Here’s Apple News today:

For my part, I picked up a bottle of carpagna vermouth for our manhattans. I’m good with dry if that works for you.

I wrote at the beginning of Christmas break that I was bringing the Chemex home to see how we felt about it vs the Melita pour over rig I usually use. (I use the Chemex at the office.) I still have to check in with Rhonda, but for myself, I feel like the Melita at home is just fine. Maybe what I like at the office is the difference, another way to have coffee. I love my pre-workout Moka pot. Is it better than the Melita? Nah. Different? Sure. I can say the same for the Chemex: do I prefer it? Nah. Is it different? For sure.

Here’s what I’d say, if I were forced to be reductionistic about it:

1. If I could only have one way to make coffee, of the three, it would be the Chemex.
2. If I could only have two, it would be Chemex and moka.
3. But none of those material restriction apply.

So the Chemex is packed up and waiting, like an impertinent child having a time out.

I’ve been dumping links into Safari’s Reading List since it was introduced in 2011 with Mac OS X Lion, but I have a spotty history of actually reading what I add there. In the interests of really using Safari’s features in a more deliberate way, and freeing myself from the never-ending “I’d-like-to-read-this-but-not-now-should-I-bookmark-pocket-instapaper-OmniFocus-it,” I thought I’d start pruning the reading list. Ultimately, I’m always near some device on which I can see the reading list, and since I very much enjoy reading on my iPhone or iPad in Safari’s Reading Mode, Safari makes great sense.

I am by no means reading every article that I added to the list since way back when, but I am clicking on things that catch my eye and deleting obviously expired and obviated links. As Oliver Burkeman counsels, we should treat this stuff like a river that passes us by, rather than a static pile to be defeated.

And noticing some things about Safari and the reading list… I really like the feature how it stays in reader mode and allows you to swipe from article to article; you don’t have to back out to the reading list to choose the next article. Plus, AI summaries now! These are really cool, and sometimes Apple Intelligence will generate a table of contents you can use to navigate the page.

Why We Procrastinate and What We Can Do About It? (New York Times) 

It’s an emotion regulation issue that involves escape and avoidance. There are some squishy recommendations to help you work through the torpor.

Gabagool

The Soprano-ificiation of deli meats, explained.

 There’s A Correct Number Of Drinks 

It just depends on who you ask.

Rye, My Favorite Spirit, was Making a Comeback in 2015

Still, that’s why the “moment” seems more like momentum to me. Rye sales don’t even scratch the hide of 800-pound gorillas like bourbon and Scotch. But if you put rye sales on a bell curve, says Nick Crutchfield, master of whisky for Diageo — which has multiple Scotches in its portfolio, but also has Bulleit rye — the rise “would start around 2006, and then somewhere around 2011, it just shoots up. And I don’t think we’re going to see the other side of the bell for years.”

There are so many varieties of rye whisky available these days. I got into it back in the mid-2000s, I think, and all we could find was Jim Beam and Old Overholt.

Philosophy Is Useful For Journalists

Epistemology — the study of what we can know — turned out to be particularly useful, since people love to tell reporters what they believe as if it’s a fact. Well, to be fair, they often don’t know the difference between their beliefs and facts. They think the mere fact that they believe something is true — for example, that angels watch over us — makes it true. While it’s true that they’re not lying, exactly, sorting out meaningful information from the mis- and dis- versions used to be the job of ink-stained wretches. Nowadays most of us produce advertiser-driven content, of course, but still I find the discipline inherent in epistemology useful when dealing with car sellers, alternative health practitioners, and marketers of all sorts.

There’s A Weight Where You Don’t Have To Struggle?

There a weight where you don’t have to worry about taking the Oreo.

I’d like to stop worrying about the chocolate-covered pretzels.

You Can Woop Your Way To Success

YAF: yet another framework.

