A weekly list of interesting things I found on the internet, posted on Sundays. Sometimes themed, often not.

1️⃣ That screamy sound you hear when peeling tape? It’s a ‘sonic whisper’ from tearing at twice the speed of sound! [🔗 sciencealert.com]

2️⃣ Craig Mod built the accounting software of his dreams, fitting his exact international needs, and which can be adapted with Claude Code as needed. Sounds amazing. [🔗 craigmod.com]

3️⃣ Chris Coyer argues that web forms should always automatically email you a copy of your submission. I agree, though I wouldn’t be opposed to it being optional, as long as the default is for the copy to be sent. [🔗 email-is-good.com]

4️⃣ Terry Godier’s essay about how all the objects in our our lives have steadily stolen more of our attention, and made us feel guilty about it is excellent As is it’s web design. You gotta read this one in its original form. [🔗 terrygodier.com]

5️⃣ Stephen Hackett (via James Thomson) shared some incredible 5K wallpapers featuring Lil Finder Guy. I love how the Lil Guy’s taken the Mac community by storm. [🔗 512pixels.net]

6️⃣ I thought tweet from Caleb Sexton was a joke about Kagi having ‘LinkedIn Speak’ as a language that you could translate into. It’s not a joke. It’s real. [🦣 mastodon.social]

7️⃣ D. Griffin Jones did the thing and put an episode of the Connected podcast onto a floppy disk. Incredible commitment to the bit! [🦣 tech.lgbt]

Thanks for reading 7 Things. If you enjoyed these links or have something neat to share, please let me know. And remember that you can get more links to internet nuggets that I’m finding every day by following me @jarrod on the social web.

HeyDingus is a blog by Jarrod Blundy about technology, the great outdoors, and other musings. If you like what you see — the blog posts, shortcuts, wallpapers, scripts, or anything — please consider leaving a tip, checking out my store, or just sharing my work. Your support is much appreciated!

I’m always happy to hear from you on social, or by good ol' email.

Just finished up a project that I’ve been meaning to get to for a year: bringing ADK Climb Club to the open web.

We’ve had a landing page on Micro.blog for a while, but all the info about our meetups was going out via Instagram and WhatsApp. But not everyone wants to use those apps, and I heard from them! So, I buckled down and imported all the old posts, and hooked up my auto-crossposter.

Now, everything that we post to Instagram shows up on our website as a native, web-friendly blog posts. And I enabled email subscriptions (free, thanks to Micro.blog!), so folks can get an email each time that we share information about a meetup.

Although Instagram is still our “primary” platform — that’s where our biggest audience is and where we pick up new members — I feel much better about the club being more accessible on the open web, and that people can stay in the loop with posts pushed out to them without having to sign up for a Meta app.

If you’re a climber (or are climbing curious) and near Lake Placid, NY on a Wednesday night, you should come check us out!

HeyDingus is a blog by Jarrod Blundy about technology, the great outdoors, and other musings. If you like what you see — the blog posts, shortcuts, wallpapers, scripts, or anything — please consider leaving a tip, checking out my store, or just sharing my work. Your support is much appreciated!

I’m always happy to hear from you on social, or by good ol' email.

The Mac Pro is no longer a product in Apple’s lineup.

For a computer that has caused so much consternation over the years, its story can be told very succinctly. Stephen Hackett captured it all in six sentences:

The Mac Pro was introduced way back in 2006 as a replacement for the outgoing Power Mac G5. It had a good few years, then languished until the 2013 model was announced.

That machine was a dud, and it languished until the 2019 model was announced.

It came out in December 2019, which was less than a year before Apple silicon was announced and the M1 shipped.

The Mac Pro got one last update in June 2023, when Apple dropped the Intel version for one with an M2 Ultra inside. It’s been languishing again ever since.

(Or, for the long version, read this retrospective by Joe Rossignol on MacRumors.)

Definitely sad to see the Mac Pro, and its amazingly-still-modern-looking-even-seven-years-later chassis head to the farm upstate. I’d held out hope for a new screamer of a machine with an ‘Extreme’ M-series chip, but alas.

It seems that Apple was waiting for permission from John Siracusa, the world’s preeminent Mac Pro believer, to kill the product. Here he is in the latest episode of the Accidental Tech Podcast, recorded just last night:

Some Very Good Tweets™

@marcoarment @siracusa if you sell it, I will buy it and wear it to WWDC

@marcoarment @siracusa The Mac Pro dies twice: first, when Apple discontinues it, second, when its name is spoken by John for the last time.

Exciting that both “Believe” shirts were resolved this month.

✅ Upgrade AirPods Max Believe
☠️ ATP Mac Pro Believe

There’s something poetic about the Mac Pro being discontinued as the MacBook Neo takes off like a rocket.

