This Week's Bookmarks - 50 Movies, How Many Cigs, Outrage Fatigue, Cringe Matrix, Photo Creepiness, WikiTok, Font Generator
50 of the Most Rewatchable Movies Ever Made | Lifehacker - Because sometimes, you just want a known quantity, and some movies seem designed to be watched again and again. Others simply go down so agreeably that you can't help but find them comforting.
Catalog – HOW MANY CIGARETTES? - There were 124 cigarettes smoked on Casablanca, 54 in Fight Club. Look up your favorite movie and find how soon the starts will dies of lung cancer.
Outrage Fatigue Is Real. Here’s Why We Feel It and How to Cope | Scientific American - Repeated exposure to outrage-inducing news or events can lead to emotional exhaustion. An expert who studies online outrage says there are ways to cope
The Cringe Matrix - by Haley Nahman - Despite being treated in the popular imagination as something specific—earnestness, maybe—I think cringe is more layered and complex than that.
They See Your Photos - Your photos reveal a lot of private information. In this experiment, we use the Google Vision API to see how much can be inferred about you from a single photo. See what they see.
WikiTok - Instead of doom scrolling midlessly through some corporate owned social media mind number, spend your time on this endless feed of Wikipedia articles and learn a bit when you get bored.
Font Generator - 𝓒𝓸𝓹𝔂 𝖆𝖓𝖉 𝓟𝓪𝓼𝓽𝓮 Fancy Cool Text - Make your text fun and stylish with our fancy text generator 🌟 featuring a wide variety of font styles ready for easy copy and paste.
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Charlotte on a cold winter night.
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I Picked My Top 20 Apps
I'm not really bothered by having more than 500 apps installed on my Mac. According to Lingon X, I have 102 apps either as login items or running in the background as helper apps. I write app reviews on my other blog, AppAddict every day, always something I have downloaded, installed and used on my personal Mac. I love my Setapp subscription because it gives me an ever-growing library of high-quality apps to try out for the same monthly price. But if all this goodness evaporated suddenly and i was forced to run vanilla macOS plus twenty apps to get my work done, which out of all the ones that own would I choose? Answering this requires some tough choices. Many of these apps I have been using for more than a decade, although a few have been adopted in the past year.
Since I am retired, I no longer need any networking, development or analysis apps. I use my Mac primarily for research and for writing. The graphics work I do is simple and straightforward. Even though I have Pixelmator and Acorn, I end up using simpler tools most of the time.
- Obsidian - an extensible note-taking app that is also well suited for writers. I've composed more than 500K words in it during the past year.
- Clean Shot X - the best screenshot utility
- Raycast - an app launcher that handles much more
- Keyboard Maestro - the ultimate Mac automation tool
- Vivaldi Browser- my choice for web browsing for reasons
- PopClip - a text selection utility
- TextExpander - a snippets app
- Drafts - a text automation app
- Day One - the preeminent journaling app for macOS
- Default Folder X - an enhancement for open and save dialog boxes
- Hazel - a Mac automation tool for file management
- DropZone 4- a file shelf utility
- Toyviewer - a Preview replacement for images with editing capabilities
- Qspace | AppAddict - a substitute for Finder
- Scratchpad - a menu bar utility for floating notes
- BarTender - I didn't buy into the hysteria, I just set up some Little Snitch rules
- Better Touch Tool - multi-purpose automation app
- Find Any File - a search utility
- Things 3- a task manager
- Kiwi for Gmail - Not a well-known email app, but one I've used off and on for years
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The Story of How I Didn't Murder a Drunk Professional Turkey Killer
For a while before I went on active duty, I was in the National Guard, assigned to Headquarters Company of an armored battalion of M1 tanks. My military job at the time was being part of a crew operating an armored personnel carrier with a 4.2 inch mortar mounted in it. That's the biggest mortar the Army has. It fires a round larger than 105 Howitzer. There is no trigger mechanism on a mortar. Instead, a firing pin is mounted at the bottom of a long tube. The ammunition bearer fixes an explosive charge to the bottom of the mortar shell. He hands it to the assistant gunner who fits the rear end of the shell into the mortar tube. When the gunner, who is responsible for using a telescopic sight to aim the weapon, gives him the go ahead, the assistant gunner releases the round. It slides down the tube until it hits the firing pin. This detonates the charge and the shell is launched with a range of about 4000 meters.
