The Blockbuster Chronicles - Chapter 1: My First Job

Most teenagers are excited to get their driver’s license. I wasn’t. As far as I could tell, a license was simply the first step in an elaborate trap. A license meant driving, driving meant gas and insurance, and gas and insurance meant getting a job. I was perfectly content staying home, watching old horror movies, and spending my free time online. Then Microsoft introduced the Xbox. The presentation featured The Rock standing beside Bill Gates, looking as if he might give him the People’s Elbow if the console failed to meet expectations. Suddenly, employment didn’t seem quite so objectionable. I called EB Games to ask about preorders and learned they were offering a package for $499.99 that included the console, an extra controller, and three games. Five hundred dollars might as well have been five thousand to a teenager without a job, but I wanted that Xbox. In February 2001,...

Five Unique Free Apps

Here are five free Mac applications you've most likely never come across. A project template/scaffolding automator, a local music player, resize batch images, a posture app that takes Advantage of the AirPods motion sensors, plus a financial calculator for cash flow simulation. • Prefab - Capture a folder structure as a reusable "blueprint," add variable placeholders to names and contents, then deploy it anywhere via the app, menu bar, or Finder right-click. Deployment can chain actions: git init, npm install, opening the project in an editor, arbitrary terminal commands. Built for developers but pitched at anyone with a repeatable folder-setup ritual: lawyers, researchers, creatives. • Playhead - Local-first music player for people who keep their own files instead of streaming. The pitch is "waveform-first": it generates and caches waveform data so you can see and scrub a track's structure instead of a plain progress bar. Two browsing modes, Library and Folder (preserves your existing structure), aimed at DJs, producers, and messy real-world collections. Supports MP3, FLAC, WAV, AIFF/AIF, M4A, OGG, OPUS, AAC; includes a metadata editor. • IResize Pro - Batch image resizer. Set a target width or height, it scales...

Five Free Alternative to Paid Apps

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 iCloud sync of filter selections/custom lists/userscripts/whitelist. It bundles an Element Zapper, "Tube Cleaner & Player Cleaner" userscripts that restore native Picture-in-Picture/background playback on media sites, a full Greasemonkey-API userscript engine, UserCSS support, custom AdGuard-syntax filter-list import, per-site controls, a blocked-request logger, and regional filters. Open source on GitHub • Wick - Wick brings timers, stopwatches, and alarms to the Mac with menu bar and Lock Screen access, a fully custom Liquid Glass material on macOS 26+, and -- its standout claim -- the first app to integrate with Alcove. Positioned as...

The Blockbuster Chronicles - Introduction

There was a time when watching a movie at home required considerably more effort than clicking an app and spending twenty minutes scrolling through thumbnails before deciding there was somehow nothing to watch. In the early 1980s, the home video market exploded. For the first time, people could rent a copy of a movie, take it home, and watch it whenever they wanted. Today that sounds almost absurdly ordinary, but at the time it was revolutionary. Before VHS became commonplace, your options were pretty limited. You could see a movie while it was playing in a theater, wait for a television station to eventually air it, or simply accept that you might never see it again. Video stores changed all of that. Small rental shops began appearing everywhere, stocking whatever tapes they could get their hands on. Horror movies, action movies, comedies, exercise videos, children's cartoons, instructional tapes and an...

Lore: A Free App for YouTubeVideo Downloading, also Builds YouTube Playlists Without Signing In

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 download) and Grayjay Desktop ($9.99 one time, aggregates YouTube with other platforms). Lore Solves a Problem Neither of My Last Two Posts Could When you find a video you want to archive, any app that merely organizes links isn't an archive at all. It's a bookmark service. There's a use for that, but if you need a quality local copy of the information, you need a proven download and catalog app. After evaluating the top contenders, I chose Lore, a native Mac app built by a...

Paycheck by Phillip K D*ck

Published in 1953, Paycheck dares to ask the question, how much of your life would you sacrifice for money? It reminds me of Johnny Mnemonic, the Johnny Depp film/William Gibson short story, where people carry sensitive information for corporations in their brain, but lose their memories as a result. In Paycheck, individuals are rented for a certain amount of years to complete a job. These jobs are sensitive, so once the job is complete, their memory is wiped. So, it begs the question, how much would it cost for two years of your life? In our story, we meet Jennings, an electrical mechanic who has exchange the last two years of his life for $50,000. We meet him just as he wakes up from his memory wipe, and is on his way to get paid. He's still trying to justify his decision and accept that he is suddenly two years...

💻 Linux where there is will, there is a way

After my Linux laptop plan got cancelled, I have felt uneasy. I had to find another way. Then, it occured to me, Linux can run on any device, actually when most operating system stop supporting their devices, linux provides these abandon devices longevity. If that is the case, I have an aging MacBook 13 inch Pro M1 that works like a dream but its a spare machine and surely there is a way to linux on it. Well, thats to the lovely people at Asahilinux, Linux can run on Apple silicon Check out their efforts in bringing linux support to Macs with Apple silicon: https://asahilinux.org/ Anyway, between spending time with my family and my son, I have been going through the process of installing Linux on my MacBook. This is how this mere civilian likes to spend a Friday night 😂 The initial download took for ever, I suppose, being...

Finishing Skin Deep

On Black Friday in 2004, I purchased a cheap MiniDV camcorder with the intention of filming a short film and finally beginning my filmmaking career. Over the next three weeks, I wrote a script, bought stuff to record audio, built my own steady cam, and planned for a quick shoot over Christmas break when my friend came home for the long weekend. I bit off way more than I could chew, and while I had the time of my life, an ice storm the first day ruined my film. I ended up with forty minutes of unusable footage, but memories for a lifetime. If you've read my blog for a long period of time, you've probably seen me talk about this. This was my one and only attempt at making a movie. Sadly, right around the time of this endeavour, I found myself without a place to live and life...

The Extension Aided Method of Ignoring thee YouTube Algorithm

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 $4.99 once for all 250+ controls; an optional $3.99/month or $35.99/year adds cross-device sync and unlimited AI video summaries, which send content to a third party. DeArrow fixes a different problem, clickbait titles and thumbnails, not the algorithm, and is free with an optional $1 license. Saying No to Video Crack Yesterday, in the second installment of this series on building a better YouTube experience, I wrote about three apps that build a subscriptions-only feed by avoiding the recommendation algorithm entirely. That's the solution...

Old Stories, Blockbuster, and People

Around a decade ago, I worked on a screenplay about two guys who used to work at a video store. The story was a way for me to work through some of my own unresolved feelings of a life that didn't live up to my own expectations. Of course, through the story, the character learns it's not the past that he wants to revisit, it's how he felt in the past that he misses the most. I never could land the ending. I kept trying to make it work, but the whole project really needed to be started over and I just didn't have it in me. Plus, I had no intention on making the film, I just needed a creative outlet to work through some emotions. Recently, I decided to adapt that screenplay into a novella. I deleted it a long time ago, but I remember the key scenes,...

No Man's Sky 10th Anniversary

Celebrating 10 years of exploration, discovery, and adventure in the vast, ever-expanding universe of No Man's Sky. Happy Anniversary to Hello Games, No Man's Sky. It is 10 years, and hopefully another 10. A sequel would be great. Thanks, Sean Murray, for a great game that started rough but has grown into a masterpiece, and all free after initial purchase. I don't play as much as I used to. When I do jump back in, I am there just to explore. I don't really care if I never reach the center of the universe. Game companies can take lessons from you, the bad and the good. The good has outweighed all the bad. Look at all the free DLC content over 10 years: For a more in depth review and history of this game see this post I made No Man’s Sky – Nearly 10 Years Later