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All Change

I'm going to be writing a column over at The Words. This one is going to be retired.

Peeling skin on my arm.

I did what Apple wouldn't do!

Backstory here. In 2012, Apple introduced VIP's for mail at WWDC. The premise was simple. You could assign a VIP status to certain contacts. What this did was allow different notifications to be set up for those people. For instance, notifications such as badges could be turned on for VIP's. Maybe you wanted those emails to show up on the lock screen while others remained silenced. The great thing about this was it could be fluid. In other words, you could turn VIP's on for certain projects. Then when those projects were finished, you could turn that VIP off. Meaning you got those important email notifications during that project. This was a phenomenal idea. But...it sparked something inside of me. I wasn't the originator of this idea (and I can't remember who I heard talk about it first). If Apple could do VIP's for mail, why can't they do it...

📡✨ I Was There

This is Montreal, Summer 2026 → This is the best place to see Montreal city: from the terrace at the top of Mount Royal. I go there many times a year, essentially all seasons except winter. Hot summer day today. Follow the trail.

Do you ever have a bunch of blog post ideas bouncing around in your head but no idea where to start, what would actually be interesting, or how to flesh them out? That's been me lately. My vision is improving, but my eyes aren't fully healed. My right eye, the first to be operated on, just hit the one-month mark. The left is about two weeks behind. I have one more doctor visit to get a prescription for reading glasses and maybe fine-tune my distance vision. Distance seems okay, but reading and intermediate vision are tricky. The intermediate could use some fine tuning, and my short-distance vision is definitely worse and needs more correction. With this better vision, I'm trying to blog more, get more done, and make progress before the next hurdle. Catching up feels overwhelming. I keep trying to do five things at once, so I need to...

There’s been so many great trailers come out of Comic Con today. [YouTube Video] [YouTube Video] [YouTube Video] [YouTube Video] [YouTube Video]

It's Saturday night, and I'm in my chair working on a D&D session, but also thinking a lot about how content I am right now.

2026 Week 30

Quite a bit worth writing about this week! 🛠️ Tools of the week• Firefox • RemNote (notes - personal) • TickTick • Capacities (notes - work) 📰 PublishedPublished my opinionated guide to privacy-based DNS. I’ve been wanting to write up some stuff like this and this week was a good time to start getting something positive on the blog. ☁️ The weather!After the crazy heat and smoke from the week before this week was absolutely gorgeous in Chicagoland. Air quality as good as it’s going to get (AQI below 50). Temps in the low 70s and dew points in the low 50s. Nice taste of Fall that comes to an end tomorrow (7/26). Back to reality. The humidity has already been climbing today. ⚛ Proton testingLast week I mentioned trying out Proton Unlimited for a month. Proton Calendar is out for my testing purposes. Some weird misses in updating recurring...

Today I'm thinking...

• Saw a Facebook group about home libraries. People posting pictures of their super cool home libraries. I am drawn to this idea, but I'm a public librarian and I know that when I die no one will want my books. Or any of my other stuff. I know this because every day people bring boxes and boxes of book donations, many from their recently deceased relatives. And I'm not going to go sit alone in a room in my house to read. • Still...a home library...would be sweet • I am slightly conflicted. Like maybe 15% conflicted

navigation menu modifications

I made a little modification to the navigation menù of this space. The NOW page now points to the main blog's /now page. It did not have any sense keeping two of them. Also, thinking about it, probably there's no need to keep it here along with the /uses and the /contacts page which can be included in the /about one. I'll take a couple of days to think on that.

Published my opinionated guide to privacy-based DNS.

