After trying it out for a month, I pulled the trigger and bought MailMate this morning over a cup of coffee. Gabe Weatherhead has a very good features overview (now a bit dated but still relevant) of this powerful mail client.

Good software is worth paying for. Even though mail on OS X isn’t my hub of productivity that it once was (being that my day job is on Windows and all), I’m convinced that a mail client as good as MailMate is worth the cost. If you try it out, don’t miss the custom keybindings and hidden preferences. You can do a lot with this sucker.

An annotated list of some of the things I used, liked, appreciated, or got particularly good value out of in 2014:

Not Computering (intentionally put at the top)

In February last year I started on some physical therapy for my shoulder, long insulted by climbing accidents and then one particularly embarrassing skiing accident, then ossified by general mis-use. When I started, I couldn’t get that arm much above my head, and when I “finished” the official course, I was comfortable, not tentative, and confident that I wasn’t about to re-injure it. I can’t overstate how much this positively affected me, day-to-day. Picking up my boy, reaching around in the car, getting something off the shelf. I should have done this years ago.

Personal training is probably the other best thing I did for myself this year (critically enabled by having done the PT; I had to learn to fish before I could, something whatever). Seriously, Internets. It feels so good to be active and strong(er).

Good coffee and food and favorite places to share with my family and friends.

Computering

Pinboard and Pushpin: I used Instapaper less in 2014, replaced in part by Pinboard. Just about everything I wanted to read or wanted to save for later, ends up in Pinboard, and the great Pushpin app enabled a lot of this — saving via its iOS 8 extension, reading and finding new things in the popular list.

Minimal Reader: I ditched RSS for a while, but picked up an annual subscription to Minimal Reader last January, and have just renewed for another year. I see (via Twitter and Minimal Reader) that Glenn Fleishman has moved away from RSS, and I agree with basically everything he writes … but have nonetheless landed on continuing to use news feeds in addition to the rapid-fire flow and conversation of Twitter. I have a relatively small set of (active) feeds in Minimal Reader, which I put there because they reliably offer something that I don’t want to miss. If I happen to have read something via a twitter conversation before I come across it in Minimal Reader, then I just float past it; and I regularly clip longer items from MR into Pinboard or Instapaper in order to keep the RSS queue as more of an inbox than an actual place to read them.

Synology: I wrote about my Diskstation a handful of months ago. It continues to sit in my media center cabinet, quietly acting as my Time Machine destination and network storage for photos and videos. I’m very pleased with this, but there is one caveat: iTunes turns out to not like an always-on disk location for its media, so I have had some trouble maintaining that part of the solution, and for now have basically reverted to keeping iTunes media locally.

Backblaze: Having now used it for years, Backblaze is one of those things I just don’t really think about. I’ve used it to restore a pre-corruption iTunes library and to recover a bunch of ssh private keys, and I am secure knowing that it’s there putting up all my stuff just in case. The second caveat regarding the NAS comes in here, however: Backblaze doesn’t yet support it. I really want to fill this gap and hope they find a way to handle it soon.

I’m hot and cold on Rdio, but continue to use it just about enough to keep paying for it. When friends or twitter contacts recommend something, it’s so easy to go check it out, and it provides streaming access to most of my library that I ever want to listen to. It’s great. I’m not a big fan of the UI anymore, as it has gone somewhat over the line from minimalist to obtuse, but it’s navigable enough that I can put up with it for the good selection. (I’m thinking I will give iTunes Match a try this year, though, as I continue to want to buy the music I really like, so I won’t lose it as it comes and goes on streaming services. I have a long malformed musing post somewhere about wanting to make the things I listen to and read somehow tangible for discovery by my son, when he’s ready to explore them, and having them all-digital doesn’t yet seem accessible for that.)

(Most of my friends use Spotify, and I use re/spin to import their playlists into Rdio. It’s awesome. Try it!)

1Password: Well geeze. Best software purchase ever? I’ve now bought this multiple times through multiple updates and devices and I never think twice about each paid update. I just make a small invocation and light incense once a week that I will never forget my master password, because I literally know almost none of my passwords anymore. The iOS 8 extension pushes 1Password close to the heart of every activity on my phone and tablet just as it had previously done on the Mac. It’s just indispensable, and if you’re not using it then you are likely doing it wrong.

MailMate: Apple’s Mail app started to misbehave on me this year — possibly some interaction with my mail server and/or ISP, but it was enough for me to start looking at other mail applications. MailMate is fantastically powerful, making my only reservation about it is that I’m not enough of a power user for it. But if you value a quality application, this is just an excellent thing. Custom keybindings, filters and smart mailboxes for the win.

Tilde Club: What a serendipitous thing to happen into, and what a great thing for Paul Ford to start rolling.

cTiVo: Hey, you can download from your TiVo to your Mac, and it’s easy! With my new Mac it’s even pretty fast to transcode them to AppleTV format. I’m routinely downloading shows to either save and make room on the TiVo’s drive, or to put on the iPad for a trip. cTiVo will “subscribe” to shows, too, so you can automatically download and transcode episodes as they come in. Detects commercials, too!

PhotoStream2Folder: I wrote about this recently and it’s still doing exactly what I want: Frictionlessly pull pictures from my iPhone’s photostream and drop them in a folder that’s monitored by Lightroom on my MacBook Pro. It doesn’t solve video, and I’m accumulating some video that I need to download and deal with through the old way, but it’s hugely valuable nonetheless.

Recently I was having a beer with a friend from work and he asked, “So, what’s your thing? What are you really into?” It was a provocative question because he and I have worked together for several years and have a pretty good relationship, so the idea that he wouldn’t know much about what makes me tick sort of took me by surprise. It really made me pause.

