Facescreen - Useful Add-on for Screencasting and Presentations
I often have to create screen recordings on my job to distribute
to the people I support for tutorials. Occasionally I do screen sharing
through Microsoft Teams when conducting training. Facescreen,
a utility from developer Ram Patra, provides a useful complement to
these use cases. It adds a feed from my webcam with a small configurable
view of my face to personalize the video. In addition to the image,
Facescreen also lets me add text, such as my email or a website related
to the subject of the tutorial or training. It's a nice professional
touch.
Facescreen, like other apps from this developer, lets you customize almost every element of what is displayed.
Image Adjustments
- Shape
- Aspect
- Orientation
- Size
- Zoom
- Color
- Mirror option
Text Adjustments
- Font
- Size
- Color
- Background color
- Radius
- Padding
You have the option to run Facescreen as a login item and to customize keyboard shortcuts to show and hide the webcam image, toggle the text and adjust the size of the image.
More information on Facescreen is available at its website. Facescreen costs $4.99. It's a one-time purchase which includes all updates. It will soon be available on Setapp. Although there is not a free trial, the developer has a no questions asked money-back guarantee. For more presentation help from the developer, check out Presentify.
This morning’s sunrise comes to you from Carolina Beach, located on a barrier island near Wilmington.
Driving
I used to drive for hours a day. My office was 30 miles from my home, much of it over two-lane country roads teeming with school buses. The first year I had that job, I drove through Ft. Bragg but that came to a sudden and scary stop on September 11, 2001. During the day, I often traveled between schools spread out over the large rural county that employed me. I spent a lot of time listening to audiobooks and podcasts. I was once a big NPR fan, but they had a habit of playing clips of Mitch McConnell speaking and by 2008, I couldn't take his voice anymore. Finally, the Obama stimulus package from his first term kicked in and a good portion of my commute happened on multi-lane limited access roads.
I was a farm kid. I learned to drive in a 1976 Ford Ranger pickup on a hog farm in Johnston County, NC. By the time I took driver's education in high school, I could operate several kinds of tractors, including a vintage International Farmall and an even older Allis Chalmers. We had flatbed truck from the fifties named Spot and other vehicles in which we always left the keys. The actual acquisition of my state issued driver's license was delayed by my first run-in with the legal system. I got arrested for drunk driving when I was 15, BEFORE I had a license. That should have been a sign that I wasn't cut out for a relationship with Demon Rum.
In the Army I got to drive lots of things I only dreamed of as a kid. I've driven several different kinds of armored personnel carriers, an M1 tank, a Bradley fighting vehicle and the classic Army Jeep (we called the "Quarter Tons") that were replaced by HUMVEEs by the time my service ended.
The loneliest time of my life was when my first marriage split up. My ex moved from NC to PA with our two children. It was an almost 900-mile round trip that I drove on as many weekends as I could manage in a stick-shift Nissan Sentra with no radio and no AC. I couldn't afford to stop and eat along the way and I often made the drive on Friday night after working the whole day. Traveling on Interstate 95 still brings back those memories. After just a few years, the kids came to live with me and I didn't have to make that horrible lonely trip any more.
After that, the longest drive we made was when I'd take them to see their Nana, my mom, who lives at the coast. We made the trip in a variety of cheap cars over the years ranging from a $500 Chevette to Dodge Caravan I bought with a loan at 18% interest. My youngest was prone to car sickness and we would cheerfully point out to her all the spots where we had to stop for her to get sick over the years. Mom still lives in the same town today and I'm traveling the same roads to see, but Wonder Woman took over the driving a few years ago, so I have it easy now in the passenger where I might occasionally sneak a nap. Fortunately, I don't have to drive disposable cars any more either.
When I go visit my dad, who lives in the next county, I will sometimes accompany him when he takes my step-mother for her daily ride. She has severe memory issues and only gets pleasure from a few things anymore. One of them is riding slowly through the farm country and watching the cycle of the crops grown in our area: cotton, tobacco. corn, soybeans and grain. Occasionally someone will get a wild hair and plant sweet potatoes or peanuts or best of all, a huge field of sunflowers. She announces that it's time for her ride, by picking up her purse and standing in front of Dad, who always just gets his keys and heads with her towards their car. If I'm there, I climb in the back seat and go along.
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Expert Guide on How To Win an Argument on the Internet
Just for the hell of it today, I searched for "how to win an argument on the Internet." Let me be clear. This is not something I do. Hardly ever. Unless someone really needs correcting. Or I'm grouchy. But only then. For one thing, I simply do not have the emotional energy to argue with anyone over anything, on or off the Internet on most days. I don't know if you've noticed, but being alive in 2025 is exhausting. Come January 20th, it will be even more so.
I conducted this search today strictly for the lolz. I wanted to see if anyone could seriously write an article to answer this question in a studied, calm and professional manner. If I was a reporter who caught an assignment to write a serious article about how to fight with a computer, I would quit on the spot because I have worked for crazy people before, and I did not like it.
