Amerpie by Lou Plummer

Crucial Track for August 28, 2026

Fri, 28 Aug 2026 17:30:29 -0400

"Desperados Waiting for a Train" by Guy Clark

Your browser does not support the audio element.

What's your favorite song about patience?- Desperados Waiting for a Train by Guy Clark

I'll keep going back to the Texas singer-songwriter well forever when the subject is some aspect of the human condition. This is a tune about the patience of an old man waiting and watching as a boy grows up.

View Lou Plummer's Crucial Tracks profile

Crucial Track for August 27, 2026

Thu, 27 Aug 2026 12:34:48 -0400

"Something More Than Free" by Jason Isbell

Listen on Apple Music

Your browser does not support the audio element.

Share a song that captures the feeling of being proud - Something More Than Free by Jason Isbell

It's a working-man's song about quiet pride in honest labor: "I don't think about you, I think about who's gonna do this work / When my back gives out."

View Lou Plummer's Crucial Tracks profile

Five Free and Low Cost Apps: Holeberry, Dock Party, Neon Vision Editor, MojiBar and Snick

Sun, 23 Aug 2026 17:21:06 -0400

Here are the best apps I tested this weekend. Two will save you time, two are fun ways to waste it on UI tweaks, and one's for a certain psychological profile. I'm sure you can figure out which one.

Holeberry - A native Swift 6 app for macOS 14 and up, built by developer Pedro Vieira, Holeberry puts the Pi-hole controls you actually use right in your menu bar. See real-time blocking status and query stats without keeping a dashboard tab open. You can disable blocking for five minutes, an hour, or indefinitely, giving you the same toggle as Pi-hole's own web UI, just one click closer. The feature that actually earns the download is per-tab unblocking. Holeberry reads the active tab in Safari, Chrome, Chromium, Firefox, or Zen, and when a site is broken because Pi-hole blocked something on the page, it can identify and allowlist that domain without making you dig through the query log yourself. That's a workflow improvement, not a cosmetic shortcut, and it's the reason to care about this app at all. (FOSS)

Dock Party - Dock Party watches Spotify or Apple Music via system audio and turns that into a light bar running along the edge of the Dock. Track name, artist, and album art appear beside it, a progress bar runs along the Dock's edge, and playback controls sit right there without requiring you to switch apps. It also adds Amplitude, Pitch, and Waveform visualizer modes, so the light bar moves with the music instead of just sitting there. ($4.99)

Neon Vision Editor - It's a text and code editor for macOS, iPhone, and iPad aimed at developers, writers, and sysadmins who value speed and a small footprint over a massive plugin ecosystem. Syntax highlighting covers Swift, Python, JS/TS, Go, Rust, SQL, Markdown, and more. There's a recursive project sidebar, Quick Open, Find in Files, a code minimap, and Git tooling for status, history, and diffs. A CSV/TSV table mode and Mac-hosted SSH remote editing round things out, and Vim keybindings are there if you want them. AI code completion exists but is opt-in, limited to minimal cursor-context text, and sent only to a provider you choose yourself. Leave it off, and the app makes no network calls at all. (Free/$4.99)

Mojibar - Mojibar replaces your Dock icon and menu bar icon with any of 3,600-plus emoji. Make sure you use this link to find the app because there's more than one out there with the same name. ($0.99)

Snick - Snick turns your trackpad into a ratchet, complete with sound and haptic feedback. That's it. That's the app. Strangely enough, it got on my radar through enthusiastic reviews. Some people need feedback from their devices. They're the ones leading the mechanical keyboard movement, using Thock for the sound effects, and they're the audience for this app.

✉️ Reply by email

Crucial Track for August 22, 2026

Sat, 22 Aug 2026 09:58:15 -0400

"Faithless Street" by Whiskeytown

Listen on Apple Music

Your browser does not support the audio element.

What's a song you associate with your biggest mistake? - Faithless Street by Whiskeytown

No, I'm not telling that story on the Internet.

View Lou Plummer's Crucial Tracks profile

Crucial Track for August 21, 2026

Fri, 21 Aug 2026 16:09:22 -0400

"New Madrid" by Uncle Tupelo

Listen on Apple Music

Your browser does not support the audio element.

**What song makes you want to write poetry? - New Madrid by Uncle Tupelo"

I love how this song conveys so much with so few words.

View Lou Plummer's Crucial Tracks profile

Legendary Meals from the 70s

Fri, 21 Aug 2026 06:49:00 -0400

My siblings and I are retired or close to it, but we still have conversations that start with "Do you remember when Mom made X?" Thus commences a discussion of Old El Paso taco kits, Chef Boyardee pizzas, waffle irons, liver, English peas and frequently, bread burgers, a 70s-era delicacy, that sounds a bit awful now, but actually wasn't that bad.

The grocery stores of my youth were a lot different than what we now have. They sold one kind of lettuce, iceberg, and two kinds of apples, Red Delicious and Golden Delicious. In the south, where I'm from, the stores considered bagels to be a Northern affectation and didn't sell them. I was in high school before I learned such a thing existed.

The other factor from the 70s that played a part in food choices was the horrible economy. It was a decade of inflation, scarcity and interest rates in the stratosphere. Times were lean and feeding five people on a budget was a challenge.

Enter the bread burger. Then, as now, hamburger came in 1 pound packages. That's not a lot when divided into fifths, but back in the disco era, we had a solution.

"The practice of adding bread or breadcrumbs to ground beef was a common culinary technique in the 1970s, often referred to as 'stretching' the meat to make it more economical for larger families. This method not only increased the yield but also helped retain moisture, resulting in a softer, juicier patty."

Ok, that AI-generated description is accurate up to a point. The way they were made in our house involved shredding several slices of loaf bread, soaking that in milk and seasoning with salt, pepper, garlic, and Worcestershire sauce. This was folded into the hamburger, which was then formed into patties and cooked in a skillet. The result was dinner.

Over time, that mildly weird meal has evolved, undeservedly, into something vile. This actually brings me comfort.

Flash forward a couple of decades, and now I'm the parent trying to stretch the grocery budget. For a time, my whole family didn't eat meat at home. I was the family cook, and this made constructing filling dinners more complicated than I liked. One dish I made frequently involved mixing black beans, corn, lettuce, cheese and seasonings with a bottle of Catalina salad dressing. I didn't dare call it taco salad because of the missing meat, so I christened it bean mixture, and I have never heard the end of it.

My 40-ish kids make it sound like bean mixture was something you were sentenced to, not served for dinner. The fact that they grew into robust, athletic adults is, I think, a testament to my obvious dedication to their nutritional development.

When you have grandchildren, you get to pay your own kids back for mocking you. In my house, grandchildren can have anything they want to eat whenever they want it, and if I don't have it in the cabinet, I'll go to the store and buy it for them. You only live once. My mom, a retired nurse and walking health encyclopedia, infamously serves ice cream for breakfast to her grandchildren upon request. It takes some mental energy to understand that Nana Ice Cream and Mother Eat All Your Peas is the same person.

Enjoyed it? Please upvote 👇

A Grits Explainer

Thu, 20 Aug 2026 06:39:00 -0400

I eat grits. I always have and I always will. Because they're delicious, that's why. Grits are a simple dish: ground corn, salt and a little butter, the traditional way. Sometimes folks get a little fancy and start adding cheese, chopped sausage or bacon and other delicacies. Grits are a savory dish. They are not oatmeal or cream of wheat. Keep the sugar and milk away from them.

People who aren't from the parts of the south where grits are commonly served are often suspicious of the dish. After all, the name suggests something you'd spit out rather than swallow. Because of all the other well-earned baggage being a southerner entails, I've never been one to join the battle of Grits Mountain to defend our dietary choices. Don't like grits? Fine. More for me. You don't know what you're missing. Never tried grits? Don't be close-minded.

Just because you are in a place surrounded by Southern accents, don't think that you have a guarantee that grits will be on the menu. I was laughed at in the mountains of Virginia for trying to order them at a gas station cafe located just off the Appalachian Trail. Conversely, don't automatically despair when traveling. I have seen them on menus as far north as Maine.

