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A Few Good Things - Vol. 24

Right vs. Wrong[YouTube Video] Labbe Family VacationsI love the way my buddy Michael blogs. It's honestly most akin to blogging of the past than most blogs these days. There's no showmanship, just a man chronicling his favorite hot dog spots or his family vacations. I look forward to each post as I know for a few minutes I'll be swept away on a journey to some place I've never been before. Scribbles Custom ThemesVincent really outdid himself with the addition of custom themes to Scribbles. I'm really excited to see what folks manage to put together, and hopefully when I have a bit more time, I can tinker a little too. Call of Duty Black Ops 2In what is yet another gaming controversy this week, the release of Black Ops 2 on Playstation has been widely criticized and dismissed. I get it, I see the argument from the lack of...

Viraam Made Me Admit I Was Wrong About Break Reminders

I've resisted the whole category of apps that nag you about breaks, posture, hydration, and eyestrain. Being told what to do by my computer felt like an insult to my judgment. The reality: my judgment about when to take a break is bad. I lose track of time at the keyboard, I resist interruptions on principle, and by the end of most days I'm running well under 100%. None of that is a software problem until you decide it's worth fixing with software. I evaluated a handful of the popular Mac App Store options for this. I landed on Viraam. The features that actually matterContext detection. Viraam auto-pauses during meetings, calls, screen sharing, fullscreen video (Netflix, YouTube, VLC), and when you've stepped away from the Mac. This is the feature that makes the rest of the app tolerable — a break reminder that fires mid-screen-share is a break reminder you'll disable within...

→ Links 🔗 Touching

A very touching story by Scott Knaster about his brother's passing. First, Scott doesn't share these very personal stories often; second, the relationship he depicts with his brother reminds me of mine with my brother. It's probably why I find this story touching. https://open.substack.com/pub/scottknaster/p/kenneth-howard-knaster

“Suffering doesn’t disappear from life, it disappears into life.” — Barry Magid, Ordinary Mind Zendo

Good morning.

“The central benefit of Zen, in the context of the ordinary ups and downs of life, is not in preventing the minus and promoting the plus but in realising the fundamental reality that is not under the sway of ups and downs.” — Muso Kokushi

Echo Results Looking Good

A man reflects with quiet satisfaction as he reviews positive echo results, surrounded by reminders of gratitude, strength, and progress in a warm, sunlit room. I wanted to share a long-overdue health update about what has happened this year and why I can finally talk about it. I recently had my second Camzyos cardiology echo and doctor’s visit of the year. I normally go every six months, and this visit gave me my best numbers yet. On Camzyos, my obstruction is much better controlled. My echo looked fantastic, so I included a table below comparing my results before and after starting Camzyos. When I first started Camzyos, I was not getting my refills consistently because of REMS requirements and the timing of my echoes and doctor’s visits. This created gaps in treatment. Once my refills became consistent and those delays stopped, the treatment began working much better. Time pointCamzyos statusEjection...

Free and Discounted Copies of Sxitch for Reader

Umang Syrana, the developer of Sxitch, a keyboard tree based app switcher gave me 10 free licenses and 10 licenses at a 50% discount to distribute to AppAddict readers. Get it free: Use code AMERPIE 50% Discount: Use code AppAddict SxitchSxitch is a variation on the Right-Cmd launcher pioneered by the Low-Tech Guys. Right-Cmd opens a popup; type letters and the list narrows -- "tree-based navigation" -- until one app is left, which auto-focuses. No cycling. What I like: The tree-based, letter-narrowing mechanic is the clear differentiator versus Cmd+Tab's unpredictable cycling. The free tier includes tree-based switching and themes; Pro adds window switching, a Hide/Quit mode, overrides, blacklists, and priority support via Discord. The developer is responsive to user feedback and has already shipped a list-view feature based on Reddit requests. Cons: May not be enough of a difference from Raycast or Alfred to justify a separate tool for some users. Price: $10...