Of course, I did find such an article, and I am including it here for you to marvel at.
How to Win an Argument Online: 7 Steps (with Pictures) - wikiHow
I found a much better Reddit thread on the always helpful sub, r/UnethicalProLifeTips containing the kind of help I was envisioning. It advises you to misstate facts when arguing so that your opponent feels obligated to correct you. Let's say you are disputing what level of hell Donald Trump will be assigned to when the syphilis finally kills him. You should mention something about his 36 felony convictions so that the MAGAt you're fighting with has to say, "That's a lie. HE only had 34 felony convictions!"
I can tell the person who wrote this article is a truly experienced Internet debater because they correctly cited Rule Number Four
- AT SOME POINT IN TIME, CLAIM THE OTHER PERSON IS A NAZI. Every, and I repeat EVERY Internet argument should involve at least one comparison to either Hitler or the Nazis. This is one of the most basic requirements of an average Internet debate, and although ignorant outsiders may find it silly to compare a person arguing on the Internet with an individual responsible for the execution of millions, this action represents one of the most traditional pillars of every online debate
How to Win Any Argument On the Internet
The final puzzle piece discovered in my research, has an easy to follow 10 point plan
- You don’t have to be right. You just have to make your opponent feel like they’ve lost.
- Never argue with an eloquent debater.
- Never argue in a room where the crowd is already dead set against you, and is allowed to be as loud as they want to be, and whenever they want to be.
- Never argue with someone who’s a certified expert on the topic you’re about to argue about.
- Never argue with someone who is knowledgeable but never gets flustered.
- When trying to appeal to a crowd. Don’t worry about the facts. Appeal to their basest emotions, and their deepest fears. Remember, it’s not a lie if it’s 20% true.
- Make the crowd chuckle at your opponent. Make sure the crowd doesn’t perceive your opponent as a human being with feelings, care, and emotions.
- If you get the slightest of feeling you are being attacked by your opponent for whatever reasons. Make sure you make personal attacks that sound like zingers even though they have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the current argument. But you have to use this as a tactical weapon to divert from the topic of discussion. And not overdo it, or seem desperate when you do it.
- Don’t ever allow your opponent to get inside your skin. You might be losing your shit inside. But you have to be absolutely calm on the exterior.
- If they catch you in a lie. Use false equivalence. Use it as often as you can.
How to win an argument online - Quora
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Disk Drill Revisited - Recovering 87K Files from a Drive That Finder Could Not Read
I first wrote about Disk Drill several months ago. The review is below. I recently had a chance to put the paid version of the data recovery tools to work in a real-world situation. I was presented with a 2TB NTFS formatted drive that would mount on my Mac, but displayed the message "Drive not available" and showed no files structure in the Finder. The drive belonged to a relative who lost access to her cloud account when switching jobs and ended up with only one copy of her files from a 20-year career - on a bad drive.
Disk Drill scanned the drive, and it was able to see files on it. It wanted me to make a byte for byte copy, but I didn't have another 2TB drive on hand. I had two 1TB hard drives and a dual drive bay, though. I used the Mac disk utility to combine the two physical drives into one logical drive and tried to initiate the copy again, but still got a message that the drive was too small. Since I knew that there was less than 100 GB of actual data on the drive, I was able to adjust the size of the number of bytes to be copied and the backup started. Although data seemed to be moving quickly, the progress indicator said the backup would take 28 hours. Ain't nobody got time for that.
Rather than doing a byte for byte copy, which also includes unused space, I elected to Disk Drill's recovery option instead. I initiated it and began to copy files, sometimes quickly and at other times seeming to stop. I got messages about the disk having physical damage, but the program never quit. After about 90 minutes, I had 86K files recovered.
I did not have to pay the full retail price to use the recovery tools because the app is available as part of Setapp, a $10 a month subscription that gives you unlimited access to hundreds of software titles.
Original Review
Disk Drill 5 by Cleverfiles is marketed as data recovery software to retrieve lost files from internal and external drive media as well as iPhone, iPad and Android storage. Its website goes into considerable detail on its ease of use, its power and its ability to recover files. The free product allows you to preview what data is recoverable, but it takes the $89 paid product to actually recover your data using its full suite of tools. There are some free recovery options too, but they require you to implement some (included) tools before use.
Free Tools
Even if you aren't in need of data recovery, however, Disk Drill
is a worthy download because of the bundle of free tools it includes:
Disk Health
Free S.M.A.R.T. Disk Monitoring Stays
Alert for Any Potential Disk Issues. It works on both internal and
external drives.
Mac Cleanup
Analyze Disk Space, Locate Unused
Files and Space Hogs, Free Up Your Storage Effortlessly.
Duplicate Finder
Easily Find and Remove Duplicate
File Locations on Your Drive.
Recovery Drive
Create Your own Bootable USB Drive
for Free Mac OS X Data Recovery.
