Yesterday I turned 50. My favorite comment about turning 50 comes from my dad, who asked my grandfather (his father), while we were having pizza and drinks, when he turned 50, “How does it feel to have a son who’s a half-a-century old?”

Half a century. Wow.

Health: I wrote last year about turning 49 that I had lost 70 pounds. It’s closer to 90 now. I’m probably in better shape than I’ve ever been in my life. I’ve never been an athlete, but I’ve spent a considerable portion of my time exercising since high school because I’m prone to being chubby. I’ve jogged, cycled, walked, jumped rope, lifted weights, rowed on an ergometer, and more. I reflected the other day that I can wear pants in sizes that I only remember from 8th grade. I don’t take blood pressure meds any more or cholesterol meds.

I didn’t do much: I exercise about half an hour a day, and I watch my caloric input. I don’t abstain from any foods, but I generally try to stay away from dense carbohydrate-heavy foods, moderate my alcohol intake, and log what I put in my body. I try to be fairly precise when I can be so that I have a decent understanding of what I’ve eaten (mostly how much) when I can’t weigh my food.

But you realize one day that it’s not a thing that stops, it’s not a goal you achieve and that’s the end of it and you check it off and walk away from it. It’s always going to be a thing to attend to, a consideration, maybe a chore, maybe a source of frustration.

It’s like life that way.

Work: Freud said “love and work.” As a matter of sheer time and energy, it’s what I probably spend the most on. I’m lucky to have been able to find a career versus a job. There are things about work I don’t enjoy fully (as a fit for my personality), and things I love. I made the fourth major career move of my life. Fingers crossed! Change is never easy.

It’s like life that way, too.

Not Work¹: I’ve long felt a nagging sense of guilt about doing non-work things, because there’s always work hanging out there. The benefit of many years of work experience includes seeing other people who you respect professionally struggle with the same things you do: too much to do, too little bandwidth, material restrictions, etc.

One of my thoughts has been, to the degree that I really enjoy technology, my pursuits and interests are often in the personal productivity sphere. I like to try out to-do applications. I switch between them from time to time and like to enumerate their differences. I spend a lot of time thinking about the best way to handle email. I think a lot about my digital filing system and my reference system, and have similarly hopped between apps like Yojimbo, EverNote, DEVONThink, and other apps.

To a great extent, these areas of interest support my professional work (although I do by all means use OmniFocus for home project management, and my notes apps–currently Apple’s Notes–are full of home info, too). Were I to no longer have a position such as I do now due to infirmity, retirement, or something else, would I have this areas of interest? Would I think so much about them?

But one thing I’ve been trying to remind myself is that people exist outside of their identity as an employee. In the same way that I don’t expect anyone who works for me to be solely concerned with their work, but to have interests and lives outside of work, I too should not only feel free to cultivate this “other side” of my life, but should find it important. This doesn’t mean not caring about work, it means caring about the gestalt of my human existence. This includes work, but isn’t limited to it.

Back to Freud:

“Love and work….work and love, that’s all there is.”

What did Freud mean here? That one had family and work, and that was it? Regarding love, he meant a dedication to something greater than ourselves. That sounds simple, but it can be difficult to do. It’s easy to swing too far in the other direction, and forget the self.

Regarding work, though: He didn’t necessarily mean “a job” or “salary,” but again, he meant something beyond ourselves. Work, in this sense, is something productive or generative. And when compared with more passive modes of spending one’s time, blogging about things we care about can certainly fit this bill. It is a dedication to something purely option, a willing of ideas into the world.

Americans are greatly, tragically obsessed with productivity and identifying with their job/occupation. But interesting people are interesting not entirely related to–or possibly wholly exclusive of)–their jobs. It’s not that it doesn’t count, but it might have nothing to do with it. Or it might have to do with the interplay between their interests and predilections, and how we bring those to bear on our work.

When I imagine myself not working, I have to imagine a person with interests and ideas and goals that are not associated with work. And all of them have to be meaningful–viable–outside of professional considerations.

¹ This bit was originally written under the title “Not Everything is About Money”

Wow, this is some sad news:

Amazon has shut off the feed that allowed Delicious Library to look up items, unfortunately limiting the app to what users already have (or enter manually).

I wasn’t contacted about this.

I’ve pulled it from the Mac App Store and shut down the website so nobody accidentally buys a non-functional app.

I remember using Delicious Monster with an iSight camera to catalog my paper book library. Pre-ebook days for me.