Daily Skips the Timer Problem Entirely — Now It Talks to Your Other Apps Too

If you bill clients by the hour, it might be time to reevaluate your workflow. Daily, a Mac time tracker from independent developer Niels Mouthaan, continuously supported since 2013, just got a substantial update: a web API, a Zapier integration, and an MCP server. Because it works via user polling and not background process monitoring, it's the go-to privacy-respecting choice in its category. Based on its review history, Daily enjoys broad support from tech professionals with ADHD and time blindness in particular, and plenty of neurotypical folks too. The human brain just isn't designed to do two things at once, despite all the hype about multitasking. Every timer-based tracker asks you to remember to press a button at the exact moment your attention shifts, which is precisely the moment you're least equipped to remember anything. You close a ticket, Slack pings you, someone walks in, and forty-five minutes evaporate into...

Hobbled

I have been hobbling about in great pain. I damaged my ankle in an accidental fashion. You don't normally have to do very much to instigate pains when you're getting near sixty, but this was a particularly painful one, with a specific cause, that would have hurt even a younger person. We were walking the dog in a park on Thursday, and she decided she was going to investigate an area of river bank that was just one metre further in front of where the five metre dog lead had already allowed her, so she had to pull at me to try to get it to stretch further. This is a Rule of Dog. Dog always wants to be approximately one metre further away from you than the maximum length of the lead they are attached to. As I was momentarily pulled along, and looking up to see where she...

Finding a home

Finding an online home for your creative work can be hard. You want it to feel right. But so many platforms, for one reason or another, just don't. At some point, though, you have to settle on one so that you can focus on your actual creative work. It's too easy to let the search become a distraction and even an avoidance tactic. It's often been that for me. Thankfully, Scribbles feels very close to what I've been looking for: a low-key, nicely designed, fun place to be. I love all the whimsical design elements, but also the editor, the thoughtful settings, and the Explore feed. It feels like the right mix of things for me. It also feels like a good companion to Buttondown, which I've been using for a while now for my newsletter. So, what I'm saying is, I no longer have any excuses for platform hopping....

Call of Duty: Black Ops 2

When I look back at my favorite video game experiences, Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 ranks up there with the best of them. Released on November 13th, 2012, Black Ops 2 was the eleventh game in the Call of Duty franchise. Sure, the single player has some sort of story that links together with the other Black Ops games, but I don't remember anything about it. It was epic and exciting, but the meat of the gameplay was with the online multiplayer where I spent most of my time. In 2012, I was managing a movie theater. Beginning with Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, myself, along with some of my co-workers would stand in line for the midnight release of each Call of Duty game, and then go right home and play the hell out of it. Working in a movie theater can a be a little strange....

Staying up late on a Friday night playing Black Ops 2. What year is it again?

I became a huge fan of Tubi, not only because of their eclectic selection, but also because they were pretty smart about where they placed their ads and they weren’t too excessive. It’s a shame they’ve increased the ads and they obviously don’t care where they place them anymore. Such a bummer.

Backrooms

Just watched and really enjoyed Kane Parsons’ Backrooms. Based on his YouTube series of the same name it’s been described as Blair Witch meets Severance or The Shining set in an infinite Travelodge. Very unique, superb production design and a brilliant soundtrack. Highly recommended. [YouTube Video]

Feathery scuff marks on the old wooden floor.

A tiny break, then back to it!

I'm nearly half way through my craft fairs for the year now, so about time there was a new entry on this blog! The picture of my largest poppy seed lamp below (with birds nest shade by Katherine Miles) is from the most distant show I've attended so far, Masson Mills, Sir Richard Arkwright's 1783 water powered cotton spinning mill in Matlock, Derbyshire. From darkest Cornwall that was a 282 miles, 4 hrs 48 mins trek (plus an hour or two for breaks), which I did with friend (and ex-Pottery Throwdown competitor) Ed King, sharing both the drive and the van's load space. However, if your vehicle breaks down when you've just started off home afterwards, then it might actually take nine and a half hours to make the same journey, by the time you've waited for the RAC man to arrive and sort you out. Lucky we had limped...