Data Protection
Protect Your Data with Recovery
Vault or Guaranteed Recovery. Recover it for Free.
Data Backup
Create Byte-to-byte Disk &
Partition Backups for Future Mac OS X Recovery. In my testing of this
feature on the internal hard drive of an M3 iMac, Disk Drill said "This
drive is encrypted with the Apple M1/2 Security Chip. You can still back
it up into a byte-to-byte disk image, but it probably won't be
recoverable." This leads me to believe that a product like Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper!
is better suited for the task. Disk Drill did fine, however, making a
copy of a 500GB external disk.
You can download all of these tools for free from Cleverfiles.
Carolina sunrise. Good morning, y’all.
What I'm Using on Reddit in 2025
This repost from my Obsidian blog got a lot of play on Reddit
You can absolutely waste some of your wild and precious life if you start doomscrolling in the wrong places on Reddit. Used wisely, however, Reddit can provide you with information on just about anything you are interested in. If you use it wisely and in accordance with the peculiar culture of the site, you can also make people curious enough about what you are up to in your other web endeavors, if you write about topics that Redditors are interested in.
I tend to frequent subreddits that mostly pertain to technology and the federated social media these days. Here are my current favorites.
r/MacApps
This is where I spend the most time. The mods of this sub were cool enough to add a link to AppAddict in the sidebar after I made an effort to cross post my reviews in their entirety every day for a few months. I only link back to my blog in posts I make if I am answering questions about an app or making recommendations.
r/ObsidianMD
Aside from all the meaningless pictures of people's graphs, this sub is an excellent place to find out about new plugins, new workflows and new use cases for what I think is the best app since the invention of the browser
r/macOS
This sub is huge with over 400K members. I am a mod here, but don't post much. It's not the friendliest community. There is a lot of one-upping going on and you can see the neck-beards doing their neck-beard things, but if you overlook all that, you can learn a lot.
r/BlueskySocial
One of the coolest things about Bluesky, is the public APIs it has lend themselves to a lot of neat websites and small software tools being developed. This is the place where you can find out about them. It's also a place where you can get your fill of Twitter hatred whenever you need to re-up, because the folks who post here never tire of putting down the bird site.
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Celebrate the Victories
Me, my sister and my brother
Last week my sister sent messaged me about a failed drive from which she needed some files recovered. She is pretty savvy with computers. She's pretty savvy with most things. Not only that, but she has never used me for free tech support, so I knew this had to be important. She explained that twenty years worth of files from her career as a Methodist pastor were on the drive, her "whole life" as she put it. I told her she could send me the drive, and I'd see what I could do. I didn't lecture her about backups or anything like that.
Over the years, I've been approached by more than one crying person holding a USB drive or a laptop. I've seen people lose the only copy of their not yet submitted master's thesis, the only copy of their wedding video and twenty years worth of lesson plans by one unfortunate middle school teacher. Sometimes I've been able to rescue files but more frequently, despite my best efforts, I haven't been able to help people who have asked, despite badly wanting to.
My sister's drive arrived by mail tonight. It was a 2TB Western Digital external hard drive with a USB3 connector. I added an adaptor and plugged it into my laptop, and it mounted immediately, a good sign. It was formatted with an NTFS (Windows) file system. Unfortunately, instead of showing me the file system, I just got a message that said, "Drive Not Available." That was not a good sign.
The data recovery application I own is called Disk Drill. I'm a Mac user, but the company that makes it also has a Windows version. Disk Drill scanned the drive, and it was able to see files on it. It wanted me to make a byte for byte copy, but I didn't have another 2TB drive on hand. I had two 1TB hard drives and a dual drive bay, though. I used the Mac disk utility to combine the two physical drives into one logical drive and tried to initiate the copy again, but still got a message that the drive was too small. Since I knew that there was less than 100 GB of actual data on the drive, I was able to adjust the size of the number of bytes to be copied and the backup started. Although data seemed to be moving quickly, the progress indicator said the backup would take 28 hours. Ain't nobody got time for that.
Rather than doing a byte for byte copy, which also includes empty space, I elected to Disk Drill's recovery option instead. I initiated it and began to copy files, sometimes quickly and at other times seeming to stop. I got messages about the disk having physical damage, but the program never quit. After about 90 minutes, I had 86K files recovered.
I called my sister and asked her to identify the most critical files and folders so that we could see if they were among the rescued files. They were. She lives just over 100 miles from me, so we agreed that I would begin to upload the data to my Google Drive and that I'd send her a link when it was done. As gently as humanly possible, I suggested that she start keeping two copies of her files. She explained to me that the situation was complicated.
In the process of being assigned a new church, she discovered that her laptop, which is indeed hers and not the property of her employer, had been set up by the tech folks at the church she was leaving to use their One Drive. She had not been aware of that and didn't discover it until she went to look for her personal files and discovered they weren't available through the user profile she now had access to. She got temporary access to the old account and copied her files onto her external drive and then deleted them. And then, of course, the drive failed.
