Links
- Activity Watch - a time tracking app that monitors apps used a websites visited
- Next DNS - one of my security tools
- Gmail - After nearly 20 years of using Gmail, I still feel most comfortable using the web interface over any email app
- Yahoo Mail - I use this account just for newsletters and mailing lists
- Google Drive - I use this for different personal documents like tracking the words written during Writing Month and the list of apps I've reviewed as well as automated documents from IFTTT that I keep an eye on
- Inoreader- I love the web interface of my RSS provider more than any app
- Pocket - since the death of Omnivore this is my read it later service
- Raindrop.io - my bookmarking service
- Social.lol - My home Mastodon instance
- 500.social - Another Mastodon instance I belong to
- Onephoto.club - a travel photography Mastodon instance
- Another private Mastodon instance with a few friends
- BlueSky - mostly for POSSE
- Threads - mostly for POSSE
- Facebook - primarily for family use
- LinkedIn - fascinated with how weird it is
- Fedica - a free service to post to multiple social media sites at once and.or schedule future posts
- Make TextEdit open with a new document instead of the file dialog box
- Turn off the verification of disk images. I've probably opened 10,000 disk images in my life and I don't remember one failing to verify. I've wasted hours!
- Make the "Save As" dialog box open in extended form
- BearBlog Discover Feed
- Scribbles Explore Page
- Microblog Discover Feed
- I don't know if Pika has a directory. Can someone let me know if it does?
- Audio
- Music
- Photography
- Fashion
- Repair Hobbies, Vocational Hobbies, Appliances and Home Goods
- Gaming
- Tech
- Crafting
- Sex
- Finance
- Fitness
- Sports
- Cars
Enjoyed it? Please upvote 👇 - A free year of a .lol domain - make your own website, hosted anywhere you like. Mine is Linkage.lol
- Membership in Social.lol - a Mastodon community based on respect for all including the LGBT community, POC and the neurodivergent. That's where I have my account and I've met some of the coolest people I've ever encountered on the Internet, and I've been online for a long time. There is also a Discord server.
- An email address - username@omg.lol, which is cool as hell anyway you look at it. Get it forwarded to an existing email account. It's so easy
- A bio page like mine - Amerpie
- A /now page like this - Amerpie/now
- A status log that can cross post to Mastodon and be embedded in a web page
- A photo gallery for sharing photos and embedding them in your web site
- Would you believe there is more? Go have a look!
This Weeks Bookmarks - The Shipwreck Detective, Python Hunter, Best Inventions of 2024, Digital Literacy for Teens, Apple Stymies Cops, Influential Cookbooks, Five Villages to Visit
The Shipwreck Detective | The New Yorker
The 200 Best Inventions of 2024 TIME
For Teens Online, Conspiracy Theories Are Commonplace. Media Literacy Is Not. | EdSurge News
Apple Quietly Introduced iPhone Reboot Code Which is Locking Out Cops
The 25 Most Influential Cookbooks From the Last 100 Years - The New York Times
Five Uncrowded Rural Vacation Ideas You Should Consider - Bloomberg
What Tabs Do You Keep Open All the Time?
It's hard to believe there was once a time when browsers didn't have tabs. Prior to 2002, opening more than one website at the times required opening multiple instances of a browser. Memory management wasn't as robust as it is now and computers had much less power. These days you often hear of people running hundreds of tabs at the time since browsers can hibernate unused ones easily. I am nowhere near that level, mostly because I don't have the headspace to make use of them all. I normally have two or three windows open at a time depending on whether I'm at home or work. Having 30-45 open tabs is the norm for me.
If you are one of those 500 tabs open at the time people, please, please leave me a comment and try to explain why you roll like that. I';d be fascinated.
These are the ones I almost always have open:
Window 1
Window 2
Social Tab Group
Blogging Tab Group
The rest of the tabs I have open normally will include a news site or two, a few blogs and a few open Google docs. I use an app called HistoryHound that consolidates my history from several browsers into one searchable database when I need to reopen something.
