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.

A writer's prayer

They always do the same thing, words. They hide away under the folds of my mind, deep in the shadows, keeping as silent as death. My ability to search for them is limited, so I try my best to shine light into those darkened box canyons of brain tissue, but words are not bound by the laws of physics and my feeble light is obscured by a thick fog. The multi-verse is popular these days, so I imagine that words exist in their own pocket universe and they can control when and where the two realities intersect, allowing me to access them again, but only for a short time.

Work arounds because Twitter sucks

Since Felon Musk has destroyed Twitter, I'm just going to blog a bit like it's Twitter. I blog on PostHaven, which is a wonderful blogging service you should definitely check out if you hate the Technogarchy, would like to adhere to a reasonable budget, and appreciate actual ethics. Here's a short list of the tools I'm using to achieve something of a social media presence:

Apple's Notes cannot be exported, and that's wrong...

Ok, this is annoying. Apple Notes is a wonderfully capable notes app that allows you to bulk import all manner of rich text file formats, even entire Evernote exports, and organize them the way you like... with one exception. If you want to stop using Notes, you have to leave everything you created in Notes behind, or export them one by one.

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.”

Medium's stats are broken, so I left...


This is my stats page. This is not helpful.

Much like today’s other causes of cultural constipation such as race relations, government, cold medications, etc., etc., ad nauseam, the page you see above appears functional, but is not.

Sure, you can click on things and you can see numbers and charts, but none of it is functional to the point where you can derive real, usable data regarding any of the indicated data points.

Take the chart above for example. The Views chart only shows you how many articles were “viewed”, but not which articles. It’s just a number. The Claps indicate how many times the Clap button was clicked, but not by how many users. You need to click the number of claps (as seen in the image below. Yes, it’s that tiny, gray thing at the bottom right corner of the screenshot.) on the article stats page to see that information. Pointing at the clap icon unnecessarily informs you are unable to clap your own article. Just make it all open the list of clappers, Medium, or put the data on the stats page. Astonishingly, readers are allowed to Clap as many times as they like, so those 10 claps for the first Mac OS piece are from two people. TWO!

Apple's Butterfly keyboard tragedy & potential e-waste disaster


Without official unit sales numbers from Apple, we have no idea how many hundreds of thousands of these machines are in the wild.

I am a life-long fan of Apple. Born in ‘68, I grew up in the thick of the consumer electronics and personal computer boom of the late 70's. Keeping to myself at times, loudly evangelistic at others, a shame-free Mac Ex-pat, reluctant Windows user for a decade, and always the staunch critic, my fandom runs deep. From my early experiences with Apple ][e machines, to all of the Macs I’ve had since, and arriving at now with the two Mac Minis on my desk, one an M1 and the other a last-gen Intel model, I have had my most satisfying and productive years on Macs.

Fortunate for me that I missed Apple’s Butterfly Keyboard era, then.

Advertising is dead. Please flush on your way out…


Ads are almost literally everywhere.

It is rare, but every once in a while I presume to speak for everyone. It’s not like this is breaking news or a controversial hot-take, either. No need to sit down or get a stiff drink:

Nobody, but NOBODY likes advertisements… except ad people.

When I was working IT at Saatchi & Saatchi LA back in the mid-2000’s, Toyota was paying them tens of millions a year to make a handful of splashy national ads. Sure, they were epic, for ads, but all that money floated a five story building bursting with 500 worker bees that would pump out a half dozen ads a year.

I don't like my mechanical keyboard


The Keychron K5 SE Low-Profile Mechanical Keyboard is anything but low profile. It’s also a clicky, sloppy, error-prone mess for a writer who taught himself to touch type using his own system.

CLACK CLACK CLACK… TIKTIKTIKTIKTIK… CLACK CLACK… TIKTIKTIK… AUUUUUUGGGHHHH!!!

Tap tap, goes my Keychron K5 SE. It takes nigh on nothing to press a key, an advantage I’m sure is prized by gamers more rabid and entrenched than myself, but when I’m writing I’m forced to BACKSPACE to repair something that was rendered illegible every third or fourth word. So, I’m typing this review on my Dell tablet PC with a typecover-style input device, and my typing accuracy rockets back up to normal levels.