Imagin Raw: a 4.3MB, free, open-source Bridge alternative for culling RAW files

TL;DR Imagin Raw is a free, open-source Mac app (4.3 MB) for culling and rating RAW photos — no import, no library, folders stay where they are. Writes ratings/labels to standard XMP sidecars so Lightroom and Bridge both read them. Compares itself directly to Adobe Bridge (9 MB vs. 2 GB, 0% idle CPU vs. nonzero). It's a few weeks old, Mac-only by design, and has a known issue with Fuji RAF previews. Not a Photo Mechanic replacement for pros yet, but a solid free option if you just need to look, rate, and reject. Imagin Raw is a new, free, native SwiftUI browser (macOS 14.6+) from developer Cristian Baluta, who also builds Spoto and cmd c. It decodes RAW files with LibRaw, watches your folders with FSEvents so changes show up in real time, and writes ratings and color labels to XMP sidecars, the same format Lightroom and Bridge use....

Thinking about... • How happy I am just sitting here in my chair, with my wife and our dog and cat • Chasing bullsh*t goals is dumb. Deciding which ones are bullsh*t is important. • Looking forward to playing Traveller tomorrow • I feel very content

Changelog July 24th

Quieter and focused writing, stickies get a little love, and signing in on your own domain behaves better. July 24, 2026• 💅 Calmer writing — Draft sits beside Save now, autosave is quieter (preview shows up once you’ve got something saved), Saving/Saved is back on the publish button in a quiet way — just a visual clue as it's autosaving, categories are easier to pick or create, and draft sharing lives in a small tray next to Download instead of being buried and hard to figure out. Page options are simpler too. Just trying to get the writing screen out of the way and make things more about writing and less about managing and options. • ✨ Simpler shortcodes — use the slash menu for embeds when writing /, or paste a YouTube / Vimeo / Spotify / Apple Music / Apple Podcasts link and it turns into the shortcode...

Let's listen together: chapter 2

Hi, welcome back. Glad you’re here, and I’m especially glad you brought your favourite headphones because I’ve prepared a smorgasbord. Shall we? Walk off the Earth I’d like to introduce you to one of my favourite bands. They’re Canadian, formed not far from where I grew up, and there’s a decent chance you’ve heard their breakout hit: this cover of Somebody That I Used to Know. It’s great, but let me show you the songs that built my appreciation for their range and spirit. Stick Season was what caught my attention. It cemented my impression of the band as a source of witty lyrics, infectious energy, and a distinctive musical voice. The vibes are impeccable from the start, with uncomfortably self-aware lyrics steeped in a particular flavour of the suburban millennial experience that I suppose I’m primed to respond to. But the way they play with rhythm and lyrics is...

Photos too!

I've generally always maintained a photogaphic blog as a separate concern to a writing blog. I don't know exactly why really, but I have an idea that I wanted to present as serious, highbrow and arty with my photos – whereas my writing characters before were often very lowbrow and frankly unhinged. I've had a long relationship with photography. If you've read my About page recently (I updated it yesterday, so very recently) you will have seen that my whole career was in photography – but it was in the selling of the gear needed for taking pictures rather than actually taking any. Although I knew all the techniques needed (and the relevant gear I could sell to customers who wanted to do it), I was talking to others about them rather than practising myself very much. Over the last ten years, I started to take more photos, to actually...

The muffled sounds heard from inside the stationary car.

Solanin (ソラニン , Soranin)

It's time to put myself on this big manga book (472 pages, 15x21cm page) I purchased nearly a year ago. I started to read little by little, but I never fully immersed myself in reading it. Now dust begins to appear on the cover and it's time to finish it and leave space to something else. This manga has been described to me as a masterpiece of Inio Asano which tells about the story of maturation and awareness of some young Japanese. I'm not very informed by the culture and education of Japan, so I am struggling a bit to empathize with the emotions and expectations of the two main characters. Despite having experienced the same uncertainty about the future, an uncertainty that, given the current political, economic, and climate climate, is still present in my life. Anyway the art is great, the dialogues flow and I think I need...

