Amerpie by Lou Plummer

"Rock Around the Clock" by Bill Haley and His Comets Listen on Apple Music Your browser does not support the audio element. What song makes you feel nostalgic for a time you never lived through? - Rock Around the Clock by Bill Haley and His Comets The first few seasons of Happy Days, a must watch TV show about a family in the 1950s, this tune was the theme song (until the producers got tired of paying for it and wrote their own.) I'm pretty sure it was also used in American Graffiti. View Lou…

Apple, in its infinite wisdom, buries a great many popular system controls three layers deep in Settings, or worse, leaves them accessible only via the command line. Luckily, we have a community of indie developers who are pretty good at surfacing that stuff, building an app around it, and selling it for $5. An app for brightness. An app for the notch. An app to keep the Mac awake. An app to mute the mic. Then one day your menu bar has 40 icons in it and your login items are out of control.…

I've resisted the whole category of apps that nag you about breaks, posture, hydration, and eyestrain. Being told what to do by my computer felt like an insult to my judgment. The reality: my judgment about when to take a break is bad. I lose track of time at the keyboard, I resist interruptions on principle, and by the end of most days I'm running well under 100%. None of that is a software problem until you decide it's worth fixing with software. I evaluated a handful of the popular Mac App…

Umang Syrana, the developer of Sxitch, a keyboard tree based app switcher gave me 10 free licenses and 10 licenses at a 50% discount to distribute to AppAddict readers. Get it free: Use code AMERPIE 50% Discount: Use code AppAddict Sxitch Sxitch is a variation on the Right-Cmd launcher pioneered by the Low-Tech Guys. Right-Cmd opens a popup; type letters and the list narrows -- "tree-based navigation" -- until one app is left, which auto-focuses. No cycling. What I like: The tree-based,…

"Summertime" by Louis Armstrong & Ella Fitzgerald Listen on Apple Music Your browser does not support the audio element. Share a song that captures the moment when seasons change. - Summertime by Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald Summertime and the living is easy, Catfish are jumping , That old cotton is high, Your Daddy's rich and your Mama's good looking, Hush pretty baby, don't you cry View Lou Plummer's Crucial Tracks profile

NanoClip is a menu-bar app combining clipboard history, text-expansion snippets, and clipboard automation "flows." Free/demo tier; Pro is $9.99 one-time ($5 with code EARLYBIRD through Jul 31). macOS 14+, local-first, optional iCloud sync, no account. By Victor Baro. (getnano.dev/clip) The world needs more $5 apps like NanoClip. Before you roll your eyes at yet another clipboard utility, this one is actually three utilities rolled into one, and each can be summoned with its own global hotkey,…

"A Day In the Life" by The Beatles Listen on Apple Music Your browser does not support the audio element. What song makes you feel like you're floating? A Day in the Life by The Beatles It always makes me happy to hear a song by The Fab Four, especially when it's unexpected. This tune used to win a lot of polls as the best rock sone ever. I don't know about that, but it's pretty damn good. View Lou Plummer's Crucial Tracks profile

I worked with a guy for twenty years. I knew his three daughters by sight and watched them progress and graduate from the school system that employed their father and me. I knew this guy's wife, his father, his mom's health history. I knew what he did in the Air Force and I knew about most of the other jobs he'd had. He was a nice person, helpful, knowledgeable, personable. He drove me crazy. He talked about himself and his life a fair bit, which I don't mind. I like getting to know people. I'm…

Reviewing software has become a minefield. Post something positive and somebody decides you must be the developer in disguise. Review a paid app and a crowd shows up to litigate every penny; make it a subscription and they bring reinforcements. Privacy-focused readers want to know where every byte goes, and given the state of surveillance capitalism, that's fair. Then there's the elephant in the room: AI. Half the internet bristles at it for reasons that are at least partly justified, while the…

"Growin' Up" by Bruce Springsteen Listen on Apple Music Your browser does not support the audio element. What's your favorite song about growing up? - Growing Up by Bruce Springsteen "I hid in the clouded wrath of the crowd, but when they said, "Sit down," I stood up" - Man, that describes my Rebel Without a Clue teenage years. I was the embodiment of Brando's famous line in The Wild Ones - "What are you rebelling against, Johnny?" Brando: "What have you got?". View Lou Plummer's Crucial Tracks…