The Summer Slide Isn’t Inevitable

What makes these “outliers” different? Their parents, the investigators found, are significantly more likely than other low-income parents to take their children to the library during the summer and to check out books while there. The parents of these “exceptional summer learners” also read to their children for longer periods of time, and are more likely to check their children’s homework and have higher expectations for their children’s conduct grade during the school year — “types of parental involvement that could well carry over into the summer months,” the researchers note.

We always took the kids to the library, especially in the summer. First, everything was free. And we were grabbing hundreds of dollars worth of kids books by the bagful and taking them home for a couple of weeks. To read. For free. Whenever we wanted.

Remember Maker Spaces ?

I feel the same way about project-based learning these days.

It’s Not A Mid Life Crisis. Just An Existential One

No shame here.

You Can Escape Zip Ties

Prone To Procrastination? Structure It.

Structured procrastination means shaping the structure of the tasks one has to do in a way that exploits this fact. The list of tasks one has in mind will be ordered by importance. Tasks that seem most urgent and important are on top. But there are also worthwhile tasks to perform lower down on the list. Doing these tasks becomes a way of not doing the things higher up on the list. With this sort of appropriate task structure, the procrastinator becomes a useful citizen. Indeed, the procrastinator can even acquire, as I have, a reputation for getting a lot done.

Batman: Not So Innocent

Batman’s reputation has always been that he used non-lethal means. It was a code. This article points out that that hasn’t always been the case.

Blue light Discovered! Put down the iPad and get a Kindle.

We got blue-blocker glasses for Joe a long time ago. I have tried to stay away from an iPad or iPhone screen in bed (preferring my Kobo) but lately I’ve been spading. I don’t notice anything.

The SAT: Not so bad?

I didn’t do that great on the SAT. Whatevs.

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Speaking of Mac OS X Lion, I have a very fond remembrance of it coming out. I had ordered my first MacBook Air, which I got just as we were leaving for vacation in Ocean City. So I had the Mac to set up and play with over a whole week of vacation. About it I wrote:

If I had to pick a favorite, it would probably be the MacBook Air. It was my first Mac with an SSD, and I absolutely loved it. I only stopped using it because my son needed something to play Minecraft on; I was not in the market for a replacement. The 13” Pro I replaced it with was superior, technically, but I didn’t really need the extra power and the Air was just the right size for everything I needed it for.

Not today, but soon… as I suggested.

Today’s spritz featured Bellview’s Pet-Nat Rosé. Very good.

The introduction of browser tabs is arguably one of the greatest advances in user interface design since the birth of the web browser. Think about all of the people you know (yourself included, perhaps) who exist in a perpetual state of crowded tabs, to the point that the tabs’ names themselves aren’t readable in the browser interface. They have, in a very real way, become today’s bookmarks.

No one doesn’t want tabs, but effective means of dealing with them in your browser at the least conjures feelings of dissatisfaction in users, and the brightest lights look for solutions. Consider recent attempts to rethink tabs and bookmarks: Microsoft Edge’s vertical tabs, for example, and Arc’s unique implementation.

I don’t think visual exposure is the solution… at least for me. In the same way that organizing files in your system is only useful to a point, the obvious answer is search. On the Mac, I rarely look for a specific file, outside of something I’m working on multiple times a day or throughout a week. I’m more likely to search: Search in Finder, search in Notes, search in an app.

You can, of course, search your open tabs in each of the major browsers. Keyboard jockeys surely know that to see your tabs, you’d type:

• Safari: Shift-command-backslash
• Chrome: Shift-command-a

What you see, however, in the browser’s UI is markedly different from browser to browser. Here’s Chrome:

And here’s Safari:

I actually like Chrome’s behavior and interface better than Safari’s, in this case. First, it visually makes a more meaningful distinction between bookmarks and tabs. In my mind at least, bookmarks are either links you’re going to click on every day, or reference links you want to have handy. They’re of arguable importance anymore, I suppose. Secondly, the menu in Chrome immediately suggests that the user’s next interaction should be search. You don’t have to search, but it’s suggested/revealed in the UI. Safari fits this second bill, but the large preview tiles, while informative, take up a lot of screen real estate.

