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Captin Solves a Major Mac Annoyance

Screenshot of a settings window titled "General" with tabs for General, Displays, Icon, Sound, Updates, and About. Options include checkboxes for "Launch Captin at login" and "Show preferences on launch," both of which are unchecked. There are sliders for adjusting HUD window size between "Small" and "Large," and for setting "On duration" and "Off duration" with values of "0 s" and "1.5 s." Color options include a black background and text colors for "On" (yellow) and "Off" (red). A button labeled "Restore Default Setting" is at the bottom. The window is overlaid on a starry night sky background.
Captin Prefs


Unless you are an accomplished touch typist, which I am not, you probably spend a lot of time looking at the keyboard when working at your computer. Occasionally, those of us who type in this manner inadvertently hit the Caps Lock key unknowingly. When we finally check the display, we see a long string of text IN CAPITAL LETTERS. Fixing this is a PIA.

Enter Captin, a free little utility that lets you know in every way possible when you have turned on Caps Lock, and not just visually. You can set a sound warning too.

Notification Methods

  • HUD - Instant visual feedback
  • Menu-Bar Icon - Customizable LED color
  • Dock Icon - Theme-aware Dock-icon style
  • Customization - Color, duration, size, and sound
  • Multiple Displays - Adjust position for each display

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The Benefactor

This man visits with the homeless who frequent the old downtown area. He sometimes gives them a little cash along with a stern talking to. He’s been doing it for years.

Black and white image of a man walking along a city sidewalk, wearing a fedora hat, leather jacket, and holding a coffee cup. He is near a building wall with spherical light fixtures. In the background, another person is walking away, trees and street elements are visible.
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Little Projects

Vivaldi - 2025-02-24 at 20

My wife is exceptionally handy and seldom asks me to do much. We aren't big gardeners. Our yard is well established, and it's easy to maintain. We pay to have big home improvements done, and the smaller projects we either do together or she just knocks them out. I will never forget when we first got together. We lived in a house with a pool. One day the pump just died, She went online, found the right pump, ordered it overnight. The next day she came home from her CPA firm, took off her business suit, unboxed the pool pump and installed it herself. In an hour, it was done. I was amazed then and I am amazed now.

Since I am newly retired, I am working on making myself a routine and coming up with a few projects. Things I want to do daily include:

  • Going for a walk
  • A half-hour to an hour of housework
  • Cooking dinner

Writing can now take up a sizable chunk of my day. I have a list of software to download and test before reviewing it for AppAddict. I plan to spend more time coming up with ideas to create link bundles about for Linkage. As far as this blog goes, my goal is just get better. I don't know what that looks like, exactly. I can take my time now, polish things a bit, quit using the word "awesome" so much, get better at commas - that kind of stuff.

I have several tech projects underway. I used the process Jason Snell wrote about to download my entire Kindle collection instead of just select books like I did previously. It took just a few minutes to get all 555 of them from Amazon's servers to my hard drive. Now I have to set up Calibre and import them to remove the DRM and get them ready for use wherever I want them.

Now that Amazon is keeping people from actually owning the things they've purchased, i found a way to get all my Audible books converted. Using the free and open-source tool, Libation, I am downloading another 500-plus books, but this process is much lengthier. Thankfully, the new Mac workstation I just set up can work on this job around the clock.

I also want to get a local copy of all my photos for various reasons, mostly to use local search tools and for quicker access to them. I requested a Google takeout today and within hours I had 15 zip files of 10 GB each ready to download. I recently exported all my iCloud photos to Google, so hopefully the files I'm downloading will have all of them complete with metadata. I will let you know.

I'm also going to pull my music collection out of the cloud so that I can set up a music server that not dependent on my Internet connection. I have about 30K songs from the olden days when we were still buying our own music, including some difficult to find bootlegs from Dylan, as well as many do it yourself albums from bars and coffee shops that aren't to be found on Apple Music or Spotify.

To hold all this data, I've rounded up a pile of various hard drives I've accumulated through the years and looked at possible reusing the housing from some small external drives with upgrades. I found a supremely useful website for locating the lowest priced drives on Amazon, and I'll be keeping my eyes on that for bargains while I assemble this homemade NAS of mine.

