CharmBar - Easy Dock Customization
Like many Mac users, I enjoy customizing the look of my operating
system. I particularly like the look of older, vintage icons from Mac
history, having spent a lot of memorable and enjoyable times on older
machines. There are several apps that let you make changes to program
icons, Replacicon
is a well known example, but Apple made it hard to alter systems icons,
Don't like the Finder face? Tough. Apple wants you to have it.
Enter CharmBar, a delightful little app from kepler.cafe, makers of DockDoor, another well thought out app that gives you Window previews when you hover the cursor over icons on the dock. Using Charmbar, you can alter or replace dock icons.with any emoji, jpg or png file. Its simple interface lets you create your own library of files. When you pick an application icon to add your own touches to, you select one or more of the images you've added to your library and overlay the original icon. You can completely cover it up or just add whimsical flourishes.
Your changes show up in real time. If you grow tired of the extra elements, they'll go away when you close the program, which runs from the menu bar.
Charmbar is a one-time purchase of $5 on Gumroad. One license code is good for installing the app on up to three Macs. There are no subscriptions and no invasive elements to suck away your data. The developer is active on Reddit, and doesn't appear to mind interacting with the community.
Retirement So Far
As the end of my second week of retired life draws to an end, I am reminded that nothing is routine. Weather irregularities and disruptions caused by maintenance issues at the university have had Wonder Woman working from home, which is nice because I like hanging out with her even when she is busy. It's kept me from firmly entrenching myself in a routine, however. When I told her that she was messing with my flow, she didn't appreciate it. All I meant is that it is challenging to establish a routine when the pattern of the days varies so much. Sheesh!
I've continued to work on my home office. It got relocated from our unused dining room to the living area where the two of us hang out so that I can work on my projects without being in a different part of the house. I rounded up all the external hard drives I had floating around, a total of eleven. When added together, they give me 17 TB of extra storage added to the four TB of internal storage in my computers. A lot of that will be unused space for a while. Some of it is being used as backup locations. I set up a Plex server on my Linux computer with movies, TV shows, music, and photos.
Another project is disconnecting from all the big tech companies apart from Apple to the extent possible. We are leaving Gmail and using Fastmail. I have all my important accounts using the new email already. I spend about an hour a day moving some other 240 accounts using my Google credentials each day. I will have that finished by the middle of April. I managed to download and remove the DRM from 500 Kindle ebooks and 500 Audible audiobooks. We are trying to decide on new vendors for each of those media types. We are dropping Amazon Prime next month, so I am in the process of downloading nearly a TB of backed up photos from there. I uninstalled all Microsoft products from my computers, but those sneaky bastards left several processes behind that I had to remove via the Terminal to finally disconnect.
I set up a weekly lunch data with my father. He's the primary caregiver for my step-mother who has advanced Alzheimer's. He needs a break once in a while, and I am happy to spend time with him. We've never been especially close, but he is fun to spend time with. He's a talented storyteller and good at making conversation.
I've assumed sole responsibility for the grocery shopping so that our weekends aren't partially given over to that chore. Wonder Woman wanted me to start making some of her favorite vegetables more frequently, so I've been loading up on asparagus, zucchini, fresh green beans and the like. She never turns down a cuppa either, so we've been having many mugs of the top-shelf Irish tea I love so much.
My sleep patterns are shot all to hell. We go to bed early because Wonder Woman likes to run before work. I am usually awake for good between 2:00 and 3:00 AM, when I get up to start writing. Of course, I get sleepy later on, indulging in a nap while sitting on the couch. I'd like to consolidate that sleep to a continuous period during the night but so far it's not working out.
We've had a couple of weekend getaways. One was to Raleigh for my birthday where we had a good time visiting our favorite restaurants and shops. Then we went down to the South Carolina low country for a race. Next weekend is the first camping trip of 2025 with five of the grandkids. Next month we are going back to Southwest Virginia for the first time since Hurricane Helene. My kiddos have been on the road too or are getting ready to. My daughter and family went to Costa Rica for a family vacation. She's been sending me daily pictures and keeping me updated. My son is preparing for a trip next week to Frankfurt and Berlin for business. His passion is art and I hope he gets a chance to see some good museums between meetings.
