Rhonda and I nipped out for some shellfish and fries to celebrate her birthday last night. It was a chance to eat some of Sweet Amalia’s amazing namesake oysters and fries. We got some steamed clams too, which replaced on our table (but not in our hearts) their excellent mussels.

Just before sunset is a great time to sit outside and swallow some shellfish. The hard afternoon sun gives way to soft, golden light. It’s hard to kiss another weekend goodbye, but this made it–ahem–sweet indeed.

There was a cool Ford Fiesta ST in the parking lot, too. I sent a picture to Aaron and my dad, both car nuts.

After upgrading my micro 4/3 camera to the E-M10 Mark IV, I kept thinking that it would be fun to get a tiny lens for my EPL-5, which I bought back in like 2013. In comparison to the E-M10, it’s a tiny camera, and has always been easy to pack for taking pictures. Unlike cell phones, cameras have a long shelf life, and there’s a thriving market for used cameras due to their usability well after newer models have replaced venerable models. Despite having a newer camera, I can still find a useful life for older kit.

Poking around on B&H led me to find this super-cheap lens. I’ve usually browsed fast prime lenses, but farting around with my iPhone 16 Pro’s Camera Control button, and taking a lot of heavily bokeh’d pictures, I realized the sweet spot is probably in the 2+ aperture range. I asked Copilot about a few lenses that I was ogling, wondering which would be a stark departure from my Panasonic f/1.7 prime.

This lens takes up almost no extra space; it’s about the same size as a lens cap. It needs a lot of light to take good pics, and I’m finding it a challenge, in a welcome way, to capture pictures worth keeping. It’s fun to take pictures and then have to wait until I get home to see the results, contrasted with the immediate gratification of using a phone camera.

There’s something about the color on this lens that makes pictures look older. There’s a faded, tan character to them that I find pleasingly nostalgic. Some of the pics I took of Aaron’s Mini Cooper are emblematic of this:

I took some golden hour pics at a couple of our favorite local wineries and a nearby restaurant that we all love.

Coda Rosa

Rhonda and I tried a bottle of their Pinot Grigio prior to dinner at the Franklinville Inn for her birthday last night. It was an interesting spot for sure, with an engaging manager and furry friends.

Sweet Amalia

Rhonda and I celebrated her birthday at the Franklinville Inn last night, but the party continued this afternoon, with some wine and shellfish at the excellent Sweet Amalia.

Fiesta Friday at Bellview

We had a sip and some cheese Friday night in lieu of dinner proper.

Aaron’s Mini Cooper S

I snapped a few pics of Aaron’s Mini at the office. I drive it a couple of days a week while he’s at school. Hey: I gotta help out where I can.

All in all, it’s been a lot of fun to take this whacky lens with me and take some pictures.

Today is a special Sunday since it’s Rhonda’s birthday. She’s the big 5-3, which means the big 5-1 is just around the corner for yours truly. We went out to the Franklinville Inn last night for dinner, just the two of us, since Aaron’s away at school and Joe was working. Joe did try to switch hours but there were not takers. I’m writing this while draining a spritz after hitting the squat rack. I did 80 kettlebell swings too, and a 10-minute super-easy row to warm up before the weights.

Coda Rosa Winery

Rhonda and I were thinking about having a spritz before leaving for the restaurant, but I remembered that there was a winery near the Franklinville Inn, in Monroeville. Alas, the joint has closed down, but I found Coda Rosa on the map, and that was actually more on the way to the restaurant than Monroeville would have been.

One of the things I enjoy most about visiting the different wineries here in South Jersey are the small differences. All of them are situated on bucolic grounds, with long, straight rows of grapes surrounding the property. Sharrott, though, is more of a restaurant: there’s a kitchen, reservations are recommended, and there’s table service. Bellview is a more casual affair, with a staffed counter, some app-style things to eat, and a grand expanse of lush green grass adjoining the winery proper for casual seating. You can bring camping gear and set up a tent and chairs if you want. And of all the places we’ve visited, Bellview is the only place with wine on tap. Maybe it’s a holdover from my early forays into the then-nascent brewery scene, but I usually prefer something on tap to something bottled.

