2026-06-25 22:43:20
TL;DR: Mira is a small (5.6 MB), native Mac app that makes YouTube calm and pleasant: no Shorts, no sponsor segments, no recommendation rabbit hole. It folds SponsorBlock, Return YouTube Dislike, searchable transcripts, optional bring-your-own-key AI summaries, Picture-in-Picture, background audio, and a real Focus Mode into one signed app instead of the pile of browser extensions you have to maintain on your on. It collects zero data, has a long free trial and costs $39.99 for a lifetime license (or $2.99/month). If you only want ads gone and you are fine with YouTune in a browser, Brave or the Vinegar + SponsorBlock Safari combo does that for free; if you want YouTube genuinely de-Googled, FreeTube or Yattee are the better pick. For everyone who just wants one quiet, native place to watch, Mira is worth the money. eryone who just wants one quiet, native place to watch, Mira is worth the money.
Buckle up. This is going to be longer than normal, but it's about an app in a pretty crowded field that needs lots of boxes checked in order to compete. Mira is a small but powerful native Mac app with unique YouTube enhancements. It also folds almost all the YouTube features you get from using DIY combos (e.g. Brave/Firefox plus Ublock, SponsorBlock, etc) or other stand alone players (Yattee, FreeTube) into one, unified experience.
If you haven't spent any time on YouTube in the past year you might not know how awful the experience has become: More ads, more Shorts shoved into every feed, autoplay previews chirping at you from the home page, and a "Continue watching?" nag that kills a three-hour lecture stream the moment you walk away. You can kinda sorta deal with the aggravation by piling on extensions like Return YouTube Dislike and the others I've mentioned, but you have to maintain that yourself and there is always the danger of one part not playing nice with another part.
Mira - Focused Video Player (its official App Store Name) is native on the Mac (and iPad and iPhone). It's not some giant Electron thing you get, unsigned from a GitHub page. It's from developer Nicholas Hershy (Hershkovitz Bros LLC) who shipped version 1.0 in May of 2026 (hence the lack of buzz), and it's been getting near-daily point updates since. It's on the App Store, and the home page is watchwithmira.com. Mira has the best privacy policy available, "The developer does not collect any data from this app." (Note: There are other apps named Mira and a video conversion app called Miro. Make sure you are testing the right one.) (Second note - Mira also works with all the big streaming services but for the purpose of this review, I'm concentrating on YouTube)
Mira operates like a browser for video. On the Mac it's a full tabbed app: ⌘T for a new tab, ⌃Tab to cycle, using standard Mac shortcuts. You can drag a link in from Safari, Mail, Notes, or Messages and it opens instantly. You can drag links back out to share them. That drag-in/drag-out behavior is Mac-only and it's the kind of small thing that makes the app feel native rather than a phone app stretched to fit a window.
Here's what you get:
It runs on macOS 14 or later.
I think the AI features are valuable, but you do you. Mira doesn't try to sell you marked up tokens or a subscription that coincidentally tracks your viewing habits. It's strictly BYOK from the usual suspects, Claude, OpenAI, and Grok. Mira's AI Summaries include key takeaways, quotes, an outline, a 15-second version, "explain like I'm 12," fact-checked claims, plus a follow-up chat, all gathered, I assume, from a well-constructed prompt that runs in the background.
The reality: you're paying the AI provider directly, pennies at a time. The docs note a $5 preload lasts a long time because a summary costs a fraction of a cent. The catch is that you need billing enabled on the provider account; a bare API key with no payment method returns an error. The good news is that transcripts work without any of this.
I can already hear that guy in the back sneering because he uses Brave. Yes, iBrave blocks YouTube ads for free, it has SponsorBlock-style features and a built-in PiP, and it costs nothing. If your only goal is "no ads," Brave is the cheaper answer, no argument. Mira earns its price by adding features you don't get in a browser. If any of these appeal to you, you need an app.
If you just want ads gone, Brave (or any browser with uBlock Origin) does that for free, and Mira's $40 lifetime price only makes sense if Focus Mode, transcripts, and the all-in-one packaging are value added for your personal use case.
The other free-and-cheap route worth naming is the Safari-extension stack: Vinegar (Two dollars, one-time) replaces YouTube's player with a plain native HTML5 player, kills most ads and the autoplay cruft, restores PiP and background-ish playback, and pairs with the free/cheap SponsorBlock for Safari to skip segments. For a lot of Mac users this is the actual default alternative to a wrapper, and it stays inside Safari. What it doesn't give you: a separate app window, Focus Mode's feed-stripping, transcripts, AI, or Watch Together. It's the minimalist's answer; Mira is full-featured.
