Amerpie by Lou Plummer

2025

Apr 16, 2025 ∞

The Walter Miller Homepage - The Funniest Website That Ever Existed



Warning: This Goes Way Back

Back in the days of accessing the Internet over a 56,6K modem, someone, probably on AOL told me about "The Walter Miller" homepage, the terribly mis-spelled and grammatically incorrect plain text website of the finniest stuff I have ever read. I'm serious. Con't click the link at the bottom of this post and start reading if you ae trying to drinnk something. You might choke to death or spray expensive red wine across the display of your MacBook.

A snippet from the landing page

ABOUT ME

Im orignally from California but now I live in rural Texas-a lonly area 2 hours from the nearest big city. Ive been here since last December. I moved here because Iam only 20 years old and divvorced and I owe the whole world money. So my family takes over my bills and debits in exhange for me to look after and take care of my granfather. Lets just say I have to haul him up on the crapper whenever he has to go-which isnt often and contributs to him bein cranky most of the time.

Our home consists of a trailor, some outbuildings, a toolshed, asorted shacks, and 2 halfs of a moduler home that were never put together and sit 50 yards apart with plastic sheets drapped over the open parts. We live in the trailor-the other buildings house the varied colections of My granfather. He has 170,000 hupcaps which maybe the bigest colection in Texas. He also colects apliances, spark plugs, books, plumming fixures, beercans, Indian blankets, cooky tins, furnoture, glasware, old typwriters, bottles and car parts, plastic bags, coffe cans, antiques, trashcan lids of pre-World War 2 era, manhole covers, rusty tools, stufed animals, basebal cards, 55 galon drums and steyrofoam. These are just a small sample of his colectibles

Theyre stroon across the whole area like a junkyard. The county has come after him many times. He also has 14 dogs and dog crap is eveywhere. Also the stuffed animals and indian blankets are outside-when it rains they get rancid.

The page is long dead, but it is preserved by the people doing the Lord's Work at The Wayback machine. When you click on this and other links within the site, you might think nothing has loaded. It has. Just scroll down a few dozen lines and pure vintahe Internet comedy genius will overwhelm you.

The Walter Miller Home Page

A vicious rumor - THE WEB'S ANONYMOUS | TIME

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Apr 16, 2025 ∞

Unlimited Internet, Ad-Free TV, Boneless Wings - Three Signs of the Apocalypse



Sign 1 - Unlimited Internet Is Not, In Fact, Unlimited

My Internet service provider sent me a nastygram today, or rather they sent a snitch letter to Wonder Woman because technically the account is in her name. They wished to inform us that we (meaning me) had FAR exceeded the normal amount of bandwidth during our current billing cycle. As a result, according to the nastygram, they will be throttling our connection speed during "congested hours" until the cycle renews. Did I mention that we pay an extra fee each month for an upgrade to our connection speed? Or, that our plan is called "The Unlimited Ultimate Plan"?

I went and looked at the data usage for the month. It's a lot, slightly over 3TB. I haven't been downloading torrents. You think I'm 12? What I've been doing is retrieving my data from Amazon and Google, primarily a lifetime of photographs, but also over 1,000 book purchases, split almost evenly between Kindle and Audible formats. After removing the limits that Amazon tries to impose on usage through digital rights management, I uploaded all the information to European servers.

Well, I guess a billion (trillion?) dollar bloodsucking corporations stick together because Verizon is now discouraging me from making full use of the service I pay them for.

Sign 2 - Ad Free Television Actually Contains Ads

I quit watching ad supported television a long, long time ago. Only once, in 2015, did I watch regular TV and that was only to follow the (almost) undefeated season of the Carolina Panthers. The amount of adverting in a football game, along with the collusion against Colin Kaepernick and the epidemic of brain damage put me off the game shortly thereafter. I pay less for the premium streaming channels than I paid for cable television, even with all the price increases. I opt for the ad-free experience because life is short, and I just don't want to waste it enduring marketing. Now that the fascists are in power and corporations can do anything they like without repercussions, one of the things they are doing is inserting advertising into the feeds of people who pay to opt out of it. What are we going to do? I know what I'll do. I'll go right back to the Lou of the early 21st century and start sailing the high seas again. I gave up the pirate life in 2006, but war is war, and I'll not be trifled with by Peacock, Hulu, Netflix, or anyone else.