Grits rank right up with rice and beans as good food for lean times. They're cheap, filling and nutritious. The method of processing corn prior to grinding it for some varieties of grits exposes a form of Vitamin B that prevents pellagra, a particularly foul variation on malnutrition. Because they are light, and often sold in a pre-seasoned portable instant form, grits are much loved by backpackers.

They aren't a plebeian dish, though. Plenty of restaurants with linen tablecloths offer shrimp and grits, using the stone-ground variety for better flavor and adding butter, garlic, onion, peppers, celery, cheese and sometimes a splash of lemon or a little Cajun seasoning.

Don't go so far towards haute-cuisine that you convince yourself that ordering polenta in an Italian place is the moral equivalent of grits consumption, because it isn't. Polenta uses a different type corn and it isn't processed in a way that exposes the vitamins in grits. Polenta is a poor substitute for the real thing and you lose bonus points for trying to be sophisticated.

To all of the people reacting in horror or making gagging sounds at the prospect of eating…corn. Grow up. If you want to mock the south, mock our per-pupil spending or our lack of unions. Leave our food out of it.

Enjoyed it? Please upvote 👇

Crucial Track for August 19, 2026

Wed, 19 Aug 2026 04:55:01 -0400

"Into the Mystic" by Van Morrison

Listen on Apple Music

Your browser does not support the audio element.

What's a song you'd want to hear while watching the sunrise? - Into the Mystic by Van Morrison

The song is built for exactly that moment; foghorns, tide turning, "let your soul and spirit fly" is dawn imagery even though it's technically about a boat coming into harbor.

View Lou Plummer's Crucial Tracks profile

AppAddict Records 1,000,000th View

Wed, 19 Aug 2026 04:16:30 -0400

When I wrote and published my first software review in 2024, I had no idea I'd still be going strong after 500+ reviews. Thank you to all of my fellow App Addicts and all the developers out there who keep writing high quality Mac software.

✉️ Reply by email

Crucial Track for August 18, 2026

Tue, 18 Aug 2026 10:52:10 -0400

"Kodachrome" by Paul Simon

Listen on Apple Music

Your browser does not support the audio element.

**What's a song you associate with your favorite photograph? - Kodachrome by Paul Simon"

"When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school..." I love this tune!

View Lou Plummer's Crucial Tracks profile

Crucial Track for August 17, 2026

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 03:26:33 -0400

"In Spite of Ourselves (feat. Iris DeMent)" by John Prine

Listen on Apple Music

Your browser does not support the audio element.

Share a song that captures the feeling of being understood.- In Spite of Ourselves by John Prine and Iris DeMent

It's the strongest fit. It's built entirely on being loved and known despite your specific, ridiculous flaws, "she thinks all my jokes are corny, convict movies make her horny,"

View Lou Plummer's Crucial Tracks profile

Five Unique Free Apps

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 03:13:00 -0400

Here are five free Mac applications you've most likely never come across. A project template/scaffolding automator, a local music player, resize batch images, a posture app that takes Advantage of the AirPods motion sensors, plus a financial calculator for cash flow simulation. 

Prefab - Capture a folder structure as a reusable "blueprint," add variable placeholders to names and contents, then deploy it anywhere via the app, menu bar, or Finder right-click. Deployment can chain actions: git init, npm install, opening the project in an editor, arbitrary terminal commands. Built for developers but pitched at anyone with a repeatable folder-setup ritual: lawyers, researchers, creatives.

Playhead - Local-first music player for people who keep their own files instead of streaming. The pitch is "waveform-first": it generates and caches waveform data so you can see and scrub a track's structure instead of a plain progress bar. Two browsing modes, Library and Folder (preserves your existing structure), aimed at DJs, producers, and messy real-world collections. Supports MP3, FLAC, WAV, AIFF/AIF, M4A, OGG, OPUS, AAC; includes a metadata editor.
IResize Pro - Batch image resizer. Set a target width or height, it scales proportionally and keeps your originals. Outputs JPEG/PNG/TIFF/GIF; imports JPG/PNG/GIF/TIFF/HEIC/BMP/WebP. Includes batch renaming, an optional colored border, and an upscaling prompt for undersized images.

Headjust - Native Mac app that uses the head-motion sensors already built into compatible AirPods/Beats to make posture drift visible without policing it.

InterestThing - Mac-only financial calculator for modeling cash-flow problems (loans, leases, valuations, financial planning) as a timeline of discrete events instead of a fixed template. Each event -- inflow, outflow, unknown, fixed principal, interest-only payment, rate change, balance date -- can be one-off or periodic, fixed or gradient amounts, paired with one of four interest types (simple, capitalized simple, capitalized simple with US Rule, compound) and three time-interval methods

✉️ Reply by email

Crucial Track for August 16, 2026

Sun, 16 Aug 2026 04:44:39 -0400

"Once In a Lifetime" by Talking Heads

Listen on Apple Music

Your browser does not support the audio element.

What song makes you want to dance alone in your room? - Once in a Lifetime by Talking Heads

The beat is nervous and jittery in exactly the way that makes it impossible to stay still, and the lyrics are about the same disorientation the herky-jerky rhythm creates. David Byrne's own dancing pretty much proves the point.

View Lou Plummer's Crucial Tracks profile

Five Free Apps Alternative to Paid Apps

Sun, 16 Aug 2026 03:55:05 -0400

Are you paying for an ad blocker, folder automation, notes & PKM and image editing ? You don't have to.

wBlock - a next-generation ad/content blocker for Safari: 750,000 rule capacity across 5 Safari content-blocking extensions (150k each), ~40MB idle RAM by running Safari's native content-blocking API out-of-process, Protocol Buffers + LZ4 filter storage, HTTP conditional-request updates, and iCloud sync of filter selections/custom lists/userscripts/whitelist. It bundles an Element Zapper, "Tube Cleaner & Player Cleaner" userscripts that restore native Picture-in-Picture/background playback on media sites, a full Greasemonkey-API userscript engine, UserCSS support, custom AdGuard-syntax filter-list import, per-site controls, a blocked-request logger, and regional filters. Open source on GitHub
Wick - Wick brings timers, stopwatches, and alarms to the Mac with menu bar and Lock Screen access, a fully custom Liquid Glass material on macOS 26+, and -- its standout claim -- the first app to integrate with Alcove. Positioned as the polished Clock app Apple never finished
Forel - An open-source (GPLv3) folder-automation app for macOS, pitched explicitly as a free Hazel alternative: watch folders, match files by name, extension, kind, size, date, tags, or Finder color label, then move, rename, tag, or run a script automatically.
Nodes - A local-first markdown note-taking and PKM (personal knowledge management) app: plain markdown files kept directly on-device (open the folder in Finder, nothing is locked in), double-bracket links with rename-safe link following, tag-based organization instead of folders, semantic + keyword search, a force-directed graph view, a growth timeline, and PDFs/images embedded as notes alongside writing. Its most distinctive claim is "the quiet part": tag/description/reminder suggestions from a local LLM that runs entirely on-device -- the developer states it works with Wi-Fi off.
ImageFuel is a lightweight Mac app for browsing images and videos without importing them into a library -- point it at any folder and get an instant scrollable grid, with filename/path search (Cmd+F), image/video/all filtering, sort by date or name, a fullscreen lightbox, in-app crop, metadata stripping, and move-to-trash from the grid.

Previous Collections

✉️ Reply by email

Lore: A Free App for YouTubeVideo Downloading, also Builds YouTube Playlists Without Signing In

Sat, 15 Aug 2026 12:38:42 -0400

TL;DR: Lore is a free Mac app that follows YouTube channels over plain RSS, no algorithm, no Google account, then archives what you keep as a permanent offline file with transcript search, highlights, and SponsorBlock built in. The site's source-code link 404s, so don't take open source on faith. Alternatives for readers who want a lighter touch: FreeTube (free, open source, no algorithm, no download) and Grayjay Desktop ($9.99 one time, aggregates YouTube with other platforms).