"Old Man" by Neil Young Listen on Apple Music Your browser does not support the audio element. What song would you dedicate to your younger self? - Old Man by Neil Young To me, this is a song about continuity. We are who we are, regardless of age. Sure, there have been plenty of changes, but the core remains the same - the need for love, and home and self worth. It's just pure poetry. View Lou Plummer's Crucial Tracks profile

I spend a lot of time watching the free-software sites, and for a couple of years now one name keeps earning a click: WidgetWorx. There are currently 17 "unquestionably niche, but surprisingly useful apps" on offer, none of them more than $4.99. In a throwback to yesteryear, a few are fully functional donation-ware. Every app is signed and notarized. No subscriptions, no telemetry, no Electron bloat. The developer answers support quickly and keeps the apps current with bug fixes and new…

TL;DR: Apple Books is a storefront that happens to read ebooks. If you own your library, the real choice is between two apps. Readest is open-source, runs on everything (Mac, iOS, Windows, Linux, Android, web), and has the deepest feature set I've seen (side-by-side reading, sentence-level translation, KOReader/WebDAV sync), but it's still v0.x and some marquee features are unfinished. Bookshelves is Apple-only and commercial, but it's polished, ships fast, and pairs a strong reader with a…

Apple's Cmd+Tab has real blind spots. It works on apps, not windows. It doesn't know about Spaces. It has no search, fuzzy or otherwise. Several independent developers have recently taken a crack at fixing it, each with a different idea of what "better" means. I'm not picking a winner here -- just laying out what each one gets right and where it falls short, in case you want to try one yourself. GroupCtrl -- Free, Open Source (GPL-3.0) Instead of assigning a different hotkey to each app,…

"Louie Louie" by The Kingsmen Listen on Apple Music Your browser does not support the audio element. Share a song that feels like it was written specifically for you. - Louie, Louie by The Kingsmen Ah, I can only hope to be as famously obtuse and mysterious as the lyrics to this classic. I mean, this is a song that was banned BY THE GOVERNMENT because they thought it MIGHT contain obscenities. That sounds like the suspiscions that Mrs. Satz, my 7th grade math teacher harbored about me. View Lou…

"Bring the Noise" by Public Enemy Listen on Apple Music Your browser does not support the audio element. What's a song you only listen to when you're completely alone? - Bring the Noise by Public Enemy No one in my house has any appreciation for the social conscious of 80's HipHop but me. Old white dudes with whiter hair ( the shoe that fits me) MIGHT look a little pretentious chanting "Farrakhan's a prophet, I think you outa listen to." so I avoid all of that by making this song and the album…

My recipe for not hating myself consists of three elements: 1. Keep changing -- and by changing, I mean improving, and by improving, I don't mean "be more productive." I mean be a better person today than I was yesterday. Better means more patient, more kind, more loving. Not richer. 2. Practice gratitude. If I'm constantly looking for things to be thankful for, I don't have time for self-pity, and self-pity destroys. 3. Punch Nazis. I want to go into Nazi punching in a little more detail.…

Age: 61 Number of Years driving: 45 Approximate number of cars owned: 13 New Cars purchased: 1 In a twist of fate so cruel it was almost unbelievable, the universe broke my beloved 2005 Camry last Saturday, the same day I wrote about a bad luck streak that included a new dishwasher, an expensive HVAC repair and $9,000 in stolen copper pipes and plumbing bills. Wonder Woman ran over a nail around mid-day and took my car to run an errand. She promptly called me to announce that the check engine…

"Bad to the Bone" by George Thorogood & The Destroyers Listen on Apple Music Your browser does not support the audio element. Share a song that makes you feel invincible. - Bad to the Bone by George Thorogood and The Destroyers "On the day I was born, kings and queens stepped aside." This is not a song that someone with self-confidence problems would sing... or identify with. View Lou Plummer's Crucial Tracks profile

The first world problems have been coming at us hard the past couple of weeks. Amidst the excitement of moving into our new house we started to experience a streak of serial disappointments so consistent that it seems scripted. It started with a load of dishes, the first load in the new house, a milestone. Well, this milestone promptly leaked all over the kitchen floor and a quick check of the dishwasher's interior revealed a lake of dirty dishwater. WTF? Time to call a plumber. We got a…

