Busted
Wonder Woman - Busted. She ran a marathon the day before and was supposed to be out, going for an easy walk, but when I saw her, she was running.

On Identity
Reflecting on the complexity of personal identity and the use of labels, expressing indifference towards their application while acknowledging societal biases and assumptions.
Genealogy Why?
The first time I heard of someone who'd done genealogical research, was in the 70's when Alex Hailey's book, Roots was made into the most talked about TV series ever produced up to that time. Despite all the obstacles faced by scant records for enslaved people, Hailey famously traced his ancestors all the way back to West Africa.
Today, genealogical research is an industry involving multi-billion dollar companies and often DNA technology. It's entirely possible to sit at a computer and trace your family back through generations without any of the hassle of visiting cemeteries, courthouses and your great-aunt Betsy. That's the "How" part of it. What is the why?
For me, it was a life long interest in history, coupled with an interest in the stories my grandparents told. I am the furthest thing you can get from being a candidate for the Sons of Confederate Veterans, even though my ancestry would support membership. My mother's side of the family is descended from Quakers who were abolitionists. My favorite relation from that war was drafted more than once. He served three shorts stints in the Army and always came back home as soon as he could. I could not find any record indicating that he deserted, but he wasn't eager to be there, that much is definite.
Another ancestor from the 19th century named Moses Parker got married and had 12 children. Then his wife died, so he got married again and had 12 more more children.
If you are interested in looking over old census records and finding out how many cousins you have, you can get started today.
NGS Recommends...17 Important Free Websites for Genealogy Research - The National Genealogical Society (frequently referred to as NGS) is here to help individuals learn about their family history. We are a non-profit organization headquartered in Falls Church, Virginia. For 120 years, we have been the leader in teaching genealogical research skills and providing a pathway to scholarly work
Find your family. Free Genealogy Archives - Everything on FamilySearch is Free. A completely free genealogy database website. You can use an Advanced Search tool by surname, record type, and/or place to access millions of records. The FamilySearch Wiki is a “go to” resource to find what exists for a wide range of family history topics, even beyond FamilySearch’s extensive databases.
Ancestry | Family Tree, Genealogy & Family History Records - Start your family tree for free. Connect with your family story on Ancestry® and discover the what, where, and who of how it all leads to you.
Genealogy related news/articles and discussion - A subreddit about all things genealogy
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Winter trees in Dupont Forest in Western, NC.

Improve your Google Searches
I am in the process of moving all my Internet research to Kagi, but I wrote this for someone who needed these instructions today.
Google, the advertising company that also has a search engine, is more interested in having you click on things it gets paid for than it is showing you the information you are looking for. Of course, it is also tracking every breath you take in case it figures out how to extract money from the very air you breathe. There are a couple of steps you can take to generate more useful information from the company's search results.
Use a Different URL for your searches
Google is the default search engine in most browsers. It pays billions of dollars for that privilege on iOS alone - one of the reasons your choice of search engines is limited on Apple products. Everyone knows the standard address for a Google search is just https://google.com. When you search there, you get a bunch of useless AI crap and ""suggested links". If you want the good old 10 Blue Links of yesteryear, add “udm=14” to your default search URL, so it reads as “https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=14” instead of Google dot com.
To set this up in Chrome, go into Settings, then Search engine > Manage search engines> Site search.
You can also do this in other browsers and in launchers like Raycast for Mac. Other search utilities like DevonAgentLite also support it.

Filter SEO Churn With Ublacklist
Ublacklist is an extension that totally blocks certain domains from appearing in your Google search results. You can also get it for other browsers. Once you have the extension installed, head over to this Codeberg page to subscribe to lists of sites to exclude from your search results. These lists were inspired by the article How Google is killing independent sites like ours on HouseFresh and Detailed.com's How 16 Companies are Dominating the World’s Google Search Results.
There are more specialized but still helpful lists at Subscriptions | uBlacklist
This railroad crossing in on one of the cycling routes my club takes. It’s been the cause of many, many concussions through the years when riders didn’t cross properly.

A farm pond in Gray’s Creek, NC in winter. The next year, swollen by rains from Hurricane Matthew, the dam burst. It has never been rebuilt.

