Amerpie by Lou Plummer

"That's Right (You're Not from Texas) (Live)" by Lyle Lovett Listen on Apple Music Your browser does not support the audio element. Which song do you associate with your favourite city? - That's Right (You're Not from Texas) by Lyle Lovett My son has lived in Texas longer than he ever did in our home state (NC). His kids are pure Texans, having grown up in Austin, one of the coolest cities in the country. I love my visits there, visiting Torchy's Tacos, Zuiker Park, 6th Street and, of course,...

Mac Apps I’m looking for feedback on a few apps. I’m looking for the answers to the following questions: Did this app solve a problem you had? If so, what was the issue and the solution. Who do you think is the target audience for the app What’s your favorite feature or biggest aggravation with the app? BookShelves eBook Reader - BookShelves is a modern ebook reader and library manager for macOS and iOS. It supports EPUB, PDF, MOBI, PRC, and Kindle formats with iClo...

"Suicide Is Painless (From the 20th Century-Fox film ""M*A*S*H")" by Johnny Mandel Listen on Apple Music Your browser does not support the audio element. What song did you discover in a tv show or movie? - Suicide is Painless (Theme from MASH)* It's funny that in my formtive years, the shows with the most social impact were the thirt minute situation comedies like MASH with its strident antiwar message and All in the Family with a theme of equality on many fronts including race and gender. Vi...

"I Saw Her Standing There" by The Beatles Listen on Apple Music Your browser does not support the audio element. Which artist were you a fan of first? Write the story of the song that made you a fan. - I Saw Her Standing There by the Beatles Say what you want about Boomers, they had the best music. I was lucky to grow up in a house where my Mom would stack LPs on the record player and we'd listen to The Beatles, James Taylor, Pete Seeger, Cat Stephens, The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and so many ...

Tower For years I assumed GitHub was only useful if you were a developer. Turns out it's actually one of the best tools I've found for managing text-heavy Mac workflows. I now use Git repositories to version and back up things like: my 13K-file Obsidian vault (private) ~700 Keyboard Maestro macros (public) Hazel and BetterTouchTool configs (public) writing projects and scripts (private) ~500 Markdown documents with my quotes collection (public) No coding required. I...

"Here I Go Again" by Whitesnake Which artist did you discover thanks to a music video? - Here I Go Again by Whitesnake I was just a mild fan of hair metal bands, but being male and alive in the 80s meant I was definitely a Tawny Kitaen fan. This, I think, is the most iconic of all the videos she appeared in. View Lou Plummer's Crucial Tracks profile

"Burning Down the House" by Talking Heads **What would you put on for a long brisk walk? - Burning Down the House by Talking Heads" I'm not usually grossly judgmental, but, if you don't like this one, there is something the matter with you. Seriously. It's an instant mood lifting anthem for me and is has been for decades. Energizing. View Lou Plummer's Crucial Tracks profile

"Love At the Five and Dime" by Nanci Griffith Listen on Apple Music Your browser does not support the audio element. Which song makes you emotional? Why? - Love at the Five and Dime by Nanci Griffith I miss Nanci Griffith so much. I think she was one of the best song writers of the last half century. Her soft Texas twang, her wit, her intuitive choice of songs to perform are all things that endeared her to me. The first time I played Love at the Five and Dime for my wife, it brought me to tea...

Developers keep finding interesting ways to make our existing tech more useful. Sometimes that means refining how we interact with tools we already rely on. Other times it means applying software to problems that don’t obviously look like “tech problems.” Here are three apps that take a slightly unconventional approach. Xspeak — a meeting companion for people who sometimes struggle to articulate their thoughts in fast-moving conversations. It transcribes discussion in real time and helps y...