That's where I entered the story, a story that looks like it is going to have a happy ending. My sister has done a lot for me and my kids over the years. Being able to do this for her is just me repaying some of the karmic debt I've incurred. Always celebrate your victories, like I'm celebrating this one.
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Using Google Photos on iOS Makes Leaving Meta Easier
If you've had enough of corporate owned social media, specifically
Facebook and Instagram, and are investigating how to preserve your
photographic memories, the quickest and easiest way, if you have space
available, is to transfer them to Google
Photos. You can do it from your iPhone.
- Click the plus button at the top of the screen
- Then click "Import from other places"
- Select Facebook and when you authenticate, you will be offered the opportunity to import from your Instagram account(s) as well.
Other Reasons to use Google Photos for iOS
- Cross-platform support - if you use both iOS and Android devices, perhaps two different phones or a phone and tablet, Google photos is much easier to access on an iPhone than trying to access iCloud Photos from a browser on Android.
- Automatic Backups - Google photos can upload your iPhone photographs automatically and delete the originals to free up space
- More Free Storage - Apple only provides 5GB of free storage with iCloud, while Google provides 15GB
- Google Lens is baked in - In my experience, Google machine learning does a better job of searching through my photo collection than Apple's tools
- Create Movies and Collages - Google photos also has decent editing tools in the stock app. You get even more if you have a Google One subscription.
- Manage Everything in iOS - With Google Photos, you can do complete management of your library right from your phone: share photos, create albums, editing etc.
There's nothing stopping you from using Google Photos and iCloud for a redundancy. Just remember, both of these services are syncing services. That's different from a backup. If you delete photos from either app, using the wrong procedure, they will stay in your trash for a period of time, but then they will be gone forever.
An early morning view of the Green Mountains in Vermont, taken through the kitchen window of a kind stranger who fed my wife and me two meals and let us spend the night in her home, take showers and wash our clothes when we were hiking through her area. #photography
The "I'm Not a Computer Person" People
Here at the tail end of a career where I've spent at least some portion of my time providing technical support to the end users of technology in industry, education, medicine, insurance and banking, there isn't much I haven't seen. That includes devious middle school kids getting around security protocols designed by the brightest minds at Apple. It also includes people with multiple advanced degrees who can't read instructions on a screen that tell them to click a button labeled "Next."
I was around when Internet connectivity was introduced to the workplace. I worked with truly lovely and talented teachers at the tale end of long careers who valiantly tried to switch from paper grade books to buggy DOS-based student information systems. They would apologize when asking for help and just about always use the phrase "I am not a computer person." I'd say "That's OK, I don't know how to teach kindergarten." Some learned faster than others. Some, sadly, never learned and retired.
OK, that was a quarter of a century ago. I don't have that attitude any more. According to Consumer Affairs, 91% of adults in the US have a smart phone - which is a hand held computer with an operating system. Computer skills are taught in public schools. Most universities require students to have a laptop. Desktops and laptops have been ubiquitous in business for many years. And yet, and yet - I still get hit with "I'm not a computer person."
Somehow, the decision makers in many workplaces have decided that demonstrating competency with one of the basic tools of a job isn't a requirement. They hire people like me to hold the hands of their employees, enabling them to forego skill development because they can just call IT when they can't find a file they were working on yesterday or they've forgotten their password for the third time this month or they can't figure out how to make PDFs open in Adobe Reader.
We require our employees to figure out how to get to work. When automotive technology changes, we don't hold their hand to show them how to plug in an EV. People buy Smart TVs every day, and they figure out how to watch Monday Night Football. Most of my fellow grandparent types manage to get Candy Crush installed.
It absolutely blows my mind how many people using Windows don't know how to find apps by clicking on the start button. I've spent over 30 years being told by IT managers to put the icons for MS Office and the installed browsers on every user's desktop. I don't expect people to use a hex editor or anything, but come on, why do we work from an expectation that people are stupid? Why isn't learning to use a password manager a basic skill? There's a sizable population who truly refuses to use self-service password resets. If they can't call the help desk to get their password reset, they just sit there, not working. WTF?
I've probably written a version of this post four or five times before. I'll finally retire soon enough and then I won't worry about it anymore. It will be someone else's turn.
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Personality Tests
I had a boss once who went to some leadership seminar where he learned about the Meyers Briggs personality. He thought it was the greatest thing since sliced bread and wanted all the technical people in the IT department to take it immediately. I was on vacation because my grandson was visiting from out of state. The boss practically begged me to come in to work anyway for an afternoon to take the test. I acquiesced, against my better judgement, and humored him. After we all took the test, and they were evaluated, all hell broke loose. My departmental nemesis and I got the same assessment, and she was not having it. She was furious. I thought it was funny. I've tried unsuccessfully to find the results from that day. I wish I could tell you. If you're interested, you can take it yourself for free.
I'd love to hear anyone's experience with life after this assessment. Did you find it helpful? Did you agree with it? Did my boss violate my privacy?
