Adam Kirsch:
If we want to keep reading from going extinct, then the best thing we could do is tell young people what so many great writers readily admit: Literature doesn’t make you a better citizen or a more successful person. A passion for reading can even make life more difficult. And you don’t cultivate a passion for the sake of democracy. You do it for the thrill of staying up late to read under the covers by flashlight, unable to stop and hoping no one finds out.
Reading is a Vice
I’ve tried a number of different ways to harness automation to logging expense. Drafts has, for a long time, been the place I went for this kind of thing: I’ve used Drafts to log my rowing sessions, blood pressure, and activities while I was taking classes and completing internships. Drafts excels at this kind of thing.
Dan Moren at Six Colors wrote a post about how he updates a Numbers spreadsheet using a Shortcut, and thought it might make a good starting place for this task. My struggle with Drafts is inputting the information in the correct order; I wanted to record the transaction total, account I charged it to, the date, and a brief description of the purchase. The problem with that on Drafts for me was recalling the order of the fields, and inserting commas (it went to a CSV file).
Shortcuts is perfect for this kind of thing, and of course it works on all of my devices. I’m very likely to be out and about when shopping, such that my phone is the obvious place to capture an expenditure. But I do like having this on my Mac, too, because I often do purchase things while using it.
The modal dialog boxes prompt me for the correct input field, reducing the friction of logging an expense. Best of all, I can fire the shortcut after searching for it using Spotlight on any device.
One of the central improvements that computers bring to us is the ability to automate repetitive tasks. As a school psychologist, I did a lot of cobbling together applescripts and templates using merge features to automate some of my writing of reports, and to reduce the likelihood of mistakes. TextExpander similarly helped me with the massive writing burden of the job as well.
My job as a manager requires much less repetitive writing, although I still rely on a text expansion utility (currently Typinator) for a lot of repetitive writing (phone numbers, addresses, and some other things),
Writing here at Uncorrected, though, introduces some repetitive tasks that I sought to address using Shortcuts, and most recently, the support for Quick Actions in macOS Tahoe.
One of the coolest new features that employs AI that’s baked into macOS is harnessing the power of Private Cloud Compute. Entirely inspired by Jason Snell’s post on Six Colors, I put this shortcut together to use Private Cloud Compute to rename screenshots and photos I intend to post based on a description of the photo. Is it hard to rename a file so that the file name matches the content? Not really. But it can be repetitive. This one is specific to my Sunday Serial series, and it appends the date to the graphic asset, which is a practice I’ve been applying for a while now.
Update: this was a helpful video, too.
We were fixing to take Aaron back up to New Brunswick today, but the snow in the forecast is forcing us to wait until tomorrow. I am thankful for the all-wheel drive on the WRX. Our original plan was to roll up to New Brunswick yesterday and spend the night; I found a Marriott in Somerset and a nice little French bistro, Sophie’s. Aaron preferred getting in another day at home, though, so I cancelled the reservations and we hung around. He was hard at work on a model for his fraternity yesterday. We did the required errands and had cheese and salami at home with a growler of rosé. Rhonda and I have off from work tomorrow, so it’s no trouble either way.
It would be easy to let the merriment surrounding Bellview’s release of their new rosé overshadow a new dry red blend, but ahem: I draw your attention to their new Boreas. They describe it thus:
A medium bodied dry red blend of Cabernet Franc and Regent with an herbal taste on the tongue and a long, lasting finish.
It’s pretty fruity up front, with a nice dry finish. We got a 500 ml growler last weekend and it was really good with dinner last week.
Hookmark is a fascinating utility for the Mac. In short, it allows you to copy links from one file or application to another, and it is invaluable if you spend a lot of time managing various bits of data across applications on your Mac.
I’ll give you a simple example: Here’s my “Car Maintenance” project in OmniFocus:
You can see in the project’s notes field, there’s a link to a folder on my Mac, “Maintenance.” There are lots of different files in that folder that I might need access too, including some how-tos, reference materials, and maintenance logs.
Similarly, you can link to files (even blocks of text in PDFs) using Hookmark. Here’s a screenshot of some specific files I linked (I linked the project to the files); invoking Hookmark shows the files I’ve linked to the project.