As you can see, I have not been bored or looking for things to do. My dream of long spells of uninterrupted time to write has yet to come to fruition, but it will get here soon enough.
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Birds of Asia
The Scarlet-faced Liocichla, native to Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam, and southern China. #Birds
Giving Criticism
On my software review blog, AppAddict, I focus on apps I like and that I think will be helpful to other Mac users. The only time I write negative reviews is when I don't like a company's business practices or when my take on an app is different than that of the majority. I give apps a fair test and I'm generally willing to give a developer the benefit of the doubt. I've gotten good feedback from a number of them, including a few I've kind of idolized over the years. The day will come, though, when the author of one of the apps of which I was critical is going to hit me up with a WTF? I'll be glad to listen and if I got something wrong, I'll correct my mistake.I won't just change my take on it because someone asks me to. Lame.
I don't think many people are good at giving constructive criticism or negative feedback. Have you ever had a boss that would email the entire department when trying to correct one person's behavior because they were just to chickenshit to talk to them one on one? I endured that for years with more than one boss. Another indicator of poor people skills is when a boss waits until your annual performance review to criticize you, instead of being a coach or a mentor. Managers get paid to manage, but too many of them don't seem ti like that part of the job.
Giving criticism isn't being mean. Sometimes withholding it is. It's a skill that can be learned. Here are some resources.
How To Give Constructive Criticism: 6 Helpful Tips - Personal Excellence - Includes the infamous feedback sandwich method
Do You Know How To Write A Good Bad Review? | by Liz King | Medium - By now we all know where to look for online reviews — on Yelp, Google, or Facebook. But do we know how to write them, and do we understand how they can impact a small business?
Are You Being Too Critical in Your Relationship? | Psychology Today - Because we aren't taught how to navigate differences in our relationships, we tend to do it badly. However, as adults, we can learn to navigate differences in a healthy way, fostering more safety and connection in our relationships.
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New File Finding App, Cling, Is Not Everything
I recently saw a new Mac file finding app, Cling, announced on Macupdate and
Thriftmac. The description of
the app said that it brings fuzzy search to a utility with a GUI.
Searches with partial or misspelled file names are promised to work. The developer's website states
that the app is designed to be similar in function to the legendary
Windows file finding utility, Everything,
which is indeed, one of the best file finding apps I have ever used.
I've installed it for many users who needed to search network drives
containing thousands of files.
I read the documentation on the website which went into detail about the amount of CPU power consumed and the memory needed to run Cling. Logically, since it does not use the Spotlight indez like some other search tools, it n needed time after starting the first time to create its own index. The website said that it takes about five minutes. I gave it a couple of hours. I ran my first seach using the word Obsidian as my search term. I've written several articles and taken a lot of notes about the app by that name. I wanted to see what Cling would return. To my surprise and dismay, it returned a list of folders with Obsidian in the path name. I tried several other searches and discovered that including a file extension helped it locate files to some extent. The results Windows only shows 30 results by default, which you can adjust up to 100, but there is no way to have it show you all the files it finds that match what you are searching for.
To compare the results, I used Find any File, another Mac file-finding utility that builds its own indez. A search for Obsidian returned 4,734 hits, all of which it displayed for me to sort and search through. I did not have to try different file extensions, nor did my results contain unrelated folders that had Obsidian in the path name. I was much happier with the results.
Other Mac search utilities that worked better for me are:
Farm House on River Road
An abandoned tenant house on the Hubbard farm in rural Cumberland County, NC
I was reviewing my journal this morning and saw this from today’s date in 2024 - Congratulations and Happy Anniversary to @jarrod
Window to the Past
Window to the past. Think of the conversations held around that table. McDougald Road, Mamers, NC 
How To Make Me Like Your Blog
Reblogged from last May because I like this one!
As I spend less and less time on commercial websites and more time
exploring the blogs on IndieWeb platforms, I am developing a type and
preferences. There's plenty to choose from.
I like tech but not too much tech
For better
or worse, it takes a fairly technical person to get involved in
blogging. A lot of the people I read are developers of some sort or
other even if they don't write about that part of their lives that much.
