If you look at social media these days, especially Instagram, you’ll soon be convinced that you need a Linktree page and a QR code for your website. All the cool kids have them.

Sadly, many of the people who fall for the fad find themselves trapped in a costly and not very useful third-party service. And worse than the expense, these service are nothing but a barrier between you and your customers and friends, from which the services profit by selling activity or showing ads (or both).

Fortunately, QR codes and “linking pages” are easy to construct with very little effort, and no expense. In my opinion, you should “roll your own” instead of signing up for one of these services.

Here’s a real-world nightmare scenario: A friend of mine signed up for one of the “free” QR code services, and had the code printed on thousands of postcards that advertise his show. What he didn’t realize is that the free service was limited, and soon after publication, his code stopped working unless he paid hundreds of dollars a month to reactive it. Now he has a thousand postcards that send his customers, not to his website, but to an extortive third-party.

Make your own QR Code

It’s easy to make a QR Code that points directly to your website.

The simple way is to by going to DuckDuckGo.com, and entering into the search field something like “qr https://gordonmeyer.com”. The first result will be a QR that you can save and distribute.

A fancier way is to use the Shortcuts app on macOS or iOS. There’s a built-in Generate QR Code action that you can add to any workflow.

Make your own linking page

You probably already subscribe to a service that lets you share documents that can contain links, via the web. For example, iCloud, Dropbox, Craft, Microsoft Word, or Google Docs. Below is an elementary example; you can get as fancy with this as your time and talent allow. Once you’re finished, share your page as a public read-only document, and use that link in your social media profiles.

What do you lose?

So, you might be asking yourself, what are the disadvantages of using these methods? What you lose is that you won’t get the usage statistics that the third-party services offer (to those who pay extra). So you won’t know how many times your links were clicked, or how they came to your page, such as via Instagram versus Facebook versus Blue Sky.

However, as a small, independent creator, do you really care? Unless you’re engaged in a fancy marketing campaign, none of that information is actionable. It’s interesting to see, for certain, but that’s about it. I could also argue that not getting the measurements frees your psyche to worry about things that actually help your business or social life.

I’ve been using the Day One journaling app for ten years. It’s where I keep track of my daily Story Cube writing exercises (occasionally shared on my Instagram account), and it’s also where I maintain a travel journal.

I ignore most of Day One’s numerous features (Too many, frankly) but the one that matters to me the most is automatic location metadata logging. Being able to recall where I was when I created an entry is why I started using Day One all those years ago.

But in a recent update, Day One began changing the location of journal entries that I had made several days before. It was doing this on its own, and was frequently changing them to an incorrect location!

This was completely unacceptable to me. Day One tech support was not helpful — when they eventually responded to requests — and my plea for help to the users’ forum on Facebook mostly garnered responses from company sycophants.

Eventually, though, a fellow frustrated user suggested that the cause might be a new feature called “Auto-Apply Points of Interest.” (This setting is turned on by default. It is buried in the “Location History” pane of the app’s settings.)

When this feature is turned on, Day One will decide that even if you carefully and specifically set an entry’s location, if that location is near a landmark it knows about, it changes the location to that of the landmark. Crazy, right? But here’s how it gets worse: the app goes through old entries, which you’ve never gone back and edited, and it changes those locations too!

So that note you created while standing in front of a great restaurant now says, after you save the note, that you were standing a few blocks away.

Turning off “Auto-Apply Points of Interest” fixed this problem for me. How in the world did Day One decide that silently altering old entries would be a good idea? If you’re having similar difficulty (and you probably are but haven’t noticed it yet) turn off this misguided feature.

This flashlight is amazingly bright — and heavy enough to be a weapon. But when you turn it on, just a few seconds later it blinks its lights then turns off. What the hell‽

Solution: Out of the box, it’s in “auto-lock” mode. To get out of this mode so the flashlight actually works as it should, hold down the power button for three seconds.

This is a crazy anti-usability feature that is supposedly for “demo” purposes, but really it just prevents customers from using the device. I bet their return rate is sky-high because there is no indication that the damn thing isn’t broken.

I got a decent deal on this flashlight at Costco, but it’s also available at the Amazon. It has some nice extras, like the ability to recharge via USB and even charge other devices, such as your phone. Did I mention it’s very bright? “The light of a thousand suns” is barely an exaggeration.

