Adam Kirsch: If we want to keep reading from going extinct, then the best thing we could do is tell young people what so many great writers readily admit: Literature doesn’t make you a better citizen or a more successful person. A passion for reading can even make life more difficult. And you don’t cultivate a passion for the sake of democracy.

I’ve tried a number of different ways to harness automation to logging expense. Drafts has, for a long time, been the place I went for this kind of thing: I’ve used Drafts to log my rowing sessions, blood pressure, and activities while I was taking classes and completing internships. Drafts excels at this kind of thing. Dan Moren at Six Colors…

One of the central improvements that computers bring to us is the ability to automate repetitive tasks. As a school psychologist, I did a lot of cobbling together applescripts and templates using merge features to automate some of my writing of reports, and to reduce the likelihood of mistakes. TextExpander similarly helped me with the massive writing burden of the job as well.

We were fixing to take Aaron back up to New Brunswick today, but the snow in the forecast is forcing us to wait until tomorrow. I am thankful for the all-wheel drive on the WRX. Our original plan was to roll up to New Brunswick yesterday and spend the night; I found a Marriott in Somerset and a nice little French bistro, …

GAS is a thing! I know this not because I read it on the internet, but because, shortly before Christmas, I ordered myself another used lens on eBay for my mirrorless cameras: the Lumix G 14mm f/2.5. A rationalization: I don’t generally get gifts for Christmas (the exception being that my parents are incredibly generous to all of us each year, and Aaron gave me a t-shirt this year, which was a pleasant surprise), so I figured this would be my gift.

A week back into the routine after a long holiday break! We’re having spritzes and cheese now; I have a pork tenderloin in the sous vide tank for tomorrow (I’ll grill it off before serving after a quick dunk in the tank again tomorrow; it will come out in about two hours and overnight in the fridge), and there are chicken thighs in the oven.

Ken Case, at the OmniGroup blog, announcing version six of the company’s venerable outliner: One of the interesting problems we’ve been pondering is how best to link to documents in native apps. We’ve spent some time refining our solution to that problem, Omni Links, which are now shipping first in OmniOutliner 6. With Omni Links, we can link to content across all our devices, and we can share those links with other people and other apps.

There’s nothing like the last Sunday at the end of a vacation to inspire the Sunday Scaries! Here’s a list of things to check out to ease your re-entry into the world of work, if that awaits you. I kept up my exercise routine but I do need the routine to keep me on track! Today’s Joey’s 21st birthday too!

Rhonda had a great idea the other night… let’s abscond for a night! We’ve been scheduling things around the family for a couple of weeks, which is always a treat, but we hand’t really gotten a chance to do something together besides the quotidian running of errands, etc. I’ve been wanting to set up and overnight trip to nearby Atlantic City for a while, because it’s a great restaurant town, your opinions about gambling notwithstanding.

We did a rib roast again last night; Shop Rite always has a sale on them prior to the holidays, and it's been Rhonda's habit to grab one in the rush up to the holidays, and then freeze it until New Year's Day. I chuck them in the sous vide tank all day and finish on the grill. We're always impressed by how good they are for the price.

It’s officially 2026, but besides making some eggs and ham, there’s not much to say about the new year yet. We took the boys up to the House of Fun in Barrington yesterday so they could blow some Christmas loot and we could try some pints from round-the-way Tonewood. We did exactly the same thing one year ago! I had the Blackbird Schwarzbier, which is a low-alcohol, darkly roasted lager.

RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, remains the backbone of digital newshounds across the web. Podcasts, too, depend upon RSS for distribution. Google used to maintain one of the most popular and best RSS readers, Google Reader, but scuttled it in 2013. Via Nicolas Magand, here’s Cory Doctorow on RSS: Your RSS reader doesn't (necessarily) have an algorithm. By default, you'll get everything as it appears, in reverse-chronological order.

It’s been a quiet few days since Christmas here in our bucolic corner of South Jersey. Friday was just lazing about, and yesterday was a quick trip to Bellview for some wine and cheese before sushi with Aaron (Joe was working). My morning have been punctuated by reading a bit and then farting around with my Mac before exercising. We’re going to cook our “free” ham from Shop Rite today, since we didn’t need the turkey when we qualified for that.

I leaned on this macmost video to set up this shortcut: I spend a lot of time resizing and renaming pics for posts here on Uncorrected, and it's exactly the kind of grunt work computers are good at automating. I get a kick out of using Private Cloud Compute for this. I generally try to name the files as descriptively as I can, and append the ISO date.

It’s the day after Christmas, so that means The Week Between has commenced. December 26th for us is usually just hanging around the house, eating leftovers, and watching TV. We hosted dinner last night and I was annoyed with myself for forgetting to take a pic of the rib roast after it came off the grill. But I just check my E-PL5 and that was not, in fact, the case: I did take a pic!

Looking back at the applications I rely on for work and personal things, here’s at list of the Mac, iPad, and iPhone applications I see myself using going into 2026. I’ve been cobbling these lists together for years! Stalwarts and new apps abound. Ulysses I tried Ulysses again after a couple of trials that never resulted in me subscribing. I realized that it’s close to perfect for my needs for writing here on Uncorrected.

I was setting up some Private Cloud Compute shortcuts and asked about a non-corny Christmas movie. Here's what I got: If you're looking for a Christmas movie that's not overly corny, you might enjoy "Die Hard." While it's often debated whether it's a Christmas movie, it's set during a Christmas party and features many holiday elements. The film combines action, suspense, and humor, making it a unique take on the holiday genre. Not that I needed to be sold on the idea.

I rolled up to New Brunswick to pick up Aaron Thursday afternoon, and we made it back home in very good time. His little Mini Cooper is a blast to drive, and feels solid on the turnpike at speed. How come no-one understands how to drive on multi-lane highways? I spend the whole ride up bobbing and weaving. Winterfest 2025…

Rhonda mentioned that she wanted to have grilled steak, a cut that hadn’t spent the afternoon in the sous vide tank, since it had been a while. (It was a veiled complaint for sure.) We happened to have a frozen ribeye on hand, as well as some chicken, and were trying to use up some frozen foods, so onto the meal plan it went.

I took some pics with the Olympus M.Zuiko Digital ED 7-14mm f/2.8 PRO, and I have a lot to learn. It was pretty damn cold out yesterday afternoon!

There’s a slow, steady fall of snow outside today: it’s a dense, heavy snow. Rhonda and I enjoyed dinner at Greenview Inn Friday night; I had the duck. Yesterday, we check out Bellview’s December cheese plate, which was “Santa and Friends.” We supplemented with some salami from Bagliani’s and some sardines for me. TineeOwl iPad mini My general rule of thumb is that an apple-branded case or folio is probably the best for my usage; I’ve largely stuck to Apple iPhone cases (most recently, a Beats case) and Apple’s Magic Keyboards and Folios for iPads.

Adam Engst: Liquid Glass can look elegant, particularly on the iPhone, but iOS wasn’t unattractive before. More importantly, I haven’t yet felt that Liquid Glass’s vaunted transparency does anything to make me more productive. Despite Dye’s departure (which appears to have been a surprise to upper management), Apple is unlikely to reverse course on Liquid Glass. We can hope that Dye’s successor focuses more on enhancing functionality to better align with the Steve Jobs quote that Apple badly misused when introducing Liquid Glass: “Design is not just what it looks like and feels like.