★★★★☆
No-nonsense but full-featured email application for macOS that works well with multiple IMAP accounts and Gmail. Features an “All Inboxes” view as well as showing each account individually. Setup can be a bit weird since parts of account config are in System Settings. Uses the system Contacts application. You can add and remove server folders on your accounts. Better than Windows 10 Mail or Geary, not as good as Thunderbird, but lighter and snappier.
(Torrance, CA)
★★★★★
One of my favorite places to go walking (and photographing) in the South Bay. (SCBG is the other.) It’s the last remnant of the seasonal marshes that once covered the western part of the LA basin. (Basically a large city block that was set aside as a nature preserve.) It’s carefully maintained to assist the natural environment. Ponds form naturally during the winter and spring rains and dry out over summer. All kinds of waterfowl visit the pools during the wet season. There is a broad path suitable for strollers (and possibly wheelchairs?) that runs around the edges and through the center, and depending on the time of year and how much rain there’s been lately, smaller footpaths run between the ponds and through the wooded area. Very flat, mostly open, shade in the wooded corner where the ponds tend to last longest.
Great for spotting birds and small animals in all seasons, butterflies and dragonflies in spring/summer, and for hearing tiny frogs that hide very effectively in the grass and stop croaking when you try to locate them. Worth visiting in multiple seasons, too.
You can see some of the many photos I’ve taken there on Flickr and on my blog. Blog highlights include hawkspotting, winter birds and seasons of the marsh.
There’s a visitor center (with restrooms!) and a garden of local native plants across the street, and the gates shut at 5 pm.
★★★★★
Great smoothies and tropical juices, plus Brazillian-style grilled pita sandwiches and Açaí bowls. Tiny (small business, literally!), with a handful of small tables (and not much shade) if you want to eat there, great for takeout whether you’re just going for smoothies or getting lunch. I keep getting the Kamehameha (pineapple, mango and banana), which is kind of ironic since it’s named after a Hawaiian. The Beirute Turkey is really good, and they have a vegetarian version using hearts of palm.
(Pronounced like in Portuguese: Nah-TOO-ray-bah, not Nature-ba!)
(If you drive, park on the street, not in the hardware store lot next door.)
★★★★★
Not just great scones, but a great variety of scones (as well as coffee, tea and custom soda drinks). Good for breakfast, lunch, a snack or just coffee. I’ll sometimes grab a lunch sandwich (a “sconewich”) made with a savory or plain scone, and a sweet scone to save for a snack or dessert later.
In a large brick building next to Anthony’s Lounge. Lots of indoor seating and a few small tables outside. Only open mornings and afternoons. If you want coffee later in the day, The Press Espresso is across the street.
Some WordPress plugins I’ve used and what I think of them.
★★★★★ One of my must-have plugins. I know the block editor is a major effort, but I still find it gets in my way more than it helps. For me, enabling the Classic Editor is a necessity.
★★★★☆ Good for the main use cases: restore from backup, and moving posts between blogs. Unfortunately the image import doesn’t seem to work (WordPress 6.3 with plugin 0.8.1), which makes it a pain to clean up image-heavy posts.
One thing I’d like to do with this that I can’t is to import another copy of a cross-post and merge the comment threads. As it is, the best I can do is import the duplicate copy and then use another plugin (or dig into the database) to move the comments around.
★★★★★ Simple and useful: it just converts #hashtags to post tags. This works great on several of my sites.
(Discontinued but still available.)
★★★★★ Major speedup for the typical use case. I’ve been using this caching plugin since before Automattic took over management. Since I don’t get very much in the way of comments on my site, the vast majority of hits are anonymous and don’t change what should be on the page next time, so a static cache helps a lot.