Writing
- 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 👇 - 10 Effective Tactics to Defeat Internet Trolls
- How to Handle Toxic People on Social Media: 13 Steps
- How to Stop Getting Into Pointless Arguments Online | WIRED
- 10 Steps to Building Your Personal Brand on Social Media | Digital Marketing Institute
- 12 Easy Steps To Build Your Personal Brand On Social Media
- 5 tricks for building your personal brand via social media | Bryant News
- Treat yourself with kindness
- Prioritize physical activity
- Spend time in nature
- Get plenty of sleep
- Take a break
- Enjoy nutrient-rich foods
- Engage in mindfulness practice
- Express your feelings
- Learn What you need
- Seek out new experiences
AMA - What is Your Favorite Quality in a Person?
A certain type of person cares very much about their constitutional right to own a gun so that they can defend themselves and their family from any perceived threat. They obviously believe in the need for a violent solution to a potential problem and are willing to take on all the added danger that owning a gun brings to their lives. Hey, after all, who wouldn't do whatever it takes for their family, right? Usually, that very same person is also adamantly against providing any type of accommodation to immigrants from countries where street violence is endemic, making the U.S. the only feasible sanctuary. It might cost them an extra fifty cents a day on their federal income taxes after all. Not only that, the more brown people there are in the country, the greater the chance that they might have kids, earn the right to vote, or speak Spanish in the presence of "real" Americans.
The same person who feels good because they adopt a kid from the Angel Tree at work every Christmas or because their church has a soup kitchen once a week has no problem supporting a political philosophy that would curtail food programs for the poor and eliminate Meals on Wheels for the elderly. They have a tremendous sense of entitlement for everything they feel they have earned and no sympathy for people who aren't in the same circumstances. Lots of people in the military lean conservative (not all though!). If you make a tour of barracks day rooms, you're likely to find lots of TVs turned to Fox News. Despite that, you will not find a more duplicitous, malingering, dishonest, getting free stuff from the government group of people than a service member at their discharge physical. There are people who specialize in helping them come up with every conceivable reason to get VA money for the rest of their lives for dubious medical reasons.
On the flip side, there are those who put themselves on the line for people whose circumstances they'll never share. Every straight high school kid who joins their school's Gay/Straight Alliance voluntarily risks bullying by homophobes. If you look at the roles of civil rights martyrs, you'll see the names of people like Mickey Schwerner and Andrew Goodman who lost their lives helping people register to vote. Plenty of white people who enjoy all the privileges that their skin color gives them are adamantly opposed to white supremacy in all its insidious guises. Fannie Lou Hamer famously said, "Nobody is free until everybody is free," and lots of people take that to heart and make it their creed.
I'm not sure what makes a person lack compassion and empathy. Whatever it is, it's unattractive and malignant. When you don't care that poverty, hunger, and untreated diseases exist as long as you've got yours, well, you have lots of company. It seems that the price of gas and eggs is more important to a whole lot of people than anything that might help the less fortunate. And, that's just it. It's more often fortune that dictates one's circumstances than it is blood, sweat, and tears. It's fortune that picks your birthplace and your skin color. It's fortune that lets your job continue to provide for you when others lose theirs. It's fortune that your neighbor's house burned down and not yours. It's fortune that you don't have a crippling illness.
I don't like associating with people who lack compassion. I don't understand their selfishness. I don't want to see them gloat and blame poverty on the poor, blame illnesses on the sick, and claim that any attempt to address the patriarchy, racism, or homophobia is "identity politics." My people are the people who care. My people are the people who make a difference. My people are the ones who make whatever claim America has to greatness a reality.
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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.
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Blogging as an Art Form
Ask me anything - Do you consider blogging to be an art form?
One thing I absolutely despise is elitism is any form, followed closely by gatekeeping. Sure, people have varying degrees of talent, but I prefer an open society that encourages folks to try their hand at things. It is much better than one that acts like the plebes should stay on the sidelines while the real pros do their thing. That's why I don't find it the least bit pretentious when anyone describes themselves as an artist, regardless of the form they choose. I smile when I see anyone present a drawing or a poem or a landscape photo to the world. It's an attempt to bring something conjured in one's creative spirit to life, shared with the hope that it will spark a feeling in others.
When I look at the effort it takes to write regularly, I know that it takes a muse of some sort. It takes real effort to come up with an idea, flesh it out, polish it and present it. I give bonus points when someone's post contains a hint of vulnerability, a confession that not everything in life is easy. "Hey world! I have a wart! Want to see it?" Laugh if you want to, that's a thing an artist would say. Let's face it, it's hard to come up with something original in a world filled with people who can say whatever they want, whenever they want. Just the act of trying conveys a certain sense of bravery.
Emily Dickinson never saw one of her poems published, yet she continued to write breathtaking poetry for the entirety of her life. Stieg Larsson wrote the entirety of the Millennium Trilogy (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) and died before it was published and became an international bestseller. There are many other examples like them. Artists write because they have something to say, something they have to get out. It's not about being recognized or lauded as much as it is about creating because doing so is a representation of our own humanity. When Og, the cave man, was drawing on the walls of his home all those years ago, he had no concept of received admiration. HE just had something inside himself that he wanted to get out.
