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Synology’s DSM 6 has reached “RC” status. Now’s probably an OK time to consider it. Try at your own risk, but I’m envious if you do.

As I balance the black-plague of subscription services I pay for each year, a few things are never a contention. Fastmail is one of the darlings of my subscription services. It’s a solid email provider and it’s constantly being improved. Today Fastmail greatly improved the mail rules for advanced customers. Previously, creating a custom Sieve rule meant permanently abandoning the convenient rule wizard. Now Sieve scripts can sit alongside basic rules.

The next version of Alfred for Mac will expand the options for custom filters and improve the clipboard and snippet manager. Sounds great to me.

A nice little blog by a nice little guy: Soon, I was also adding brief summaries of my days. Then I was capturing ideas and even, perish the thought, writing about my feelings. Without noticing it, I had finally picked up journaling. That describes so many of my habits, including this blog. Start small and build step by step. Don’t make it life commitment, just make it a small habit.

Interesting breakdown of political spending by tech companies. To understand Apple’s efforts at persuading legislators of various issues, I compiled a measure of political footprint which combines a company’s own federally registered lobbying expenditures from 2015 with the campaign contributions they made during the 2013-14 election cycle from their corporate PAC as well as any employees who made campaign campaign contributions (and listed their employer). This data comes from the Center for Responsive Politics.

From AppAdvice: Instead of navigating the on-screen keyboard, the tvOS beta offers you one more way to enter your login information. You can dictate your username and password, one character at a time, which makes logging in much easier. The service works well for me, but you do have to speak slowly and clearly to avoid mixing up like-sounding letters such as “f” and “s.” This was a bewildering omission in the new AppleTV.

I’m still a big fan of Feedbin. Just when I think they are starting to coast they add something new and awesome. Now I can subscribe to email newsletters in my RSS reader. I really don’t understand the rise of email newsletters from the consumer side. I work very hard to keep things out of my email. Now that I can use RSS instead I’m much more likely to signup for some those listed in the Feedbin post.

Do you remember “Remember the Milk?” There was a time that I lived in their web and iOS apps. It was the best. Then it sat, relatively unchanged, for years while other apps leaped ahead or sprang into existence around them. Today is a bright new day for the service and all of its apps. The new service fills in most of the egregious gaps. Here’s just a taste: Sub tasks with their own due dates and tags Drag and drop assignment of tags, priorities and due dates Improved smart add with due date parsing START DATES Task sharing RTM has always nailed the advanced search operators so don’t let the cuteness fool you.

This latest beta sounds pretty great. Content Search You can now use Mac Finder to quickly search the content of indexed files within mounted folders on your Synology NAS. Even the little bits are huge improvements. Like this little note about synchronizing with Google Drive: You can now convert Google Docs to Microsoft Office or jpeg formats in download-only tasks to keep an offline backup copy. I love this little computer more every year.

Vulture has been creating some interesting reading material lately. The 100 Jokes That Shaped Modern Comedy is delightful not for some laughs but becuase it’s interesting to see how culture and sense of humor changes over time. What a great compilation.