Coda Rosa is perhaps the simplest of the wineries we’ve visited: the winery and tasting room are housed in a small rectangular building, and there’s a small patio for seating outside. The host/manager, Tanya, is a vibrant soul. We ate grapes straight out of the vineyard (Chambourcin) and petted the two “security” dogs who traipsed about. We split a Pinot Grigio and it was excellent.

TT Artisans 18mm f/6.3 UFO Lens

After upgrading my micro 4/3 camera to the E-M10 Mark IV, I kept thinking that it would be fun to get a tiny lens for my EPL-5. It’s such a tiny little camera and would still be fun to tote along for taking pics. Unlike cell phones, cameras have a long shelf life, and there’s a thriving market for used cameras due to their usability well after newer models have replaced venerable models.

Poking around on B&H led me to find this super-cheap lens. I’ve usually browsed fast prime lenses, but farting around with my iPhone 16 Pro’s Camera Control button, and taking a lot of heavily bokeh’d pictures, I realized the sweet spot is probably in the 2+ aperture range. I asked Copilot about a few lenses that I was ogling, wondering which would be a stark departure from my Panasonic f/1.7 prime.

This lens takes up almost no extra space; it’s about the same size as a lens cap. It needs a lot of light to take good pics, and I’m finding it a challenge, in a welcome way, to capture pictures worth keeping. So it’s been fun. I’ll probably write up something more in depth with more picture samples. The spritz pic up top was taken using the UFO, as was the picture of Coda Rosa’s building and the chalk wall.

Gina Trapani ’s Note to Self

Internet celebrity Gina Trapani (who I read daily at Lifehacker back in the day) has returned to blogging on her own site.

Note to Self

Diablo III

I rarely game, and I hope I’m able to retire early enough in my life before the curtains come down so that I can while away a few hours playing some games. I purchase Warcraft 3 at an Apple Store back in 2002 on CD-ROM but have never played it through. I have installed Battle.net on my Mac many times over and have Warcraft 3, StarCraft, and Diablo III waiting for me to dive in. I finally tried Diablo III on my desktop Mac last weekend and had an absolute blast playing it. Dead-simple controls, that familiar Blizzard sheen, and good (if obviously dated) graphics all conspired to keep me thinking about playing again all week.

Logging Your Food Can Get Cumbersome: The upshot of measuring your food is that you’re better at guesstimating when you’re in situations when you can’t (or won’t) measure: out for dinner, at a party, etc. I know about how much steak is 120 grams, and likewise with chicken. I’m pretty sure I know how much salad I ate when I can’t measure. A half of a medium baked potato is around 80 grams. But measuring half a dozen pieces of salami and some bits of brie can get downright fiddly.

Me, inThoughts on Losing 90 Pounds, or Bouncing Along the Bottom

One of the reasons I started counting calories is the first place was not to lose weight, but to understand what I was eating having lost the majority of it. It took me a year to get to 165, and looking back at pictures from that time, that was a good weight for me (I’ve been floating around 155 these days).

I got to 165 by cutting back on intake and increasing my physical activity. But I never measured my food to get there. I suspected, though, that it might be an important maintenance practice.

With that thought in mind, I downloaded FoodNoms shortly into 2024, and started weighing my food. I imagined that I’d be able to use the practice at home to get a sense of what I was eating when I couldn’t measure my food–think restaurants and dinner out with friends. (I won’t pull a scale out of my pocket in a restaurant.) Writing this, I realize how contrary my approach was: I was doing a good job “feeling” my way through it, but longed to understand it numerically.

Indeed, weighing and logging my food and drink helped me absorb some standards that assist with tracking when I can’t measure my food. For example , I’m disciplined about measuring a 100-gram serving of wine to enjoy with dinner. That’s just a bit less than 4 oz. So that’s a good ballpark number for winery visits, 100 grams.

• Cheese is something I love, but it’s calorie-dense. By weighing my apps at home, I noticed that I tend to lop off about five grams of most cheeses. That’s true of cheeses like cheddar, Asiago, and Manchego. Brie, however, finds itself cut off in gooey 12-16 gram bites. And viscous blobs of burrata tend to weight 20 grams or so. A corollary: I will easily eat 10 grams of bread every time I hit the loaf, but the crostini Rhonda makes at home, which I invariably break in half, are five grams.
• Salami is usually 5 grams for a thin slice; thicker preparations are likely closer to 12 grams. Pepperoni is 3-5.
• Peanuts are around a gram a pice, so they’re easy. Almonds are a bit heavier, but they’re easy to count, too.
• I tend to eat 150-200 grams of protein: steak, chicken, or pork
• A banana is probably around 100 grams
• Tiny apples are 100 grams. Like comically small ones. That one you just housed was probably closer to 200.

