Blogging since 1998. By David Wertheimer

Month: January 2026

Fiddly App Friday

I was using one of my more niche apps this morning for a work project and got to thinking about the little productivity things I have on my Mac that most people don’t. I’m not talking about Fantastical or BBEdit, which are well-known tools; I’m talking about the “I solved a problem” apps, like Tyke, which scratched a specific itch for a specific thing.

My list is not long, but here they are.

Itsycal—Simple calendaring tool that also lets you customize the presentation of date and time in the menu bar. I click into the month view multiple times a week. I also prefer its date stamp to the default MacOS options.

Free Ruler—I think this has been on my machine in one form or another for 25 years. Measure stuff, straighten stuff. Leaves itself as a transparent overlay while you manipulate whatever it is you’re wrangling in the active app. Perfect.

Flickr Uploadr—I’m still a Flickr user, thanks to the thousands of tagged and captioned photos that I can’t seem to export with their full data sets. And when I want to upload new photos, the Uploader is a delight. Make a desktop folder, drop photos into it Dropbox-style, see photos on Flickr. That’s all it does. That’s all I need it to do.

(Dis)parity

Baseball headline of the week: Kyle Tucker, Dodgers agree to 4-year, $240M deal.

The Los Angeles Dodgers’ 2026 payroll is larger than the bottom five Major League Baseball teams’ payrolls combined.

The Dodgers’ payroll is so big that the gap between them and the New York Mets’ #2 payroll is larger than six teams’ entire payrolls.

The Dodgers and the Mets are the only two teams with projected payrolls over $325 million. Fifteen other teams—half the league—are under $160 million. You could put any two of those teams on the field and play ball for less than the Dodgers or Mets pay for one dugout.

The Dodgers’ use of deferred money means they have $298 million in commitments for 2028 already. Twenty of the other 29 teams have less than $100 million on the books, and three have $0 (really).

I don’t know how this ends, and I root for the original large-market juggernaut, but this game needs some degree of payroll parity in the next agreement, because leagues need fair competition to stay interesting.

(Source)

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