HeyDingus is a blog by Jarrod Blundy about technology, the great outdoors, and other musings. If you like what you see — the blog posts, shortcuts, wallpapers, scripts, or anything — please consider leaving a tip, checking out my store, or just sharing my work. Your support is much appreciated!

I’m always happy to hear from you on social, or by good ol' email.

Apple published this video to their Support channel on YouTube yesterday, and it motivated me to get this off my chest:

Uninstalling apps on macOS is not as easy as it should be.

Yes, I know, I know that you can just drag an app to the trash and technically it’s gone. That’s what Apple recommends doing in its video. But then why do are apps like Raycast, CleanMyMac, and AppCleaner able to find leftover files scattered around your system by the deleted app? Maybe it’s just the completionist in me, but I don’t want those files left behind!

One thing — the only thing? — I liked about Launchpad was that it made it super obvious how to uninstall (Mac App Store) apps.¹ Just like on your iPad/iPhone, you could click and hold on the app’s icon to send it into “jiggle mode” and then click the ‘X’ would remove it. I could be confident that all the app’s associated bits and bobs would be removed from my system.

But that changed with Tahoe. While Spotlight got a huge boost in capability as a whole with clipboard history and actions, it also subsumed Launchpad’s role as the main, well, launcher for apps. But there are no affordances in Spotlight for removing apps like Launchpad had.

AppCleaner was my go-to tool back in the day, but now I use Raycast to get the job done with confidence. Raycast’s implementation could offer some inspiration for Apple. After searching for an app within Raycast, a simple ⌘K shortcut reveals a host of actions that can be taken on the app. You can open an app, reveal it in the Finder, quit it, and, yes, uninstall it — among other things.

Apple could follow this model and provide an ‘Uninstall App’ action to take within Spotlight.

Spotlight’s interface, seeing as it replaced Launchpad, should offer the same capability for removing apps. And it should be as thorough as on an iPhone or iPad.

P.S. I also occasionally use Raycast to quit apps that stubbornly have no icon in the Dock or menu bar and therefore make it tricky quit completely.

HeyDingus is a blog by Jarrod Blundy about technology, the great outdoors, and other musings. If you like what you see — the blog posts, shortcuts, wallpapers, scripts, or anything — please consider leaving a tip, checking out my store, or just sharing my work. Your support is much appreciated!

I’m always happy to hear from you on social, or by good ol' email.

A weekly list of interesting things I found on the internet, posted on Sundays. Sometimes themed, often not.

1️⃣ iWeb lives! Sort of. If you have an old Mac. But Corbin Davenport made an iWeb website just a few months ago and, honestly, it looks pretty awesome. [🔗 iweb.corbin.io]

2️⃣ Manton Reece shared a letter that his mother wrote to her mother many years ago while she (and Manton) lived in Greece. A lovely snapshot in time. [🔗 manton.org]

3️⃣ Alpinesavvy shared a story about drinking water that has me thinking about the counterproductive choices I make. [🔗 alpinesavvy.com]

4️⃣ The first use of “Wendy” as a first name was in Peter Pan. We still don’t know what it was short for! [🔗 wikipedia.org]

5️⃣ Rands did the work and made incredible data tables with all the good charging/charger brick information for modern Apple devices. [🔗 randsinrepose.com]

6️⃣ Todd Vaziri shows why having only two dots instead of three to represent outs in a baseball score graphic is just wrong. Looking at you, Netflix. [🦣 mastodon.social]

7️⃣ The Midleton Mule was a featured drink at our St. Patrick’s Day meal and I can’t stop thinking about it. It was so fresh and delightful. Gonna have to make it at home! [🔗 gelsons.com]

Thanks for reading 7 Things. If you enjoyed these links or have something neat to share, please let me know. And remember that you can get more links to internet nuggets that I’m finding every day by following me @jarrod on the social web.

HeyDingus is a blog by Jarrod Blundy about technology, the great outdoors, and other musings. If you like what you see — the blog posts, shortcuts, wallpapers, scripts, or anything — please consider leaving a tip, checking out my store, or just sharing my work. Your support is much appreciated!

I’m always happy to hear from you on social, or by good ol' email.

Sooo… I did a thing. I couldn’t help but be slightly dissatisfied by the clarity of my Studio Display XDR’s nano-texture display. It just made everything look a little less than Retina-quality. And for this price, I don’t want to have lingering regrets each time I use it.

So, I ordered a second non-nano-texture version, banking on Apple’s generous return policy.

It came in today. I set it up about 30 minutes ago. I put the two displays side by side and… it’s no question. The nano-texture is going back.

Showing the same content on each display, at the same brightness level, I can absolutely see the fuzziness introduced by the “matte” display.

