It’s a long weekend here in the United States; we are celebrating Memorial Day, which is a holiday to remember those who have died in military service. Like many federal holidays, it has been associated with retail sales, and is the informal kickoff of the summer season. As such, barbecues (lots of outdoor grilling, more accurately) are a feature of the weekend. The boys have been working this weekend, and the weather is crummy, so we’re not doing anything special. I do have a grocery store prime rib in the oven right now, though, so that will be a fun meal later today.

I got home a little early Friday, so I stopped at Bellview to fill up our growlers. We took Aaron out for Indian food Friday night, his first visit since’s he’s been home from college. They had these laminated cards on the tables encouraging diners to try their chicken lollipops, which are frenched drumettes.

Last night, we tried a new Turkish place, Wandering Rose, that opened up in a spot previously occupied by a diner; we had it delivered via DoorDash. It was really good, and we’re excited to go back.

Steve Jobs in Exile

I preordered Steve Jobs in Exile a while back when I learned about its impending release. I’m perennially curious about how NeXT evolved into Mac OS X. On a recent Upgrade episode,author Geoffrey Cain spoke with Jason Snell about the book. Jason pointed out that Steve Jobs in Exile fills the hole from David Pogue’s recent history of Apple, where Steve Leaves before returning to Apple. As Pogue’s book is about Apple, he doesn’t wander into the NeXT era save for how Apple came to acquire it (also a great story).

Steve Jobs in Exile

MarkEdit

MarkEdit is a Markdown editor for the Mac; the developer bills it as TextEdit for Markdown. It has a great set of themes to choose from, including an excellent Cobalt theme, which is usually my favorite for such applications. I used TextMate for a long time with a Cobalt theme, and MarkEdit’s looks even better.

Claude Code for JXA Scripting

I downloaded Claude’s Mac app to try it out; I’ve been using assorted AI tools to help me cobble together AppleScripts for a while now. Since Apple has elevated JavaScript to have first-class support in macOS, and added the ability to write and run JXA in Script Editor, I’ve been asking Claude to build JXA scripts for me.

One simple script grabs both the URL and title of the current tab open in Safari and makes a link for me. Little scripts like this are a great time saver.

const safari = Application("Safari");
const tab = safari.windows\[0].currentTab();

const url = tab.url();
const title = tab.name();

const formatted = `[${title}](${url})`;

app = Application.currentApplication();
app.includeStandardAdditions = true;
app.setTheClipboardTo(formatted);

formatted; // return value shown in Script Editor

I like to fire these from Launchbar.