AppyHour’s “Taste of Ireland” Box

Rhonda ordered AppyHour’s “Taste of Ireland” limited release box after some hesitation (ie the price) to celebrate Monday. I don’t generally equate Ireland with anything besides cheddar cheese, and that is here in spades, with a very nice two-year aged variety. But the Cashel Bleu is outstanding. I really like the mustard they included too.

Sharrott Winery’s Spicy Pepperoni Flatbread

Sharrott Winery is the perfect spot for a quiet chat with someone you love, over a bottle of their rosé, and something to chew on. The spicy pepperoni flatbread is a nice, chewy dough topped with natural casing pepperoni. It could stand a turn in a hotter oven, but it’s still a great dish.

Bellview Winery’s Fiona

Fiona does not appeal to me visually, and hearing the taste profile made me pretty sure I’d dislike it, but the latter was not the case. Like Bellview’s Sunrise wine, it’s “off-dry” or “semi-sweet,” interchangeable descriptors that are best used depending upon who you’re trying to sell to, I suppose. But it has enough acid and sturdiness for this oenophile.

I just scratched “waiting for wordland” off of my OmniFocus list. Dave Winer created this super-fast, dead-simple posting tool for WordPress. You can write a proper post, but you can post Mastodon-length toots too. It’s so fast and simple.

Wordland

More sunlight (thanks DST!) makes smash burgers even more likely for dinner. We love them but they’re a fair bit of work.

I use two 56-gram (2 oz) patties per sandwich, and an onion-burger option for adventurous diners. I make an imitation In-and-Out Animal Sauce too.

Hey! It’s Daylight Savings Time. This will jack up my sleep a bit but I like longer daylight hours in the evening.

Here’s this week’s list of things to check out:

Radial Launchers for macOS

I missed the boat on these radial launcher utilities for the Mac, but I see the discussion remains strong on the /macapps subReddit. I installed Launchy and the difficult-to-spell Pieoneer on my Mac and am trying them both out.

These types of apps might scratch the itch I find missing from my Max Menus days, which was a Mac OS X app I purchased back in the day and used with great affection.

I don’t like how crowded they are on my Mac Studio at home, where I leave a lot of apps running. I have a 32” display, so the menu could be much bigger. Only Launchy offers resizable palettes, but even at the largest size, it looks crowded:

My command-tab (macOS default app switcher) and command-space (Launchbar) muscle memory is so trained at this point, I don’t know if there’s another mode of app switching in my life. But I would like something visual and gesturally tighter than command-tab at this point. Especially with my using a Magic Trackpad at home these days. Pieoneer has nice sounds and haptics, so it wins for now.

Baron De Ley 2019 Varietales Garnacha (Rioja)

Rhonda and I had this at the Greenview on Friday with NY Strip and lamb chops. Highly overpriced, as you might expect when buying in a restaurant, but we enjoyed it.

A Festive Spouse

I often joke that I’d live in a cinderblock room, unappointed, bachelor-pad stylee were it not for Rhonda. It’s a fault for sure. But I benefit by proximity, and I love when she changes the LED lights on these surfaces to match the holiday. And while my favorite color is blue, I really do enjoy green. Here is this season’s delightful LED array in the kitchen and my office.

One of my key weight loss strategies was cutting calories. I didn’t ban anything from my diet, but took a hard look at portions. Cocktails were the very first target. To this day, I only make a tiny cocktail for myself, and it has worked for me long before I started tracking calories.
I knew I cut down the size, and because I measure when I make cocktails, I knew how much rye and vermouth went into the drink, but simply measuring the poured drink isn’t the way to tell how many calories you’re sliding down your gullet. A properly made cocktail is going to be diluted from the stirring (or shaking, if you’re an animal) step, so my 2.5 oz Manhattan doesn’t have 2.5 oz of booze in it.
I wanted to figure this out for myself once I started using FoodNoms to track my calories, the adoption of which was mostly to help me better understand how much I eat in a day, and hopefully prevent me from gaining weight back after working so hard to lose it.
I started by calculating the calorie load of the entire cocktail batch I was making:
– 90 grams of whisky: 205 calories
– 30 grams of vermouth: 44 calories
– 5 grams of bitters: 5 calories
Normally you could stop there; if you split the cocktail batch evenly between two people, you’d just halve the calories in the batch (254/2) and log. But I wasn’t drinking half of that; I was having a cocktail that yielded a 2.5-oz drink, while Rhonda’s was more like 4.5 oz.
So I figured out of seven ounces, I was drinking about 35% of the cocktail, which would be around 81 calories. I’ve worked this out using Excel and even Soulver in the past.
I checked in with ChatGPT about this, and even though I had to correct it once (it oddly figured that I was drinking half of the undiluted booze), the LLM figured I’m having about 85 calories in my drink.
The best part about using ChatGPT, though, was starting the chat led to the model asking me some questions, including if I garnished the drink. I replied that I put a twist of orange in each, and it described this as “expressing” to orange skin into the glass. I had never heard the term applied to mixology before, but like my example of “productivity rain dances” the other day, it resonated immediately as an effective word to describe what I was doing.

