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👍 My Default Apps 2024

I saw that people are posting the apps they have installed on their Mac and thought I’d put my collection out there too. After throwing together my list, I realized that this exercise is based on a podcast episode where people were competing to see who used the most default apps. That’s cute, but I just want to share what I’m using and see what others are using. This is why my list is different than everyone else’s. I also realize some of these aren’t Mac applications, but I use them just like I do an app and figure they are worth mentioning.

🏃 Activity Tracking:Strava, WorkOutDoors, Apple Workout, Footpath
🤖 A.I.:OpenAI, Perplexity, Raycast
😷 Air Quality:PurpleAir/Paku, IQ Air, Netatmo
📱 App Store:Setapp, Apple App Store
🎤 Audio:Adobe Audition
🖥️ Backups:Rewind
🔋 Battery Management:AlDente
🔖 Bookmarks:Pinboard
🧭 Browser:Google Chrome
🔢 Calculator:Calcbot
📆 Calendar:Fantastical
📷 Camera:Apple Camera app, Sony Alpha 6400
💬 Chat:iMessage, Slack
📋 Clipboard Manager:Paste
☁️ Cloud file storage:Mega, Google Drive, iCloud Drive
🤓 Code:BBEdit
📇 Contacts:Apple Contacts
📦 Delivery Tracking:Deliveries
🖌️ Design:Adobe Photoshop
📖 Dictionary:LookUp
🏠 Home Networking:UniFi, WiFiman
🚀 Launcher:Raycast
📍 Location Tracking:Swarm, Checkie, Arc
✉️ Mail Client:Spark Mail
📬 Mail Server:Custom domain, Fastmail
🦣 Mastodon:Ivory
🎶 Music:Spotify
🗞️ News:Google searches
📝 Notes:Notion, Drafts, Scrap Paper
🔐 Password Management:1Password
💰 Personal Finance:StockCharts, One Finance, Charles Schwab
🌅 Photo Management:Apple Photos iOS app
🔬 Photo Processing:Adobe Lightroom
🎙️ Podcasts:Pocket Casts
📽️ Presentations:Google Slides
👓 Read Later:Omnivore
📵 Robocall Blocker:Robokiller
📰 RSS:IFTTT (RSS to email), Reeder
🖼️ Screen Capture:CleanShotScreen Studio
🔎 Search:Google
📊 Spreadsheets:Google Sheets
⏳ Timer:Gestimer
✅ To-Do:OmniFocus
🗣️ Translation:DeepL
🗺️ Travel Directions:Waze, Google Maps, Scenic
🧳 Travel Planning:Furkot
🚚 Upload:Transmit
🎥 Video Editing:Adobe Premiere
🔒 VPN:Cloudflare Warp
📺 Watch Later:YouTube, Notion
🌦️ Weather:Carrot Weather, Windy, Weather Underground, Apple Weather, Netatmo, IQ Air, Sunset Wx
🕸️ Website Builder:Adobe Dreamweaver
⌨️ Word Processing:Drafts, Google Docs

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👍 Bamboo for your bum

Maybe a year or two before the pandemic struck, I found an advertisement somewhere promoting a toilet paper made from bamboo instead of wood fiber. The argument was that bamboo grows incredibly fast, producing much more material to be used for paper products than trees which take decades to grow big. I’ve seen the effects of the timber industry, so I thought I’d give the product a try. Plus, the idea of toilet paper automatically showing up at my front door every two months sounded appealing.

The toilet paper I received was not great. It was uncomfortable and so thin I could see through it. However, the fact I no longer needed to go to the store to buy toilet paper had me keep my subscription and I am glad I did. Soon the pandemic hit and toilet paper was no where to be found in stores. Even better, the paper did not take long to greatly improve in quality. I never complained, but the company must have acted on feedback they received. Now its quality is on the same level as wood-based toilet paper. My subscription has continued ever since.

The company offering the bamboo toilet paper is called Reel. Since launching as a small start up, they’ve expanded their product line to offer paper towels and tissues. When they released their paper towels I bought a box, which just like the first rolls of toilet paper were just okay. Not hugely impressive. However, I am sure Reel has used the feedback they’ve received to make some improvements so I’ll have to try them again in the future.