I enjoy reading about the relationship people have with the tech in
their life and how that has evolved over time. I find it interesting to
read about what people are making, although if a blog primarily consists
of code blocks and inside baseball talk about the nuances of particular
programming languages, I'm probably going to move on. Most people do a
pretty good job at striking a balance.
I like smart and smart-ass but not people who think themselves
smarter than everyone else
There are a few bloggers
who consistently write about how dumb people are and it's a big old turn
off. I like smart people. I like people smarter than me (not hard). I
even like people with a smart ass sense of humor but I have worked for
too long with stereotypical computer support people who think all end
users are stupid and I'm so very weary of that attitude. I think it's
great to point out the misconceptions of others but it's boorish if
that's the main thing someone writes about.
I like people whose political content is about peace,
compassion, equality and diversity
In other words,
I'm not a fan of, nor will I read very much of what passes as
conservative ideology these days. I don't want to live in a bubble but
I'm just not going to waste any of my remaining time on this planet
engaging with people who don't believe in climate change or the
importance of stamping out white supremacy or in allowing people to be
as non-traditional as they want to be. Luckily, I haven't run into too
much of that on Mastodon or Scribbles or Micro.blog.
I like consistency
If you are the kind of
blogger who just spits out content day after day, I'm here to tell you
to keep it up! I realize not everybody has that in them and that's OK.
With me, you just don't have to worry that you post too much. If you
only write a few paragraphs a week, it's harder to get to know you, to
develop curiosity about your the things you share. I don't always have
the time or the inclination to read 5,000 word missives, but I like
knowing what folks are up to.
I like friendly
I'm from the south and have
lived here my whole life. Down here we have a sort of innate
familiarity. We are apt to ask how your Mama's doing even if we don't
know her. I like people who come across with that same sort of vibe,
letting pieces of their real lives leak out. I absolutely do not mind
hearing about you feeling tired taking your kid to basketball practice
or shocking news about your grandma's affair. I like authentic people
who don't posture, who are just themselves, struggling like the rest of
us to make sense of a confusing world without resorting to barrier
building between themselves and their readers.
Quotes for Every Occassion - Please Share Yours!
I love quotes. Nothing would make me happier than for you to send me any of your favorites in an email, or post them on mastodon or Bluesky and tag me. I'll be glad to give a shout out to anyone who cares to share.
"Everything you can imagine is real." — Pablo Picasso
“Dreams are extremely important. You can’t do it unless you imagine it.” — George Lucas
"Who looks outward dreams, who looks inward awakens." — Carl Jung
I was doing some maintenance on my collection of quotes today, a relaxing, if never ending task. I had a few highlights I'd saved without also recording the author's name, so I did a full text search for them on Kagi and found out that Goodreads has a huge quotes repository. Every single quote I was looking for had a Goodreads page. I found pages for Albert Camus, Maya Angelo, Joseph Campbell and several other notables.
More Quote Websites
A-Z Quotes | Quotes for All Occasions
Best and famous collection of quotes at QuotesLyfe
My Collection of 500+ Authors and Quotes
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In Search of the Perfect Quotes App
I have collected quotes for years, using various apps, Obsidian Notes, spreadsheets and Google Docs. I am still in search of the elusive perfect, feature packed app. Here's what I would like the app to be able to do.
Features I Want
- Import from a spreadsheet containing the quote, author, source, tag(s), date collected
- iCloud or other reliable syncing mechanism
- Export individual quotes in a format suitable for social media
- Universal (Mac and iOS)
- Automatic import of author pictures and biographies from Wikipedia or other source
- Share sheet in and out
- Searchable by tag or author
- A nice to have, but not absolutely required feature would be importing Kindle highlights
Apps That Have Some of These Features
- Quotemarks - Quote Notebook - This comes close, but it doesn't sync through the cloud and doesn't have a way to share anything but text to social media.
- Thoughts - Inspiration Manager - iOS only. Does not display a list of authors. Tag list is not in alphabetical order.
- Quotes - Organize and Recall - Mac only. Can't import anything other than a Kindle clippings file.
