Apps

May 16, 2025 ∞

Guilt Free Dital Media Pipline Automation

After a nearly twenty year break from using peer-to-peer technology (torrents) to download movies and TV shows, I have decided that it's more ethically pure in 2025 to once again fly the skull and crossbones than it is to put money in the hands of the fascist billionaires who monopolize the entertainment industry. To be clear, I'm not advocating doing this to software from independent developers. It's the collaborating big tech companies that don't deserve your money any more.

Don't do this without a VPN. Just to show you how easy it is for your ISP or anyone who has your router's IP address to see what you download, you can use I Know What You Download

With minimal effort, using mostly free or freemium software. you can cobble together a secure, integrated system capable of importing my watchlist from Trakt into a an app that will search torrent web sites for the media that you want, download it and add it to a Plex media server.

The tools needed for creating this system are:

Trakt - an online database of movies and television shows (Freemium)
Nord VPN - a privacy protecting virtual private network to shield my Internet traffic from my ISP and others. Other VPNs using the OpenVPN or Wireguard standard with P2P capabilities can also be used. (paid)
Prowlarr - an app that facilitates public and private torrent sites and adds them to other apps from the same developer to search for media (FOSS)
Radarr - imports my movie watchlist from Trakt, searched the Internet for movies in English, that are at least 1080p and that do not exceed 10GB . It adds those movies to my BitTorrent client. It renames them using the Plex naming standard and adds them to the folder where my media library is located. (FOSS)
Sonarr- imports my television watchlist from Trakt, searched the Internet for shows in English, that are at least 1080p and that do not exceed 10GB . It adds those movies to my BitTorrent client. It renames them using the Plex naming standard and adds them to the folder where my media library is located. (FOSS)
Deluge - a BitTorrent download client with built in VPN integration and a highly configurable interface (FOSS)
Plex - a media server that lets you watch movies and TV shows stored on your computers hard drive on your television through your Apple TV, Roku, Amazon Firestick or other streaming mechanisms

Jeff Bezos owns Amazon Prime Video, The Washington Post , and a hobby space exploration company among many other things. When the de facto head of Saudi Arabia's government ordered the murder of the Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, Bezos protested loudly and had a PR photo taken at the man's grave. Yesterday, Bezos proudly announced a new business partnership with the same government that committed the murder.

Apple has been in active collaboration with MAGA since the CEO, Tom Cook, donated $1 million to the president's inauguration. The company was just found to have committed perjury and ignoring a court order to end abusive business practices that unfairly rob developers of revenue and inflate the price of software and services.

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May 9, 2025 ∞

The Real Apple

bad_people_wall_art

Today, after many years of being a devout user of Apple's online services, going all the way back to the days of .Mac, I took steps to reduce the company's access to my data in as many ways as possible.

If I told you that Apple gives up user data to law enforcement data a higher percentage of the time than Facebook does, would you believe me? What if I told you that Apple turns over user data 90% of the time? That doesn't quite square with the image the company has cultivated, does it?

Did you know that you can continue to use Apple's default products like contacts, calendars, and reminders without using iCloud at all? You can still enjoy the great design and functionality without putting all your eggs in one basket. If you use every Apple default app with the default settings, and you lose access to that one account, your digital life is just about over. It happens every single day.

Over 40% of the average Internet user's traffic goes to just five big tech companies: Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook (Meta) and Amazon. The leaders of those companies are trying to curry favor with an authoritarian US government. That government is arguing that not all people in the US are entitled to due process. Protecting yourself and your data is more important than it has ever been.

I urge the people I care about to spread their digital life around so that a single compromised account won't ruin their lives. I also urge them to use companies outside the US so that what they have online can't be used against them.

I've written a mega-post about privacy for Mac users with links to the sources of the information about Apple's real privacy record. It's too long and covers too much ground to be appropriate here. For anyone looking for Mac apps that help break GAFAM dominance and reduce dependence on Apple and other companies, here are resources and information to use.

May 9, 2025 ∞

Mega Post: Protect Yourself Like Your Freedom Depends On It

Today was the day that I finally went through a comprehensive checklist to cut down my dependency on Apple web services to the fullest extent possible. I'm still a fan of their software and hardware, but despite their PR campaign to pose as a privacy first company, they cooperate with law enforcement a higher percentage of the time than Facebook does. Let that sink in. In a time when our right to due process in America is under question, I'm not letting any US big tech companies have any more access to my life than is absolutely needed.

All of you who are big fans of using Apple default apps with their default settings, take note.

The "GAFAM" (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft) are the 5 dominant Internet companies that own many popular services, often operating under a different name, e.g., WhatsApp and Instagram for Facebook. Collectively, about 40% of the average computer and smartphone traffic goes to just these five companies. All of them have been fined by governments around the world for illegal invasion of privacy and other infractions.

Apple makes headlines occasionally for refusing to cooperate with government demands for access to customer data. According to their own transparency reports, though, the company gives the government what it wants in 90% of cases.

“iCloud content, as it exists in the customer’s account” can be handed over to law enforcement in response to a search warrant, Apple’s law enforcement guidelines read. That includes everything from detailed logs of the time, date and recipient of emails sent in the previous 25 days, to “stored photos, documents, contacts, calendars, bookmarks, Safari browsing history, maps search history, messages and iOS device backups.” The device backup on its own may include “photos and videos in the camera roll, device settings, app data, iMessage, business chat, SMS, and MMS [multimedia messaging service] messages and voicemail”, according to Apple.