When purchasing tissues at the grocery store recently, I found another company producing bamboo paper products: Caboo. After using a couple boxes of their tissues I am an enthusiastic customer. These are better than wood-based tissues in every way. They are softer, just as absorbent, no less structurally strong, and best of all: they don’t emit a cloud of paper dust from the box each time you yank a new tissue out! That last quality alone is more than enough reason to never buy another box of non-bamboo-based tissues. I’ve put in an order for their wet wipes and paper towels, so I will soon be able to report back regarding the quality of those as well.

While I am under no illusion that my use of bamboo toilet paper helps the world in a significant way, I find these products interesting, innovative, and very convenient. I am curious to see what other products replace their source material with a more sustainable material over the coming years as well as how many other products are able to convince people to open a subscription.

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👍 Grunge Off

If you smoke cannabis, your life can be split into two parts: The time before you learned about Grunge Off and the time after you learned about Grunge Off.

Grunge Off is a liquid cleaning solution which you soak your bongs, pipes, and other smoking hardware in. Doesn’t matter if you’ve been smoking flower or dabbing. It will clean anything. After some hours of soaking, you remove the piece, rinse it off, and that’s it. The piece comes out looking just like new. No scrubbing or hassle required.

Grunge Off has a strong orange-scented cleaning solution smell to it, but it’s not composed of harmful, nasty chemicals. You can get it on your skin without any worry at all.

Being easy, safe, and super effective, Grunge Off is basically a miracle liquid. I think back to all the silly things I used to do to try to clean my pieces and shake my head with shame. This cleaning liquid would have saved me so much time and trouble.

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📹👍 Winnebago Man

Cannot recommend this documentary more highly. Without question this is one of the most memorable documentary films ever made. You cannot call your life complete until you’ve watched Winnebago Man.

It seems the production company that made this film has decided to honor Jack Rebney’s death by releasing the film for free.

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💡👍 How I View the Stock Market – May 6th 2023

I do not have a strong sense of what I’m doing when it comes to investing in stocks, but I’ve dabbled in the subject, find it interesting, and loosely follow what’s happening to the market. I focus on the S&P 500 while occasionally looking at a specific stock. While I would never advise someone to follow my perspective on the market, I figured I would document my thoughts right now so that I can look back on them in 6-12 months to see how correct my thinking was.

Back in November/December I mentioned to a colleague at work that I thought the market had bottomed. This perspective was based on the information-sphere (internet, media, news, etc.) being over-saturated with negative market outlooks. When I begin to see certain types of doom-titled articles about the market, in the past I’ve found that those moments mark the bottom of the downtrend. There’s no one left to sell and that’s when the buyers resume control of the market. So far my prediction from last year has turned out to be correct.

The S&P has been in an intermediate uptrend since October last year. Indicators have generally been positive and just this week price bounced off the 50 day moving average. People in general still seem quite pessimistic about financial conditions though. I don’t have high hopes of this uptrend extending significantly further in the near future. It will likely take more time for financial attitudes to lighten enough for the market to grow.

While looking at the weekly chart above is interesting, things get even more interesting when looking at the weekly chart for the S&P:

The rosiness of the daily bar chart disappears to some degree when looking at the weekly chart. Price action has been struggling to break above a cloud since the beginning of the year and there’s clearly strong resistance at 4200. However, price action keeps testing that resistance. If it keeps doing what it’s doing now, eventually the price will breakout higher with the next significant resistance being at 4600 and 4200 becoming support. I am optimistic that we will see that happen by late summer, barring any major catastrophic world events.

So that’s the basic summary of what I see when I look at the stock market right now. Just to provide some background, I thought I’d elaborate a bit about the tools I used to stay informed and follow the market:

I do not follow any specific sources of news to inform my investing perspective. I absorb what makes its way to me through Reddit, YouTube, and a couple news email newsletters. For the most part, my investing follows the technical analysis approach which dictates that all of the information I need to know about a stock is represented in it’s price action. It is impossible for me as an amateur, hobbyist, individual investor to know more than what the market already knows. The only way for me to make money is to ride the trends and waves of the market. Given these circumstances, I believe in following the price action of the market and that’s why following price action is the only research I do.

I use a great service called StockCharts.com. It’s a super powerful set of tools that can do much more than I need to do. The service provides excellent charting features and even a mobile app to view my charts on-the-go. I have not found a better way to view detailed, customized bar charts. I don’t think I would want anything to do with investing if StockCharts.com did not exist. I definitely recommend giving it a try.

💡👍 How I View the Stock Market – May 6th 2023 Read More »

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