Link

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

1. elago Vintage Mac Apple Watch stands: I don’t remember where I found out about these, but they’re always available on Amazon. Everyone in the house has a little plastic foam Mac they drop their watch into for charging: Aaron has a classic Mac, as do I; Rhonda and Joe have colorful pink and blue iMacs, respectively. I just got this one for my new 10-series watch, which has a faster charger. I can track my sleep now.
2. Wallaroo: Iconfactory has been making great icons and wallpapers for the Mac for decades. They continue to make neat apps for the Mac and iOS, including Wallaroo, a wallpaper app. You can use Shortcuts to set your chosen wallpaper, or download the included wallpaper to your device. I have a great thanksgiving wallpaper on my phone from Wallaroo right now.
3. Balatro: I kept seeing Balatro pop up on the App Store as a hot game. I don’t generally play card games, so I passed on it. But Jason Snell brought it up on MacBreak Weekly on Episode 947 and I decided to give it a spin. Part of what piqued my interest was his claim that it’s great on the iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

Part of culling my Feedbin/RSS subscription list has come with it the realization that I like reading independent blogs and websites. I tend to avoid the firehoses, with exceptions, including even good sources like the NYT. It’s just too much for me to read in a feed reader; for those, I can use their proper apps or Apple News.

So I’ve trimmed the list down, recatorized and decatorized a bit, and synced NetNewsWire and Unread with Feedbin, which I’ve updated by unsubscribing to all of my old feeds, and uploading the winnowed down list, which I exported from NetNewsWire.

We’ll see how that goes.

But another thing I discovered, in trying to find search engines more inclined to return results from blogs and smaller sites, was Marginalia, which its creator, Viktor, describes thus:

Remember when you used to explore the Internet, when you used to discover cool little websites made by people and it wasn’t just a bunch of low effort content mill listicles and blog spam?

I want to show you that the Internet you used to go exploring is still very much there. There are still tons of small personal websites, and a wealth of long form text from both the past and the present.

So it’s a search engine. It’s perhaps not the greatest at finding what you already knew was there. Instead it is designed to help you find some things you didn’t even know you were looking for.

I created a quick custom search template in Launchbar so that I could check out the results over time; I’m curious to see if I find some good Feedbin additions.

I’m always amused by how Siri (mis)pronounces local places when I’m using my phone for directions. One that I can think of is a local town called “Lawnside.” I used to work near Lawnside, and one of the exits from one of the major roads that I took often is named for the town. Siri always says, “Lown-side,” which I find hysterical, because it’s a pretty simple and familiar portmanteau of two words: “lawn” and “side.” And lawn, by itself, isn’t a word I typically associate with curious regional pronunciations.

So “Lawnside” has always made me chuckle. Most recently, I was using the phone for directions, and the suggestion was to turn onto “Delsea Drive.” Delsea is a well-known main road that continues across multiple counties, and like “lawn,” it’s generally pronounced the same way: Del-see, with emphasis on the first syllable.

Siri, however, did a charming take on this pronunciation, breaking the word into two very clear syllables, and placing equal stress on both syllables. So it was more like “Del, See.” I really liked it, and it highlighted for me the last three letters (-sea). It evoked a dreamy kind of shore vibe, like it’s some special, sea-foam green road that connects two very relaxing places.

I just briefly suffered and then found a solution for a new-to-me Mac problem: Notification Center stopped working. Clicking on the Date and Time in the upper-right-hand corner of my display did not yield the expected result of showing my notifications. Another weird side effect that I didn’t grok immediately but noticed later was that the widgets I had placed on my Desktop weren’t showing. Lastly, clicking on Notifications in System Settings didn’t do anything: didn’t load the options, nuthin.

I dug around on the internet and found a few troubleshooting steps that didn’t work, and I even decided to reinstall macOS on the MacBook last night. Nothing worked (in addition to the macOS reinstallation, I found myself deleting the Notifications plist file).

I did a quick web search this morning over coffee and found a Reddit thread that led to this Apple discussion of the problem. The solution, it turned out, was to delete all of the files in a folder in your home library folder:

Try removing all files and directories from here:

/Library/Group Containers/group.com.apple.UserNotifications/Library/UserNotifications/Remote/default

if doing so in Terminal you will need to grant Full Disk Access to Terminal first in System Preferences -> Privacy & Security

I emptied out the folder using Finder and rebooted, and voilà! everything is back to normal. I was pretty sure I was going to have to move all of my stuff over to a new user account, but this is a happier resolution.

I make ‘em.

On the most recent Accidental Tech Podcast, a listener wrote in to ask what hack the hosts rely on so much that using a Mac without it makes the Mac feel broken. That’s a fun question and one I can definitely identify with. Marco mentioned LaunchBar, which is probably the first thing I notice when I’m using a different Mac. My wife’s iMac even feels weird when I sit down to use it, as it has Alfred installed.

