Apple computer bits
No native Apple app for Substack
If you are an Apple user, you probably know Substack doesn’t make a native app. If you want to make something that looks and feels like an app on your Mac, there is a workable workaround. Here’s how to add Substack (or your favorite Substack) to your Mac:
- Open Safari and browse to Substack.com (or to your favorite Substack like the Random Wire or Zero Retries).
- Click File, then Add to Dock. At that point, it should show up in your dock.
- If you wish, you can then delete it from your dock and it will still be findable in your applications.
That’s how it works for me on my big iMac. And as you can see below, I need to clean up my dock! (The Random Wire logo is toward the right on the dock, in between the Settings icon and Quicktime.)
While this doesn’t create a native app, it works well enough. You can see that in the screenshot below where I am writing this actual content.
Password management
On my Android phones and tablets, I use KeePass2Android to manage passwords. On my Windows machines, I use KeePass. But KeePass is not offered for the Mac. Instead, I’ve installed KeePassXC.
KeePassXC is a fork of KeePassC. It is actively maintained and the code has been audited. Since I’m running a Mac that uses an Intel CPU, I couldn’t use the KeePassXC for Apple Silicon Macs that was first offered on the Download page. Instead, I had to select KeePassXC for Intel Macs.
That worked fine, but now the next challenge was that I keep a copy of my password file in the cloud. It happens to be a cloud service run by a direct, primary competitor of Apple. It took a couple of tries to get their app to install and populate on my iMac, but I got there.
In KeePassXC, I opened the remote password database file and authenticated with my master password. Boom. All of my many passwords are now available to me. Nice.
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