I can link emails from MailMate to tasks or projects, link Google Suite links to projects and tasks, and more. You can even send links to Instapaper. It’s a great service for keeping yourself organized, and I’m not sure I’m even scratching the surface of what it can do.
One of the central frustrations of being a Mac user who likes to use an iPad, though, is that many of the utilities that make the Mac so great aren’t available on the iPad. And that was a central limitation of using Hookmark until very recently, when CogZest introduced Hookmark Pal.
The upshot is that your Hookmark links work on your iOS devices. It’s called a “pal,” I suppose, because it’s not a universal app that works across all of your devices; Hookmark Pal gets you some of the features you depend on, without the full experience of using Hookmark on your Mac. It’s a welcome addition for sure.
Hookmark Pal for iPhone and iPad – Hookmark
App Store
it’s bittersweet when they leave, but a joy to watch them grow.
GAS is a thing! I know this not because I read it on the internet, but because, shortly before Christmas, I ordered myself another used lens on eBay for my mirrorless cameras: the Lumix G 14mm f/2.5.
A rationalization: I don’t generally get gifts for Christmas (the exception being that my parents are incredibly generous to all of us each year, and Aaron gave me a t-shirt this year, which was a pleasant surprise), so I figured this would be my gift. It works for me!
Anyway, this lens came to my attention in a YouTube video where someone was trying to make an affordable version of the ever-popular (and expensive) FujiFilm x100. I believe they paired a m4/3 Lumix or maybe an Oly with this lens as a pocketable everyday carry, and I was immediately smitten.
I’ve been using (and enjoying) the Panasonic LUMIX G II Lens 20mm F1.7 for a long time now, probably a decade, and I’ve always considered it a small lens that can sorta end up making for a pocketable camera. The TT Artisans 18mm f/6.3 UFO Lens, of course, is even more so, but it has pretty specific light requirements and isn’t something I want to be tied to.
The Panasonic Lumix G 14mm f/2.5 definitely takes up less room, and on the Olympus E-PM2 you can really notice the small footprint. I imagine this lens would be super cute on a LUMIX GM1.
I’ve only been able to take a few pics with this lens, and I need to get out in bright light to really get a sense of its image quality. The 1.7 lets in more light than the 2.5, so that’s a consideration, and explains why some of the pics I took the first night at a new restaurant are pleasant but dark.
My iPhone would have taken a much brighter pic of my sushi last night for sure:
Lots of bokeh on Rhonda’s roast chicken thighs, though:
This pic of Bellview’s new rosé vintage, taken with lots of light last Saturday, shows the lens’s potential, though:
I think most people are perfectly well served by using their phone camera, and that’s why the middle end of the camera market is being gutted. I liken enthusiast photography to driving a manual transmission, or switching your clock to military time when you don’t need to–you introduce some complexity into your life for the sake of learning. I enjoy the process of trying to understand more of what might capture a good picture, of inserting myself in between the subject and the device.
More on that E-PM2 soon.
A week back into the routine after a long holiday break! We’re having spritzes and cheese now; I have a pork tenderloin in the sous vide tank for tomorrow (I’ll grill it off before serving after a quick dunk in the tank again tomorrow; it will come out in about two hours and overnight in the fridge), and there are chicken thighs in the oven.
We had a fun weekend: out with the ‘rents for Joe, Sorayah, and Dad’s birthdays (bunch of January babies!) at Maplewood, then hot pot/Korean BBQ with Aaron for lunch yesterday. We made a trip to a vinyl shop he loves in the Hamilton Mall after lunch, too. We fancied going to Guitar Center, but Rhonda and I were meeting an old friend at Bellview for wine in the afternoon, so we had to cut Guitar Center out of the plans. Today was just groceries. I did take the dog for a walk, which was nice.
Rhonda and I met a friend at Bellview yesterday, and their new rosé, made with Chambourcin grapes, was on tap! That means it will be bottled soon, but on tap is the way to go. It’s been out of stock for a few months, so this was a very welcome development. I need a few more swigs to weigh in on the difference between this and other vintages, but it was familiar for sure.
