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TIL on macOS > System Settings > Desktop & Dock > Widgets > Widget style > Monochrome. I have a few widgets on my desktop and I don’t like that they switch between monochrome and color when the desktop is in focus. This is a nice setting that I wish I had looked for earlier.

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Poking around on Halfway.

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Went glamping. Hammock naps. Bike rides. Cool crisp nights. Puppy time.

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Molly White on RSS as a newspaper

Molly White recently wrote about how publications are moving to publishing newsletters because their search traffic is dwindling. One downside to us readers is that managing a bunch of newsletter subscriptions creates a lot of clog in our inboxes.

She then goes on to detail how she uses RSS to create her own “newspapers”. Which frees her up to read whenever she’d like and keeps her inbox clean.

[…] at least I could choose when to read the news, go to the newspaper and get my fill, and then put it away. No pings in the middle of my workday pulling my focus away from my writing. No notifications during my planned relaxation time, alerting me to some new horror. No threats to my inbox zero, requiring me to choose between staring neurotically at the unread emails notification or marking an email as read only to lose it forever. Maybe there was something to be said for the newspaper.

I’ve been doing something similar for years. I have a “Newsletter” folder in NetNewswire and, rather than sign up to newsletters via email, I subscribe to them with RSS. In fact, if they don’t have an RSS feed I seldom subscribe. I love reading the posts that I have in NetNewswire and do so nearly every morning for over 20 years!

But it isn’t all perfect.

As Molly also mentioned, some publishers have no idea they are also publishing an RSS feed. This is an issue because many publishers use their stats to sell ads. So the more people that subscribe to an RSS feed without the publisher knowing, the less their analytics show their true reach.

Like Molly I wish more people used RSS. It isn’t as easy as following someone on a social network (it should be) but it isn’t much harder either. Her post describes how to get set up.

If you have a website of any kind, check to see if you have an RSS feed for your posts. If you don’t, see if you can enable one. And then, add a /subscribe page to your site and explain RSS to your readers. Help more people learn about RSS.

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I sometimes feel that I have so much to do that I don’t know where to start. This is when I remind myself; make a list, start at the top. It works every time.

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Favorite Toots 0.2.5 fixes embeds

I love my favorite toots page which shows toots that I favorited on Mastodon recently. It is a nice showcase of people doing awesome things and sharing them on Mastodon.

But it was broken for a while. I only looked into the issue very briefly months ago and I wasn’t able to determine the fix. Well, this morning I decided to ask an LLM for some help and I was able to fix the issue in minutes. As with most programming problems, I was overlooking something very simple. Do with that information what you will.

So, Favorite Toots has been updated to 0.2.5 and now works again. Enjoy!

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It is starting to look like I’ll be pushing off updating to Apple’s “26” family of OSes this fall. Not just because of the obvious waffling on the Liquid Glass UI that I’m seeing in the betas, but also because it really seems like they are lost as a company.

Perhaps it is time to go to Linux? (I’ve done this in the past, it is more possible today than ever.)

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Switcheroo 1.2.0 adds new UI and switch tab to profile feature

Switcheroo, the default browser that I use everyday, just had a new release over the weekend thanks to Zhenyi Tan.

The 1.2.0 update includes a new profile picker UI (seen below) and a new “switch tab to profile” feature making it easier to move tabs between Safari profiles.

Switcheroo’s new profile picker UI.

What is Switcheroo? I wanted a way to be logged into all of my various services for each context I find myself in each day; work, personal, a side project, etc. I do this by having a Safari Profile and Safari window for each profile. Whenever I click a link, Switcheroo lets me quickly choose which Safari Profile to open the link in. I love it and I don’t know what I would do without it!

I’ve recently started using macOS Spaces for each of my contexts. I had tried this in the past and I could never get it to work right. It isn’t perfect, but with Switcheroo this is now possible.

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Did some wildflower picking.