One other bit of personal experience - when I was a correctional officer, I worked for a time in an in-processing center where we admitted inmates from jail. There they had to take a battery of tests, medical and psychological tests, including the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, a 600 question torture session that they all tried to pencil whip, forcing the staff psychologist to tell them that their answers indicated all sorts of horrible traits, whereupon the inmates would grudgingly try to answer the questions for fear of being labeled as a "bug", prison slang for the mentally ill.
Myers Briggs Type Preferences Perception Judgment
Personality Tests | Psychology Today - 45 different tests, including "Are you a psychopath," "Assertiveness Test" and "Emotional Intelligence" test.
Personality Tests Are Useless (Most Of Them Anyway)
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Recent Additions at MacMenuBar
One of the websites that stay open in my browser at all times is
MacMenubar.com. It's a deep
resource for new Mac apps in multiple categories. It currently features
links and short descriptions to over 1,000 applications. Here's a list
of the latest additions and links to all the different types of apps on
the site.
- Kleanly - Clean your Mac's keyboard, trackpad and display - With just a tap, Kleanly lets you completely disable your keyboard and trackpad, allowing you to clean them without turning your Mac off.
- Trace - This menu bar app tracks the active apps and websites you visit without requiring any extra plugins or extensions (works with Firefox, Safari, Google Chrome, Arc, Brave, Chromium, and more).
- Onliner on the Mac App Store - Onliner keeps you “online” effortlessly by simulating undetectable mouse activity in the background. Ideal for remote workers and professionals, Onliner ensures uninterrupted focus and avoids idle status notifications. Simple, efficient, and smarter than any mouse jiggler.
- fayazarahawa A simple white noise app which sits in the menubar - Hawa means air/breeze in Hindi. This menubar plays ambient sounds to help you focus on your work or relax. You can choose from a variety of sounds, adjust the volume of each sound individually, or create your own mix.
- Deskeen - Capture your insight! - This menu bar app is designed to efficiently capture your screen. Every feature is accessible through quick keyboard shortcuts. Deskeen can read everything, from symbols to languages.
- RSS Ticker News Feed on the Mac App Store - This menu bar app is an RSS reader designed to mimic the ticker display seen on forex stock exchange boards. News feeds update automatically when their respective RSS feeds are refreshed. The free version is limited to a single RSS feed.
- Sudoku Anyway on the Mac App Store - This menubar app features unlimited puzzles, five difficulty levels, customizable board colors, and helpful hints.
- Learn Flags - Menu Edition on the Mac App Store - Learn world flags and boost your memory with this quick-access menubar game.
- Captain for Mac - Manage Docker containers instantly from your menu bar. See which containers are running and which have stopped.
- RightMenu Master 1.11.0 - This menu bar app is a Finder extension that adds powerful functionality to the right-click menu and toolbar in Finder.
- Overkill-for-mac Stop iTunes from opening when you connect your iPhone - This menu bar app makes sure iTunes never interrupts your work. If you have other apps you don’t want to launch automatically (e.g. Photos app), you can add those apps to the Overkill list as well.
- Let It Snow - A touch of winter with snowflakes that gracefully drift across your screen.
- MenuBarGrid on the Mac App Store - Turn Google Sheets into powerful menu bar apps. Customize layouts, automate updates, and manage projects effortlessly.
- Ping MenuBar - This menu bar app displays ongoing ping (ICMP) results as a compact visualization. The design is similar to Pingr.
- NeverNap in the Mac App Store - NeverNap keeps your Mac awake, preventing sleep or screensaver activation for 5 minutes or indefinitely. It ensures smooth operation without manual system adjustments.
Categories at MacMenuBar
- AI Apps
- Audio Apps
- Audio Apps (Music)
- Audio Apps (Podcast)
- Battery Apps
- Browser Apps
- Calendar Apps
- Cleaning Apps
- Clipboard Managers
- cloud apps
- color apps
- design apps
- developer apps
- display apps
- email & contacts
- files & folders
- Finance Apps
- Keyboard Apps
- launcher Apps
- Meeting Apps
- menu bar managers
- misc & others
- Network Apps
- note taking apps
- personal apps
- Productivity apps
- screen capturing Apps
- security apps
- Sleep control apps
- social apps
- system Stats
- system tools
- time apps
- time apps (pomodoro)
- Time Tracking Apps
- Time Zone Apps
- To-Do List Apps
- wallpaper apps
- weather apps
- window managers
- writing apps
How Do You Know When It's Over?
I'm not one you worries about endings that much. In my experience, they are difficult to predict and arrive suddenly. Jobs, marriages, friendships, passions are all here until they are not. Buddhists believe that everything is disintegrating from the moment it is created. So do I. Permanence is an illusion. Thinking back on the giants I've known and how I could not conceive of a world without them and now what do I have? I have a world without them.
