Happy Father’s Day! I usually barbecue for this holiday, preferring the satisfaction of DIY to something prepackaged. Not always my wont, but for this day, it is. Here are some things to check out.
iPadOS 26 Developer Beta
After resolving not to install iPad betas anymore, I found myself installing the iPadOS 26 Developer Beta on an older M1 iPad. It’s terrific and I’m looking forward to the full release in the fall.
I will admit that the windowing doesn’t make a ton of sense to me on an 11” screen, but it absolutely shines when plugged into a display (which I did). I found myself forgetting for a moment that I wasn’t using a Mac until a few keyboard shortcuts that don’t exist on the iPad didn’t work. It’s gonna be interesting.
Files is a revelation, and the new menu bar is revealing and helpful, but stays out of the way when you don’t need it. It doesn’t require a keyboard, either.
Fathers Day Toy Show
I’ve been taking the boys to this version of Bob D’Amico’s toy shows since 2022. It’s outside, and fairly close to home, both of which are plusses. We blast up to the show early and get home stat.
I’ve been taking Joey and Aaron to toy shows since 2011, and they’ve been a mix of magic, wonder, and meh at the same time. This year’s show was an eclectic mix, as ever, with a lot of vinyl thrown in, much to Aaron’s delight. I’m glad we went.
Father’s Day Toy Show
Bellview Winery’s Astraea
Rhonda and I wandered into Bellview yesterday afternoon to fill our growler, and the dry white we’ve been enjoying (Hyancinth) was replaced with Astraea. We tried a sip and agreed to a growler full. It’s a light, citrusy wine perfect for the dog days of summer ahead.
A few months ago, my oldest son, who is in college, reported that his electric scooter wasn’t working. He uses it to get around campus, which I thought was a great idea when he first ordered it, as it was a quick way for a commuter to get around on campus. (Another part of me isn’t sure why he needs a scooter, because there’s nothing wrong with walking, but hey.)
Anyway, I did a quick search via ChatGPT to see what might be the problem (the display/control board was flashing an “E1” error), and while some of the solutions might have been achievable by us by jiggling a wire or resealing a connector, I suspected it might have something to do with the electronics, which I wouldn’t be able to diagnose without more know how (electric scooters don’t have ODDB ports, at least not this one).
In any event, I figured, let’s give it a shot and dig around. We took off some of the fairing, inspected the wires, and even pulled out the battery pack hidden behind a long metal plate, to check and see if there was any evidence of where or damage to the battery.
I had some things I wanted to do that night for work, and then maybe do some reading and writing for myself, so at first I wasn’t all that excited about getting into this project. But moms being moms, I could sense Rhonda’s worry about him not having it in the cold, so I thought it would be worth diving into the project for a little bit, seeing if we can solve it.
We all row in the same direction, as a mentor once said to me.
What ensued was a fairly classic dad thing: showing Joey the difference between some of the screwdriver heads, such as Allen or hex keys versus Philips, the different sizes of each, and how different kinds of wrenches can get you more or less torque, depending upon your need. We even got to use my Makita drill driver to pull 16 screws from the bottom of the scooter to expose the battery, which tool comports with one of my pieces of fatherly advice: don’t buy a cheap drill.
I did everything I could to show Joey what I thought we should do, but let him go ahead and try it himself. And I got to thinking how much that’s what dads do. Dads aren’t always good at everything that moms are . But we can be great at showing you how to do things, to show you how things work, and when you can’t fix or control or directly manipulate, show you some other problem-solving tricks.
Sure, no dad is going to be good at all of those things, and plenty of moms are resourceful in this capacity. I think trying to inspire a sense of adventure and a willingness to try and explore are more important than necessarily demonstrating victory or success every time. That’s a dad’s job. And I’m glad I get to do that.
And I’m glad I got to learn that from someone else growing up. Thanks Dad!
I’ve read some unflattering things about the “sea leg” or “crab stick,” the hot dog of the seafood world. I generally avoid dishes that feature the ingredient, but our local sushi haunt gives us these gratis when we visit, and it’s just delicious.