"She Thinks I Still Care" by George Jones Listen on Apple Music Your browser does not support the audio element. Post one of your favorite sad songs. - She Thinks I Still Care I first heard this song on James Taylor's live album from the mid-90s. JT's version is great (of course) but George Jones' original is the real tear jerker. This is one of the few tunes I'm able to harmonize, so it's a sing out loud favorite of mine. View Lou Plummer's Crucial Tracks profile

AppTela I recently organized my /Applications folder; it contains more than 660 apps. The tool that finally made it manageable is AppTela, a layered, categorized launcher available for $4.99 on the Mac App Store. I tend to keep an app for every contingency. The problem isn’t disk space; it’s remembering the name of the utility you installed last year to solve a problem that only shows up every few months. If you’ve ever had the experience of knowing you have an app fo...

"Deportees (Plane Wreck At Los Gatos)" by Pete Seeger Listen on Apple Music Your browser does not support the audio element. A song that you like in multiple versions Deportees (Plane Wreck At Los Gatos) was one of the last songs Woody Guthrie ever recorded before he entered the hospital for his long and slow decline from Huntington's disease. It's the story that stresses the dehumanization of immigrant workers. Woody was pretty damn prescient. The song is about current events just as much as...

"Battle Hymn of the Republic" by US Army Band and Chorus Listen on Apple Music Your browser does not support the audio element. Which lyric always gives you goosebumps Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord; / He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored; / He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword: / His truth is marching on. - This has actually been a top 40 hit twice in its history, for the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and Andy Wil...

Navidrome My ten-year experiment with Apple Music is over. Over the past month I rebuilt my workflow for managing a large local music collection; roughly 36,000 tracks. After a lot of experimentation, these are the tools that finally clicked. Migration – Apple Music with iTunes Match ($25/year; you only need it once) Repair – Yate (free) Management – Swinsian ($34.95) Maintenance – Yate + Swinsian Consumption (hardware) – iPod Classic ($40–$400) Consumption (st...

"The Ballad of the Green Berets" by SSgt. Barry Sadler Listen on Apple Music Your browser does not support the audio element. A song that represents where you live My high school girlfriend lived in the same neighborhood where Barry Sadler did when he recorded The Ballad of the Green Berets - about a mile from the gate of Ft. Bragg. I've been a soldier or lived among them my entire life. The guys in Special Forces tend to be pretty smart and usually interesting. The training is rigorous, ment...

"Where Did You Sleep Last Night (Live Acoustic)" by Nirvana Listen on Apple Music Your browser does not support the audio element. A song that's largely acoustic Showing a deeper appreciation for grunge's roots than most, Kurt Cobain's performance of this tune (AKA In the Pines), a Leadbelly song has been one of my favorites. View Lou Plummer's Crucial Tracks profile

Radial I spent the afternoon experimenting with Radial 4, a rapidly evolving pie-menu app from independent developer Gustav Lubker of AppVerge. If you’re not familiar with pie menu apps, they present a circular menu divided into sections (or slices), each representing an action or command. When configured well, they map naturally to muscle memory and can be extremely fast to use. Other pie-menu apps I've used include: Pieoneer (good) CirMenu (good) PieMenu (limite...

"Wagon Wheel" by Old Crow Medicine Show Listen on Apple Music Your browser does not support the audio element. A song by a band whose merchandise you've bought - what was the merchandise My last concert was Old Crow Medicine Show in Winston Salem and I bought a t-shirt of course. Wagon Wheel is the unofficial state song of NC. A little known fact - Bob Dylan gets half the royalties and a co-writers credit. Dylan recorded the chorus in 1973 while OCMS added verses 25 years later. View Lou Plum...

BackiGo If you rely on iCloud but don’t have a true backup of that data, BackiGo is one of the simplest ways to create one. BackiGo is an iCloud backup app I can recommend for anyone looking for an alternative to Parachute. Parachute is a well-known iCloud backup utility that was recently acquired by a company with a solid reputation, but also a history of price increases and subscription transitions. Who This Is For BackiGo is particularly useful if you: Store large...

"The Times They Are A-Changin'" by Bob Dylan Listen on Apple Music Your browser does not support the audio element. What song would you play to counterbalance the world when it feels like a broken and unrelenting monolith designed to bring terror and tragedy Bob Dylan is the answer to everything. Yes, times are dark these days, but they've been dark before and we made progress. As long as there are people willing to sacrifice, and there are, there is always hope. View Lou Plummer's Crucial Tr...

