If you use Bunch to launch Logic Pro, using “Logic Pro X” in the Bunch file doesn’t work with Logic Pro 11.1. However, the bundle identifier (com.apple.logic10) consistently launches it (and quickly). “Logic Pro” didn’t work at first, but it started working after I launched it once using the bundle identifier. For some reason, though, it launches noticeably faster using the bundle identifier.

StopTheMadness Pro is an essential Safari extension. It fixes numerous usability issues that you might encounter on websites. I recently found a great use for its custom style feature: flagging links to certain sites that I almost never want to visit, like Twitter/X. I wrote some imperfect but effective CSS that puts a flag at the end of any link that matches the rules.

Sunset on my street, 2024-01-23

One of the part-time jobs I held during college was AutoCAD technician at a small facilities management consulting firm. Our clients (mostly hospitals and universities) would give us blueprints of their buildings’ floor plans. My job was to tape the blueprints to a large digitizing tablet and essentially trace them to produce AutoCAD drawings. A consultant had usually already done a site visit and made notes on each room in the building — the type of room (e.g., an office or a classroom), the type of floor surface, and so forth. In addition to creating the drawings, I had to measure the area of each room and enter it, along with the consultant’s notes, into a database. The database had been integrated with AutoCAD so that you could invoke a popup window to enter new database records and edit existing records without leaving AutoCAD.¹

In the summer of 2023, I decided I was no longer serious enough about photography to continue paying for an Adobe subscription. (I still enjoy taking and editing pictures, but some of my other hobbies are just more fulfilling at this point, and the time I spent as a “serious” hobby photographer got shorter and shorter.) It was hard to justify paying $120 a year for software that I wasn’t using that often. Non-subscription photography software has come a long way since I started using Lightroom and Photoshop almost 10 years ago, and some of the alternatives seemed more than capable of meeting the needs of a casual user like me. Lightroom had become very sluggish on my 2019 iMac, which is otherwise working fine. It was also inconvenient being half in the Apple ecosystem and half in the Adobe ecosystem. The photos I took with my iPhone were available everywhere, but the photos I took with my Fuji mirrorless were only on my Mac. I began thinking about how I could move from Lightroom to Apple Photos — or if it was even feasible.

I achieved three of my four running goals for 2023.

1. Run a half-marathon in less than 3 hours. I finished my first half-marathon of 2023 in 2:54:52.
2. Complete the Triple Peach.
3. Run 365 miles. I finished the year with 369.5 miles.

My fourth goal was to run twelve races, and I ran seven.

• Three half-marathons
• One 10-miler
• Two 10k’s
• One 5k

My favorite run of the year was a four-mile run between Santa Monica Pier and Venice Beach when I visited California in the spring. There were so many people exercising – yoga, volleyball, running, even a stationary cycling class. It was inspiring, and not something I would ever see when running at home. And it didn’t hurt that I had a view of the Pacific for the entire run.

Thanks to Brett Terpstra’s 2023 favorites post, I learned about MacUpdater. When I read that the Pro version can update audio plugins (or at least tell you when they need to be manually updated), it was an instant purchase. Keeping my Logic Pro plugins updated has always been a struggle, and MacUpdater makes it much easier. I think this feature alone is worth the price, and I highly recommend it to anyone who uses Logic Pro or another DAW.