In addition to the excellent MarsEdit, Daniel Jailkut’s Red Sweater software offers the very cool FlexTime utility, a “versatile timer for repetitive activities.” I found myself, late last week, feeling especially overwhelmed by a crap ton of of urgent, open loops. OmniFocus is my central planning tool, but the challenge of overload is prioritizing, and sometimes, that means setting some time limits so that you can make some progress on a few projects.
I’ve written a bit here about how I deal with this aspect of productivity, most notably trying to plug into Neil Fiori’s Unschedule technique. OmniFocus’s Planned Dates feature helps tremendously with daily planning, but outside of allowing you to estimate how long something might take, it’s not a tool for timing.
There are no shortage of timers for the Mac and iOS timers, but Red Sweater makes some great stuff. I tried it out a few years ago, and I liked it, but only used it for a spell. I downloaded it again and am planning to try it out again.
FlexTime lets you create a variety of timers and save them for reuse. You can specify a number of different activities per timer, and set notifications for each activity. You can even spit your timers out to Apple Music, which seems like a smart alternative to having the app run across platforms.
Aaron and I first (finally!) tried hot pot about a year ago at Kung Fu Hot Pot, after a tour at the University of Delaware. We really enjoyed the experience, especially on a cold day. Our second visit occurred after a visit to Rutgers, also cold and drizzly, and we both agreed that the Happy Lamb was a superior experience to Kung Fu.
Yesterday, we headed to Mays Landing to try out Top Pot Hot Pot and BBQ while Aaron is still home on break. It, too, was exceptional.
Some niggles: the broth situation is such that there’s no easy way for two people to share broth; the pots are arranged such that they’re conveniently near one diner, not in the center of the table. This is to make room, of course, for the brazier, which takes center stage on their tables (and in the experience of having KBBQ at Top Pot). Hot pot or BBQ are $31.99 as of yesterday, but you can combine them Also, the vegetables, rice balls, and other non-meat goodies are ordered from the menu, which we didn’t prefer; it’s a lot of fun at Happy Lamb, for example, to go up to the buffet or ingredient station and pick out different root vegetables and rice balls (and all kinds of other things) that look good, whereas you have to ask for everything at Top Pot.
Top Pot does newbie diners a great service, however, by not only offering a fulsome selection of sauces, but also a display behind the buffet of sauces you can concoct for yourself. Similarly, there are some brief cooking directions and diagrams posted at each table. Like dining on phô, the experience of eating hot pot is different from your standard western dining situation. We are, happily, adventurous diners, but some know-how is appreciated to maximize the experience. To become an expert, learn the rules first.
We had a couple of kinds of tongue, and really loved the version they prepare for hot pot (the BBQ preparation was less exciting), and there was a lemon pork belly we both adored. Everything was good, though. It was a really big lunch.
Ken Case, at the OmniGroup blog, announcing version six of the company’s venerable outliner:
One of the interesting problems we’ve been pondering is how best to link to documents in native apps. We’ve spent some time refining our solution to that problem, Omni Links, which are now shipping first in OmniOutliner 6. With Omni Links, we can link to content across all our devices, and we can share those links with other people and other apps.
With OmniOutliner, these powerful Apple Intelligence language models are fully under your control. Like all language models, they’re not perfect oracles by any means—and they’re not fundamental to using OmniOutliner. But sample plug-ins leveraging Apple Intelligence are ready for immediate one-click installation, and plug-in authors can integrate these language models with OmniOutliner in all sorts of creative ways.
Two great tentpole features, and a clutch of improvements.
There’s nothing like the last Sunday at the end of a vacation to inspire the Sunday Scaries! Here’s a list of things to check out to ease your re-entry into the world of work, if that awaits you. I kept up my exercise routine but I do need the routine to keep me on track!
Today’s Joey’s 21st birthday too!
I was enjoying Upgrade’s Upgradies episode over the break, and they mentioned Casey Liss’s Callsheet, which I had tried a while back but never really took to. The truth is, though, that like books, I do need a place to park a kind of TV Show/Movie wishlist. I’ve been trying Sofa for a number of years, and I like it, mostly, except it doesn’t lend itself to the most obvious setup for my use case: a list of things I’d like to watch, and then an archive of things I have watched. Sofa has branched out from TV and Movies to books, restaurants, and all manner of other interests.