There are four types of shells that can be fired from a 4.2 inch mortar: high explosive, white phosphorus, smoke and chemical weapons. I fired all of those except the chemical rounds which, although manufactured by the hundreds of thousands, were never used. If the gun crew didn't keep the tube clean, the debris could interfere with the round sliding down the tube, resulting in what is known as a hang fire. While I was in this unit, another crew of mortar gunners firing from the same range where we trained had a hang fire while firing white phosphorus rounds. The resulting explosion killed everyone in the gun crew and badly burned members firing from nearby positions. It's dangerous work. You're dealing with stuff designed to be as lethal as possible, and there isn't a lot of room for error.
My section leader, a sergeant, was named Larry “Big Dog” Evans. His full-time civilian job was killing turkeys in a poultry processing plant in town. To my knowledge, I never saw him completely sober, ever, not once. He was funny and profane and didn't have a mean bone in his body. I wanted to kill him. He made live fire exercises a nightmare. All of his mortar training had been on the job. Whereas I had actually been through indirect fire school at Ft. Benning. Big Dog had been a specialist 5 clerk-typist who was converted into a sergeant and squad leader when the unit's mission and the Army rank structure was changed. He had never been to an NCO class. Such was life in the National Guard in the decade after the end of the Vietnam War.
This particular drill weekend, we were live firing high explosive and white phosphorus rounds at Ft. Bragg. Our platoon leader was a nervous second-lieutenant who ran a convenience store for his father-in-law. He was scared of enlisted men and was seldom seen. Big Dog was drunker than Cooter Brown and couldn't get the sights lined up with aiming stakes, no matter how hard he tried. It's important when firing big weapons that you know where you are aiming because of the whole thing about them killing everyone in the location where they land. I was having to do my job and his, a situation I loudly protested, even though I was just a PFC.
My situation wasn't made any better by the situation at home. I was 19, married, with a son already and a daughter on the way. My civilian job had just ended unexpectedly. It was one I'd uprooted my entire family to move several counties away from where we knew people. I had no idea what I was going to do about that, and now I had the stress of trying not to die at the hands of a drunk professional turkey killer. Finally, someone called the company First Sergeant on the radio and told him that he might want to come prevent Big Dog's death at my hands.
When he arrived at the training area in his jeep, he called a cease fire and training stopped. He summoned me to the vehicle and asked me to tell him what was going on. I could hardly talk, but I sputtered out the story of the dangerous incompetence I felt was endangering everyone. The First Sergeant promised to take Big Dog off the range and talk to him about drinking during training. Since this was a wholly normal situation because being inebriated was his normal state, the First Sergeant wanted to know why this particular instance had gotten me so wound up. I told him about losing my job and not knowing what to do. He immediately told me that he was a building superintendent for a commercial construction firm. He said that if I would come to his job site on Monday, he would hire me. All I had to do was promise to calm down and quit threatening to kill his NCOs. I told him I thought I could handle that.
The following Monday, I showed up where the company was building medical offices and went to work. I kept that job until I finally enlisted in the regular Army. I'll always be grateful for that man's leadership and guidance. He was old school and I learned a lot from him.
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When I worked at a large rural high school, I used to take a walk every day at lunchtime, even when we’d have a rare southern snow storm.
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Lorikeets, a nectar eating parrot found in Australia. It is common along the eastern seaboard, from northern Queensland to South Australia.
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My Raycast Extensions
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A Mastodon friend asked me to list the Raycast extensions I have
installed. Raycast is a replacement for Spotlight that has considerable
superpowers in its vast extension library. I use Raycast as my clipboard
manager, emoji picker, window manager and I do quite a lot of image
modification with it. As you can see, there are many more features
available.
90% of the feature set is free. The $10 a month pro subscriptions buys the ability to sync your settings between computers, interact with AI advanced features and some more options with Raycast notes. You also get regular backups of your settings.
You can see a categorized list of extensions here.
