2026-10-16 18:57:07
"Eddy Went to Spain" by Kate Jacobs
What's a song you discovered in an unusual way? Eddy Went to Spain by Kate Jacobs
A couple of years before his death, Senator John McCain wrote an admiring obituary for an American communist who fought for the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War. This sent me down a rabbit hole and one of the things I discovered was this song about the great-uncle of this songwriter, who also left the US to fight fascism.
2026-09-23 16:36:32
"Hearts on Fire" by Gram Parsons
What’s a song you’ve had on repeat recently? Hearts on Fire by Gram Parsons
If by recently, if you mean for the last twenty years.
2026-09-22 07:30:50
TL;DR: Five free Mac utilities worth a look this week: a menu-bar fix for notification banners landing on the wrong monitor, a drag-and-drop media compressor, a keyboard-backlight scheduler, an unusually hard-to-skip screen-break app, a notch utility with AI-agent alerts, and a local-only document search tool that cites its sources.
The apps I have been testing this week include a couple of entries from someone whose Mac was doing X when they wanted it to do Y, so they built an app to make it do what they wanted. I wish I had those chops, although with AI, the days of being locked in to someone else's UI choices isn't the limiting factor it once was.
BannerHither — free. A small menu-bar utility solving one specific multi-monitor annoyance: macOS always shows notification banners on the "main" display, which in many multi-monitor setups isn't the screen the user is actually looking at. BannerHither redirects banners to the display in use.
Kompakt — free, open source (MIT). A compact Mac menu bar app for compressing and converting images (PNG/JPG/WebP/GIF/SVG) and video (MP4/MOV/M4V) by drag-and-drop — no file pickers or export dialogs, it appears the moment you drag media in. Distributed as a signed DMG off GitHub Releases.
Nocturne — free, donationware (Buy Me a Coffee). A small menu-bar app that turns off the built-in keyboard backlight when you don't need it — all day, on a schedule, or from sunrise to sunset based on location — and hands it back untouched when done.
Screen Break — free. A menu-bar break-reminder app that opens a full-screen guided rest on every display when it's time to step away, deliberately designed to be hard to dismiss meaninglessly: a passcode unlocks an early rest, and manual restarts and temporary quits are limited. Configurable 30–50 minute work sessions with 5-minute rests, smart idle reset (doesn't count time already spent away from the computer), and busy auto-defer (detects media playback, calls, presentations, or full-screen work and holds off). Localized in seven languages. Distributed as a direct download.
Notchly — free, open source (MIT). A macOS utility that turns the MacBook notch into an interactive "Dynamic Island"-style space: music controls (Apple Music/Spotify, including lock-screen controls), battery/charging status, volume/brightness indicators, swipe gestures, and focus-mode animations. Its standout feature is "Codex Alerts" — AI coding-agent notifications (Codex, and by extension tools like Cursor) that surface approval requests or completed-task alerts directly in the notch via a local Stop hook, aimed at developers who want passive status visibility without app-switching. Built natively in Swift/SwiftUI, signed and notarized, actively maintained.
Minna — free, open source. A local-first search index plus an AI assistant restricted to answering only from the user's own indexed documents on their Mac, with citations to a specific document for every claim. The developer describes it as a student's own answer to the "LLM makes things up" problem.
2026-09-20 15:54:28
"The Weight" by The Band
Which song would you use to introduce yourself to someone new? - The Weight by The Band
After pulling into Nazareth, the son's narrator get's no relief from people who keep passing the load but in the end, the whole town shares the weight. This is a song about community and its importance.
2026-09-15 07:29:19
"Graceland" by Paul Simon
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.
2026-09-10 22:00:00
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 way to smoke my first joint with a new, more street-wise friend from our apartment complex. We found a nearby construction site. He pulled a fat but loosely rolled joint from his sock. It was damp with sweat and hard to light. I did not catch the slightest buzz from half a doobie of sweat-soaked, low-quality, Mexican ditch weed. And that was that. I did not immediately seek out more. In fact, I waited another couple of years.
We'd moved to another city, all the way across the state. It took a while, but I eventually got invited to light up again and this time, it worked. I have a distinct memory of standing in the kitchen of my benefactor, sharing a jar of maraschino cherries and giggling. I definitely wanted more. I'm not a moocher by nature, so I asked about buying my own supply. I had no idea how that even worked. As it turned out, one could purchase individual hand-rolled joints on the junior high school market for $1.
That's how I bought my very first joint. I was so excited that I tried to light it up in the five-minute break between classes, but I only had three matches and it was a windy day. As I returned to the building, a teacher, and undercover teenage dope-fiend detector, had used the skill called "looking out the window" to see me trying to spark up my purchase. She grabbed me and asked to see what I had in my hands, whereupon I threw the barely singed joint onto the floor. She picked it up. She took me to the principal, a man who knew me very well. He sent me home with instructions not to return for two weeks.
My home life wasn't pleasant. My mom was married to an abusive (in more ways than one) narcissist who didn't like me any more as a teenager than he had as the first-grader I was when he entered our lives. Getting busted was the last straw. The way to keep the peace turned out to be me leaving home for good. I moved to my uncle's farm, where the adventure continued.
If I'd just learned to be cool with weed and rested on my laurels, my life would have been much different. Instead, I ended up wrestling with demon rum until I eventually had to turn from abstinence from everything in order to have the kind of life I wanted. That was in 2008.
Without romanticizing it, I have interesting cultural memories of the way cannabis was used in the 70s and 80s. As mentioned, you could buy single joints at school. Hell, my school still had a student's smoking area, a built-in marketplace. The nickel bag era was gone, but a dime bag, $10 worth of the green, netted you 1/4 ounce of a product that would indeed get you high, if you smoked enough of it.
Smoking it usually involved joints using the rolling paper that you thought the cool kids used. For me, that was J&B 1.5s. Not using a double wide signified that I had been rolling long enough that I didn't need all that extra paper. People these days talk about having an everyday carry pen or knife. For me in those years, it was a packet of rolling papers. We also occasionally managed to get our hands on pipes (bowls) from head shops. Most potheads of my era could make an emergency pipe with a toilet paper roll, some tinfoil and a safety pin.
Looking back now at how my fellow smoke hounds turned out reveals that no one's life was ruined by reefer madness. My fellow partakers are today a senior military leader, the head of HR at one of the county's largest employers, a physician, a retired cop and an ordained minister. I have no idea if any of them still puff, I doubt it, but I wouldn't judge them if they did.
These days we know that most of the harm attributed to cannabis is the stuff of myths, while the claimed health benefits for pain control, anxiety, nausea and appetite stimulation are true. Rather than a life-ruining addictive and noxious weed, the sticky-icky is an herb with thousands of years of medicinal use in its background.
It's not for everyone, but I am 100% certain that you know someone who would be a lot cooler if they would just burn one once in a while.
Weed never got its hooks in me. The bottle did. That's the one that almost took me down, and the one that made me give up everything as a trade for not killing me.
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