Blog title: Lore Solves a Problem Neither of My Last Two Posts Could
Reddit title: Lore: The Mac App That Skips YouTube's Algorithm and Keeps the Video Even After YouTube Doesn't

Lore Solves a Problem Neither of My Last Two Posts Could

When you find a video you want to archive, any app that merely organizes links isn't an archive at all. It's a bookmark service. There's a use for that, but if you need a quality local copy of the information, you need a proven download and catalog app. After evaluating the top contenders, I chose Lore, a native Mac app built by a solo developer, Adrian Galilea. It solves two of YouTube's problems in one place: it follows channels without an algorithm, and it keeps what you save even after YouTube stops hosting it.

Five features for power users

The built-in browser follows channels over plain RSS. No algorithm, no home feed, no recommendations. No Google account required.
Web ingest archives any link as one self-contained offline file, subtitles, chapters, and metadata baked in. This needs yt-dlp and ffmpeg installed separately; Lore will tell you which one is missing if you're not set up, but it doesn't install them for you. Set them up yourself ahead of time to avoid the interruption.
Transcript search runs across your entire library, powered by SQLite full-text search. Find the video where someone actually said the thing, instead of scrolling ten channels trying to remember which one it was.
Highlights let you mark a moment with a keystroke, edit the clip against the transcript, and export it as a standalone video file.
SponsorBlock auto-skip, chapter markers with hover-frame previews, and full keyboard-driven navigation, all of it working offline once a video is archived, plus Spotlight, Shortcuts, and Siri actions to play, pause, skip, or archive a link without opening the app.

It's free. No purchase, no subscription, no App Store listing; support is optional through Ko-fi or GitHub Sponsors. Development has been unusually aggressive: 28 versioned releases between June 11 and July 6, 2026, most of them driven by direct user feedback.

Although the landing page on Lore's website has a link to view the source code, it 404s, pointing at a GitHub page that no longer exists. I'm not sure what that portends, but be aware of it before you install.

The feature that shall not be added

The developer has also publicly turned down adding related-content recommendations, writing that it feels at odds with the reason people use the app in the first place, and that it won't ship unless it can be done without becoming distracting. That's a stronger commitment than a marketing line; it's a maintainer talking themselves out of a feature that would have been easy to justify.

Added to my toolbox

I've been burned by a video disappearing, and I just don't trust YouTube to keep hosting things I care about. If you're on macOS 26 with Homebrew already comfortable in your workflow, Lore does more in one app than anything I've discovered while writing this series. The transcript search alone is worth the price of admission, and the price of admission is nothing.

Alternatives

FreeTube, an app I have used and recommended for years, does the algorithm half of this, and it can download individual videos too, but it stops there. Free, open source, and already reviewed here on the blog. It builds a local, unranked feed from your subscriptions using its own extractor, no Invidious required, and has been shipping steadily through 2026. The download button saves a file to disk with a choice of format and quality; what it doesn't have is anywhere to manage those files afterward. No downloads tab, no in-app library, no transcript search. You get the file; Lore gets you the file plus a permanent, searchable home for it.

Grayjay Desktop is worth a mention for a different reason: it aggregates YouTube alongside other platforms, Twitch, Odysee, PeerTube, into a single feed with no algorithm by default. One-time purchase, $9.99, from the FUTO team. Until recently, Mac build currently needed a manual terminal command to get past Gatekeeper, but the current version does not.

Unless otherwise noted, anything mentioned above beyond Lore is based on research, not testing on my end.

Who this isn't for

If you're not on macOS 26 yet, this is off the table until you are. If you don't want to install yt-dlp and ffmpeg separately, the web-ingest half of the app won't work for you out of the box. And if open-source code matters to your trust in a tool, Lore doesn't currently back up its own claim to it.

More in this series

✉️ Reply by email

Crucial Track for August 15, 2026

Sat, 15 Aug 2026 05:29:04 -0400

"Don't Think Twice, It's All Right" by Bob Dylan

Listen on Apple Music

Your browser does not support the audio element.

What's your favorite song about letting go? - Don't Think Twice, It's Alright by Bob Dylan

It's the archetypal letting-go song: no bitterness, no melodrama, just a clear-eyed walking away. "It ain't no use to sit and wonder why" is about as economical as songwriting about acceptance gets.

View Lou Plummer's Crucial Tracks profile

Earned Invincibility

Fri, 14 Aug 2026 11:15:00 -0400

If you listen to podcasts about endurance sports, you'll hear a common theme come up among the hikers, cyclists and runners whose idea of fun is covering long distances under their own power. Many of them are recovering addicts and alcoholics. They often say "I traded one addiction for another." That's me.

After a struggle with drinking that stretched back to my teens, I got sober and stayed that way in 2008 at age 43. It took nine months for me to drop 100 pounds. The following year and the year after I rode my bicycle over 10K miles each year. Then I switched to long-distance hiking, completing the Appalachian Trail, a distance of 2189 miles in under six months.

The vocabulary of people like me includes the phrase "type 2 fun". This is any activity that leaves one miserable during the event, but is rewarding and fun to remember later. The transition between the misery of doing the thing and the rewarding feeling you get for having done it, is the most peaceful place in the world.

Grueling physical exertion reduces your cognitive ability. By the end of a long day of movement, many endurance sports participants have lost the ability to do mental math; an important skill when its primary function is allowing you to know how many more miles you have to go until you can stop.

When climbing mountains, all day every day, during my AT adventure, my wife who was also my hiking partner, seldom cared about the day's elevation gain. When a mountain showed up in front of her, she just climbed it and kept going. Not me. I studied the mountains we were going to encounter each day, calculating how much it was going to suck while making our way to their summits.

Laboring away on the wooded slopes of the Smokes, the Berkshires or even the treeless granite expanses in the Whites, you had no way to determine the distance to the top. Every hiker hates the false summit, a spot that looks like the top, but isn't. You struggle to climb your way there only to find that your big mountain just became your bigger mountain. It can happen in succession, multiple time on the same peak.

Eventually though, you arrive at a spot that you cannot climb beyond. Often there is a sign with numbers on it telling you exactly how far you are above sea level, as if that had some meaning. After a long climb, my mind would start out racing with an inner dialog that seldom varied, "Damn, that was hard. I'm glad it's really over. I wonder if there's a view up here. Where can I sit down? How much water do I have? How far away is the next mountain?"

All of that takes much longer to type in hindsight than it does to live through it in the moment. In the moment, you feel your heart rate begin to slow. It becomes easier to breathe. The burning in your thighs starts to lessen. You are flush a bit from having won a battle with the natural world. You remain undefeated and nothing feels better than knowing that. You're literally on a mountain top. You are high, absolutely high. You get this sense of earned invincibility.

I'll always be an addict, always chasing a high, but finally finding peace.

Enjoyed it? Please upvote 👇

The Extension Aided Method of Ignoring thee YouTube Algorithm

Thu, 13 Aug 2026 09:17:04 -0400

TL;DR: Control Panel for YouTube, UnTrap, and DeArrow all quiet YouTube down without making you leave the account, the browser, or the ecosystem behind. That's the whole point and the whole limit: you still get Google's ranking, you just stop looking at what it hands you. Control Panel is free and open source on Chrome and Firefox; the native Safari app is $3.99 once, no subscription. UnTrap is $4.99 once for all 250+ controls; an optional $3.99/month or $35.99/year adds cross-device sync and unlimited AI video summaries, which send content to a third party. DeArrow fixes a different problem, clickbait titles and thumbnails, not the algorithm, and is free with an optional $1 license.

Saying No to Video Crack

Yesterday, in the second installment of this series on building a better YouTube experience, I wrote about three apps that build a subscriptions-only feed by avoiding the recommendation algorithm entirely. That's the solution I endorse. It's also work: a new app, a different login situation, in one case giving up your account entirely.

Not everyone wants that. Maybe you've got YouTube Premium and don't want to lose ad-free playback. Maybe your watch history and real subscriptions matter more than you want to admit. Maybe you just don't want another app.

There are still options. The three below don't get you off Google's radar. They just make youtube.com stop trying to hand you free samples of video crack.

Control Panel for YouTube

Control Panel doesn't offer a single "distraction-free" toggle. It's dozens of individual switches for deciding what YouTube is allowed to put on screen: disable video previews, hide Shorts entirely, kill autoplay, remove Related videos, strip end cards and end-screen suggestions, turn off the Home feed, hide suggested sections in Home, Subscriptions, and Search, hide comments, remove Premium upsells, tidy the sidebar, and force theater mode to actually fill the window instead of leaving it boxed in.