89 installed extensions
Basic Bookmarks https://raycast.com/rauno/bmrks
2FA Code Finder https://raycast.com/yuercl/imessage-2fa
Alt-Text Generator https://raycast.com/jack\_casica/alt-text-generator
Amphetamine https://raycast.com/gstvds/amphetamine
Apple Reminders https://raycast.com/raycast/apple-reminders
Auto Quit App https://raycast.com/koinzhang/auto-quit-app
Battery Health https://raycast.com/o1y/battery-health
BetterTouchTool https://raycast.com/dnnsmnstrr/bettertouchtool
Bing Search https://raycast.com/maver1ck/bing-search
Bing Wallpaper https://raycast.com/koinzhang/bing-wallpaper
Bitly URL Shortener https://raycast.com/blessanm86/bitly-url-shortener
Bluesky https://raycast.com/dharamkapila/bluesky
Brew https://raycast.com/nhojb/brew
Browser Bookmarks https://raycast.com/raycast/browser-bookmarks
Browser History https://raycast.com/crisboarna/browser-history
Browser Tabs https://raycast.com/koinzhang/browser-tabs
Change Case https://raycast.com/erics118/change-case
ChatGPT https://raycast.com/abielzulio/chatgpt
CleanShot X https://raycast.com/Aayush9029/cleanshotx
Clipboard Editor https://raycast.com/pomdtr/clipboard-editor
Clipboard Formatter https://raycast.com/joshtemple/clipboard-formatter
Close All Open Apps https://raycast.com/guide/close-apps
Coffee https://raycast.com/mooxl/coffee
Color Picker https://raycast.com/thomas/color-picker
CopyQ Clipboard Manager https://raycast.com/andrewcincotta/copyq-clipboard-manager
Day One https://raycast.com/AntonNiklasson/day-one
Downloads Manager https://raycast.com/thomas/downloads-manager
Drafts https://raycast.com/FlohGro/drafts
Dropover https://raycast.com/jag-k/dropover
DuckDuckGo Search https://raycast.com/tegola/duck-duck-go-search
Easy OCR https://raycast.com/Rafo94/easy-ocr
Emoji Search https://raycast.com/FezVrasta/emoji
Fantastical https://raycast.com/devahschaefers/fantastical
Flush DNS https://raycast.com/rasmusbe/flush-dns
Folder Search https://raycast.com/GastroGeek/folder-search
Font Awesome https://raycast.com/dutzi/font-awesome
GIF Search https://raycast.com/josephschmitt/gif-search
Google Drive https://raycast.com/vishaltelangre/google-drive
Google Gemini https://raycast.com/EvanZhouDev/raycast-gemini
Google Maps Search https://raycast.com/ratoru/google-maps-search
Google Search https://raycast.com/mblode/google-search
Google Workspace https://raycast.com/raycast/google-workspace
Hide All Apps https://raycast.com/peduarte/hide-all-apps
Iconify — Search Icons https://raycast.com/destiner/iconify
Image Modification https://raycast.com/HelloImSteven/sips
IMDb Search https://raycast.com/ryan/imdb
Installed Extensions https://raycast.com/pernielsentikaer/installed-extensions
Keyboard Maestro - List Macros https://raycast.com/eluce2/list-keyboard-maestro-macros
Kill Process https://raycast.com/rolandleth/kill-process
Link Cleaner https://raycast.com/MisakiCoca/link-cleaner
Lorem Ipsum https://raycast.com/AntonNiklasson/lorem-ipsum
MacUpdater https://raycast.com/kall/macupdater
Markdown Reference https://raycast.com/codedbyjordan/markdown-reference
Mastodon https://raycast.com/SevicheCC/mastodon
Mastodon Search https://raycast.com/daveverwer/mastodon-search
Meme Generator https://raycast.com/timoransky/meme-generator
Messages https://raycast.com/thomaslombart/messages
Microsoft Edge https://raycast.com/KartikKumarSahoo/microsoft-edge
Music https://raycast.com/fedevitaledev/music
My Daily Log https://raycast.com/frugoman/my-daily-log
MyIP https://raycast.com/Kang/myip
Obsidian https://raycast.com/KevinBatdorf/obsidian
Obsidian Smart Capture https://raycast.com/millin\_gabani/obsidian-smart-capture
omg.lol https://raycast.com/danpalmer/omg-lol
Open Folders https://raycast.com/timothy\_boye/open-folders
Open Link in Specific Browser https://raycast.com/koinzhang/open-link-in-specific-browser
Open With App https://raycast.com/fturcheti/open-with-app
Paste as Plain Text https://raycast.com/koinzhang/paste-as-plain-text
Quit Applications https://raycast.com/mackopes/quit-applications
Raindrop.io https://raycast.com/lardissone/raindrop-io
Random Password Generator https://raycast.com/textnav/random-password-generator