"Alice's Restaurant" by Arlo Guthrie Post one of your favorite relaxing songs. After we finish our Thanksgiving meal, my family has a tradition dating back to my childhood. We all gather in the living room and listen Alice's Restaurant, the story of Arlo Guthrie's arrest for littering in a Massachusetts small town in the late 1960's. View Lou Plummer's Crucial Tracks profile

DoubleMemory I’m always impressed when an out-of-the-box thinker builds an app unlike anything I’ve seen before. Iterating on proven concepts is fine, but after testing enough clipboard managers and voice-to-text apps, they all start to blur together. Give me something new, clever, and useful, and I’ll happily change my workflow to make room for it. a year ago, DoubleMemory caught my attention with its interesting feature set and it's done nothing but improve since t...

"Long Black Veil" by Johnny Cash Listen on Apple Music Your browser does not support the audio element. Post one of your favorite songs that has the name of a color in the title The Man in Black does a solid version of this sing-along classic. Other worthy versions include performances by The Band and by Mick Jagger with the Chieftains. "Ten years ago, on a cold dark night, a man was killed 'neath the town hall light." View Lou Plummer's Crucial Tracks profile

Number 500!!! I posted my 500th app review this week. If you keep typing long enough, this is what happens. It makes me super happy and I hope I have helped some of you find apps that you've grown to use and love. If I have, please leave a comment, it will be motivating and appreciated. I want to give a shout out to r/MacApps for all the support and feedback I've gotten there. I also want to thank Scribbles, the blogging platform I've used the entire time. I recently...

"With a Little Help From My Friends" by The Beatles Listen on Apple Music Your browser does not support the audio element. Some albums have a good opening track, but the 2nd track is totally killer. What's your favorite 2nd track song? This was an easy one. I also love Joe Cocker's version (Who doesn't? I will fight you) Lennon/McCartney wrote this especially for Ringo in an octave he could sing it in. View Lou Plummer's Crucial Tracks profile

"Somebody to Love" by Queen Listen on Apple Music Your browser does not support the audio element. Share a track by your favorite vocalist of all-time. I don't think anybody else has ever had the chops Freddie Mercury had. His is THE VOICE. View Lou Plummer's Crucial Tracks profile

PicMal Every Mac user eventually ends up with a pile of files that need converting. Screenshots that are too large for the web. HEIC photos from iPhones that need to become JPEGs. Audio recordings saved at ridiculous bitrates. Video files that need to be optimized for sharing. You can solve all of that with command-line tools like ffmpeg or with a handful of separate utilities. Or you can just use Picmal. Picmal is a single macOS utility that handles image, audio, and...

"Jessica" by The Allman Brothers Band Listen on Apple Music Your browser does not support the audio element. What's your favorite instrumental song? Jessica by the Allman Brothers Band is my fave, although a few more stand out in my memory, like Misirlou and Wipeout from the surf rock era, Tubular Bells from the early 70s and Chariots of Fire in the 80s. View Lou Plummer's Crucial Tracks profile

Power User Apps I spend a lot of time trying to remove small bits of friction from my Mac workflow. macOS is a great system, but out of the box it still leaves a lot of obvious automation opportunities on the table. I spend a lot of time trying to remove small bits of friction from my Mac workflow. macOS is a great system, but out of the box it still leaves a lot of obvious automation opportunities on the table. Most of the improvements I rely on come from stitching t...

"Carry On" by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young Listen on Apple Music Your browser does not support the audio element. Share a song with some of your favorite vocal harmonies. Last year I would have picked a Simon & Garfunkel tune, but I'm mad at Paul Simon (ask me why). I don't think I could ever be angry at Neil Young or David Crosby, so I'm going with Carry On. The chorus harmony stack is one of their most powerful. It really shows how Neil Young's higher, thinner voice really changed the blend...