I've tested a lot of apps in this category and the one that comes closest to matching Mira is Friendly Streaming Browser. Friendly is the same core idea as Mira: one native-feeling window that wraps Netflix, YouTube, Disney+, Prime Video, Hulu, Spotify, and the rest, with a built-in YouTube ad blocker, Picture-in-Picture, and some media-player extras (local file playback, brightness/contrast/transparency adjustments). It's published by Sensor Tower, it's been on the Mac App Store since around 2012, and it's free to download with an optional paid tier (a few dollars) for extra ad-blocking and to tip the team.
I wouldn't recommend it to anyone though. It's literally owned by a data mining company, Sensor Tower, and one read through its privacy policy should send you screaming out of the room.
https://sensortower.com/friendly-privacy-policy
The closest comparisons are the open-source YouTube front ends. Two are worth knowing:
FreeTube is free, privacy-first, blocks ads, integrates SponsorBlock, and runs without a Google account. It's an Electron app and a YouTube client, full stop.
Yattee is the one that overlaps Mira's cross-platform story most directly: free, open-source (AGPL), native, and it runs on macOS, iOS, and tvOS. It routes through Invidious/Piped instead of YouTube's own API, blocks ads, and bundles SponsorBlock, Return YouTube Dislike, PiP, AirPlay, queue, and history. If you want a privacy-respecting, no-account, genuinely free native app and you don't need the streaming-service wrapping or AI, Yattee is the strongest free alternative on the Mac and deserves a real look before you pay for anything.
MacTube still works, but its last release was February 2022.
FreeTube and Yattee are both excellent and free, so Mira has to justify itself against them. Things Mira does that the open-source crowd generally doesn't:
If you want YouTube without the tracking, then Mira isn't for you. FreeTube and Yattee are the solutions you want.
Three options, billed through Apple:
You get 5 days of full access on install, after which the subscriptions start with a 7-day free trial; Lifetime has no trial. For an app you'd use daily, the $39.99 lifetime is the one that makes sense, and it's nice to see a lifetime option offered at all instead of subscription-only. All three unlock all platforms.
Mira is a universal app: one buy unlocks iPhone, iPad, and Mac. It syncs nothing to a Mira account because there isn't one. On iOS and iPadOS the controls collapse into a floating "eye button" in the corner that opens a tool menu and fades as you scroll, rather than the Mac's persistent toolbar. iPad lets you reposition the toolbar to the left, top, or right edge. The mobile versions add gesture controls (swipe up for fullscreen, pinch to crop a wide video edge-to-edge) and lean on an iOS built-in fullscreen player for the custom sites you add yourself, which sidesteps the usual mobile-web fullscreen breakage. Background play and PiP carry over, which is the main reason to want this on a phone: free YouTube on iOS won't play audio with the screen off, and Mira will. Both mobile platforms require iOS/iPadOS 17. One real limitation worth knowing: on iPhone and iPad, a Watch Together session drops if you background the app for more than about 30 seconds, because iOS won't hold the connection open. The Mac doesn't have that problem.
2026-06-25 17:30:13
"Masters of War" by Eddie Vedder
Share a song that represents rebellion or freedom to you. - Masters of War by Bob Dylan, performed by Eddie Vedder
The lyrics are just as powerful 60 years on as they were in the cold war days when Dylan wrote this. "Let me ask you one question, Is your money that good, Will it buy you forgiveness, Do you think that it could, I think you will find, When your death takes its toll, All the money you made, Will never buy back your soul"
2026-06-24 22:09:00
My phone will ring some time in the next hour. It will be my Dad. He will be having a problem with his television. He will probably be pretty cross about it. He won't ask me to fix the problem. He will just blurt out "It's not doing anything." It's the same way a pre-schooler announces "I'm thirsty" instead of asking for a drink.
The calls started shortly after he and my stepmother moved into an assisted living facility last fall. My wife (AKA Wonder Woman) found a remote system designed especially for this set of circumstances. Via my iPhone, I can see and control my Dad's TV and his Amazon Fire Stick as if I were in the room. I can also look in on him via a camera or send text messages that display on the TV.
