Part of culling my Feedbin/RSS subscription list has come with it the realization that I like reading independent blogs and websites. I tend to avoid the firehoses, with exceptions, including even good sources like the NYT. It’s just too much for me to read in a feed reader; for those, I can use their proper apps or Apple News.

So I’ve trimmed the list down, recatorized and decatorized a bit, and synced NetNewsWire and Unread with Feedbin, which I’ve updated by unsubscribing to all of my old feeds, and uploading the winnowed down list, which I exported from NetNewsWire.

We’ll see how that goes.

But another thing I discovered, in trying to find search engines more inclined to return results from blogs and smaller sites, was Marginalia, which its creator, Viktor, describes thus:

Remember when you used to explore the Internet, when you used to discover cool little websites made by people and it wasn’t just a bunch of low effort content mill listicles and blog spam?

I want to show you that the Internet you used to go exploring is still very much there. There are still tons of small personal websites, and a wealth of long form text from both the past and the present.

So it’s a search engine. It’s perhaps not the greatest at finding what you already knew was there. Instead it is designed to help you find some things you didn’t even know you were looking for.

I created a quick custom search template in Launchbar so that I could check out the results over time; I’m curious to see if I find some good Feedbin additions.

I’m always amused by how Siri (mis)pronounces local places when I’m using my phone for directions. One that I can think of is a local town called “Lawnside.” I used to work near Lawnside, and one of the exits from one of the major roads that I took often is named for the town. Siri always says, “Lown-side,” which I find hysterical, because it’s a pretty simple and familiar portmanteau of two words: “lawn” and “side.” And lawn, by itself, isn’t a word I typically associate with curious regional pronunciations.

So “Lawnside” has always made me chuckle. Most recently, I was using the phone for directions, and the suggestion was to turn onto “Delsea Drive.” Delsea is a well-known main road that continues across multiple counties, and like “lawn,” it’s generally pronounced the same way: Del-see, with emphasis on the first syllable.

Siri, however, did a charming take on this pronunciation, breaking the word into two very clear syllables, and placing equal stress on both syllables. So it was more like “Del, See.” I really liked it, and it highlighted for me the last three letters (-sea). It evoked a dreamy kind of shore vibe, like it’s some special, sea-foam green road that connects two very relaxing places.

I just briefly suffered and then found a solution for a new-to-me Mac problem: Notification Center stopped working. Clicking on the Date and Time in the upper-right-hand corner of my display did not yield the expected result of showing my notifications. Another weird side effect that I didn’t grok immediately but noticed later was that the widgets I had placed on my Desktop weren’t showing. Lastly, clicking on Notifications in System Settings didn’t do anything: didn’t load the options, nuthin.

I dug around on the internet and found a few troubleshooting steps that didn’t work, and I even decided to reinstall macOS on the MacBook last night. Nothing worked (in addition to the macOS reinstallation, I found myself deleting the Notifications plist file).

I did a quick web search this morning over coffee and found a Reddit thread that led to this Apple discussion of the problem. The solution, it turned out, was to delete all of the files in a folder in your home library folder:

Try removing all files and directories from here:

/Library/Group Containers/group.com.apple.UserNotifications/Library/UserNotifications/Remote/default

if doing so in Terminal you will need to grant Full Disk Access to Terminal first in System Preferences -> Privacy & Security

I emptied out the folder using Finder and rebooted, and voilà! everything is back to normal. I was pretty sure I was going to have to move all of my stuff over to a new user account, but this is a happier resolution.

I make ‘em.

On the most recent Accidental Tech Podcast, a listener wrote in to ask what hack the hosts rely on so much that using a Mac without it makes the Mac feel broken. That’s a fun question and one I can definitely identify with. Marco mentioned LaunchBar, which is probably the first thing I notice when I’m using a different Mac. My wife’s iMac even feels weird when I sit down to use it, as it has Alfred installed.

Another little thing for me is wallpaper. Outside of really nice pics, I generally don’t like personal shots or photorealistic wallpaper. I like vector graphics and smooshy moody pics.

Orthogonal to this topic is “what’s the first app you install on a new Mac?” That would surely be 1Password for me. Then LaunchBar.