The Chrome and Firefox extensions are free and open source. The native Safari app, which is how it runs on Mac, is $3.99 once, no subscription, no in-app purchases. Both the Chrome Web Store and Safari App Store listings disclose no data collection. Current version 1.35.2, last updated in July 2026. On iOS and iPadOS the extension has to be manually enabled in Settings after install, a one-time Apple quirk, not a Control Panel problem.

Developer: Jonny Buchanan, soitis.dev.

UnTrap

If Control Panel is the restrained version, UnTrap is the kitchen sink. The developer advertises 250+ controls: hiding Shorts, comments, Related, and suggested videos; removing sidebars, trending tabs, and notifications; redirecting the homepage; blurring or hiding thumbnails; blocking videos, channels, or comments by keyword or regex; scheduled focus sessions and opening delays; custom hotkeys.

On the Mac App Store it's $4.99, one time. All 250+ of the controls above work at that price. The developer said so directly in an App Store response: no subscription needed for those features. What the optional subscription, $3.99/month or $35.99/year, actually unlocks is settings sync across devices and unlimited AI video summaries; without it you still get three summaries a day.

Those AI summaries are the one feature that doesn't fit the spirit of privacy I try to encourage here. Generating them means sending video content to a third-party service, a different privacy posture than everything else UnTrap does locally in your browser. If you use UnTrap, that's the toggle to look at twice, whether or not you ever pay for the subscription.

It runs on Safari, Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Opera, and Brave. One real limit on iOS: the Safari extension doesn't work inside the YouTube app itself, only inside Safari.

Developer: Yevhen Tretiakov.

DeArrow

Control Panel and UnTrap fight what YouTube puts around the video. DeArrow fights what's on the thumbnail.

It crowdsources replacement titles and thumbnails: viewers submit plain, descriptive titles and screenshots pulled from an actual timestamp, then vote on the best ones. With no submission yet, DeArrow auto-formats the original title into proper Title Case or Sentence case instead of leaving the arrows and shocked faces alone, and swaps in a random in-video frame for the thumbnail instead of whatever the algorithm favored.

This isn't solving the same problem as the other two. It's not hiding recommendations; it's making the ones you do see less manipulative. Worth running alongside either of the above, not instead of them.

Open source, built on the same codebase as SponsorBlock by the same developer, works on Chrome, Firefox, and Safari for macOS and iOS. Free to use, with a $1 one-time license if you want to support it.

What I left out

Unhook is the extension most people mention alongside these three, but I'm not testing it because it doesn't have a Safari build. Switching browsers regularly to cut down on fingerprinting means a tool that excludes one of the three I use isn't a real option for me. If you're locked into Chrome or Firefox and don't share that constraint, it's worth a look, but it doesn't meet my needs.

Unless otherwise noted, anything mentioned above beyond Control Panel, UnTrap, and DeArrow is based on research, not testing on my end.

Who this is for

If you're keeping your Google account and your Premium subscription, browsing youtube.com in Safari or Chrome, and you just want less noise while you're there, start with Control Panel. It's free on Chrome and Firefox, $3.99 once on Safari, does the most with the least, collects nothing, and never asks you to subscribe to anything. Add UnTrap, $4.99 once, if you want deeper filtering by keyword or channel. The subscription is skippable unless sync or unlimited AI summaries actually matter to you, and if privacy is the reason you're here, that's the toggle to leave off either way. Add DeArrow regardless; it solves a problem the other two don't touch, and it's free.

What this doesn't do

None of this stops YouTube from knowing what you watch. It doesn't stop the algorithm from running. It just stops you from seeing only what Google decides is best for you, which means best for Google.

The apps in my previous post isolate you from Google. These three just make it easy to ignore. Both are legitimate solutions. They're not the same when it comes to your privacy. You turned the volume down. Google’s still in the room

✉️ Reply by email

How to Experience YouTube With No Algorithm

Wed, 12 Aug 2026 23:10:57 -0400

TL;DR: Play, Yattee and Unwatched all refuse to let YouTube pick your next video; each builds a feed from your subscriptions instead of Google's ranking. Play is free to download with the channel-following features behind Premium at $2.99/month, and it's the only one of the three that isn't locked to a single backend. Yattee runs through public Invidious and Piped instances, which Google has been blocking since 2024. Unwatched pulls from YouTube's own RSS feeds and Data API instead, which should make it sturdier, but needs macOS 15.

Play, Yattee and Unwatched Won't Fix YouTube's Algorithm. They Just Won't Ask It.

I wrote last time about paying for YouTube Premium after years of running my own ad-blocking stack. Premium immediately silences ads. That's the extent of its problem-solving. It didn't buy me a say in what shows up next. The recommendation engine is still running, still deciding, still doing the exact job it was built to do: keep me watching something, whether or not that something is what I came for.

That's the part no subscription fixes. The algorithm doesn't check whether you paid before it decides what to put in front of you.

So I went looking for apps that don't ask it in the first place.

Ranking happens whether you pay or not

YouTube's Home tab, the sidebar, and the autoplay queue are all running the same job: predict what keeps you watching, then show you that. It works whether you're a free user with ads or a Premium subscriber without them. The engine doesn't know or care which one you are. Turning off autoplay helps. Hiding the sidebar helps. Neither one changes what's happening upstream; the feed is still built by ranking, and ranking is still the thing making the decision.

The only way around that is a feed that isn't ranked at all. Something that shows you new uploads from channels you follow, in the order they were posted, and stops there.

The obvious solution has been in front of me for a while.

Play

I've used Play for over two years and reviewed it previously.

Play started as a save-for-later app. Give it a video URL through the clipboard or Share Sheet and it builds a personal video database that you can organize with tags and other metadata.

That's still useful, but Play has grown into something more interesting.

With Play Premium, you can follow YouTube channels directly. Each channel can have its own filters, so following somebody doesn't have to mean accepting everything they publish. If a creator covers five subjects and you only care about one, Play can filter the incoming videos before they reach you.

That turns subscriptions into something much closer to RSS.

The Channels section becomes a continuously updated timeline of new videos from sources you deliberately selected. There is no recommendation engine sitting between the publisher and you.

The part that makes Play different from Yattee and Unwatched: the in-app player isn't locked to one backend. You can play through Invidious, through Piped, through a custom site you point it at, or straight through YouTube itself. If you go the YouTube route directly, you can hide Shorts. That means Play doesn't live or die by whether a given Invidious instance is up this week; it's a hedge built into the app instead of a single point of failure.

The catch is price.

Play is free to download, but the channel-following features that make it especially useful for this workflow require Play Premium at $2.99/month, $19.99/year or $99.99 lifetime.

It's a universal app with iCloud sync, so the same subscriptions follow you from iPhone to Mac to Apple TV.

Developer site | Mac App Store

Yattee

Yattee is a free, open source SwiftUI app for Mac, iOS and tvOS that plays YouTube through Invidious or Piped, two open source front ends that stand between you and Google's servers. You point Yattee at an instance, add channels as favorites, and it builds a feed from exactly those channels; nothing else. SponsorBlock and Return YouTube Dislike are built in.

Everything depends on those instances staying up. Google has been blocking Invidious instances at the IP level since 2024, and that fight was still going on through 2026, with public instances getting hit with CAPTCHAs, throttling and outright blacklisting. Piped has reportedly held up better under the same pressure, but neither is infrastructure you control. Unlike Play, Yattee has no fallback to YouTube directly if your instance goes down; the proxy is the only door.

I don't like the friction Invidious introduces. More than once, the few minutes I set aside to watch videos have been consumed with fixing a buggy back end. If your experience has been different, Yattee is popular for a reason. Use it and enjoy. It's just not for me.

GitHub | Mac App Store

Unwatched

Unwatched is a free, open source, native Swift app; macOS 15 or later on the Mac, iOS 17 or later on the phone. The difference from Yattee: it pulls from YouTube's own RSS feeds and the YouTube Data API instead of routing through a third party front end. That's a different kind of dependency, not zero dependency; you're still relying on Google's API staying available and its quotas staying reasonable. But you're not waiting on a volunteer-run proxy server to survive the week.