Changelog May 8th — July 9th

A round of speed and navigation polish on the feed and reader, plus a little cleanup on sign-in and the homepage. May 28, 2026• 💅 Various little things — homepage, login and auth pages got some love. July 8, 2026• 🚀 Snappier navigation — timeline, subscriptions, and reader should feel noticeably faster when you're moving between posts and feeds. • 🚀 Faster reader open — clicking into a post from your feed now prefetches the reader and opens quicker. July 9, 2026• 🚀 Instant feed paint — your main and pinned timelines show the shell right away and lazy-load posts, so the page feels ready immediately. More for me to do here for sure. I'm working slowly on this project and I am pretty much happy it works for myself, and my own needs — however if you want anything, just let me know. ✌️❤️ — Vincent

• 🚀 Faster-loading post images — inline images on your public blog now serve responsive sizes based on the reader's screen, so posts use less data on phones and tablets. Tap to open the lightbox and you still get the full-resolution original. Small changes, but important. ✌️❤️ — Vincent

Changelog July 6th — July 10th

Happy changelog Friday! Passkeys, Ultra AI portfolio insights, grouped weekly emails, a fresher group dashboard experience, and smarter content monitoring — plus a round of settings and Insights polish. July 6th, 2026• ✨ Grouped weekly email reports — choose per-site reports, one combined report for all your sites, or both from your account settings. Send yourself a test grouped report anytime. This is a new feature when you have multiple sites, but just want a simple grouped email. • ✨ Group dashboards, upgraded — they now match the sites dashboard experience, with configurable aggregate widgets you can arrange to taste. Working on making this better as time goes. • ✨ Site features overview in settings — a collapsible summary of everything enabled on a site, so you don't have to dig through tabs to see what's on. Too many settings and features... maybe. • ✨ Browse verified links on the...

“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.” — Viktor Frankl

Poor refereeing aside, this World Cup has been great. Lots of amazing goals and classic matches, but there have been some god awful penalties!

The World Needs More $5 Apps Like NanoClip

NanoClip is a menu-bar app combining clipboard history, text-expansion snippets, and clipboard automation "flows." Free/demo tier; Pro is $9.99 one-time ($5 with code EARLYBIRD through Jul 31). macOS 14+, local-first, optional iCloud sync, no account. By Victor Baro. (getnano.dev/clip) The world needs more $5 apps like NanoClip. Before you roll your eyes at yet another clipboard utility, this one is actually three utilities rolled into one, and each can be summoned with its own global hotkey, fully remappable: • Clipboard history (⌃⌘V) -- everything you've copied, searchable • Snippets (⌃⌘S) -- text expansion with keyword auto-triggers • Flows (⌃⌘F) -- automations that transform whatever's on your clipboard Upfront, I'll tell you that you can get a portion (but not all) of what NanoClip offers from Raycast or Alfred. The developer isn't hiding from that; right on the product page he features detailed comparisons against both of those big-name launchers, plus...

I’m drawn to Zen for many reasons but perhaps mostly because it has a sense of humour. I mean one of its primary teaching tools, the Koan, is structurally similar to the way jokes work. Much of so-called spiritual practice is so needlessly serious and earnest. Zen delights in undermining the lofty and honouring the trivial.

📡✨ Ironic

It's interesting how companies often discover that the total costs of deploying artificial intelligence exceed the expenses of the employees they mistakenly thought AI would eliminate. What a paradox!

When you look for what’s looking and find only looking…

Good morning.

→ Links 🔗 Redesigned DPReview

The venerable DPReview website was rebuilt from the ground up, and I like what I see. I especially digg the typeface selection. Same content quality, just a modernized look built on a new platform. People seem to like it, generally speaking. https://www.dpreview.com/site-news/welcome-to-the-new-dpreview/

Whatever time we get is luck.

Allihat: Good App, Hard Sell

Reviewing software has become a minefield. Post something positive and somebody decides you must be the developer in disguise. Review a paid app and a crowd shows up to litigate every penny; make it a subscription and they bring reinforcements. Privacy-focused readers want to know where every byte goes, and given the state of surveillance capitalism, that's fair. Then there's the elephant in the room: AI. Half the internet bristles at it for reasons that are at least partly justified, while the other half has quietly used it to do things that would have been difficult to impossible without it. None of that changes what a review is for: what the app does, who it helps, and what I learned from actually testing it. So here goes. AlliHat AlliHat is a Safari extension by Nathan Kontny that puts an AI assistant — Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, or Apple's on-device model — in...

“Pascal would see the modern smartphone exactly as it is: a weapon of mass psychological destruction. The tech industry has weaponized his understanding of divertissement.” — Joan Westenberg, Pascal would have thrown away his iPhone

Switzerland vs. Columbia + glass of rosé = 😊

🍫 Stocking up on treats

I am sweet tooth and giving up on chocolates simply results in me overindulging myself in a couple of weeks (obviously, I feel great for the first few minutes and sick for the next couple of hours). The cycle repeats itself. Therefore, I'm implementing a new strategy where I keep treats at work. I go to the office once a week, so once a week, I can treat myself to one chocolate bar (approx 165 calories) These Mr Beast chocolates appear to be clearing out in Australia and likely won't be restocked. I am not a fan of the Mr Beast Youtube Channel but I do like these chocolates and over 60% off, its a bargain. So I grabbed a few... ok more than a few. To show my determination and willpower to myself, I didn't have any today, so I have to wait till next Tuesday for my treat...