I only recently arrived at the conclusion that I no longer wanted to store things like my calendars, contacts, and reminders with Apple. For one thing, it's always a bad idea to have too much data tied into a single account. People lose access to the iCloud and Google accounts all the time. Spend some time on Reddit or do a quick Internet search for examples. Many people don't fully understand that you do not have to store your contacts, calendars, and reminders in iCloud to be able to use those apps on your Mac and Phone. I've blocked all three services at the DNS level and am happily accessing my data from third-party providers that aren't in GAFAM.

Reducing Your Apple Connections

You can take the following steps to cut down on the traffic between your computer and Apple.

Go through your security and privacy settings with a fine tooth comb and remove access from everything you are not using regularly.
- Location services
- Contacts, Calendars, Reminders, Photos, etc
- Analytics & Improvements: (turn them all off
- Screen recording camera and microphone access
- Full disk access

Go through everything with iCloud access
- I had over with 100 apps with access to iCloud Drive. Not anymore.
- Consider an alternative to iCloud photos
- Turn off Passwords/Keychain syncing if you use 1Password or another password manager

Turn off automatic services
- You don't need your computer to ask Apple every day if updates are available. Set that to manual.
- You don't need the app store to install all those iPhone apps on your Mac. Turn off automatic updates.
- Go through the apps that are listed beneath your login items and turn off access to anything you don't use regularly or that you don't recognize. Use Lingon or StartupManager to do an even more thorough job.

Since January 20, 2025, I've taken the following steps to leave GOFAM:

Changed email providers from Gmail to a company located outside the US. I use my own domain for email and have unlimited email addresses. My primary address doesn't get handed out repeatedly to people I would rather not have it.
Moved the majority of my cloud storage to European providers and removed everything from Google Drive and Google Photos
Stoped using Google search entirely in favor of Kagi
Canceled Amazon Prime and stopped backing up photos to Amazon servers
Uninstalled all Microsoft products and removed all files from OneDrive
Canceled all Meta accounts and blocked Facebook at the DNS level

Other Privacy Related Practices

I use NextDNS which allows granular control over Internet traffic. With the right settings, you can stop ads and trackers from passing through your router, speeding up your connection and increasing your privacy. It also provides encrypted DNS to block third parties from having a record of your Internet habits.
I rotate between five browsers to cut down on fingerprinting. On browsers that support it, I use uBlock Origin, still the Mack Daddy of ad and tracker blockers.
I use a VPN almost all the time, especially away from home
I use a third-party firewall to block certain outgoing traffic, since the Mac firewall is only for inbound traffic. You should still turn it on, though.

Tiny Little Acts of Resistance

resist_stickers_on_laptop

As a certified, card carrying, paid up member of the resistance, my days are spent with an eye towards doing something, anything to retain my sanity in a world seemingly going mad. I am always on the lookout for whatever I can do to bolster my faith in humanity and to connect with those who feel much the same way about the world as I do.

Here are a few of the things I've done recently.

Reaching Out

In 2010, on my 45th birthday, I went on a long bike ride with a group from my cycling club with a selection of much younger military guys and one civilian woman who was an elite road bike racer. I met my friend AJ that day. A couple of years later, when they got out of the Air Force, they left straight away for Springer Mountain, Georgia to hike the Appalachian Trail. AJ was the first person I'd ever known to start that journey. Years later, when I set out to do the same thing, they provided me advice and even met Wonder Woman and I in Maryland, bought us lunch, took us to the grocery store and offered up a variety of gear to us in case we needed it. Later on , AJ came out as non-binary. I've followed their life for a long time now and seen them complete an education, write and direct plays, complete unbelievable bike rides (like the Tour Divide), get married, parent two boys and joyously become an English professor.

I sent them a letter recently to let them know that I'm still a fan. We used to keep up with one another on Facebook, but since I left, connecting on Bluesky has not been as easy. Unfortunately, AJ's return letter bore the news that their boss at the college was trying to get them fired. The college is in an area that voted MAGA by a 3 to 1 margin, so you can guess why they want o part ways with my friend. It just goes to show that staying connected with the vulnerable people in our lives is something we have to do in times like this. We all need one another.

Speaking Out

If there has ever been a time to be loud and proud, 2025 is that time. I try not to let an opportunity to advocate for resistance pass me by. Just tonight on my App Review blog, I suggested a tool that lets people access information without putting money in the pockets of billionaires and fascists. If you need to see something from the Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post or The New York Times, I've got you covered. And, if for some reason, you need to look at something from Twitter, I can show you how to do that without going to the Nazi bar. If I see someone with a Kamal bumper sticker or an anti-MAGA one, I go out of my way to praise them for their sanity.

Staying Informed

I refuse to doom scroll the news on my phone or computer. I haven't watched TV news since before Obama and the only thing I listen to these days is old music and the occasional audiobook. Still, I spend about 30 minutes every morning going through the headlines from the sources I trust. Here's a list. I don't have to wallow in self-pity and frothing anger. I just need to know what kind of damage the Fascists are doing. I take the time to celebrate victories, like the recent decision to stop the GOP from stealing an election here in NC that they lost by 70K votes. I'm also happy to see that the Catholic Church has a Pope who can help stifle the reactionary conservatism of the Americans. Go Leo!

Being Honest

I know that I speak to the current situation from a position of privilege. I'm a cisgender, heterosexual middle class white guy who gets to play the game of life on easy mode. I know this. I keep that in mind. I celebrate the others of my kind who are keeping things as radical as they can, like Adam from OMG.LOL who makes accountability his brand. Another OMG.LOL member @bbq just put up $10K of his dough to match donations to progressive causes and people have stepped up to support The Trevor Project , Prison Literacy, support for the neurodivergent, medical research and more. These role models give me hope for the future.