He’s a board game guy, like a level 18 board game geek. Once every few months I make it to his place on a Saturday afternoon to play some games with him and a handful of others. I’m mostly casual; they’re pretty hardcore, like the guy with a remarkably elaborate packing system for his Arkham Horror sets,¹ which is totally okay, just not so much my thing.

So despite being really into plenty of things, I paused when asked. My coworkers don’t really see that much of my non-work life and interests; despite believing in sharing and celebrating nerdy enthusiasms, turns out I’m not a really big sharer, myself. I’m quiet; it shouldn’t surprise me that having worked with someone for a few years, he wouldn’t really know what I dig.

I might have gushed: I’m into hobby coding, programming tiny things only for myself, blogging and online communities, all things internet and sometimes the internet of things, personal web pages, twitter and tinkering with APIs. I’m an IT guy, and I work with deeply IT people of various kinds, yet many of the things that feel to me to be such natural elements of being into computers for so long, growing up with them and working with/on/around them — like twitter, blogging, and RSS feeds full of nerds — just aren’t resonant with most of them, or at least most of the folks I spend most of my time working with.

I told him about my tilde.club network visualization, which required a brief visit to first principles: Here’s a bunch of people who put up tilde web pages; oh, a tilde page is this convention for home pages; home pages are something I’m into. Then I gave an explanation of what the network graph shows and why I would think it might be cool enough to spend several weekend evenings tinkering with, and a quick demo on the screen of my iPhone. Not sure he got it, though. On a cool exercise in parsing XML to produce a map of beer styles, Gabe Weatherhead nicely sums up the impulse to do this kind of thing: “It’s not super-useful. But, then again, this was never about the problem. It was always about the problem solving.”

Over at But She’s a Girl I find some familiar thoughts about being too much geek (or perhaps, really, about being a different sort of geek among other geeks):

That — in a nutshell — is why this blog is a lifeline for me. Many of you are fellow geeks and share my enthusiasm for ridiculously geeky things like building documents with embedded statistical output. You are my kind of people. Plus, on the internet, I can’t see the eyes of those of you who are not interested in geeky things glazing over with boredom and despair as you read this.

Yes. And while I share the notion that this online space is a lifeline, one of the things I want to do for myself this year² is to be more open and expressive about the things I enjoy, in order to find more local community and friendship in it.

I like this piece by Ben Kuchera about managing one’s leisure time and making goals for play & culture in order to avoid “fun” turning into “homework.” I’ve started aggregating books, comics, games and music into a feed that I can pipe into a thedash dashboard. This helps me keep track of all that stuff and also acts as a check against overpopulating it. ¹

Look, Ben notes and I agree that this is like the first worldiest of first worldie dilemmas — oh, my, so many free-time activities! Woe — but pulling back a little bit, this is also about being thoughtful about how I spend my time. Not a bad thing to keep in mind as we careen into one more year.

Among the games I played over my winter holiday (which got me thinking about all the Games of Christmas Past, and stewing on a post chock full of nostalgia about that), I have so far had a great time with Endless Legend. It’s a complex “4X” turn-based strategy venture, and I spent some time writing up an Endless Legend gameplay journal about my experience so far.

Jason Garber writes up and shares his nice webmentions service. While I use flat files, Jason uses a database and provides a real API — super-cool. He also points to webmention.js, which in turn leads to webmention.herokuapp.com; the former, a javascript function to display webmentions, and the latter, a service to both receive and embed mentions.

It’s really fun to come across these, both from a perspective of opportunities to replace or improve my implementation as well as just seeing more threads within this community.

I Huffduffed this great discussion with Jeremy Keith weeks ago, and am just now catching up over my holiday vacation. Jeremy talks about some key tools, and his explanation in particular of the way rel="me" relates to IndieAuth finally made sense to me. He also points to Known, a hosted or self-hosted platform with microformats, webmentions, and other indieweb elements as core capabilities. Cool!

To me, there’s definitely a through-line between these tools and platforms, and the kinds of activity sparked by Tilde Club and the Other Tildes. While the tilde clubs diverge in some senses, they share the indieweb notion of cobbling something together to scratch one’s own itch, sharing and spreading around that capability, and enabling likeminded people to tool around, tinker, and express. For me, they both represent some of the community and sharing that have been underlining much of my enthusiasm for first BBSs, later usenet and home pages and all things internet, for the past so many years.

Go forth and make/write/play, huh? Okay!

Winston Hearn:

If you give a developer a domain, they’re going to want to host a site on it. But where should they host it? They’re probably going to need to do some research on hosting. But they can’t decide on hosting until they figure out how they’re building the site. They are really familiar with this framework but since they have full control maybe they should experiment with this other framework.

Photo: Launch Ring Restored, Launch Complex 34, (Apollo Saturn) Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida – Roland Miller

Roland Miller is a family friend and I grew up with many of his photos in the house. He has been working on a project titled Abandoned in Place for more than twenty-five years. He is documenting in photographs the facilities and structures that were the foundation of the U.S. space program, like launch towers, gantries, factories, control rooms and panels.

Roland’s Kickstarter for an Abandoned in Place photo book is almost home! If you are interested in space, science, history, or photography, this is right in your sweet spot and I encourage you to check it out. You can get the book — with essays and memories from space program scientists and astronauts and writing by Ray Bradbury! — along with signed prints, and help preserve the stories and images of these places that are gradually being lost to time and the elements. Go go!

Bridgy by Ryan Barrett is another fantastic-looking and new-to-me tool for spinning up your own piece of the indie web. I’m really excited for the possibilities presented by it and webmention.io, both of which I found via Jeremy Keith. His Indie web building blocks post is one more great primer on how all this works.

I have so much to do.