Callsheet is a more focused app, showing you popular television shows and movies, which you can pin for later viewing. Callsheet will help you find where to watch a show or movie, and you can dig deep into an actor’s oeuvre if you’re curious about where you saw what’s-his-name before.
Interestingly, Mike and Jason crapped on Tapestry, which is an app category that, too, initially found mystifying, but found myself returning to time and again. As I’ve written, I’ve set up the New Reeder and subscribed to it, as it’s a lot less expensive than Tapestry and I still love the original Reeder.
I’ve really been enjoying Amerpie by Lou Plummer; his tech-focused blog is an endless stream of app recommendations. He highlighted ExtraBar, which proposes an alternative to utilities like Bartender, Ice, and Barbee.
There’s no way to test drive the app, which seems a little scummy to me. I did buy one seat to try it out, and it’s not a simple swap from, say, Bartender to ExtraBar. You have to know a bit out apps that support links, such as OmniFocus, to start setting things up.
This is one of those apps that I’m going to want to get a lot of use out of, but will struggle to find a place for. Just a hunch.
I coworker gifted me a bottle of this just before the holiday, and I was terribly excited to try it after many years. I do believe this varietal was my introduction to red wine, and it really is a great place to dip your toes into the sea of red wine. It’s not to be drunk aged, just glugged after bottling. It’s a lighter, fruitier red, without being a sweet wine. We had some with our grilled chicken thighs last night in fact. Such a fun wine.
Rhonda had a great idea the other night… let’s abscond for a night! We’ve been scheduling things around the family for a couple of weeks, which is always a treat, but we hand’t really gotten a chance to do something together besides the quotidian running of errands, etc.
I’ve been wanting to set up and overnight trip to nearby Atlantic City for a while, because it’s a great restaurant town, your opinions about gambling notwithstanding.
Atlantic City is a pretty bombed-out town; it’s incredibly poor, with a heart-breaking stratification between the haves and have-nots. The haves, I don’t think, live in town at all. Whatever money the restaurants, hotels, and casinos pull in must, through financial tricks I could only fathom, remain with the businesses. It’s pretty wild, when you consider the relative affluence of towns like Ocean City, Avalon, and Stone Harbor.
But this isn’t a treatise on Atlantic City or the socio-economics of South Jersey shore towns. Because for however much I hope for a more equitable distribution of wealth in a town like that, I still enjoy the fuck out of the nightlife.
First thing’s first: there are great–and I mean great–restaurants in Atlantic City. You can discount the casino-based places if you like and it’s still a great restaurant town.
We’ve been going to the Knife and Fork since it reopened back in the early 2000s, and it’s always an experience. We’ve wanted to go down and stay over and make a long night of a visit, though; we’ve been down for many dinners over the years, but we have always returned in the same night. So there’s 45 minutes or so each way before and after dinner, or a 90-minute commute, however you like to calculate it. How fun would it be to get a room, have dinner, and make a night of it?
A lot, unsurprisingly.
We hit Renault Winery in Egg harbor City on the way down. Their bottled wine prices are outrageous, but it’s quiet a place: a resort, ice skating rink, outdoor fire pits, little huts and igloos you can rent, a nice bar… We remarked that we’re lucky to live near one of the best and most affordable wineries in NJ in our local Bellview. But we like to try them all! Renault is way out in the middle of nowhere, at the end of a long road. The sign on the street is huge and really old; you get that it’s an old place with subsequent upgrades.
Anyway, we tried their Chardonnay, which was excellent, and a sip of the Meritage, and we took a bottle of each to go. We also split the charcuterie for two.
I found a newly established Marriot in AC for a decent rate, right on the boardwalk, and within walking distance of the Knife and Fork. It wasn’t so cold that we couldn’t stroll down there, so walked we did. We had a great meal and then got lost in the Tropicana for a while.
