Lately, though, I’ve noticed something different about his reviews. They seem to flow a little better, the sentences are a little less awkward, the rough edges have been sanded off. Has he suddenly become a better writer? I would like to think so, but more likely he’s taken to running his reviews through AI.

What a shame.

Before, he had a voice, a personality that I could imagine with a passion he enjoyed writing about. Now, he’s . . . I don’t know what to call it. Some words on the internet?

If you really want to improve your writing, there are some great books to help you do that. A good start is On Writing Well by William Zinsser, which is itself well written and thus an easy read.

Here’s what he wrote in the book’s introduction in 2001:

Ultimately, however, good writing rests on craft and always will. I don't know what still newer electronic marvels are just around the corner to make writing twice as easy and twice as fast in the next 25 years. But I do know they won't make writing twice as good. That will still require plain old hard work — clear thinking — and the plain old tools of the English language.

Whatever you do, keep your own voice, even if it is unvarnished. It’s part of who you are, and we appreciate it.

I wrote about an early attempt in 2024 when I discovered that you can get a random RSS feed from indieblog.page. To this day, I continue to get 10 random posts every day in my feed reader.

The problem, though, is that those posts are rarely of any interest. They tend to be extremely niche. Typically, they are about a technology I don’t understand or something personal suitable mainly for friends and relatives.

I haven’t given up, though.

Kagi Small Web is another way to randomly find indie web posts. I find that it’s good for filling in a few minutes of boredom, but I’m pretty sure I’ve found only a few articles that I enjoyed reading.

There is a more recent effort called Blogosphere, where you can go through the latest posts of indie sites chosen by the developer. With a fair bit of scrolling, I can find one or two articles worth reading — so it's not bad. You can also sign up and follow your favourites, but why not do that with your feed reader?

The latest I’ve come across is Bubbles, which came out about a month ago. It allows for up-voting and comments, both of which help surface articles worthy of your attention. It’s like getting recommendations from like-minded people. There is also a daily briefing for the top posts, and a hall of fame for the top blogs.

It might seem a little too close for comfort to the corporate world of Reddit, but I’m willing to live with that. If the indie world is going to flourish, it needs a way to make itself known. Bubbles might not be the best way to do this, but it’s the best I’ve found so far.

So what happened?

I can only guess, but I do know what I was doing just before the miracle — fixing an error in Terminal, along with cleaning up brew installations.

The error was a missing quote mark in a file, something that has plagued me for years. Before AI, I would copy and paste errors into Google and hope for an answer. Typically I would wind up going down rabbit holes, becoming increasingly frustrated until I finally gave up.

What saved me was Le Chat from Mistral. It showed me how to find the offending file and how to fix it. Out of curiosity, I asked if the the missing quote mark would cause any problems. To my chagrin, it had the potential to create a long list of problems, many of which seemed embarrassingly significant.

But this was a long-standing error, so how would fixing it solve problems that just cropped recently? Again, I can only guess that it was a cumulative thing over the years that finally reared its ugly head.

While I was at it, I upgraded all the stuff that I’ve installed with brew. In some cases, I decided to uninstall — things that take up a lot of space and that I no longer have use for. These included Node, Ruby and Hugo.

Why were these installed in the first place? Because I was curious about static site generators. Fussing around with Terminal is not my idea of a good time, so I eventually moved on. Good old Textpattern can never be replaced.

Recently I learned that Font Awesome has acquired static site generator called Eleventy. They’re rebranding it as Build Awesome.

This is surprising given that Font Awesome’s icons are meant to make life easier for developers. The same goes for Web Awesome, a collection of code components.

I’ll be curious to see how or if they can make a static site generator easy for the average person who has never hear of Terminal, and would be scared to touch it if they had.

Until now.

It started with Spotlight no longer being able to find any apps or files. After a lot of back and for with Claude that resulted in more time in Terminal than I normally like, along with a trying number of reboots, I was able to force Spotlight to re-index.

Spotlight is now back to normal except for one weird thing — it can’t find the stock Apple apps, including, just to make things more irritating, Terminal. These apps are kept in a separate part of the system, and Spotlight — for reasons unknown — is no longer able to index this part.

Claude suggests re-installing macOS, insisting that it’s not that hard and only takes 30 minutes. I’m skeptical, and besides there are other solutions. For one thing, Terminal is now in the dock.

And Spotlight has been demoted from Command-Space. I’ve turned that combo over to Launchbar, which has no trouble finding stock apps. I’m tempted to go on a rant about why on earth a third-party app would be better at indexing than the one built in. But I'll spare you.

I tried other launchers. Raycast found the stock apps, but slowed down the computer to the point of making it juddery. Alfred, surprisingly, could not find the stock apps. Quicksilver found them, but has an interface that only a mother could love.

Launchbar is free if you don’t mind the occasional nag. I haven’t been nagged yet, so we’ll see how that goes. If it gets bad, I might be tempted to see if I can bear Quicksilver. Or, you know, actually pay for Launchbar.

Update: Now Mail won't send email. I switched to Spark, which has a free version that seems fine. But this really is annoying. My expectation is that it would be the opposite — Apple's apps should be the gold standard for basic reliability. Third-party apps should only be there for optional functionality.