Category: Miscellaneous

I wear a FreeStyle Libre. It’s great. The annoying part is checking it. I’ll be writing or grading (or pretending to write while actually grading), and every twenty minutes I pick up my phone and open an app, or glance at my watch and hope it’s synced. Meanwhile I’m sitting in front of a 27-inch screen all day, and my glucose shows up everywhere except there.

The menu bar on that screen has been showing me the time, the Wi-Fi, and an emoji button I’ve never clicked. It had room for one more thing.

So I built LibreBar. It’s a small native macOS app that puts my current glucose in the menu bar: the number and a trend arrow, updated every minute. Click it, and you get a 12-hour chart with my target range shaded green and anything below it drawn in red. There are desktop widgets in three sizes. It handles mg/dL and mmol/L. It updates itself. That’s the whole app.

A few things that mattered to me while building it:

Privacy. Your LibreLinkUp login is stored in the macOS Keychain and only ever sent to Abbott’s servers, the same ones your phone already talks to. No analytics, no telemetry, no third parties. The app is sandboxed and notarized. The only counting I do is anonymous daily check-ins on my server so I know roughly how many copies are running. Nothing identifying is stored, and the website says so in plain English.

Honesty. Macs don’t have NFC, and Libre sensors won’t pair with them. So LibreBar gets your data through Abbott’s LibreLinkUp sharing service, the same one family members use to follow someone’s glucose. It’s an unofficial API. Abbott could change it someday, and if they do, the app will tell you rather than silently break. Also, this is not a medical device. It just shows you data you already have. Make treatment decisions with your real device, not my menu bar.

My wife found the first bug within a day. I tested everything before launch: signatures, notarization, all of it. Every check passed. Then my wife downloaded the app and macOS told her to move it to the trash. Turns out I had tested the way developers test, with command-line tools, and never once just double-clicked the zip like a normal person. One missing flag in my build script broke the app for everyone who extracted it in Finder, which is everyone, while it worked fine for me. Lesson learned: test like your users, not like yourself. And if you don’t build software: this is why we’re like this.

LibreBar is free and it’s at librebar.app. You need macOS 14 or later, a Libre sensor, and a LibreLinkUp follower account. The site walks you through the setup. It takes about two minutes of phone-app clicking.

I built this for myself and I use it all day. My phone stays in my pocket now, and my watch is back to telling me to stand up. If you use a Libre and a Mac, give it a try and tell me what you think. What should it do next? I’m leaning toward low-glucose notifications.

It looks like my favorite app, LogRaker, is now available on the Mac App Store!

Go and give it a try!

Oh, and by the way, here are some screenshots of LogRaker

The worst part of working in pixels all day isn’t the pixels. It’s that pixels taught me everything can be nudged one pixel to the left and undone. Then I go paint a wall, mow the lawn, or glue a fin on a model rocket, and my brain demands pixel precision from materials that have never heard of Control+Z/Command+Z.

Fellow pixel people: how do you turn it off?

A few days ago, I wrote about LogRaker, a new app I was testing. Today, with the Version 1.8 update, they added widget support. Time to dig in some more to see what else has been added. Super cool tool. Go and check it out at https://lograker.app.

Workslop (noun) – The flood of low-quality, AI-generated work that looks polished on the surface but is hollow underneath. It clogs inboxes, reports, and project folders with half-baked writing, shallow analysis, and factual slush that others have to fix, rewrite, or ignore.

In short, workslop is the illusion of productivity without the substance of real work. It wastes time, erodes trust, and turns collaboration into a cleanup duty.

Every so often, I catch myself thinking about why I design my classes the way I do.

College is the real world. My students aren’t waiting for life to begin after graduation; they’re living it right now. Working jobs. Raising kids and balancing a million things.

So when I build assignments, I don’t pretend we’re in some academic bubble. I try to make my classes reflect what it’s actually like out there: teamwork, deadlines, problem-solving, communication, and showing up even when it’s hard.

It’s a reminder to myself: I’m not “preparing” students for the real world.

I’m teaching in it.