Coincidentally, over 10 years ago, I wrote about an Energizer flashlight that had a similar, inscrutable feature. Bad idea then, bad idea now.

I’ve been using Selznick Scientific Software’s PasswordWallet for a couple of decades. (Seriously, it has been that long. The oldest entry in my wallet is for the ACM Digital Library, and it was created in 2001.)

However, in the last couple of macOS updates, PasswordWallet has developed a few annoying problems, and I’ve found myself relying on Apple’s keychain instead. With the release of macOS Sequoia’s Passwords.app, it is time to say goodbye to my beloved PasswordWallet.

On macOS (only), Passwords.app allows you to import data, but what the new app expects, and what PasswordWallet exports, aren’t compatible. Sadly, the user guide for Passwords.app doesn’t give any useful information about importing. (But it can help you find the Import menu item, if you’re unable to do that. 🙄)

Before you begin, use PasswordWallet’s local sync function to merge all copies of your wallet (such as from your iPhone) with the wallet on your Mac. Make a note of how many total entries you have. (Mine has nearly 1000.) Then, make sure PasswordWallet’s search field is clear and use the export command to save a text file of all your entries. Then do the following:

1. Open the exported file in BBedit and change all the tab characters to commas.
2. Save the file with a .csv extension, which is what Passwords.app requires.
3. Import the csv file into Numbers for further manipulation.
4. Only the first five columns are needed, so use Merge Cell to move any information from columns six and beyond into the fifth column. (This will become the Notes field in Passwords.app)
5. Delete columns six and beyond.
6. Add a Header Row that names each column as follows: Title, URL, Username, Password, and Notes.
7. Save the .cvs file.
8. In Passwords.app, use the Import function to open the cvs file. (Importing takes a surprisingly long time. Be patient.)
9. When the import finishes, you’ll see a list of entries that were skipped. In my case, about 20% were not imported because they were duplicates of what I already had in Passwords.app (based on the item’s URL). You may want to compare each of these with what you have in PasswordWallet and manually re-enter any Notes that you want to retain.
10. As a sanity-check, compare the reported number of entries imported with the total entries that were in your PasswordWallet.

To finish up, I recommend using PasswordWallet to save a backup file of its data, for safekeeping. It will be encrypted and require PasswordWallet to open, should you need it. You can also save your import files, but as they are in plain text, I strongly suggest doing so using an encrypted archive or disk image. In any case, be sure to securely delete your import files so they can’t be recovered. (Another point that the Help book fails to mention.)

I would appreciate it if there were a way to assign imported entries to a group, but I couldn’t figure out a way to do that. It might be possible by adding columns to the spreadsheet, but doing so is left as an exercise for the reader.

Good luck!

In The Home as a Place of Production, Karen Rosenkranz asks: “So what would an alternative vision for the home of the future look like?”

I think some clues are to be found in the past. In the pre-industrial era, the domestic dwelling was where most work took place. From shoemakers to blacksmiths or scholars, skilled workers made things out of their homes. Food was produced within or around the house. This was all part of life – making, mending and feeding oneself. The duality of life and work hadn’t been established yet.

via Dense Discovery

Today, I wasted a good half-hour of my life trying to find refill tape for my Brother P-Touch “Home and Hobby II” PT-85 Label Printer (catchy name). I have the old, empty cartridge and it clearly reads “M-K231 12mm 1/2”. Do you think that I can find a new one to buy? Nope. The Brother website literally has zero results for any combination of those words, and it is their product! A search on Amazon returns an overwhelming list of results, none of which are Brother-brand products, and none of which have the same part number or size.

Some third-party tapes are close. They have variants that are similar to M-K231, and they are nearly the same size (0.47”), but not a one of them is an exact match for what I need.

I’m guessing that Brother has stopped making this size tape (all their part numbers start with TZe), which isn’t surprising given that the label machine is easily 20 years old. What is surprising to me is that the no-name replacements sold on Amazon can’t be bothered to make it clear that they are compatible with the actual Brother part number.

Despite middling reviews related to adhesiveness, I ordered one of the knock-off label cartridge from Amazon. My irritation at how hard it was to find is exceeded only by my anxiety that what I receive will work or be any good. Stay tuned.

Update: The replacement tapes have arrived and they are physically identical to the Brother cartridge, but are labeled slightly differently than described on Amazon, and still different from the Brother cartridge. Reviews on the site mention that the labels are hard to peel, but the ones I received a split-back, so go figure. The cartridge does work just find, and the adhesive seems fine, although to my eye the black print isn’t as dark as it is with the Brother cartridge.