"My Back Pages" by The Byrds Listen on Apple Music Your browser does not support the audio element. What song feels like a personal anthem right now? - My Back Pages, written by Bob Dylan, performed by The Byrds One of the greatest lines Dylan ever wrote “I was so much older then; I’m younger than that now.” As someone who has changed so much, decade by decade, personally, spiritually, politically, this songs feels like an autobiography. View Lou Plummer's Crucial Tracks profile

TL;DR: Mira is a small (5.6 MB), native Mac app that makes YouTube calm and pleasant: no Shorts, no sponsor segments, no recommendation rabbit hole. It folds SponsorBlock, Return YouTube Dislike, searchable transcripts, optional bring-your-own-key AI summaries, Picture-in-Picture, background audio, and a real Focus Mode into one signed app instead of the pile of browser extensions you have to maintain on your on. It collects zero data, has a long free trial and costs $39.99 for a lifetime…

"Masters of War" by Eddie Vedder Listen on Apple Music Your browser does not support the audio element. Share a song that represents rebellion or freedom to you. - Masters of War by Bob Dylan, performed by Eddie Vedder The lyrics are just as powerful 60 years on as they were in the cold war days when Dylan wrote this. "Let me ask you one question, Is your money that good, Will it buy you forgiveness, Do you think that it could, I think you will find, When your death takes its toll, All the…

My phone will ring some time in the next hour. It will be my Dad. He will be having a problem with his television. He will probably be pretty cross about it. He won't ask me to fix the problem. He will just blurt out "It's not doing anything." It's the same way a pre-schooler announces "I'm thirsty" instead of asking for a drink. The calls started shortly after he and my stepmother moved into an assisted living facility last fall. My wife (AKA Wonder Woman) found a remote system designed…

RegexPilot by developer Kristof Polleunis, is an app designed to protect you and your work from the hallucinations and miscalculations AI can inject into the regular expressions you ask it to build. Not Voodoo It took a while, but I finally realized that regular expressions are not the computer voodoo I always assumed them to be. In 2026, even regular (non-developer) users are managing and searching large data sets of movies and tv shows, music, ebooks or even just collections of documents…

"Eminence Front" by The Who Listen on Apple Music Your browser does not support the audio element. What's a song with lyrics you didn't fully understand until you were older? - Eminence Front by The Who One of my favorite misheard song lyrics - I thought this was a song called "Living in a Funk" View Lou Plummer's Crucial Tracks profile

I'm BackA former colleague once told me, "When you see a swimming pool, you don't dip your toe in. You do a cannonball." When I rediscovered blogging a few years ago, I started accumulating domains like bad habits. I went five hundred straight days writing three blog posts every 24 hours, and a good chunk of that was before I finally retired from my job at the university where I worked. Every day was a blank sheet of paper, and I always figured out a way to fill it. The secret to maintaining…

Activity Monitor is one of those apps you open when something is wrong and then quietly resent. It tells you a process called java is eating a core and offers you almost nothing else. No version, no path, no command line, no idea which of the four Java apps you have running is the culprit. For a tool that ships on every Mac, it is remarkably bad at answering the one question you actually have: what is this thing and why is it doing that? I've spent the last year using ProcessSpy as my answer to…

"The Road Goes On Forever" by Robert Earl Keen Listen on Apple Music Your browser does not support the audio element. Describe the perfect song for a road trip and why it works. - The Road Goes on Forever by Robert Earl Keen The song is basically Texas outlaw mythology compressed into four minutes. Sonny and Sherry are not heroes in any moral sense, but Keen writes them with enough speed, grit, and sympathy that I just lean into it. It is kin to “Pancho and Lefty,” “Me and Bobby McGee,” and old…

If you've ever had to search for "how to make Excel quit removing leading zeroes," I have an app for you. SmoothCSV won't turn some random number into a date and then refuse to change it back. In fact, it won't format anything unless you expressly tell it to. It doesn't try to be a lightweight spreadsheet; it's a grid editor, first and foremost. It leaves your data as it is, with no helpful "guesses" at what you might be trying to do. That's the pitch, and it's enough to make this my CSV editor…