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Florian Ziegler discontinues monthly posts

Florian Ziegler:

I tried to do these monthly posts for a while because I like to read them when others post them. But I always forget to write down things I’ve been watching or doing, so at the end of the month, it feels like too much work to try to remember everything and then write a post about it. I tried to make it a habit to log my thoughts for these posts, but it does not come naturally to me. So I am renouncing any further monthly posts.

Man I feel this. I’ve said in the past, I really like to read other’s weeknotes type posts, and I wish I did my own. I envy those that are so good at it. I thought Diversions would be something I stuck with but writing them feels like a slog.

Oddly, when I did my what I saw series of posts, for some reason I stuck with that through 100 posts. So, sometimes we can’t tell what will stick and what won’t.

The moment a personal blogging project feels like work is when I drop it and move onto something else. When it comes naturally is when it is really fun. So I think Florian is right to discontinue his monthly posts and he’s inspired me to also state publicly that I’m discontinuing Diversions.

That feels good.

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Zhenyi Tan releases Technotes

Zhenyi Tan:

Technotes is a Safari extension that adds user-contributed notes to the Apple documentation website. The notes can include sample code, warnings about common pitfalls, and other useful stuff.

The Safari extension being for all sane, well reasoned individuals. There are, of course, versions of Technotes available for other browsers used by miscreants and ruffians.

A commenter on Michael Tsai’s blog singely named Matthew says: “This is a great idea, but the problem with all of these approaches of in-place supplementing of documentation and commenting, is one of critical mass.”

Let’s get Zhenyi some mass.

Note: Zhenyi is the majority contributor to Switcheroo, an app I could not live without.

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Tracy Durnell thinks self-web mentions need to be displayed slightly differently on WordPress. Consider upvoting the GitHub issue if you agree.

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Eliza and I have been thinking about buying some e-bikes for a long time. We live in a mountainous area and a traditional bike is fun, definitely a good workout, but also limits the number of times and places we’d bike. Having the e-bikes broadens our horizons quite a lot.

Most used e-bikes are sold at nearly retail price, I would have no idea how they were treated, and don’t come with any warranty. So, after searching for used e-bikes for many months, I decided to buy new.

I picked up two bikes from Lectric. An XP4 750 for me, and an XP Trike for her. We really love both of them. I particularly like that Eliza is on a super stable system that reduces my anxiety when she’s riding.

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Should Tuff come to WordPress?

I’m using the Simply Static WordPress plugin to generate the files for two of my websites. It is a nice plugin with some good features and I gladly pay for it.

One of the websites is just over 5,000 files. To me, this seems like an average-sized website. SS takes nearly 15 minutes to generate the website. Tuff, my homegrown SSG that was a pile of spaghetti code, used to generate a similarly sized site in about 12 seconds – and I thought that was very slow at the time.

Perhaps I need to pull Tuff apart and rebuild it for WordPress?

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I find myself in need of new Apple TVs, AirPods, and AirTags. But I have the feeling that Apple is on the cusp of releasing new versions of all three. I must be patient!

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Manuel Moreale on silence

Manuel Moreale, who is purposefully taking in far less information during the month of June, mentions this about the silent periods that he used to fill in with podcasts:

First couple of days I could see my brain wanting to fill the silence with something but that was mostly out of habit more than anything. It’s now a week and I don’t even think about podcasts anymore. It honestly was easier than I thought.

Find times to be bored. Let your mind wander in silence. For me, it has allowed real ideas – ideas that are authentically my own and not spurred on by someone else’s thoughts – to spring up and take shape.

See also, from 2010, The “What To Do When You’re Bored” List.

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I’ve been running macOS in “Increase contrast” mode for nearly a year. Yesterday’s WWDC keynote, which debuted the Liquid Glass design across all of Apple’s OSes, reminded me to look at my settings again. Toggling that off again is an entirely new experience using macOS. It is like I don’t even need to download the beta! (I won’t be downloading in betas, btw. But I appreciate those that do. Thank you.)