His primary issues are simple to fix. Sometimes he just has the wrong remote. He only needs the one for the Fire Stick, but he insists on holding on to the one for his Walmart television. They are both small and black. Although they are plainly labeled and Dad can read just fine, he can't tell them apart. His other frequent issue is a result of indiscriminate button pushing that changes the TV's input to something other than what it should be on. Cut off from his two best friends, Fox News and YouTube, he gets pretty edgy.
I have four siblings, but none of them live within a hundred miles of here. I'm a 15-minute drive away. I found myself at an appointment with a lawyer last year, where I was unexpectedly assigned power of attorney for all categories of my Dad's life, including health care decisions. He's not been declared incompetent by the court. He just can't be bothered to manage his affairs any longer.
My brothers and sisters all help out in other ways. They handled the estate sale we held to empty the huge house where he lived. My sister is dealing with the real estate people to sell it. The ones within driving distance come to see him regularly.
Wonder Woman is a CPA, so I haven't managed our finances since we got married, but now I'm having to keep track of a man who receives income from a combination of eleven different pensions, annuities and government benefit checks.
As a committed Trump voter, Dad tacitly supports cutting benefits for the poor and working class while receiving a VA disability pension in an amount that would blow your mind. He was in the Army for seven years (1967–1974), and that period of service over 50 years ago is paying off handsomely in his dotage. Because he MIGHT have been exposed to Agent Orange, every health problem he has is considered service-connected. He gets paid to have diabetes, never mind his diet.
We've never been close. Most of my life he's been uninterested in spending time with me or my kids, his grandchildren. He never saw any of us play a ball game, act in a play or graduate from high school.
I am absolutely unable to articulate why I spend hours out of my week making him as comfortable as I can. He hates where he lives, but my stepmother, his wife of 40 years, has to be there, in the memory care unit. She recognizes no one but him, and he spends time with her every day, brings her candy and makes sure she gets her meals. The services I perform are necessary. He has a very small group of friends who visit, but most of his social interactions are with family.
I loved my grandparents mightily and without reserve. In my mind, I rationalize that Dad is their son and that they would want me to do what I'm doing for him. That's enough motivation to keep me going. Besides, I don't come from a family who would turn their backs on anyone. If I weren't doing this, someone I love would have to. I have the time and the physical, if not always the mental, energy to handle it.
Besides, I owe my Dad. He has been a huge motivator for me to remain in close touch with my 40-plus-year-old kids and all of my grandchildren. They are all deserving of as much love as I can give them.
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2026-06-24 20:05:17
RegexPilot by developer Kristof Polleunis, is an app designed to protect you and your work from the hallucinations and miscalculations AI can inject into the regular expressions you ask it to build.
It took a while, but I finally realized that regular expressions are not the computer voodoo I always assumed them to be. In 2026, even regular (non-developer) users are managing and searching large data sets of movies and tv shows, music, ebooks or even just collections of documents accumulated over the years. If you do find-and-replace in BBEdit, Nova, or Obsidian; clean up messy CSV exports; build filters in Hazel, Keyboard Maestro, or Alfred; or wrangle a marketing list full of inconsistent phone numbers, you are using regex whether you call it that or not.
Although RegexPilot was built for people who already know how to build regular expressions, it has turned out to be a good tool for teaching the rest of us a thing or two. The way it works becomes quickly understandable. You describe what you want in plain English, get a draft, and then see it drawn out as a railroad diagram: anchors as start and end markers, character classes as colored pills, groups as bracketed branches. You fix the part that is wrong by dragging it, not by counting backslashes in a text field. Hovering over any node tells you what it does, and watching matches appear and disappear as you tweak teaches the difference between \b and \B, or what a lookahead actually does, faster than any reference page.
AI models are particularly good at writing regex, until they aren't. They fail, predictably, in a couple of ways. They rely on training data that doesn't differentiate between public and private IP addresses or it interprets all 10 digit numbers as belonging to US telephone customers. AI does pattern recognition. It doesn't think.
AI models also are prone to giving you the wrong flavor of regex. You're looking for something that will work in Python and you get a Javascript friendly version instead. If you're making a living doing this, you can't tell your customers "It worked in ChatGPT."