Note to "Steve", the anonymous coward who left a comment and thinks that my mockery of torrents and my planned re-embrace of them are worthy of a confused face emoji. You might have a point. I haven't needed torrents in almost twenty years because I am willing and able to pay for the entertainment I consume - as long as I get what I pay for. If the mega-corporations who take my money don't deliver what they promise, then all bets are off.

Sign 3 - You Can Choke to Death on the Bones in Boneless Chicken

Dissenting justice: “The question must be asked: Does anyone really believe that the parents in this country who feed their young children boneless wings or chicken tenders or chicken nuggets or chicken fingers expect bones to be in the chicken? Of course they don’t.

“When they read the word ‘boneless,’ they think that it means ‘without bones,’ as do all sensible people.”

Yeah, a man in Ohio had a bone from a plate of "boneless wings" served to him in a restaurant get lodged in his throat, causing a serious infection. A jury, using what we normal people call common sense, found in his favor when he sued the joint for false advertising. Not to be deterred from protecting pretend people (corporations) from actual real people with, you know, families and jobs, the Republican majority on the state appeals court decided that "boneless wings" describes a cooking style and is not offered as a description of the food you are paying for. They took away the damages that a jury of his peers awarded him in a decision decided by a one-vote majority, One of the dissenting justices was pretty scathing in his critique of how much the court Republicans suck.

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Apr 16, 2025 ∞

SmartBackup - Free, Fast and Foolproof




While I have long used Time Machine as my primary backup for my Macs, it does have some drawbacks. If you go looking for a missing file, it's a hit-and-miss operation to find the last known good copy of a document, image or folder. You basically have to work your backwards through your snapshots until the file appears. You also have to know the exact path of what you're looking for unless you are willing to restore in bulk.

The type of backup I need isn't a whole disk backup. I'm fine with Time Machine for that, plus I have the option of using SuperDuper!, Carbon Copy Cloner or DiskDrill. for copying a whole disk, something that is much more nuanced and complicated using AFPS than it was ever using HFS.

After testing several options, some of them excellent, others not so much, I decided to use the free product, SmartBackup because I liked its basic interface, multiple options for backing up, and its easy to understand and use restore mechanism which works through the Finder. SmartBackup will optionally archive changed or deleted files in timestamped folders. You can choose how long you want to keep these files. The restore feature includes a built-in search panel that will show you multiple versions of a file grouped neatly in the results.

The other attractive feature is the speed at which it backs up, especially to an SSD drive plugged directly into a Thunderbolt port. It's engineered to take advantage of SSD technology and even allows you to choose the number of data threads you want active at one time. The default, two, should be used if you are backing up to a mechanical hard drive, but from SSD to SSD, four worked better for me.

The built-in scheduler is simple. You pick a time and specify if you want to perform a daily or weekly backup. It will run in the background without launching a window and notify you when it is done.

SmartBackup works on Intel and Apple Silicon.

You can download SmartBackup at the developer's website.

Note - I tested three other products, two of which work well: FreeFileSync and SyncFolders Pro. The product that underperformed dismally was ChronoSync Express. I'd heard good things about it, but it was exceptionally slow and failed three times to back up my home directory. I was surprised because it had been recommended to me by a couple of people.

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I have a couple of newsletters now. One is a weekly collection from my personal and links blogs that goes out on Mondays. - ✏️ Subscribe | Amerpie by Lou Plummer



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Apr 16, 2025 ∞
Flying Into Salt Lake City
Whenever I go out west, I’m always struck by how drastically different the terrain is compared to the relatively featureless coastal plain here in the east, where I live. This photo was taken on the approach to the Salt Lake City Airport.