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Books, Books, Books

Cincinnati library

Looking for book recommendations is a favorite pastime. My areas of interest are wide and varied, probably a little more guy-heavy than they should be, although I did unashamedly find myself a fan of a genre I only later learned was called "Paranormal Romance." I even read a couple of the Twilight books a few years ago. Just to give you a taste of what my main jams are, here are a few lists I've collected or put together through the years.

My Favorite Books About the Appalachian Trail | Linkage

Best Baseball Books | Goodreads

23 Best Time Travel Science Fiction Books - The Best Sci Fi Books

Readers Weighed in on the Best Books About the Vietnam War - The New York Times

7 Books Every Nordic Thriller Fan Should Read

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Libation - Audiobook Downloader and Converter

Libation
Libation


Amazon recently announced its intention to prevent customers from being able to download copies of their purchased audiobooks, a feature it had supported since the inception of the Kindle. Amazon is also the company behind Audible, the popular vendor of audiobooks. Although they have not said they will be revoking download access to this service, it is a possibility and audiobook owners looking for a way to back up what they have purchased are looking for a solution to make this content useful outside the Amazon walled garden.

The solution I am using is Libation, a FOSS title available on GitHub. Libation is a bare-bones application without a fancy UI, but it is fully functional and takes only a few minutes to set up and use. After it converted my audiobooks into M4B files, a standard audiobook format which allows bookmarks, I was able to play my books using VLC and various iOS apps like the free Audiobooks MP3 and M4B Player.

One warning - the file sizes are large. If you have a sizable collection, I would advise against downloading to your internal hard drive unless you have a lot of free space. Saving to an external drive would be a better option.

Download Libation on GitHub.

Features

  • Import library from Audible, including cover art
  • Download and convert all books to other audio formats (M4b and MP3)
  • Download accompanying PDFs
  • Add tags to books for better organization
  • Powerful advanced search built on the Lucene search engine
  • Customizable saved filters for common searches
  • Open source
  • Supports most regions: US, UK, Canada, Germany, France, Australia, Japan, India, and Spain
  • Fully supported in Windows, Mac, and Linux

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Snow in the Cemetery

A couple of snaps from a snowy visit to the cemetery

A green statue of an angel is covered in snow, with snowflakes gently falling around. The angel's face is tilted upwards, and its wings are visible. The background is blurred, showing trees and a snowy atmosphere. A textured stone relief sculpture depicting a hand with extended three fingers and thumb, partially covered with snow. The high-relief carving is set against a rough, rectangular, stone-like background, with some smaller patches of snow around the edges.

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Observations on Booze

Wine and Sweet Tea
I don't think I could have made myself drink this even on my darkest days.

I had next to no drama involving alcohol while I was growing up. My Dad sometimes drank beer in the evenings while watching TV, but I only lived with him for a couple of years in elementary school, so there were limited opportunities for me to witness anything ugly. For a long time, he lived in Alabama, where he was an instructor pilot at the Army'd helicopter flight school at Ft. Rucker. My siblings and I all lived in North Carolina, along with most of the rest of our extended family. I'd never seen a single drop of anything alcoholic in my grandparent's house. My grandfather, who reportedly used to like a cold beer once in a while, forswore it when he turned his life over to the Lord, a decision he did not take lightly. I couldn't conceive of my grandmother taking a drink. As an adult, I found out that she would accept a glass of wine at dinner when visiting my Mother, I was absolutely scandalized.

Anyway, when Dad would come to visit, he would keep a cooler of beer in his car and make periodic trips to it during the evening to pour cold Budweiser into a red solo cup, which he would then take into the house. I lived with my Dad's brother at the time and I can assure you that he did not approve of this behavior. My uncle liked beer himself, but he didn't believe in taking it into the house. He was a farmer. He would drink beer out at the barn or sitting in his truck listening to country music, but that was as close to the house as it got. Not only that, but he is nearly 80 now and still has a refrigerator and a recycling barrel at the barn.

I went with my first wife to her family's Thanksgiving dinner the year we got married. When I saw them sitting bottles of wine on the counter, I didn't know what to think. I had no experience with people doing such a thing. My family drank iced tea with Thanksgiving dinner. Even today (different wife) when we go to Sunday dinner at my in-laws, and they break out the wine and liqueur to sweeten the coffee with, I am still faintly surprised that people, nice people too, do things like that.

