Menu Bar Clutter 2024

by

Recent posts by ldstephens and The Art Of Not Asking Why listing the contents of their Mac’s menu bar reminded me that it can be an insight into one’s usage and the evolution of apps. I listed mine in 2020, 2012 and 2010. So here is the 2024 update – will retirement have made any difference?

A Mac's menubar showing the icons of the apps stored there.

From left to right:

The first three are from Sound Source for shunting audio around your Mac.

Then Apple’s new Passwords app and then their Time Machine backups.

I keep trying clipboard managers such as ClipBook but none have yet replaced Clipy (far right).

With a gazillion terabytes of external storage hanging off the back of my Mac Jettison helps mange their mounting and ejections.

Likewise Cookie ejects all the crud that developers like to load into my browsers.

Apparently Focus is there but I never use it/have a need for it.

Alas I have never really got to grips with Keyboard Maestro and all it can do – will add it to the list of retirement projects.

The Bluetooth lets me check when the keyboard and trackpad are running out of juice etc.

The trackpad is greatly enhanced by BetterTouchTool and its almost daily updates with ever expanding features.

Quick switching of Sound output/volume for when you blast sound from the speakers at midnight thinking it was going to your headphones.

The Mac is kept awake/put to sleep with Amphetamine – It is on the Mac’s App Store but the developer does not seem to have an actual website.

The venerable 1Password will probably be usurped by the Passwords app one day but it is still here for now.

The Hazel app does background stuff moving downloads to the right place and collecting files associated with apps you moved to the bin etc.

Replacing TextExpander, when they introduced some silly subscription thing (since reversed I think) Typinator does an excellent job of automatically filling in oft repeated text.

Of course there is PopClip. A Mac without PopClip is barely a Mac at all. How it avoided being Sherlocked remains a mystery.

WiFi and Spotlight although I just Command+Space for the latter.

A new arrival is RunCat which runs faster or slower depending on the drain on your CPU. Mostly I just wanted to play around with adding my own animation.

To save the bread from burning (again!) Gestimer works well.

Replacing ClipMenu (see 2012 and 2020 editions) which was seemingly abandoned by the developer Clipy resumed development. I have not found anything as useful for clipboard management.

The final star icon is for Bartender which hides all the above when not required. There was a bit of a kerfuffle on the Interwebs recently with people getting upset (imagine such a thing!) but their explanation seems reasonable so it is still here.

Then there is the immovable Apple stuff which means I no longer have Fuzzy Time .

So farewell WordPress

by

Like so much of the web these days WordPress has ceased to be fun/interesting having become evermore skewed towards the money makers it offers little for the non-developer/techy individual. I gave up with their JetPack nonsense last year and have now moved the whole thing to ClassicPress which reverts the everything back to when it was fun/interesting. This provides for the opportunity to endlessly tweak this and that until, inevitably, the whole thing breaks and you have to start again.

The conversion process was well thought out, informative and easy to follow. Not all themes and plugins are supported but there are more than enough for my simple needs. As yet I have not found where to change the colour of the blog’s title but it must be in here somewhere….

Bing Bong

by

Intrigued by the variation in search results from Google and Bing/DuckDuckGo I created a very specific page about the building of the breakwater at Rhos on Sea in 1983.

Sure enough searching for some combination of those words with Google my page will be at, or near, the top. Take that UK Gov!

Screenshot of Google search results showing duncanmoran.net as first result above gov.uk site

Alas Bing does not find it at all. Even after jumping through the BingSiteAuth.xml hoops.

Copilot offered to help:

Screenshot of conversation with Bing's Copilot asking for images from Duncan Moran which Copilot fails to find.

Perhaps a more general enquiry:

Screenshot of conversation with Copilot asking if Duncan Moran has a web site which Copilot is unable to locate.

It is called Duncan Moran dot Net. It should not be that hard to find. Perhaps if I was on LinkedIn….

As Molly White recently quipped we are witnessing what many of us think about as “the web” rotting right in front of our eyes. 😞

Noise Toys – Summery

by

There was once something akin to Droplets on early iPads but I can find no trace of it now.

You add taps across the top and bars (tuned by their length) beneath. The flow of drips from the taps can be adjusted by rotating the tap.

With an array of options from setting a scale to tweaking the built in synth or sending midi out to other instruments it is both useful and fun.

For endless tweaking Stacks may satisfy. Following on from Strokes it is a sequencer/looper/granulator thingy. Currently in an early release version with several features ‘coming soon’.

More noise you say then obviously SoundDust’s Hobbes is what you are looking for.

With which you can Ooof and Doof to your heart’s content – or just click all the dmoRan options…

But for some serious randomness the Eclore player provides pieces that play in Reaktor and can be remixed to provide countless variations.

The web of nonsense

by

As the developers and techy people continue to drive everyone else from the web and into the welcoming arms of the social media silos so they can have the web all to themselves – because they are so special/precious; let us take a look at some of their quality work.

Now the Torso Electronics T-1 is an actual thing. And it is fair to say that my ever expanding, increasingly saggy, aged torso could do with some improvement but this is just silly….

One can barely imagine the excitement and sense of satisfaction that was generated by the creation of this slidey uppy button thingy…

 

ADD TO BAG it shouts. It could have said ‘Add to my bag’ but no that would be taking things too far. But who has a bag large enough to contain a sofa? Alas there is nothing to actually put into your bag as it will take two or three weeks to deliver your purchase. You are only ordering it.

Ho-hum.

Duane Eddy 1938 – 2024

by

As my several years older siblings moved on to other things I inherited the family record player and their old records. One of which was Duane Eddy‘s Peter Gunn (Apple Music, Spotify, YouTube) with Yep on the B side. It was one of those records from the late 50s/early 60s where the guitar had not yet assumed the starring role from the saxophone which wails along to keep things moving.

Almost thirty years later he re-recorded it with Art Of Noise (Apple Music, Spotify, YouTube)

London was a branch of Decca Records which licensed American recordings for release in the UK.

I thought Duane Eddy was in this but apparently not…but still worth seeing again:

Doing the Spotty Dog

by

Watching the David Byrne dance routine in today’s Open Culture post reminded me that what he describes as Puppet Leg, where an imagined puppet string is pulled to raise the leg,

was part of a ‘dance‘ (I use the word in its loosest interpretation) routine known as the Spotty Dog that we did in the 1960s resulting in much merriment.

Upon a search for a Spotty Dog clip I discovered that it is, bizarrely, an actual exercise these days. But as Miss Cox confesses she, and I suspect many others, has no idea why it is called the Spotty Dog.

Well let me enlighten you.