The honest fix for both is a verification loop: paste the draft into a tester, run it against the real engine, throw your edge cases at it, watch what lights up. RegexPilot is that loop collapsed into one window. The AI is built in (bring your own key for OpenAI, Claude, Gemini, and others, or run a local model through Ollama or LM Studio), and anything it generates renders on the canvas and executes against the selected language's actual engine immediately. The "did it hallucinate" check happens before you ever paste back into your code. You are not replacing the AI; you are giving yourself somewhere to catch it.
Although I've worked in tech for a long time, I'm not a developer qualified to speak on the pros and cons of this app for that kind of work. Suffice to say, the documentation alludes to broad compatibility with multiple flavors of regex and promises that per-pattern recognition happens in milli-seconds.
Privacy - No analytics, no telemetry, no account, no email list, nothing leaves the machine by default. The voice dictation runs entirely on-device via a bundled Whisper model, and if you point the AI at a local model instead of a hosted key, the app never touches the network at all. The only thing phoning home is license validation.
Pricing - RegexPilot needs macOS 14 (Sonoma) or newer; the core app is about 8 MB, closer to 72 MB once the bundled engines are included. The JavaScript and TypeScript flavors are free forever, which for a lot of web work is the whole job. A single €19 one-time purchase unlocks all 21 flavors with their authentic engines, AI, voice, the full library, and every export format. There is a 30-day trial of everything, and no subscription, which in 2026 still deserves to be said out loud. Download it from regexpilot.com.
Roadmap - VS Code extension and a Raycast plugin are on the v1.1 roadmap, with a step-through debugger slated for v1.2. Bug reports go to his GitHub issues page, and he means it when he asks for them.
2026-06-24 14:48:21
"Eminence Front" by The Who
What's a song with lyrics you didn't fully understand until you were older? - Eminence Front by The Who
One of my favorite misheard song lyrics - I thought this was a song called "Living in a Funk"
2026-06-24 02:25:00
A former colleague once told me, "When you see a swimming pool, you don't dip your toe in. You do a cannonball." When I rediscovered blogging a few years ago, I started accumulating domains like bad habits. I went five hundred straight days writing three blog posts every 24 hours, and a good chunk of that was before I finally retired from my job at the university where I worked. Every day was a blank sheet of paper, and I always figured out a way to fill it.
The secret to maintaining that pace is a well-managed case of bipolar disorder and riding a long stretch on the manic side for all it's worth. The reality is that it always eventually ends. It's not a bottomless well. There's definitely a bottom. I didn't stop writing because I ran out of things to say. I stopped because the engine that was running that hard finally idled back down to a normal speed, which, it turns out, is really a healthier place to live. I don't miss the pace, but I do miss the interaction with folks that writing all those posts gave me.
My first attempt at retirement started during COVID and turned out to be a disaster. I had done no real planning and had no idea how to fill my time. I never really found anything, and consequently, I basically squandered a couple of years.
So I went back to work in the same field where I spent my career. I had a good stretch in the IT department at a small private university, glad for the extra income and the lack of stress. When it was time to leave, I knew that my second attempt at leisure would be much different from my first. That prediction has come true.
I stay occupied with the things I enjoy. It seems that I get the urge to build or upgrade my self-hosted server about every three months, and I've explored tech topics I avoided for years, like Linux and networking. No one is calling me to change their password, and I don't have to sweet-talk recalcitrant co-workers into accepting two-factor authentication as a fact of modern life.
One of the biggest changes happened just this past month, when Wonder Woman and I moved out of the house where I'd lived for 30 years. Our new place is swankier than anywhere I've ever lived. That's a strange word to type about myself, but our new home has what matters.
It's quiet and on a single level, which my knees now require. It's also much easier for my grandson to roll around in his wheelchair, and for our elderly parents to get into. I miss my friends, the tree rats and birds who entertained me for decades. But I value the strengthened connections this place allows me to have with the fam.
Even though I wasn't writing long blog posts over the past year, I managed to stay connected on Mastodon. I took advantage of the microblogging format to stay in touch with the IndieWeb folks, whom I've come to regard as real friends. Mastodon is probably the healthiest online community I've ever been a part of, and not a day goes by that I don't see something meaningful there.
So that's where I'm at: life at a slow pace. My second retirement is being good to me. I'm still the same guy, and I still hate Nazis. I'm living in a new house with good bones and no stairs. I don't think I'll return to writing three posts a day, or even every day. But I do have that feeling that each morning presents me with a blank piece of paper, and for the first time in a while, I want to put something on it. It's good to be back.
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