As a recovering alcoholic in long-term sobriety, I try not to make any kind of value judgments on anyone else's drinking. I totally get the fact that my family followed a Souther Protestant tradition where drinking is frowned upon, and holy communion is always taken with Welches grape juice. My in-laws are Catholic, with a sprinkling of military life and strong Italian heritage thrown in. Their take on booze is that it isn't a sin and responsible adults can do whatever they hell they want to do - as long as they go to mass. (Just kidding - kind of)

My own inability to drink moderately didn't come from a constant exposure to booze as a kid or the ready availability of it in any house I grew up in, and there were many in my tumultuous early life. I was just born without that feeling that tells non-alcoholics to stop. Scientists have identified the gene that indicates a genetic predisposition to addiction. People don't develop alcoholism because it's fun (it is not.) I'm fully on the side of the illness being from nature, not from nurture in my case at least.

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Telling Stories to Children

Telling stories

When a child says, “Tell me a story,” she is not asking for a narrative. She is asking for your attention - How to Tell Stories to Children

When my kids were in late elementary school and middle school, I started making up different stories about certain houses in our neighborhood. One house had a well-maintained yard, but there were seldom any cars there, The curtains were always drawn and there were no decorations or personal effects ever in evidence. I decided to tell the kiddos that all of those facts were clear evidence that this was a CIA safe house. I never backed down from that assertion. To this day if one of them mentions it, I support my original premise with whatever I can make up on the spot. Its been a running gag for thirty years.

Another house got labeled as The Church of Satan just because I didn't like the look of it. It sits on a double lot, which I find pretentious. It also has a secluded backyard and an extra tall privacy fence. Wonder Woman has never heard me refer to is as anything else.

My son loved camping trip ghost stories until I made one up based on the character of Blue Duck, a psychopathic Indian from a Larry McMurtry book. I found out recently that my story telling skills had traumatized him for years. Oops. Sorry, Buddy!

We always read to our kids. I think it's an invaluable way to spend time with them. I was glad to see the tradition carry on to another generation when my grandkids came along. It is a sacred part of their nightly routine. Maybe I was a little unconventional with my stories, but the kids all turned out OK, so no harm done.

How to Tell Awesome Stories to Your Kids | The Art of Manliness

Dads, what are your go-to strategiess for making up bedtime stories on the fly? : r/daddit

How Telling Stories Helps Kids Learn |… | PBS KIDS for Parents



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My Obsidian Plugin List

Obsidian is the GOAT!
Obsidian is the GOAT!


#Obsidian #ObsidianMD #PKM
I'm not one of those people who tell others that the only or best way to use Obsidian is by eschewing plugins and going with a vanilla version of the app. If that works best for some people, that's fine, but in my experience, the real power and enjoyment of the Obsidian experience comes from finding plugins to extend the functionality of the app.

My primary uses for Obsidian are:

  • Where I do all my writing
  • As a life record/journal
  • Personal database

The plugins I use are the ones that help me with those tasks. I don't leave all of these turned on all the time. For example, I leave the importer plugin turned off unless I am going to use it immediately. Since I use Obsidian on multiple devices and sync with Obsidian Sync, I am able to use different plugins on each device, a feature you don't get with DIY syncing. I can also have different settings for plugins on different devices. I only use my primary computer with the plugins that sync with external services like RSS and Raindrop.io

You can generate your own list of plugins to share with Share my plugin list by Benature

My Plugins



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Bike Life

Price Lake on the Blue Ridge Parkway during Cycle North Carolina

During the years that cycling was at the center of my life, I enjoyed signing up for charity events all over the southeast. For somewhere around $50 I could register for an event that would provide a marked course of 100K or 100 miles with several rest stops along the way, stocked with Gatorade and carbohydrate rich snacks to fuel all the spandex clad riders coming through. Oh, and portable toilets were also provided, which was always helpful. Usually, the organizers would also provide a souvenir shirt to commemorate the event. I've got a closet full of them.

