Free Mac apps

From Macworld : thirty free Mac apps. They’re presented as a slideshow (click, click, click), but okay, they’re free. My favorites: Alfred, Simplenote, VLC.

Low Power Mode

Marco Arment makes the case for a Low Power Mode for MacBooks. Until that comes along, he recommends Turbo Boost Switcher, an app he first recommended in 2015.

I’ve been using Turbo Boost Switcher ever since reading Marco’s first recommendation. The app keeps the fans from roaring and keeps the computer from heating up. Highly recommended.

Criminals

Watching Rachel Maddow’s interview with Lev Parnas tonight makes undeniably clear, in just sixty minutes, that Donald Trump* and company have turned the executive branch of government into a criminal organization, dedicated not to the public good but to private gain, with anyone in the way considered an enemy, to be neutralized by whatever means avail. The sinks–toilets–showers shtick and other shticks are just the cheap shiny objects that keep the marks from wondering what’s happening behind the curtain.

There’s more coming tomorrow night.

“Us”

Donald Trump*, in advance of signing his “deal” with China, acknowledging audience members Sheldon and Miriam Adelson: “They’re tremendous supporters of us and the Republican Party.” Us = me, not the country. It’s the presidential plural again. “I would like you to do us a favor though.”

A related post
“We”

[CNN and MSNBC have now cut to the House. Fox and OAN are sticking with Trump*.]

“Clock watchers”

[Nancy, April 11, 1950. Click for a larger view.]

Note to the school: If you don’t want kids to watch the clock, don’t put the clock on the side wall. Talk about poor design. And it’s still only 2:00.

Merriam-Webster has it as clock-watcher : “a person (such as a worker or student) who keeps close watch on the passage of time.” My third-grade teacher called me a clock-watcher, and I cop to the charge. If you had been a person (such as a worker or student) in her classroom, you’d have been watching the clock too.

By fourth grade I was wearing a watch (over a shirt cuff) and had no need to watch a clock. And anyway, I was paying attention to the wonderful person at the front of the room, Miss D’Elia.

Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)

[Nancy past is Nancy present. All time is eternally Nancy.]

Various Sardines

MY Sardines, if it’s even real, is a cryptocurrency backed by sardines. Here is the MY Sardines homepage. Go fish.

I’ll stay here, with some other sardines, the Hot Sardines, performing a song made popular by Louis Prima and Phil Harris. Hot stuff. Thanks, Martha.

Donkey Hodie rides again

Coming to PBS, a new show inspired by Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood: Donkey Hodie, with Purple Panda, Duck Duck, Bob Dog, and Donkey Hodie, the granddaughter of the original Donkey Hodie, now known as Grampy Hodie. The show will arrive in the winter of 2021.

If only PBS would bring back the Neighborhood itself, Monday through Friday, an episode a day.

Thanks, Ben.

[Duck Duck? A descendant of Audrey Duck?]

Rails to Sales

A Cooper Hewitt Object of the Day: Rails to Sales, a poster promoting subway advertising posters, by Otis Shepard and Dorothy Van Gorder. Don’t miss the links to other samples of their work: Santa Catalina, Chesterfield, Cubs, gum.

Keyboard Cleaner

Jan Lehnardt’s Keyboard Cleaner is a tiny free app for macOS that does one thing only: it locks the keyboard for easy cleaning. Open the app to lock; quit (⌘-Q) to get going again. I’m intent on keeping my MacBook Air’s keyboard from developing a greasy shine, so I wipe the keys on occasion with a spritz of distilled water on a microfiber cloth. (Don’t laugh.) Keyboard Cleaner makes this slightly obsessive task easier to manage.

The strangest synchronicity I’ve ever encountered online: yesterday I posted a photograph of a decades-old box of typewriter correction film. The random letters typed on the film visible in the photograph: ploks. I thought that would make a nicely cryptic blog description line. I typed it in. When I went to the page for Keyboard Cleaner this morning, I was startled by the URL. Look closely:

jan.prima.de/~jan/plok/archives/48-Keyboard-Cleaner.html

Jan’s explanation, on the same page: “plok — It reads like a blog, but it sounds harder!”

NYPL top ten

The New York Public Library’s top ten checkouts of all time — in other words, since 1895, when the library opened. King of the hill, top of the heap: Ezra Jack Keats’s The Snowy Day (1962). Oh how I’d like a Snowy Day library card.