Don't charge into the Unwatched setup by adding 200 must-watch channels in one go. You'll get rate limited and frustrated.

Unwatched doesn't handle playlist organization, and the developer says as much directly in an App Store reply, pointing users toward Play. Which, at this point in the post, shouldn't surprise anyone.

You can also skip the app entirely and read the same channel feeds in a regular RSS reader. NetNewsWire is free and open source and will do it. Inoreader is the paid service I use and prefer, but nothing about this approach requires paying for it.

Mac App Store | GitHub

Alternatives

FreeTube does the same job on the desktop side, and it's one I have used and reviewed here. It builds its feed locally from subscriptions, doesn't require Invidious to function since it has its own extractor, and has been shipping updates steadily through 2026. It's one of the few Electron apps I'd install anyway.

Grayjay Desktop belongs on this list even though I have only started testing it. It's a one-time $9.99 purchase from the FUTO team that aggregates YouTube alongside other platforms into a single unranked feed, no algorithm unless you log in. The Mac build previously needed a Gatekeeper bypass, which is the kind of friction that either doesn't bother you or ends the conversation immediately. As of this writing, it is notarized.

Grayjay is also the one app here that runs on a phone that isn't an iPhone. The license covers macOS and Android, and there's no iOS version; FUTO's own FAQ says an iPhone build isn't coming in the near future because the team is focused on making the Android app first-class. Play, Yattee and Unwatched all run on iPhone and none of them run on Android, so if your Mac sits next to a Pixel, Grayjay is the only entry on this list that follows you to both.

Who this is for

If you want one app that follows you across every Apple device, saves videos alongside subscriptions, and doesn't put all its weight on a single third party server, Play is the one I'd point you to first. If your Mac is Apple Silicon and you don't mind depending on a proxy that Google is actively trying to kill, Yattee adds SponsorBlock and dislike counts on top of the unranked feed, free. If you're on macOS 15 and you'd rather depend on Google's official API than a volunteer's server, Unwatched is the sturdier free bet, minus playlist support.

If the algorithm mostly works for you, you're probably reading this wondering why anyone would go to this much trouble and expense to get away from something that just suggests videos. That's a fair question.

I've run all three. None of them gets you off Google's radar entirely.

What I actually want from YouTube

There's no single app here that fixes YouTube, because the app was never the whole problem. Google still builds the feed on youtube.com; these three just stop asking it to.

No "you might also like." No endless Home feed. No algorithm deciding that because I watched one video about replacing a refrigerator water filter I have apparently developed a lifelong passion for appliance repair.

I don't actually want Google to find more things for me to watch. I already have more interesting books, movies, music, podcasts, articles and videos than I'll ever have time to consume.

The scarce resource isn't content anymore. It's attention.

So my ideal YouTube gives the algorithm as little work to do as possible.

I pick the channels. I pick the videos. I decide when I'm finished.

Then YouTube shuts up.

✉️ Reply by email

Wonder Woman vs. Me - She Remains Undefeated

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 08:49:00 -0400

Privilege comes and privilege goes. I've had stretches in my life where I lived frugally out of necessity, not because I had a hidden virtue. Later in life, with debts paid off, we managed to save some dough for retirement. Well, retirement arrived, and although we don't have "buy your own helicopter" money, we don't have to live with the crappy refrigerator that came with the house we just bought either. After doing my due diligence (i.e., asking ChatGPT what I should buy), we bought a lovely French door, counter-depth, freezer-on-the-bottom GE fridge from a locally owned business (virtue signal warning).

I've been dreaming of this day for two reasons: new fridge (duh) and the realization of a life-long dream. I have a garage now and I have a functioning refrigerator that I can put in it. There are few men who wouldn't kill to be in my position.

I don't drink beer (since December 28, 2008) so it's not there to serve as a plug-in brew cooler. To me, it's just a luxury, kind of like a Rolex, but functional and not so flex-y. Never again will I lose a special treat in the depths of an overcrowded refrigeration device. I love cold cans of sparkling water, even the store brands. Now I can pack multiple cases of them into my garage fridge and stand there with the door open whenever I want, admiring the abundance.

There's only one problem. Wonder Woman has the ultimate veto power over my life. I mean, she is smarter than me (way). She's also practical and sees things in an annoyingly realistic way vs. my charming rose-colored glasses method. She uses criteria like "is there room for a fridge in the garage?" and "we live in the South, AKA the sweltering armpit of Satan." Our garage makes you want to climb into a sauna to cool off. Supposedly, this affects how well a refrigerator will work out there.

Long story short: my dreams are crushed. I'm not getting it. When they deliver our new one, the current refrigerator will be taken away and I will never, ever get to see it again (sob).

Because she loves me and gets genuinely distressed at my sadness, Wonder Woman researched beverage fridges and picked out a sleek, glass door model with LED lights and a 106 can capacity. She had it delivered overnight and went with me to the supermarket to buy four cases of sparkling water to stock it with. It's purring away in the kitchen right now.

I may lose every single argument we ever have, but I won the wife lottery.

Enjoyed it? Please upvote 👇

YouTube Premium kills the ads but doesn't solve the real problem. Here's the stack I use to do that.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 07:44:13 -0400

TL;DR: Paid for YouTube Premium after years of DIY ad-blocking. Ads are gone; the algorithm, the clutter, and the impermanence aren't. Building a stack of small tools instead of hunting for one app that fixes all four. First post in a series; toolbox preview inside, full reviews coming.

Google did not design YouTube to entertain you or to inform you. Every major design choice points toward one purpose: to make you watch more YouTube. Watching more leads to one of two outcomes: your attachment to the platform gets stronger, or you get shown more advertising. For a lot of people, it's both.

For a long time, bragging about how you managed to watch YouTube without being subjected to ads was a particular kind of geek flexing, and an annoying one. The problem few people admit to is that avoiding advertising isn't a fix, it's a moving target. Anyone who tells you they've permanently solved it is trying to sell you something.

Turning the YouTube experience into something usable and enjoyable requires you to become your own IT department. That's definitely a downside for some. If you enjoy tinkering, it may not bother you much. I started using YouTube in December 2005, the month it debuted. That is to say I've watched the user experience decline in quality for twenty years. For most of that time I kept the ads off through whatever it took: ad blockers, standalone apps, Invidious instances, switching to whichever browser handled YouTube best that year. A few months ago, I decided there were better uses of my time than maintaining that fight. As much as I hated to do it, I subscribed to YouTube Premium and eagerly waited for a better experience. I didn't really get one.

The Problem Isn't Ads. It's Design.

Advertisements are only one of four major pain points to using the platform. Paying for Premium doesn't solve the other three.

Ads. If you're not paying, you're watching them or fighting them somehow. Premium solves this one.
The algorithm. YouTube decides what gets put in front of you next. Premium doesn't buy you a different recommendation engine.
Clutter. Shorts on the home page, autoplay previews, recommendations everywhere, interface elements devoted to pulling you into something else. Individually they're minor annoyances. Together they make YouTube worse at simply showing you what you came to see.
Impermanence. YouTube gives you lists, not a real personal library. Watch Later is useful, but it lives entirely inside someone else's service. Videos disappear. Channels disappear. Things you know you've watched become surprisingly hard to find again.

The Easy Solution

There isn't one.

Fighting a platform that doesn't answer to you is the toll for staying in control of your own experience, and nobody refunds the time you spend on it. If you've got limitless energy, fight on every front: email, search, maps, storage, video, all of it, all the time. Most of us don't have that budget. The honest move is picking which fights are worth spending it on this year and letting the rest go without guilt.

I want to decide how I discover videos. I want to decide what appears around the player. I want better ways to organize the things I intend to watch later. And when something matters enough that I don't want it disappearing because a creator, a copyright holder, or Google changes something, I want my own copy.

There isn't one app that does all of that. That's the point.

Instead of looking for a mythical "YouTube replacement," I've started treating YouTube the way I treat a lot of other technology: as infrastructure underneath a collection of smaller tools. One tool can handle viewing. Another can clean up the browser interface. Another can manage subscriptions without an algorithm deciding what deserves my attention. Another can download and archive the things I actually want to keep.