Breakfast the next morning was at a cute little diner called The Little Goat, which I found when we both realized we wanted some breakfast. They had a special omelette which included ham, avocado, tomato, and Cooper sharp, and I ate the home fries too.
Then: it was errands.
We did a rib roast again last night; Shop Rite always has a sale on them prior to the holidays, and it’s been Rhonda’s habit to grab one in the rush up to the holidays, and then freeze it until New Year’s Day. I chuck them in the sous vide tank all day and finish on the grill. We’re always impressed by how good they are for the price.
We’re gonna bug out of town for Atlantic City tonight. I got a reasonable rate on a Marriot room and we’ll have dinner at Knife and Fork.
It’s officially 2026, but besides making some eggs and ham, there’s not much to say about the new year yet. We took the boys up to the House of Fun in Barrington yesterday so they could blow some Christmas loot and we could try some pints from round-the-way Tonewood. We did exactly the same thing one year ago!
I had the Blackbird Schwarzbier, which is a low-alcohol, darkly roasted lager. It had a great roasty flavor and a tasteful, gentle hop profile. I was keen to try their Blipstream ESB, but it was can only. I ordered their Biergarten Marzen for my second pint, which was excellent but I thought that I hadn’t had it before; checking my posts here on Uncorrected this morning revealed to me that I had, in fact, tried it before.
Where my tastes skew German and English, Rhonda tends to go for more juicy, hoppy selections. She tried a pint of their Slopes Pale Ale, which was a moderate 5.2% ABV and “hopped heavily with Talus, Simcoe & Chinook,” with “notes of dank resin, honey & orange.” The hops put me in mind of Sierra Nevada’s Celebration Ale, of which I have very fond memories, especially the time I turned 21 and my friend, Mike, took me to a German bar in Kutztown, PA, and we had many pints of it in a fireplace-heated, low-ceilinged bar. It was a great night. Her other selection was the Chilly Bin, which we have in cans here at home. It’s a West Coast Pilsner, which is kind of wild: you get the assertive, bitter hop bite that I grew to love with Sierra Nevada’s original Pale Ale, but the smooth body of a lager.
The bartender pouring yesterday mentioned that they have the ESB on cask at their Oaklyn location, so I’m gonna obsess over getting to that location until it happens. I love cask-conditioned ale pushed via hand pump.
Best wishes for a great 2026 for you. This has been the best year for my readership on Uncorrected; it’s peanuts compared to the internet-famous, but I can’t be anything but thankful that I get a fairly regular number of hits each day, week, and month. Thanks for stopping by and reading.
RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, remains the backbone of digital newshounds across the web. Podcasts, too, depend upon RSS for distribution. Google used to maintain one of the most popular and best RSS readers, Google Reader, but scuttled it in 2013. Via Nicolas Magand, here’s Cory Doctorow on RSS:
Your RSS reader doesn’t (necessarily) have an algorithm. By default, you’ll get everything as it appears, in reverse-chronological order.
Does that remind you of anything? Right: this is how social media used to work, before it was enshittified. You can single-handedly disenshittify your experience of virtually the entire web, just by switching to RSS, traveling back in time to the days when Facebook and Twitter were more interested in showing you the things you asked to see, rather than the ads and boosted content someone else would pay to cram into your eyeballs.
If you ever bristled at how your social media feeds have targeted the content you see, you should check out RSS instead. The Mac and iOS/iPadOS ecosystem remains a great place to use an array of RSS reader apps.
Here are some of my favorites.
NNW is the GOAT! I remember using NetNewsWire Lite back when spending money on software was extravagent, and discovering that you could make your own CSS sheets to style the entries. That was a long time ago; NetNewsWire disappeared for a while after Brent Simmons sold it to NewsGator, where nothing happened to it, but he resurrected it after gaining the rights back to it (NewsGator sold it to Black Pixel).
NetNewsWire is a great RSS reader, and it’s free; Brent won’t even take money for it. It supports a number of RSS feed reader services, but also supports local-only accounts and iCloud sync. It looks like a Mac-assed Mac app, with a menu of feeds to the left, articles list in the center, and the articles themselves on the right side. This layout makes pretty good sense on a Mac, but it’s not necessarily the best option for smaller devices (or form factors). If your preferences in RSS reading are to focus on the articles list and article bodies only, or even just swiping from article to article, you can set up NetNewsWire that way too.
