I’m using pencils a lot these days, especially for drafts and taking notes. I’m starting to be a little more particular and leaning firmly towards darker graphite or the 2B graphite rating. I liked the black Staedtler Norica HB I tried last year so much I decided to try the blue Norica 2B. My black Noricas came…
Author: Lisa Spangenberg
She/her I’m a Medievalist, a Celticist, and a technologist. I Admin Absolute Write, and I write for money.
The Commonplace Book Lives
In one of my earliest blog posts on February 8, 2002, I compared blogs and commonplace books. Since then a number of other bloggers have made the same comparison; it is in fact, now a commonplace to compare blogs and commonplace books. Many are echoing Dori Smith’s discussion of her blog as her “Backup Brain”; something…
Another Batch of Pencils for Writing
There are far more high-quality affordable wooden pencils than I ever realized. I’ve tried four more for more pencils since my first post about wood-case pencils. I’d happily use any of these four pencils for writing, but I’m particularly pleased with the Staedtler Norica, the General’s Cedar Pointe #1, and the Musgrave News 600 as…
Oct17 Wooden Alarm Clock
I wanted a way to see the time at night without constantly checking my phone. I was initially looking for an analog watch, but this Wirecutter review of alarm clocks caught my eye, especially the Oct17 Wooden Alarm Clock caught my eye. The clock is shaped like a very large Toblerone chocolate bar, has a…
NetNewsWire 5.0b4
Brent Simmons’ NetNewsWire is back. NetNewsWire 5.0b4 is a free and open source RSS reader for macOS. You can download the NetNewsWire 5.0 Beta version now, or wait if you’re not experienced regarding using beta software (this means being prepared to have bad things happen, like losing your data). Seriously, don’t use a beta if…
Wood-Case Pencils
My favorite pencils for long-form writing and editing.
Clearing Recently Used Fonts from the macOS Font Panel
The macOS Font Panel, for apps that support it like Notes, TextEdit, and XX, allows you to quickly pick a font, point size, and color. It also displays categories of fonts, including a list of the Recently Used Fonts. It’s not completely clear to me when and why a font is added to the Recently…
TextExpander
I’ve written about TextExpander before, because I’ve been a constant user for a little more than seven years. And now, with TextExpander 5, it’s even more useful. Smile Software’s TextExpander is a macOS and iOS utility that saves keystrokes by expanding a short abbreviation that you type, with whatever text you have previously associated with that…
NIXPlay 10 inch Digital Frame
I bought this NIXPlay Advance 10-Inch Widescreen digital frame for my mom after reading this WireCutter review of the Nix Seed. My mom doesn’t have WiFi, so the NIX Seed wasn’t an option for her. She loves her Nix Advance. It holds a giant amount of images and videos, and so the image is always…
Your NaNoWriMo Portable Writing Studio: No Computer Required
One reason a lot of writers tell me they’ve never tried NaNoWriMo, the annual November challenge to write 50,000 words in a month, is that they can’t fit in long writing sessions; they work and have other commitments, or they don’t have a portable device and can’t write at home because there are too many…