I just wanted to say I saw the news of John C. Dvorak passing yesterday. I hadn't heard much from him in years and often assumed he had retired. I was first introduced to him by watching Leo LaPorte and TechTV back in the day. I remember being introduced to Google Voice when Mr. Dvorak and Leo talked about it on a show. I can't recall the exact show or episode, but Mr. Dvorak talked about how he and his son used it to save on phone costs. If I remember correctly, it helped with long-distance charges, though I'm not certain. I also remember reading the articles he wrote for PC Magazine. What I didn't know until he passed was that he came from a semi-famous family, the inventor of the Dvorak Keyboard (never used one). It's getting to the point where some of the pioneers from the internet era...

👨‍💻 Vincent is on fire 🔥

Vincent, the kind gentleman that makes this very blog has been on fire for the last week or so. Hopefully he will take the weekend off. The m.merecivilian.com blog is hosted on the Scribbles platform which I wholeheartedly recommend you check out. The improvements and enhancements Vincent has done to Scribbles have been impressive. Check out the log here: https://scribbles.page/updates/archive Personally, I appreciate that my blog can be fully backed up now. This is reassuring: “✨ Full-site backups — Export & import now defaults to a themed static HTML site: your look/theme, archives, category feeds, and a proper favicon. You name it. Classic HTML and Markdown archives are still there if you want them. So you basically get a full static site that you could host yourself (and I have more announcements regarding that soon).” Font selection is also a neat addition, I am struggling to decide which font to pick though:...

Changelog July 22nd — July 23rd

More settings tidy-up (still a longer road), Explore’s image gallery gets a bit nicer, and a few rough edges around dates and highlights. July 22, 2026• 💅 Dark mode highlights — white highlight marks were turning into solid white blobs in dark mode. They now get a soft yellow wash so you can actually read them. • 💅 Explore gallery — short posts with images show up in the gallery now, and I dropped the “Featured” labels. Felt like clutter in the UI. July 23, 2026• 💅 Settings keep getting sorted — Nitpick is now Display, Menu is Header & footer, layout stuff lives with Appearance where it belongs, and related options sit on one page each. Search is a bit sharper too, plus a Need help card if you’re stuck. Still figuring settings out — for most people the defaults are enough. Feeling good though! • ✨ Easier navigation...

🤣 Jack Baty writes: “I can hardly be bothered writing things anymore. I get an idea for a blog post and thinking about all the words I'd have to come up with makes it just sort of fizzle out. It's a phase, right?” Boy do I understand that feeling.

Here's what I'm thinking about today..

• I feel pretty good today, but now at 3:25pm I am losing energy. I had to be an extrovert this morning. Draining. • Looking forward top spending a few hours reading tonight. • Was thinking today "why am I compelled to write?". I don't have an answer. • Is this true? When we are young we worry about how others see us. When we are old we think about being the person we really are, authentically. • I've had a really good career, and I'm proud of it. I'm proud to be part of the librarian profession.

January 8th, 2020

A few days ago, I found myself feeling nostalgic for a certain moment in my blogging history. A moment when everything seemed to really mesh. Thankfully, I have all of my blogs backed up as .epubs from 2020-current, so I opened up to the first entry in 2020 which started on January 8th. I'd just come off a several month break from blogging and social media. At the time, my audience consisted of a couple of friends who'd occasionally read my blog and after years of starting and stopping, rebranding, and renaming, I had once again started over. “Hello. My name is Brandon. You may know me as the guy who has run a couple dozen blogs over the years, and hardly ever sticks with one more than a couple of months. I’m that guy who gets excited about an idea, does a ton of writing over a few days,...

I was on my way to the office this morning while the rain was pouring, and I watched the car in front of me hydroplane into the ditch. I took the next exit, turned around and went straight back home. I told my boss, I'd work from home or I'd take a personal day, whatever he'd prefer but I don't make enough to afford a car payment right now.