Enjoyed it? Please upvote 👇
Three Free System Utilities
Deeper
In the spirit of old standbys like Onyx and TinkerTool, Deeper provides a GUI to tweak multiple system settings, including a few I haven't seen before, including:
Pester
Similar to the paid app, Due, this alarm/timer app will keep reminding you to do something until you kill it. It's full of thoughtful touches, like showing the amount of time left on a timer in the dock icon. For alerts, you can choose any combination of an onscreen message (which also displays the time), a bouncing Pester Dock icon, a spoken version of your message, or to play an alert. When creating alarms you can use abbreviations like 20m for 20 minutes, 11a for 11:00 A.M. or tomorrow, next Saturday etc. The alarms are reusable, which is convenient if you use Pester to remind you to check laundry or take a break at a certain time of day
Übersicht
Widgets have become more useful as more and more developers have added to them to their apps, but there is still a use for widgets not connected to apps to provide information at a glance for all sorts of system functions and external information. This app lets anyone with developer chops use JavaScript + React's JSX to roll their own widgets. The rest of us can choose from a gallery containing widgets like:
.
Finding an Internet Community
Mastodon
I don't know that their is a universally accepted definition of online communities. I would think that a community is definitely different than a platform. There may be communities within platforms, like my beloved OMG.LOL community that resides on Mastodon at social.lol. I wouldn't say that all Mastodon instances are communities, since the large ones, like Mastodon.social have over 800K members. There are Mastodon instances for all kinds of communities from PKM aficionados to different flavors of LGBT folks. A good tool to get information on the rules and make up of different instances is the iOS app Mastowatch
Blog Platforms
Aside from social media, there are communities of bloggers who use the same platform. You can see some of these at :
Forums
Here is a master list of forums in all kinds of categories, including:
This Week's Bookmarks - McDonaldland, Connecting Social Networks, Baseball Bat Bros, Otters, Polenta Recipe, TV Show Suggestions, When Sober Influencers Relapse
Shady Things About The McDonaldland Characters
Bridges & The Last Network Effect - Connecting Social Networks
Influencer Brothers Are Selling More Baseball Bats Than Pro Athletes - Bloomberg
Shetland man’s bond with otter becomes subject of award-winning film | Scotland | The Guardian
Italian sausage and peppers with creamy polenta | Sunbasket
Somebody Somewhere | Official Website for the HBO Series | HBO.com
This Weeks Bookmarks - Latest Apple Updates Explained, Mac History, Willie Nelson's New Album, GTD by Being Nice, Best New Books, Rare Horses
Apple Intelligence Arrives in macOS 15.1 Sequoia, iOS 18.1, and iPadOS 18.1 - TidBITS - This is what you get if you upgrade your iPhone or Mac to the latest version.
A brief history of Mac firmware – The Eclectic Light Company
All About Willie Nelson’s 153rd Album, ‘Last Leaf on the Tree’
Getting Stuff Done By Not Being Mean to Yourself - The Open Heart Project
How Two of the Rarest Horses on Earth Got Lost - The New York Times
I have updated my /now page - What I’m reading and watching, plus links to this week’s blog posts, the week’s best purchase, and the links I added to my personal bookmarks.
This Week's Bookmarks - Best Horror Movies, Aerial Photos of Junkyards, Digital Decluttering, Chili Recipe, Food Trends for 2025, Fly with One Bag, Messages for Life
The 100 Best Horror Movies of All Time: Critics' Pick
Aerial photos of scrapyards and arranged the junked cars, planes, trains, and other objects_
Digital decluttering – alexwlchan
White Chicken Chili (BEST EVER!) - Cooking Classy
Whole Foods predicts the major food and beverage trends of 2025 | Food Dive
How to Fly With Only a Personal Item—Plus Our 3 Favorite Small Bags (2024) | WIRED
Messages for Life are short, inspirational emails that have been brightening my days. They arrive only on weekday mornings and always contain a positive message, like reminders to slow down, relax, celebrate yourself, and play. These messages convey a lot of wisdom in a very natural and relatable way. They feel like love letters from the Universe.
