2025-12-06 19:10:00
I've mentioned this in passing a few times and sparked some curiosity, so I'm going to tell the story of the time I ended up on an FBI watchlist, which was creepy AF but still a badge of honor for getting under the skin of the man.
I live near Ft. Bragg, the gigantic U.S. Army base that's home to the 82nd Airborne and Special Forces, AKA The Green Berets. I was in the Army in the '80s, and two of my kids are also military vets. The Bush administration's decision to invade Iraq was an abomination, one that I deeply opposed to the point where protesting that war became the center of my life. I was a member of various groups, but my work centered on my relationships in three of them: Military Families Speak Out, Veterans for Peace, and our local group of old Quaker ladies and the usual lefty suspects.
On the first anniversary of the invasion in March of 2004, local folks organized a demonstration against the war that surprised us with its turnout and drew attention from all over because of the proximity to the large local military community. We decided to do it again in 2005, and it quickly became obvious that we had more support than we could imagine. Everybody who was against the war wanted to come. The list included a member of Congress and Cindy Sheehan, a Gold Star mom who became infamous for protesting outside W. Bush's Texas ranch to confront him about the death of her son. The newly formed Iraq Veterans Against the War was there, along with a parade of groups like Code Pink and veteran activists from Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Nelson Johnson, a survivor of the Greensboro Massacre, spoke. Multiple documentary filmmakers contacted us.
It took months of planning. It was clear from the beginning that we were a threat to the pro-war crowd. They definitely didn't like the participation of so many disaffected members of the military community. I got doxxed on a local message board and started receiving hate mail addressed to my house. At work, I started finding pro-war propaganda left on my desk regularly. The rear window of my car was shot out in my driveway. Then the phone calls started.
The callers, always men, presented themselves as active-duty soldiers who were against the war. I'd talked to many GIs who thought the war was bullshit, and they didn't sound like the men who called me. The callers wanted to know if we were going to "do anything," meaning direct action, e.g., trying to enter the military base or "anarchist-type shit." It was obviously a clumsy attempt to gather intelligence on our already very public plans.
The demonstration was a huge success. It was the largest antiwar event outside a military base since Vietnam. We held it at the same park where Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland had once entertained antiwar GIs in the early '70s. The local police called in reinforcements from 11 other agencies, including horse-mounted cops and surveillance units with cameras and telescopes. The following week, a newspaper poll of the community found that 50% of the people in our community were against the war. That was pretty telling in a county where the vast majority of people were on active duty, veterans, or members of military families.
Since the war didn't miraculously end, I kept on organizing, locally and nationally. In early 2006, I got a call one day from a reporter from NBC. He told me he was working on a story about government violations of the Patriot Act. He'd discovered that the FBI was maintaining records of antiwar activists past the legal time limit on such lists. Of course, my name was on the list that had been leaked to him. He wanted to know if I would comment on the record about the information. I gave him a sound bite about the evils of the Bush administration and the similarities to government actions against activists during the days of J. Edgar Hoover.
I didn't hire a lawyer or call Washington with an attitude. It took a couple of days for the shock to wear off, but I took it more as a badge of honor than anything else. It made me happy that our movement was such a threat to the government that they felt they had to use resources to keep tabs on us. I knew that I wasn't doing anything illegal. No behavior modification was needed on my part. I was fatalistic about anything happening to me. Nothing would have made the war machine happier than to intimidate people like me into silence. That wasn't going to happen.
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2025-12-06 05:15:38
"Carolina In My Mind" by James Taylor
Share a song that captures the feeling of being homesick. I've seen JT perform a couple of times, not far from where he lived as a kid in Chapel Hill, NC. I think he has one of the most distinctive voices in American musical history. My god, he's written some of the most iconic songs of my lifetime and I have listened to them since my Mom played the LPs on a record player at our house in Raleigh.
2025-12-06 04:04:24
I've built what amounts to a database of my entire digital life stretching back to the early 90s, using the super powers of EagleFiler from C-Command Software and the highly respected, veteran developer, Michael Tsai. EagleFiler is the ultimate everything bucket for my needs. With it I can quickly locate any email, social media post, blog article or work document that I have ever created, plus more. EagleFiler is much faster than Spotlight at finding what I am looking for. It provides a very scalable way to organize, annotate and expand any project.
