'Once In a Lifetime' by Talking Heads Listen on Apple Music Your browser does not support the audio element. What song makes you want to dance alone in your room? - Once in a Lifetime by Talking Heads The beat is nervous and jittery in exactly the way that makes it impossible to stay still, and the lyrics are about the same disorientation the herky-jerky rhythm creates. David Byrne's own dancing…
Are you paying for an ad blocker, folder automation, notes & PKM and image editing ? You don't have to. wBlock - a next-generation ad/content blocker for Safari: 750,000 rule capacity across 5 Safari content-blocking extensions (150k each), ~40MB idle RAM by running Safari's native content-blocking API out-of-process, Protocol Buffers + LZ4 filter storage, HTTP conditional-request updates, and…
TL;DR: Lore is a free Mac app that follows YouTube channels over plain RSS, no algorithm, no Google account, then archives what you keep as a permanent offline file with transcript search, highlights, and SponsorBlock built in. The site's source-code link 404s, so don't take open source on faith. Alternatives for readers who want a lighter touch: FreeTube (free, open source, no algorithm, no…
'Don't Think Twice, It's All Right' by Bob Dylan Listen on Apple Music Your browser does not support the audio element. What's your favorite song about letting go? - Don't Think Twice, It's Alright by Bob Dylan It's the archetypal letting-go song: no bitterness, no melodrama, just a clear-eyed walking away. 'It ain't no use to sit and wonder why' is about as economical as songwriting about…
If you listen to podcasts about endurance sports, you'll hear a common theme come up among the hikers, cyclists and runners whose idea of fun is covering long distances under their own power. Many of them are recovering addicts and alcoholics. They often say 'I traded one addiction for another.' That's me. After a struggle with drinking that stretched back to my teens, I got sober and stayed that…
TL;DR: Control Panel for YouTube, UnTrap, and DeArrow all quiet YouTube down without making you leave the account, the browser, or the ecosystem behind. That's the whole point and the whole limit: you still get Google's ranking, you just stop looking at what it hands you. Control Panel is free and open source on Chrome and Firefox; the native Safari app is $3.99 once, no subscription. UnTrap is…
TL;DR: Play, Yattee and Unwatched all refuse to let YouTube pick your next video; each builds a feed from your subscriptions instead of Google's ranking. Play is free to download with the channel-following features behind Premium at $2.99/month, and it's the only one of the three that isn't locked to a single backend. Yattee runs through public Invidious and Piped instances, which Google has been…
Privilege comes and privilege goes. I've had stretches in my life where I lived frugally out of necessity, not because I had a hidden virtue. Later in life, with debts paid off, we managed to save some dough for retirement. Well, retirement arrived, and although we don't have 'buy your own helicopter' money, we don't have to live with the crappy refrigerator that came with the house we just bought…
TL;DR: Paid for YouTube Premium after years of DIY ad-blocking. Ads are gone; the algorithm, the clutter, and the impermanence aren't. Building a stack of small tools instead of hunting for one app that fixes all four. First post in a series; toolbox preview inside, full reviews coming. Google did not design YouTube to entertain you or to inform you. Every major design choice points toward one…
TL;DR: CaptionSnap is a $9.99 one-time menu bar app that saves your Teams, Zoom, and Google Meet transcripts by reading the live captions the meeting app already displays. No audio recording, no bot in the call, no cloud, no model download, and Accessibility is the only permission it asks for. Speaker names come from the platform, so attribution is a lookup instead of a guess. You have to enable…
TL;DR: AutoShelf ($19.99 one-time) ships an embedded MCP server that works, but do you actually need that? An AI model can write a launchd LaunchAgent and a shell script once and it runs forever, no app, no daemon, no purchase. The MCP's real value only shows up once you're managing enough rules to want conversational audit and editing instead of hand-maintained scripts, and even there, my…
My parents were young when I was born, only 17, but despite the relatively small time gap, we are from distinctly different generations. They've been divorced since the 70s, so their needs and circumstances, while similar, are still unique. Last year, my dad and his wife moved to an assisted living facility about a 20-minute drive away. It takes about three hours to get to my mom's. That's doable,…
TL;DR: Part two of the Apple Account series. Backup apps that pull your iCloud data down to storage you control, email providers that speak IMAP/CalDAV/CardDAV so Apple's own apps keep working without iCloud, ways to buy and track software outside the App Store, and a password manager that isn't Keychain. My own five picks are at the end, along with why you should be testing a restore every…