Resist!

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May 8, 2025 ∞

Redirect Web for Safari

I've recently been using Safari much more regularly than I have in years. I found quite a few helpful extensions that improve the experience. One that I didn't find on my own, but that I am grateful to have discovered through a tip from a reader, is Redirect Web for Safari, which allows you to define how your computer handles links from certain sources. You can use predefined rules or build your own.

Predefined Rules

Make Reddit links open in Old Reddit
Open Twitter links in Xcancel to avoid adding any traffic to the official site
Open Wikipedia links in Wikiwand for a more pleasant reading experience
Open Google Map links in Apple Maps if you're trying to de-Google as much as possible
Since Safari doesn't offer Kagi as a default search engines, you can use this extension to redirect all your searches to Kagi, skipping a trip to Google completely. There are other ways to do this, so if you have something that is already working, stick with it.
You can also redirect any searched from Google to Brave Search or Startpage
There are other rules to improve the user experience for Figma, Notion, Facebook, Google Search and multiple tweaks for YouTube

I have long supported ethical journalism sources financially. For years, the New York Times was the most expensive of my subscriptions, including TV, software. I was also a Washington Post subscriber for more than a decade. Last year, after the owners of the publications introduced changes to their editorial policies, I elected to quit supporting them financially. On the occasion that I want to read a story from either of them, I created simple rules that take their URLs and redirects them to the Internet Archive. The same rule works for other paywalled sites owned by billionaires, such as The Wall Street Journal and Bloomburg. You can do the same thing manually and with various other extensions, but this method has less friction than any that I've found. For that reason, it is the one I recommend using.

The extension costs $3.99 for a lifetime use or $1.99 for one year with a seven-day free trial. It has no ads and no tracking. It just makes the Internet better.

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May 7, 2025 ∞

BarCuts Brings Order to Your Shortcuts Menu

I make extensive use of shortcuts all day long on my Mac. I use them to import data into Obsidian, generate alt-text for images I post on my blog or social media, query Open.AI, dismiss notifications, quit all apps, launch multiple apps at once, perform backups and so much more. In the past, I've made extensive use of the option to add shortcuts to a native menu running from the Mac menu bar, but over time the list grew long and more difficult to mage.

Just in the nick of time, one of the friendliest and most helpful developers on the planet, Germany's own Carlo Zottman, released a small app called BarCuts. It also runs from the menu bar, but only shows shortcuts that work in the currently active app, plus ones that you decided you always want to have available.

This means that when I am in Obsidian, I see shortcuts to import a weather report and copy the day's appointments into my daily note. When I use any other app, I don't see those shortcuts. When I am in Safari, I see the shortcut I use to open paywalled site at the Internet Archive.

I always see the shortcuts for emptying my trash and dismissing all the notifications from the Notification Center. All you have to do to configure your options is to add a single Shortcuts action at the end of your existing shortcuts.

Because Carlo is good at what he does, "the menu can also be opened by a global keyboard shortcut, you can put your workflows in sub menus, and there's a separate section for all those important always-available workflows.

Naturally, BarCuts comes with scripting support, and you can also hook it up to Alfred or plug it into Raycast."

BarCuts has a two-week fully functional free trial. Licenses are €12 personal/€24 business and include updates for one year. You retain ownership and use of the app as long as it is compatible with macOS. There is no subscription.

For more shortcuts add-ons, see this review. Enhance Apple Shortcuts with These Apps | AppAddict

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May 5, 2025 ∞

A Mac Guy Gets Into Self-Hosting

Before 2025, my self-hosting experience had been limited to running the media server software, Plex, on a 2009 iMac. When I retired that machine, I didn't resurrect Plex on my new Mac, although I did hang on to all the media files. I retired myself this year and resolved to start self-hosting some services as a learning experience. My home network consists of three Mac laptops, a Lenovo ThinkPad, that 2009 iMac I mentioned, plus five iOS devices and an Amazon Kindle Fire (Android).

I elected to use the ThinkPad as a server, although the platform I chose, Unraid, will also run on a Mac. Many of the services it hosts are fully accessible on Mac and iOS devices. I picked Unraid because I have contacts who use it. It is not FOSS. A license that allows you to connect six hard drives in a RAID array is $49.

Unraid Benefits

• 1 year of free OS updates
• All Unraid OS features
• Perpetual Starter license
• Access to Community Apps
• VM and Docker Management
• Integrated Tailscale + VPN Support
• Network-Attached Storage Dual Parity Protected Array, ZFS, BTRFS, XFS Pools

In the two weeks I've been using it, I have installed a media server (Plex), a photo management server (Digikam), file sharing (Syncthing), and the Mac compatible VPN, Tailscale that allows geographically distant devices to interact as if they were on a LAN.

Other services I plan to investigate are:

Nextcloud - a personal alternative to Dropbox, Google Drive, One Drive etc.
Self-hosted Calibre ebook server
Paperlessngx - a document management system

In seeking advice from experienced self-hosting folks, I received this detailed answer from a friend on Mastodon, @phillip@omg.lol

Unraid

"Unraid is probably the easiest turnkey solution if you have the cash to throw at it. Easy App Store, Docker, VMs, NAS, etc. It stays easy while leaving you tons of headroom to grow. There’s also a huge community with tons of resources and docs behind it. The main con here imo is money. Some have complained about performance issues, but afaik that’s only in larger NAS setups."

yunohost

yunohost.org is pretty slick and even has its own App Store to make downloading new apps dead simple. However, it doesn’t use Docker containers (harder to switch to another platform later like Unraid) and seems to prefer opening ports publicly. That not may be a con if you were already planning on doing that anyways.