The size of the events varied. If the ride was new and didn't have any kind of history, there might be only 30 or 40 participants. On the other hand, established events, like the rides for multiple sclerosis would stretch over an entire weekend, providing camping, meals, showers and two rides of 100 miles (160.93 km) each. There would be well over 1000 participants, all of whom raised money and paid an entry fee to participate. In North Carolina, the rides start and end in the eastern city of New Bern, in an area that's blessed with smooth, flat roads that don't have a lot of traffic. Typically, if we had to cross any really busy highways, the sheriff's department would station a car there for safety.

One of my favorite was the annual Mountains to the Sea event, known as Cycle North Carolina. Sponsored by the state tourism board, it draws people from all over the US and abroad for seven consecutive days of cycling across the widest state east of the Mississippi River. A normal day's mileage is somewhere around 70 miles (ca. 113 km). Most people bring a tent that is ferried from one town to the next by the event organizers along with their luggage. All the riders have to do each day is eat like their lives depend on it and ride their bikes. Each host town along the way goes all out to make the riders welcome. There are always some unique folks making the journey. One year I rode with a man who rode in business clothes and had heavy racks made from lumber attached to his bike. Since I don't live close to the mountains, the days we spent there were always challenging as we pedaled along the Blue Ridge Parkway with much larger elevation gains and losses than I was used to.

North Carolina has 100 counties, and my goal was to ride my bike in every one of them. Before physical ailments curtailed my riding, I'd managed to pedal at least a few miles in 78 of them. Even today, I find myself miles and miles from home, recognizing spots I cycled by in the past. A few places are really memorable, either because of the difficulty or the scenery or both. There is a climb in western South Carolina up the Greenville water shed that is more than five miles uphill. It looks very imposing when you see it on the day's elevation profile, but it proved to be a pleasant experience, something to feel good about at the end of the day.

That was one of the real joys of riding to me. It wasn't just the endorphin rush from the physical exertion or the scenery or the camaraderie, although all of those things were wonderful, What I loved was the sense of accomplishment achieved by voluntarily doing something difficult. The discomfort from too many miles on a narrow little bike saddle, the hills that make it feel like someone is sticking daggers in your thighs, the miles, and miles in the rain, far from home have faded into the background and what remains are the memories of the joy I felt so many times when mile 100 came earlier than I ever thought it could. I never had the kind of hand/eye coordination needed to be good at sports involving any kind of ball, but when it came to endurance, that I could do.

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Everyday Apps


I never realized this blog would become as popular as it has. I picked up blogging as a hobby to accompany the other joy in my life, which is the never-ending process of refining my workflows to use the absolute best software for every task. Somehow, I ended up with three blogs, this one, Living Out Loud, Linkage and another that is a combined fire hose of everything put together. I'd be lying if I told you that I'm always able to remember what I've written on each platform. In 2024, I wrote 500K words. I'm too old to keep all that straight.

I don't think I've ever shared the actual list of apps that I used to get work done here on AppAddict. These aren't the coolest or the most powerful or the best bargains, not necessarily. They are the workhorses that allow me to do what I need to do. I'm not saying they are the best for everyone. If you do a lot over email, you need something more specialized. I don't do much with spreadsheets or presentations, so I'm not even listing those.

Most (not all) of the links here describe my use cases or what I like about the app and why I use it. All links contain download info.

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My Favorite TV Shows By Decade

Omar Little from The Wire

I've lived in seven decades. These are my favorite TV shows from each one.

1960s The Andy Griffith Show

The Andy Griffith Show

I don't know if my affection for this show arose based on it happening in a fictional town in my vert real home state or because I really wanted to hang out with Opie, but I'v enjoyed watching Andy and Barney and Aunt Bea and the rest of the folks from Mayberry my entire life.

1970s MASH and All in the Family

MASH

I remember watching MASH when I was seven or eight and not getting many of the jokes but having the feeling that the characters were kind. It made me feel good. By the time the last episode aired, I was a senior in high school and only a few months away from the army myself.

All in the Family

Watching Archie Bunker on All in the Family, I think, taught me the ridiculousness of bigotry and misogyny. It also helped me understand those traits a little better. I loved watching Archie come to little realizations about his own nature.

1980s Hill Street Blues

Hill Street Blues

Until the Golden Age of Television commenced at the end of the 20th century, I considered Hill Street Blues to be the best show ever to air. Every police procedural for the past 30 years owes it a debt of gratitude. The writing, acting and directing were all way ahead of its time and the show's gritty realism and willingness to confront the humanity and shortcomings of the officers assigned to Hill Street Station made it a classic. When I retired from the school system in 2020, I spent the first few months wtching a couple of episodes a day until I'd rewatched the entire run.