Well I wasn’t expecting an England win. Norway next. On paper more beatable than Mexico at the Azteca but therein lies the problem. We rarely put in performances against beatable sides. It takes a daunting occasion to bring us out of ourselves.

🦜 Parrot Garden: RSS feeds to Bluesky and Mastodon

Since resuming this blog 🥳, I have been exploring how I can automatically cross-post to Bluesky and Mastodon. For my main blog, I am using EchoFeed to cross-post my blog posts to Mastodon and Bluesky. However, I am using the free account, which limits RSS feed to one. This was perfectly fine for me, but now I have two blogs (this one and Merecivilian.com). You see, the more you have, the more you have to maintain.. but thats my problem and thats for another blogpost to explore.. Coming back to the issue at hand..... I found Parrot Garden, and it seems to do exactly what I was seeking. I also found comfort in the fact that its open source and 🆓, also, who doesn't like a parrot 🦜 Its setup is straightforward, and within minutes, I was all ready to go. Actually, I have yet to find out if it...

⌚️ Apple Watches don't hold their value

This isn't a new discovery, few years ago, I learnt, the only Apple product that holds its value is the iPhone. In current times, Apple Macs also hold their value thanks to AI eating every RAM it can find. Anyway, when I discovered my Apple Watch Ultra (1st Gen) is NOT getting watchOS 27. I took this opportunity to consider my next steps. The next Apple Watch will be more expensive, because why wouldn't it be? Anyway, I have lately embraced mini devices, which my recent love affair with the iPhone 13 Mini and the iPad Mini (6th generation). Check out my recent blogpost: https://merecivilian.com/experiments-are-experiences/ I landed on the 42mm Apple Watch. My intention was to buy a refurbished Series 10 (with cellular) and call it a day. Anyway, I got a used Apple Watch 11 42mm instead for less than AUD350. In Australia, Apple sells this watch for $849....

Developer Spotlight - WidgetWorx

I spend a lot of time watching the free-software sites, and for a couple of years now one name keeps earning a click: WidgetWorx. There are currently 17 "unquestionably niche, but surprisingly useful apps" on offer, none of them more than $4.99. In a throwback to yesteryear, a few are fully functional donation-ware. Every app is signed and notarized. No subscriptions, no telemetry, no Electron bloat. The developer answers support quickly and keeps the apps current with bug fixes and new features. You can tell he put real thought into each title, and I've used enough of them long enough to speak to whether they hold up. They do. My Favorite WidgetWorx AppsCommand Keeper - A searchable, personal library you build over time: command-line snippets, shell scripts, SQL queries, even AI prompts, all a click away. That single click can insert a command or script straight into macOS Terminal, iTerm,...

Changelog June 28th — July 5th

A busy week — smoother onboarding, a fresher homepage, smarter content monitoring, a friendlier dashboard overview, spell-check controls, and new API endpoints for managing sites programmatically. June 28th, 2026• ✨ Guided onboarding after signup — new accounts land on a focused welcome step that walks you through adding your first site. Your trial starts at signup, so you can explore straight away. • 💅 Create site form refresh — URL-first layout with https:// prefilled so you can paste and go. • ✨ Weekly email reports on by default for new sites — opt out anytime from the Omakase card if you prefer fewer emails. • 🐛 Content monitoring now ignores indieauth.com/auth links so IndieWeb auth endpoints stop showing up as broken. • 🐛 429 rate-limit responses from content checks are deferred and rechecked over several hours instead of firing immediate false alarms. • 🐛 Fixed broken-link detection for URLs in...

🍿 Watched Project Hail Mary (2026) on Prime Video

⚠️ SPOILER WARNING: FULL SPOILERS In "Project Hail Mary" (2026), a lone astronaut awakens to an uncertain mission, fighting for humanity's survival amid the vastness of space and the unknown. My Rating: ⭐⭐⭐½ (3.5/5 stars) Okay, first thing: overall, it wasn't a bad movie. The pacing drags at the beginning, and several scenes could have been explained more clearly or cut shorter. The second half and the ending are much stronger. The first half felt slow, and the premise is kind of stupid, but the story between the two main characters at the end is the best part. Ryan Gosling was okay in this movie. The film was definitely too long. It's a so-so movie and not worth buying, but I'm glad it's included with my Prime subscription since it gave me something different to watch. This product uses the TMDb API but is not endorsed or certified by TMDb

🤔 Unfiltered thoughts are back on Scribbles!

