No Post on Sundays

This afternoon, as I was taking out the trash, I thought to myself, “I should check the mail.” So I rounded the corner of my house, strolled down the driveway, and reached out to open the mailbox.

As I did, another thought occurred: “If any of my neighbors see me right now, they’re going to think I’m ridiculous.” You see, today is Sunday, and the mail doesn’t run on Sundays. Why would anyone be checking the mail today?

It’s a long story.

My son Noah, who will turn two in August, loves mail. I mean, he really loves mail. When I receive a piece of junk mail, I hand it to him, and he thinks I’ve just given him an awesome gift. “Mail!” he exclaims as he proudly carries his envelope around the house. He keeps it with him for hours before it inevitably gets forgotten and subsequently thrown out after he goes to bed.

Checking the mail when Noah’s around is a bit of a gamble because he gets very emotionally invested. If he sees me open the mailbox, he expects not only that there will be something in it, but that there will be something it for him. If the day’s mail only contains important items that I have to keep, or – more likely – if there isn’t any mail in the box at all, my son becomes quite disappointed. And he’s not shy about letting me know when he’s displeased.

And so, I’ve learned to only check the mail under certain circumstances – namely, when my son is otherwise occupied. This way, I minimize the risk of him getting upset while still maintaining the potential upside of gifting him my junk mail whenever possible. It’s a win-win. (That is, unless you look at it from an environmental perspective; why do we even have paper mail anymore?)

Which is how I found myself checking the mail on a Sunday afternoon. Noah was taking a nap, and it had been a few days since I’d had a chance to get out there, so I took advantage of the opportunity when it arose. Alas, the mailbox was empty. No junk mail treasures to share this particular Sunday.

A good deal of successfully relating to other people is learning how they tick and trying to be respectful of it. Parenting a toddler pushes this notion to the extreme – other triggers I avoid include dusting and uttering the word “outside” unless my shoes are already on – but there’s something special about caring for someone deeply enough to anticipate and accommodate their needs. It’s something I’m working to get better at each day. May we all know others so well and be known so well ourselves by someone else.

Mac Automation

I wrote an actual Mac story! In the latest Club MacStories Monthly Log, I shared my approach to automating the Mac.

I’ve mostly sat on the sidelines of the conversation when it comes to Mac utilities because those tools aren’t available on my platforms of choice. But thanks to the persistent influence of my colleagues who are always finding interesting new tools for their computers, I recently started dipping my toes into the world of Mac automation.

I haven’t used a Mac as my primary computer in a really long time, but it’s still an important part of my work at the church. Rather than optimizing my Mac for getting everyday work done, I’ve created automations that help me oversee the tech side of services and stream events live. It’s been a fun new area to explore, and I enjoyed getting to write about it.

You can check out the full article on Club MacStories if you like. Thanks as always for reading!

Friend of the Show

I had the privilege of being the first guest on Joshua Wold’s new podcast Friend of the Show! The episode covers a wide range of topics: online friendships, faith, the role of luck in our career paths, our shared love of Neopets, and more. It was a great chance to chat with Joshua, whom I met a couple of years ago on Mastodon but haven’t had a chance to connect with beyond text chat. And if other people enjoy listening in, that’s even better.

You can listen to the episode here. My thanks to Joshua for having me.

Vision Pro’s New Guest User Mode

One last link post today, I promise. My effort to write more about the Vision Pro continues, this time with an article at MacStories detailing the changes to Guest User mode in visionOS 2.4. Guest User has been a significant pain point for me personally and for the Vision Pro user base as a whole since the device’s launch, so it’s refreshing to see the feature improved so much in this update. I wouldn’t say it’s perfect, but it’s certainly come a long way, making the Vision Pro much more sharable in the process.

Writing this article was a reminder to me of how different it is covering visionOS than any other operating system. Testing Guest User required me to recruit Katherine as an assistant – at least, until I figured out how to trick Optic ID by squinting my eyes. Also, the screenshot you see at the top of the article took way more effort than you might think. It involved an Xcode update, changing out the physical strap on my Vision Pro, and trying to hold my head just right to catch the window level and straight on. It made me appreciate the ease of screenshots on my other devices, for sure.

I’ll just consider this article a warmup for my summer coverage of visionOS 3, which by all indications seems like it’s going to be a big update.