Sure, you can log repeated five-gram bites of cheese into FoodNoms over a long, leisurely visit to your local winery. Or you can live. Tally to the rescue: this killer utility can eliminate the fiddliness of measuring food on the go.

Tally doesn’t have any opinions about what you count–It’s agnostic in purpose. You can tally good habits, bad habits, weird predilections, annoyances, interruptions, how many times you let the dog out, trips to the loo… Tally has no presets, no specific purpose. It just counts.

So how does food logging shake out on Tally? You create one or more tallies, organized, if you like, into sets, and set the step, reset to, and even a target, for the tally. You can count up or down.

I don’t need to tap a tally 100 times for a glass of wine; each tick of the tally is set to increment by 100. I leave cheese and salami set to increase by a gram at a time. And for spritzes? They’re invariably 6 oz of prosecco and 2 of aperol. So I can just count how many I had, because I don’t vary the recipe.

Tally is an amazingly flexible but focused utility for your iPhone. It only does one thing: count. But you can make it count what you want, any way you want.

Matthew Weber:

The thing, though, about being comfortable in your habits, is that nothing really new happens. If you don’t do things differently or try new things, your life is going to pass you by, because the new experiences are what make life worth living. They are what create new and cherished memories.

It is Good to Be Uncomfortable

Alain de Botton:

While we may not be able to overcome our burdens themselves, it does lie in our power to alter what these burdens have to mean to us. We may not have to take them as proof of our stupidity or ill-adjustment, they can be signs that we are destined to have interesting lives rather than calm ones, lives marked by a high degree of exploration, psychological understanding, and striving rather than settled certainty and equilibrium.

An Interesting Life Rather Than a Happy One

Now that we’re back to a standard work week, we have to squeeze all of our domestic responsibilities and fun into two days. Rhonda had to renew her drivers license Saturday morning, so we were out of the house by 8:30. Refreshed ID in hand, we ripped through a complement of errands: butcher, vegetable market, farm stand for corn, and even groceries at Shop Rite. We were back before noon, which gave me time to iron and hit the squat rack and bench for some strength training.

We took Moscato with us to the winery on Saturday, too; she was looking at us as we were fixing to leave, and remembered that we had been talking about taking her with us recently. It’s a nice loose place to hang out at: lots of outdoor seating, and they have poop bags on hand for cleaning up deuces. She was OK about it; she hates riding in the car, and was a little worked up when we got there. She settled down though.

Belmont Peanuts

The director I used to work for (now a friend and colleague), Teri, used to buy a can of Belmont Peanuts for the office sometimes. They’re the nice dry, slightly salty take on the humble peanut, as opposed to the greasier canned type you get from Planters and other vendors. They remind me of the excellent Monkey Joe’s peanuts.

When Rhonda first ordered a can for the house, we found them on Amazon for like 20 bucks. When I told Teri that I got them on Amazon, she tsked at the price and suggested we check our local Marshalls. While Amazon is hella convenient, getting them locally for six bucks is worth the effort. I eat about 15 grams of them every day at work, mixed in with almonds and some roasted edamame.

Kettlebell Swings

I’ve done 1,000 or so this month. They’re supposed to be great exercise. Watch some videos to ensure that you’re using proper form so you don’t hurt yourself. Bonus: Pavel Tsatsouline’s accent. I can listen to this guy talk about kettlebells all day.

Matiz Piri Piri Sardines

I read an article earlier this week about ways to eat sardines. I like them a lot but don’t always have a way to eat them, and after a particularly funny incident that I experienced at work years ago, am reluctant to eat them there. I grabbed a can of these yesterday with the intention of taking them to the winery, and I ate the whole can myself. I try to limit how many processed carbs I eat (crackers and bread), so I was slathering everything with the sardines: radish slices, cheese, salami, and more. They were great and not very spicy at all. I love all manner of “trash fish” including mackerel and bluefish.