Yacht

For free + docker, I’d recommend a dashboard app like Yacht (or Dockge for even simpler). You’ll need to manually configure your apps, but it’s generally pretty straightforward and a “set it and forget it” kind of thing.

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May 4, 2025 ∞

Five New to Me Apps for a New Week

iDrive Cloud Backup

From Assaf at Labnotes - IDrive Cloud Backup I started looking into Backblaze alternatives, and so far iDrive is a strong contender. I chose the mini plan, 500GB of backup for $9.95 a year (it’s somewhere in the UI, look it up). It does have continuous backup, but so far I’m happy just running on a schedule. Can’t figure out how to get it to ignore repeat directories like every node_modules, or limit by file type/size (eg don’t backup large videos). And the UI is not pleasant, but neither is Backblaze (their restore is overly complicated), so just trading one deficiency for another. Oh, but they do give you 100GB of space to sync files between your devices.

Command Keeper

Command Keeper by Ari Feldman - Use Command Keeper (Free) to easily organize and access your command line snippets, shell scripts, and even SQL queries. It's ideal for app developers, web developers, or just anyone who needs to spend time working with command line interfaces.

Build a Big Collection: Add or edit up to 999 command snippets (each can be up to 4K in size)
Save Time: Automatically insert the selected command or query directly into your Terminal. Command Keeper works with your choice of the macOS Terminal or iTerm, Warp, and Ghostty (if installed)
Always Ready: Runs in the background, so its always available and you can even pin your favorite snippets to always appear first
Powerful Filtering and Search: Filter your snippets by category and search your snippets by command, description, and even notes contents
Keyboard Friendly: Use keyboard shortcuts to create snippets and browse through snippets efficiently
Preserve Your Data: Export your snippets to a CSV or JSON file and backup your snippet database
Fast and Lightweight: Its simple and minimalist design ensures it’s light on resources
Wide Compatibility: Works on macOS Ventura, Sonoma, and Sequoia; optimized for Intel and Apple Silicon CPUs

Readeck

Readeck - (Free)a web app that runs as PWA on a Mac with self hosting available this year. It's an open source read it later application

Curate Your World

Archive, mark as favorite, add labels to your content so you can find it later.
Search anything in your growing content and create dynamic collections. Highlight What Matters
Highlight the key parts of any text content and come back to it later.
Browse and find the highlights from all your content. Save Video Transcripts
Save a video link and Readeck will retrieve the transcript when available.
Read, export, highlight and search the save transcript as if it were an article. Export to E-Books
Take an article with you on the ride home or a full collection for a weekend.
Readeck lets you export articles and collections as a single ebook. It provides a standard catalog on supported e-readers. Adjust to Your Needs
Read your way; set a different font, text size and line height.
Readeck lets you do all that and remembers your preferred settings for your next read. Browser Extension
Save while browsing with the browser extension.
This includes the content on websites you can access but Readeck can't.

Czkawka

Czkawka - (Free) - An open source app with multiple tools to cut down on accumulated cruft on your Mac.

Multiple tools to use:

Duplicates - Finds duplicates based on file name, size or hash
Empty Folders - Finds empty folders with the help of an advanced algorithm
Big Files - Finds the provided number of the biggest files in given location
Empty Files - Looks for empty files across the drive
Temporary Files - Finds temporary files
Similar Images - Finds images which are not exactly the same (different resolution, watermarks)
Similar Videos - Looks for visually similar videos
Same Music - Searches for similar music by tags or by reading content and comparing it
Invalid Symbolic Links - Shows symbolic links which point to non-existent files/directories
Broken Files - Finds files that are invalid or corrupted
Bad Extensions - Lists files whose content not match with their extension

Legcord

Legcord - is here to help you hate Discord less. It's a lightweight, free and open-source Discord client.

Highlights

Uses a new lightweight electron framework
Built-in game detection tools
Very hackable for you developer types
Made for privacy - Legcord automatically blocks all of Discord's trackers; even without any client mods, you can feel safe and secure! They also don't collect any data from you.
Designed for Mac - Legcord is optimized for macOS, with a native screen sharing and a more Mac-like experience. It's optimized for both Apple Silicon and Intel macs! No more spinning fan when opening Discord.

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May 3, 2025 ∞

How to Check All Your Apps for Homebrew Availability

I don't think there is any question on how useful the free Mac package manager, Homebrew, can be. You can download and install an app with just one simple terminal command, something like:

brew install bbedit

After it's installed, there is no ZIP archive or DMG file to clean up or manage. To update you apps installed with Homebrew, you don't need a special app or a subscription to anything. You just open a terminal windows and run:

brew upgrade

Your apps will be upgraded in place with nothing for you to clean up. To back up your configuration, you just run

brew bundle dump

and a custom brewfile will be created at the root of your home directory. If you get a new Mac od do a fresh install on your current machine, you can use that brewfile to download all your apps and packages with one command.

If you are late to the party and already have an /Applications folder full of your favorite apps, don't worry, you can use a simple shell script to compare what you have installed with what is available for the Homebrew catalog. It won't take long to replace your manually installed apps with their Homebrew counterparts.

How To Check Your Applications Folder

Here is the script. It isn't 100% foolproof, so read the explanation and don't empty your trash until you've verified that the app you got from Homebrew is the same as the app you replaced.