- Quotebook by Lickability - The OG quotes app dating back to 2011. It was removed from the App Store in 2016, but has remained usable. The deprecated version has good syncing via iCloud, automatic import of author pictures and biographies, import and export through CSV. There is no Mac version, however and it's sure to break one day since it is quintessential abandonware.
- Quotz - a nice iOS app of quality quotes, but you can't add your own. It does have good sharing features though
- BrainyQuote - Another nice quote data base with good sharing features, but with no way to add your own content
- TextShot - Works on Mac and iOS. Allows you to create your own quotes with title, author and source, but only saves image files of the quotes, no tagging, no searching.
- Quotify - No way to import existing quote collection except through one at a time manual entry. Have to use work around for tagging. Doesn't display a list of authors or tags. Has nice sharing features. The individual import feature is also well thought out.
Quote Sources
If you are interested, I have a repository on GitHub with Markdown notes from 500+ authors and public figures with one or more quotes from each of them. Browse the notes or download a ZIP of the whole thing. They are formatted for Obsidian, if that's your jam.
Goodreads also has an extensive quote library.
ACAB or Not?
The centrist and traditionalist wing of the Democratic Party stays perpetually irritated at the more progressive and leftist members of the party. James Carville recently said that "defund the police" were the three stupidest words ever uttered by a politician. I can never tell whether the Democrats who rake in all the corporate dollars are compromised progressives or not. I have a hard time believing that Barak Obama was ever truly against same-sex marriage, or Bill Clinton either for that matter, but both of them stood in front of news cameras and said they were. I tend to think they were both temporary sell outs for the sake of courting middle of the road voters.
Richard Nixon and George Wallace both ran a law and order campaign in 1968, appealing to older people who were put off by all the scary black people and the college kids raising hell about the war. For a long time, members of both parties were all about mandatory minimum sentences, building more prisons, and hiring more cops. Right-wing television has never met a killer cop they didn't like and defend. Most voters seem to be OK with short-changing all kinds of people in need to be able to spend money on law enforcement. Smart politicians try to scare the hell out of people because it works. Scared people vote for those they think will protect them.
I'll go ahead and say that no, I do not think All Cops Are Bastards (ACAB). I don't believe that all of any group is homogeneous. I do think that police work, unfortunately, attracts too many people who aren't suited for it. Too many cops shoot to kill, claiming they were scared for their life because some black person did something besides lay perfectly still on the ground. Too may judges and juries fall for that shit and too may people are dead because of it. Hey, it can be a scary job, I get it, but if you tend to frighten easily, don't sign up for the police. Do something else.
The tiny university where I worked spent big bucks buying gear for the campus police, including two four-wheel-drive vehicles and new long barrelled weapons. This was the same year they laid off librarians, admin assistants and humanities professors. Of course, they also changed the names of the DEI department since January too. But hey, people still have their pronouns in the email signatures and discreet pride flags can be seen, so the important stuff is covered, I guess.
I'm going to go ahead and say, too, that if you think we need militarized police forces with armored vehicles and arsenals of automatic weapons, you and I probably should not hang out. If you think we require more prisons while ignoring aging school buildings, stay away from me. If you are already over the death of George Floyd and think all that Black Lives Matter stuff was a bad idea, well, you aren't alone, but neither are you right.
All over the US, people who were late to the party to recognize police violence against people of color are already sauntering back to their liberal (I don't mean that in a good way) attitudes. That's when you support people of color as long as they don't live next door. The right-wing crazies are making room for the reluctant supporters of maybe, just maybe, spending a little less on cops and a little more on preventing crime to abandon that risky idea. I mean, when James Carville is calling you stupid, how can you be right?
Well, not me folks. I'm all for spending money on kids, education, health care, poverty prevention and a host of other worth causes and instead of the po-po. I don't think giving the police even more immunity from violent crimes they commit is anything but crazy. I think that anyone who is afraid to publicly state that Black Lives Matter is a POS. Sorry, if the shoe fits. I'm not going to be one of those white folks who are secretly relieved that it is OK to be a little racist again. I'm not going to sell out my LGB or my T friends either, no matter how easy it now is to get away with it. Why, because right is right and wrong is wrong and popular opinion ain't got shit to do with it.