El Paso, Elsewhere

This game is a shameless copy of Max Payne (a game I’ve played through dozens of times on the Mac) in the best way. It’s got the noir detective vibe, monotone voiceovers, bullet time, and a complement of satisfying weapons for taking out vampires. Lots of fun.

Lost in Play +

I read about Lost in Play on Jolly Teapot, so I downloaded it and tried it out on my iPad mini. The audio is amazing, and sounds great using AirPods. The gibberish the characters speak is delightful, and the variety of monsters you encounter are comic yet artful. It’s a point-and-click puzzle game, so it’s not about speed. Also lots of fun.

I mentioned doing 100 kettlebell swings two weeks ago in Sunday Serial (“Starting Over”). I’ve done 100 every day since August 31st (except for yesterday), and probably won’t today because I’ll do skwats and the bench press. I can squeeze them in after a 20- or 30-minute row, four sets of 25 usually, and so far, so good.

I loved Apple’s original bumper case. They’re releasing a new one-but only for the new Air. Alas.

I find this retro-leaning blog absolutely cheeky and delightful. I even found myself shopping for a typewriter last night, but I’m sure there’s something I can try at the office. The mechanical thunk you get using a mechanical typewriter is wholly satisfying, in the same way the shutter in my mirrorless camera is.

Adjacently, see “On the Reverse Flynn Effect,” where Cal Newport quotes James Marriott:

“Print requires us to make a logical case for a subject. A really significant feature of books is that if you make a case in print, you have to make it logically add up. You can’t just assert things in the way you can on TikTok or on YouTube…print privileges a whole way of thinking and a whole way of processing the world that is logical, that is more rational, that is more dense information, that is more intellectually challenging. If you lose these things in our culture, which I think we really are in the process of losing them, it’s not surprising that people are getting stupider…and that we seem to find that IQ is declining.”

One Typed Page

Last week was the official start of the 2025-26 school year, which brings with it much harried work and fewer boundaries and edges around the work day. Comes with the territory! I’m back to a five-day workweek, which of course is tough to adjust to compared to the more languid rhythms of summer, but the longer days and weeks will certainly give me more time to get stuff done. Execute on the vision, as it were.

Here are some things to check out.

TabTab

In my quest to find an analog for Chrome’s tab search view for Safari, I stumbled upon TabTab. Like Witch, TabTab can replace the default command-tab application switcher feature in macOS, but adds a cool search option (also like Witch).

Unlike Witch, however, TabTab has a bespoke design that is all its own. You can search through open tabs, browsers, and application documents, or focus on one in particular (ie Safari). It’s pretty great and I’m excited to have finally purchased the pro license. In addition to searching open applications and browser tabs, TabTab can act as an app launcher as well. It’s a swell utility.

Bellview Winery’s Adella Blend

Rhonda and I met my former boss at Bellview Winery recently, and she tried some of their excellent Astraea, which I’ve gushed about here. Bellview describes it thus:

A beautiful dry white blend of Gruner Veltliner, Viognier, Vidal Blanc, and Cayuga. This crisp white is light and refreshing to enjoy on a warm summer weekend.

I can’t argue with any of that. Astraea replaced the excellent Hyacinth, which replaced their Perseus. My understanding is that they use the wines on tap to test blends to see if they would be worth bottling.

Gone is my beloved Astraea, replaced by a new blend– Adella. It’s a blend of their Viogner and Traminette, if I recall correctly. It’s very light and crisp and will carry us nicely into the fall.

We took our own cheese and salami, as we have a decent stash of cheeses and a big salami from both Baglianis and Appy Hour.

Chole Bhatura

We nipped out to Royal Spice, an Indian restaurant in nearby Millville. We went for a long time without an Indian restaurant nearby, and we’re glad to have a decent option locally now.

Rhonda and I first stopped in there on our annual Anniversary date: we usually take the day off, have lunch out, and go shopping. I had tried the dish for the first time at the now-shuttered Indeblue in Collingswood while I was working in Camden County, and fell in love with the dish (they still have a location in Philly). Indeblue’s version was a fiery affair, with a rich red sauce and the namesake fried bhatura flatbread. Royal Spice makes a good version as well, and I suggested we try it back in 2022 when we first went. She loved it too, and subsequent visits revealed the dish to both Joey and Aaron, who similarly enjoy it. Even Joe, a more selective diner, finds himself scooping up some with the fried bread.