Apr 15, 2025 ∞

The Most Important Tech Skill for Every Single One of Us



What's the most important computer information you've ever lost? Was it pictures, something you'd written, your contacts or your entire phone or hard drive? It's a rare (or dishonest) person who can claim to have never suffered some kind of data loss. I have been asked to help recover wedding videos, a master’s thesis, decades of lesson plans and the accumulated files from an entire ministerial career.

Wherever you have information that is important to you, on your iPhone, Android, Mac or PC or even in a cloud service like Google Drive or Dropbox, do you know if you have taken the right steps to back up your data? A backup means at least two copies, three is better, with one of those stored offsite. Saving your files to a thumb drive or an external drive is not a backup if that is the only copy of them. Even keeping your files in iCloud or Google Drive is not a backup, if losing access to that account would cut you off from your data. People lose access to their online accounts seven days a week for all kinds of reasons. Do all those Google Docs that only live on Google Drive mean anything to you? If they do, then learn how to back them up today.

Back up iPhone - Apple Support

How to Back Up Your Android Phone WIRED

How to back up your Mac - Apple Support

How to Back Up Your Files in Windows 11 Microsoft Windows

Google Takeout

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Apr 15, 2025 ∞

Those 1 AM Thoughts That Keep You Awake



Some people are so selfless that they seem almost saint-like. They aren't common, but they aren't rare either. There are usually one or two in most work situations. They are the people who seem to have endless patience for answering questions and never seem too busy to lend a hand to people who need it. There isn't a time in anyone's memory when they hurt someone's feelings or made them feel bad. I have never been one of those people. I'd like to think that I'm just an average guy, one who gets a little impatient sometimes, a little stressed at others and who slips up from time to time and says things he wishes he could take back. I have a mental playlist of those occasions that just decides to start running through my brain from time to time.

Once a co-worker made a mistake setting up a school's computer image for a new year and didn't find it until she had erased and reinstalled the software on hundreds of devices. It happens. She was far from incompetent. She just made an unfortunate error and as a result had to do a lot of extra work. It could have happened to me a hundred times over. I was laughing about it with a couple of people on my team, nothing mean spirited, just being glad it didn't happen to me. Yeah, the problem was the person I was talking to was on the phone with her, and she heard every word I said. Ouch. I spent the next five years trying to make it up to her. I felt horrible. Still do when it pops into my mind.

Like many tech people, I joke about being my family's go to for computer issues. I write about it on this very blog. Because I've done this work for so long, it's a rare, rare day when a issue causes me any stress. It might be aggravating, but I'm up to most challenges given enough time. I forget that normal people don't have that mindset. All they know is that this expensive piece of equipment they rely isn't working, and they have no idea why or how to solve it. It is no joke. One Thanksgiving, I was at my poor sweet Mother's house when she came and told a group of us guys that she needed some help with some tech issue after lunch. I started joking with my brother and broth-in-law that they would have to help her because I just didn't have the patience for it, which was jerk of a move and made my mother cry, since what she wanted was in no way a big deal. Man, I wanted to crawl into a hole. I don't know what possessed me to be so callous. Thankfully, I have tried to be the most patient person who ever lived with every tech problem she's asked me to look at since that day. Lesson learned.

Let me be clear. I don't think I am some kind of monster. We all have our ups and downs. I have just as many good memories of having been helpful at work and supporting loved ones in tough times. I think we evolve to have these memories of our mistakes as a way to help us grow. Having a conscience is a survival skill, unless you are some kind of sociopath.

The difficulty in 2025 is that half the country have stopped evolving. They've stopped having a conscience. They no longer feel any empathy for those whose suffering they've contributed to. In fact, they seem to take some perverse pride in it.

Even during times when the economy has been in the dumps and I didn't have much extra money, I was still fine as far as having my basic needs met. I never wanted the state (my employer) to take money away from child nutrition or health care programs just so I could have more disposable income. I think it's a good idea to use tax money to do research on breast cancer and sickle cell anemia, even the chance of me getting those illnesses is minuscule. In no way would I ever think that winning the cosmic lottery and being born a middle-class white American makes me deserving of anything, rather than a poor immigrant whose struggles I cannot even comprehend. Only a sociopath would be uncaring in the face of suffering. Yet, here we are.