Years ago (20 March 2024 to be precise), I got a lifetime Scribbles account. It felt like a nice place to blog. To this day, it remains a nice place to blog. Vincent, the developer of Scribbles, whom I consider a web friend, has so carefully and delightfully enhanced Scribbles with thoughtful touches over the years, yet still maintaining the vibe of a nice place to blog. This is no straightforward task. I stopped publishing here because I focused on my main blog. I feel that was not the right decision. It has almost been 2 years since my last post. I intend to rectify it. This blog remains a place where I can publish my unfiltered thoughts. I take this opportunity to thank Vincent. Check out his blog: https://vincentritter.com/ and also explore his other projects, Body Beats is cool.

Completing the Kindle Spring reading challenge

Amazon’s reading challenges inspired me to read again (by coincidence). Seventy-five days ago, I picked up my abandoned Amazon Kindle Paperwhite (11th gen.) and ruminated over all the unread books. I was shocked by the number of books I wanted to read but never got around to doing so. I had seventeen unread books in my collection. It just so happened at the time of the discovery, I was looking at reducing my YouTube consumption and reviewing what hobbies I wanted to pursue.  Starting the reading adventure I browsed at what I had read in the past two years. There was certainly a common theme of self-improvement, tech, finance and minimalism books in the collection of read books. I knew I had a particular interest for personal growth. After reviewing those titles, I looked at what I hadn’t read or stopped midway through. One uncompleted book caught my attention -...

📺 Miss Scarlet and The Duke

Couple of weeks ago, while browsing Amazon Prime, I came across Miss Scarlet and The Duke. According to Amazon Prime, it is one that I would like. Its probably because I enjoyed Young Sherlock (which I did). Anyway, I found it odd (likely due to licencing issues) that Amazon Prime had season 2 and onwards but not Season 1. Who in the their right mind would start watching a TV show from Season 2... not this mere civilian. Anyway, this show seemed right up my alley. Lately, female based detective shows are something that I find enjoyable. Elsbeth (on ParamountPlus) is also another show that I am slowly watching and enjoying. Anyway, I found another way to watch Miss Scarlet and The Duke and currently on episode 3 of Season 1. I am utterly disappointed, in myself, that I somehow not discovered this show earlier. I am down right kicking...

🇺🇸 Happy 250th, America 🇺🇸

Happy 250th birthday, United States of America! What a strange moment to mark a birthday, given everything going on in the world. Even so, I believe the U.S. has done enormous good and has served as a beacon for the world since at least World War I, if not sooner. I remember being about 7 years old in 1976, during the last major milestone, America’s 200th birthday. My aunt, uncle, and cousins lived in Lakeland. I was staying with them, and we went to the train yard in Lakeland to see the Freedom Train. It did not stop in Lakeland until December 1976, but I still remember it. Now it is the 250th anniversary, and this year just feels different. It should be a big celebration, and I hope it is. For all our problems, this is still one of the best countries in the world, and possibly the best....

📡✨ I Was There

Paris, France, Summer 2026 → A pirate flag flying on top of an old building in Marseillan’s port. Reminds me of the pirate flag that once flew on top of an Apple building in the early eighties. Follow the trail.

📡✨ I Was There

Paris, France, Summer 2026 → Clams linguines is one of my favourite meals. Got the best one here. The second best one was in New York. Follow the trail.

📡✨ I Was There

Paris, France, Summer 2026 → Another great stop for lunch: Marseillan. We are having a great time and nice lunch. Here are Beignet de lotte. Follow the trail.

The Best eBook Readers: Readest vs. Bookshelves

TL;DR: Apple Books is a storefront that happens to read ebooks. If you own your library, the real choice is between two apps. Readest is open-source, runs on everything (Mac, iOS, Windows, Linux, Android, web), and has the deepest feature set I've seen (side-by-side reading, sentence-level translation, KOReader/WebDAV sync), but it's still v0.x and some marquee features are unfinished. Bookshelves is Apple-only and commercial, but it's polished, ships fast, and pairs a strong reader with a 1.5-million-book built-in catalog. Cross-platform reader? Readest. Living entirely on the Mac and want the nicer native app? Bookshelves. Full breakdown below. I spend a significant portion of every day managing and curating an embarrassingly large ebook collection. For a long time, I was a dead tree books guy and honestly, I can be talked in to visiting a book store with very little effort, but for sheer usability and utility, nothing matches a digital...