Reddit Search https://raycast.com/ewlcheng/reddit-search
Remove Paywall https://raycast.com/tegola/remove-paywall
Screenshot https://raycast.com/Aayush9029/screenshot
Script Commands Store – Find and manage your Raycast Script Commands https://raycast.com/tholanda/script-commands
Search HoudahSpot https://raycast.com/felixthehat/houdahspot-search
Speedtest https://raycast.com/tonka3000/speedtest
System Monitor https://raycast.com/hossammourad/raycast-system-monitor
Things https://raycast.com/loris/things
ToolBox https://raycast.com/Kang/toolbox
Type Snob https://raycast.com/sawyerh/type-snob
Unsplash https://raycast.com/eggsy/unsplash
Vivaldi https://raycast.com/crisboarna/vivaldi
Weather https://raycast.com/tonka3000/weather
Wi-Fi https://raycast.com/koinzhang/wi-fi
Wikipedia https://raycast.com/vimtor/wikipedia
Xecutor https://raycast.com/GastroGeek/xecutor
YouTube https://raycast.com/tonka3000/youtube
YouTube Companion https://raycast.com/sasivarnan/youtube-companion
YouTube Downloader https://raycast.com/vimtor/youtube-downloader
Sunrise over Tomales Bay in Inverness, California.
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The Death Penalty
I've been to a place few people ever go. That place is death row. In my home state, death row is located in Central Prison in Raleigh. It has been more than 30 years since I was there. IN those days, guards like me who were at Central because we'd transported prisoners to the hospital there for treatment were sometimes pressed into service if they unit was short-staffed. The death row inmates were not under strict segregation from the rest of the population and when they had medical appointments or visits with their lawyers, they were escorted there, walking the halls right along with other inmates. You knew they were on death row because they wore bright red jumpsuits instead of the brown clothes other felons wore. While I was there, I saw two prisoners I recognized. They were a pair of brothers who killed two law enforcement officers during a traffic stop. The younger one later had his sentence commuted because he was a minor at the time of the crime.
Despite having a more intimate knowledge of the true nature of convicted murderers, I have never supported the death penalty. There are people who should never be let out of the prison, but the state should not be involved in killing people. I believe that for many reasons.
- The death penalty is not a deterrent.
- The death penalty costs many times what alternative punsihments cost.
- For every eight executions, someone is freed from death row after their innocence is established.
- Their is a long history of racial discrimination in applying the death peanlty.
- There is no way to rectify a wrongful execution.
- Asking medical staff and correctional officers to participate in executions is immoral.
Executed But Possibly Innocent | Death Penalty Information Center - It is now broadly accepted that the judicial review provided to death-penalty cases in the United States has been inadequate to prevent the execution of at least some prisoners who were wrongly convicted and sentenced to death. Some cases with strong evidence of innocence are listed here.
Innocent Lives in the Balance - Equal Justice USAince 1973, at least 200 people have been freed after evidence revealed that they were sentenced to die for crimes they did not commit.1 That's more than one innocent person exonerated for every eight executions
On Jun 16, 1944: Fourteen-Year-Old George Stinney Executed in South Carolina - On June 16, 1944, George Stinney Jr., a 90-pound Black 14-year-old boy, was executed in the electric chair in Columbia, South Carolina.
Wrongful Execution – TCADP - A documentary film, The Phantom, tells the story of how Texas executed Carlos DeLuna, a likely innocent person, in 1989. It is available to watch on Netflix. In addition to the case of Carlos DeLuna, there is strong evidence the State of Texas has executed several innocent people, including Ruben Cantu, Cameron Todd Willingham, Gary Graham (Shaka Sankofa), Larry Swearingen, and, most recently, Ivan Cantu, who was put to death on February 28, 2024.