I am not implying that my wife or your is going to leave either of us tomorrow, although you never know what's going to happen tomorrow. Because all rules have exceptions, there are cases where things apparently haven't changed over the course of my lifetime. No matter what I've done, and I have certainly done much, my dear Mom has always been there. Always. Always. Always.
Within one month's time, I went from a child walking in a line to the lunchroom, raising my hand when I wanted to speak and asking permission to use the bathroom to being handed a rifle and shooting at human silhouettes representing the enemies of my country. Childhood ended abruptly at the gates of Ft. Benning. More than once, I had a job when I woke up and didn't have one when I went to sleep. It could happen again tomorrow.
Any reunion worth its salt will have a table with pictures of those who could not be there to celebrate. Because they died. In fact they start dying immediately, and they just keep on doing it. The rest of us keep getting up and going to work until we join them and someone puts our picture in the table at the next reunion.
I have a point.
I'm getting to it.
Just live. Do your job and try not to love it or hate it too much. It's just a job. Love your wife today. Don't wait for things to get better or different before you're ready to put in that extra effort. Friendships can wither if you don't water them, so fill up your bucket and make some phone calls or get in your car and go see someone. If you have a passion, and god I hope you do because that's what makes life worth living, then act on it today. Ride your bike, write in your journal, get out your camera, go to the gym. Do it today. It's all you have.
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What Happens When You Get Used to Evil Companies
It's only human to become used to even the worst of news. When you hear the same types of events reported for the hundredth time though, it's hard to attach any emotion to it. Most people who use social media are at least peripherally aware that the big companies that own Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and others have been caught doing everything from violating users' privacy and lying about it to undermining a US election by platforming a Russian intelligence agency. Maybe you even know about the resistance these companies have put up to cracking down on child sexual abuse material and bullying that's resulted in teen suicides. I case some of this sounds a little unfamiliar, let me just remind you of a few of the things that users of these platforms are implicitly condoning.
FTC Imposes $5 Billion Penalty and Sweeping New Privacy Restrictions on Facebook | Federal Trade Commission - I case you're wondering, this happened during the first Trump administration, not under the Democrats. Facebook blatantly lied for years to users to lull them into thinking their personal information was protected while selling it to the highest bidder, including personal telephone numbers. It subjected users photographs to illegal facial recognition software.
Anti-Semitic social posts 'not taken down' in 80% of cases - Even when notified of Neo-Nazis posting hateful and derogatory content, the big platforms only take action in one case out of four. On the other hand, I've had posts removed that extolled the French resistance against the Nazis in World War Two removed. I recently posted a cover of Time Magazine's Man of the Year for 1936 (Hitler) to compare it to 2024's MOY (Trump). That post was also removed.
Facebook and Instagram are steering child predators to kids, New Mexico AG alleges - CBS News - An undercover investigation set up phony accounts of fictional teens and preteens, using photographs generated by artificial intelligence. Meta's algorithms recommended sexual content to those accounts, which were also subject to a stream of explicit messages and propositions from adults on the platforms.
Has Social Media Fuelled a Teen-Suicide Crisis? | The New Yorker - A product manager at Facebook named Frances Haugen. Haugen, ...released thousands of the company’s internal documents to the Securities and Exchange Commission and to the Wall Street Journal, claiming that the company knew about the harmful effects of social media on mental health but consistently chose “profit over safety.”
Snapchat brushed aside warnings of child harm, documents show : NPR - An internal email shows the company received around 10,000 reports of sextortion per month. Employees pointed to one account that had 75 complaints against it, and it wasn't taken down. Internally, Snapchat said that addressing child grooming would create privacy issues and be too expensive.
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FSNotes - A Free and Open-Source Successor to NValt
FSNotes is a plain text note
editor with a two-pane interface of Brett Terpstra's classic Nvalt,
which ceased development in 2017. FSNotes has an extensive feature set
for run-of-the-mill notes and for developers. If you have an existing
folder of plain text or Markdown notes, you can access them from FSNotes
by moving or copying the files to the default folder or by changing the
path to the folder you are already using.
There are built-in keyboard shortcuts for searching your notes database, creating a new note from the clipboard contents and for creating new notes. You can choose a default external editor if you want to use something like Bbedit or Cot. The two pane layout can be used side by side or over/under. You can change the appearance and color of the app, as well as light/dark themes and the fonts used for notes and code. Line spacing and margins are also adjustable. Aside from encryption, you can also lock the app with a master password.
Features Included
- Markdown-first. Also supports any plaintext files.
- Fast and lightweight. Works smoothly with 10k+ files.
- Access anywhere. Sync with iCloud Drive or Dropbox. (iCloud required for iOS syncing)
- Multi-folder storage.
- Keyboard-centric. nvalt-inspired controls and shortcuts.
- Syntax highlighting within code blocks. Supports over 170 programming languages.
- In-line image support.
- Organize with tags.
- Cross-note links using [[double brackets]].
- Elastic two-pane view. Choose a vertical or horizontal layout.