In the movies, generally, the bad guys know they are bad people. These days, we are surrounded by horrible people who seemingly have no comprehension of their own rotten souls. The head of the Southern Baptist Convention recently gave an interview explaining why empathy isn't Christlike. How do these people even sleep at night? I feel bad about hurting someone's feelings 15 years ago and my fellow Americans are celebrating their president taking away aid from a country under attack from an invading marauder. I just don't get it.

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Apr 15, 2025 ∞

Change the Location of Notifications With PingPlace




One of my favorite tech writers, Justin Pot, who publishes a lot over at Lifehacker, reviewed a new to me app today called PingPlace. If something happens on a Mac, someone is going to figure out a way to tweak it. This free app moves the pop-up location for notifications from the upper-right corner's default, to just about anywhere else on your primary display that you'd like to see them appear"

• Top Left
• Top Middle
• Top Right
• Bottom Left
• Bottom Middle
• Bottom Right

Reasons For moving the default location include the size of your monitor, or just plain personal preference.

The only real option in the settings is to have the application launch at startup, which only makes sense.

The apps requirements are a minimum of macOS 14 and accessibility permissions.

You can download it on GitHub, or even better, get it via HomeBrew.

brew tap notwadegrimridge/brew
brew install pingplace --no-quarantine




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Apr 15, 2025 ∞
Tree Rat Mad
I forgot to put out and chow for my backyard friends, and this gut came down to the deck to give me an earful and a few scornful looks.

Apr 14, 2025 ∞

The Ingredients of a Good Day



What are the qualities of a good day for you? I'm talking about an ordinary good day, not the birth of a child or getting promoted kind of good. What has to happen for you to go to bed with a smile on your face?

For me, good days almost always come after a good night's sleep. Although I can almost always fall asleep easily, I'm turning into one of those old people who can't seem to string together eight hours to save my life. Today, I managed to sleep until almost 4:30 AM, which is the latest I've been in bed all week.

Although the presence of coffee does not guarantee a good day, the absence of it almost assuredly means getting anything done will be extra challenging. Today, we had coffee, so there was no crisis. I also just ordered one more shipment of Barry's Tea before our Amazon Prime subscription expires in a couple of weeks. Somehow, I ended up with four boxes of this delectable nectar from the Emerald Isle. I switch over to drinking it mid-morning and continue to make a brew every couple of hours throughout the day.

I like being productive. These days, in retirement, I can pick out my projects. The primary one I'm working on now is organizing nearly 100,000 photos, a lifetime's worth from several generations. It gives me a unique opportunity to come up with new technical solutions while being submerged in the great memories old photos bring back. That's digital photos going back to the 90s, the quantity of which drastically increased when we got smartphones. It's also massive amounts of DSLR shots from a time when I spent many hours a week pointing and clicking at anything remotely interesting, including trips all over the country to take photos. Finally, there are scanned family snapshots going back decades for both my wife and me.

I like my solitude very much, but I also relish family time. One of our daughters and her husband are going to a concert tonight (Disturbed) and we agreed to watch their kids overnight. They live a couple of hours a way, but made the drive all the way here to drop off their offspring. I was prepared with plentiful snacks and drinks. As soon as their folks left, I proposed a trip to the old school arcade in town, to which they instantly agreed. We spent a couple of hours playing pinball, skee-ball and trying in vain to extract loot from claw machines. Nobody whined or complained. My granddaughter, age five, got a little teary when she failed to win a stuffed animal, but her heroic high school aged brother deftly cheered her up immediately by giving her all his tickets for her to redeem at the prize counter.

The evening was spent eating food I didn't have to cook in a house remarkably calm despite the presence of young people. The only loud noise was the kids laughing at each other. Wonder Woman went to bed early since she has to work tomorrow. In the morning I'm taking the kids out for pancakes at my favorite diner, which is right down the street. I'm eagerly awaiting another good day.