Apple decided to just throw out that entire system and build a new one that’s unabashedly inspired by the Mac. In iPadOS 26, you can resize windows arbitrarily, put them anywhere, and manage them using the familiar stoplight buttons in the top left corner.
Nobody, not even power users like me, wants to see the simplicity of the basic iPad experience degraded in any way. I think they’ve done a pretty good job of adding pro features without breaking it for everyone else. We’ll see how it goes over the summer and into the fall.
No clipboard manager, but a big Files (dare I say Finder) update, too. I installed the developer beta on an older M1 iPad Pro. I’m dying to plug it into the thunderbolt hub.
I was using Safari to find an article I’d written here on Uncorrected and copied the title text. Invoking Launchbar and hitting the spacebar, I recently discovered, allows you to send text input to OmniFocus’s inbox. It’s not really faster than using OmniFocus’s input panel, but I use Launchbar so much that I often find myself ctrl-spacing and typing o-f before I can stop myself. So why not?
True to form, I invoked OmniFocus and paused long enough to remember to hit the space bar. I pasted in the name of the article and added it to the inbox. A delightful side effect of adding a next action to OmniFocus this way is that it copies the URL of the webpage to clipboard as well, and drops that into the notes field of the action. Had I used OmniFocus’s quick input panel, I would have had to have separately copied the URL from Safari in a second step.
Other apps that can take text input this way include Drafts, Spotlight, Fantastical (which feature I apparently used back in April of 2024 and subsequently forgot). If the app doesn’t take text input, it shows a list of most recently opened documents.
Launchbar never ceases to amaze.
Update 6/11/2025: Copying a URL and following the same procedure yields the same result, but the feature is smart enough to grab the page title and make it a link, which is inserted into the notes field, with the next action name left blank. Smart.
It turns out that Launchbar is grabbing the OmniFocus System Service. I assigned that service a shortcut in the Keyboard menu of System Settings, so I can invoke it that way, too; it is, of course, exposed in the UI under the Services submenu of the currently active application menu.
We haven’t had grilled shrimp at home for years–decades, maybe. I’d often suggest it, because it’s easy to make. I also like cleaning shrimp, because I had a job in high school where deveining and the peeling shrimp was a frequent assignment, and was, in its way, preferable to peeling onions, for example. I remember the owner’s brother, who would help out sometimes on busy nights, declaring that cleaning shrimp was a “good job.” I didn’t think so at the time, but some 30+ years later, I don’t have bad memories of it at all.
That’s a digression: my tendency it to suggest something for dinner (or a wine, or a place to eat) for a long time before we actually get around to doing it. Rhonda, perhaps kindly considering my low-carb preferences during the week, found this recipe from Kenjii Alt-Lopez and prepared it (I did the grilling). It was great and I think I can look forward to having grilled shrimp again soon.
Back in May, I wrote about some iPadOS rumors and my hopes for the os update. Today, Apple unveiled a lot of good stuff across their OSes. My short list for ipadOS was:
Rethought support for background processes
ChatBot Siri
A clipboard manager
Launcher utilities
Background tasks can run now, and show as a Live Activity on screen. These get on my nerves sometimes, but I’m curious to see how it works for me.
That’s all I got from my list, but if the improved Spotlight makes it over to the iPad, it might not matter as much. I did not, sadly, get a clipboard manager, but maybe the updated background processes will enable a developer to make one. No Chatbot Siri, either. I’m gonna have to stick with copilot for now.
In addition to new features coming over from iPhone and the Mac, iPad gains:
Files app improvements, like specifying default apps for opening file types
more Mac-like window management, with red, yellow, and green widgets
A menu bar and a true mouse pointer
Preview: no more using Files to mark up PDFs
Other notable developments:
– Split View and Slide Over are gone. I will certainly issue the latter, especially using Notes with Safari
– The Phone app on the iPad: what could this mean for the iPad Mini with cellular?
– Audio input: I wonder if this will work cleanly with my Thunderbolt dock and Scarlet Solo?
I’m excited to see Liquid Glass running on everything. I think I’ll skip the monochromatic themes, but I look forward to seeing others’ screenshots. (Clear, maybe.) I do hope Apple stops referring to it as if it were a substance, though.