\# List all applications in /Applications and ~/Applications
find /Applications -maxdepth 1 -type d -name "*.app" -print0 | while IFS= read -r -d $'\0' app_path; do
  app_name=$(basename "$app_path" .app)
  echo "Checking: $app_name"

  \# Sanitize the app name for Homebrew search (replace spaces with hyphens, etc.)
  search_term=$(echo "$app_name" | sed -e 's/ /-/g' -e 's/\./-/g' -e 's/@.*//') \# Basic sanitization, might need more

  \# Search Homebrew formulae
  brew search "$search_term" | grep -i "^$search_term$" && echo "  Found in Homebrew formulae"

  \# Search Homebrew casks
  brew search --cask "$search_term" | grep -i "^$search_term$" && echo "  Found in Homebrew casks"
done

Explanation:

The script finds all .app directories in /Applications and ~/Applications.
It extracts the application name.
It performs basic sanitization of the name to make it more suitable for a Homebrew search.
It uses brew search and brew search --cask to look for matches in both Homebrew formulae (command-line tools and libraries) and casks (GUI applications).
The grep -i "^$search_term$" part tries to find exact matches (case-insensitive).

How to use:

Save the script to a file (e.g., check_brew_availability.sh).
Make it executable: chmod +x check_brew_availability.sh.
Run it from your terminal: ./check_brew_availability.sh.

Limitations of this script:

Naming variations: Homebrew package names might be significantly different from the application bundle names.
False positives/negatives: The simple name sanitization might lead to incorrect matches or miss potential ones.
Manual review needed: You'll likely need to manually inspect the output to confirm if the Homebrew package is indeed the same application you have installed.

In case you are wondering, this script and the instructions were written with the help of an LLM coding GPT. I've tested it on several different Intel and Apple Silicon Macs with solid results.

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May 3, 2025 ∞

This Week's Bookmarks - Classic Marketing, LBJ, Goodbye Google, No WoW for 1yr, Best Books, Holocaust Survivors on Freedom, Photographers in Vietnam

Obsidian - 2025-05-03 at 18

The raccoons who made computer magazine ads great - In the 1980s and 1990s, PC Connection built its brand on a campaign starring folksy small-town critters. They'll still charm your socks off.

LBJ & the Great Society - Ken Burns - LBJ "voted against every civil rights bill during his tenure as congressman, then spearheaded the greatest civil rights measures since Reconstruction".

Why I abandoned Google search after 27 years — and what I’m using instead - Google = a once dependable search engine that has lately become nearly unrecognizable to anyone who remembers the days of 10 blue links and the motto "don't be evil."

Netigen A Year Without Azeroth - This feels entirely too dramatic, but yesterday marked the one year anniversary of my quitting World of Warcraft—an event that feels both overwrought and consequential.

Best Books of the 21st Century (So Far) | Kirkus Reviews - Warning! If you are a compulsive book buyer, like me, this might get expensive.

Our Freedom is Fragile: Lessons From the Jewish Children Who Fled Nazi Germany ‹ Literary Hub - "America is no longer a country of refuge but one that is preying upon its most vulnerable inhabitants, including children, who stand to suffer the most…"

How Photography From the Vietnam War Changed America - The New York Times This week marked the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War. The images in this article are some of the most influential works of photojournalism ever taken.

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May 1, 2025 ∞

30 Years of Web Communities

Online Communities

This is my contribution to the May IndieWeb Carnival.

Although I used a local BBS and AOL chat rooms back in the day, the first online community I ever found a home in was at [Epinions].(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epinions) It was a dotcom company that paid you to write reviews of commercial goods, including books and albums. You could use HTML to dress up what you wrote, so there was a small but satisfying thrill in learning how to be good at that. As usual, they had an off-topic category too, where you could write about whatever you wanted, and I contributed there all the time. People could follow you and send you private messages. I eventually outgrew it, but I tried to find a guy from there recently, after 28 years, and I succeeded because he's still using the same unique username.

When I had a Geocities website, part of it was dedicated to Vietnam veterans and their kids. I corresponded with quite a few men and women who were eager to have someone to talk to about their experiences. I live near a giant army base, so all the vets I know have comrades-in-arms everywhere they g0. The 18-year-old who got drafted from Iowa in 1967 and did his year in hell didn't always have that, and I was glad to hear them out, publish their stories, and generally just be as supportive as I could.

I was in some great bicycling forums around the turn of the century, one of which still sends me birthday greetings every year. I went as far as Georgia to meet folks from there for an organized ride.

For a few years, believe it or not, I took part in the local newspaper's community forum, which was mostly a cesspool of name-calling and ad hominem attacks on liberals. I'd write outrageously provocative stuff about W. Bush and his wars just to stir up the flag wavers. They doxed me regularly, and the woman I was married to absolutely hated me going on there. After a while, it wasn't fun anymore, so I stopped.

When I hiked the Appalachian Trail, I kept an online journal every single day and posted to a website called Trail Journals. As a result, I had people up and down the East Coast who wrote to us and visited us on the trail. It wasn't unusual to meet trail groupies who knew all kinds of our fellow hikers from reading their journals. More than a decade later, I am still in touch with people I first met through that journal.

Then we enter the long dark winter of the soul—Facebook was all there was. I never really used Twitter for anything besides news, so I didn't find much social about it. My Facebook experience was much the same as many folks. In 2008, it was a place to keep up with friends and family and to reconnect with people from the past. In 2017, I had a viral post that caused me to get literally thousands of friend requests, many of which I accepted for the hell of it. I met plenty of cool people, including a friend I eventually met in Derry, Northern Ireland. I ditched it for good this year after Zuck sucked up to MAGA and fired the fact-checkers.