Capital Punishment or Life Imprisonment? Some Cost Considerations | Office of Justice Programs - Florida has estimated that the true cost of each execution is approximately $3.2 million, or approximately 6 times what it would cost to keep the person in prison for life
Prison officers traumatized by rate of executions in US death penalty states | Capital punishment | The Guardian - The relentless pursuit of “non-stop executions” by a rump of US death penalty states is exposing prison staff to extreme levels of psychological and physical stress, according to traumatized corrections officers who are appealing for help
DOES THE DEATH PENALTY DETER CRIME? - In 2004 in the USA, the average murder rate for states that used the death penalty was 5.71 per 100,000 of the population as against 4.02 per 100,000 in states that did not use it
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Celebrating the Decade
Age 50 / Age 60
This is my last week in my 50s. Looking back over the past 10 years, I am grateful for a great many things, lots of travel, three additional grandchildren, the conclusion of a career and the continued health of everyone in my family.
Where I Went
I spent my 50th birthday in Charleston, SC, a great city even if it was one of the coldest weekends they'd ever had. Wonder Woman hired a photography teacher as a guide. The three of us spent a day walking all over the old part of town with our cameras. I learned a lot and managed to take some photos I still enjoy looking at.
We took several other trips, flying to New York City, Colorado Springs, Anchorage, Santa Fe, Austin and Belfast, Northern Ireland. Wonder Woman started running competitively again when she turned 50 in 2017. We spent many weekends at races and places where she likes to train. She ran a lot in the Francis Marion National Forest in the South Carolina low country and in the Uwharrie National Forest in central North Carolina. We spent a lot of time in southwest Virginia, an area we fell in love with when he hiked through there on the Appalachian Trail.
Three New Babies
On my 50th birthday, I already had 10 grandchildren. I wasn't sure if any of our kids planned to have anymore. Our youngest daughter, Jennifer, surprised us first, and she had Tristen, a wee little man who vacillates between being earnest and very silly whenever it suits him. Anna really surprised us, since her only child was already nine before she decided to have another baby. She had James, a blue-eyed, blonde headed handful of a little boy who brings me nothing but joy. Finally, Elizabeth, who has three boys and also waited a long time before having another baby, announced to us that she was expecting. To everyone's delight, she had a little girl, our Evie, who already dances, plays the piano, does gymnastics and martial arts. She is amazing.
Work
I wrapped up a 27-year career as a civil servant in 2020. I'd spent seven years as a correctional officer in a state prison and twenty years working in IT for the county school system. I opted for the security and benefits (a pension and health insurance for life) over chasing higher paying jobs in the private sector. I spent a couple of restless years being retired and then went back to work in 2022 at the small private university where Wonder Woman Works. I'm only a few days away from retiring from there too, this time with a better plan to make use of the time.
Family
This was the decade when I suddenly realized that everyone was aging right along with me. All the big movie stars I'd enjoyed for most of my life are now relegated to playing old people in their films because, well, they all got old. Our kids are either in their 40s or getting ready to hit that milestone. Our two oldest grandchildren have graduated from high school. My ageless mother managed to not only walk across Scotland in her early 70s, she went to Spain and hiked the 500-mile Camino de Santiago a couple of years later. My Dad had a more difficult decade. He's now the caretaker for my step-mother, who has memory related issues and needs a lot of attention. My siblings continue to make me proud. One of my brothers, Todd, lives and works in Marin County, California giving nature tours at Pt. Reyes National Seashore. My other brother, Matt, a physician assistant for the State Department, did a tour in Athens with his family and is starting a tour in London this year. My only sister, Mitzi, a Methodist pastor, continues her ministry as the type of Christian who believes in loving all people, feeding the poor and helping the immigrant — you know, the stuff Jesus preached about.
I don't know what the next decade holds in store for Wonder Woman and I. In a few years we will be able to be retired together, and I can only imagine the places she will want to wander to. She's already talking about visiting the Alps and making the long flight to New Zealand. Her running career continues. She intends to run twelve 5Ks in one day just next month. We will probably become great-grandparents at some point in the next ten years. I'm going to keep writing and helping where I can in the struggle against fascism. Life is good, if challenging.