In the best kind of diversion, I cobbled a quick Keyboard Maestro macro together to at least make the key command the same for showing tabs in between both browsers, as the Chrome one for some reason developed muscle memory for me, whereas the Safari keystroke hasn’t been sticky.

It has make me realize, to some degree, that for as much as I have historically used Safari, I never made the strides to understand it and get the most out of it as I had other applications, and notably Edge. The reason for Edge, of course, is that so many of Windows’ solutions happen in the browsers. That’s an OK version of computing for plenty of people, including students using Chromebooks. It’s just not for me.

So! Back to tabs.

I wrote about Tabby way back in 2003, which I liked because it was a small utility that would show all of your open browser tabs, searchable, across Safari and Chromium-based browsers. I did check out Tab Switcher at the same time, but didn’t ultimately adopt it because it was specific to Safari, and I used it and Chrome (or Edge) simultaneously. I did not, however, prefer Tabby’s interface, which anchored your search to the left side of the screen, resulting in some visual interface weirdness, and it was also hard to see in that corner of my larger home display (this wasn’t an issue on a laptop screen or even the 27” I had at the office).

Happily, it looks like Tabs now supports Chrome as well. I don’t use it as much as I used to, though, so I was gonna switch to Tabs Switcher for a bit anyway.

Via Nancy Friedman, Pantone’s color of the year is “mocha mousse.”

Here’s a list of things to check out as the week between wanes.

Kitschy Gifts

The holidays are made merry by lots of gift giving. Unexpected delights this year included this coffee mug set, which we used this morning for our moka pot cups.

Pat Lafrieda Meat Purveyors

We had a beef rib roast Christmas Day from Lafrieda. It was terrific. Rhonda and I were just lamenting that we can’t find hanger steak like we used to. Lafrieda has them.

Cava Spritz

I was up reading and learned about cava:

Tahiirah Habibi, an Atlanta-based wine educator and sommelier with a penchant for bubbly, recommends cava, a diaphanous and toasty Spanish sparkling wine made from grapes like Xarel-lo, Macabeo, and Parellada. “If you want some really affordable great sparkling wine, it’s comparable to Champagne,” Habibi says. It can hover between $10 to $15, but bumping your budget a bit over $30 will net you truly exemplary cava.

I’m curious to try something other than our usual Prosecco in spritzes.

MG Siegler, on the iPad and phone sizes…10 years ago:

It’s a different type of computing device. You can argue that as phones get bigger, they veer too close to tablets for a tablet purchase to still be justified. But I do believe we’ll see phone sizes eventually settle in the 4 to 5-inch range, while tablets go the other way: larger, as they embrace their destiny.

That’s not turned out to be the case; people still love big phones. (I have a Max.) None of Apple’s scurrent line save for the SE fit those dimensions.

But the larger point is correct in a couple of ways. First, the iPad and the phone are different devices. Second, and closely related: you could have an iPhone and not an iPad, but not the other way around.

The Astonishing, Disappointing iPad

I have a note in Notes titled “My Next Keyboard.” I’ve been rocking a Keychron K3 Bluetooth Mechanical Keyboard for a few years, and I like it plenty (save for the poor battery life on bluetooth). I’ve been using a couple of Apple Magic Keyboards at the office and thought maybe I should try this keyboard again; I have one, which I bought at the local Best Buy kind of on a whim. It’s a nice keyboard, but I didn’t use it much at home because my keyboard tray is kinda small. The Keychron (or any keyboard lacking a keypad) fits just fine on the tray.

I handled this a couple of ways. First, I dispensed with the KVM switch, which I’d originally set up to be able to swap between my son’s old Alienware PC, which I’d stuffed with 32 GB of RAM and updated to Windows 11. For an old machine, it was perfectly serviceable for my needs. I decided to move the KVM setup so that I could switch between my Mac Studio and old MacBook Pro, but honestly, I don’t need that setup like ever. Adding to that is the fact that the not-entirely-Mac-compatible Samsung 32” display I’m using now wakes from sleep when I tap the keyboard, which it did not do prior to either the KVM coming off, or the Apple Keyboard being hooked up (I will tell you that the Keychron always woke the Mac from sleep; the display did not, however, reliable wake up along with the Mac.