1990s NYPD Blue

NYPD Blue

This is the decade where I watched very little TV. My kids were coming of age and I didn't want them spending a lot of time in from of the tube, plus I was a cheap bastard and didn't want to pay for cable. We spent many weekends with rented VHS tapes from the local video store. Early in the decade though, I was a big fan of NYPD Blue, mostly because I admired Steven Bocho's work so much. It wasn't the same a Hill Street Blues, but the characters were so developed and real. Good show.

2000 The Wire

The Wire

To me, this show is and will always be the GOAT. I've never thought about the lives of fictional characters as much as I have the ones from this show: Jimmy McNulty, Omar Little, Stringer Bell and all the other cops, gangsters, politicians, reporters, dock workers and teachers who gave every show of every season a special touch. I think I am up to four complete viewings. Whenever someone tells me they are watching the show for the first time, I get so damn jealous.

2010s Stranger Things

Stranger Things
I don't know if it is 80s nostalgia or just the superior quality of the show, but I've loved Stranger Things since episode one. Watching the kids from from middle school into high school was handled well and Millie Bobbie Brown's character, 11 (Ellie) is one of the best viewing experiences Netflix has ever offered.

2020s Ted Lasso

Vivaldi - 2025-02-22 at 17

Man, was I sad when I the last show of season three aired. And, man was I happy when I found out they were going to make at least one more season - just because we fans want one so badly. This show is unique. It's not really a sports show in the way Friday Night Lights was. Maybe because it is a marriage of English and American culture. I adore the characters. Fucking Roy Kent. Am I right?

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This Week's Bookmarks - Defending Democracy, 100 Greatest TV Performances, True Crime, Travel Tips, Southern Cooking, Pharaoh's Tomb, Lessons from Jim Crow 1.0

How to Defend Democracy

Choose Democracy What can I do to fight this coup? - Choose Democracy - If you look, there are people resisting at every level. Blockades of freeways. American Bar Association urging an end to illegal orders. Past inspector generals penning op-eds, as a current inspector general refuses to accept her illegal firing. The Pope slamming VP Vance's theology.

The 100 Greatest TV Performances - When one thinks of the defining TV performances of the past 25 or so years, what comes to mind? Some of the answers included a teacher-turned-drug kingpin, spies working both for and against the U.S. government — and perhaps the defining comedy character of this long political moment, in part for how dark her will to power becomes.

The True Story Behind the Grisly Murder of Cash App Founder Bob Lee - When Cash App creator Bob Lee was stabbed to death on a San Francisco street, it sparked outrage about random violence in the city. The true story of his death was deeply personal.

The Technium: 50 Years of Travel Tips - I've been seriously traveling for more than 50 years, and I've learned a lot. I've traveled solo, and I've led a tour group of 40 friends. I've slept in dormitories and I've stayed in presidential suites with a butler. I've hitchhiked penniless for months, and I've flown by private jet. I've traveled months with siblings, and with total strangers. I've gone by slow boat and I've ridden my bicycle across America, twice.

The Woman Who Introduced Southern Cooking to the World | Finding Edna Lewis | Full Documentary - YouTube - From Freetown, Virginia, to New York City, Edna Lewis carved a remarkable path. She introduced many Americans to seasonal cooking, Southern cooking — the cooking of the Black community in rural Virginia that raised her. Yet despite a life that included fame and acclaim, she is not a household name. In FINDING EDNA LEWIS, Deb Freeman travels to the places where Miss Lewis made her mark.

Thutmose II: First pharaoh's tomb found in Egypt since Tutankhamun's - A British-Egyptian team has located it in the Western Valleys of the Theban Necropolis near the city of Luxor. Researchers had thought the burial chambers of the 18th dynasty pharaohs were more than 2km away, closer to the Valley of the Kings.

Surviving Fascism: Lessons from Jim Crow – Scalawag - Accept that this is happening. Denial won't change the outcome.

