Evaluate your current Mac by launching Activity Monitor and sort by CPU. Launch your most intensive workflow and examine the CPU load over time. Now rush into the most feeble justification for buying a new Mac. This is critical for step 4. Spend inordinate amounts of time on the Apple Store website looking at every possible configuration of your new Mac. 4a. Be sure to start with the fully loaded model.

I’m a huge fan of Overcast as a podcast player. I’ve tried a bunch of other apps and nothing seems to fit how I listen. One thing I’ve always struggled with though is listening to a single episode of a podcast without subscribing. Somewhere along the many updates to Overcast I missed the new feature. Here’s how it works.

I use my 10.5" iPad Pro every day for taking notes. I greatly prefer to hand-write my notes using the Apple Pencil. This allows me to capture ideas and questions in the margins as well as detailed drawings and diagrams in the main body. It’s fantastic. But, unlike plain text, this is one area where the app makes all the difference. Many iPad note apps support the Apple Pencil and implement some sort of inking system with line coloring and thickness adjustments.

During December I had a lot of time think. That’s never a good thing. I ended up with a little project to define my personal values. I want something I can write down and measure myself against. You know, kind of a like a corporate mission statement or values list, except for just me. I figured that I can’t ever be better unless I know what better means to me.

I really like the annual Six Colors report card for Apple, which is why I was thrilled to participate. While the contributors are Apple fans, their assessments usually span from adoring to down right hostile. This year’s is no different. I hope Apple executives are reading this because they are definitely not winning in every category. The grades for the Mac illustrate this the best. “I feel like the Mac rallied a bit this year—we got a new file system and nothing blew up,” wrote Mac Power Users host David Sparks.

Ever find an old iPhone screenshot in your camera roll and think about the days when you had only a few apps? Sometimes those apps aren’t even installed on my devices anymore. This year I decided to go back and evaluate some old favorites to see if they could bring back a tiny sliver of the pre-2017 joy. Paprika I used Paprika like crazy for about a year. It’s ability to extract a recipe from a webpage is remarkable.

Plex has made a steady but solid push into the mainstream market for media players. Their latest announcement includes future support for podcasts. What this means isn’t clear yet but I think the possibility for recommendations of related content for movies and TV shows is a real winner. I love the idea that my media aggregator could recommend a podcast episode with the crew or that a really good fan-site could just show up when I rate a show highly.

Stay with me. This isn’t my typical link-post. It’s also long so if you don’t care about the web or independent writing, here’s a nice article about genealogy and statistics. Two recent articles by Jason Kottke mesh nicely with something that has been weighing on me for the past couple of years. Let’s set the context though. I think kottke.org is a wonderful site and I read every article he publishes on his RSS feed.

From Timothy Lee at Ars Technica: The legislation comes on the heels of the contentious 2016 election. Post-election investigation hasn’t turned up any evidence that foreign governments actually altered any votes. However, we do know that Russians were probing American voting systems ahead of the 2016 election, laying groundwork for what could have become a direct attack on American democracy. I wonder if they’ll put in a backdoor. You know, for the good guys.

I’m following posts like this one from Jason Snell very closely: Once again, that’s a little more than half the time. It’s enough for me to declare that for jobs optimized for multiple processor cores, this base model iMac Pro is nearly twice as fast as the top-of-the-line 5K iMac from 2014. I’ve also been looking at the Geekbench scores but I think this Bare Feats post summarizes the performance comparisons best.