Tabs in photos look good; I take a lot of pictures with my iPhone, but I love to view and edit them on the iPad.
I’ll wait until Jersey corn is available. There are definite charms to living in southern New Jersey, including the tomatoes and corn in the summer. And the blue claw crabs, which we were going to make tonight but decided on grilling some chicken drums instead. Maybe I’ll post a pic of those later. I gotta get on the stick.
Burr Grinder
There’s something about a hand-me-down that can trump a new purchase. I had a pair of tan leather workboats that my grandfather gave me in high school (we were pretty much the same height, shoe size, and pants size for a long while), and while the boots themselves were nothing special and didn’t even strike my fancy, style-wise, I loved the fact that they were somehow a perfect fit and had lasted many decades having seen little wear, but still were remarkably wearable. They had undergone that transformation from being out of style to timeless.
ANFIM Burr Grinder
I think one of the things about a hand-me-down is the degree to which they highlight something that you might want or need, but when it comes into your life, you’re happy to have that thing, and that thing is somehow better than the one you had, or adds something to your life.
My dad recently upgraded his coffee bean grinder, and offered me his old burr grinder, which he had repaired. I imagine he figured that he didn’t need two, but that there wasn’t really anything wrong with the first one. So he repaired it and passed it on to me.
ANFIM Burr Grinder
The burr grinder I have isn’t cheap, necessarily, but it’s nothing special; it s a cuisinart that I’ve had to replace once already. The new one, after some wrangling, works great, and it’s so quiet in comparison to the thrashy, high-decibel noise that comes out of the cuisinart.
So I didn’t know I wanted a new burr grinder, and I wouldn’t have purchased one for myself, but I’m glad dad didn’t chuck this one when he upgraded. My new old grinder is better than my old new one.
SEKI EDGE SS-112 Stainless Steel Nail Clipper
I heard Merlin Mann and John Gruber waxing ecstatic about these nail clippers, and we were talking at home about how terrible an experience nail clipping can be. I remembered these and ordered a pair. Sharp as shit, no joke.
SEKI EDGE SS-112 Stainless Steel Nail Clipper
Tabby 3.0
I featured Tabby in a Sunday Serial back in January of 2024; it was something I was looking for after using Chrome (or Edge) a lot for work. I don’t prefer Chrome (or Edge) to Safari, but I do like its Tab Search feature. Both Tabby and Tab Switcher have found use on my Macs; I recently dove back into Tabby, because while I like Tab Switcher’s center-of-the-active-window UI behavior, I like Tabby’s ability to quickly close tabs.
Updating Tabby today on my Mac Studio found me trying it out again. Version 3 is significantly different from version 2.x in that it appears as a standalone app when you invoke it. I don’t like this better at all; I like the tab search window to be a kind of hud or pop-up menu, with the browser window just behind it.
But there’s a lot to like about the new app: You can save windows with open tabs for later use, just like tab groups in Safari. And, of course, the tab search is awesome.
Tabby 3.0
Tabby does seem to reproduce Safari’s Tab Groups feature in this respect, although as with searching open tabs, Tabby makes things a bit easier. I’ve been using it on my Mac at home at I do like it.
Launchbar
As is usually the case, though, Launchbar can do that, too.
WWDC 2025 Keynote
There was nothing like a Stevenote: Steve Jobs would get up on stage at an Apple event and show off their latest kit. The iPhone introduction is legendary, but there are others worth watching, whether you’re impervious to the reality distortion field or not.
The keynotes aren’t quite like they were in Steve’s days, but they’re still exciting. Things to watch out for include a preview of the next version of macOS, and a significant redesign to your iPhone’s interface.
With the popularity of Markdown, and notably some great apps in the Apple ecosystem that feature the syntax, I always wondered if Markdown’s creator used any of them.
Some people find this surprising, but I personally don’t want to use a Markdown notes app. I created Markdown two decades ago and have used it ever since for one thing and one thing only: writing for the web at Daring Fireball.
Gruber likes Notes for what I’ll assume most people use Markdown apps for: taking notes. Smart Script won me back over to Notes, but it really is a great WYSIWYG editor.