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Apr 14, 2025 ∞

Fascism is Here, Evidence Included



The Italian philosopher and novelist, who came of age in Mussolini's Italy, penned a list of the 14 characteristics of fascism, all of which are currently present in the United States.

1. The cult of tradition. This is the belief that the truth is already known once and for all. Fascists believe there is no need to advance in learning.
2. The rejection of modernism. Fascists reject the Enlightenment and its evidence-based rationality.
3. The cult of action for action’s sake. Fascist leaders act impulsively, without thinking or planning ahead.
4. No analytical criticism. Fascists ignore nuance and see any disagreement as treasonous.
5. Fear of difference. Fascists fear diversity. Thus they are racist by definition.
6. Appeal to a frustrated middle class. An economically frustrated and/or politically marginalized middle class is easy to stir to anger.
7. Obsession with a plot. Because the followers must be made to feel besieged, an internal “enemy” is provided: Immigrants, Muslims, Hispanics, Blacks. (Historically the Jews were often made to be “the enemy.”)
8. Anti-elitism. The followers are made to feel humiliated by the wealth and strength of the educated “elite.” This is used to create resentment.
9. Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. Fascists believe that life is permanent warfare. Therefore a desire for peace is treasonous.
10. Contempt for the weak. A fascist leader despises his underlings, who in turn despise those under them. They all either mock or ignore the poor, the sick, and the disabled.
11. The cult of heroism. The Fascist is eager to die a hero’s death. In his impatience, he frequently sends other people to their deaths.
12. Machismo. Fascists show disdain for women, disregard for chastity, and condemnation of homosexuality.
13. Selective populism. Under fascism, the “voice of the people” is not the democratic majority, but only the voices of those who support the leader.
14. Ur-fascism speaks Newspeak. Just as in Orwell’s 1984, Fascists use an impoverished vocabulary and an elementary syntax to limit complex and critical reasoning.

Smart People Say We're There

The rise of end times fascism Far right (US) The Guardian - The governing ideology of the far right has become a monstrous, supremacist survivalism. Our task is to build a movement strong enough to stop them

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American Fascism Then (1939) and Now (2025) Columnists insightnews.com - Historian Heather Cox Richardson reminds in a recent article that there was a time in American history when the Nazi Party, while still somewhat on the fringe, enjoyed a level of "normalization" in the run up to the start of World War II in 1939 that bears eery resemblance to the modern push for fascist extremism in the United States.

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How the US Went Fascist Mass Media Make Excuses for Trump Voters – BillMoyers.com - Trump's racism and xenophobia violates America's core beliefs — yet the media and many Americans are okay with it.

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Apr 14, 2025 ∞

Safari Extensions Worth Paying For and A Couple of Worthy Freebies




One of my current strategies to minimize the ability of tech companies, starting with Google, to use browser fingerprinting to extract information from my browsing habits involves rotating among a half dozen browsers on my Mac. Because I have long used Chromium-based browsers and the extension ecosystem associated with them, I've had to find some alternatives for Safari, which I am using as part of my rotation. Unlike most Chrome and Firefox extensions, many Safari add-ons incur a cost, usually small. These are the ones I opted to buy. I'm sure some of the long-time Safari users out there have some suggestions for alternatives or criticisms of some of these choices. You are welcome to school me, I won't be offended. I also realize that watching ad-free YouTube on Safari is a never-ending battle. I have alternative solutions for that, primarily using FreeTube.