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Use Calibre to Back Up Your Kindle Books Before February 26
Amazon just announced that you have until February 26, 2025, to download your Kindle content. After that date, you will no longer be able to access the books you've paid for if you have a legacy device or a Kindle that has experienced wireless issues. The only way to load what you've paid for onto a device will be through wireless sync.
Thankfully, using the free ebook manager, Calibre, you can convert your Kindle content into formats readable on other ebook readers or into PDFs. You will be protected if Amazon ever removes books you've paid for. You do not need to download the Kindle app on your Mac to accomplish this.
Log in to your Amazon account. In the account section, select Content Library>Books. You'll have to download each title you want to back up as a separate files in azw3 format.
Download Calibre directly from the developer. To gain the ability to convert the books into other formats using Calibre, you will need to download a plugin from GitHub.. Make sure to install and set up the plugin before importing your books into Calibre. You will need the serial number from your Kindle to do this. You can get this information from the Amazon website or from the device itself.
For detailed instructions, see this article.
The tulips in the spring in Central Park, New York City
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Researching Retirement
I have five working days left before I finish working out my notice at work. Hopefully, they will be uneventful. My boss, in a move I did not see coming, has given me the silent treatment since receiving my letter. I'm sorry he is being a weirdo, but it doesn't bother me too much. I've gotten some warm farewells from the people I've helped over the past couple of years, which is something I'll hold on to.
I've been putting a lot of thought into creating a workspace for myself where I can look out over my backyard, which abuts a wooded patch of wetlands. I can do some birdwatching from where I plan to set up and even go out on my deck with a cup of coffee when the weather permits. I have music, a good chair, a coffee pot and natural light.
As I have shared, I'll be doing a lot of writing. I have a PC that I'm going to set up as a home server so that I can experiment with some self-hosted services. I've been thinking of what kind of daily schedule I want to adhere to and even giving thought to a few meals I would like to cook for Wonder Woman.
How to Enjoy Retired Life: Creating a Retirement Routine
10 Tips to Create a Perfect Workspace at Home
Backyard Birding – World Sensorium / Conservancy
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Working in a Village
Most of my working life has been spent working in education, mostly for a K-12 school system in a large, mostly rural county but also for a small, private university. The goal of both organizations was conveying knowledge to build an educated citizenry. There's a certain amount of bureaucracy involved and by their very nature, bureaucracies sometimes lose sight of their intended purpose in their struggle to be self-perpetuating. Mostly, though, the people I've worked with have put the focus on doing what it takes to help students learn.
School systems more moving parts than you might imagine. The biggest group of employees is the faculty, the people who have to get up in front of the students and teach them. I've known so many good teachers. The one characteristic they all shared was a palpable sense of excitement when they were preparing to teach a lesson they thought their students would get into. A lot of thought goes into lesson planning. People usually teach subjects they enjoy. When they think they have a good strategy to really get their point across, they act like athletes before a big game. I always tried to be patient and listen to them share when I could tell they were fired up.
There are support staff in multiple categories required to operate a school system. When I went to work at my first school, my county was in the process of connecting to the Internet, so I got to usher man, many people into the information age in my IT role. I always made a point to get in tight with several workers at each school: the school secretary because they know everything, the lunch ladies because if you take care of them, they will take care of you and finally, the custodians, because I always needed their help a lot more than they needed mine. There are also other areas to support at the county level, like the huge maintenance department, a bus garage, HR and finance and all the administrators. There were many specialized systems I had to master for those different departments.
The school based professional staff also had various requirements. I worked with physical and occupational therapists to set up computers for students with special needs, including blind students, students in wheelchairs and other impairments. I helped the medical and mental health folks with securing sensitive information and configuring software for testing and medical devices. During the tension - filled weeks of high-stakes online testing, I had to be on standby in case any network issues affected connectivity.
Certain departments had the needs for software that pertained just to their roles. There are music programs for the band director and scoring programs for the coaches. We even had an AS-400, an IBM computer that contained all the district's financial data.
While my job in public school didn't often involve interacting with the students, my higher ed job did. As much as the "get off my lawn" types like to grouse about how horrible young people are these days, that has not been my experience. I've found that most students are polite, good listeners, and they just want to be able to use the tech they need to complete their assignments. Sure, some of the more inquisitive ones have tried mightily, and occasionally succeeded in getting around security safeguards, but then so have I, right?