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Black and White Diner
Not your average taco place, is it? One of their specialties is bulgogi with kimci.
<img src=“https://amerpie.lol/uploads/2025/day-one2025-03-11-at-04.10.38.jpeg" width=“600” height=“399” alt=“A black and white image of a retro diner interior featuring a long counter with several swivel bar stools. The counter area is attended by three staff members working in the kitchen. The ceiling has pendant lights and ceiling fans. On the left, there are several round tables with chairs. A large sign above the counter reads “Off the Hook Taco Emporium.” The overall atmosphere is vintage and cozy.">
Underrated Awesome Stuff
One of my favorite parts of living in the information age is the ease of discovery of entertainment options. I remember when we had to wait for the TV Guide to show up in the mailbox, listen to FM radio and read the siges outside the cinema for information. Now, thanks to huge databases and fan communities, you can get in depth suggestions from your digital alter ego at a moment's notice. It's also fun tio find out what your friends like. You can ask questions and give feedback. Here are a few under the radar picks from yours truly.
Books
- Lexicon by Max Barry - a science fiction novel about an organization that teaches it's candidates how to use language as a way to control the minds of others
- Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing by Ted Conover - the author practices immersice journalism by placing himself in situations where he experiences life first hand in order to write about it. In this case he takes a job as a guard at Sing Sing prison in NY to explore modern American prisons.
- A Rising Man (Sam Wyndham, #1) by Abir Mukherjee - Set in India during the British Raj, this is a novel featuring a detective who is an opium addicted veteran of The Great War. It has a great sense of time and place.
- Never a Dull Moment: 1971 The Year That Rock Exploded by David Hepworth - I love books about music and this one thoroughly explores the greatest year in rock hostory when classic albums by Led Zepplin, The Who, Carole King, James Taylor, Rod Stewart, Joanie Mitchell and more were released.
- The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World by Michael Pollan - Michael Pollan may be the best popular science writer alive. In this book he explores four plants: the apple, the tulip, marijuana, and the potato in a way that us informative and entertaining.
TV Shows
- Scott & Bailey - D.C. Rachel Bailey and D.C. Janet Scott have a robust and engaging friendship which enables them to draw upon each other’s strengths and investigate murders for the Manchester Metropolitan Police. I love the strong female leads.
- Broadchurch - The murder of a young boy in a small coastal town brings a media frenzy, which threatens to tear the community apart. I've been a David Tennant and an Olivia Coleman fave ever since I watched this.
- The Fall - When the Police Service of Northern Ireland are unable to close a case after 28 days, Detective Superintendent Stella Gibson of the Metropolitan Police Service is called in to review the case. Under her new leadership, the local detectives must track down and stop a serial killer who is terrorising the city of Belfast. Not one to watch alone. It is intense.
- Inspector George Gently - A British crime drama adapted from the George Gently novels by Alan Hunt and set in the 1960s. Inspector George Gently is an old-school detective trying to come to terms with a time when the lines between the police and criminals have become blurred. British cop shows are so much better than American ones. They think more, shoot less.
- Foyle's War - As WW2 rages around the world, DCS Foyle fights his own war on the home-front as he investigates crimes on the south coast of England. Foyle's War opens in southern England in the year 1940. A great job of recreating Britain during its greatest hour.
Movies
- The Station Agent (2003) - When his only friend dies, a man born with dwarfism moves to rural New Jersey to live a life of solitude, only to meet a chatty hot dog vendor and a woman dealing with her own personal loss. Peter Dinklage before GOT.
- Yesterday (2019) - A struggling musician realizes he's the only person on Earth who can remember The Beatles after waking up in an alternate reality where the group was forgotten. Lot's of Beatles music and a few surprises.
- The Dig (2021) - As WWII looms, a wealthy widow hires an amateur archaeologist to excavate the burial mounds on her estate. When they make a historic discovery, the echoes of Britain's past resonate in the face of its uncertain future. One of those movies that will have you reading Wikipedia articles as soon as it is over.
