introduction and history

I’ve experimented for a while with consuming a range of media through an RSS reader. I don’t remember how long I subscribed to Feedbin, but being able to follow both Twitter accounts and email newsletters in the same app as my RSS subscriptions was a real game-changer. Eventually, I jumped ship for NetNewsWire—I don’t remember all the reasons behind the switch, but knowing that I could keep subscribing to Twitter and start following some subreddits was definitely a major factor.

There’s a great xkcd strip (see below) about someone who always plays video games on a five-year lag because you get to enjoy all the good games with less of a hassle:

I love this strip for a few different reasons. First of all, I’ve never been a hardcore videogamer, so if I do ever play a big title, it usually is about five years after the fact. Second, I think there’s something about it that gets funnier (or else makes me feel older) over time: It’s funny to think of someone only discovering Portal in early 2013, but now that “five years late” is almost “ten years ago,” there’s something kind of absurd about the strip. At any rate, I wish that Portal were still supported by modern macOS, because even if that’s 15 years late, I would gladly play through the game again. In fact, I wanted to show it to kiddo a couple of months ago and was frustrated that I couldn’t!

A week ago today, my MacBook Pro suddenly stopped being able to communicate with its SSD. I’m not entirely sure what happened, but I spent most of my Tuesday afternoon wiping everything from the drive and reinstalling macOS so that I could get back to work. While I haven’t kept a physical backup for a couple of years (I accidentally fried mine when moving back into my campus office in Fall 2020), I have all of my most important documents scattered between three cloud services, so this wasn’t too painful of a process.

This morning’s RSS issues seem to be a problem with NetNewsWire’s standalone functionality, so as much as I love the app, it’s time to find a new one. Now taking RSS recommendations for iOS/macOS.

Just this weekend, I was trying to figure out if I could do this to improve some video quality. Neat!

link to ‘You’ll soon be able to use an iPhone as a Mac webcam - The Verge’

Just when I thought I had screenshot shortcuts down for macOS, Cmd+Shift+5 reveals itself and blows my mind!

A bug in my macOS mail client has just told me that after years of trying, I have finally reached the elusive “Inbox Negative One.”

One of my favorite “not designed for that” uses of the macOS app Alfred is to strip formatting from text when copying from one doc to another—paste it in Alfred bar in between, and voilà!