• Homecoming for Mastodon on the App Store - The $2.99 app redirects any Mastodon link back to my home instance so that I don't have to log in repeatedly when following links to people who use other servers.
• MarkDownload on the Mac App Store - This $2.99 app copies the URL of the current tab in Safari as a Markdown link. It can also copy the entire web page to your clipboard as Markdown or make a Markdown list of all the open tabs in your browser.
• Baking Soda - Tube Cleaner on the App Store - This $1.99 app is a Safari extension that replaces custom video players (except the YouTube player) with a minimal HTML video tag. It standardizes your video experience from site to site, including videos saved by collaborative meeting sites.
• Acidity - View Page Archives on the App Store - This free extension is the best paywall remover that I've found for Safari and it rivals anything I've ever used on other browsers.
• MousHero for Safari on the Mac App Store - This $1.99 extension, MousHero is a Safari extension that adds automation superpowers to your browsing experience: trigger URL actions by adding up to 3 custom context menu items to Safari's right-click menu. You'll be able to launch apps, services and automations (for instance with third-party applications such as Shortcuts, Keyboard Maestro, Drafts, etc.), optionally passing the currently selected text, destination link, current page URL and title as parameters.
• Wipr 2 on the App Store - Since there is no uBlock Origin or Privacy Badger for Safari, I chose the highly regarded ad and tracker blogger from Indy developer, Kaylee Calerolla to handle those tasks for me - $4.99
• Hush Nag Blocker on the App Store - Browse the web like it should be – free of nags to accept cookies or privacy invasive tracking. It's tiny, fast, free, open, secure and without any access to your data.
• Vinegar - Tube Cleaner on the App Store - For $1.99, Vinegar is a Safari extension that replaces the YouTube player with a minimal HTML video tag. It removes ads, restores picture-in-picture, and keeps videos playing in the background.
• Stop the Madness Pro Extension for Safari, Chrome and Firefox AppAddict - Offers extensive customization on a site by site basis to combat data harvesting and dark practices by social media and other sites. $14.99

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Apr 14, 2025 ∞

American Goldfinch

Do yourself a favor and purchase a couple of thistle seed socks because that’s all you need to attract Goldfinches like this to your yard if you live in the right place in North America. They are beautiful birds. #birds

Apr 13, 2025 ∞

Some App Finding Resources for You



It truly seems like there is an unending river of new Mac apps to check out. I once worried that I would not be able to find enough apps to continue writing about them daily. These days I wonder how I will ever find the time to download, test and review all the interesting software I discover. When it comes to discovery, I rely on tips from readers first and foremost. If an app is good enough for someone to take the time to tell me about it, it must be special. I also have a full complement of sites that I look at regularly to see what is popular, what has been updated and what’s just been released. Take a look. 

AppAddict Source Websites

• MacUpdate Search - this is a bookmark to the recent releases of free apps
• Discover Software & User Reviews Tool Finder - a comprehensive site with YouTube videos, reviews, links and more
• Open Source Software, Open Source Alternatives, OSS Software - A decidedly technical site that I keep looking through for stuff easy enough for somebody like me to understand
• thriftmac - Over 400 quality totally free Mac apps
• Mr. Free Tools - The Best Free Tools & Resources - Not just software, but also web services
• Recently Added – MacMenuBar.com - One of the best software sites in the Mac ecosystem, run by luuk, a friend of AppAddict
• Apps - MacSources - Comprehensive reviews
• Today on Mac - More good reviews
• Top Mac Apps - Top 1000 Apps - the website of the MacUpdater App
• Premium macOS apps gone free or on discount - Score the occasional free App Store gift code here
• Best Privacy Tools & Software Guide in in 2025 - Has been an big help to me in securing my data and ensuring my privacy
• GitHub - Axoraxawesome-free-apps Curated list of the best free apps for PC and mobile - A long, long list of apps to investigate




A Preview of the Pipeline

These are individual apps and services that I've bookmarked to download and test for possible reviews on App Addict. If you are fond of any of these, please let me know why you like it. Also, if you've tried any of these and found them lacking, give me a heads-up on that too.

See potential AppAddict candidates on Raindrop.io.

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Apr 13, 2025 ∞

This Week's Bookmarks - Anti-Fascist Films, Ancient Graffiti, White House Rumors, 1995 and The Web, Best Browsers, Middle-Class Income Needs, Apple and Developers



The 40 Best Anti-Fascist Films of All Time - In light of recent events, it might be a good time to remember a very simple truth: Nazis are ALWAYS the bad guys.