ATP 612: Screen on Face

Here’s this week’s list of things to check out:
1. Basic Mac Guy Wallpaper: Fun Apple-focused blog from a designer who makes top-notch Mac, iPhone, and iPad wallpapers.
2. Apple’s Retro Mac Wallpaper: This isn’t new to anyone who was running the macOS Sequoia betas, but the “Macintosh” Dynamic wallpaper collection is a lot of fun, especially for old-skool Mac users like me. The screen saver is a real treat.
3. J Lohr Arroyo Seco Monterrey Chardonnay: Rhonda got a bottle of this as a gift some years ago, and it’s just great. Nothing fancy, but good. We try to grab a bottle to keep in the fridge upstairs for impromptu sushi outings, as happened last night. Loves me some gyoza.

[

Matt Birchler on migrating to Todoist and then going back to Things:

It was perfectly functional and reliable, but I just didn’t enjoy using it. If you made me get specific on what didn’t work, it was a combination of two things: tactility and data density.

One of the best aspects of Things is how satisfying it is to do basically anything in the app. Checking off a task has a satisfying thunk to it, and moving things around (like a task from one project to another) is super intuitive, and everything just works how you’d want. This is all even more impactful on the iPhone and iPad apps where the feel of an app makes even more difference.

Things is a great app on the Mac, iPad, and iOS, and there are some delightful aspects to interacting with the interface. I would say the same for Todoist, but mostly on the iPhone and iPad; it’s an electron app that doesn’t really feel like its part of the ecosystem.

[I Tried to Migrate to Todoist; It Didn’t Go Well](https://thesweetsetup.com/i-tried-to-migrate-to-todoist-it-didnt-go-well/](https://thesweetsetup.com/i-tried-to-migrate-to-todoist-it-didnt-go-well/)

Via Daring Fireball:

The Onion, the satirical news company that repeatedly spoofed conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, has won the bankruptcy auction for control over his media empire — most notably InfoWars, the far-right, conspiracy-minded website that served as Jones’ primary online platform.

Now if we could just get them to buy Matt Gaetz.

The Onion wins Alex Jones’ Infowars in bankruptcy auction

As part of my decluttering of my RSS feeds, I’ve been finding lots of cool blogs that mirror my interests. I found this post via Bicycle for Your Mind about the iPhone’s Today view.:

The Today View is the screen of widgets you get to when you scroll left on your Lock Screen or first Home Screen. And they were speculating that it might get removed in time, as it doesn’t get much love from Apple. They didn’t say that they wanted it to go away — but it was also clear that they wouldn’t really mind.

I didn’t even know this screen had a name.

It’s basically a dock-less home screen you can set widgets on. I set one up:

Not terribly seriously, but yeah, of course I pondered it. I did a little digging just for fun; I have zero complaints about my desktop Mac. It does everything I want and can do so much more. It’s fine. What’s more, I enjoy using it.

Because the Mini would replace a Studio, I would not need to worry about a display or keyboard or anything. I could easily swap out the studio, plug the Mini into the KVM switch, and carry on.

So everything else being neutral, and cost aside, what’s the difference between the two?

Spec	Mac Studio (M1 Max)	Mac Mini M4 Pro
CPU	10	14
Peformance Core	8	10
Efficiency Cores	2	4
GPU Cores	24	20
Neural Engine	16	16
Memory Bandwidth	400	273

I imagine the CPU performance in the M4 would be better than the Studio, but not in ways that I’d experience or appreciate. On the spec side, the Studio does have more GPU cores and that memory bandwidth is only bested by the Ultra. That might not really matter in real life, but hey it’s fun to know.

A while back, I finally subscribed to Ulysses not because I wanted another Markdown-flavored writing app, but because it seems to be the best app from which to post to WordPress from an iPad.

I don’t generally post to Uncorrected from Ulysses on the Mac; that’s reserved for MarsEdit. I do tend to start posts in Ulysses, though, so posting directly from the app would often be the shortest path. (The exception on the Mac is photo handling; I really like how MarsEdit supports this via its upload utility, which works nicely together with Yoink’s ability to convert photos dragged out of it into PNG or JPEG formats. Dragging out of Photos to the Desktop will produce a similar result.)

Anyway, I got to wondering if there’s a way, besides my manually filing sheets into a “Posted” group, to know if I had posted a sheet to my site. And then I noticed the nice little paper plane icon next to a sheet I’d posted in Ulysses’ list view. Nicely done.

Icon denoting status

Alas, Drift, we barely knew ye. I took to this blog and yelp to extol the virtues of this hip, bespoke spot one year ago. Our visit last night was not the return trip we’d imagined, though. I did get the scallop crudo, which I’d pledged to do and to which I held fast. It was good, but doesn’t hold up in my mind. Rhonda fancied the ribeye, but they were sold out. We had a couple of poorly timed servings, too. There was just something missing this visit.

Beer on the ferry. Salt Air for dinner