Rhonda discovered Melissa’s Reels on Facebook; she is famous for selling cupcakes, but makes and eats salads on the internet. I wouldn’t imagine that a salad video would be quite so inspiring, but there are some great ideas on her feed. Melissa inspired this peeled carrot salad, which features hot chili oil, rice vinegar, and soy sauce. Really good. Carrot salad
I usually order maraschino cherries for our manhattans on Amazon, but sometimes I imagine that I’ll have occasion to stop and grab a jar. Today, this was my intention; we picked up groceries and I was gonna shoot into the liquor store for a jar. But I forgot.
I asked Copilot for a quick cherry syrup recipe, and so combined equal parts fresh cherries, sugar, and water to make one. I strained the cooked cherries out and put three cherries, which I’d been soaking in vodka, in the syrup while I mixed the drinks. Came out pretty good.
Cherries in syrupGlasses garnishedManhattans
I did just order a can of Luxardo cherries though.
Just up the street is a Vineland restaurant stalwart, the Savoy Inn. It’s a family operated business that has withstood the test of time (and Covid). It was, for a long time, both a venue for big events (like weddings and retirements) and home of the Bistro, a restaurant serving Italian-ish food. They opened Luna’s as a fresh start in a bid to keep up with many local restaurants unveiling outdoor dining options, starting with nearby Villa Fazzolari.
The dining al fresco revolution was welcome; Rhonda and I have been lucky enough to visit Italy twice, both peripheral to Y2K, and lamented upon return back to the States the lack of outdoor dining options that didn’t involve picnic tables and custard. Everywhere we went in Italy, there were restaurants on busy Roman streets with casual tables scattered just outside the storefront. We would find ourselves having pizza and wine for dinner, or a couple of beers, the docle vita expanding languidly into the evening hours.
Luna’s is a little affected: there are aesthetic attempts at making it look like a clam shack, or a landmark spot on a shoreline barrier island road. It’s none of those things, of course, but it also has its own collection of dishes and drinks that suggest an otherness from the Bistro.
Sign at Luna’s
It was a cool and raining evening, but it was still a lot of fun to commune around the table and enjoy the fresh air. It really is a nice spot to sit outside, sip a glass of Sauvignon Blank (see below), and be with the whole fam.
Clams Casino at Luna’s
Sauvignon Blanc
I am guilty of having been a red-wine-only person for a long time; I don’t know where or why that happened, but for many years, a glug of red was my go-to with dinner or a meal out somewhere nice. The Bota Box in the pantry was always a red. This, after a long stretch of preference for whites, probably because I ate fish and veg mostly peripheral to finishing college; I adopted a low-fat vegetarian diet, punctuated by fish for dinner when I’d have a chance to dine out. I fancied Alsacian rieslings at the time, having read that James Joyce favored the varietal.
The gateway wine for me was rosé. I always thought the varietal was a sweeter wine, but I tried a few and loved the lightness of the wine, but appreciated the tartness and body. And having been down the white wine road before, I knew that certain dishes, such as raw oysters, beg for the crisp minerality of a thoughtfully crafted white.
As is my lot in life, I yammered on and on to Rhonda about how good the rosé at Bellview Winery was, after trying a glass at a celebration of life for a former colleague there in the fall of 2023. By that Christmas break, I’d managed to get her over to Bellview, and that’s exactly what she had. That has become our go-to when we visit, in fact.
At home, though, and often when we’re out to eat, we’ll get a bottle of chardonnay. Rhonda likes the oaky, buttery versions generally speaking, and I enjoy them too. But I have an adventurous palette, and on occasions where she’s having a beer or something else, I will wander to other varieties.
J. Lohr Sauvignon Blanc
We took Joe to the nearby Pickwickian for a bite Thursday, and Rhonda ordered a beer. I decided on a class of their house Sauvignon, and it was really nice. (I tend to order their half-chicken when we go there, as it’s pretty guilt-free for bar food.) It was light, crisp, tart–perfect with the chicken. And last night, we joined my parents at Luna’s to celebrate Joe’s girlfriend’s earning her associates degree and I had a couple of glasses there. And Friday night, Rhonda made mussels here at home with some nice bread, and steamed the mussels in some J. Lohr Sauvignon Blanc, which paired nicely with the shellfish.