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A Tour of Ancient Rome's Best Graffiti: "We Have Urinated in Our Beds ... There Was No Chamber Pot & More| Open Culture - Apart from the likes of bra­vo and piz­za, graf­fi­ti must be one of the first Ital­ian words that Eng­lish-speak­ers learn in every­day life. As for why the Eng­lish word comes direct­ly from the Ital­ian, per­haps it has some­thing to do with the his­to­ry of writ­ing on the walls — a his­to­ry that, in West­ern civ­i­liza­tion, stretch­es at least as far back as the time of the Roman Empire.

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10 rumors involving Trump's press secretary, Karoline Leavitt So, the question is, does she spread more rumors from the White House podium than are spread about her because of her wackadoodle behavior and inexperience.

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1995 Was the Most Important Year for the Web - The History of the Web - 1995 is a fascinating year. It's one of the most turbulent in modern history. 1995 was the web's single most important inflection point. A fact that becomes most apparent by simply looking at the numbers. At the end of 1994, there were around 2,500 web servers. 12 months later, there were almost 75,000. By the end of 1995, over 700 new servers were being added to the web every single day.

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These Are the 7 Best Browsers That Aren't Google Chrome - STOP USING CHROME!! Chrome was once a great browser, but it's known to be slower, battery-draining, a memory hog, and collects massive amounts of user data. If you want something better than Chrome, you don't have to pick one. Each option excels in certain situations; you should try them to find what best suits your needs without much compromise.

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The Income Needed to be Middle Class in Every U.S. State (2025) - Middle class is defined as earning between two-thirds and twice the median household income.

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The Dark Side of Apple Development: Why Developers Are Struggling On Apple’s Increasingly Hostile Platforms – Magic Lasso Adblock = "They would rather have a ChatGPT or TikTok than an OmniFocus or Magic Lasso. Apple is too big to fail, which means it's too big to care." - Ian Betterridge

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Apr 13, 2025 ∞

White-breasted Nuthatch

These little nuthatches are easy to spot because of their habit of descending trees headfirst, like the one in the photo.

Apr 13, 2025 ∞
Downy Woodpecker
The Downy Woodpecker is the smallest woodpecker in North America. They are easy to attract with inexpensive suet feeders like the one in the photo. #birds

Apr 12, 2025 ∞

PhotoSync to take Control Over Your Images




For anyone who wants to eliminate as much friction as possible in creating backups of their iPhone photos outside of iCloud, most people have long turned to apps from big tech companies like Google, Amazon, and Dropbox. They all have apps that will gladly upload your photos on to their servers, where you can be assured they will extract every bit of data about you that they legally (hopefully) help themselves to. 

Using the paid iOS app, PhotoSync, you get the ability to wirelessly and automatically send copies of your photos to the file system of your computer, a long list of commercial cloud services, plus my choice, custom WebDAV servers. I store my photos on non-US systems with strong encryption because privacy matters. 

PhotoSync has various options to name and organize your exported photos. You can also have multiple options for formats: raw +JPG, HEIC, JPG and various choices for handling Live Photos and videos. You can include or exclude metadata, including GPS locations. Additionally, you can export both the edited and original versions of a photo or just one of those choices. 

If you want to get photos from your phone to your Mac, where you can edit them, decide on what you would like to archive and create a name and folder structure to your liking, there is a free macOS companion app that facilitates that. It also lets you move photos from your computer to your phone without using Apple Photos. 

The Photosync iOS app has various pricing models, both subscription and lifetime purchase options, the latter running $24.99 for the premium version which adds extra features: 

• In-app camera for instant transfer
• Client-side encryption
• Backblaze, Amazon S3 and Wasabi support
• Advanced Siri Support and shortcuts
• Downloads from DSLRs right to your phone
• Upcoming feature to organize your iOS library on your Mac


Photosync has been in the App Store for 14 years, and I have used it off and on for most of that time. With my current focus on protecting my data from big tech companies, I will be using it more and more.