Most of us have bloggers we admire. I told Keenan last week that I wasn't jealous. I just wished I could write the way they write. They responded kindly, saying, "I like the way that you write like you." What an affirmation. To me it means I've practiced my own art form enough to have developed my own style, something recognizable. That's the thing about almost any skill. When you practice, you get better. Malcolm Gladwell famously wrote about the 10,000-hour rule, where he proposed that The Beatles, Bill Gates and other successful people reached the heights they did because of how much they practiced, how much experience they had. That's why I write every day without fail. This is my art form and I want to get better at it.
That's why I don't give any credence to the criticism of blogging challenges. Writing every day isn't a gimmick. It isn't forced, necessarily. It is learned behavior and discipline. Writing is just taking what your thinking and putting the words down on record. If you think every day, and you do, then you can write every day. No one said making art was supposed to be easy. Picasso probably had days when he asked himself, "What the hell am I going to draw today?"
To all my fellow artists, do your thing! Do it often. Do it for yourself, and to hell with the rest of the world. Internal validation is the best validation.
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Twitter - What Was Taken from Us
When Elon Musk purchased Twitter and his toxic nature became clearly evident, lot's of people left the platform, with the socially aware tech crowd leading the way. After last week's election and Musk's role in it, there is another mass migration under way. Part of me thinks "better late than never" and part of me thinks"you should have been gone already." To e fair, I wasn't a big Twitter user. I didn't delete my account immediately because I rarely used it. It was never all that important to me and in my first six months on Mastodon, I posted more than I did in 15 years on Twitter. Still, I was very much aware of it and made use of it during times of fast breaking news. I preferred to monitor things like presidential debates through Tweets rather than subject myself to watching them on TV. When January 6th in all it's ugliness was happening, I followed it on Twitter.
Anyone with an interest in the Internet or the social history of the 21st century might get a whiff of nostalgia looking over the history of the platform. The idea for it was sketched out in a single day at its predecessor company, Odeo. A picture exists of Jack Dorsey's legal pad with a rudimentary sketch of the information flow that was imagined. We know who the first person to coin the term "tweet" was and we know who and when introduced hashtags, a carry over from IRC to Twitter.
To those who spent much time on the platform, nothing has really replaced it. I love Mastodon and plan to use it for the foreseeable future but it isn't the same. Neither in Bluesky or Threads or anything else. I don't know if the fractured outlooks people have on the world will ever again allow something like it to flourish.
Take a trip down memory lane. Look at what we had. Look at what happened to it.
History of Twitter - Wikipedia
A brief history of Twitter From its founding in 2006 to Musk takeover
What We Lost When Twitter Became X The New Yorker
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AMA - Morning Person or Evening Person?
Today's Ask me anything is - Are you a morning person or an evening person?
I love to sleep as much as anyone I know. My ability to lapse into unconsciousness is my superpower and one for which I enjoy a certain bit of notoriety among my friends and family. But, when I am done with a nap or a night's sleep, I'm not one to lie there and try to drift back off. When I am done, I am done. I'm ready to get up and do something else. I love to get up most mornings. The thought of that first cup of coffee and the chance to catch up on eight hours of missed news is too tempting to pass up.
I am nearly robotic upon waking, which is normally around 4:30 AM. We have one of those wonderful Nespresso one-cup coffee makers that brew great coffee quickly. I stand by it, bleary-eyed but patient as I wait for it to dispense its life-giving elixir. I make my way to my laptop, disconnect my backup drive, and begin the morning IT routine. First, I start my daily journal in Obsidian, one I will transfer to Day One at the end of the day. Then I add my daily app review, written the day before, to Reddit at r/MacApps. I don't even link back to my blog anymore. The moderators there added AppAddict to the sidebar, and that drives plenty of traffic my way. Then I check Mastodon and Micro.blog to see if I got any messages overnight. My friends in Europe are typically active already, so I see what they're up to.
Wonder Woman gets up at the same time I do. We spend the first 30 minutes or so together before she leaves for her morning run. Sometimes she's only gone for 30 minutes or so, but it is not unheard of for her to run a half-marathon before work, particularly if she's working from home and has a bit more time. Prior to having my knees replaced, I used to go for a walk in the mornings, a habit I need to rekindle. I loved being out on the dark streets listening to music or a podcast.
One of the other things I enjoy looking at in the morning is retrospectives from the day's history. I can do this in the Photos app, in Day One, and on Facebook, where my account is now 16 years old. It's fun to be reminded of past getaways, and to see pictures of my grandkids when they were younger. What's not so fun is to see what outrage Donald Trump has committed on this date in history. As an example, today I see posts relating to his quid pro quo attempt with Ukraine when he withheld military aid in an attempt to get them to investigate the Bidens. That got him impeached the first time.
By the time Wonder Woman has returned from her run, I am usually into the part of my morning that many people find funny. It's my pre-work nap. Despite just having slept for eight hours and having consumed coffee, I normally try to doze off for another few minutes before showering and getting dressed for work. For most of my working life, I had to leave a great deal earlier than I do now. I used to have to be on the job at 7:30 AM. My office was 30 miles away. These days, I don't have to be at work until 8:00 AM to an office that is less than 10 miles from home.
As much as I enjoy my job, a low-pressure tech support role at the same university where Wonder Woman is a big wheel, I don't always relish the start of the day. I routinely remark with something grouchy and profane when she summons me to get in the car for my chauffeured ride across town to our lovely campus. By the time we get moving though, I cheer up. My wife is my favorite person. I enjoy the brief interlude to chat about the day ahead, to crack jokes, and make plans for the evening. Everyone should be so lucky
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Five of My Favorite TV Series
Broadchurch
This British crime drama, filmed in scenic Dorset, tells the tale of a child murder and its aftermath. Starring Olivia Coleman, David Tenant and Jody Whitaker. Any of the three of them makes any show worth watching but the fireworks and raw emotion of Broadchurch are something special. Make sure you watch the British version of the show. For some weird reason, an America version was filmed and it is a poor comparison.
The Wire
Regarded by many as the best television show ever made, the five season's of The Wire loosely follow the Baltimore Police Department and drug gang while also spending time with longshoremen, politicians, newspaper reporters and school teachers. All of these intermix in an unflinching look at the intertwined cultures of a modern American city. The acting, the screen writing and the directing are all excellent. Some of the characters from the show live in my imagination years after watching the show for the last time.
The Sopranos
A classic by any measure, The Sopranos removed the glamor and mysticism from the mob created by The Godfather and revealed the extremely flawed human beings who make it up. Like The Wire, the screenwriting and acting is top notch and the characters unforgettable. It's almost impossible to watch one episode at the time if you have more available.
The Fall
Starring two of the world's beautiful people, Jamie Dornan and Gillian Anderson, this story of a Northern Irish serial killer and the cop, imported from the Metropolitan Police to track him down is as suspenseful as anything I have ever watched. A scene that takes place in Belfast hospital emergency room after a shooting is a revealing testament to the combat medical skills doctos in that part of the world learned during The Troubles.
Lonesome Dove
I regard Lonesome Dove as the best American novel ever written and this television adaption starring Tommy Lee Jones and Robert Duvall among many others may be the best network show since Roots. It tells the story of an epic cattle drive out of Texas and has everything you'd ever want in a western. It's a must watch
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A Man With a Cold
I don't actually have a cold, but if I'd titled this post "A Sick Man" then everyone would have thought it was about Trump and avoided it because we are all so tired of him and the attention he gets. To further obfuscate things, I don't believe I am actually sick either, just feeling the after affects of a couple of vaccinations. This has happened to me as punishment for telling Wonder Woman that I've never felt bad after getting a shot, possibly insinuating that people who do are experiencing a psychosomatic reaction. She said her arm was a little stiff at the injection site, prompting me to wave mine around, windmill fashion to show that I was just fine.
I generally escape the variety of communicable diseases that seem to plague some folks. Thirt years of working in the close confines of first a prison and then public schools seems to have given me the immune system of a plague doctor. While others complain of reoccurring sinus infections, bronchitis or other upper respiratory illnesses, I just get the sniffles once in a while or a mildly stopped up nose, both of which are adequately handled by OTC medications.
When I do come down with something, I usually have company. Wonder Woman and I have lived through two bouts with Covid, a horrible flu and joint food poisoning from a sketchy Mexican restaurant. We lie in bed together so that our kids won't have to wonder around the house to find our bodies if we end up dying. The bad case of flu happened when one of our daughters was visiting at Christmas. Her family drove all the way hear from central Florida and barely got to see us since we rarely ventured out of our bed room as we did not want to infect them.
I am not one of those men the Internet likes to mock when I don't feel well. I am not prone to moaning or any sort of drama. What I want more than anything is to be left alone. Headaches and bodily aches and pains tend to make me a little cross and ill natured. I usually don't feel up to any sort of prolonged conversation. I want nothing more than to be left alone so I can sleep. Sleep is the great cure all. The more I am unconscious, the less awareness I have of my plight and the better I like it.
Being sick on a weekend is the worst. You don't even get an unexpected break from work since you are already off. Thankfully, my white collar job offers PTO so if there is a need to stay home, my pay won't get docked. I remember the jobs I had early in my life when no work meant no pay and often those types of jobs also wanted a doctor's note, forcing you to actually pay to take a sick day. Isn't American great?
If I were one of those science denying Republicans, or RFK, Jr., I would be fine since that type no longer believes in the proven efficacy of vaccinations for some reason. That's fine. The fewer of those people in the world, the better off we all are. I know that wasn't a nice thing to sy, but you'll have to excuse me. I don't feel well.
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This is Where I Find All That Great Software
Rarely does a day go by without me downloading, installing and testing a new app or two. I'm currently dealing with an installed app count of 559. Part of the reason I have so many is because I'm always on the lookout for new apps to review over at AppAddict, my software blog with over 225 reviews already published an a new one being added every day. I have several sources for finding software and today I'm sharing them.
r/MacApps
This is one of the friendlier communities on Reddit. It's a place where software fans and devs both post. It's well moderated and spam free.
Tool Finder
Get over 450+ reviews, insights, videos, tutorials, and ratings for productivity apps for work & life.
Open Source Software
This website currently lists 642 free and open-source titles from a variety of categories. It's updated daily and makes it easy for devs to submit their titles for inclusion in the collection.
MacUpdate
This huge repository lets you narrow your search by several criteria. The link above is just for free software and it returned 5650 titles! The titles are in order by date last upated/released.
thriftmac
Thriftmac is a collection currently numbering 413 totally free Mac apps.Each app is assigned a category and accompanied by a short description.
MacMenuBar
I linked to the recently added page but it's easy to get to the entire collection and to filter for just free apps or just open-source.
Mr. Free Tools
Mr. Free Tools is a directory site with an advanced search engine that helps you find the best free software, apps, and tools from around the web. Those free solutions can help you with work, projects, studies, or hobbies.
Awesome Mac
Awesome Mac is a GitHub page with links to a huge variety of Mac software. The free and open-source titles are clearly marked.
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AMA - “What’s the best music-related experience of your life so far?”
Today's question comes from hiro It has been answered by gabz, Tyler and Helen.
What is the best musical experience of your life?
Rather than describe a concert to you—and I have seen some wonderful acts—I'd rather talk about a quest I went on. This is a story about a particular time on the Internet when ethics were a little more cloudy than they are today, or at least that's my story and I'll be sticking to it. Somewhere around the turn of the century, two things collided in my world. I became one of the first people in my city to get broadband internet by virtue of having signed up on the waiting list years ahead of time when it was first opened up. The other circumstance was the heyday of Napster, a program that let you share your music collection for the rights to access the collections of other people, which you could then download at will.
Napster debuted in June of 1999, and by July of 2001, it was shut down by court order. This was a time before purchasing and downloading music online was widely available. The iPod and the iTunes store were still several years away. The way most people obtained music was by driving their car to the store and purchasing CDs. If you wanted to listen to music on your computer, you either slipped the CD into the drive or you went through a process known as ripping, where each song was converted into a format known as MP3. Hard drives were much smaller at the time, so you really had to keep an eye on disk space. I used a Windows computer I'd built myself in a giant tower that was almost three feet tall. It had room for three hard drives and a CD drive, all of which I used.
Rolling Stone Magazine, then and now, was fond of creating lists of songs and albums for music fans to argue about. I found an article online with their version of the top 500 albums of all time. I copied the entire list into an Excel spreadsheet and added two columns: HAVE and NEED. I went through the list and checked off the albums I already owned. As a classic rock fan, most of the highly regarded albums by The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, and the like were ones I already owned. I didn't have any hip-hop, and my soul and blues albums were pretty sparse. It was definitely a white boy's music collection.
Each night after supper, I would sit down at my computer and search first for entire albums and, in some cases, for individual songs to piece other albums together. I relied on a website that still exists to this day, Allmusic.com, to find the track lists for the albums since the Rolling Stone article I used didn't have that information. I would listen to the tracks to make sure I wasn't getting a live version if I was trying to build a studio album and vice versa. Some songs were shared at a low quality, forcing me to download second and third copies to find ones that matched what I already had.
I was in my mid-30s while I was doing this, probably at the north end of the Napster-using demographic. The typical user was a college student with a computer connected to their school's broadband connection. Most people at home were just starting to give up their screeching dial-up for cable modems and DSL lines at the time. Because Napster skewed towards younger people, finding older albums—particularly ones that were out of print—was difficult. Two I remember searching for over a months-long period were Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music by Ray Charles, released in 1962, and Phil Spector, Back to Mono (1958 - 1969). The latter album, in fact, was the last one I needed to complete the entire 500 album collection. I remember the night I finally completed it.
As a result of searching for and curating the editions of so many songs, I was exposed for the first time to classic 90s hip-hop in the form of Dr. Dre's The Chronic and N.W.A.'s Straight Outta Compton. I got my first Frank Sinatra album, In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning. Hank Williams, Willie Nelson, and Johnny Cash all had albums on the list, and so I found out that I enjoyed their brand of country music. I found blues artists like Little Walter and Bobby Bland.
For a moment in time, I had a veritable music museum available to me. I could discuss and play just about anything a critic could name as being influential to the modern music scene. Over twenty years have passed now. When Apple released their top 100 albums of all time last year, I was deeply, deeply offended when I realized I didn't have them all. In fact, I didn't have anything by Frank Ocean or Kendrick Lamar, two of the artists with top 10 albums. Not only that, I couldn't even name any of their songs. That's on me. After Napster was shut down, I once again started purchasing music, both CDs and through downloads. My musical taste shifted from classic rock to alt-country, which is what I like to listen to today. For a period of time, though, I was on top of the musical world.
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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:
I 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.
AMA - What Is It You Long For
This question was asked by Curious Magpie. It has also been answered by Anniegreens. Do you experience Hiraeth (a deep longing for something)? What is it you long for - a time, a place, a feeling?
The greatest adventure of my life was my honeymoon, a blissful 156 day long-distance hiking journey that saw my new wife and I walk across 14 states along the Appalachian Trail. I think and talk about it often and probably always will. Even the best of regular life has its monotony. You sleep in the same place. You see the same things when you look out the window. The clerk you see at the supermarket rang you out last week and when you return next week, they will ring you out again. It's very possible to be extremely happy amidst all that sameness, bit it can hardly be described as an adventure. It's more like contentment.
During the time we spent walking through the mountains, every day brought things we'd never seen before. Every night we slept in a new place, whether it was a tent site, a shelter or a boisterous hostel in some trail town. Long distance hikers have only three things that are constants: the unending evaluation of their energy levels, the location of drinkable water and the decision on where to spend the night. Everything else is just the relentless magnetic pull down the trail, putting one foot in front of the other, moving toward the terminus of their journey, no matter how far distant.
The pure physicality of the journey makes for many, may opportunities for small victories. Every single time you make it to the top of a mountain, it means that you've won. Every time you wade across a river, your unbeaten streak continues. When you cross into another state, it is both a finish line and a starting line in a slow race to the next border. It doesn't take long during a through hike to achieve peak fitness. Any excess body weight melts off. There is real magic in knowing that you have earned the ability to do almost anything you desire with your physical skills. When you see day hikers along the trail, huffing and puffing as they labor towards a peak and you saunter pass them with your fully loaded backpack, knowing they are climbing but one mountain that day while you are climbing a half dozen, you can't help but appreciate the hiking machine you have become.
One of the true joys during that journey was the chance to appreciate things we take for granted during our normal lives. When you spend most nights in a sleeping bag that is growing increasingly dirty as you lay on the ground inside your tent or the hard wooden boards of a shelter floor, the chance to get a rare hotel room as you hike through a trail town is magical. Sliding between clean sheets on a soft mattress with air conditioning is to experience true luxury. Imagine living off cold poptarts, oatmeal made with creek water, unrefrigerated cheese and the other foods that make up a backpacking diet. Then, while you're making your way through the incredibly rough wilderness of southern Maine, you come to a town like Rangely and you sit down for a restaurant meal of fresh lobster. You know in your heart of hearts that nothing will ever taste that good again.
As adults without trust funds, we have worked without much of a pause since our teens. We were privileged to take a six month break from that grind because my wife sold her partnership in her business. Just the freedom to be able to live a life that isn't tied to an obligation to report to X location to do X task for eight hours a day, five days a week was a once in a lifetime opportunity. When you can live your life without having to be responsible to anyone but your partner, the days have a different flavor. People often remark that if the two of us survived teh stress of walking 2,000 miles together, then we must be destined to be together. They do not know how much truth there is to that observation. We became so in tune with each other, do defendant on each other for mental, physical and emotional support. It has lasted through the entirety of our marriage.
So there it is. That's what I long for. All of those feelings and experiences during that period of my life are precious memories. I will always have them.
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A Post Election Survival Kit, Tools to Use
I don't know about you, but I'm tired of reading mortems on why the Democrats did so poorly on November 5th. The very same people who told us the race was too close to call or that Harris/Walz were going to win nor purport to know why Trump did so well, and I'm just not putting much stake on that particular hot take. I just want to know what do and where to go now. I've assembled a small collection of links that I think are informative and motivating in the aftermath of the Republican win.
Share Me: The New Media List - Alternatives to WaPo and NYT - Oliver Willis put together a list of news sources that won't try to normalize Trump or make excuses for him. These news outlets won't tell you that everything is normal and they won't call white supremacy and fascism by more acceptable names.
Election Grief Is Real. Here’s How to Cope | Scientific American - If you weren't effected on an emotional lever by the election then WTF is wrong with you? We lost a great deal with Trump's second ascendance. The next four years are going to be some of the most challenging in American history and I for one, wasn't looking forward to a challenge. I'm getting old, and I wanted the autumn of my life to be a hopeful period. Knowing that it isn't makes me sad and this article has practical advice to that end.
AI Resume Screening Tools Biased Against Black Male Names, Study Finds - This is only tangentially related to the election. It is a reminder that all those tech CEOs who emailed their congratulations to Trump don't give AF about POC any more than George Bush did after Katrina.
OpenHistoricalMap - In case you wanted to see how the world changes over time, this is for you. It's never been a static body politic, and it never will be. We can hope against hope Ukraine still exists after Trump pulls the plug on American aid and starts covertly supporting Vladimir Putin.
Non-profit newsrooms that speak truth to power In case you need a different type of media than what is listed in the first link above, here are even more sites to get a clear understanding of issues that will only grow more important as time passes. Some of these organizations specialize in core issues of the progressive movement, like climate change and criminal justice
Why Democrats won't build their own Joe Rogan - More Americans will watch the Super Bowl in January than voted this month. The oligarchs have manufactured a society that values entertainment over information. Joe Rogan, a steroid abusing man whose claim to fame was making reality TV contestants eat out of garbage dumpsters is now one of the most influential people in America. Unfortunately that model doesn't translate to the left where our most valuable orator is a man that was editor of the Harvard Law Review and President of the United States.
Trump Has Won, but Democracy Is Not Over - The Atlantic This is not the end, beautiful friend, this is not the end. Yes, there is a different vibe now than there was eight years ago when Trump beat Clinton. People are less outwardly hostile and may seem resigned, but there is a raging storm beneath the surface. We have been beaten, but we have not been defeated,
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AMA - What Historical Figure Would Your Bring Back?
Denis asked - Here is a wand. With it, you can bring back anyone from the dead from any era, at any point of their life and for only one day. Who do you resuscitate for 24h, at what point in their life and to do what?
This is the kind of question meant for me. I love history and I am prone to spending a great deal of time pondering things that will never happen. I have contemplated what I would do with my lottery winnings for hours despite the fact that I don't buy lottery tickets. I'm bad at math but I'm not that bad at math.
After last Tuesday, I'm tempted to say that I'd be willing to bring back Lee Harvey Oswald. I'd get him a good military grade rifle, not that Italian made mail order thing he used last time. Of course, Lee loved Russia, having lived there. His wife was also Russian so it might be hard to persuade him to do the job so he might not be the best candidate for this experiment.
With what America is facing right now, I also think that bringing back Dr. King for a 24-hour marathon strategy session would be a good idea. Aside from the power he conveyed with his amazing oratorical powers, he was also an organizing genius and man who could inspire others to do hard things. He successfully led the Montgomery bus boycott and the March into Selma. He advised the people of Birmingham how to deal with Bull Connor. I think he could quickly analyze the current political situation and help the resistance, such as it is, on a plan to mitigate the damage that's going to happen over the next four years. I'm thinking though, that it might be too heart breaking to only have him for a single day. I don't know if we could stand that loss again.
As long as Paul McCartney is still alive, I'd be tempted to bring back John Lennon for a day, give him a guitar, a pen and some paper and lock the two of them in the studio at Abbey Road with a supply of strong tea and some good weed. There have been many good song writers in the rock era but no one even comes close to those two guys. I don't know if they could put together an entire album in 24 hours. I'd settle for just a couple more songs to listen to for the rest of my life.
Since this exercise has been pretty male-centric, I think I'd better also think of a few women to consider. I'd definitely want to talk to someone smarter than me, someone creative with a unique way of explaining the world. Three candidates that quickly come to mind are Dorothy Parker, Virginia Wolfe and Sylvia Plath. It would be really cool if Denis would let me cheat and bring the three of them back simultaneously. Can you imagine being in the room to hear that conversation? I wouldn't say a word. They could all be pretty scathing and I don't think I'd want to risk becoming famous for being humiliated by a memorable one-liner.
Forced to choose someone outside of the 20th century, I think I'd got with Henry David Thoreau. I love smart and eloquent people. He qualifies. I think I'd come up with a series of questions for him to pontificate upon. We'd go for a walk in the park that now exists to preserve the site of his famous cabin. I would tape everything he says and have it transcribed. It would make a best selling book and I'd happily live off the profits for the rest of my life.
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Why Don't You Try a New Browser Today?
The browsers people use to access the Internet have varied widely over the past 30 years. The scumbag billionaire. Marc Andreessen, was once a brilliant software engineer who led the way in introducing Netscape (previously known as Mosaic) to the world. The market share it garnered was north of 95%/ The next major shift was to Internet Explorer, the browser installed on all Windows machines from Windows 95 through Windows 8. It swallowed the Internet and eventually had as large a market share as Netscape ever did. Then, here came Google. It's Chrome browser is nearly ubiquitous today, despite it's many faults, primarily privacy concerns and battery drain on mobile. Many Mac users stay with the default browser on their computers, Safari, which is also native in the iPhone.
Chances are, you are probably a Chrome or Safari user unless you're a techie, in which case chances are you may be a Firefox user since it has better privacy than it's main competitions. If you have been using the same browser for a long time, I'm suggesting that you try an alternative for a few days, just in case you're missing something.
Every major browser has import options that let you bring in your bookmarks, passwords and history if you are currently using one of the major players.
Here are a few choices:
Microsoft Edge - this has been my workhorse on Windows, Mac and iOS over the past two years. It is a stable browser with a huge variety of features, most of which are easy to turn off are hid if you don't want to see them. It's based on Chrome, so the extensions available are plentiful. You can read more about why I like it here,
Firefox - this descendant of Netscape is the one of the most private of browsers and it still allows you to use the most powerful ad-blocking extensions (see uBlock Origin) which are being phased out in Chrome based browsers. For an open source alternative using the Firefox engine, try the Zen Browser
Brave - this is another browser for the security minded with built-in blocking of ads, trackers and third party cookies, which also makes it pretty fast. It has a built in version of Tor for browsing that is untraceable for all practical purposes. Based on Chrome, it has a wide variety of available extensions.
Orion - a browser developed by the private search engine, Kagi, is also privacy focused, promising zero telemetry and the ability to use either Chrome or Firefox extensions. It claims to block more ads by default than any other browser. It is 100% funded by Kagi users.
Vivaldi - this browser's claim to fame is extensive customization. You can place your browser tabs just about anywhere you want, turn on ad blocking with downloading an extension, and enjoy end-to-end encryption of your synced data. I am currently giving it a try.
I am not going to link to Arc, the favorite of many people over the past couple of years because its parent company recently announced they don't intend to update it any further and weren't all that clear on where they are headed going forward. IMHO, it's a gamble to use Arc with it's steep learning curve and radical differences to the browser paradigm right now.
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Time Machine Diaries
Ask Me Anything - Where (and when) would you go if time travel were real?
Should time travel ever be invented, I think those of us living in 2024 are going to be pretty safe from being visited from the future. No one is ever going to look at this era and think, "Man, I'll bet that was a fun time to be alive!" Nope, they're going to look at this version of America and want to stay as far away from it as possible. In fact, other than the night that Obama won the election in 2008, most of the truly memorable moments of this entire century to date have been horrible, starting with the botched election in 2000 and then 9/11 the following year. Follow that up with war and the financial crisis and year after year of Donald John Trump and you don't get a time traveler Disneyland.
If I could travel in time, I'd be content just to see of the 20th centuries greatest hits. I think I'd enjoy going to one of the monumental concerts from the decade of my birth, the 1960s. Of course, Woodstock is the first thing to pop into my mind, but it was pretty wet and muddy for a good portion of the time, so I'd probably choose the Monterey Pop Festival in June 1967 so I could see acts like The Animals and Simon and Garfunkel and get to watch Jimi Hendrix literally light his guitar on fire. I'd definitely go to Liverpool, England in the early 60s to watch the Beatles play at the Cavern Club before they got famous.
I would go to the March On Washington in 1963 and watch Dr. King give that speech on the very spot where the 2013 version of me later got married, right on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. I'd like to go down to Mississippi after the Civil Rights Acts was passed and watch Fannie Lou Hamer vote for the first time. I'd definitely spend some time on college campuses, probably at places like Berkley and Columbia, to see the student movement in action. I'd go to the airport in San Francisco and buy beers for the GIs coming home from Vietnam. I'd verify that the right wing myth of spitting protesters is indeed a lie.
Then I'd probably get back in the time machine and go back to the 50s, just so I could go to Yankee Stadium on October 8, 1956, to see Don Larsen pitch a perfect game in the World Series against the Brooklyn Dodgers. I'd get good seats behind home plates, and I'd be ready to watch Yogi Berra jump into Larsen's arms after the final out. There's not much else I'd want to see of the 50s, except maybe the look on Rosa Park's face when she got out of jail for not giving up that bus seat. She is one of my heroes.
Going back to the 40s, I'd attend the funeral of FDR. If ever there was a right man at the right time for a job, it was him. He guided the US through the great depression and then straight into World War Two where he assembled a staff and alliances that resulted in a victory over fascism. I know he had faults. We all do, but he was a giant and there is a lot to admire there. I'd probably listen to a couple of Churchill's speeches in the House of Commons too. I'd love to be there to hear him say "We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing-grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills. We shall never surrender!” He's another flawed guy, but he did the job when Great Britain needed him.
The 30s were pretty rough, but there were still some things worth seeing. I'd go right to the heart of Nazi Germany and the 1936 Olympic Games just to see Jesse Owens destroy the myth of Aryan superiority as he defeated the master race and won four gold medals in sprinting and the long jump. I'd laugh as Hitler rushed out of the stadium to avoid shaking his hand, and I'd smile as Owens mounted the podium to the sounds of the Star Spangled Banner playing for all the Nazis to enjoy. I'd also do whatever I had to do to find Woodie Guthrie and listen to him sing his songs, even if I had to make my way into a hobo jungle in the rail yards.
I don't know a lot about the first two decades of the last century. I think I'd like to see that total badass named Teddy Roosevelt, the day he gave a campaign speech after being shot in the chest and before going to the hospital. Furthermore, I'd like to see big Jack Johnson, the first black heavyweight champion, defend his title. If I wouldn't stand out too much, I'd go to New York City in 1919 to watch the World War One victory parade to see the Harlem Hellcats return from France. I'd also hang out at the polls to watch women come to vote after the passage of the 19th amendment.
Finally, I'd zip forward to other moments. I want to be on the White House lawn in 1974 to watch Richard Nixon get on the helicopter after resigning the presidency after members of his own party told him they would no longer support him because of his crimes, showing that people like Barry Goldwater had more morals than today's Republicans. Finally, I'd go to the Dakota apartment building on December 8, 1980, to try and stop Mark David Chapman from killing John Lennon. That would change the future, certainly, but only for the better.
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Don't Read Articles on How to Be Good at Social Media
A quick search for advice on how to post on social media will turn up plenty of listicles. Each one has a few good tips on being yourself and keeping your profile updated, but they also tend to veer into subjects like "building your personal brand," using AI to "help" you and using scheduling software to help you "maximize your engagement." I get some of that if you're marketing your lawn care service or jewelry shop on Etsy, but not if you are seeking community with fellow travelers in the 21st century.
My reasoning for engaging is social media is two-fold. I like keeping up with my family and IRL friends, which is why I am still on Facebook despite its evil influence. I also like meeting interesting and like-minded people who are into the things I enjoy, blogging, tech and furthering progressive ideas. I normally follow people back who follow me. I look at people with skewed ratios of followers as being maybe a little full of themselves sometimes, but it's not really any of my business. I like conversations and learning about folks more than meaningless Internet points.
Read stuff like this
Don't read stuff like this
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Has Someone Had a Profound Impact on You from AMA
Today's question comes from the November Indy Web Carnival - "Has someone had a profound impact on you?"
My transition from a person who viewed the world as something that just happens around us to a person who sees the world as a place that is ours to change came about under the tutelage of a unique man whose life story is unlike anyone I've ever met. I became interested in a local group formed to oppose the death penalty. Even when I was an uninformed, apolitical prison guard, I knew at a deep level that state-sanctioned killing was wrong. Even though I'm not religious and the name of the group was People of Faith Against the Death Penalty, I decided to attend. That's where I met the most revolutionary man with whom I've ever been associated, a man with the unlikely name of Chip Smith.
Chip was from Philadelphia's main line. His father had been a research scientist for a pharmaceutical company and ended up a wealthy man. Chip was nearly 70 when I met him, and he still had a trust fund left to him by his father, but he was hardly typical of that breed. In the '60s, while the war in Vietnam was raging, Chip had gone to work for the Agency for International Development in Laos, living among the American community there, rife with CIA agents and other clandestine operatives. When he returned to the United States, he fell into the radical left movement and stayed there for the rest of his life.
American communist and socialist organizations have Byzantine family trees. Groups continually split over differences in political philosophy and tactics. I can't describe every group Chip was a member of, but in 1979 he was a part of the People's Viewpoint organization, composed mostly of educated professionals who went to work alongside the working class to organize them into what would hopefully become a revolutionary movement. Despite having a doctorate in economics and that trust fund I mentioned, Chip went to work in a steel mill and became a shop steward in the union. His wife, an actual neurosurgeon by trade, went to work in a garment factory. The organizing of the People's Viewpoint organization came to a bloody end in November 1979 when a rally they organized in a Greensboro, NC housing project was attacked by the KKK in an ambush the police knew was going to happen and did nothing to stop. Five people were killed.
Chip's wife went back to work in the hospital, but Chip kept on working towards revolutionary changes in the U.S. By the late '90s, the organization he was a member of in Philly had a plan for members to move to the U.S. South to organize. Despite the bloody history that had touched their lives, Chip and his wife moved to NC. His plan was to join local progressive groups, assist them in their mission, and help them grow. He successfully mentored us into actually getting the city council of our city to endorse a death penalty moratorium in a campaign that succeeded. NC hasn't had an execution in 17 years.
When 9/11 happened and the U.S. government went to war, Chip used his extensive contacts to help the little peace group we organized do things like help military resisters, hold giant demonstrations, and direct military families towards others like them against the war.
On a personal level, he taught me so much. I learned about the history of the Palestinian people from Chip. I had no experience with organized labor or unions, being from the least unionized state in the country. Chip taught me what they've done for workers and why they are needed. Chip patiently taught me about the societal cost of white privilege. In fact, he wrote a book about it. Chip taught me about the importance of inclusion, about how as two white guys, we should work towards building organizations that valued women and people of color. I spent many, many hours riding around the state in Chip's old van, going to meetings at labor councils and organizations like Black Workers for Justice. He never talked all that much, but everyone knew him and respected him.
He wasn't just a political mentor either. When I was struggling to get sober, Chip and his wife were there for me, kind of like loving but very disapproving village elders urging me to do better. Eventually, his wife took a position in a hospital a couple of hours away, and they moved. Of course, he immediately identified the issues most pressing to the workers in that area, joined a local organization to help them out, and worked with them until he died a few years later, dedicated until the very end to making a better world with other people.
When making decisions, I often ask myself what Chip would do in my situation. He never got too bent out of shape about the news of the day, viewing the struggle for revolutionary change to be a long and slow, but constant, process. In these trying times, I do my best to emulate that thought process. I believe in my heart of hearts that people, organized together towards a common goal, have immense power. I learned that from Chip Smith.
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Coping Strategies for When You Are Feeling Down
Lots of us are feeling down and sad today for pretty good reasons. There's something to be said for feeling your feelings and processing grief, but prolonged feelings of sadness produce cortisol and are physically, not to mention mentally, bad for you. Plenty of folks can have a couple of drinks or burn one and relieve a little pressure but that isn't an alternative for the recovering community or other abstainers. I thought I'd do some public service and research a few techniques on lifting your mood. Here you go.
How to Cheer Yourself Up On a Hard Day, According to Science
What to Do When You’re Sad: 11 Tips to Feel Better
How to Cope with Losing | Psychology Today
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