Writing for the once-great Chicago Sun Times, the fabulous columnist Neil Steinberg discovers what techies have known for years: Google can pull the plug at any time

This is very much a cautionary tale, and the lesson is that writers need to own their words. Sure, if someone is paying you for “content,” you don’t own that instantiation (pardon the programmer-speak), but you do morally own the product of your labor. Save it. Keep a plain text backup of every. single. thing. you. write. Always, and forever. I accomplish this in two ways: First off, I compose anything I intend to publish in Ulysses, so there’s a copy inside that app’s library. Secondly, I publish using MarsEdit, which also keeps a copy of what’s pushed to the website. That’s two back-ups, so to speak, built into my workflow. I don’t even have to think about it, as long as I follow my process.

For other things that I write — notes, email drafts, etc. — I do all that using Drafts. This app also has an automatic library of documents where I can find anything unfinished over the last few years. Again, it happens automatically, so long as I follow my self-imposed process of always using either Drafts or Ulysses, and nothing else.

On a related note, if you’re running your own site, WordPress, Ghost, and the ilk, are quick and easy, but have no longevity. For the technical among you, read, savor, and follow this: This Page is Designed to Last: A Manifesto for Preserving Content on the Web

The irony that you’re reading this on a TypePad-hosted website is not lost on me. I’ve been publishing here for over 20 years, so there is a lot of inertia against leaving the platform. TypePad is very much a zombie service, and they haven’t been accepting new customers for years now. I’m grateful the owners keep it running (sort of), but there’s no doubt that someday I’ll have to move. But when that pain-in-the-ass day comes, I won’t lose any of my words.

I recently needed to extract about 100 contiguous pages from a 450-page PDF. Simple, right? Wrong.

Don’t try to shift-select in Thumbnail View and then copy to the clipboard, so you can paste into a new, empty PDF document. This will cause Preview, PDF Pen, PDF Viewer and probably most others to freeze up, if not crash. (But that’s a quick way to accomplish the task if you have fewer pages. It’s also a good way to determine where you want to split the PDF in general.)

The phrase “split PDF” is a problematic search on Google and in product manuals. You’ll mostly find tools that export each page as a separate file. (The correct term for that is “burst,” but sadly most documentation doesn’t use it.)

PDF Expert, one of my favorite PDF apps, has an “extract” function that promises to do what I want, but it couldn’t handle the number of pages I was working with.

The venerable and byzantine ghostscript can probably do it with ease, but now I’ve got two problems. I would rather not learn how to install and use ghostscript.

DevonThink has the ability to split PDFs by chapters, but unless your PDF has chapter marks (which are rare, in my experience) it only extracts odd or even pages, which might be useful for someone, but not for me.

I stopped my search, and got on with my work, when I discovered PDFsam. It’s aggressively cross-platform, but provides some very useful functions, including exactly what I needed. Yay! It’s a good tool to have at hand for processing your growing collection of PDFs.

I was a very early adopter of Roomba robot vacuums. I’ve owned several models, including the ill-fated mopping “Scooba,” and my previous posts about these products remain some of the most popular articles that I’ve shared.

However, when I moved into a three-story home, the hassle of using a Roomba with stairs led me to sell all of my iRobot products. (I sold them to a battlebot competitor to use for parts!)

But recently, I bought a new Roomba and, boy, a lot has changed with the product over the years! It can now avoid stairs and (some) other obstacles that would previously cause it a lot of difficulty. (This New Yorker article about how it all works is quite enlightening.)

The product line has also become quite complicated. There are multiple series, with mysterious designators and inscrutable differences between them. I finally gave up and bought the one that Costco offered at the lowest price.

I’ve had a few hiccups, which I have mostly solved, so I offer these tips:

• The Roomba I bought doesn’t come with a user guide, and the iRobot documentation on their site is not only poorly written, it’s nearly impossible to search because of all the different models they offer. You’re better off just using Google to find YouTube videos (and blog posts like this one). But even then, remember that what you’re finding might be out of date or doesn’t apply to your particular model.
• The mapping function, in which the device “learns” the layout of your home, can take nearly a dozen runs before it completes. Extreme patience on your part will pay off eventually.
• If there’s an area that it simply won’t map, start, then pause a job (using the app). Pick up the Roomba and move it to the area that’s not mapped. Press the Clean button that’s on top of the Roomba. The status in the app will now read “Cleaning and discovering” and the area should be added to the map.