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I have a couple of newsletters now. One is a weekly collection from my personal and links blogs that goes out on Mondays. - ✏️ Subscribe | Amerpie by Lou Plummer



The other newsletter is for this blog, one app review delivered to your mailbox every day. in case you don't have enough software in your life - Subscribe | AppAddict Newsletter




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Apr 12, 2025 ∞

Horses



One of the joys about being a prolific reader is the opportunity to become fascinated and informed about all kinds of things that are totally outside your lived experience. In the 70s, as a fifth grader, I read the book The Black Stallion by Walter Farley. This led to an immediate and long-lasting fascination with horses, even though I've never seen thoroughbreds race and have only ridden about a dozen times. Actually, as a pre-school child in a time before I have clear memories, my mother bought me a book about horse breeds which I promptly memorized. I think my parents used me as a party trick to show off that particular skill.

The 70s were a good time to be interested in horses and racing. Secretariat had won the Triple Crown in 1973 in a fashion so dominating that it may never be matched. He won the final race, the Belmont Stakes, by an unimaginable 50 lengths. He was the first to win all three races in 25 years. Many sportswriters went so far as to name Secretariat as one of the 20th century top athletes. Then in 1977 and 1978 there were Triple Crown Winners in back to back years for the only time ever. The person who rode Affirmed to victory in 1978 was a teenager, Steve Cauthen, who became the only jockey ever named Sports Illustrated's Sportsman of the year.

I asked for and received figurines of famous horses for Christmas. I read every book the library had about them. I was especially interested in thoroughbreds, but anything horse related was worth investigating. I studied my grandfather's collection of World Almanacs for the lists of names of the horses who had one the famous US races. I knew as much about Man O' War, the legendary horse from the early 20th century, as I did about Babe Ruth, the ultimate star of my other favorite sport, baseball.

Although I did not get to see them until I was an adult, I read all the books I could find about the feral horses of the islands on the eastern seaboard, including, most famously, Misty of Chincoteague. I am always happy to see the horses on Ocracoke Island and other coastal areas of North Carolina where I visit. I was pleasantly surprised when the book, Seabiscuit by Laura Hillenbrand became a bestseller and read it eagerly. by One of the highlights of my Appalachian Trail thru-hike was the day we hiked Grayson Highlands state park in Virginia where a delightful band of feral horses greets lucky hikers. I've been back there several times to see them.

These days, I'm lucky to have a granddaughter who has several years of experience riding and competing in horse shows, including dressage and jumping as well as cross-country. She's worked hard to develop her skills and recently got promoted from the junior level to the senior level of competition. She rides an American Quarter Horse named Say Pepsi Please, who she is naturally very fond of.

Unfortunately, the so-called sport of kings that sparked my interest in the whole scene has been ruined (like baseball and professional cycling) by rampant use of performing enhancing drugs, resulting in an epidemic of death among the equine athletes. Attendance at famous tracks has declined sharply, and the allure and mystique of the entire scene no longer interests me. Like most Americans, I only pay attention to the Triple Crown races, and then only superficially.

Still, I love an opportunity to watch or spend time with horses, even if it's just an old mare eating grass in a pasture. It is good to have things you enjoy, don't you think?

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Apr 12, 2025 ∞
Ruby Throated Hummingbird
Spending $5 on a plastic sugar water dispenser is so worth it. #birds

Apr 11, 2025 ∞

The Roth Memory Course



Have you ever seen or read about the people who can memorize the exact order of multiple decks of cards? Those people are freaks and they scare me, so I'm not advocating those kinds of skills, but who wouldn't like to be able to retain information more easily? Several years ago I came upon a free PDF version of The Roth Memory Course by David M. Roth, first published in 1918. Written in the stilted and formal British English of the era, Roth presents seven lessons and techniques to memorize more information than you ever though possible, using methods you could teach to a child. I read the book and learned the techniques and, while I kept my skill sharp, could easily recite lists of 100 random words in order. That's a neat party trick, but not very useful otherwise. The practical use was learning dozens of technical acronyms and terms while studying for IT exams.

It's an easy read and a fun self study exercise. If you look around, you can find the PDF version, although hardcover and kindle versions also exist.

Roth Memory Course A Simple And Scientific Method Of Improving The Memory And Increasing Mental Power by David M. Roth

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