Last Sunday, inspired largely by interest in how fucking intensely I experience the cold these days, I wanted to know what my body fat percentage was. I looked around a while ago (from the sofa) for where and how to do that, but it appeared to require a drive to Philly or Central Jersey. A simpler solution emerged in the Withings Body Smart scale, which was on sale on Amazon.

I’ve been weighing myself on our old bathroom scale, which works just fine. I manually logged my weight in the Health app on my iPhone. The app shows you the changes over time, and you can vary the scale. It’s been a useful companion.

This version of data tracking is anachronistic compared to the rest of my life. With the Apple Watch and iPhone, I can track multiple data points, including workouts, without much, if any, effort on my part. The most analogous task is entering my food data in Foodnoms. With this app, I manually log what I eat, although I have some pre-set items (like Manhattans) that I follow to make logging easy.

So! No longer. With the Withings, you sync your scale with the Withings app on your phone. The Withings app collects data from your weigh-ins, but also analyzes data from other sources, too (if you give it permission to access your health data). It has a lot to say about the quality of my sleep, for example, using nothing more than the same data that Apple Health collects.

The Body Smart measures your weight, but also reports “body composition” data as well. This apparently disaggregates your fat mass, reported as a percentage, from your muscle mass. It further reports visceral fat, lean mass, and bone mass. So you can see what you’re lugging around each day in your bag of bones.

This scale also reports a heart rate, but it’s always higher than what my watch reports, so I don’t trust the number. Maybe I’m excited to be stepping on Darrh Vader’s scale.

And about the body fat: I’m gonna be cagey. But let’s say I loosened the reigns a bit.

Here’s this week’s list of things to check out. This is a special sportsball edition of Sunday Serial:

Readkit

Where Windows is a barren wasteland of RSS readers\<1>, the Mac and iOS are a bounty of riches. Readkit has been around for a long time, but its most recent incarnation is the fastest and best version yet. I love how it handles showing and hiding the feed list on an iPad rotated to portrait orientation. It’s a cheap subscription and worth it even if you hop between readers (as do I).

Grinder

I am prone to rising at the same time every morning on the weekends (vacations are an exception, when the mornings slowly unfurl into something more organic). I am likewise the earliest riser in the house on any given morning, because those meters aren’t going to row themselves. As such, there are occasions when I need to grind coffee, but am loathe to engage the burr grinder and wake my slumbering brood. To remedy this, I ordered a cheap-ish manual burr grinder, which arrived this morning. Aaron and I both made cups of AeroPress, and it was delicious. For emergencies only, of course.

Human Graciousness

Thank you.

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\^1\ Using Windows, for the end user, is like using a Chromebook.

I wrote about xSearch here on Uncorrected around Christmas, and I still think it’s a neat utility. One thing that I was curious about, orthogonally related to xSearch, was alternative search engines. I use Google and Duck Duck Go all the time and generally find the search results useful, but one thing that I did observe was that many of the most interesting posts that I’ve read, especially in the software/tech nerd realm, are from small, independent blogs and sites. Google and Duck Duck Go generally show me results from larger sites, and there’s a lot of SEO bullshit and listicles and things of questionable quality that come up in search results. To remedy this, I started poking around the web for alternatives to some of the big dogs.

Marginalia Search “prioritizes non-commercial content,” according to Marginalia. I’m just dipping my toes into the engine so I can’t say much about the results, but it does sport a “Blogs” filter.

It’s a simple trick to add Marginalia to xSearch:

LaunchBar next!

I set my Mac and phone to military time probably 12 or so years ago. That’s a conspicuously nebulous timeframe for remembering when a person decided to complicate his life.

My adoption of military time nearly bit me today; I almost made a rez at the Maplewood for 4:30 pm, because 1630 is 4:30 for civilians. My intention was a quiet table for two at a beloved local spot: at 6:30. Which is 1830.

Fun, right?

If you don’t know how military time works

But the other side of this is… I had to solve a little problem. It was a few seconds, and probably good for my brain.

Always nice to see. Let the deluge commence.

I want to be gracious in my hypothesizing about why using OneDrive might be required to use Copilot on the Mac in Office, but it smells like Enshirtification. They do this kind of thing on Windows, too.

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

Blk Shp

This is a small plates/tapas-style joint in quaint Swedesboro. There was a sports ball game on, so it was empty. Cocktails, wine, and good nummies abound. We tried pork “wings,” hanger steak, tacos, brie flatbread, and more. You should definitely go.

Micro.blog

I set up a micro.blog a while back but didn’t see the point in continuing. I’m not sure if I was even posting regularly here on Uncorrected at the time. But I’ve wanted recently to post more photo-only stuff, but I really don’t want to fuck around with Instagram anymore. Indieweb, anyone? Anyway, I’m back.