EagleFiler isn't just a repository for historical data, it's a great app for organizing projects on an ongoing basis. Using hotkeys, it's easy to quickly add web archives or new blog posts and other documents. If using tags and folders isn't granular enough, you can have multiple libraries. More than one library can be open at the time and multiple pages can be open per library.
EagleFiler uses the finder for the documents you have. There is no duplication caused by importing the very same info into a different database. EagleFiler's own data consists of its index of what you've added, your tags and notes. If you use Finder tags, they remain with the original document. One benefits of using EagleFiler search s that you can skip folders and tags if you aren't inclined to use them and just search for the information you want.
Once you have data in EagleFiler, there's a three-pane interface where you can view and edit files directly, without having to open, close and save in separate apps. You can also quickly create new files of different types in the current folder or tag where you're working.
Exporting your emails from practically any client or service makes gives you a leaner daily driver and can speed up searches in Outlook, Gmail etc. I've encountered more than one person whose sole use of EagleFiler is for email archiving. Rob Griffiths (of the late, great OS X Hints website) said "Import from Mail is ridiculously easy—select a mailbox or a number of messages and press Option-F1 in Mail."
The list of apps that integrate with EagleFiler is long and comprehensive. It includes text editors like Bbedit, browsers including Arc, Brave (and Chrome and other Chromium based browsers), utilities like PopClip and Hookmark, just about the whole gamut of Microsoft and Apple productivity suites, task managers like Omnifocus and even RSS readers like NetNewsWire and Reeder.
Yes and no. At a high level, both products are used to store, search, sort etc. documents in a structured database format. I asked Michael Tsai to give me his stock answer to the inevitable comparison questions and he said "There are many features in common. I know that some people prefer DEVONthink because of one or another feature that it has and EagleFiler lacks. Customers who have used both generally tell me that they prefer EagleFiler because it's easier to use and faster and because of the way it handles e-mail archiving and integration with the Mac file system and other apps." EagleFiler is $69.99 and if you are the sole user of the app, you can install it on two computers. DevonThink pricing is complicated, but at the simplest level it is $99 for the standard version and $199 for the pro version that also includes the companion mobile app.
The latest (free) update to EagleFiler was in October, 2025 includes the following enhancements:
When I asked Michael about his plans for the future of EagleFiler her gave me quite a list. "The top priority is making it fully Apple Silicon native and at the same time rewriting it in Swift. Another high priority is adding a widescreen view (i.e. with the preview pane on the side instead of the bottom). Lots more new features, optimizations, and refinements are planned. I love EagleFiler as is (and use it every day to run my life as well as to help develop the app itself), but I think there's so much potential to make it even better."
I asked about the Rosetta issue and he explained, "It's compatible with Apple Silicon Macs, but currently only part of the app (the indexer and web page fetcher) runs natively, so Rosetta is still required." This can be a deal breaker for some folks, so you've been warned.
2025-12-02 21:14:21
This is the third annual edition of my personal tech stack. In 2023, I saw many people talking about their default apps as a result of an episode of the podcast Hemispheric Views.. I learned about a lot of great software that I wasn't familiar with. I wanted to get in on the fun, so I started a blog for that express purpose, and the rest is history.
The biggest changes in 2025 happened as a result of cutting ties with Google, Microsoft, Meta and Amazon. I've tried to move as much of my back end tech stack out of the US for privacy reasons.
Apps with a ⭐ are new choices since last year. There are links at the end to my previous year's choices.
2025-12-01 20:37:52
With nearly over 500 apps installed on the MacBook I use for testing, keeping everything updated is a daily chore. If I wait a week between scans, I end up with 60-80 available updates to install. Based on my experience, the app updater that catches everything doesn't exist. Historically, the app that does the best job is MacUpdater, but, absent any breaking news, it will become deprecated at the end of December.
Today, I ran several updaters on my system to determine how they compared.
2025-12-01 17:47:31
"Bang the Drum All Day" by Todd Rundgren
Share a song that perfectly soundtracks your commute. Well, I'm actually retired, so my commute is the hallway from my bedroom to my computer desk, but I still get the regular honey-do list from Wonder Woman. I've played this song for years at full blast when I wake up with an attitude.