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The Pineapple Fountain

Charleston, SC

A large fountain shaped like a pineapple is centered in a park. The foreground features manicured hedges and a paved walkway leading to the fountain. On either side of the fountain are palm trees and lush, green lawns. In the background, brick buildings and more trees are visible under a cloudy sky.
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Serenity, Wisdom and Power

taylors valley

Coming up with the energy to do battle with the forces of evil means that I can't waste my energy, a finite resource, tilting at windmills. Although I am not a religious person, I respect the wisdom found in the basic prayer that alcoholics recite before AA meetings, known as The Serenity Prayer.

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

This prayer, jointly attributed to Reinhold Niebuhr and Winnifred Wygal, became popular in the 1930s. Like many godless heathens in the recovering community, I substitute a belief in a higher power in my mind instead of a deity, but I think folks should do what works for them. My higher power is the collective wisdom of the people I respect. It works for me.

Learning what can and cannot be changed is life's challenge to us all. Some folks believe "you can't fight city hall." Then you have Rosa Parks. Finding out what is possible within our limitations is not easy, but I have learned a few things since I was introduced to this way of thinking. We are all powerless over the past. I wish I'd made all kinds of different choices through the years, but what's done is done. I've learned not waste time wishing my life away on regrettable mistakes.

Another learned skill is when I finally began to differentiate between what I wanted and what I needed. I say that like I'm batting 1.000 in that department, but it is still a work in progress. In 2025, I need to be involved in the struggle against fascism. As an older straight white man, I could easily sit on the sidelines and suffer minimal losses, but I'd have no self-respect and rightfully so. I know that in the current struggle, there will be many defeats, but there will be some victories too. I think it's OK to want to win certain rights back from the right-wing, as long as we can accept that we won't actually get to pick the wins we achieve. This is where courage enters the equation. It's what makes us different from the people we are going up against. They don't have courage. They live in fear; fear that they might get treated the way they've treated minorities, fear that they won't get preferential treatment from employers and the courts. They are not striving for equality. They shudder at the idea. They feel entitled to supremacy.

One of the primary lessons learned in my life was that people have power together. Organized groups of people are what emancipated the enslaved, gained women the right to vote, stopped Jim Crow 1.0, and gave workers in this country what power and rights they have in the workplace. Part of my own received wisdom is to be a part of as many collectives as I have energy for. Isolation and some naive belief in rugged individualism results in the death of a movement. We need each other. We need to give voice to our anger, our fear, our outrage, and our determination. I'm not one to corner an unwilling listener to harangue them on anything, but I am one who will speak in the public square, whenever I find myself in one. People who are too privileged or too lazy to be concerned with what is happening to large swaths of the people in this country might want to police conversations. Good luck with that. I have people I love who are being targeted, a son-in-law who depends on veterans benefits because he was severely injured in combat, a grandson with a debilitating disease, LGBT family members, trans friends and the list goes on.

So, yeah, I need serenity, wisdom, and power and so do you.

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Privacy Badger Extension from the Electronic Freedom Foundation

Privacy Badger
Privacy Badger


Protecting your online privacy is an ongoing game of whack-a-mole with big tech. Google is making a big deal out of eliminating tracking cookies at the same time is implementing tracking based on digital fingerprinting for which few protections exist. One organization working on privacy protection solutions for this invasive technology is the Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF). It's free privacy tool is a browser extension, Privacy Badger, available for Chromium and Firefox browsers. A Safari version is under development. Since tracker blocking is an ongoing struggle, it's good to know that the developers at the EFF are actively working on meeting the challenges of emerging invasive practices by big tech.

Privacy Badger is not a traditional ad blocker, and it will not replace whatever you are currently using. The extension is focused on preventing companies big and small from tracking where you go on the Internet and what you do there. It doesn't work off a list of URLs. Instead, it uses an algorithm to determine if you are being tracked and takes action to block offending sites. For tracking sites that you want to have a relationship with, such as Meta or X, it provides clickable links to connect to them from external sites when you choose to. I like that it creates an opt-in situation for you.

Privacy badger is compatible with native tracking prevention found in more secure browsers like Librewolf, Firefox and Vivaldi. As the political situation evolves in the US, protecting your browsing habits will become more important than ever. Take the steps needed to keep yourself safe from big tech and the government.

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My Favorite Movies by Decade

I've lived in seven decades. These are my favorite movies from each one.