The result is less like replacing YouTube and more like building my own multi-part client for it.

The Toolbox, By Problem

Each of these gets its own real look later in the series. For now, sorted by which of the four problems above it actually solves:

Ads & sponsors

Escaping the algorithm

Yattee
Grayjay
FreeTube
PocketTube
RSS curation via Inoreader or NetNewsWire

Cleaning up the interface

Keeping what matters

If you have a favorite that isn't here, let me know.

What's Coming

The next few posts get into the actual tools: apps that get you out of the recommendation feed entirely, ways to strip the clutter out of the browser experience, and how to actually keep the videos you don't want to lose. Premium's verdict, when it comes up again, is not a blanket yes. It's worth the money if your time is worth more than $15.99 a month to you and ads were the fight costing you that time. If ads were never the fight, paying Google more won't touch the one you're actually still in.

✉️ Reply by email

Caption Snap: Meeting Transcriptions With No Bot, No Model to Download, No Data Transferred and No Drain on Your CPU - Free Trial, One Time, $9.99

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 10:39:53 -0400

TL;DR: CaptionSnap is a $9.99 one-time menu bar app that saves your Teams, Zoom, and Google Meet transcripts by reading the live captions the meeting app already displays. No audio recording, no bot in the call, no cloud, no model download, and Accessibility is the only permission it asks for. Speaker names come from the platform, so attribution is a lookup instead of a guess. You have to enable captions yourself, transcripts are only as good as the platform's captioning, and it requires macOS 26 on Apple Silicon.

CaptionSnap Reads the Captions Your Meeting App Already Shows You

Here is a list of the many things I don't like about transcription apps.

Using one in a meeting often means a bot joins the call and you have to explain it to everyone.
Local models require a huge download.
Remote models send my conversations to somebody else's server.
They require numerous privacy and security exemptions.
Local models are processor intensive.

Well, I found an app that doesn't do any of those things and still delivers better-than-average accuracy while using a tiny percentage of my CPU. It's called CaptionSnap.

The trick

Teams, Zoom, and Google Meet already transcribe your meeting. That's what live captions are. The text is right there on screen, generated by the platform, attached to the correct speaker, and then thrown away the second the call ends.

Every other tool in this category ignores that and starts over from scratch. Record the audio, run it through a model, guess at who said what, hope the diarization holds up. CaptionSnap just reads the captions the meeting app is already displaying and writes them to a Markdown file with timestamps and the speaker names the platform supplied.

That one decision is the premise for the whole app. It's why there's no model download, no audio pipeline, no microphone prompt, and no bot in your call. There's nothing to overcharge you for.

What that buys you

Real speaker names, not guesses. The names come from the meeting platform, so "who said that" is a lookup, not an inference. Whisper-based tools get diarization wrong constantly on four-person calls with crosstalk. This sidesteps the problem instead of solving it.

One permission. Accessibility. That's it. No Screen Recording, no microphone, no camera (CaptionSnap FAQ). If you've ever watched a meeting app collect four permissions on the way in, you know why that matters.

Minimal CPU. Not a tuning achievement. There's no neural network running, so there's nothing to burn cycles on. Your fans stay quiet and your battery survives a day of calls.

Plain Markdown on your disk. No account, no sync, no server, no export step. The developer claims the app makes no network connections at all (CaptionSnap homepage). Optional summaries run through Apple Intelligence on-device.

It works behind other windows. The meeting can sit in the background while you do actual work, and the transcript keeps filling in.

What it does not do

It does not turn captions on for you. Live captions are off by default in Teams, Zoom, and Meet, and you have to flip that switch yourself before CaptionSnap has anything to read (CaptionSnap FAQ).
It does not record audio, so there's no recording to go back to when the transcript is wrong.
It does not fix bad captions. If Teams mangles a name or drops a clause, that lands in your file exactly as mangled. Your transcript is only as good as the platform's captioning, and the marketing line "accurate by design, not guesswork" is about who said what, not about the words.
It does not run on Intel, and it does not run below macOS 26. Apple Silicon and Tahoe or nothing. (I have not tested it on the macOS 27 Golden Gate beta.)

The potential gotcha

CaptionSnap has to be running in your menu bar when the meeting starts. It does not turn on captions in Teams, Google Meet, or Zoom for you, so that's your job too. CaptionSnap provides instructions for each platform. As long as you don't disable captions later, the setting should hold between restarts of each app, but verify it yourself. The worst version of this is finding out after the meeting that nothing was captured.

Who this is for

This is for you if you take meeting notes on a Mac, you don't want a bot announcing itself in a client call, and you'd rather have a plain text file than a web dashboard. If you aren't fond of explaining to IT why you need an app with Screen Recording permission, CaptionSnap doesn't put you in that conversation.

Who this is not for

This is not for you if you need the audio and not just the text, or if you work with people who never enable captions. Don't get it if you're on Intel or an older macOS, or if you want AI-generated action items and CRM sync. For that last one, this is deliberately the wrong tool and the subscription products below are the right ones.

The alternatives

macOS Live Captions. Free, built in. Vanishes when you dismiss it, no speaker names, no timestamps, nothing saved. Useful in the moment, useless a day later.

MacWhisper. Free tier, or €64 one-time for Pro (macwhisper.com). Transcribes local audio with Whisper and Parakeet, records Zoom, Teams, Webex, Skype, and Discord without a bot, and Pro includes automatic meeting start and end detection plus speaker recognition. Much larger tool, much larger job. It does the model download and the CPU work that CaptionSnap avoids, and in exchange it also handles interviews, lectures, podcasts, and system-wide dictation. If you need transcription generally and not just meetings, this is the one. I wrote about it in 2024: MacWhisper - Transcription Powerhouse.

Granola. Free Basic tier with limited history, $14 per user per month for Business, $35 for Enterprise (granola.ai/pricing). Also avoids joining as a bot, but it processes in the cloud and is built around AI-enhanced notes and team integrations rather than a raw transcript you own.

Otter.ai. Free tier at 300 minutes per month, Pro at $16.99 per user per month billed monthly or $8.33 billed annually, Business at $30 monthly or $19.99 annually (otter.ai/pricing). This is the thing CaptionSnap is reacting to: it joins your Zoom, Teams, and Meet calls as a notetaker, and everything lives on Otter's servers. I've used Otter for dictation, but not for meetings.

Unless otherwise noted, the alternate apps mentioned above are based on research and not individual testing.

Price and verdict

Fourteen-day trial, no credit card, then $9.99 once for up to three Macs, with a 30-day refund policy (CaptionSnap pricing). Ten dollars, paid one time, against $14 to $17 a month for the subscription notetakers.

This is Wes Stockfisch's first shipped app. I give developers the benefit of the doubt, but be aware, there's no maintenance track record here, and the macOS 26 plus Apple Silicon requirement means you need a current M-series machine. But the idea is right. The captions already exist. Reading them instead of recreating them is the kind of obvious move nobody made because, well, they mnight have been overthinking it on this..

One caveat before the verdict: I haven't been able to test this extensively. Retirees don't have a lot of Zoom calls. But in the testing I was able to do, CaptionSnap held up.

In my opinion, ten dollars to stop explaining a bot to clients is not a hard decision.

✉️ Reply by email

Autoshelf Has an MCP Server You Probably Don't Need and The Rule Engine Is Weak - A Review

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 05:04:48 -0400

TL;DR: AutoShelf ($19.99 one-time) ships an embedded MCP server that works, but do you actually need that? An AI model can write a launchd LaunchAgent and a shell script once and it runs forever, no app, no daemon, no purchase. The MCP's real value only shows up once you're managing enough rules to want conversational audit and editing instead of hand-maintained scripts, and even there, my hands-on testing found the rule engine underneath thin: no dynamic subfolder sorting, limited management by file size, and an action list a fraction of Hazel's. AutoShelf delivers less using AI than its marketing promises and loses the file-organizer argument outright.