• Regarding the map, the definition of walls can be critical and tricky. If you have two adjacent rooms, if your delineation is off by just a couple of pixels, your unit will visit both rooms even when you tell it only vacuum one of them. You’ll have to move the location of the wall in the app to prevent this, even though in reality, the wall is not quite where it’s shown.


• Although the documentation doesn’t emphasize this at all, when you initially set up the device, you should place its base station where you intend to keep it located. If you fail to do so (like I did), don’t move the base station to its new location until the unit has fully completed its mapping of your home. Then you can move the base station, and the Roomba will figure out its new location after three or four runs. (Conjecture: A “clean everywhere” run might speed this process.)


• My Roomba is particularly annoying about sending alerts to change its filter and replace its debris bag. In fact, it started insisting the base station was “full” after just three runs, and I assure you, it was not. Get accustomed to ignoring these notifications and using your judgement. I am almost convinced this “feature” is a way for iRobot to sell more consumables.



• Finally, the biggest problem I’ve experienced with the new Roomba is that it hallucinates obstacles. About a third of the time when I start a run, it will exit the base station and travel a few feet, then pause for over a minute before returning to base and falsely reporting that there was something in the way. This is extremely frustrating and means that I cannot reliably use the scheduling function. I have contacted tech support, and they say to check the wheels (they are clean), and make sure lights are on in the room (they are).

Despite the glitches and annoyances, I’m glad to be back in the Roomba family as it does save a significant amount of time (when it works). Hopefully, these tips and observations will help you.

About a year ago, I decided to buy a single-edged razor from Supply. I did it partially in a quest for a better shave, but also out of frustration at paying high prices for multirazor cartridge blades.

I tried, but hated, Dollar Shave Club. I also subscribed to Harry’s, and while I enjoy the lower price and convenience of a subscription, overall their quality is not impressive.

When I ordered the Supply razor online, I immediately started receiving emails with links to tutorial videos. This timing is poorly thought out, as without having the product in hand, the videos aren’t very helpful. Additionally, I was annoyed by the anti-tracking alerts my computer displayed every time I watched one.

Once the razor arrived, I quickly realized that the tutorials didn’t accurately reflect the true out-of-box experience of loading the first blade. Here’s what they left out: The razor ships with a metal shim where the blade goes. My shim was red. You need to remove that before installing a blade. In my case, the shim was stuck in place and the only way to remove it was to disassemble razor by removing the thumbscrew under the head, (The thumbscrew is another thing that’s not mentioned in the half-dozen tutorial movies they inundate new buyers with.)

Because I wasn’t sure how to load my first blade, I reached out to Supply via email, and then via text when I didn’t get a reply after a couple of days. Unfortunately, their eventual responses didn’t answer my question clearly.

I was off to a rocky start, for sure.

Also in the “poor experience” column, it’s not clear in the online store, but you get an 8-pack of blades with the handle. It’s nice to have the blades, but they should tell you exactly what’s included.

All that aside, the Supply razor consistently gives me the best home shave I’ve ever accomplished. It definitely takes some practice though, and here are my tips:

• Focus and do not rush. Do not let your mind wander when you shave. Enjoy the moment of mindfulness.
• Do not press. Not because you’ll cut yourself, but because you’ll weirdly get a closer shave with a light touch.
• Angles matter. Although all razor manufacturers will tell you to be aware of your whisker grain, it is even more important now. Additionally, make sure the Supply logo is against your face.
• When you replace the blade, its position in the handle matters. (Another fact omitted by the tutorial videos.) This is where the thumbscrew adjustment comes into play. See the photo below and note there are no cutouts visible above the cutting edge.

I also recommend buying the handle grip, particularly if you shave in the shower. The razor is heavy and can get quite slippery.

Overall, I’m pleased with the Supply, although I’ve kept my subscription to Harry’s for use when I travel. The Supply razor is simply too heavy and expensive for me to take it on the road. But when I’m away from home, I definitely miss it.

You can get blades from the Amazon, but for the razor itself, you have to order direct. (That way they can send you all those tutorial videos.) The razor I have is now called the “The Single Edge SE,” and the price has come down from what I paid. However, don’t believe that “no learning curve” ad copy, there will be an adjustment period from using multiblades.