1960s

To kill a Mockingbird

To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) - Although the book played a more meaningful role in my life, the movie played a part in imparting ideas that shaped my attitudes on justice and race.

1970s

The Godfather

The Godfather (1972) - I did't see this until I was an adult, thank goodness. It's a true masterpiece. Watching it now, more than 50 years after its release, it doesn't feel dated at all.

1980s

Platoon

Platoon (1986) - My Dad spent two long years of my childhood in Vietnam. The war and its aftermath played an outsized role in my life. Oliver Stone was also a veteran of the war and his insight and skill as a filmmaker made this movie memorable. The performances of Charlie Sheen, Willem Defoe and Tom Berenger were stellar.

1990s

Pulp Fiction

Pulp Fiction (1994) - My favorite movie of all time. I have the script on my iPhone and its one of the few films I have a physical copy of. I'm a go to source of trivia about this movie and I know multiple lines of dialog. One line of the film became an oft used phrase in our house. Whenever any said "Oh Man", someone else would always answer with "I shot Marvin in the face!"

2000s

Talladega Nights

Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby (2006) - Just to prove that I'm no status seeking high brow intellectual, I 100% love this Will Ferrell comedy centered around a North Carolina NASCAR driver. It's funny AF. The dialog is memorable and I'm happy just to watch a few scenes from time to time.

2010s

'71

'71 (2014) - Probably the most obscure movie on this list, 1071 does a good job portraying the maddening tactics employed during The Troubles in Northern Ireland as well as the often unexplored side of what armies do with soldiers when they are done with them.

2020s

A Complete Unknown

A Complete Unknown (2024) - This film was so spot on that I floated above my seat in the theater while watching it. Timothée Chalamet deserves a great many awards for his portrayal of Bob Dylan. Edward Norton's role as Pete Seeger was also stellar. The music was as wonderful as it's been since Dylan penned it. Good flick. See it.

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Dawn on the Beach

When I visit the coast, I always try to watch the sunrise right on the beach. It’s one of the truly great free pleasures of life and so beautiful just about every morning.

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The Streets of Charleston

Two of the great joys of my life, books and bicycles.

A stack of books is placed on the back rack of a blue bicycle parked in a city street. The rusty metal bike rack holds two bicycles, including the blue one. The street is lined with storefronts and buildings, and cars are visible in the background. The scene suggests an urban setting with a mix of cycling and literary themes.
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Sandkorn - Comprehensive Information on Your Apps

Sandkorn Report
Sandkorn Report

Sandkorn, from developer Peter Borgas, is a free app that provides you comprehensive information on the apps installed on a computer, particularly sandboxed apps and what those apps are entitled to access.

Every app you obtain from the Mac App Store today is sandboxed, isolated from other apps and information sources, however, the apps have certain entitlements to different resources on your computers, some of which, but not all, you can see in System Settings > Security and Privacy. On a Mac, what you see in your applications folder are actually bundles you can right-click on an app and select View Package Contents and see what is contained in the bundle. Some apps have plugins and XPC services bundled with them that have their own entitlements. BBedit has 18. Xcode has a whopping 90!

Entitlements are things like:

  • Calendar
  • Contacts
  • Location
  • Bluetooth
  • Camera
  • Microphone
  • Printing
  • Incoming Network Traffic
  • Outgoing Network Traffic
  • Folders in your home directory

Although I only have six apps showing in my Security and Privacy Settings that have permission to access my camera, there are 56 apps that are capable of using it. Theoretically, they should ask before I access a feature that requires its use, but I'm just a guy on my couch with a laptop. If you are analyzing software in a highly sensitive area, knowing these entitlements is vital information.

Aside from the information I have already described, Sandkorn is the best app I've found for generating lists based on certain criteria, like architecture. If you're one of the people that recoil in horror over the prospect of using Rosetta on your precious M-series Mac, Sandkorn can tell you if you have any Intel apps installed. It can generate lists of pure Apple Silicon and Universal apps. If you keep apps in a non-standard location, such as an external or secondary hard drive, you can have Sandkorn scan those locations too.

Get additional information on Sandkorn at the developer's website. Check out his other apps like Lingon X and Smultron while you're there.

You can download Sandkorn from the Mac App Store.

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