2025-12-10 21:37:00
I've always used a file manager as the center of the way I interact with my computer, much more so than a launcher, dock, or menu-driven UI. I used PathFinder for 17 years before switching to Qspace in 2024. I took advantage of the Black Friday sale on Bloom, a relatively new app, to give it a try. Bloom is a well-designed, affordable app with a lot of promise. It's definitely a tool for advanced users and may be overkill for those who aren't. It's not a Finder clone, so you'll have to reprogram your muscle memory to use it efficiently. The developer is actively adding new features and seems responsive to user feedback.
If you like this kind of tool, I'd pick up a copy now, for $16. The dev's website says that all future updates will be available to anyone who purchases the app—no subscriptions, no paid updates after a year, or any of that monetization optimization stuff. If you need more features right now and don't want to wait, try Qspace, but keep Bloom in mind.
2025-12-09 10:22:00
I am not snobbish about the television shows I watch. I don't declare a new series to be a failure if it isn't the second coming of The Wire. Sure, some shows are just watchable, while others make me count down the days until the next episode. Good old Netflix still releases some quality stuff all at once, and you can binge the whole season in a weekend.
Here are my top picks from the past year. You'll see that I'm partial to shows that are made in or take place in the UK. Six of my top 10 selections fit that bill. I've subscribed to Acorn and Britbox for years. Those shows also fall off the back of trucks and into Usenet and torrent sites just like their American counterparts. IYKYK
2025-12-09 02:03:47
In a move no one could have predicted, I managed to cut my subscription costs this year (by $7). I drastically reduced the number of subscriptions, too. In December of 2024, I had a whopping 55 monthly subscriptions that cost me $193 a month, a number that includes software developers, bloggers I support financially, web hosting companies, network services like my DNS and VPN providers, and pay TV. This year, I managed to pare it down to 43.
Some of the costs I picked up in 2025 are associated with my decision to de-Google in the name of privacy. I'm now paying for Kagi, a search engine; Fastmail for email; and ChatGPT instead of Google Gemini. Some of the money I saved by canceling all pay TV services except Netflix went towards a subscription to a Usenet provider and indexer. Substantially less of my income is going to billionaires now. I'm not paying a dime to Amazon, Microsoft, Google, or Meta, and they have much less access to my data. Most of my app subscriptions go to indie developers and employee-owned companies.
I no longer subscribe to 13 of the App Store apps that I was paying for last year, mostly because I found that I no longer used them enough to justify the cost; I didn’t rage-quit anyone's app. I dropped a location tracker, a list maker, a couple of quotes apps, two related to movies and TV, and one that went out of business, Pocket. I use Inoreader, my RSS provider for read-it-later services, now.
Obviously, I like the stuff I'm paying for enough to let go of some dough. Almost everything I use has some cost incurred by the owner for backend support. Development continues, and new features get added. My most expensive subscription used to be The New York Times at $24 a month. Today, it's ChatGPT, a company whose morals and ethics are suspect but whose product basically taught me the skills I needed to get into self-hosting this year. I don't think I could have mastered Linux as quickly without its help.
I know that it's a privilege to be in a place where I can afford all of this. I'm retired. I drive a 21-year old Toyota. I don't have cable. I don't get a new phone every year. I've lived in the same house since 1996. Testing software is my hobby and, yes, it costs money. Many hobbies do.
2025-12-07 10:19:05
"Dublin Blues" by Guy Clark
What's a song you'd want your best friend to hear for the first time? My favorite version of this tune is from a benefit concert for the Interfaith Dental Clinic, recorded live at the BlueBird Cafe in Nashville in 1995 with Guy Clarke, Steve Earle and Townes van Zandt. (plus an uncredited appearance by Emmylou Harris on two songs) My favorite line is "I have seen the David, seen the Mona Lisa too, and I have heard Doc Watson play Columbus Stockade Blues". Me, too Guy, me too.
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.