Learning Linux
If you have an old computer lying around, so what i did, for less than $100, I bought an SSD and 32MB of RAM and had a machine perfectly capable of running the free operating system, Linux. Not only is the operating system free, there are also a great many apps available at no cost. If you enjoy tech and would like to expand your horizons a bit, try this experimint in your spare time.
Create a bootable USB stick with Rufus to install| Ubuntu
New Here? Let's Get Started! - YouTube
How to Build a Linux Media Server - A step by step guide -
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Moments Worth Savoring
I decided not to let the never-ending fire hose of WTF coming out of Washington ruin every moment of my life. I still read the news once a day. I still reach out to people affected by all the random craziness. There are numerous federal workers in my hometown, Most of them work on Ft. Bragg, but there are also quite a few who work for the VA, including our daughter. Her job is safe, she's told. For my own mental health, I've been trying to be mindful when doing things that bring me joy, to really savor them and to take in the experience.
Picked Out a Concert
Wonder Woman and I haven't been to a concert in recent memory. As much as I love music, the prospect of dropping a thousand bucks for a weekend's worth of tickets, lodging, parking and restaurant food took the appeal out of the experience. Tonight, on a whim, we went through a list of upcoming shows to see if there was anyone we could see without having to sell a kidney. Bob Dylan is coming to Raleigh in May, and we thought about that for a minute. We kept looking, opting out of a long list of senior citizens like Rod Stewart, Billy Idol and Rick Springfield. We finally found a home-grown band I dearly love, Old Crow Medicine Show, playing a couple of hours away at a venue with festival seating. Sold! Now I have a show to look forward to and a few albums to put on repeat until we go to the show.
Building a Home Lab
I got my hands on a couple of old computers, spent a few bucks on some extra storage and RAM, and now I have a little mission control center set up in my new home office. I installed Linux on one of the machines, the first time I've messed with that in years. I upped the speed of my home Internet connection, since I won't have any more of that sweet fiber optic action from my job any more. I'll have fun trying to figure out new uses for this old hardware.
The Regular
On Saturdays (and Sundays), I usually go to the diner at the end of my street for breakfast, They were exceptionably busy this morning, and it took the server a little longer than usual to get to me. I wasn't bothered in the least. When she came to the table, she brought me my usual drink order without even asking me what I wanted. Then, to make me feel extra special, she asked which of the two meals I alternate between was going to be my choice today. Hundreds of people are in and out of this place every day. It feels good to be remembered and treated with such warmth.
Keeping Up with the Kiddos
I've been hearing from my kids a lot lately. My son's 10-year-old Prius finally died and he was excited to send me a picture of its replacement, a nice looking Jeep that will serve him well driving around the Texas Hill Country outside of Austin. My poor daughter waited until now, she's soon to turn 40, to get poison ivy. What's worse was that she got it on her face. I had to offer up some sincere fatherly sympathy for her plight. I've also started texting some of my grandkids more regularly lately. I love to send all of them pictures I find of them "back when they were cute." Of course, they are still cute now, but teasing them is my love language.
Good Email
I have a few folks I exchange messages with regularly these days—all people I've met through blogging and Mastodon. My app review blog gets many visitors and sparks some conversations, but on good days, the tech people who have questions and comments about what I write there, open up a bit and we move on to other subjects, not that I mind chatting about tech. I like having folks who have similar backgrounds and opinions to get to know. Typically we just talk about life experiences, with only a little moaning about the fascist takeover. No one is losing sight of the country's precarious position, but we aren't resigned to living in a gloomfest either.
So, there you have it. I looked for a few good things, and I found them. I encourage you to do the same. We will survive this together.
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I’m not phobic about snakes, but this thing was just creepy looking. No cuddling for him.

File List Export for Mac

One of the apps I recently picked up from the new Bundlehunt sale is File List Export by developer Georgios Trigonakis. This simple but surprisingly powerful utility is available for just a dollar right now. The normal price in the App Store is $7.99. You can get a trial version at the developer's website.
I tested the app by having it create a spreadsheet of my Obsidian vault containing 9722 files and 1843 folders. You can choose an output file in either csv or xlsx format. By default the app does not calculate folder sizes to speed up the analysis, but you can toggle it on if you want the information. On my M2 MacBook Air, the process was still relatively fast.
The most useful feature of the app is its ability to export metadata from files, particularly helpful for photos, video and music. Because the data ends up in a spreadsheet, you can manipulate and sort it in all kids of ways. If you have album artwork associated with your music files, it even gets exported into your spreadsheet. You also get the path of every file in your analysis, which can be helpful if you need to operate in the terminal.
For Every File, You Can Get This Info:
- File name
- Date modified
- Date created
- Kind
- Size
- Path (the location of the file)
- Comments
- Tags
- Version
- Pages
- Authors/Artist
- Title
- Album
- Track NO
- Genre
- Year
- Duration
- Audio BitRate
- Audio Encoding Application
- Audio Sample Rate
- Audio Channels
- Dimensions
- Pixel Width
- Pixel Height
- Total Pixels
- Height DPI
- Width DPI
- Color Space
- Color Profile
- Alpha Channel:
- Creator
- Video Bit Rate
- Total Bit Rate
- Codecs
- md5
- sha256
Exif Metadata for Your Photos
- Camera Make
- Description
- Camera Model Name
- Owner Name
- Serial Number
- Copyright
- Software
- Date Taken
- Lens Make
- Lens Model
- Lens Serial Number
- ISO
- FNumber
- Focal Length
- Flash
- Orientation
- Latitude
- Longitude
- Maps URL
- Camera Make
- Description
- Camera Model Name
- Owner Name
- Serial Number
- Copyright
- Software
- Date Taken
- Lens Make
- Lens Model
- Lens Serial Number
- ISO
- Fstop
- Focal Length
- Flash
- Orientation
- Latitude
- Longitude
- Maps URL
Koalas are adorable to look at and fun to photograph, but if you’ve ever thought about adopting one, do yourself a favor and Google “Gumnut and Craigslist” and you can thank me later.

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.

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.

Lorikeets, a nectar eating parrot found in Australia. It is common along the eastern seaboard, from northern Queensland to South Australia.

My Raycast Extensions

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.