- Chef (2014) - When Chef Carl Casper suddenly quits his job at a prominent Los Angeles restaurant after refusing to compromise his creative integrity for its controlling owner, he is left to figure out what's next. Finding himself in Miami, he teams up with his ex-wife, his friend and his son to launch a food truck. Taking to the road, Chef Carl goes back to his roots to reignite his passion for the kitchen -- and zest for life and love. Even though Jon Favreau is responsible for a bunch of MCU schlock, he redeems himself in this story about self discovery and parenthood.
- The Bookshop (2017) - Set in a small English town in 1959, a woman decides, against polite but ruthless local opposition, to open a bookshop, a decision which becomes a political minefield. Another story with a strong, indomitable female character.
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Swinsian Music App - The Answer to Feature Bloat
Swinsian is an app for playing
music that ticks every box in what a Mac based music player for local
libraries sgould be. I can think of no other app that exemplifies bloat
like Apple's Music app, a product desgned not for ease of use, but for
maximization of revenue. Someone in Cupertino decided that none of us
who had massive, carefully tagged collections of music files collected
over the years deserved an app to make thge best use of our tunes. They
decided we' were just going to stream and that we were going to be happy
doing it.
Swinsian took a backup of my iTunes (yes, iTunes) library from 2017, with 32K songs from 2.3K albums and imported the information in a matter of minutes, complete with play counts, ratings and playlists. The customizable interface is reminiscent of a time when iTunes just worked. Now that the information is imported, Swinsian will monitor the folder where I keep my music and automatically add any other files I place there.
You can download and use all of the features of Swinsian without limitations for 30 days, after which it requires a license costing $25. It's available at the developer's website.
Features
Customize
There are multiple ways to view tracks: art grid, column browser and track inspector, all of which can be hidden if you are into a minimal interface.
Organize
Tag multiple tracks at once with ease. Use regular expressions to find and replace tags, ensuring your music stays perfectly tagged. The Duplicate Finder comes in handy, helping you find and remove duplicate tracks with flexible criteria, keeping your library organized and clutter-free.
Control
Control playback with global shortcuts and the mini window. The customizable desktop art widget adds a nice touch to the interface.
Other Nice Touches
- Folder watching
- Album art fetching
- Playback Notifications
- Last.fm scrobbling
- Separate playlist windows
- Find and replace tag editing, with regex support
- Smart playlists
- Library stats
- Playback over AirPlay
- Automatic Podcast downloading
- Applescript control
Audiophile Information
- 10 or 31 band Graphic Equalizer
- Supports Flac, MP3, AAC, ALAC, Ogg Vorbis, WMA, WAV, Opus, AC3, AIFF, MusePack, DSF, and APE.
- Gapless playback
- Automatic changing of device sample rate
- Support for cue files and embedded cue information
Other Reviews
SW Virginia Before the Hurricane
From The Virgina Creeper Trail, Mount Rogers National Recreation Area prior to Hurricane Helene. It looks much different now.
Communication Evolution
For years when I was growing up, my Mom's husband refused to get a telephone put in our house. What was strange was that he was a journalist. He spent so much time at the newspaper office that they never needed to call him at home. The rest of us just did without talking to our grandparents or friends except in person. I'm not sure how my mother managed to arrange visits with the family, but she figured it out.
One set of grandparents were on a party line. One long ring meant the call was for them. Two short rings meant it was for the neighbors. If you wanted call someone in the same town, you only had to dial five numbers. Theirs was the first phone number I ever learned and more than 50 years later, I still remember it.
I moved to my uncle's farm when I was a freshman in high school. He and my aunt lived in a 100-year-old farmhouse that thankfully had a telephone, but just one. It had about 50 feet (ca. 15 m) of phone wire tethering it to the wall, so it was semi-portable if you cared to string the wire all through the house to get someplace where you could talk in private.
I wasn't dying to get a cell phone when they first became popular. The whole process of typing out texts on a keypad seemed utterly ridiculous and only business executives and politicians had Blackberrys. Besides, I wanted an actual portable computer, so I spent my money on a Palm Pilot at first. I eventually had to get a cell phone for work. My youngest daughter got a job at Subway, just so she could buy a cell phone, buy somehow I got stuck with the bill. She started dating a GI whose home state, and cell phone number were both Florida based. It didn't matter that he was right down the road at Ft. Bragg. Every time she called him, and she called him A LOT, it was a long-distance charge. She also couldn't stay within her limit of text messages and I got a few surprises there too.