Another little thing for me is wallpaper. Outside of really nice pics, I generally don’t like personal shots or photorealistic wallpaper. I like vector graphics and smooshy moody pics.

Orthogonal to this topic is “what’s the first app you install on a new Mac?” That would surely be 1Password for me. Then LaunchBar.

ATP 612: Screen on Face

Here’s this week’s list of things to check out:
1. Basic Mac Guy Wallpaper: Fun Apple-focused blog from a designer who makes top-notch Mac, iPhone, and iPad wallpapers.
2. Apple’s Retro Mac Wallpaper: This isn’t new to anyone who was running the macOS Sequoia betas, but the “Macintosh” Dynamic wallpaper collection is a lot of fun, especially for old-skool Mac users like me. The screen saver is a real treat.
3. J Lohr Arroyo Seco Monterrey Chardonnay: Rhonda got a bottle of this as a gift some years ago, and it’s just great. Nothing fancy, but good. We try to grab a bottle to keep in the fridge upstairs for impromptu sushi outings, as happened last night. Loves me some gyoza.

[

Matt Birchler on migrating to Todoist and then going back to Things:

It was perfectly functional and reliable, but I just didn’t enjoy using it. If you made me get specific on what didn’t work, it was a combination of two things: tactility and data density.

One of the best aspects of Things is how satisfying it is to do basically anything in the app. Checking off a task has a satisfying thunk to it, and moving things around (like a task from one project to another) is super intuitive, and everything just works how you’d want. This is all even more impactful on the iPhone and iPad apps where the feel of an app makes even more difference.

Things is a great app on the Mac, iPad, and iOS, and there are some delightful aspects to interacting with the interface. I would say the same for Todoist, but mostly on the iPhone and iPad; it’s an electron app that doesn’t really feel like its part of the ecosystem.

[I Tried to Migrate to Todoist; It Didn’t Go Well](https://thesweetsetup.com/i-tried-to-migrate-to-todoist-it-didnt-go-well/](https://thesweetsetup.com/i-tried-to-migrate-to-todoist-it-didnt-go-well/)

Via Daring Fireball:

The Onion, the satirical news company that repeatedly spoofed conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, has won the bankruptcy auction for control over his media empire — most notably InfoWars, the far-right, conspiracy-minded website that served as Jones’ primary online platform.

Now if we could just get them to buy Matt Gaetz.

The Onion wins Alex Jones’ Infowars in bankruptcy auction

As part of my decluttering of my RSS feeds, I’ve been finding lots of cool blogs that mirror my interests. I found this post via Bicycle for Your Mind about the iPhone’s Today view.:

The Today View is the screen of widgets you get to when you scroll left on your Lock Screen or first Home Screen. And they were speculating that it might get removed in time, as it doesn’t get much love from Apple. They didn’t say that they wanted it to go away — but it was also clear that they wouldn’t really mind.

I didn’t even know this screen had a name.

It’s basically a dock-less home screen you can set widgets on. I set one up:

Not terribly seriously, but yeah, of course I pondered it. I did a little digging just for fun; I have zero complaints about my desktop Mac. It does everything I want and can do so much more. It’s fine. What’s more, I enjoy using it.

Because the Mini would replace a Studio, I would not need to worry about a display or keyboard or anything. I could easily swap out the studio, plug the Mini into the KVM switch, and carry on.

So everything else being neutral, and cost aside, what’s the difference between the two?

Spec	Mac Studio (M1 Max)	Mac Mini M4 Pro
CPU	10	14
Peformance Core	8	10
Efficiency Cores	2	4
GPU Cores	24	20
Neural Engine	16	16
Memory Bandwidth	400	273

I imagine the CPU performance in the M4 would be better than the Studio, but not in ways that I’d experience or appreciate. On the spec side, the Studio does have more GPU cores and that memory bandwidth is only bested by the Ultra. That might not really matter in real life, but hey it’s fun to know.

A while back, I finally subscribed to Ulysses not because I wanted another Markdown-flavored writing app, but because it seems to be the best app from which to post to WordPress from an iPad.

I don’t generally post to Uncorrected from Ulysses on the Mac; that’s reserved for MarsEdit. I do tend to start posts in Ulysses, though, so posting directly from the app would often be the shortest path. (The exception on the Mac is photo handling; I really like how MarsEdit supports this via its upload utility, which works nicely together with Yoink’s ability to convert photos dragged out of it into PNG or JPEG formats. Dragging out of Photos to the Desktop will produce a similar result.)

Anyway, I got to wondering if there’s a way, besides my manually filing sheets into a “Posted” group, to know if I had posted a sheet to my site. And then I noticed the nice little paper plane icon next to a sheet I’d posted in Ulysses’ list view. Nicely done.

Icon denoting status