Chole bhatura is a great dish in that it’s vegetarian but still wholly rich and satisfying in a way that doesn’t rely on jacking the star of the show with cheese or anything. The chickpeas shine in the stewy, fiery sauce, and the puffy bhatura is at once visually arresting and wholly pleasing in texture and chew.

How did the summer disappear? The pool is too cold for swimming, but the weather is divine. We’ll be having spritzes and apps on the deck soon. With Aaron off to college, and Joey commuting to school + working a lot at his new job, we’re effectively empty nesters.

I reflected yesterday, en route to Bellview Winery after a late lunch at Sharrott, that the familiar pattern of diversions of our lives have gradually reemerged, in an unsurprising way, to what they were before we welcomed the kids into our lives: shopping, nipping out for something to eat and drink, and domestic futzing around.

We were also reminiscing about all the fun things we’ve done as a family over the years, and the crazy, hyper-local, mostly free adventures I’d take them on when they were little. I saw the same brownies at a farmers market that I got for the boys after our first summer in Ocean City.

There are many more to be enjoyed, too, which is a joyful thought indeed..

Witch

Witch by Many Tricks Software is an alternative to the Mac’s default command-tab app switcher. It’s an ingenious utility that allows you to create a number of different kinds of switchers, and in my case, I was interested in making a Safari tabs switcher (although I still think Launchbar might be the best solution for me).

macOS’s default switcher is great, and as I discovered before, there’s a bit more to it than meets the eye. Pressing on the up or down arrow key while selecting a running application from this menu will show you the open application windows and hide everything else that’s running, and along the bottom row, shows recent documents.

Witch does something similar: invoking the app switcher shows a menu of running applications, but you can style the list such that it’s vertical, for example, or tabs from right to left (a test, perhaps, of a person’s sanity), and more.

Most salient, however, is Witch’s ability to search through your stable of running apps. Let’s say you’re using the excellent Bike outliner to take some notes, and you do a web search to understand a feature. In this situation, you have an app named Bike running, as well as a Safari tab or two with articles about Bike. Invoking Witch and smacking the escape key allows you to search for the phrase “Bike” and see all of it. That’s a pretty simple example to illustrate the feature.

You can create multiple “actions” in Witch and assign them to different keyboard shortcuts. I have a second action that shows only the frontmost app’s windows in a vertical array. It’s perfect for switching and searching Safari tabs.

MacSurfer

Way back in the 90s, when I was in college, my dad’s browser homepage on his enviable Centris 650 was MacSurfer. It was emblematic of that era’s webpage design: a white page, mostly text, very low rez. But it was the source for curated Apple News, and it became my homepage for a long time, too. I eventually replaced MacSurfer as my homepage with Google Reader (tuned to the Apple tag group).

And it’s back. Eric Schwartz interviewed the new owner, who has resurrected the site. It’s been a welcome return to a curated news page; I love my RSS collection, but this is fun, too. I’ve always appreciated how the page is organized

Starting Over

Being a beginner is fun. You’re expected to make mistakes and you improve quickly. Contrast, though, with “Expertise is not a Tombstone.”

Starting over has a similar charm, with caveats: you remember your past progress, have experienced the law of diminishing returns, but get a chance to start over in a quasi-noobie frame of mind.

I started rowing back in 2014 I think, and logging my efforts some time in 2015. I swapped out rowing for strength training in the late winter of 2016 after reading an article on the Art of Manliness about the Stronglifts 5×5 program. I purchased the app and followed the program and was very happy–even impressed–with the progress I made.

You can’t possibly do Stronglifts for much longer than six months or so. If you can put in the time, you go from zero to hero pretty quickly. I started, for example, with a 45-pound squat and finished the program with 305 lbs.

Once you reach that point, your body can’t recover from the serial work sessions at Stronglifts’ pace, so you have to back into a different program, which for me was Wendler 5/3/1. Wendler’s model backs you down to doing the four core exercises (squat, deadlift, overhead press, and benchpress) once a week, which is much less volume than Stronglifts.

I continued to make slow and steady progress using Wendler, almost reaching a 400 lb squat. But serial injuries (some back pain from deadlifting, should pain from overhead presses, and eventually some IT band issues from squats that were so bad that I couldn’t sleep at night) led me to slowly excise some of the movements from my routine. And then, in December of 2022, I started rowing again. A lot.