- External editor support (changes seamless live sync with UI).
- Pin important notes.
- Quickly copy notes to the clipboard.
- Dark mode.
- AES-256 encryption.
- Mermaid and MathJax support.
- Optional Git versioning and backups.
You can examine the code and download the current version for free on GitHub. If you wish to support development and receive automatic updates, you can get FSNotes on the Mac App Store for $8.99. There is also an iOS version which can sync with iCloud.
A Non-Believer's Appreciation of Religion
Despite having tried mightily for many years, I've never experienced a moment of true belief in God in all my time on planet Earth. I grew up attending church. I took my kids to church. I've been baptized in three different denominations. I owe my life to a program that is riddled through and through with references to God (there are loopholes) and yet I just can't muster up any conviction that there's anything like a deity. I just can't do it.
I'm not angry with religion. I don't think religious people are stupid or always deluded. I think there's a lot of wisdom and practical life advice in many tenets of various faiths, including Christianity, the one with which I am most familiar. If you don't believe the golden rule has practical applications in personal relationships, we probably won't be friends. Unlike a lot of in your face Christians though, I am much more comfortable with the Beatitudes than I am with the 10 Commandments. "Blessed are the peacemakers. Blessed are the merciful" I can get behind that.
My sister is a minister in the Methodist Church. Aside from religion, we share a lot of similar beliefs about the world and about the solutions for its problems. I get angry when someone makes it known how much they love Jesus and yet they vote for a party or politicians who promise to cut food programs for the poor, as an example. My sister explained how some people truly believe that the answer to poverty is the food kitchen at their church, where they donate their time and money, taking a personal interest in the people who show up there. OK. I think that kind of labor and commitment is admirable. I don't think it's a comprehensive answer to poverty, but I don't look down on it.
When there are natural disasters, and I live in hurricane country where they are common, there are organized teams from faith based organizations who show up with boots on the ground to help people. The provide food and other necessities to anyone who needs it. Habitat for Humanity has a great record of helping people achieve home ownership. Mission teams routinely go to Haiti and other impoverished counties in this hemisphere to provide medical care and construction labor. That's real tangible stuff.
Yes, there are massive problems and contradictions with religion worldwide and particularly in my country. Covering up the sexual abuse of children by priests for decades is inexcusable. The church's attitude toward the LGBT community is a direct contradiction to the premise that God is love. The right-wing claim to be the party of God is offensive to anyone, even non-believers, who have ever read the Bible. The persecution of immigrants, the denial of food, shelter and medical care to people in need in a country with so much excess wealth is obscene. I'm not making any excuses for that.
Except for the believing in God part, most of my personal ethical and moral standards would past muster with the church. When I see someone who is comforted by their faith, I am nothing but happy for them. It's a damn cruel world and all of us has to take comfort wherever we can find it.
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Automations Make Macs Fun - Try These
I use all kinds of apps and services on my Mac and iPhone to make things happen in the background to make my life easier. I like to reserve my headspace for things I enjoy contemplating, like where I'm going to get my next order of tacos. I don't like having to remember to do things, mostly because I'm not that good at it. Here are a few of my favorite "set it and forget it" workflows.
Journaling with Day One
My first Day One entry was in January 2014. Since then, I have over 20,000 separate posts that are backed up online and synced to my iPhone, iPad and Mac. Here are the entry types that get automatically created:
- Liked YouTube videos
- Posts from all three of my blogs
- Articles I save to Pocket
- Mastodon posts
- Every TV show and movie I watch
- Daily weather reports
- Books I add to Goodreads
All of these automations are done with IFTTT, may of them with RSS feeds. - Day One Integrations - Connect Your Apps with IFTTT
Time of Day and other Triggers with Keyboard Maestro
Keyboard Maestrohas a long list of triggering events that cause automations to run in the background. Here are a few of my favorites.
- Time of Day Trigger - an hour before I get up, Keyboard Maestro ejects my backup drive from my laptop so all I have to do is unplug it when I start the day - no more error messages because I was bleary-eyed and forgot to go through the procedure.
- Time of Day Trigger - at 2AM,Keyboard Maestro launches a file synchronization appthat backs up my Obsidian vault to Google Drive and then quits.
- Login Trigger - At work, whenever I log into my computer, all of my open apps are hidden so that if people are standing around my desk, they don't get to see what web pages I had opened when I left to go get a cup of coffee. It's none of their business.
File Magic With Hazel
Hazel is a Mac app that watches specified folders on your computer for certain conditions. When those conditions are met, it performs any of a long list of actions on the files.
- When I left Evernote, I missed being able to send emails to my my new notes app,Obsidian, so I created a workflow that gives me that non-native capability.
- Add images I download from the Internet to the Mac photos app - without even opening Photos
- With the help off a 99-cent app from the app store, Hazel automatically mounts downloaded DMG archives, extracts the program contained within, moves it to my Applications folder and dismounts the archive.