My experience on the IndieWeb since I joined micro.blog in January 2023 has been my favorite experience out of all of them. In my first 10 months, I' posted more on Mastodon than I did on Twitter in 15 years. I closed my Twitter account soon after joining the Fedi, not wanting to send any traffic to what is essentially the Nazi Bar of the Internet. I am a happy customer of OMG.LOL, Aside from Micro.blog, I also use Scribbles and BearBlog.

There are bloggers who I've come to be exceptionally fond of. Some are just damn good writers, and all are damn good people. Knowing them makes me a better person.

I have an account on Bluesky, but it lacks the community vibe of Mastodon. It's not really decentralized, even though the technology exists for it to act that way. I have to remind myself that it is a billionaire funded corporation and, like all of its ilk, destined for enshitification.

I do love Reddit, where I've had an account for over 19 years, despite its checkered past. Syndicating AppAddict there has driven lots of traffic to my website. Earlier this year, I volunteered to become a moderator of r/macOS, a subreddit with over 300K members. That's been interesting. I get a chance to help out newbies and to stamp out some toxicity, so what it lacks in actual fun, it makes up in satisfaction.

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Apr 30, 2025 ∞

Glide — A Reading Aid for Those With Concentration and Perception Challenges

Luckily, I don't have a diagnosis of ADHD or dyslexia, although anyone who spends much time online quickly becomes aware that those challenges are common among people of all walks of life, including tech. I'm old, so I lived a good thirty years before widespread Internet access arrived in the 90s. In the olden times, I was a voracious reader of books. Gradually through the years, my ability to concentrate eroded bit by bit until, like most people these days, I rarely even read all the way to the end of news articles unless I really force myself.

The developer from Applorium LTD contacted me and asked me to take a look at Glide, an app made especially for people with ADHD and dyslexia. The app has five different tools to isolate text on a page. You can choose one of six different colors to partially color the part of the screen that you are not reading. You control the opacity, and you decide how much of the page you want to highlight. You can narrow it down to just a thin line that moves down the page as you read of you can hide everything but what you are reading. It's harder to describe than it is to use. I got the hang of it in less than a minute.

Everything can be controlled from a menu bar icon or from user-defined hotkeys. There is a well-written guide to get you started, should you need it. It's not long or difficult to understand.

I've got to say, that using the app to read a detailed article on some complicated Linux related material really helped me concentrate in a way that I didn't expect. It has practically no impact on my computers' performance, so I will have no problem toggling it on whenever I have the need to make the extra effort to retain important info.

The app is currently $5.99 in the App Store.It appears that the developer is responsive to user input, as he has made numerous updates since first releasing the app. Almost every element in the interface, from color, to opacity to line height can be adjusted.

Even if you don't feel that you require this app, please suggest it to anyone in your circle with concentration or perception challenges.

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Apr 29, 2025 ∞

NameQuick Comes in Handy

No matter how consistent you are, your computer is more consistent. One of my hobbies requires me to do frequent file exports, and I've just never come up with a consistent naming scheme to provide me the information I want at a glance. I always have to get info or switch Finder to show details to differentiate between different versions of the files I use. NameQuick, an Ai-driven file naming utility by indy developer Josef Moucachen, is a full-featured app with numerous automation options.

There isn't a free trial, but there is a three-day period to get a refund, so you can still safely see if the app works for you. You have to enter a registration key to use the app. There are currently two licensing options, $19 for one Mac and $29 for three Macs, and priority tech support. Those are one-time payments and not subscriptions.Both of these options require you to use your API keys from Open AI or Gemini, or you can use Ollama, a local LLM. If you don't have an API key, the link to get one is in the app.

NameQuick requires accessibility access and asks that you enable notifications. You have the option to turn on full-disk access if you would rather not bother approving various folders one at the time.

When setting up the app, you can set up watched folders and any new files that are placed in them will be renamed based on their content and any rules you set up. You can specify that only files that begin a certain way get renamed, or that only files with a certain extension. You can have AI extract patterns from your files to include in the name, such as the name of a client or project, the location of a photo shoot or the date.

You can invoke NameQuick by a user definable hot key or by selecting files in the finder and using the menu bar icon.

I tested the app on some random photos I recently used in a blog post. I had it rename some PNG files of screenshotted text quotes, and I threw some complicated CSV files at it. I also had it parse out files names from a folder of PDF invoices. Out of 25 files, I only had to manually rename one that, I felt, wasn't adequate. I used both OpenAI and Gemini in my testing.

I would like to see the developer add integration into the services' menu, since I use that often in my workflows. I am also an automation junkie, so having shortcut support would also be nice. I would like to be able to click on a file or group of files and have "Rename with NameQuick" as an option. The other feature request I have is the ability to include file attributes as variables in the name, such as the file creation date or camera info from EXIF data.

"NameQuick supports a comprehensive range of file types including • Images: PNG, JPG, JPEG, HEIC, WEBP • Documents: PDF, TXT, MD • Spreadsheets: CSV • Video: MP4, MOV, AVI, MPG, MPEG, WMV, 3GP, WEBM, FLV • Audio: MP3, WAV, AAC, FLAC, M4A, OGG, OPUS"

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Apr 28, 2025 ∞

It Might Be Time to Get Rid of Backblaze

Backblaze offers two products to Mac users. The first and oldest is an always on backup service that backs up your entire hard drive to the cloud. In the event of a hard drive crash, theft or disaster, they will mail you a USB drive with the entire contents of your drive so that you can restore to a new device. For incremental restorations, you can recover files online after making a request for what you want. Their other product is online storage similar to Amazon's AWS or Microsoft Azure.