It’s not that nano-texture is all bad. I love how it looks when the display is dark — there are zero reflections.¹ But the point is to enjoy it while the display is on. Without nano-texture, everything is as crisp as I had hoped. I tend to lean toward the display when I’m concentrating, and even close up, the display is razor sharp.

I technically have until April 9th to send back the nano-texture XDR, but, honestly, I think I’m going to package it up tonight.

Well… maybe tomorrow. I might as well enjoy having 10k pixels of display at my disposal while I can.

A note on Apple’s return period

If I hold onto the original display until the last day that I can send it back, I will have had it for 24 days. That’s a full 10 extra days beyond the stated 14-day return period. It’s possible that I could have squeezed in even a few more days by initiating the return today, the 14th day after it was delivered, instead of the 11th.

With that in mind, one could get nearly a month of use for testing and comparison of Apple’s products, with the ability to return it (free shipping both ways) for a full refund. That’s serious commitment to customer satisfaction, and one area where Apple’s standards haven’t slipped.

To boot, by paying with Apple Card’s Monthly Installments (which allow you to pay for an item over 12 months with 0% interest), I’ve only been charged $287.92 for the nano-texture display, and $263.92 for the regular one. I think that was just the taxes for each one.

To be sure, it’s a privileged position I’m in to be able to do these shenanigans, but there’s a lot to be said for how easy Apple has made it to purchase even it’s most expensive products with very little risk.

HeyDingus is a blog by Jarrod Blundy about technology, the great outdoors, and other musings. If you like what you see — the blog posts, shortcuts, wallpapers, scripts, or anything — please consider leaving a tip, checking out my store, or just sharing my work. Your support is much appreciated!

I’m always happy to hear from you on social, or by good ol' email.

A lot has been said about Apple’s 50th anniversary. Stories shared. Favorites ranked. Contributions celebrated. But it turns out that I also have feelings to share. 

As I reflect on why we even care that a computer company has been around for five decades, I keep coming back to the fabled challenge that Steve Jobs gave to John Sculley as he tried to woo him into becoming Apple’s CEO:

Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?

Somehow — I sure couldn’t have — Sculley turned him down, at least at first. But eventually he, and thousands of other people — developers, engineers, marketers, retail staff, artists — answered that call to put a dent in the universe.

Through their contributions as employees, app developers, evangelists, and executives, they’ve made some wonderful things. Products that have changed the world. That help us connect and build, that democratize access to information and to privacy, that entertain and watch out for us.

Apple’s not a perfect company. I’ve been less enthused by some of its actions and inactions in its latest years. I hope they do better. But as a whole, I still find myself inspired by the products they make.

No, actually, that’s not quite right. I’m not inspired by the products. I’m inspired by the attention to detail, the exquisite taste, the enormous effort, and the giving a damn by the people who make them.

Sure, they just make computers. Hardware, software, and services melded together into computers of different shapes and sizes. But what attracts me to Apple’s computers is that they — unlike the computers from nearly every other company in the market — carry with them the spirit, or DNA as Jobs would say, of the people that built them.

From the iPod nano, to the iMac and macOS, to the iPhone, the iPad, the Apple Watch and AirPods, and, yes, the Vision Pro. There’s something about each of these products that ignited curiosity in me. What could I do with them? I sit here, typing these words on a MacBook in my car while traveling across a lake on a ferry, connected to the internet through Wi-Fi (which Apple helped birth) tethered to my iPad. I’ll publish it to the World Wide Web (invented on Jobs’ NeXTSTEP, which would serve as the foundation for Mac OS X) on a website themed and named to pay tribute to Apple.

I spent my youth expanding my taste with an iPod and iTunes. I took notes and studied in college with an iPad. I launched my business and keep it running with a Mac. I track my runs and pay for almost everything using my Apple Watch. My favorite TV shows are the ones that Apple produces. If Apple made shitty things, I would look elsewhere. But, so far, they keep making wonderful things.

It’s been fun to look back at how far Apple has come — from two guys selling 50 computers to their local Byte Shop, to one of the largest and most successful companies with billions of devices in use by people across the globe. But now I’m most excited to see what they’ll do in the next 50 years. 

I’ll update this post with quotes from other articles and retrospectives that make me smile as I come across them. Hope you enjoy them too.

Apple doesn’t settle for fine, functional, or good enough in its hardware (and thanks for your incredible work on that). We love making and using products that aren’t just great, but greater than they need to be, always raising the bar of greatness for its own sake. Software, services, revenue sources, and world impact need to be held to that same standard.

HeyDingus is a blog by Jarrod Blundy about technology, the great outdoors, and other musings. If you like what you see — the blog posts, shortcuts, wallpapers, scripts, or anything — please consider leaving a tip, checking out my store, or just sharing my work. Your support is much appreciated!

I’m always happy to hear from you on social, or by good ol' email.