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I'm done with Microsoft Windows
As of May 31st, 2024 when Microsoft announced Windows Recall, I have a single physical machine, and no virtual machines, with any version of Windows installed and that will not be changing as long as Microsoft remains on the path they're forged for themselves. The one machine which has Windows 10 is a Dell Venue 8 Pro which needs a dongle to install another operating system, and I need to find the dongle. Once I find the dongle, Windows is gone, gone, gone. Why would I go through so much trouble getting rid of Windows?
Mastering the macOS Menu Bar
I came across the following article on Apple Insider a few days ago and was initially enthused. I'd recently written a quick guide to a freeware tool for the Mac called Spaced and was hoping to find some more gems to get my menu bar under even more control. It turned out to be little more than an advertisement for Bartender, a paid app.
So, I've decided to write my own guide instead and this post has no paid anything. It's all freeware.
Spaced | macOS Freeware
I was a Bartender user for a few years. It was quite nice to get a handle on my Mac’s menubar. But I was paying $10 a month for SetApp and access to their library of around 240 applications and utilities. I could have purchased Bartender for $16 instead, but I didn’t. I paid SetApp $240 for two years to end up using about six apps.
That's not a value in my book.
Save The Web: Advanced Dollarnomics
In the first part of this series I started last year, I spoke about the idea of Dollarnomics, describing it in some detail. If you want to get the basics of the concept, then you should go read that first. It’s not a long piece and I’ve linked it below. I do outline a few ideas there, but there needs to be some additional context so that you might fully understand the power that I believe resides both in the $1 bill and in the people who are tired of always being on the bottom of the economy, even if you only have a few million dollars in the bank, an amount that is nowhere near as comforting as it was a decade or two ago.
How J.J. Abrams broke Star Trek
Star Trek: The Next Generation 30th Anniversary Print by Dusty Abell, Copyright © 2017, Roddenberry Entertainment Inc. Reprinted with permission. All Rights Reserved. Dusty Abell is a comic artist who has pencilled countless comic books, is an illustrator, and has been involved in the animation industry as a character designer since 2000. He has worked on productions such as Batman: Return of the Caped Crusader, Batman vs. Two-Face, Young Justice, Mike Tyson Mysteries, King of the Hill, The Official Handbook of the Invincible Universe for Robert Kirkman, the creator of The Walking Dead, and many, many others.
The first Star Trek television show, known colloquially as The Original Series, ran from 1966 to 1969. The series, produced by Paramount Television and both commissioned by and broadcast on NBC, had its moments with episodes that broke critical new ground, like the first inter-racial kisses in Season 1’s introduction to Khan Noonien-Singh, “Space Seed,” and the more frequently cited kiss between Kirk and Uhura in Season 3 episode “Plato’s Stepchildren.”
It’s time to open source MacOS 9: An Open Letter to Tim Cook
The now legendary Mac OS 9 desktop, a refinement of what came before and the influence for today’s macOS releases. Even to this day, untold thousands, likely tens of thousands, classic Mac OS machines are being used & loved, traded & developed for. [SOURCE: Wikimedia Commons]
Dear Tim,
How’ve you been? Good, I hope. I’ve been watching Apple’s events and your production quality is just top notch. Serious kudos to your production team. Gotta love those drone shots and slick transitions :) I’ve also been tracking the transition to Apple Silicon and I’ve been impressed. I got myself an M1 Mini that I’ve very pleased with, so much so I bought one for my wife.
Saving the Internet for Humanity: Dollarnomics 101
Or not…
The Internet of 2023 sucks.
Every site, every service, every entree and every destination on the modern Web of today is controlled by corporations. Blood and treasure is expended, our personal data and real money is hoovered up to feed bottomless C-suite salaries…
While the World Wide Web may be comprised of an endless cavalcade of corporate entities vying for ultimate control, there remains a much, much larger contingent that has yet to stand up and take it’s own power: we average peeps.
Yup. The rest of us. The rank and file, as it were. The NOT 1% of Americans who just want to get on with life minus all the drama and violence.
So, within this unpleasant and difficult context, I’d like to offer my thoughts on fixing our ailing Internet. Now, I’m not going to suggest my ideas can fix all our woes, but a better foundation for our public internet can go a long way towards healing the rifts dividing and disrupting all our lives. So, let’s kick this proverbial pig.