All of this is a long way to say that I really like this keyboard and this current setup a lot! I might not need the next keyboard note for a while.

Apple Magic Keyboard 2 Long-Term Review: Still My Favorite

I mentioned Readwise in Essential Software for 2025, and I was reminded of how much I value it the other day when this quote popped up:

“It’s not a question of better or worse. The point is, not to resist the flow. You go up when you’re supposed to go up and down when you’re supposed to go down. When you’re supposed to go up, find the highest tower and climb to the top. When you’re supposed to go down, find the deepest well and go down to the bottom. When there’s no flow, stay still. If you resist the flow, everything dries up. If everything dries up, the world is darkness. ‘I am he and / He is me: / Spring nightfall.’ Abandon the self, and there you are.”” (Haruki Murakami and Jay Rubin, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle)

It’s a good quote, for sure–a great one, maybe. I remember reading The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle was back before e-readers were even a thing. I don’t even know if I got it from Amazon. But it was a tremendous book, different from what I expected, and truly transportive to a different time, place, and perspective.

Again, though, the thing isn’t that Readwise showed me a quote from a book I read–it’s that I didn’t even highlight that passage. I must have marked off that I read it in Goodreads, and Readwise will pull passsages that other readers have highlighted from time to time and show those to you. Similarly, it will show you “supplemental” highlights from other readers from books you have in fact read and highlighted on device.

And lest I let the synchronicity of the moment slip away, that Murakami quote reminds me of one of my favorite Mike Patton quotes:

“My point is we don’t ever really know, and we don’t ever really have a plan, and it’s okay. It’s okay to ride the waves here and there and then kind of figure it out. That’s what I did. That’s all.”

Much of 2024 was me flirting with being a Windows user, and trying out software in that ecosystem to make the most of the platform. That was a lot of fun, and there are both delights and challenges on that side of the hobbyist platform. But I love the Mac, and by extension Apple’s mobile devices. Here are some applications I lean on every day and expect to be using in the new year.

OmniFocus: I moved back to OmniFocus after using Todoist for a year. I really like Todoist, but for me OmniFocus is the example par excellence of both what a to-do list manager should be, and an argument for using native apps over web-based solutions.

Apple Notes: As with to-do apps, the notes category of applications is rife with challengers. There are a thousand ways to take notes on your device, many of them good to excellent. What does Tiago say? Pick one. Narrow your focus, as the stoics say. Living with Windows meant embracing OneNote, and I learned that with windows, often the official solution was the best. That’s the case with the Mac, too, in some solutions. And for iPad, it’s Notes. Yeah, writing on the screen hits the battery hard, but smart script is amazing, and while it lacks some of the coolest features of apps like DEVON and Craft and Obsidian (flesh out), it’s a great app, fast sync, smart script, and more. Things it needs…

Soulver : where some people open a spreadsheet for quick math, I always reach for Soulver. I calculate expenses and divy up bills. It’s Excel for the markdown generation.

Ulysses: When an idea comes to me, I open a sheet in Soulver. If it’s an idea that would be made more clear by writing, I start a sheet here. The real reason I started using Ulysses was that I needed something to post to WordPress from iPadOS that supported posting images. Ulysses is secondarily a writing tool, in this regard; I was happy using iA Writer or another Markdown app, but happily, Ulysses is a great one and fun to use. There are some strange UI things going on, and I’m hesitant to engage another database app into my work flow, but there it is.

MindNode Next: I’m really late to the mind mapping game; I like them and find them helpful sometimes, but their usage hasn’t always stuck. MindNode, though, is such a nice app that I’ve always gone back to looking for uses for it. Recent updates have more tightly integrated the relationship between mind mapping and outlining, and as an inveterate outliner, I was happy to use MindNode as an outliner, and then eventually as a mind map. I love the confluence of these two very seemingly different ways to categorizing knowledge.