I like knowing that a good chuck of my life has been in the service of helping people learn. I've done IT work in the medical field, banking and manufacturing too, and none of it was as rewarding as helping teachers and students. After spending the first decade of my adult life in the infantry and as a prison guard, being the helpful computer guy brought me a lot more joy. It really does take a village to produce well-rounded and educated citizens. I was glad to be a part of a good one.
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Metadata Lab - Exif Editor
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Modern DSLR cameras and cell phones add extensive data to every photo they take. The information recorded includes camera settings like ISO speed, shutter speed, focal length, and other details. Including GPS location. After a photo is taken, and you've downloaded it to your computer, it's possible to add other information to its metadata, including a description, keywords and licensing/copyright information. Some of this information is more important to professional photographers than it is to regular people, but there are reasons why anyone might want to edit the details of a photo.
Some higher end photo management applications have metadata editing capabilities, but if you are piecing together your own workflow, the free app, Metadata Lab is a quick and easy way to add, remove or change information on any photo you have. The app is compatible with RAW, JPEG, PNG, TIFF, and many other formats (including video/audio files). You can import photos from the Mac Photo's App into the Metadata Lab. Not only can you edit the EXIF data, you can also edit IPTC, PDF, PNG and QuickTime metadata.
Use Cases
- Correcting date and time data if it was incorrect on the camera
- Adding GPS data for later personal reference
- Removing GPS data for images shared with third parties or on the Internet
- Adding keywords for cataloging purposes
More information is available on the developer's website. You can download Metadata Lab on the App Store.
I love the way the snowy background makes them look so brilliant. #birds
The Greensboro Massacre of 1979
I'm sharing tonight a repost of a piece I originally wrote last summer about the very real attack by the KKK and Nazis on leftist labor organizers in Greensboro, NC, resulting in five deaths and 10 wounded. Maybe you think that all the recent talk of Fascism and Nazis and white supremacy is a bit overblown. It is not. There are people organizing for change right now who have weathered gunfire and violence from what used to be the extreme right wing. Today, those people are closer to the mainstream.
In November 1979 I was a junior high student in Jacksonville, NC when I heard on the news about what the media initially called a shootout between the Ku Klux Klan, a group of Neo-Nazis and Communist labor organizers in Greensboro, three hours away. I remember being confused that the Klan and Nazis, who in my mind were relics of a dark but distant past, were still active and engaged in violence. And, I'd never even heard of Communists on American soil. It was a tumultuous time in America that month. It was when Iran took more than 50 Americans hostage. Inflation was over 10% and rising. President Carter was not the revered statesman he is today, but a beleaguered man presiding over a country that felt lost.
As it turns out, on that day in Greensboro, there was no shootout. Instead, there was a massacre planned with an active police informant that involved carloads of Klansmen and Nazis, who the police knew were on the way to what turned into a killing ground in a public housing project. With television cameras rolling but no law enforcement present, the forefathers of today's alt-right movement gunned down the labor organizers from the Worker's Viewpoint Organization, who were graduates from Duke and Harvard and in a couple of cases, medical doctors. Having previously faced down the Klan at a China Grove, NC rally. The left-wing activists underestimated the willingness of the fascists to engage in violence and paid for it with their lives. Aside from the five who were killed, 10 more were wounded.
The state and federal government both tried to convict the planners and shooters involved in the massacre. There were numerous eyewitnesses. The Klan was infiltrated with informants. There was ample videotape. In both trials, however, all white juries refused to convict those responsible for the violence and death on the streets of Greensboro. We aren't talking about 1960s Mississippi Burning times. One of these trials happened when Michael Jordan was in college in NC.
Two decades later, when I became involved in activism in North Carolina, some of the same people who had naively been involved in the Greensboro anti-Klan organizing were still committed to trying to do things like establish a death penalty moratorium, ensure affordable housing, ending the nuclear arms race, ensuring same-sex marriage and stopping the US led war in Iraq. My mentor was a Ph.D. economist from Temple University who had worked for 10 years as a lathe operator in a mill while trying to organize workers. His wife was a leading neurosurgeon who had taken a break from medical school to work on a textile mill to organize the people on the looms. Their lives had been upended by the events of 1979 and Kim, the wife, never quite recovered the fire in her belly to organize, Chip, her husband, remained actively working with low wage workers and community activists until his death in 2014.