I wish I had the nerd cred to claim ownership of a first gen iPhone, but I didn't make the move until 2009. One of my co-workers was at the Apple Store on Day One though, and he laid down the dough for that squat, under-powered little world changer. There wasn't even an app store. You just went to websites that acted like apps. Steve Jobs said they were just as good.
Once I got an iPhone, I became one of those new phone every year people for the next decade. I made a few release day drives to the nearest Apple Store, a 75-mile one-way drive from home. Luckily, I've never broken a display despite dropping the damn things hundreds of times. I've even driven off with my phone on the hood of my car and didn't break it by slinging it onto the road. I have washed an iPhone in the washing machine. I was sad about that. I also left my phone and wallet at a store when out on a long bike ride once and didn't get either of them back.
I kept the iPhone 11 for four years. I only upgraded because Obsidian wouldn't work correctly on a phone that old. Of course, these days everyone has a phone. My parents both have iPhones and only call me about them occasionally. All but the youngest of the grandkids have phones and I absolutely love texting them. If Wonder Woman and I do anything fun without them, I let them know. I don't go in a candy store without sending "Wish you were here!!" One of our kids, the youngest is a rebellious sort occasionally goes over to the dark side and rocks an Android from time to time. My sister, who has multiple degrees, good politics, a kind heart and a giant brain, has never owned a single Apple product in her life, a character flaw if there ver was one. My Republican brother is also Not An Apple Person. Everyone else is, though.
I like to look at my usage stats from time to time. My goal each month is to have less than five minutes of actual voice use. I don't care how much data I burn through or how many messages I send and receive, I just don't want to talk on the phone. This isn't the 80s.
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Can We Agree That Recipe Blogs Are the Worst?
I like a great many elements of the Internet, even in 2025, when cookie banners, privacy warnings, newsletter subscription popups and the like rob us all of some joy while we browser. I get hives when I have to search for a simple recipe. Every person who's ever read an article on how to monetize a blog seems to have decided that the blog they need to create should have recipes and a metric ton of search engine optimization crap on it. Not only that, instead of just saying "This is good. You should cook it." Recipe bloggers need to talk about how their Aunt Nancy made the recipe on ger organic Vermont rabbit farm when they were kids. I don't like it. Not a fan.
Here are some recipe websites where you don't have to deal with that anxiety inducing clutter. If you want to make some cornbread, they will tell you how to do it without commenting on how you should feel about doing it.
If You Need to Bake a Cake - Get Mela Recipe Manager
I've got cake on the brain today, for some reason...
I've extensively tested four different recipe management apps, all available in the App Store:
All of them are quality apps and they are not mirror images of each other. Anylist, for example has helpful features unrelated to groceries or cooking. It, along with Crouton, is a subscription app. Paprika is a one time purchase of $29.99. Mela, my pick for recipes, is only $9.99. The developer, Silvio Rizzi, is also responsible for the popular RSS app Reeder Classic and the chronological timeline app, Reeder. He's a talented developer but has a reputation for being difficult to get a response from. I don't have personal experience in that area. His apps work fine for me and I've never had to contact him.
Mela Features
- In app browser with preview - If you've looked for recipes online, you know they can be buried in SEO slop and lots of stories about how Aunt Nancy used to bake this cake. Mela helps avoid that by automatically extracting most recipes from wordy websites.
- Feeds - If you have favorite cooking blogs, you can subscribe to them from within Mela and read the recipes in the viewer.
- Cook Mode - Displays the recipe in a large, easy to read font and can load multiple recipes for the same meal
- Timers - In app timers to use when preparing meals
- Scanner - Scan and OCR recipes from cookbooks and magazines
- Apple Integration - Meal planning is calendar based and can be viewed and shared on devices whether Mela is installed on them or not. Grocery lists are managed in reminders and can also be shared on non-Mela devices.
- Printing - You can print Mela recipes
- Organizing - Create categories for your saved recipes based on your won criteria
The iOS/iPadOS version of Mela is an extra purchase, but it is only $4.99