SimpleScan

From the creator of the must-have iOS/macOS Drafts comes SimpleScan. Scanning to your iPhone or iPad is way simpler than ever, and SimpleScan delights knowledge workers even more. Scan to the Files app, an email, text, or elsewhere.

Connor Beaton on the Modern | Wisdom Podcast:

Grief is the Natural Way We Honor What Love Misses

There’s much more to this episode, including the connection between grief and success. Worth a listen.

Modern Wisdom #890 – Connor Beaton – A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings

I noticed that I got a copy of Steven Sinofsky’s latest Hardcore Software Substack post in my inbox, and realized that I hadn’t moved it over to Feedbin. After doing this, I wondered: could I just email myself something at my Feedbin newsletter email address and have it show up in my feed?

Lo and behold, you can indeed. I’m not sure how much I’ll use this, but it’s a cool feature. A didn’t see that it was documented, but I guess the mechanism is the same.

I made an unschedule for today just to build the habit. I should have made one for tomorrow but bed calls.

I took Aaron to the University of Delaware today for a tour. It was cold and still empty from the break. It was my second visit; I took Joe a couple of years ago.

I don’t remember college tours being so cold. I do remember enjoying them though.

We followed up with some hot pot at Kungfu Hot Pot. It was the lunch special and there were two kinds of broth (we settled on spicy sichuan and beef broths. I told the guy, “first time.” He was patient.) We also ordered some kind of spicy Korean beef, pork belly, another kind of beef, and something else. There was an adjoining room with all kinds of grizzly bits and tripe and noodles and fish cakes and there’s too much to mention. Oh veggies too. And sauces. All kinds of sauces.

I had no idea what was going on, save for the idea that things should be dunked in the roiling broth before us.

We tucked in hard.

As I write this, the joint is still open. What sort of boozehoundery must ensue at this late hour?

I got a pound of coffee, too.

Whew it’s kinda late. Here’s this week’s list of things to check out.

Forever Notes

Since diving back into Apple’s Notes app, I’ve wondered about how best to organize the notes. I don’t subscribe as fully to the magic of search as I used to; it’s necessary, for sure, but not sufficient.

I set up Notes using Tiago Forte’s PARA Method and, despite my continuing confusion of what, exactly, goes into the “Areas” folder, it’s working out pretty well. But me being me, I always wonder…

Forever Notes doesn’t suggest much in the way of organization, but focuses more on linking notes and using some characters to enhance your search powers. It reminded me of some of my early uses of TaskPaper as a kind of project anchor document. Hookmark largely obviated the need for this kind of document for me, though. It’s a good way to learn all the goodies in Notes you’re not using.

Half Growlers

This adorable upstart is, as its name suggests, half of a standard wine growler at our favorite local haunt. I neglected to bring our one liter growler to fill up on their Lynx wine, and was about to buy a new one when I spied the halflings on the shelf below. I drink exactly 100 grams of wine with dinner most nights of the week, so 500 ml will be just about right. Started this evening in fact with the sous vide chicken drums and Mac and cheese we had.

ChatGPT tells me that they got the name “growler” from the gurgling sound they made when people sloshed them around in buckets.

The Unschedule

I’ve been trying to read Neil Fiori’s The Now Habit since I purchased it long enough ago that it’s not even ironic any more. It’s an interesting take on procrastination, but some of the core strategies Fiori recommends are purely behavioral, and in the case of the Unscheduled, cribbed from the practice of BF Skinner himself.
Without getting into it too much, the Unscheduled shows you have to track how you spend your time each day in discreet blocks of time, blocking out commitments and things you have to do (like commuting, making coffee, prepping dinner) and then build in time for things you like to do (reading, writing, socializing, gaming…whatever it is that you do intrinsically). It’s effectively time blocking, but a little less granular.

(For my part, I cannot understand how someone who’s properly using a to-do app to time-block with the surfeit of very short tasks that inevitably populate your system.)
For example, you might pick a project that you’re having a hard time getting started on and block out just one half-hour to work on it with uninterrupted focus. You then track the minutes that you spend doing the project, and reward yourself for completing the 30-minute dash by doing something preferable.
The larger point of all of this is to help you see that you don’t have to work interminably to make progress, and that planning for play will make you more, not less, productive.

OmniOutliner

It inevitably comes to the mind of any good tech nerd that unscheduling begs for the creative application of software. I looked at some PDF templates and set something up in Notes, but I also cobbled together a quick OmniOutliner document that totals up the time logged in a cell. I love using OmniOutliner but don’t often find a good use for it. It sits in a weird space between outliner, notes app, to-do list, planner, and spreadsheet. It’s impossible not to love, a kind of Emacs for Mac nerds . It’s dense and challenging, although this has improved to some degree in this regard over subsequent releases for me (mostly around formatting). I suspect OmniOutliner doesn’t sell in anything close to the volume of OmniFocus, and so might not be as actively developed. But it’s fantastic on the Mac, iPad, and iPhone, and sync is fast over iCloud.