I was horrified when the Unite the Right rally happened in Charlottesville in 2017. I know what these people are capable of doing. They've shown us. Hopefully, those who oppose them won't fall into the same trap as the anti-fascists did in 1979. This stuff isn't from the distant past. It's from the here and now.
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5 Great RSS Feeds for Good Reading Every Day
This is a special edition containing links to five of the best sources on the Internet to keep abreast of the latest trending topics and discover new writers. And then there is a bonus feed.
1 follow my favorite IndieWeb bloggers via RSS to stay abreast of what they are up to, for inspiration and education. I also have an RSS feed that's mostly for curated reposts of the best of the web each day. If you'd like to build a list like that, here are some great feeds to get started with. Keep these in a separate app or however you want to segregate them, but don't mix them up with all your other subscriptions or they will just get lost.
- Jason Kottke - one of the Internet's OG bloggers who posts regularly and who alwways seems to be finding the best stuff. - RSS Feed
- I've been reading NextDraft for well over a decade. Dave Pell says "I pluck the most fascinating news items of the day and then create a modern-day column which I deliver with a fast, pithy wit that will make your computer device vibrate with delight." -RSS Feed
- Feedle is a search engine for the IndieWeb where any search you fo can be turned into an RSS feed. Try it for any subject that interests you. In the meantime, subscribe to their curated feed of some of the best blog posts they've found -RSS Feed
- BearBlog is the home of two of my own online endeavors. It's also the home of many fine bloggers. Reading the most popular posts on the platform each day is a good use of your time and a good way to discover new writers - RSS Feed
- Murmel is a service that tracks the most shared stories on social media. The main feed covers a giant cross-section of the Fediverse, but you can subscribe to a personalized feed to see what the people you follow are sharing. - RSS Feed
- The last feed on the list is in way over its head. If you have a hard time sorting out where all the stuff I write about is being posted, you can subscribe to a single RSS feed and get it all out of one fire hose, including my weekly bookmarks and my updated /now page in addition to AppAddict, Living Out Loud and Linkage. - RSS Feed
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Librewolf for Security and Privacy
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If you become more concerned with privacy and surveillance
regarding your online activities, moving to a more secure browser is a
definite step in the right direction, along with using a reputable VPN,
a privacy focused DNS setup and good ad and tracker blocking extensions.
The ultimate in privacy for most users is probably using the TOR browser
and network. That comes with a significant performance hit. If you are
looking for more privacy without the usability issues of TOR, Librewolf
is most likely your best option for a daily driver.
LibreWolf is a privacy-focused fork of Firefox. Its primary benefits include:
Tracking Protection
- Strict default settings protecting against trackers, ads and scripts
- uBlock Origin included by default
- Fingerprinting resistance, including protection against canvas, font, and WebGL fingerprinting.
- Encrypted SNI:preventing your Internet Service Provider (ISP) from seeing which websites you visit.
Privacy
- No telemetry or data collection
- Privacy-focused search engine, DuckDuckGo enabled by default, although you can change it to Kagi or the engine of your choice:
- Cookie AutoDelete to automatically purge tracking cookies after each browsing session
- HTTPS-Only Mode on by default
Security
- Blocks known malware sites through disconnect.me's list of over 5000 tracking and malicious domains
- WebRTC disabled by default to prevent IP address leakage
- Strict default settings for website permissions for your location, camera, and microphone
Open Source
- Open Source
- Ethical community members
- Removes sponsored content, distracting elements on the home page, and search suggestions
- Wide range of customization options
The most important element in your security setup is you. No amount of consumer technology can protect you as much as limiting what you share online. Making use of encryption technology to share highly sensitive data can be a necessary step if you are engaged in conduct that hostile actors could intercept.
The recommended way to install Librewolf is using Homebrew. You can download a DMG, but you will lose access to automatic updates.
brew install --cask librewolf
A winter view of the dogwood and azaleas in my front yard that will be so beautiful come spring.
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