Eric Schwartz:

While I have used a handful of RSS readers over the years, NetNewsWire is one of the earliest I used and one I still come back to, even after a bumpy ride. There are probably more than a handful of blogs and sites that I’ve subscribed to that have made the jump from NetNewsWire to NewsFire to Reeder to whatever else in between and more than a handful of back-end sync services to keep track of it all. If I see something insightful that someone writes and some of their other posts are enjoyable, I’ll subscribe. Social media comes and goes, but the little geeky list of things that computer enthusiasts, designers, and other interesting folks are writing has been a part of my daily routine for the better part of the last twenty years.

My RSS feed is something I check every day. Using it would have took different than it does today to catch a toehold with social medians, though.

RSS and Email Might Save Some of Us From Social Media Rot

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.”