Rowing is a great exercise, engaging more of your musculature than walking, running, or cycling. I had been thinking about adding in the bench press and squats again, not necessarily looking to get back up to where I was before (at my current body weight, I’m not sure that’s even possible, and I’m well into being 50 years old now).

I’m just going to use paper logs instead of an app to make sure that I’m tracking how much weight I put on the bar. I’m starting off plenty heavy for a person who hasn’t been lifting for a couple of years, but well below my old PRs. My understanding is that you don’t exactly start over physiologically after a break; your body remembers your previous level of fitness and capability, and you can expect to reasonably return to a previous level of strength.

Part of my motivation is to add some muscle for aesthetics, sure, but I also want to juice my basal metabolic rate. I lost close to 90 pounds all told, but I’ve added about 10 more back on since last fall into winter. I’m less strict about how much I eat and drink during special occasions, but I have to be mindful about things, too. You don’t lose 90 pounds overnight–it comes off slowly, with deliberate effort. They can come back, too–not overnight, but slowly, with mindless sipping and chewing.

Another move I’m keen to add in is the kettlebell swing. I have a 25 and a 50. I did a bunch of swings yesterday and today, and except for a little twinge in my back from my deadlifting days, it felt good and surprisingly hard. It’s an interesting contrast: I can row at a slow pace and not get winded at all, but there’s really no way to do kettlebell swings at a low intensity. If you’re swinging a 50-pound ball of metal, it’s all or nothing. I’m writing them down on my paper squat log and I did 100 today after a 20-minute row.

On September 3rd, 2023, I posted my first Sunday Serial. It was a perfunctory list indeed. In the early days and consonant with the spirit of this blog, it was Serial Sunday sometimes, and Sunday Serial other times, until I started checking it before posting to make sure i was being consistent. I don’t remember what caused me to decide on a dedicated weekly theme; I think I was driving, kicking some ideas for posts around in my head, and the idea that every Sunday, once a week, I’d publish a list of things I found noteworthy.

And save for a couple of Sundays, I’ve stuck to it.

Sunday Serial is emblematic of Uncorrected: it’s a list of things that compel me to write. My focus is broad, as is Sunday Serial. I often feature posts from the week as an item in Serial, and likewise, a mention in Serial might turn into a post later in the week.

I’ve dabbled with creating post categories, as I am guilty of following a link to a site and reading a story, but learning the contents of the site are otherwise not interesting to me. In these cases, I’ve wished for a category list or tagging system. I have a draft of categories that I’ve settled upon, but I don’t know if I’ll ever be so fastidious here.

I’ve never wanted Uncorrected to be fiddly. So far, no categories. I write about what I want to when the spirit compels me, and I make a list every Sunday.

It’s an old-school blog. Thanks to you for reading it.

Aaron was digging through some drawers and bins while packing for school and culling some accumulated cruft, and he popped out of his room with two keyboards: first, the terrible Logitech K480, which I never liked, and my old Logitech Keys to Go. It’s the original from around 2015, which has an Alcantara-like fabric coating and a great keypress. The keys are admittedly small, but it’s still nice to use on the go. He had them from previous vacations for his iPad.

The newer model  has a smooth, rubberized coating, and is both less satisfying to the touch and harder to press the keys. I haven’t used it very much due to this, so I’m pretty psyched to have the original back.

I also have the new Logitech Keys to Go 2, which I also really like, but it’s a much bigger piece of kit than the wafer-thin original. It’s nice to type on, but feels a plasticky. I’m sure if you stripped the cover off the OG Keys to Go, it would feel plasticky, too. It’s a touch more narrow than Apple’s Magic Keyboard, and noticeably lighter.

We moved Aaron into college today. It was a busy, hectic, emotional affair for everyone. We left at 8 am sharp and made it up to campus and his dorm by 10 am. There was plenty of traffic due to all of the first-year students moving in.

In addition to using the elevator, we took a lot of trips up and down the six flights of stairs to his dorm. We helped move the bunks and other redecorating, but I was definitely starting to get in the way.

We lit out together for lunch and a Target run to pick up some hangers and other necessaries we forgot.

We were all three of us choked up leaving.

Rhonda remarked tonight, after looking in his room when we got home, “He never made his bed. But today, he did.”