Meditation
Did you know that the incessant flood of language that besets you when your mind wanders is one, totally normal, and two, not something you have to allow to run your life? Sam Harris thinks so. Meditation is hard.
Thronefall
Plants vs Zombies was all the rage back in 2009, and was my introduction (but not initiation–I never played it) to the tower defense genre. I did enjoy a couple of titles, though: Kingdom Rush and Iron Marines. I preordered Thronefall so that I’d have it at debut. I played through the training mission and it was a blast. I suspect it’s a great intro to the genre, but enthralling for seasoned vets as well.
Rhonda just clued me in that Loretta Switt, who played Margaret Houlihan on the TV version of MASH, died on Friday.
Hot Lips on TV was not the caricature from the movie version. And that makes sense; you can say the same thing about the difference between the television show and the movie. I grew up with the sitcom version on TV each night, but only watched the movie later, in college, rented from the library. My father often lauded it in the same breath as Catch-22. The MASH movie remains among my favorite films of all time. The film is satire; the television show was far more sincere. Both cast a hard light on the human cost of war, with divergent strategies, but equally noble goals.
I imagine that in the same way there are people who stridently affirm that Van Halen is better with Dave and The Office ended when Steve Carell left, the movie trumps the film, or vice versa. For my tastes, I prefer the dark, artful humor of the film, but I recognize how black comedy would not translate into a television serial.
In the same way that Alan Alda brought a pathos to Donald Sutherland’s Hawkeye, Switt played Hot Lips not as a turgid rule follower but as a values-driven exemplar of service–if, occasionally, a little coarse.
I included Neil Fiori’s Unschedule in a Sunday Serial in January. I’ve bastardized it in the intervening months such that I don’t track the time I spend on items necessarily; it’s more of a loose guide of things I think I need to spend time on that day, with all of the time commitments I have (meetings, errands, domestic responsibilities, as well as exercise) accounted for. It still helps me see when I can really sit down and focus for a while, and more importantly, when it would be wise to. And in a pinch, if my Sunday night OmniFocus review doesn’t happen, it at least helps me prioritize Monday.
Most of the items that populate my Unschedule come from OmniFocus. I schedule time for emergent projects on my Unschedule, and consult fantastical for meetings and the like. The astute OmniFocus user might suggest that the Forecast View can, in fact, display your calendar items, so what’s the point of the Unschedule?
Besides, of course, an opportunity to use OmniOutliner.
I’ll tell you, and it’s counterintuitive.
In Getting Things Done, projects are comprised of next actions, and next actions are the small, visible things you can do to move a project forward. OmniFocus excels at capturing these next actions, and is most effectively used to organize these next actions into projects. The general wisdom holds that you work off of action lists: phone calls, email, or errands, for example.
Not so with the Unschedule. You can conceive of it like a punch card system, where you would record 30-minute blocks of work around your other commitments (most importantly, preferred activities… aka fun).
Next actions, atomic nuggets of work that they are, often don’t take up 30 minutes. A phone call might go 10 minutes. Writing a letter might take 15 minutes. Sure, you could log 30-minute blocks of phone calls, and only do that for 30 minutes. But that’s not necessarily how people work. Or me, anyway.
I do find that setting aside time to work on projects is helpful. I can work on the budget for an hour, and I’ll use OmniFocus’s corresponding project to clue me into my next actions. To that end, I find myself populating the Unschedule with projects (sometimes I’ll use Hookmark to link to the project in OmniOutliner). So it’s more of a focused projects list than a repeat of tasks I’ve already recorded elsewhere.
I was thinking about OmniFocus’s Focus perspective and I tried grouping by project. But Forecast doesn’t support such tomfoolery. So I cobbled together a perspective called-what else?-Unschedule, which shows any available tasks that are flagged, due, or deferred, grouped by project. And by using the Collapse All command, it’s effectively an Unschedule without the duplicate data entry. This doesn’t help with time blocking, if that’s how you’re using the Unschedule, but it’s close.
Here’s a slightly ginned-up Unschedule if I weren’t working for a living:
