Keyboard Centered Apps for Power Users
A global keyboard shortcut is a combination of keys you can press
while in any application on your Mac to execute an action belonging to a
background process. I typically have a half dozen or more apps running
in the background that use glocal keyboard shortcuts. Some of these
include:
Keyboard Maestro
Keyboard Maestro is an automation app that allows you to initiate or control just about any repetitive process. Don't let the name fool you though. Keyboard Maestro can execute actions based on two dozen triggers, not just keyboard combinations. Some of the actions I launch with the keyboard from Keyboard Maestro include typing in extra long passwords with a shortcut, launching apps using keyboard combinations, launching a shortcut that queries OpenAI using my API key, activating templates in Drafts, running AppleScripts and more.
My Top 10 Keyboard Maestro Macros
Raycast
Raycast is a keyboard app launcher with over 1000 available plugins, including an emoji picker, window manager, clipboard history manager, notes, passwords and many more. You can assign hotekys to any action. Some of the ones I use most frequently are searching Kagi, generating alt-text for images I post on the Internet, opening my downloads folder, searching social media sites, searching Reddit, searching YouTube, sending clipboard text to Drafts and Obsidian.
My 10 Favorite Raycast Use Cases (and all the apps it replaced) | Amerpie by Lou Plummer
Things 3
Things 3 is a task manager with clients for macOS, iOS and iPadOS. It has two built in global keyboard shortcuts: 1) The Quick Entry window lets you enter new to-dos into Things from anywhere without having to switch applications. Use the keyboard shortcut to make the window appear. 2) With Autofill, the Quick Entry window is automatically pre-filled with useful information from the application you are working in. From Mail, for example, it will create a link to the email you're reading. In a browser, it captures the URL of the page you are on.
Things 3, Maybe the Pinnacle in App Design | AppAddict
Dropover
Dropover is the king of shelf apps. Shelves are mini-platforms to hold files while you wait to move them or perform actions on them. Some of the actions you can accomplish from Dropover include sending a file to cloud storage and sharing the link, converting or resizing images, sending a file by Airdrop, in a message or email, attaching a file to a note. You can invoke Dropover when you are in any app, which is very convenient for grabbing an image from a web page or some text from any app. Dropover works well with Apple Shortcuts too, making it easy to move and manipulate files.
Supercharge
Supercharge is a an that features a variety of tweaks and shortcuts for a number of tasks. My favorites are quit all apps, hide all apps, close all notifications, open Passwords and toggle desktop widgets on and off.
Better Touch Tool
Better Touch Tool is anoter automation app that can do a couple of things that Keyboard Maestro and Raycast can't do, such as use the fn key and trigger actions from text strings. I use simple double taps of modifier keys to activate and deactivate Notification Center and Mission Control.
Better Touch Tool Favorites | AppAddict
Others
- Fantastical and BusyCal both allow you to create new appointments and tasks from anywhere on your Mac.
- Language Tool is a writing aid with spelling and grammar checking. You can invoke it anywhere you enter text.
- Default Folder X has a search tool that can bu sommoned from its menu bar interface at any time.
Making It Easier
Two free apps to get to make life as a keyboard warrior easier are Karabiner
Elements for remapping keys and creating macros and KeyClu,
which gives you a heads-up display of keyboard shortcuts in any app,
allowing you to enter your own for apps that it doesn't detect
automatically.
I have a couple of newsletters now. One is a weekly collection from my personal and links blogs that goes out on Mondays. - ✏️ Subscribe | Amerpie by Lou Plummer
The other newsletter is for this blog, one app review delivered to
your mailbox every day. in case you don't have enough software in your
life - Subscribe |
AppAddict Newsletter
Georgia Mountains
The mountains in northern Georgia, taken from the patio of the lodge at Amicalola Falls State Park, home of the southern terminus of the Appalachian Trail.
This Week's Bookmarks - Privacy Guides, 21-Day Cyber Cleanse, Famous Resaurants, True Crime, Wild West Food, Ad Blocker Testing, Liberation Library
Privacy Guides: Independent Privacy & Security Resources - Privacy Guides is a not-for-profit, volunteer-run project that hosts online communities and publishes news and recommendations surrounding privacy and security tools, services, and knowledge.
Cleanse - The 21-day Cyber-Cleanse: designed to remove toxic tech from your life
Most Famous Restaurant in Every State - Business Insider - From fine dining restaurants to local barbecue joints, every state has at least one legendary restaurant that everyone knows about.
True Crime - Masters treasures went missing, then the FBI showed up | GolfDigest.com -
The first item the young man stole from Augusta National was a green and white golf towel. This was just after the 2007 Masters, when he had come to understand it was customary for warehouse employees to take one or two small things
What Food was Served at Wild West Saloons? - YouTube - It starts with cowboy bacon and beans and goes from there - From A Taste of History
AdBlock Tester: test your AdBlock extensions - How good is your ad blocking setup? Just go to the page to receive a grade. If you want to get a score of 99 or 100 out of 100, shoot me an email and I'll send you my setup.
Liberating Library - Liberating Library is a book distribution program and online collection of relevant radical resources run by a Pan-African socialist.
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rclone - An Easy to Use and Powerful CLI
There are quite a few apps with GUIs available for Macs that let
you connect various cloud services to upload, download and move files.
Most of them are costly. Today I needed to move files from Google Drive
to a kDrive, a cloud storage company in Switzerland, Instead of using
one of the expensive apps, I opted for a free command utility, rclone,
and in just a few minutes initiated a complete transfer of the data on
my drive.
If you've dealt with cloud storage, including iCloud over the past few versions of macOS, you might agree with me that Apple has made a mess of it. They insist on hiding your files away in ~/Library/Cloud Storage and other non-obvious locations. By default, the files stay in the cloud, making utilities like Hazel ineffective managing them. You just never know when you click on a file if you are going to have to wait to download it or not. The official clients for Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive and Box.com us that strategy. Even when you select the option to keep a folder downloaded, you get no notice that the download is complete and, in my experience, I have found that the settins revert from time to time with no notice, forcing me to redownload files.
So, I was really happy today to take the time to set up rclone to move the files. You can get a good overview of rclone's history and capabilities from Wikipedia.. You can use rclone with a long list of cloud services.
You can download and install rclone right On a Mac from the terminal, using the command
sudo -v ; curl [rclone.org/install.s...](https://rclone.org/install.sh) | sudo bash
Documentation
You can read the documentation on rclone at the official GitHub repository.
Here are links on how to set rclone for a few common services:
Full Compatibility List
- Alibaba (Aliyun) Object Storage System (OSS)
- Amazon Drive (See note)
- Amazon S3
- Aruba COS[27]
- Backblaze B2
- Box
- C14
- Ceph
- Citrix ShareFile
- Cloudian[28]
- Dell-EMC ECS[29]
- DigitalOcean Spaces
- Dreamhost
- Dropbox
- Enterprise File Fabric[30]
- FTP
- Google Cloud Storage
- Google Drive
- Google Photos
- HDFS
- HTTP
- Hubic
- IBM COS S3
- Jottacloud
- Koofr
- Mail.ru Cloud
- Memset Memstore
- MEGA.io
- Microsoft Azure Blob Storage
- Microsoft OneDrive
- MinIO
- NetApp StorageGRID[31]
- Nextcloud
- OVH
- OpenDrive
- OpenIO[32]
- OpenStack Swift
- Oracle Cloud Storage
- ownCloud
- pCloud
- premiumize.me
- put.io
- QingStor
- Rackspace Cloud Files
- rsync.net
- Scaleway
- Scality[33]
- Seafile
- Selectel[34][35]
- SFTP
- StackPath
- SugarSync
- Tardigrade
- Tencent COS
- Wasabi
- WebDAV
- Yandex Disk
- Zoho Workdrive[30]
GUI Alternatives
File Managers/Browsers
- Odrive - $99 a year
- Multcloud - $189
- Raidrive $34 a year (limited free tier)
- Expandrive $75 lifetime
FTP/SFTP/Cloud Clients
Mounters (Network Drive Mappers)
- MountainDuck - $39
- CloudMounter - $75
- Netdrive - $50
Sundown in Town
I love a parking garage for getting pictures of lines and shadows. Sometimes urban photography can be quite fun.
Who Are You Thinking About?
There is a saying in the recovery community that if I could do anything to my worse enemy, I'd make him self-centered. There's nothing worse than continually being concerned with "How am I doing today?" I'm not knocking therapy. It's helped untold numbers of people, including me. Nor, am I smack-talking introspection because questioning your motives and evaluating yourself are healthy practices. No, what I'm getting at is the type of person who is always concerned with fairness, about what size your slice of pie is compared to his, about how life rewards you while it shafts him. I don't like that guy. I would rather not hang out with him.
What I find enjoyable is having a circle of people and a mind with enough space to let them all in. Most of us have our person, to borrow a concept from Grey's Anatomy. We have the one person whi is at the head of the line when we start making space in our consciousness when we begin to make room for something outside the scope of our wants and needs. No need to tell you that my person is Wonder Woman, my wife, my partner, my friend, and my coach. Although she sometimes doubts it, I evaluate almost every interesting fact in my life to decide whether I should share it with her. Tech-geek that I am, I have special apps and certain workflows just to be able to send her things during the day that she might like or be interested in.
One of my morning rituals is reading over my journal and looking at photos from this day in past years. Now that I've been doing the IndieWeb thing for longer than a year, I'm starting to see quotes from my favorite bloggers show up in my journal. I dig being able to send someone a screenshot to let them know, "Hey, I thought you were pretty astute last year and I still feel the same way." Who doesn't like to get fan mail, right?
For the people, like me, who share personal bits and pieces of their lives, well, it's better than a television show trying to keep up with what's happening in people's lives. During the day I start to wonder, How is mb feeling today, He's been ill. Or I wonder how Annie's son finished out the wrestling season or if Alexandra is freezing her butt off waiting for the bus on a Quebec sidewalk. When I think about the people working for the government, I think about Jen, Scott's wife her who had her dream vacation curtailed because of the fascists. and, OMG, if someone goes off the grid for an extended period of time, I start getting nervous. It constantly happens. Someone I enjoy reading, just gets fed up with the Internet and they disappear. I hate it.
It's a rare day when I don't send someone a photo I have of them. This week, I sent my youngest brother a shot of the one and only time he ever wore cycling shorts in his entire life. He called me stupid. I laughed. My brother-in-law scanned hundreds of my extended family's photos and shred them with us all. I like to find funny, early 1950s pictures of my dad with his flattop haircut and send those to him or pictures of my mom who was and is beautiful, just to let her know I am thinking of her. I have to stop myself from inundating my kids with constant pictures of their kids, most of which they sent me in the first place. It's just that all those grand babies are too precious not to show someone.
I have a vivid imagination. I consider it a blessing. When I was a third shift prison guard, stuck on a gun tower for eight hours, decades before cell phones were a thing, the only way I kept my sanity was an active mind. These days, I catch myself imagining the lives of my favorite fictional characters from television shows and movies. I gauge a show by how easy it is to bring its characters to life in my imagination. Take The Wire for instance. It was a show about the people of Baltimore, all kinds of people: cops, drug dealers, dockworkers, politicians, reporters, school teachers and more. One of my all-time favorites was Omar Little, a gay gangster with a penchant for robbing drug dealers, never regular people. He was courageous, funny, loving, intelligent and knew exactly what he wanted right until he was killed by a grade school kid in a corner store while buying his beloved Honey Nut Cheerios and Newport cigarettes. I think about Omar often and wonder what would have happened to him if he'd lived.
I'm not too good at striking up conversations with strangers, although in the right circumstances I don't mind it. My mother is the master at making friends with waitresses and clerks. She isn't putting people on either. She's genuinely interested in them. Mom admires anyone with a kind spirit and looks down on no one. Not once, ever. She might not approve of certain lifestyle choices, but she doesn't consider herself superior to anyone. She's just glad she doesn't have any tattoos and wishes I didn't either. My mother wasn't a big fan of me getting my ear pierced either, but that was a long time ago.
The moral of this longer than I intended post, is that if you want to be happy, think about others. Think about how you can make them happy. It will rub off. I promise.
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It Must Be True, I Read It on the Internet
One of the reasons that the United States is in the middle of an existential crisis is that too many damned people believe everything they read on the Internet. For these people, the Internet is not the information super highway. It is a cesspool of lies, misinformation, manipulation by foreign adversaries and scammers out to make a buck. It is beholden to MAGA and the right wing, who grow angry and vengeful when they are fact checked. To keep from being attacked by the government, Meta, the parent company of Facebook fired its fact checkers when Donald Trump was reelected. Elon Musk fired Twitter's fact checkers when he paid 44 billion dollars for the company.
No information source is infallible. Still, intelligent people should be able to separate fact from fiction. In the immortal words of way too may people Do your research.
Credible Information Sources
PolitiFact - Our only agenda is to publish the truth so you can be an informed participant in democracy.
Snopes.com | The definitive fact-checking site and reference source for urban legends, folklore, myths, rumors, and misinformation. - Snopes (/ ˈ s n oʊ p s/), formerly known as the Urban Legends Reference Pages, is a fact-checking website. It has been described as a "well-regarded reference for sorting out myths and rumors" on the Internet. The site has also been seen as a source for both validating and debunking urban legends and similar stories in American popular culture.
Some other fact-checking resources similar to Politifact and Snopes include:
- FactCheck.org - A Project of The Annenberg Public Policy Center
- Fact Check: Political & News Fact Check | AP News
- Fact Check | Reuters
- .Full Fact
- BBC Verify
- FactCheck – Channel 4 News
- Lead Stories
- Truth or Fiction? – Seeking truth, exposing fiction
- International Fact-Checking Network - Poynter
I have a couple of newsletters now. One is a weekly collection from my personal and links blogs that goes out on Mondays. - ✏️ Subscribe | Amerpie by Lou Plummer
The other newsletter is myapp review blog, delivered daily in case you don't have enough software in your life - Subscribe | AppAddict Newsletter
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Cool Tools for Mastodon
When it comes to the new breed of social media, I prefer the
federated and independent nature of Mastodon over everything else. I
want nothing to do with Threads or anything else tainted by Meta. I like
the atmosphere at Bluesky, but we have to face that it is a company
founded by a billionaire, funded with venture capital and it's going to
be enshittified one day - breaking the heart of millions. Mastodon, on
the other hand was founded in Europe and is out of the control of the
American fascist movement. Unlike the reality with Blue Sky, you really
can have your very own Mastodon server. While it has an undeserved
reputation for being difficult for normal people to use, there is only a
single extra step to get started and there are many guides and walk
throughs o hold your hand throught that step. In the 15 months of being
on Mastodon, I have yet to witness the kind of hate filled craziness
seen on corporate owned social media every day.
There are almost 100 different apps with Mastodon access available for Apple hardware and a few online, browser based clients as well. Here are a few unique offerings that can compliment or replace your primary Mastodon client.
Newsmast (free)
In a first for the Fediverse, we’re seamlessly integrating content from your home server with Newsmast’s hand-curated, knowledge-sharing Communities, hosted on our customised Mastodon instance, newsmast.social. There’s no scraping or content aggregation - all the community content comes from Newsmast users or via federation, and is moderated by applying the Oliphant Tier 0 blocklist, filters that keep out NSFW, crypto and hate-speech, and our human team.
Automadon ($14.99 year)
Automadon provides a suite of Shortcuts actions for Mastodon with support for multiple accounts. Actions available within Shortcuts include: • Post to Mastodon • Full-text search • Get account details, timelines, and following/follower lists • Interact with posts, including boosting, favoriting, and bookmarking posts • Follow/unfollow, block/unblock, mute/unmute accounts
Toot Later for Mastodon ($4.00)
With TootLater, you can: • Schedule multiple posts with different dates and times • Add multiple Mastodon accounts and switch between them easily • Attach images to your posts and preview them before sending • TootLater uses the official Mastodon API to ensure your account and posts are secure
Video for Ants ($3.99)
Got videos that are too big to upload to Mastodon? Everyone does. What kind of limits are these?! All you have to do is pick your video and then tap a button and video for ants will automatically convert the format, compress the bitrate, and optimize the fps (frame rate) as needed to make them fit. You only have to tap a button. That's it. That's the app.
Threaditor: write for everyone ($9.99)
- Draft threads for popular microblogging platforms all in one place
- Save unlimited threads to the cloud - always pick up where you left off
- Link your accounts to automatically publish, and group accounts to post to multiple places at once
- Add images and polls to your posts
Re: Toot ($2.99)
Re: Toot turns Mastodon posts into images that are suitable for quote posts. Images are accompanied by attribution to the original author and an alternative text. Images created by Re: Toot can also be shared to other social networks and messaging services. To create an image from a Mastodon post, just copy the link the post and open Re: Toot or invoke the app through the Share Sheet.
Still Followers for Mastodon (Expensive - just use the free features)
Still Followers is a useful analytics tool to keep you fro getting suckered by the people who game social media by following and unfollowing people. The free version offers several useful tools for the casual user.
AppAddict Picks
- My favorite Mastodon client isMona for Mastodon, a one time purchase with more features than any other Mastodon client.
- My favorite Mastodon instance is social.lol, which is for members of OMG.LOL and IndieWeb platform with multiple features inlcuding a link in bio page, a blog, photo hosting, an omg.lol email address and much more, all for $20 a year.
- My favorite social media tool for analytics, scheduled posts. account discovery, reports and more is Fedica. The free tier is useful. A paid membership is insane. Works with 10 different social media platforms.
- If you want to learn more about the Fediverse, how to use it, what it can do - head over to Fedi Tips.
I have a couple of newsletters now. One is a
weekly collection from my personal and links blogs that goes out on
Mondays. - ✏️ Subscribe |
Amerpie by Lou Plummer
The other newsletter is for this blog, one app review delivered to your mailbox every day. in case you don't have enough software in your life - Subscribe | AppAddict Newsletter
Hiker's View of Massachusetts
On the Appalachian Trail in New England, you spend all day moving the through the woods of Connecticut to suddenly come upon this cleared field with its breathtaking view of Western Massachussets in the distance. My god, it was so beautiful. One of best moments of my hike.
Browser Extensions Are a Secret Weapon
This is a special edition of AppAddict. Tonight, I'm covering one
of the best sources of computing functionality that often goes
overlooked in the hunt for productivity enhancements and better work
flows. There are many browser extensions that replace or enhance apps
you use every day. This is my personal aresenal that I use in my daily
workflow.
A modern Mac is a miraculous machine. My decidedly middle of the road laptop is an M2 with 16GB od RAM. I bought it in December of 2023 and hope to continue using it for years. The number of programs I have running at login (~40) would give Y2K Lou nightmares. The sheer number of installed applications would freak (628) that guy out. Finally, there are my browser extensions, and I'm only talking about the ones for my daily driver, Vivaldi, not the ones in the other five browsers I have installed. Where once I would have been concerned with somehow slowing down the Internet, today I just want to get the maximum amount of functionality out of my interface with it. I use A LOT of extensions. Let's get to them, shall we?
Aboard
Aboard does a a great many things but the way I use it is simple. It what I click when there is a webpage I want to share with my wife. She gets a notification on her phone when I share something and she can view it in the Aboard app or in a browser at the website. It's how I share shows I want to watch, restaurants I want to check out or news items that are blowing my mind.
Activity Watch
Activity Watch is a free time tracker that tells me how long I've been using my computer, which apps I use and for how long and what websites I visited and for how long. I can assign apps and web pages to categories and make the reports it creates as granular as I want to.
Activity Watch - Free No Effort Time Tracker | AppAddict
Language Tool
I use the paid version of this grammar, paraphraser and spelling tool, but I have used the free version as well and it is definitely a step up from native tools.
Language Tool - Free is Good, Paid is Better | AppAddict
Anylist Recipe Importer
I only activate this when I'm looking for recipes. Anylist importer clears all the cruft away from recipe sites and kust imports the ingredients and directions and leaves out all the SEO crap. It works with the Mac/iOS/Web app called Anylist, which is an app I've used for over a decade for shopping and packing lists and collecting recipes.
AnyList for Recipes, Shopping and More | AppAddict
Archive Today Automator
This is the extension I couldn't live without. Whenever I want to read a paywalled article from the New York Times, The Atlantic, The Verge, Medium, The Wall Street Journal or practically any other site, I just hit this button in my toolbar to obtain immediate access to a version from the Internet Archive. I subscribe to and support several progressive news organizations so I don't feel bad for reading MSM sites for free.
Block Party
Block Party is a paid service that inspects settings on invasive websites and changes things with your consent to offer yoy the most privacy possible. It works with Reddit, Google, YouTube, Strava, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, amd Instagram.
Bluesky Sidebar
Bluesky sidebar loads on web pages from the Bluesky social media platform and gives you extra information on the people you follow, the people who follow you, trending topics and the lists you are subscribed to.
Cloudhiker
Cloudhiker is a freemium service that is the closest thing you'll find on the wen today to the old Stumble Upon website. Use Cloudhiker to suggest and discover new sites in a large number of categories.
Cloudhiker - StumbleUpon for the IndyWeb | Linkage
Fedica
Fedica is a freemium service that allows you to schedule posts on all the major social media sites, you can crosspost to several of them at once. Paid customers get analytics and research tools, pluse reports from certain sites, like Mastodon and Bluesky.
Fedica - Post to Multiple Social Networks at Once, On a Schedule - For Free | AppAddict
Kagi Privacy Pass
Thiis extension is iused to authenticate to the paid Kagi search engine if you want to block all access toy what you are searching for. With this enabled, there is no history of your search activity using Kagi.
Using Kagi Search Engine on a Mac - Software and Tips | AppAddict
Markdownload
This is another one of my favorite extensons. It copies webpage links as Markdown links for insertion into posts and documents. It cam also copy whole pages as Markdown, although now that usefulness has been supplanted by the Obsidian Web Clipper. Finally is will create a markdown list from all the open tabs in a browser windos. It's great for bloggers and researchers.
MarkDownload - The Browser Extension that Works With #Obsidian | Amerpie by Lou Plummer
Mastodon Redirector
No matter what Mastodon instance I land on while browsing and following toots from others, clicking this button opens the page in my home instance, allowing me to like, follow and comment with ease. I find that ut works better for me than Graze, another plugin with similar features.
Obsidian Web Clipper
This free tool uses templates to download web pages as markdown files. Using AI, you can get summaries of the page and automatically assign tags. It will even download the transcript from YouTube videos. I have templates for IMDB, Bluesky, Mastodon, Reddit, YouTube, Medium, Wikiepedia and general web pages.
Privacy Badger
This free extension from the Electronic Frontier Foundation is not an ad blocker. It works hand in hand with them to detect and block trackers using an algorithm and machine learning. The EFF is working on ways to prevent browser fingerprinting, the strategy used by tech companies to follow you around the web without cookies.
Privacy Badger Extension from the Electronic Freedom Foundation | AppAddict
Raindrop.io
Raindrop is a freemium bookmarking service from which I gety great value. I use it to create webpages of links I want to share, to save canonical copies of stories so that if the are removed from the Internet, I can still access them. I have never used my bookmarks more than I have with Raindrop.
Battle of the Bookmark Managers | AppAddict
Quick Pocket
I am a big believer in automation and in reading the work of smart people at depth. Aside from using Pocket as the excellent read it later service that it is, I also use it's integration with IFTTT and RSS to automate the saving of full text blog entries from Matt Birchler and Jarrod Blundy, two of my favorite tech oriented bloggers. Their articles are routed through Pocket right into Obsidian or Day One for preservation and reference. Pocket is owned by the Mozilla foundation.
Ublock Origin Light
The Original Ublock Origin is still the best as blocker ever made. It is no longer compatible with Chrome, Edge and Vivaldi, although Forefox users can still use it. Using a complete security toolkit that includes a customer DNS server, built in blockers in Vivaldi, Ublock Origin light and Freetube for YouTube, I routinely score 99 or 100 on ad blocking tests.
My Online
Security Setup | Linkage
I have a couple of newsletters now. One is a weekly collection from my personal and links blogs that goes out on Mondays. - ✏️ Subscribe | Amerpie by Lou Plummer
The other newsletter is for this blog, in case you don't have enough software in your life - Subscribe | AppAddict Newsletter
Dragonfly
Fun times in the spring with a maco lens. You have to get these shots before the mosquitoes get too bad!
Life is Different
I like Wednesdays. On Wednesdays, Wonder Woman usually gets to work from home, so I get to spend the day with her, even if we don't get a chance to interact all that much. I just like to be able look across the room to see her sitting with her laptop on the couch. When I make tea, I get to make two cups, instead of just one. In all the years before the pandemic, except a snowy day or two, I don't remember her ever working from our home. Like many jobs, hers recognized that today's technology, coupled with the work ethic of modern employees meant that people could indeed, get things done without sitting in a cubicle all day.
Thinking about that got me to consider how many things are different now than they were in the past. Change happens slowly, but when you look back over time, you realize how weird it would be if things you once took for granted became commonplace again. Take smoking, for example. So many people used to smoke and they did it everywhere. My high school had a smoking area outside the cafeteria for students to light up. You could practically see the smoke billowing from the teacher's lounge between classes as the staff went in for a nicotine fix. You could smoke everywhere - in the library, airplanes, restaurants. Hell, you could get an ashtray brought to your hospital bed. At the prison where I worked in the 80s, if an inmate could not afford cigarettes, they cost 45 cents a pack, the state would give them loose tobacco and rolling papers.
Grocery shopping was a different experience too. You used to have to wait for fruits and vegetables to come into season. There were no refrigerated containers bringing you fresh blueberries from South America in December. There was much less variety, too. I don't think I ever had anything but iceberg lettuce until I was well into adulthood. There were two kinds of apples available, Red Delicious and Golden Delicious. Eventually Granny Smith made her way in, but forget having the choice of a half dozen different types like we have today.
Before the gas crisis of the early 70s, most people went to full-service stations where you didn't have to get out of the car. The attendant would check your oil and wash your windshield while you got a fill-up of that sweet 50 cents a gallon leaded gasoline. Other than the time I had to get gas in New Jersey, where the law forbids you from pumping your own, I don't think I have ever had someone gas up my car but me. By the time I was able to drive, we were well into the era of expensive gas. In fact, in terms of real purchasing power, has never cost more than it did when I was in high school, driving my family's 1975 Impala.
Even my kids can wax nostalgically about how things used to be in tech. They remember when they had to beg to use our landline in the evenings because I kept it tied up with my dial-up Internet. My daughter used to wait until after 9pm to talk to her boyfriend because that's when her free cell phone minutes started. She dated a guy once whose cell phone number was long distance, and she racked up a giant bill talking to him, even though in reality, he was just a few miles away. She even had to ration her text messages because her plan only let her have a small number for free.
Some things have gotten worse instead of better. At my high school, the student government, all the clubs and sports teams were racially diverse. All of us Gen X kids had started school a couple of years into the integration era, escaping the last remnants of Jim Crow by a couple of years. I've been disappointed to see self-segregation become the norm in many areas. My younger cousin went to the same high school I did. By the time he got there, white kids had just about stopped playing on the football team. He was one of only three to even try out. I worked in education for 20 years and saw too many mono-cultured events take place. It's depressing.
There are so many little things too:
- Paying for everything with plastic. People used to scoff at you if you had a credit card purchase for only a dollar or two.
- Standard transmission cars used to be the cheap model, not the special order that they are today.
- Only upper middle-class people could afford a $700 VCR and the steep membership and deposits at the first video stores.
- Actors either made movies or they made TV show. The thought of Robert De Niro starring in a TV series was laughable. Now here we are.
- There used to be liberal Republicans (Nelson Rockefeller) and conservative Democrats (most of the southern ones). Today the GOP is batshit crazy and any Democrat who thinks people ought to have food, shelter, and medical care gets called a Commie.
What are your favorite examples of how things are different today?
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What To Do If You Get Arrested
I haven't been arrested in 39 years, I came close a couple of times during demonstrations against the war in Iraq, but some wise elders advised me to cooperate with pushy police officers to avoid it, so I did. Most of my run-ins with the law happened when I was a teenager and they all involved alcohol. The sober version oi me has been pretty good at staying away from the police. But, as Bob Dylan so aptly put it, the times, they are a changing.
I'm not sure whether it's paranoid to fear political persecution as a regular left wing American citizen or not. It's very evident that the current federal government will avoid due process whenever and however it can. Rounding up Venezuelan immigrants and flying them to EL Salvador against a judges orders should wake folks up. Then there are the legal residents who have excercised free speech in a way that pisses MAGA off. These people have not broken the law. They said words out loud in public. That's it. That's their offense. For that they've been imprisoned. That's the America that we are living in.
So, that's why I am reading up on how to handle myself if they come for me, or if I get pulled aside while traveling. I don't think I have it in me to just be quiet and go along with what's happening to my country.
- Do not be violent.
- Don't talk to the police
- Don't run
- Don't submit to warrantless searches
- Avoid asking for medical help
- Do not admit guilt
Know Your Rights | Protesters’ Rights | ACLU
What Happens If You Are Arrested For Protesting? - Criminal Appeals Advocates, P.C.
Here’s What to Do If You Get Detained at a U.S. Airport
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KeyKeeper Checks All the Boxes for Tracking Software Licenses
I've been working on getting all my software licensing information
into KeyKeeper, an
app by the same team that operates Bundlehunt. I've been buying Mac
software since the days of the classic OS. Believe it or not, some apps
I purchased as far back as 2004 are still functional, requiring the
original license ket when I set up a new system. Shout out to SuperDuper!
I've used various methods to track licensing information: a spreadsheet, Evernote, an email tag, Obsidian, the freeware app, Licensed All of them are functional enough, but when I saw the features in KeyKeeper, available for $4.99 in the current bundle, I decided to try it out.
KeyKeeper is security focused, requiring a password to enter the database. The design follows modern Mac conventions. There are all of the database fields you'd expect for this type of app, but you can add unlimited custom fields and file attachments, useful for screenshots and apps that have downloadable license keys. The fields for URLs are live, so if you need to visit a product website or redownload the app, you can do both right from KeyKeeper. A feature I like is the ability to create your won categories for your apps and make your own assignments. You can also create a favorites list. If you've been tracking your app purchases in a speadsheet, you can import the data into KeyKeeper and save yourself all the manual data entry. Once you have the data in KeyKeeper, you can export it into a spreadsheet as well. You can use Python to convert the exported spreadsheet into Markdown notes for Obsidian, if you think that would be helpful.
A single license for KeyKeeper is good for use on two Macs. The regular price is $11.99 if you miss the Bundlehunt special.
No, I'm Not in a Bubble
One of the unfortunate stories being written and rewritten lately is about how (wait for it), liberals/progressives/"the left" are in an information bubble because they've forsaken Twitter and canceled their subscriptions to the Washington Post. Supposedly, people like me are out of touch with the majority of voters in the country because I choose not to consume news that's controlled by people with a vested interest in the success of MAGA — meaning Elon Musk, the Murdoch family, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and their billionaire cohort. Many of the ostensibly centrist journalists who fret about the poor misinformed leftists are actually just peeved that the social media following they labored to build on Twitter over the past decade has deserted them. It's just not fair. Besides, it would be a lot of work to start over somewhere else.
Needless to say, I think these people are full of shit. MAGA has been running the country for less than 100 days and already ABC, CBS, and Meta have settled frivolous lawsuits initiated by the US president rather than stand their ground in the face of his threats. A good part of my upbringing occurred while my step-father worked as a journalist. I have long supported and admired the underpaid and overworked people who bring us the news, but that feeling is ebbing in the modern era. The industry hasn't handled the way the country has been reshaped. It's still in the habit of framing arguments as if both sides have merit, even when one of those sides is batshit crazy, racist, misogynistic and incoherent. The word "sanewashing" had to be invented to describe what once respected outlets like the New York Times does to present Donald Trump as if he weren't a crazy person. Even Fox News cuts away from his live speeches to keep from showing the nonsensical, incoherent imbecile that he truly is.
Until lately, most Americans were in agreement that the Civil Rights Movement was a well managed and courageous era in American history. A non-violent crusade of moral righteousness prevailed over hatred and bigotry and racial hatred, murder, and bombings. What's not often discussed is how much disapproval people like MLK faced in their time. When Kind was killed, he was among the most-disliked men in the country. The majority of white people did not agree with the tactics of the Freedom Riders and those conducting sit-ins at lunch counters. In hindsight, we can see that the majority were wrong. The minority were right. The same holds true today. The hateful MAGA policies of 2025 are wrong. The belief of the minority in justice, a social safety net and equal rights is as morally righteous as it has always been.
I do not need to understand in great detail why straight conservatives want to turn back the clock on the LGBT community. I don't need an explanation or justification for mean-spirited immigration enforcement that now includes deportation and incarceration without a hearing, straight into a third world prison cell. I do not need some fancy-pants journo to explain the country I've lived in for the last six decades to me FFS.
What people who accuse the left of being in a bubble fail to consider is that we live in the same damn country they do. We see the same things they see. We pay the same prices at the grocery store. We fill out applications for the same jobs. I live in a purple state with a Democratic governor and attorney general who I admire as they try to protect me from the fire hose of WTF in Washington. There are millions and millions of us, and we know exactly what is happening without having to watch Fox News or have the paid employees of the billionaires break it down for us. We know how our neighbors feel. We hear them. We just think they're wrong.
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There Ought To Be a Law
You are probably familiar with Betteridge's Law of Headlines whether you know its name or not. The law is an adage that states: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no." It's a common sense analysis of a journalistic practice where publications seek to avoid being incorrect when they aren't certain about an outcome. Were they certain, the story they published on the topic would have been presented as a certainty.
Becoming familiar with the thinking behind Betteridge's Law is a good step on the road to media literacy.
Betteridge's Law of Headlines | Tools for Thinking
YSK the fundamentals of Betteridge's Law of Headlines
The Blog and Newsletter
Ian Betteridge is still around and still saying smart things. He's one of the more experienced tech journalists still plying the trade. His crtitiques of Apple, other journalists and the Internet writ large, are generally dead on and entertaining.
Ian Betteridge - Ian's Blog
One of the best newsletters I get each week is Ian's 10 Blue Links. The stories are generally topical and tech related. Ian point's out hypocrisy and industry bullshit with deadly accuracy.
Ten Blue Links, “good news, bad news, old news” edition
Follow Ian Betteridge on Mastodon
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iNet Network Scanner
For anyone with a home lab or who is invested in the Internet of
Things, the ability to scan your network is a tool that you want in your
management arsenal. Additionally, if you live in an urban environment,
being able to monitor the devices on your Wi-Fi network is important if
you suspect one of your neighbors might be attempting to access anything
they shouldn't.
iNet Network Scanner from BananaGlue GmbH is a particularly useful tool for anyone with a home network that's heavy on Apple devices. It's scanner can correctly identify laptops, desktops, iPhones, iPads, Apple TVs and HomePods. It can also pick up other computers, tablets, thermostats, picture frames and similar devices.
Network Scanner
- Displays information for all devices powered on and connected to the network including their IP and MAC addresses.
- Customize the names of the devices in your network and assign them custom icons
- Set the IP range to be scanned or the interfaces to be scanned
- Export the scan results as an Excel (csv) or PDF file
- Connect to devices with different protocols from within the scanner (e.g., SMB or SSH)
Bonjour monitor
- Display of all running services (Bonjour) in real time (e.g. SMB. SSH, Media Sharing, VNC)
- Display of the services running on a specific device
- Display of detailed information about a service
- Selection of the active Bonjour domain
iNet Network Scanner also features wake on LAN controls to sleep, wake and restart compatible devices. For anyone still using an Apple Airport as a home Wi-Fi device, there are numerous monitoring features.
The app is available in the App Store for $24.99 as a one time purchase with lifetime upgrades.
Biltmore House
The largest private home ever constructed, the Biltmore House in Asheville, NC. It’s a nice place to visit. I’ve cycled and kayaked on the estate. Good times.
The Audience Effect
This is the 52nd week of this blog's life. It doesn't seem like I've been doing this for almost 365 days, but I have. I think I may have missed a day in there somewhere, but i made up for it the next. In fact, I've posted 377 times since March 28, 2024. It's a good thing I'm not as talkative in real life as I once was, because evidently I can't shut up on the Internet. But, you know what? I think I'd rather write that many original blog posts than I would engage in some unfulfilling back and forth on social media arguing with someone who is never going to change their mind. That kind of exchange is like a Kabuki play where every line is predictable, as is the outcome. Somebody gets called a Nazi. Someone gets called a Commie. End of.
What I appreciate about blogging is the opportunity to be my consistently authentic self to the people interested enough to check in a regular or semi-regular basis. It makes me extremely happy when other people casually refer to Wonder Woman the same way that I do, or even better, when they are casual enough to shorten it to just WW. I dig getting teased that I outsource my blog to one of my many grandkids as the likely explanation for my proclivity to post so often. When I left mt job, the support and congratulations meant a lot to me. It felt personal.
I try to be the same kind of supportive reader for my blogging friends. It's just a matter of being interested and paying attention. That's always been my nature. I knew the names of my co-workers kids and whether their parents were still alive, what kind of dog they had and what their favorite TV show was. I with one guy for 20 years and I could answer every one of those questions about him and I doubt that he could have answered a single one of them about me or any of the other people on our team. He was a nice person, just uninterested in other people. Trust me, if you share pieces of your life on your blog, I am paying attention. I know who loves dachshunds, who has kids in college, whose partners have health issues and what kind of software you like the best.
I have a special tag in my email so that I can easily find letters from the people who have written me about the things I've posted, even the people who just have technical questions. I like providing technical help. It does not make me feel taken advantage of. I've had people write to me about some deeply personal topics, about quitting drinking and dealing with depression, about struggles at work and in their relationships. I consider it a real privilege to get a letter like that.
I have no idea how many people read Living Out Loud. Sure there are analytics and I look at those but I have a hard time translating those numbers into human beings. My favorite part of analytics is seeing that someone has posted a link back to something I've written. That's the best feeling. I try to repay the favor and promote my favorites in return. It's all part of being am IndieWeb blogger and member of a community of creative people who have chosen the same medium to share themselves with the world. It takes what it takes to get us all to where we are today. Hindsight is 20/20. I just wish I'd wasted a lot less energy on Facebook all those years when I could have beeb doing this instead. Of well.
If you've read enough posts on this blog to know me a little, I appreciate you. I'm a fortunate man.
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