Online Communities of the Past and Present
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, 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 27 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 with about their experiences. I live near a giant army base, so all the vets I know have comrades-in-arms everywhere they go, but 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 other than news, so I didn't find much social about it. My Facebook experience is 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. Today, it's the same toxic hellscape for me as it is for everyone else. I mostly stay there to see pictures of my grandkids. 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.
My experience on the IndieWeb since I joined micro.blog in January has been my favorite experience out of all of them. In 10 months, I've posted more on Mastodon than I did on Twitter in 15 years. I have three accounts on different servers. I closed my Twitter account too, not wanting to send any traffic to what is essentially the Nazi Bar of the Internet. I am a happy customer of OMG.LOL, 500.social, and Onephoto.club. Aside from Micro.blog, I also use Scribbles and BearBlog.
I have accounts on Instagram, Threads, BlueSky, Pinterest, Nostr, Pixelfed, Farcaster, and Tumblr, but I use them mostly to syndicate what I write on my blogs.
I do love Reddit, where I've had an account for nearly 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.
Enjoyed it? Please upvote 👇
Make Your Internet Better Today
Make Your Internet Better Today - A free service can block ads and malware before it ever gets to your computer. Start using it today. I did. - linkage.lol/make-your…
This Week's Bookmarks - Grocery Prices Worldwide, Wildlife Photo Winners, The Truth about Media Lies, Stranger's Project, Content Creators vs. Journalists, 2004 the 1st Year of the Future, Great Talk from XOXO Conference
OMG.LOL is the Best Thing on the Internet
OMG.LOL is the Best Thing on the Internet - The community at OMG.LOL along with the services offered are the best thing on the Internet. - linkage.lol/omglol-is…
OMG.LOL is the Best Thing on the Internet
When I first started investigating blogging, I was heavily influenced by a British fellow by the name of Robb Knight. One of the many things he recommended for folks looking to involve themselves in this thing called the IndyWeb was a $20 a year membership in the web community found at OMG.LOL Describing what you get for that is kind of hard, but I'll give it a shot:
I have four blogs on three different platforms and I use elements of OMG.LOL in conjunction with all of them. If all this sounds cool to you but you simply can't afford it, message Adam, the guy who runs the place, and you might qualify for a scholarship sponsored By a caring member of the community. If you can afford it, great, sign up using my referral link, and I promise to use the benefits to help someone come onboard.
Enjoyed it? Please upvote 👇
📝 Doing the Best We Can - For once, pop psychology gets it right. We are doing the best we can do with what we have to work with. - louplummer.lol/doing-the…
Bump Up Your Meme Game
Bump Up Your Meme Game - A good meme says a lot. Here are some famous ones to study and a website to make your own. - linkage.lol/bump-up-y…
📝 Blogs Are Not Commodities - The blogs I like are building blocks of something beautiful and heartfelt, not optimized, market driven revenue generators - louplummer.lol/blogs-are…
Cardinals at the Window - A Benefit Album for Western North Carolina
Cardinals at the Window - A Benefit Album for Western North Carolina - An album featuring 136 artists costing only $10 is available with the proceeds benefitting hurricane victims in Western, NC. - linkage.lol/cardinals…
📝 Quit Being Paranoid - Being cautious is a survival skill. Being paranoid is just an annoying personality trait. - louplummer.lol/quit-bein…
Can I Trust This App
Can I Trust This App - Learning how to determine whether software is trustworthy is a 21st century survival skill. - linkage.lol/can-i-tru…
📝 What Is Your Love Language? - In what way do you like to be shown you are loved? - louplummer.lol/what-is-y…