FoodNoms: during the week between Christmas and new years 2022, I’d resolved yet again to cut back the size of my nightly martini and subsequent wine consumption prion. I had a coupe of goals: sleep better, feel better, and maybe get down one pants size. One year later, during the week between 2023, I enjoyed the fact that I’d lost close to 80 pounds and had gotten down 4 to 6 pant sizes.

Despite this evident success, I worried constantly about gaining it back. Was it a ruse? Was it all a happy accident?

But in the same way I’d found Reframe helpful in logging my drinks, I thought to look for the food equivalent. I wanted to know what I ate and how I did it. How I’d lost the weight.

Apps like Foodnoms help you realize pretty quickly that weighing your food is the best way to really know. I do that now, when I can, and while I could write more about the internal struggle that comes even with successes like mine, I’ll just wrap up by saying that Foodnoms did exactly what I needed it to do, and I continue to learn about nutrition by using the app.

Health: Apple like FoodNoms and ErgData write to the Apple Health app, which serves as a database for your health information, but also a personal health dashboard. I can track my daily activity, sleep, heart rate (resting and otherwise), and other stats. My use of the Health app corresponds directly to my efforts to improve my health, and I look at it multiple times a day.

Fantastical: My go-to calendar on all of my devices. Native on Windows on ARM, no less. I started using the proposed meeting dates feature recently and that, by itself, is worth the cost of the subscription.

ChatGPT: LLMs got big during my Windows phase, so my first real blush with this implementation of AI was through Microsoft’s Copilot app. I liked using copilot a lot, and the Mac and iOS apps were good too. Eventually, though, Microsoft made the app on windows a web app, which I don’t prefer. I could go into the app ecosystem on Windows at this point, but that’s for another post.

Waiting for Siri to catch up, I installed the Chat GPT app on my Mac and other devices. I like it a lot, use it constantly, and am excited to try out newer integrations, including how it works with Notes. It sounds a bit like Microsoft’s long-delayed Recall feature, and I’m excited to take this step. I’m good at capturing info, but organizing and searching are always challenges. Search should, and will I suppose, rule your Mac anew.

ErgData: I row every day pretty much. I use this app to track my stats and recommend interval efforts for me. I got back into rowing using apple fitness, but I haven’t used that in over a year. I got really competitive with myself and a little stats obsessed, but that has calmed down and now I focus on lots of base mileage and zone 2, and toss in intervals to train VO2 max. It’s not an entertaining app by any stretch, but it is crucial infrastructure.

Reddit: there’s a lot of shit on the web. And there are a lot of “experts” writing listicles about topics they know very little about. The same is absolutely true of Reddit, but if you’re looking for how someone solved a particularly familiar itch you have, someone on Reddit probably shared it. It’s fun to help people who are having a problem you already solved, too. I like Reddit a lot.

Carrot: we were on our annual ocean city NJ vacation many, many years ago, and the rain that had kept us cooped up for a few days was still hanging around. We decided to brave the elements and drove north up the island to an area near the boardwalk. The rain continued, but I remembered hearing about Dark Sky on a podcast, and how hyper-specific and accurate it was. I downloaded it from inside our car and learned that the rain was to stop in five minutes. That actually happened, just as Dark Sky forecast, and we went on to enjoy our day.

Since then, I’ve always taken note when tech cognoscenti coalesce around their affection for a weather app. In Apple’s ecosystem, Carrot gets all the love. It’s a great, flexible app, with a strange sense of humor attached to it. I don’t have the same feelings for it that I had for Dark Sky, and to this end, both Apple’s weather app and Carrot vie for my attention (and widget space).

Readwise: Less app, more service, Readwise allows me to review information that I’e highlighted from a variety of sources. Highlights from Kobo and Amazon ebooks, web articles, and other sources are collected in Readwise and only lead to my using it for a few minutes each night while I brush my teeth. I get five highlights to review from my past readings, presented in a schedule I can only describe as random. It’s a great way to revisit information you read and thought worthy of a highlight somewhere. Readwise has a strange and somewhat scattered landscape, but I think the developers’ dream of creating a catch-all for your digital errata is right-headed.