AutoShelf

I've had a Hazel rule watching my Downloads folder since before I can accurately date it. It reads PDF invoices and files them by vendor, decompresses ZIPs and moves the app inside to Applications, converts HEICs to JPG, and hands ebooks to Calibre and audiobooks to Audiobookshelf without me touching any of it. That's the bar. A new license for Hazel is $42, which is steep for some and I've written before about cheaper options. AutoShelf wants to be added to that list, and it's making its case with a feature none of those alternatives had: an MCP server for use with AI agents plus a CLI.

More Than Just Simple File Management

An MCP server built into the app binary, not a plugin bolted on after the fact. Point Claude Desktop, Cursor, Codex, or Windsurf at it and describe a rule in plain English instead of building it in a UI.
A companion CLI for scripting rule creation and running jobs from the terminal, the same engine the MCP server talks to.
Where-from metadata as a condition, so a rule can act on which browser or app downloaded a file, not just its type or name.
OCR and Live Text matching as of version 2.2, so a rule can file a scanned invoice by what's written on it. Not new ground: Hazel's Contents attribute has done on-the-fly text recognition on images and text-layer-less PDFs for years, it's the mechanism behind the vendor-filing rule in the intro. AutoShelf catching up to a feature Hazel already had is parity, not an edge.
Multi-action, chainable rules: move, tag, rename, and archive to ZIP in a single pass, added in the 2.0 rewrite.

Is It Better Than Hazel for Working With AI?

Does anyone even need a layer between a prompt for file management and their file system? For a well-defined one-off job, not really. A capable AI model can write a launchd LaunchAgent with a WatchPaths key, native FSEvents, no polling loop, and a small shell script that switches on extension and moves the file. Write it once and it runs forever: no app, no background daemon, no $19.99. That's possible without Hazel or AutoShelf.

An MCP connection can do something a bespoke script can't: with it running, AutoShelf can immediately edit any rule with natural language, without you having to track down the launchd job and script you created six months ago. I created eight AutoShelf rules and asked Claude to check on them through the MCP connection; it returned current rules, current paths, and current enabled/disabled flags. A launchd script has no equivalent self-report; ask it "what are you doing" six months from now and the honest answer is "go read the shell and simulate it," and any edit needs a launchctl unload/load before it's live. MCP matters once you're managing enough rules that you'd rather audit, pause, or edit them by asking than by maintaining scripts by hand, or you want the GUI, activity log, and undo the app provides that a bare launchd job doesn't have unless you build it yourself.

Against Hazel specifically, AutoShelf is still ahead on this one front. Hazel doesn't have an MCP server and doesn't claim to; anything an AI does to a Hazel rule today runs through a general-purpose file-editing layer poking at Hazel's XML underneath, which is fragile and unsupported. So among app-based rule engines with a GUI and an activity log, AutoShelf's MCP integration is real. On my Mac, it was easy to set up and worked as advertised on the first try.

The Rule Engine Underneath Doesn't Hold Up

This is where my hands-on testing exposed the weaknesses in AutoShelf. It can't sort a folder of mixed files into subfolders by extension unless you create every destination subfolder yourself first and then write a separate rule for each file type. I had to build five nearly identical rules, "Sort PNG files," "Sort JPG files," "Sort JPEG files," "Sort GIF files," "Sort MD files," each one hand-built with its own hardcoded destination path. Hazel does the same job with a single "Sort into subfolder" action and a pattern; AutoShelf makes you write and maintain N rules for N extensions.

Two more gaps from my testing: size conditions only go down to whole megabytes, no decimal places, so you can't write a rule for anything under 1 MB or between whole-MB steps. More importantly, AutoShelf's action list (Move, Copy, Trash, Rename, Add Tag, Archive to ZIP, Optimize, Convert Image/Video/Audio, Photos import) is a fraction of Hazel's, which adds sync, upload, tags, color labels, comments, alias creation, three Music/Photos/TV import targets, and five different scripting hooks (Shortcuts, AppleScript, JavaScript, Automator, shell) on top of pause, notify, and rule-chaining controls.

The Recursion Illusion

AutoShelf's App Store listing says it will "watch any folder you choose, including nested subfolders," and the 1.5 changelog calls it "Nested Folder Watching." (App Store listing) But on its own Product Hunt launch, the developer told a commenter directly that watched folders are top-level only, files dropped into a subfolder are not picked up, and true recursion is a tracked feature request, not a shipped one. (Product Hunt) Read charitably, "nested folder watching" means you can manually add specific subfolders you already know about as additional watch targets, one at a time. That is not the same as what Hazel does, which is recursive: add one "Run rules on folder contents" rule and Hazel will walk into subfolders of subfolders it has never seen, at any depth, applying your existing rules the whole way down. (Noodlesoft manual) That's a real discrepancy between AutoShelf's marketing copy and its confirmed current behavior, and now my own rule list shows the practical cost of it: I'm hand-maintaining what Hazel would do with one rule.

Who This Is For, and Who Should Stay on Hazel

If your files land flat, one folder, no meaningful variety in file type, and you are considering a $19.99 one-time tool with a working AI hook, AutoShelf's free tier is worth an afternoon. If your needs are more complex, stick with Hazel. My own eight-rule test folder is the case study: if you have more than three or four file types, or anywhere the folder structure has depth, AutoShelf turns into more manual rule-building than the automation it's supposed to replace.

✉️ Reply by email

Mom and Dad - The Missing Manual

Sat, 08 Aug 2026 07:32:00 -0400

My parents were young when I was born, only 17, but despite the relatively small time gap, we are from distinctly different generations. They've been divorced since the 70s, so their needs and circumstances, while similar, are still unique. Last year, my dad and his wife moved to an assisted living facility about a 20-minute drive away. It takes about three hours to get to my mom's. That's doable, but not as easy.

For most of my life, each has been independent. They are both part of the generation that almost understands cell phones, but not quite. My career was in IT, so I have long been their go-to for tech support and purchase advice. Other than that, they never needed much help. Until they did. In both cases, the transition happened suddenly.

Last year, my dad fell late one night, breaking his shoulder and hitting his head - hard. My stepmother has advanced Alzheimer's. She was asleep, but heard him calling for her. Luckily, Dad was able to coach her through retrieving his Life Alert device to summon help. When the paramedics arrived, they made note of a half-empty bottle of bourbon sitting on the counter.

He's never recovered from that night. The damage to his shoulder is irreparable. The concussion and his relationship with alcohol have impaired his short-term memory and decision-making skills.

My mother, an independent widow, has been remarkably fit for years. Since turning 70, she's walked across England and Spain - and I mean all the way across. She lives by herself on an 11-acre tract of land she's long maintained without outside help. Then, suddenly this spring, a hidden back injury surfaced and nearly incapacitated her overnight. She went through weeks of intense pain, lost the ability to drive, and couldn't stand long enough to prepare a meal. Her situation has improved somewhat, but some of the physical impairments might be permanent. Mentally, she is sharp as ever, highly opinionated with some endearing quirks, but she's all there and then some.

I wasn't prepared for either parent's transition. Whenever I've known someone who was providing aid for their mom or dad, my thought pattern was just "That's tough." I never really considered getting mentally ready to step up. The thing is, the universe doesn't care if you are ready or not. When the time comes, unless you are a terrible human, you just start doing what it takes.

Sure, there are books and websites that purport to help you get ready for your new responsibilities, but they aren't clairvoyant, so they don't know what's going to be the event that flips the switch from independence to "needs help." You won't know either.

In my case, the energy it takes to do what needs to be done is disconnected from my feelings. My relationship with each of my parents is and has been very different.

I am much closer to my mom. She's been my supportive parent forever, a wonderful grandmother and great-grandmother, generous with her time and energy. She's smart and interesting and genuine.

My dad is difficult. He's also smart, but he's been absent from my life in most meaningful ways. He leans towards being judgmental, and his one overriding filter for examining everything in the world is how it affects him. He's not interested if it doesn't.

Again, the universe doesn't care. Their needs are unrelated to their degree of likability. They need what they need from you, and the truth from where I'm standing is simple. You do what needs to be done and you use whatever you have to for motivation. My mental gymnastics work like this:

I would move heaven and earth for my mom
If I don't help my dad, someone else I love (my siblings, or my aunt and uncles) will have to
My grandparents would want me to do this
One day, I'm going to need this same help, and I need the karma points

I realize that this instruction manual is nothing of the sort, but it's my real, lived experience. There's no manual. There's just the drive to Dad's, and the drive to Mom's, and the fact that I make both of them.