The personal backup plan is $9 a month or $99 a year. I've used the service in the past and was impressed by how easy it was to use. I never had an issue
.

There seem to be numerous problems with the business end of the company that do not bode well for its future, however. Morpheus Research, a business analyst, recently released a pretty scathing report on Backblaze.

Backblaze, in our view, is the archetype of a failed growth business and its latest "restructuring" will do little to resurrect the company's woeful capital market performance or transform its undifferentiated storage offering. Its capital markets story has been kept alive by allegedly inflated cash flow forecasts, hidden internal investigations and accounting tricks, which appear to fuel exit liquidity for insiders.

What that means is the company has been using voodoo accounting tricks to hide its massive losses, and the stock and the company are headed for a big crash that could leave any Mac user who depends on Backblaze in a bad place. I would suggest moving to another service as quickly as possible. Wasabi has plans starting at $6.99 per TB per month that allow you to use your own backup software, like Arq to back up to their cloud servers.

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Apr 26, 2025 ∞

Make dupeGuru Part of Your Maintenance Toolbox

As a non-developer, I appreciate how difficult writing good software must be. There are a few tasks that it seems are nearly impossible to prefect. Finding duplicate images is one of them. Apps that use machine logic to identify images with different file names, different creation dates, file sizes and even image dimensions seem to have an almost impossible task. One of my ongoing projects is curating a lifetime of photos that include scanned paper photos, images from various digital cameras and every smartphone my wife and I have ever owned. The images have been in iCloud, in Google Photos, Amazon photos and one various Macs and backup drives through the years.

I am fine with using multiple tools. I realize after working on this for a while that no single application is going to find all the duplicates.

I found a great many dupes using Gemini by Macpaw.

I also used the freeware duplicate finder, ZeroDuplicates.

I'm now scanning the same directories with another free app and still finding files to remove. The app I am using is a free and open-source offering available on GitHub for macOS, Windows and Linux. It's called dupeGuru and it is pretty powerful in its own right. It has three modes: regular files, music, and images. "dupeGuru is customizable. You can tweak its matching engine to find exactly the kind of duplicates you want to find. The Preference page of the help file lists all the scanning engine settings you can change.

dupeGuru is safe. Its engine has been especially designed with safety in mind. Its reference directory system as well as its grouping system prevent you from deleting files you didn’t mean to delete.

Do whatever you want with your duplicates. Not only can you delete duplicates files dupeGuru finds, but you can also move or copy them elsewhere. There are also multiple ways to filter and sort your results to easily weed out false duplicates (for low threshold scans)."

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Apr 25, 2025 ∞

Apps For Travelers

When I travel, my phone ceases to be an entertainment and diversion device and turns into a real tool. Whether I'm staying in town or on an outdoor adventure, I rely on my phone for directions and information about things to do and places to go. Here are a few of the apps I find helpful.

History Pointer

History Pointer uses your current location to show you locations on the National Historic Register. I was amazed to see how many places in my own hometown were listed. You get maps, Wikipedia excerpts and an augmented reality tour. ($4.99)

Gas Buddy

Last weekend, my gas light came on while I was way out in the country carrying my granddaughter to work at the horse farm that employs her. Luckily, I have Gas Buddy installed. I use it without signing in and only letting it use my location when I'm actively searching for gas.

Organic Maps: Offline Maps

There are some excellent offline map apps that are very expensive. Then there is Organic Maps, an excellent offline map that's free. You just need to plan ahead and download the maps for the area where you plan to travel. It does directions for walkers, cyclists and drivers. It uses Open Street Maps data and was just updated this month.

Rego

Rego bookmarks geographic locations. Whenever we travel, it's easy to find places where we've enjoyed eating in the past. The same with coffee shops and hotels and rental properties. Adding a new location can be done onsite, from an address or pulled from the metadata from a photograph. Bookmarks contain GPS coordinates, street address where applicable, notes, date added and a stock photo or one or more of your own. You can also use custom pin colors and designate any location as a favorite. ($9.99 yr. / $24.99 lifetime)

iExit

If you do any traveling on the Interstate highway system, iExit, helps you find gas, food and bathroom access. I use it on every trip. The information is plentiful and up to date. (IAP $1.99 to remove ads)

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Apr 24, 2025 ∞

Get Plain Text - Adds a Feature the Mac Lacks

People who work with text a lot are familiar with the Mac shortcut to paste the clipboard as plain text - Command + Shift + Option + V. This shortcut works in many native Mac applications like Pages, Mail, and Safari. When you copy content from a source and use this shortcut to paste, it automatically strips away any formatting. While the shortcut is highly versatile, it only works sometimes. Applications like Microsoft Word or third-party software may not support it natively. You can learn application-specific methods of pasting as plain text. Word has a way to do it. So does Google Docs. It is easier, however, to find and use an application that will just take care of this for you.

A good choice is an app that has been round for over a decade, Get Plain Text, available for free (with an IAP to tip the developer if you'd like to.) "It instantly removes everything unneeded: colors, typeface size, style (for example, boldface/italics), hyperlinks, images, etc. In other words, everything that isn’t plain text! Now you can put plain text in your letters and documents using the copy/paste functions, without having to clean it up manually. Get Plain Text will convert any bit of text into plain text, no matter where you copied it from (a website, PDF document or elsewhere). You can activate the feature manually, or check “Automatically remove formatting” to make the app take care of it every time you copy something."

There are other apps that offer similar functionality if you are sketched out by the length of time since this app has been updated (9 years, LOL). The handling of text formatting is long-established, programmatically, so IMHO, there's nothing to fear.