TL;DR: Mac power users vet apps carefully and then hand their entire digital life to Apple without a second thought. Apple can close your account on suspicion alone, keep your unspent balance, and never tell you why; a federal judge confirmed all of that in 2023 and threw the case out. An Apple Account is simultaneously an authentication system, cloud-storage account, software license repository,…
'Radar Love' by Golden Earring Listen on Apple Music Your browser does not support the audio element. What song makes you want to take a midnight drive? - Radar Love by Golden Earring This has got to be the classic answer for a reason: the bassline mimics tires eating up highway miles, and the lyrics are literally about driving through the night to a lover, View Lou Plummer's Crucial Tracks…
TL;DR: Four free iPhone apps that handle jobs you would normally do on your Mac: API Bot for testing endpoints, View Source Vibe for inspecting a suspicious link, Fiper for algorithm-free RSS, and Owl VIP for sender-level email notifications. Two earn a place on your phone. Fiper loses to NetNewsWire for anyone reading this blog, and Owl VIP charges a subscription for something iOS Focus Modes…
You have a chance this week (ending August 7th) to pick up five apps at the lowest prices I've seen them listed for. Sale Details . Reviews of Apps I Have Personally Tested TextSniper - Better Than Native OCR | AppAddict ($7.99- On Sale For $1.99 -%75) Hit a hotkey, drag a box over anything on screen (a locked PDF, a video frame, a screenshot someone sent you), and the text lands on your…
'When I Paint My Masterpiece' by The Band Listen on Apple Music Your browser does not support the audio element. Share a song that perfectly captures anticipation. - When I Paint My Masterpiece, written by Bob Dylan, performed by The Band at the 30th Anniversary Celebration Bob's song writing along with Levon's voice. It doesn't get better. Promise that you'll be there with me, when I paint my…
TL;DR: RAD Weather pulls forecasts from four services and shows you where they disagree instead of averaging the disagreement away. Free, with RAD Ultra at $1.99 a month, $19.99 a year, or $99.99 once, plus a MultiPass tier at $2.99 monthly or $29.99 annual. The Mac build is a real Mac app, the subscription is justified by per-forecast data costs, and there is no radar. RAD TV shipped in 7.6.7 and…
TL;DR: Orbit runs each of your Google accounts in its own isolated WebKit session inside one native Mac window, for $89 one time instead of the $50 to $200 a year the alternatives want. It exists because you can de-Google yourself but you can't de-Google your father. The catch is that it only works as long as Google keeps letting Mac apps sign in, and passkey-only and Advanced Protection accounts…
TL;DR: Blankie is a free, open-source ambient sound mixer for Mac, iPhone, iPad and CarPlay; no ads, IAPs, or subscriptions. 24 mixable sounds, saved presets, custom audio import, menu bar control. Stacked against Noizio, Dark Noise, myNoise, and Endel, all of which charge something for depth or convenience Blankie gives away for free. I'm not usually one to complain about app pricing, but I make…
Mac users tend to be nostalgic about the hardware and software they used in their earliest exposure to tech. That doesn't mean anyone wants to try to get real work done on a late-90s PowerPC Mac clone, or go back to 14-inch monitors. People just enjoy being reminded how far we've come, and pretend there was once a time when everything 'just worked.' (It didn't. I was there.) German developer Maik…
'Jack and Diane' by John Cougar Listen on Apple Music Your browser does not support the audio element. Share a song that captures the feeling of being seventeen. - Jack and Diane by John Cougar I grew up fast. I was desperate for adulthood and freedom, but the good stuff already felt like it' was slipping away in real time. That's what this song feels like to me. View Lou Plummer's Crucial Tracks…
Quick Look extensions have evolved over time. Once the category seemed to be made up of legacy junk: kernel-adjacent hacks that broke every time Apple shipped a point release, the kind of thing you install once, forget about, and eventually blame for a random Finder freeze. That reputation was earned. For years the ecosystem really was a pile of abandoned generators held together by community…
Is it possible to shrink image file sizes on a Mac using native tools? Yes, but with some big IFs thrown in. Preview can knock a file's size down if you dig into the export dialog and guess at a quality slider, and Photos will do the same on export, but neither remembers what you did last time or watches a folder for you. That's way too much friction when alternatives exist. No one wants to live…