Scribbles Analytics

For anyone following my work over the past years you probably know that I've built my own analytics service, Tinylytics. Over the years, in Scribbles, you could easily copy in your embed script and it would track visitors and also allow for Kudos (think "Likes") on posts. That was followed by surfacing this data straight in the admin — which uses some in-house back and forth between Scribbles and Tinylytics. It worked great (just didn't look it). At the same time, this caused friction — not just from trying to embed the script and finding it, but also confusion why you'd need both subscription. This is fair and I tried to address this and find some sort of balance. However as time went, I wanted something built in, without adding unnecessary complexity. So, powered by a new product within Tinylytics (because why not), I am happy to announce that Scribbles...

Iris, The Mac Photo App for People Who Don't Trust iCloud With 80,000 Photos

TL;DR: Iris is a Mac photo viewer that indexes photos where they already live (folder, external drive, or your existing Apple Photos library) instead of importing them into a managed database. It does on-device face recognition, OCR/speech search, and a real map (Photo Trails) that plots every geotagged photo so you can browse by location. No cloud, no account, no subscription; one-time purchase, 14-day trial. It's a viewer, not an editor, so RAW/Lightroom workflows aren't the target use case. Tyler Hall has a new app, Iris, a photo management app built for a very specific kind of workflow. I am a Tyler Hall fan. He is a respected Mac developer with a proven track record operating a one-person shop out of Richmond, VA. Longtime Mac folks will remember his web-developer tool VirtualHostX; he sunset that in 2021 and rebuilt around a small set of native, single-purpose apps. The rest of his catalog is made...

No room for the internet today.

Bitey b*stards

It was already horsefly season here, but now the as yet unidentified, silent and stealthy little bitey b*stard flies have started too. I seem to be of the right blood type to be attractive to unidentified little bitey b*stard flies. My skin reacts by starting to grow a volcano-shaped swelling at the point of puncture, which then continues to itch enough for me to consider amputating the affected limb. These are currently the only two creatures in the entirety of creation that I will kill on sight. Unfortunately, I mainly get to see them – and then try to kill them – when I notice one is settled and has just bitten me.

📡✨ I Was There

This is Montreal, Summer 2026 → Another typical architectural style example that you'll find in Montreal. These buildings were typically built circa 1930. Follow the trail.

No room for the internet today.

An Internet Love Letter

As a Reddit user for over 20 years, I feel qualified to do a deep dive on my favorite subreddit, r/MacApps. I recently analyzed the culture that's developed there. I've decided I like this place, so I am hanging around despite some of its quirks. Take your average question, let's say it's someone asking about a simple app to keep a window on top. Within an hour, the replies will include: • A free open-source utility • A $5 single-purpose app • A $30 app that also performs 46 unrelated functions • A recommendation for Raycast • Someone saying that Alfred can do it better • Someone else announcing that subscriptions are destroying civilization • That guy who accuses everything of "being AI" • The developer of a completely different app, praising the question and dropping a link to his unrelated app "if you're interested" This is a feature, not...

🍪 First time in Bryon Bay

I landed in Gold Coast early yesterday morning, my fault for booking the 6:30 flight from Melbourne. Cannot blame a guy for saving money due to the cost of living crisis that is impacting everyone. Morning flight does have its perks though: Our hotel wasn’t available till 2pm. Therefore we got the rental and drove straight to Byron Bay. Gold Coast is in Queensland and Bryon Bay is in NSW (New South Wales). Although, fun fact, the Gold Coast airport runway is located on both Queensland and NSW. One end is in Gold Coast and the other in NSW. Probably the only airport runaway crossing two states. First stop was the Byron Bay lighthouse. The weather could have been better. It was overcast and as we were wrapping up, slight drizzle promptly ended our adventure. Light houses are interesting and happen to be on the most fantastic locations. The view...