TextSoap - $50, multifunctional, also available through Setapp
PurePaste (free) from Sindre Sorhus - always a good choice. This app can exclude certain apps, preserve links, normalize (quotes, newlines, lists, etc.) and also remove tracking parameters from URLs.
Some clipboard managers offer this feature as an option in their settings, including PasteBot($12) and ClipMenu (free).

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Apr 24, 2025 ∞

Tips for Organizing Photos

digi-resized

One of my ongoing projects is organizing a lifetime of digital photos. My collection includes all the smartphone photos taken by my wife and me, the DSLR photos we've saved and scanned photos of multiple generations. The images have been gathered from iCloud. Google Drive, Amazon Photos, family photo albums and many different backup drives accumulated over time. The process includes the removal of duplicate images, renaming, adjusting date information, performing face recognition , tagging and backing everything up. I realized soon after I started that I also need to segregate images that aren't personal, meaning illustrations for blog articles and the many, many photos I've taken at work that still have some usefulness but aren't appropriate to be included in a family collection.

The ultimate goal of organizing photos is being able to quickly find what I am looking for based on these criteria:

People
Date
Location
Content
Camera type

So, if I want to find a picture of my brother holding a parrot from a beach trip in 2014 that I took with my iPhone, I have multiple ways to narrow down the search. For people willing to let Google, Amazon or Apple have complete access to their photos, this is simplified by letting their powerful servers do a great deal of the hard work. If, like me, you want to have more privacy, you have to do a great deal of the organization manually or find applications that can do the work on your computer without relying on the Internet.

I decided to use a free and open-source image management program that works on Mac and Linux called Digikam.

I am temporarily using another application with local AI, called Peakto, which can find photos according to subject without using the Internet.

Here are a few tips on photo management

The Ultimate Guide to Organizing Your Photos Tips and Tricks - Are you tired of scrolling through endless photos on your phone or computer, trying to find that one specific picture? Organizing your photos can seem like a daunting task, but with the right tips and tricks, it can be a breeze. In this ultimate guide, we’ll cover everything from creating folders to utilizing software programs, so you can finally have all your memories in order.

What are the best practices for photo organization - Organizing your photos is not an easy task. Where do you start? What is the best way to proceed? Often, we wait until we need to find those photos for a birthday album, website or book before we realize that our photos are disorderly and difficult to locate. Rather than wait till the last minute, only to find ourselves frustrated and annoyed, we could be proactive and follow the advice of experienced photographers.

How To Organize Your Photos, From Backing Up To Tagging Life Kit NPR - We take hundreds and thousands of photos these days because we can. Long gone are the days of film rolls limited to 24 shots. Storage is trending cheaper and more infinite. You don't want to miss any of your dog's cute moments or your kids' as they grow up. But when we have so many digital images and we want to cull them down a bit and get organized, where do we even start?

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Apr 22, 2025 ∞

Quick App Launcher - Pro, A Well Thought Alternative

There are various ways to launch apps on a Mac. The most obvious and the one used most by new Mac users is clicking icons in the dock. Apple also has Launchpad another built-in launcher. More advanced users sometimes move on to keyboard-driven methods, starting with Spotlight and advanced launchers like Raycast or Alfred, although some don't want the added system overhead or extra features. Some like the convenience of a menubar launcher like Xmenu or Folder Peek. Lately, there has also been a growing popularity among so-called pie menu launchers like Pieoneer.

Another choice now available from developer Baser Kandehir, is a well-thought-out pop-up palette of applications through which you can sort in various ways. The app is called Quick App Launcher - Pro. You summon the application window with a user-defined keyboard shortcut or by clicking its icon in the menu bar. You can choose one of three window sizes to display your installed list of applications, which, without filtering, are displayed in alphabetical order. As you begin to type, the apps filter based on what you've entered. If it works for you, you can scroll through the list and click on what you are trying to launch. There are several methods of launching from the menu, including entering the numbers 1-9 to correspond with the grid pattern, typing a partial match, and clicking one of the choices or typing until nothing else matches, at which time the app will launch.

If you only want to use Quick App Launcher - Pro on a subset of your apps, that's no problem. In the settings, you can toggle off anything you don't want to launch with the app. Everything is turned on by default. You can also choose whether it launches Safari Web Apps or not. Other options in the settings include choices for the background of the application window, toot tip visibility, and whether numbers appear beside the apps while you search. Currently, the numbers are a little difficult to see, so hopefully that feature will be improved. The tool tip and window background features still need some refinement, as the changes I toggled were not apparent. The app does have dark mode compatibility.

The developer told me he is working on additional features and refinements. I would like to see the following:

The ability to open folders in the finder
The ability to open files
The ability to open URLs
Being able to specify what folders to search for applications, since some people offload big apps to external drives or keep them in non-standard locations.

Quick App Launcher - Pro is $5.00
as a one-time payment. It collects no data and can be used in Family Sharing.

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Apr 21, 2025 ∞

Free App List Number 4

This is the fourth collection of free apps reviewed on AppAddict. Links to the first three collections are posted below. I've downloaded and installed each of these on my Mac. I've added many of these apps to my workflows for getting stuff done.

Previous Collections

Free App List Number 4

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Reducing Your Apple Connections

Other Privacy Related Practices

Related Posts

Reaching Out

Speaking Out

Staying Informed

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Czkawka

Legcord

How To Check Your Applications Folder

History Pointer

Gas Buddy

Organic Maps: Offline Maps

Rego

iExit

Here are a few tips on photo management

Previous Collections

Free App List Number 4