I was adding feeds to Tapestry and poking around in the interface, and I was delighted by this menu:

At first I thought it was unique to the app, so I hopped over to OmniFocus to see if there was a similar feature in the UI. There was:

But it’s an iPadOS thing and isn’t actually new. I should have recognized it from the files app.

Really looking forward to this. I was a big fan of the comic as a child, and lucked into Frank Miller’s Born Again story line when I started reading the title.

I was listening to Cal Newport’s The Deep Life this morning on my way in to the office and he was talking about a guy who used a spreadsheet to log how he felt each day. A -2 was the worst feeling he would score a day, and 2 was a great day. He’d tab over and add notes in the adjoining column.

I thought about trying this out and, after considering using Numbers, it would make a great Soulver sheet. So I’m doing that.

Here’s this week’s list of things to check out.

Ivory

When Twitter changed things such that apps like Twitterific and Tweetbot could no longer effectively serve their customers, Tapbots, the maker of Tweetbot, introduced Ivory in short order. It’s a great Mastodon client, feels familiar to Tweetbot users, and I prefer it to the stock Mastodon app.

Tapestry

I featured the new Reeder in Sunday Serial back in September. The new Reeder is made by the same developer who makes the now-called Reeder (Classic); the latter is an old-school RSS reader that connects to a number of services (or uses local or iCloud sync), while the former is of a new breed of app, a kind of content aggregator that collects your favorite content from across many silos.

Tapestry is the Iconfactory’s take on the same kind of application. You connect RSS feeds, Mastodon feeds, YouTube creators, Subreddits, and other sources to Tapestry, and read across services. It’s a beautiful and well-thought-out app, which is no surprise coming from Iconfactory.

The Black Magic Trackpad

Apple has a strange history of charging more money for otherwise identical products whose distinguishing feature is their black color. I am an avid sucker of this ploy, having purchased a black polycarbonate MacBook back in 2006, when Apple switched over to Intel for their processors.

I wrote last month that I’ve been flirting with replacing my Logitech mouse here in my home “office” with a Magic Trackpad. My previous attempts to use it with a Mac have always fallen flat, but I really like using it with my iPad. I think the touch-driven interface of the iPad lends itself to using a similar surface as a pointing device. And I do generally prefer using an iPad when it’s up to the lift. So I ordered a black one to match my black (pro?) keyboard.

Matt Gemmell on using the Mac after years of iPad exclusivity:

It’s satisfying in the conventional way, in that it meets needs without drama or acrobatics. It works in the sense that it marshals its resources firmly in the direction of service, rather than theatre. It’s flexible not as a shape-shifting device of modularity and digital magic, but in the unassuming and reliable way that its answer is invariably yes. For me, that’s more than enough of a recommendation.

Back to Mac

Manton Reece:

We are so used to exciting new gadgets and software, released all the time, and yet none of it is profoundly new. AI is the only thing that’s comparable in scale to the tech advances that have changed everything, like the graphical user interface, mobile phones, and the web itself.
I couldn’t agree more. I’ve been excited about near-term affordances but using the heck out of the current crop.

GPT-4.5 preview thoughts… and Steve Jobs

Via Matt Birchler:

Blogging is valuable because it helps you learn, because it helps others solve problems, because you get a rare buzz when you realise that yes, people are reading this stuff, and because you’re building a portfolio of writing to show your skills. The only one of those that I believe AI might harm is the buzz of engagement, and that’s so rare for most blogs that I don’t think it’s worth worrying about.

I think we all wonder why we do it, knowing damn well we’re going to keep doing it.

Giles Thomas.com

Two years ago, In “Building a Better Me,” I wrote about using my Apple Watch to track some health metrics after having lost around 30 pounds. One of those metrics ended up being heart rate variability, or HRV:

This is a stubborn and somewhat mysterious metric, but it too has crept up from below 20, and in some individual cases much lower, to often spiking during the day into the 30s and 40s. I know it’s low if I’m tired or in a blue mood. I am usually pleasantly surprised to see a higher number, but often reflect that I was busy and not terribly reflective when the number is at its highest.

Tonight, on the sofa, I started poking around in the Health app on my phone (what’s up, water weight!) and noticed that my HRV averaged 60 today. That’s not characteristic of my daily average, but I did notice that it has drifted higher, largely due to the fact that it sometimes increases while I sleep–which I now track, since updating to an Apple Watch 10 (it will always be the Alex’s Apple Watch X to me).

Looking back a littler further, though, and contrary to what I expected to see, is that while my average is far from high, if that means anything, I did manage to double my average number. So like 16 back in 2022 to over 30 since last fall.

So now I’m chatting with Chat-you-know-who about increasing parasympathetic nervous activity.