Obsidian Tricks
At it's core, Obsidian is just a plain text markdown editor. The power comes from it's massive 2000-plus and counting available plug-ins. Here are a few automations they allow me to set up.
- Download the full text of all the articles I send to my read-it-later service, Pocket.
- Download the highlights I make on any of the 1300 bookmarks I have saved in Raindrop
- Keep a centralized recordof my daily schedule and tasks completed using the data from my calendar and task manager.
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Unsplash Wallpaper App - Free Unlimited Wallpapers at Your Fingertips
Unsplash is one of the largest providers of royalty-free images in the world. Without an account, you can search for, download and use any one of the millions of photographs on the site. For photography fans or anyone who enjoys aesthetically pleasing wallpapers, Unsplash provides a free app to cycle the wallpaper on your displays at regular intervals: hourly, daily, weekly. You can also manually cycle in a new image. When using the manual settings, the app has a built-in viewer so you can see a reasonably sized thumbnail preview of the available images. The selected image is downloaded to your computer, helping you to create a permanent collection if you want one. It provides wallpapers for all attached displays and virtual desktops.
You can select one or more categories of images, from which the app will select new wallpapers. The default categories included with the app include:
- Black and White
- Nature
- Beach
- Animals
- Space
- Textures
- Abstract
- Editorial
You can also browse the thousands of collections on the Unsplash website and choose collections to add to the wallpaper app. One drawback is that you can only add one wallpaper collection at a time. To add a new collection, you have to remove your previous custom selection.
The app is available in the App store for free. It does not collect any information connected to your identity.
How to Internet - 2025 Edition
Even after it became obvious that Facebook was an invasive cancer on not just the Internet, but all society, I kept my account. There were too many ways it was ingrained into my life. It was the way my cycling club announced rides and planned events. Friends who moved away years ago kept in touch with me through Facebook. So many people on the job where I worked for 20 years had accounts and I could up with them. I had 16 years of photos from family birthday parties, Christmas get-togethers and I could see my grandchildren's first days of school and their graduations. That's what kept me there. It wasn't for the opportunity to look at and post memes or to preach to the choir or lecture people on how to feel about this or that, although I did do some of all of that too. I'd use it occasionally when I got bored to see clips of the Beatles, old boxing matches and baseball games from my youth. It was good for that.
I had a Twitter account too, but it was never that important to me. I didn't have many real relationships there. I mainly followed hard new journalists and tech people. I liked to follow it during presidential debates, which make my stomach hurt if i try to watch them. I'd much rather read the astonished takes from journos about whatever put-downs the politicians were using on each other. When I started blogging, I used Twitter as just another place to put links to my app reviews and Obsidian how-to articles. I talked to a few people, but all my real interacting was happening on Mastodon. Finally, I decided I just couldn't be someone who hung out at that particular Nazi bar just to get a few more eyeballs on my little personal, n on-monetized blog. I closed my account and didn't have a single emotion as a result. It was just checking something off a to-do list.
When Mark Zuckerberg while wearing a $900,000 watch, announced last week that Meta was going to stop fact checking, I knew the end was near. Then that asshole went on Joe Rogan and lied. He claimed he was bullied by the meanies in the Biden administration who yelled at him for letting Republicans tell people not to wear masks or get vaccinated during the deadliest pandemic in a century. That was followed by an announcement that Meta was going to end its diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. As if that weren't enough, Facebook deleted content it had bragged about creating for trans and non-binary people. I couldn't take it.
I sat down and marked my Threads and Instagram accounts for deletion. I requested an archive of the thousands of pictures and posts I had on Facebook, dating all the way back to the George W. Bush administration. When that comes through, Facebook is gone. Down here in the south we still have plenty of all white organizations ranging from private swimming pools, to country clubs to churches and ceremonial military units. Those are just the organized all white organizations. Lots of ad hoc groups are intensely exclusionary, too. I made a point a long, long time ago to avoid all of that and never, ever willingly participate or endorse all white spaces. I'm not going to participate in fact free or gay free or trans free spaces either. I'm not going to be responsible for a single set of eyes looking at a damn thing Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk profit from. I am embarrassed that it took me so long.
It's been a decade since Facebook ran an experiment on the accounts of a whopping 600,000 people to see if it could make them sad by what it exposed them to. Yeah, they really did that and it worked. People found about it. It made the news. Nothing ever came of it because in America, billionaires are like Ricky Bobby's sons. They get to do whatever they want.
You do you. I'm not here to tell you that using Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, or Threads makes you a bad person. If you stay, I'll assume that you have a good reason. I just can't think of one that would let me use something that will be a prime means if spreading disinformation to millions of people, disinformation that will hurt and possibly even kill them. Too dramatic? I think not. That's what it comes down to. The people running that company and the politicians they are now supporting don't give a shit if you live or die. They just want to extract as much wealth from you as they can.
Get a Mastodon account. Get a Bluesky account. Just stay away from billionaire owned manipulation machines.
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