writing (phone numbers, addresses, and some other things),
Writing here at Uncorrected, though, introduces some repetitive tasks that I sought to address using Shortcuts, and most recently, the support for Quick Actions in macOS Tahoe.
Rename Photos for Blog Posts
One of the coolest new features that employs AI that’s baked into macOS is harnessing the power of Private Cloud Compute. Entirely inspired by Jason Snell’s post on Six Colors, I put this shortcut together to use Private Cloud Compute to rename screenshots and photos I intend to post based on a description of the photo. Is it hard to rename a file so that the file name matches the content? Not really. But it can be repetitive. This one is specific to my Sunday Serial series, and it appends the date to the graphic asset, which is a practice I’ve been applying for a while now.
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.
A week back into the routine after a long holiday break! We’re having spritzes and cheese now; I have a pork tenderloin in the sous vide tank for tomorrow (I’ll grill it off before serving after a quick dunk in the tank again tomorrow; it will come out in about two hours and overnight in the fridge), and there are chicken thighs in the oven.
We had a fun weekend: out with the ‘rents for Joe, Sorayah, and Dad’s birthdays (bunch of January babies!) at Maplewood, then hot pot/Korean BBQ with Aaron for lunch yesterday. We made a trip to a vinyl shop he loves in the Hamilton Mall after lunch, too. We fancied going to Guitar Center, but Rhonda and I were meeting an old friend at Bellview for wine in the afternoon, so we had to cut Guitar Center out of the plans. Today was just groceries. I did take the dog for a walk, which was nice.
Bellview’s Dry Rosé
Rhonda and I met a friend at Bellview yesterday, and their new rosé, made with Chambourcin grapes, was on tap! That means it will be bottled soon, but on tap is the way to go. It’s been out of stock for a few months, so this was a very welcome development. I need a few more swigs to weigh in on the difference between this and other vintages, but it was familiar for sure.
Bellview Rosé
FlexTime
In addition to the excellent MarsEdit, Daniel Jailkut’s Red Sweater software offers the very cool FlexTime utility, a “versatile timer for repetitive activities.” I found myself, late last week, feeling especially overwhelmed by a crap ton of of urgent, open loops. OmniFocus is my central planning tool, but the challenge of overload is prioritizing, and sometimes, that means setting some time limits so that you can make some progress on a few projects.
I’ve written a bit here about how I deal with this aspect of productivity, most notably trying to plug into Neil Fiori’s Unschedule technique. OmniFocus’s Planned Dates feature helps tremendously with daily planning, but outside of allowing you to estimate how long something might take, it’s not a tool for timing.
There are no shortage of timers for the Mac and iOS timers, but Red Sweater makes some great stuff. I tried it out a few years ago, and I liked it, but only used it for a spell. I downloaded it again and am planning to try it out again.
FlexTime by Red Sweater Software
FlexTime lets you create a variety of timers and save them for reuse. You can specify a number of different activities per timer, and set notifications for each activity. You can even spit your timers out to Apple Music, which seems like a smart alternative to having the app run across platforms.
Top Pot Hot Pot and BBQ
Aaron and I first (finally!) tried hot pot about a year ago at Kung Fu Hot Pot, after a tour at the University of Delaware. We really enjoyed the experience, especially on a cold day. Our second visit occurred after a visit to Rutgers, also cold and drizzly, and we both agreed that the Happy Lamb was a superior experience to Kung Fu.
Yesterday, we headed to Mays Landing to try out Top Pot Hot Pot and BBQ while Aaron is still home on break. It, too, was exceptional.
Some niggles: the broth situation is such that there’s no easy way for two people to share broth; the pots are arranged such that they’re conveniently near one diner, not in the center of the table. This is to make room, of course, for the brazier, which takes center stage on their tables (and in the experience of having KBBQ at Top Pot). Hot pot or BBQ are $31.99 as of yesterday, but you can combine them Also, the vegetables, rice balls, and other non-meat goodies are ordered from the menu, which we didn’t prefer; it’s a lot of fun at Happy Lamb, for example, to go up to the buffet or ingredient station and pick out different root vegetables and rice balls (and all kinds of other things) that look good, whereas you have to ask for everything at Top Pot.
Top Pot Hot Pot
Top Pot does newbie diners a great service, however, by not only offering a fulsome selection of sauces, but also a display behind the buffet of sauces you can concoct for yourself. Similarly, there are some brief cooking directions and diagrams posted at each table. Like dining on phô, the experience of eating hot pot is different from your standard western dining situation. We are, happily, adventurous diners, but some know-how is appreciated to maximize the experience. To become an expert, learn the rules first.
Meats, before grilling
We had a couple of kinds of tongue, and really loved the version they prepare for hot pot (the BBQ preparation was less exciting), and there was a lemon pork belly we both adored. Everything was good, though. It was a really big lunch.
