Amerpie by Lou Plummer

"Graceland" by Paul Simon Listen on Apple Music Your browser does not support the audio element. Share a song that got you through a difficult time - Graceland by Paul Simon Losing love is like a window in your heart, everybody sees you're blown apart. - The album on repeat at the end of my first marriage. View Lou Plummer's Crucial Tracks profile

I entered adolescence in the disco era. I gotta admit, out of all the songs that they could play at the roller skating rink, you could do a lot worse. It was still the post-Woodstock decade and many attitudes weren't far removed from the ones that people ordinarily associate with the 60s. Cocaine was consumed openly at Studio 54 and the prevailing attitude was "rich people, what can you do?" The devil's lettuce was everywhere. That's how, at the age of 12 I found myself all of a sudden on the…

The Apple-created graphics that appear on your folders are called SF Symbols. There are thousands of them, and they're designed to stay legible in multiple sizes and weights, from tiny up to headline-sized. Apple allows you to create your own, in a process that turns out to be pretty complicated when done correctly. You're drawing potentially nine weights (Ultralight through Black) at three scales, making sure the strokes stay visually consistent at every combination, making sure the whole…

"Get Back" by The Beatles Listen on Apple Music Your browser does not support the audio element. Pick a song from an artist or band that’s had the biggest impact on your life. - Get Back by The Beatles I count myself lucky that Beatles records found themselves stacked on my parents' record player during my childhood. John Lennon's death hit hard when I was in the 10th grade. I am so glad that Paul and Ringo are are in decent health, View Lou Plummer's Crucial Tracks profile

Moving from the only home we'd known in our married life this spring required us to downsize in ways that once would have caused me oceans of anxiety. Certain material goods were so intertwined with my self-identity. As avid, life-long readers, our bookshelves were overflowing, although our reading has mostly been on a screen for years. We bagged up hundreds of books and spent hours driving around stocking every Little Free Library we could find. The remnants of my passion for road cycling took…

"Waiting for the Great Leap Forwards" by Billy Bragg Listen on Apple Music Your browser does not support the audio element. What's your favorite song about moving forward? - Waiting for the Great Leap Forwards by Billy Bragg Bragg's version of it isn't naive optimism, it's someone clear-eyed about how slow and disappointing progress actually is, choosing to keep pushing anyway ("just because you're going forwards doesn't mean I'm going backwards"). That's a more honest read of "moving forward"…

TL;DR: Five free, mostly open-source, no-telemetry Mac utilities from this week's testing: docktor (dock widgets + hover previews), Kompakt (drag-and-drop image/video compression), TetherShot (live iPhone screen capture over USB/Wi-Fi), FolderForge (rule-based folder icon styling), and ImageFuel (import-free folder browsing with RAW support). Each gets a free alternative below if you want to compare before committing. Removing Irritation My app testing time this week was spent on free apps,…

"Desperados Waiting for a Train" by Guy Clark Listen on Apple Music Your browser does not support the audio element. What's your favorite song about patience?- Desperados Waiting for a Train by Guy Clark I'll keep going back to the Texas singer-songwriter well forever when the subject is some aspect of the human condition. This is a tune about the patience of an old man waiting and watching as a boy grows up. View Lou Plummer's Crucial Tracks profile

"Something More Than Free" by Jason Isbell Listen on Apple Music Your browser does not support the audio element. Share a song that captures the feeling of being proud - Something More Than Free by Jason Isbell It's a working-man's song about quiet pride in honest labor: "I don't think about you, I think about who's gonna do this work / When my back gives out." View Lou Plummer's Crucial Tracks profile

Here are the best apps I tested this weekend. Two will save you time, two are fun ways to waste it on UI tweaks, and one's for a certain psychological profile. I'm sure you can figure out which one. Holeberry - A native Swift 6 app for macOS 14 and up, built by developer Pedro Vieira, Holeberry puts the Pi-hole controls you actually use right in your menu bar. See real-time blocking status and query stats without keeping a dashboard tab open. You can disable blocking for five minutes, an hour,…

"Faithless Street" by Whiskeytown Listen on Apple Music Your browser does not support the audio element. What's a song you associate with your biggest mistake? - Faithless Street by Whiskeytown No, I'm not telling that story on the Internet. View Lou Plummer's Crucial Tracks profile

"New Madrid" by Uncle Tupelo Listen on Apple Music Your browser does not support the audio element. **What song makes you want to write poetry? - New Madrid by Uncle Tupelo" I love how this song conveys so much with so few words. View Lou Plummer's Crucial Tracks profile

My siblings and I are retired or close to it, but we still have conversations that start with "Do you remember when Mom made X?" Thus commences a discussion of Old El Paso taco kits, Chef Boyardee pizzas, waffle irons, liver, English peas and frequently, bread burgers, a 70s-era delicacy, that sounds a bit awful now, but actually wasn't that bad. The grocery stores of my youth were a lot different than what we now have. They sold one kind of lettuce, iceberg, and two kinds of apples, Red…

I eat grits. I always have and I always will. Because they're delicious, that's why. Grits are a simple dish: ground corn, salt and a little butter, the traditional way. Sometimes folks get a little fancy and start adding cheese, chopped sausage or bacon and other delicacies. Grits are a savory dish. They are not oatmeal or cream of wheat. Keep the sugar and milk away from them. People who aren't from the parts of the south where grits are commonly served are often suspicious of the dish. After…

"Into the Mystic" by Van Morrison Listen on Apple Music Your browser does not support the audio element. What's a song you'd want to hear while watching the sunrise? - Into the Mystic by Van Morrison The song is built for exactly that moment; foghorns, tide turning, "let your soul and spirit fly" is dawn imagery even though it's technically about a boat coming into harbor. View Lou Plummer's Crucial Tracks profile

When I wrote and published my first software review in 2024, I had no idea I'd still be going strong after 500+ reviews. Thank you to all of my fellow App Addicts and all the developers out there who keep writing high quality Mac software. ✉️ Reply by email

"Kodachrome" by Paul Simon Listen on Apple Music Your browser does not support the audio element. **What's a song you associate with your favorite photograph? - Kodachrome by Paul Simon" "When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school..." I love this tune! View Lou Plummer's Crucial Tracks profile

"In Spite of Ourselves (feat. Iris DeMent)" by John Prine Listen on Apple Music Your browser does not support the audio element. Share a song that captures the feeling of being understood.- In Spite of Ourselves by John Prine and Iris DeMent It's the strongest fit. It's built entirely on being loved and known despite your specific, ridiculous flaws, "she thinks all my jokes are corny, convict movies make her horny," View Lou Plummer's Crucial Tracks profile

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…

"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 pretty much proves the point. View Lou Plummer's Crucial Tracks profile

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,…

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). Blog title:…

"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 acceptance gets. View Lou Plummer's Crucial Tracks profile

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 way in 2008 at age 43. It took nine months for me to drop 100 pounds. The following year and the…

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…

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 blocking since 2024. Unwatched pulls from YouTube's own RSS feeds and Data API instead, which…

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 either. After doing my due diligence (i.e., asking ChatGPT what I should buy), we bought a lovely…

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 purpose: to make you watch more YouTube. Watching more leads to one of two outcomes: your attachment…

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 captions yourself, transcripts are only as good as the platform's captioning, and it requires macOS…

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 hands-on testing found the rule engine underneath thin: no dynamic subfolder sorting, limited management…