Unread, since its debut, has always been an iPad and iPhone-first product. It places a premium on look and feel, and presents your feed to you in a clean list, but once you click in to a story, it feels very natural to page from article to article instead of returning to the articles list. It’s a tap- and gesture-based interface, which makes perfect sense on the iPad (which is how I first started using it). The larger the screen, though, the less sense Unread makes. 13” iPad users take note.
Unread is available as a free version, and it’s incredibly full-featured in its free mode as long as you’re connecting it to a third-party service, such as FeedBin. You can use the free version to sync your RSS subscriptions between devices, but if you want to take advantage of read-it-later service integration, change the icon, and have a faster (cached) reading experience, the subscription is a good option. Plus, you’re supporting an independent software developer.
Navigating in Unread is a gesture-rich experience, full of swipes between panels instead of buttons and controls exposed in the UI. With Unread, you swipe from screen to screen (folders, feeds, articles), and to get to share menu items , adding subscriptions, searching, and settings. It’s a touch-driven interface in a way that’s uniquely iPad and iPhone. It can feel a bit mysterious swiping around for preferences or other controls, but it’s a great way to read on an iPhone or smaller touchscreen. The interface does not scale well to 13” iPads, though.
I have been a longtime Unread user and favor it on the iPad. Its interface allows the reader to effortlessly focus on one article at a time, and it stands apart in terms of look and feel.
Interestingly, there’s a Mac version of Unread. Contrary to the iOS version’s strong opinion on design and presentation, Unread for the Mac is more standard experience compared to the iOS version. For this, I am glad: what makes Unread work on a touchscreen would make it weird on a Mac. It has the most interesting theme collection of any of the Mac apps in this post, and I do find myself using it on the Mac. (I will confess, though, that I don’t read RSS on the Mac very much.)
Even if you don’t use Unread, the share extension is incredibly useful. If I am on a page that offers an RSS feed, I can use the extension to subscribe in Unread, and even file into the FeedBin tag or tags for focused reading.
ReadKit, when it came out, put me in mind of Vienna when it first came out. It was pretty bare bones at first, and I didn’t give it much of a spin before bonding it for other applications. But version 3 on the Mac, iPhone, and iPad is great, with a tasteful theme implementation and support for lots of third-party services. ReadKit has the cleanest minimal layout, and is my favorite on the iPad mini.
There’s a new version of Reeder out for Mac/iPadOS/iOS that varies from what is now known as Reeder (Classic); the latter app is a great version of an RSS reader, and was one of the first killer apps for iOS. I can’t ignore Reader Classic in this article, as it’s still supported and available, and possibly my favorite on iPad.
Reeder Classic was one of the first must-have apps for the iPhone for nerds. Developer Silvio Rizzi has continued to update the app, and offers Mac and iPad specific versions that are excellent.
Reeder Classic on iPad is a delightful whoosh of animation in the user interface. Of the apps featured here, it’s the most bespoke in its use of custom animation. Compared especially to NetNewsWire and ReadKit, Reeder has a design language all its own.
Reeder Classic only has light and dark modes, with some toggles in between to customize your experience; you can tweak font and font size and a few other details, but unlike ReadKit or Unread, themes are less transformative.
A word about Reeder’s new incarnation: it is looking to be more than your RSS reader. It wants to be your hub for everything you read on the internet. And I think that’s a laudable, if lofty, goal. Going to one app to see all of your news and interests is compelling in theory, but that app has to be feature-rich and be a preferable way to consume said content. Reeder will grab all of the links you throw at it and treat them as a bookmarking service, read it later service, RSS service, YouTube aggregator, and Reddit aggregator. It doesn’t do this using your accounts, however; you point it towards a favorite subreddit, for example, and browse the postings. You can’t interact with the content using the platform’s affordances (ie upvoting Reddit posts). If you’ve tried Icon Factory’s Tapestry, you are familiar with Reeder’s feature set.
I think this new version of Reeder shows a lot of promise. It’s not for me by itself right now (I don’t think it’s a better RSS reader than either NetNewsWire or Unread), but it’s an exciting rethinking of what a news reader can be. One of my favorite features is being to shunt content (such as links) using a share sheet action from Safari to drop articles into Reeder for later review.
Fiery Feeds is an interesting RSS reader. Like the others mentioned, it supports Feedbin and other backend services. It offers its own smart searches recipe system as well, and a couple of the demo searches–“Hot Links” and “Low Frequency”–are interesting presentations of your feeds.
Fiery Feeds has some of the most interesting layout options available on the iPad, and for that reason alone, is worth a download.
Finding a new feed is always exciting, and adding it to your RSS readers is, ideally, a low-friction event. The manual way–long-pressing on the link and copying the URL, switching to your RSS reader, and pasting in the URL–is a fine way to collect new feeds, but some of the RSS apps I’ve been using include either Actions or Extensions to automate the process.
Both NetNewsWire and Fiery Feeds reveal their application as a Favorite in the Sharing Actions list when you long-press on a feed URL; Unread offers to subscribe to the feed for you using a share extension. Unread will also allow you to save an article to its read it later service, which requires a paid subscription. Readkit offers something similar, but I don’t use read-it-later services in my RSS applications (I like Safari’s just fine).
Unread brings its iOS-style color themes over to the Mac; there are a bunch of dark and light themes with different colors to suit just about any taste. NetNewsWire and Reeder use macOS’s light and dark themes, but NetNewsWire supports separate themes for the article pane (where you read an article). This invokes the original’s support for CSS and fond memories of goofing off during meetings cobbling themes. Inspecting the .nnwtheme package reveals that this is exactly what they are. The other readers feature a variety of color schemes in their appearances panes, but they’re more subtle than Unread’s visual overhauls. Fiery Feeds stands out, however, not only because of the themes supported (you can create your own or download themes from their directory), but because of the number of inventive layouts you can specify for your device. It’s a great affordance to scale from larger devices to smaller devices.
All of the RSS readers I’ve tried support syncing with a number of popular RSS services (I use Feedbin) if you like to use a back-end service. iCloud sync is also included. If you wanted a completely free solution across all of your Apple devices, NetNewsWire and Reeder Classic will do the trick.
ReadKit only allows you to subscribe to up to 20 feeds on the free tier. Unread offers a wealth of customization options with a sub, but it’s very full featured without one. You can’t pay for NetNewsWire even if you wanted to, and while that would normally give me pause, knowing the developer, Brent Simmons. I suspect it will be around for a long time.
| Feature | NetNewsWire | Unread | Reeder | ReadKit | Fiery Feeds |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sharing Action or Extension | Action | Extension | No | No | Action |
| Hookmark | Yes | No | No | Yes | No |
| iCloud Sync | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | Yes |
| Mac & iOS | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Pricing | Free | Freemium | Free | Freemium | Freemium |
| Themes | Yes (Articles) | Yes | Light/Dark | Yes | Yes |
| Timeline Sync | No | No | Yes | No | No |
| Widgets | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | Yes |
I ultimately don’t like any one RSS reader more than another enough to declare One Reader to Rule Them All; I do like NetNewsWire on the Mac best of all, but Unread’s Mac version is a solid implementation of a more traditional Mac app interface, too, and I often find myself using it. On the iPad Mini and iPhone, I probably like Unread the most, because it’s the most expressly designed for a touchscreen, but on a larger iPad, I find myself gravitating towards Reader Classic; on a large screen, Unread doesn’t scale and there’s a lot of wasted space. ReadKit is solid on any iOS screen.
The New Reeder is perhaps the most interesting and adventurous design in that it supports more than just RSS. It is, it a sense, a post-RSS reading app: it’s designed to be a central hub for a variety of information sources, including Reddit and YouTube in addition to RSS. It’s a more manual curation process of disparate streams you want to follow; it breaks out of the mode of consuming content via singular apps connected to specific services.
It’s been a quiet few days since Christmas here in our bucolic corner of South Jersey. Friday was just lazing about, and yesterday was a quick trip to Bellview for some wine and cheese before sushi with Aaron (Joe was working). My morning have been punctuated by reading a bit and then farting around with my Mac before exercising. We’re going to cook our “free” ham from Shop Rite today, since we didn’t need the turkey when we qualified for that.
I’ve been grabbing all manner of canned fish for our winery trips; it’s a chance to pile on some protein and avoid some of the carbs that might otherwise tempt me. I’ve see this Fishwife brand at ShopRite a bunch of times, and while the art on the box is fetching, the price has put me off. They’re on sale right now and I grabbed a can of the mackerel and the sardines; Aaron and I split the mackerel yesterday at Bellview while Rhonda watched in horror. Simply the best canned fish I’ve had to date. I’m going to stock up today when we run over for some provisions.
I have an estranged friend who used to swear by yoga for both fitness and mental health. I tried it a few times by awkwardly watching workouts on my iPad in the basement, and I liked it enough to get a cheap yoga mat. I tried a few workouts back in 2022, and the idea hit me a couple of weeks ago–this would be a nice diversion from the usual rowing grind. I tried a 40-minute workout and loved every second of it.
I recalled being impressed at the reported calorie burn back in 2022 when I tried some Yoga workouts, and was disappointed with the report from my most recent workouts. Maybe being 230+ pounds makes that kind of exercise more calorically intensive. Still fun though.
Rhonda’s been making these melty brie plates since we had one at Cedar Rose winery not long ago. It was our favorite at Bellview until they stopped serving it. We got some brie at Bagliani’s yesterday, so I wouldn’t be surprised if we had one later today.
I leaned on this macmost video to set up this shortcut:
I spend a lot of time resizing and renaming pics for posts here on Uncorrected, and it’s exactly the kind of grunt work computers are good at automating. I get a kick out of using Private Cloud Compute for this. I generally try to name the files as descriptively as I can, and append the ISO date.
It’s the day after Christmas, so that means The Week Between has commenced. December 26th for us is usually just hanging around the house, eating leftovers, and watching TV.
We hosted dinner last night and I was annoyed with myself for forgetting to take a pic of the rib roast after it came off the grill. But I just check my E-PL5 and that was not, in fact, the case: I did take a pic! Thanks afternoon drinks!
My dad has been ordering from Pat LaFrieda for a long time, and even when we switched over to Rhonda and I hosting the holiday dinners, he continued to buy the star of the show in the form of an aged roast. This was a 30-day aged roast, and I can see from previous entries in Day One that this has been our go-to roast for years. I will confess to wanting to try it low and slow in the spare oven upstairs next time; I’ve been sous viding and grilling the roast, which I like, but I would really like those chewy, well-done bits that you get with a dry roast. They are also hard to wrestle into a bag. I split the roast and the bones into two bags and everything worked out fine! I will say that this is surely the best meat I’ve eaten. We’re lucky to be able to host with such a superstar centerpiece!
I always make breakfast on the griddle for the family on Christmas Day; our tradition has been pancakes forever, and it’s nice to be able to use all the space on the Blackstone to make a big pile of pancakes at once. Bacon too, of course.
Aaron said something about making egg nog earlier in the week, so I looked up a recipe on Serious Eats and gave it a shot. The first batch I made featured some cheap cognac we’d gotten for making sidecars; Aaron really liked it. I made a bigger batch yesterday, and made a virgin portion for Joe and Sorayah, and then used Goslings Black Seal Rum for the big-kid version. Aaron preferred the rum version, and it was also very good.
Aaron and I were talking about photography a bit yesterday since we got him a cheap point-and-shoot. He asked about aperture and I snuck this pick while grilling because of the sun and its angle against the cars, and what the whack TT Artisans might do with all that sidewise light. Serious lens flare but interesting in its way.
Bellview Winery had, for a long while, a melty brie platter on their menu. It featured DiBruno Bros brie, and we loved it and ordered it many times. They don’t offer that one anymore, which is heartbreaking, but we manage. Our recent trip to Cedar Rose winery, however, revealed their take on the dish.
Rhonda’s been making a version ever since we went there, and made it at home both Tuesday and Wednesday nights.