Enjoyed it? Please upvote 👇

The Apps I Use So Apple Can't Take Everything

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 07:49:53 -0400

TL;DR: Part two of the Apple Account series. Backup apps that pull your iCloud data down to storage you control, email providers that speak IMAP/CalDAV/CardDAV so Apple's own apps keep working without iCloud, ways to buy and track software outside the App Store, and a password manager that isn't Keychain. My own five picks are at the end, along with why you should be testing a restore every quarter.

Disaster Avoidance Apps

Yesterday I laid out what happens when Apple closes your account: your identity if it's an @icloud.com address, your photos and messages, your purchases, your hardware in every practical sense, and a 2023 federal ruling that says suspicion is the only standard Apple has to meet. That post was the bad news.

This is the other half. These are the apps and services that move your data out from under a single Apple Account, what each one actually protects, and where each one falls short. There are more options here than anyone needs, and I have not run most of them. At the end I'll tell you the five I actually use and why I stopped looking after those.

iCloud Backup Apps

BackiGo. Photos, videos, iCloud Drive and Contacts, backed up and restored to USB, NAS, or cloud storage you control. Drive versioning, scheduling, incremental backups, optional client-side encryption, and browsable restoration. I reviewed it here: BackiGo is a Dependable and Full Featured iCloud Backup Solution.
Parachute Backup. Downloads iCloud Photos and iCloud Drive to external drives, NAS, or cloud folders. Handles originals, edits, Live Photos and Shared Albums, with scheduling and full, incremental or mirror modes. My review: Parachute Backup, Specially Designed for iCloud and Photos. Restore to a location that doesn't depend on the same Apple Account, or you've built a circle. The original dev sold the app and I moved to Backigo.
Time Machine, with one warning that undoes the whole thing if you miss it. Turn off Optimize Mac Storage in your iCloud settings. Leave it on and macOS keeps only stubs of your iCloud files locally, so Time Machine dutifully backs up the stubs and you find out the day you need the originals.

Standards-Based Providers for Email, Calendars and Contacts

You can keep using Apple's Mail, Calendar and Contacts without tying any of the data to your Apple Account, by pointing them at a provider that supports IMAP, CardDAV and CalDAV. Reminders is the exception; Apple moved it to a private format, though Things 3 can pull to-dos out of a designated Reminders list into its own inbox.

Five providers with full IMAP/CardDAV/CalDAV support on macOS:

Fastmail. JMAP, IMAP, CardDAV and CalDAV, with push sync on Apple devices. Custom domains and third-party app access both come with the Individual plan; the cheaper Basic business plan has neither, so don't buy that one for this purpose. I've been using Fastmail for two years, and it also runs an MCP server if you want your mail reachable from an AI agent.
Mailfence. IMAP, CalDAV and CardDAV syncing straight into Apple Mail and Calendar. Belgium-based, EU jurisdiction.
Posteo. IMAP, POP, CalDAV and CardDAV for €1 a month, which makes it the cheapest option on this list by a wide margin. Germany-based with serious privacy protections. It does not support custom domains, so it solves the provider problem without solving the address-ownership problem.
Mailbox.org. CalDAV and CardDAV plus ActiveSync, with a bundled office suite. Germany-based, 30-day free trial.
Runbox. IMAP with CalDAV and CardDAV. The Runbox 7 web interface is still in development, so plan on using it through standard clients.

All five work natively with macOS Calendar and Contacts. Fastmail has the smoothest CalDAV experience of the ones I've touched. Posteo is the cheapest. Mailfence leans hardest on open standards.

Software Acquisition and Licensing

Whenever you have the choice, download applications directly from the developer rather than from the App Store, so your access survives your Apple Account. You give up automatic updates, Family Sharing, and in a few cases unlimited installs.

Updaters that close the first gap:

Updatest. Menu bar updater that scans each app's own metadata to find its update source, covering Homebrew, Mac App Store, Sparkle, Electron and GitHub Releases. $12.99 one-time for 3 Macs, $24.99 for 10. Fourteen-day trial, 30-day money-back guarantee. Requires macOS 15 or later.
Nektony App Cleaner & Uninstaller. Broad app coverage with direct update installation, and it handles uninstalls too. $24.95 a year. It's fast and doesn't miss much - but that subscription...
Latest. Free and lightweight. Checks Mac App Store and Sparkle apps only, so expect it to catch a fraction of what the paid tools track. It's free, but it misses things the paid apps pick up.
TrashMe 3. Cleaner and uninstaller with update detection as a side feature, plus duplicate files and startup item management. $17.99 one-time, 15-day trial.
Homebrew with topgrade. One terminal command updates Homebrew packages, Mac App Store apps and system tools. Free, broadest coverage, and the only one here that expects you to be comfortable at a prompt. I run this every four hours with launchd.

Then track the licenses somewhere you can export from:

License Store. Library for keys, license files, invoices and expiration dates, with drag-and-drop app import and export to CSV, JSON or its own .ls format. $7.99 one-time for the current major version, one user, up to five Macs. Requires macOS 26, which rules it out if you haven't moved to Tahoe. It syncs through iCloud, which is the dependency this whole post is about. Treat the sync as convenience between your own Macs and the manual export as the backup. Export to JSON or CSV on a schedule, put the file wherever your other backups live, and import it once to confirm the round trip works before you need it to.
AppVault. The everything option: app snapshots with restore, unified updates across Sparkle, Homebrew, Mac App Store and Electron, a license vault with CSV import, spending tracker, deep uninstall with 14-day quarantine. $21.99 one-time, lifetime license, 3 Macs. I'm currently testing this.

An Independent Password Manager

Keep your passwords, recovery codes, server credentials and export encryption passwords outside iCloud Keychain. Then protect the new vault's recovery material somewhere else again, or you've just relocated your single point of failure.

Bitwarden. Open source, end-to-end encrypted, cross-platform. The free tier covers unlimited passwords on unlimited devices, which is all most people need. Premium is $19.80 a year and adds encrypted file storage and YubiKey support.
1Password. $3.99 a month for individuals. Autofill, Watchtower breach alerts, 14-day trial, and the most polished Apple-side experience of the group. I stopped uing this when it went electron.
KeePass. Free, open source, entirely offline, AES-256 by default, extended by community plugins. No sync and no polish; you build both yourself. The right answer if you want zero dependencies and the wrong one if you want it to just work.

Unless I've said otherwise above, the apps in this post come from research rather than daily use. The five below are the exception.

What I Actually Run

Five, and the list has been stable long enough that I've stopped shopping.

BackiGo pulls my iCloud Photos and Drive down to local storage on a schedule. It's the only one on this list that gets irreplaceable data out of Apple's custody.

Fastmail holds my mail, calendars and contacts on a domain I own, and Apple's own Mail, Calendar and Contacts talk to it over IMAP, CalDAV and CardDAV without knowing the difference. Two years in. If Apple closed my account tomorrow, my address would still work, which was the whole point.

Updatest keeps the direct-download side of my Mac current. Buying from developers instead of the App Store costs you automatic updates, and this is what I bought to pay that cost back.

License Store holds the keys and invoices for everything I didn't buy through Apple. The JSON export goes out on a schedule and lands with my other backups, per the caveat above.

Bitwarden keeps my passwords and recovery codes out of iCloud Keychain. The free tier does everything I need and I pay for Premium anyway, because a project I depend on this much should get some money from me.

Test the Restore, Not the Backup

None of this counts until you've restored from it. A backup you have never pulled a file out of is not a backup; it's a hypothesis with a progress bar. Once a quarter, pick something you'd hate to lose, a photo from ten years ago, a document with a deadline attached to it, and restore it to a machine that isn't signed in to the account you're insuring against. Open it. Confirm it's the full-resolution original and not a thumbnail, that the metadata came along, that the encryption password you set eighteen months ago still unlocks the archive. The failures I've seen were never missing backups. They were backups that ran green for two years and turned out to be empty, stale, or locked with a password nobody wrote down.

✉️ Reply by email