Safari: Using Windows found me trying to stick to one browser for just about everything; I cycled through Brave, Firefox, and Edge, generally using Edge the most. One of the reasons I used to always run two browsers on the Mac was that I’d use Chrome, signed in to my work account, and then Safari for mostly everything else. Edge prompted me to try using Microsoft’s implementation of profiles, which work like they do on Chrome but with an unsurprising Microsoft twist: they require you to have separate Microsoft accounts for each profile. One Microsoft account is plenty, thanks! Can you imagine having to create multiple iCloud accounts to use profiles in Safari? But reengaging with Safari led to my discover that Apple’s implementation of profiles is pretty much like Googles, which is the way it ought to work.

DayOne: I like to write, and especially post here on Uncorrected. I don’t know how most people feel, but reading and thinking make me want to write, and to share what I’m thinking about and writing. I suspect it’s a lot like musicians, who aren’t content to keep what they’re doing confined to the bedroom or basement. But not everything is fit to print, and that’s what DayOne is for: thinking, private thoughts, quotidian journal entries, and things that could, at some point, become a post here. I like being able to text to DayOne, too, for quick thoughts on the go.

Photos: I take a lot of pictures. I use the Photos app all the time to view and edit my pics. As with writing, I like to share them, too.

Other Stuff:
– 1password
– OmniOutliner
– Drafts
– Acorn and Pixelmator
– Pastebot
– TextExpander
– NetNewsWire and Unread
– Shortcuts

Chris Lawley featured this app on a recent YouTube post, and it sounded a bit like creating search indices in Launchbar, but something that would work on iPadOS. Which it does!

Usually, switching search engines means changing the setting for your browser, or navigating to the search’s homepage. The advantage of using something like Launchbar or Raycast to conduct searches is you can switch the engine with a couple of keystrokes.

Xsearch is a Safari extension that interprets characters inputted into the search bar as switches. Depending upon how you set it up, this can search google:

G what’s a good book to read?

Will search google, while

ddg what's a good book to read?

Will search the same in Duck Duck Go. It’s very cool and cheap to boot. It makes me wonder what else you might be able to do with this kind of extension.

Here’s a quick video of what it looks like on iPadOS:

Xsearch on the App Store

I’ve been making coffee at home using this Melita pourover cone with no. 4 papers forever. It’s perfectly serviceable and makes great cup after great cup.

I’ve always fancied a Chemex, however, and even went to some lengths to fashion my own. I did finally get the real deal when I switched jobs in the spring of 2024. I really love making coffee in the office using it, and thought I’d bring it home for the break and see if we prefer one over the other. So far, I find the Sawmill brew from nearby Endgrain a bit toasty for my taste, but I’m curious to try a pot of Melita and see if I feel the same way. I might be grinding a little tight.

I was looking at my Forecast view in OmniFocus this morning, and the list was fully expanded. Because I use defer dates a lot, the expanded Forecast can look pretty intimidating. I can never remember the key command to collapse and expand, so I end up manually doing it in the GUI. I thought this might be a good use of AppleScript, especially since OmniFocus has a scripts folder that you can use to store scripts and then drag them into the toolbar.

I asked ChatGPT to write a script to first collapse, and then another to expand, and then realized I should ask it to make the script toggle the state based on whatever state is currently active:

tell application "OmniFocus"
    tell front document
        tell content of front document window
            set theTrees to trees
            if theTrees is not {} then
                set firstTreeExpanded to expanded of item 1 of theTrees
                set newState to not firstTreeExpanded -- Toggle based on the current state of the first tree
                repeat with aTree in theTrees
                    set expanded of aTree to newState
                end repeat
            end if
        end tell
    end tell
end tell

Here’s what it looks like:

applescript-of-expand-collapse.mp4

It’s in the toolbar too: