Drafts opens to a blank note instantly — the idea is that text lands here first, then gets routed somewhere else via actions. I use it as a frictionless capture layer: quick notes, URLs to process, things to look up later. Actions let you send the content of a draft anywhere — to Obsidian, email, reminders, a shell script, whatever. The action directory has hundreds of community-built options. Drafts on Mac syncs seamlessly with iOS, so anything captured on iPhone shows up immediately.

dupeGuru scans folders for duplicate files using exact matching or fuzzy logic — useful for music libraries where files may have slightly different tags or filenames but identical content. Three scan modes: standard (hash-based), music (tag-aware), and picture (image similarity). Open source, no cost.

Hazel watches folders and automatically moves, renames, tags, or deletes files based on rules you define. It runs silently in the background as a System Preferences pane — no app window, no fussing. I use it to keep Downloads from becoming a graveyard, auto-sort receipts and invoices into dated folders, and trigger follow-on Automator or shell scripts when specific files land in watched locations. Once the rules are set, you forget it’s there.

Primary browser since ~June 2026 (Brave is legacy/secondary). Chromium fork by imput, focused on stripping Google integration and ads without Brave’s crypto/rewards baggage.

• Bundle ID: net.imput.helium · profile at ~/Library/Application Support/net.imput.helium/Default/
• Chromium-based, so Chrome extensions work, and anything that reads Chromium history/bookmarks formats (the browser-history skill, clipper tooling) can point at the profile path above.
• The Claude-in-Chrome extension attaches to Chromium browsers — check per-session whether it’s connected to Helium or Chrome.
• Brave remains installed for the legacy profile and the odd site that misbehaves; the Brave page is retained but marked legacy.

Snapshot: 2026-07-12T06:00:05.208359 · 257 applications · 0 Homebrew casks · 0 formulas · 32 launch agents. Regenerated on every site deploy from latest-inventory.json (snapshot refreshes Sundays 6:00 AM). Page built 2026-07-18 19:00.

Curated write-ups for the apps Ed actually leans on are in the Mac Apps section sidebar — this page is the raw, complete list.

Launch agents (user)

One-tap voice recorder on iPhone/Apple Watch; recordings sync via iCloud to the Mac. It’s the capture front-end of the dictation pipeline — everything downstream (Whisper large-v3 transcription, dash-command parsing, task extraction, journal routing to Notebooks) is capture-agnostic.

• Target for recordings: ~/Sync/ED/dictation/inbox/ (the field-dictation path) and ~/Sync/farm/emlid-exports/voice-memos/ for GPS-survey voice memos.
• Status note: the dedicated field recorder was lost in June 2026 and isn’t being replaced — JPR on Watch/iPhone (or AirDrop of .mp3s into ~/Downloads, which Hazel routes to the inbox) is the capture path. Diary volume has been low since; the Ed dashboard diary section reflects that honestly rather than looking broken.
• Transcription details: whisper-transcribe.py (mlx-whisper, auto-chunks recordings >10 min; hallucination filters). See dictation pipeline docs for the full flow.

The journaling system of record since 2026-06-07. All diaries, journals, and briefings live here as iCloud books — one dated .md file per entry — replacing the old flat files in ~/Sync/ED/.

• Books at ~/Library/Mobile Documents/iCloud~com~aschmid~notebooks/Documents/<Book>/: Diary, Farm Journal, Bee Journal, Pond Journal, Planting Journal, Equipment Journal, Notes & Ideas, Morning Briefing, From Claude (reports Claude writes for Ed).
• Single write path: ~/scripts/notebooks-entry.py — every pipeline (dictation, daily briefing, Claude sessions) writes through it; never compose iCloud paths by hand.
• Cron-readable mirror (2026-07-13): macOS TCC blocks cron/launchd from iCloud paths, so notebooks-entry.py write-throughs a mirror at ~/Sync/ED/.notebooks-mirror/<Book>/. Anything running from cron (the Ed dashboard builder, check-briefing-stale.sh) reads the mirror.
• Dictation dash-commands route to books automatically (dash farm journal, dash bee journal, dash pond journal, …) — see the dictation pipeline docs.
• Web capture: the Notebooks clipper (bookmarklet/extension → note + PDF).

Obsidian stores everything as plain markdown files in a local vault — no proprietary format, no lock-in, just folders and files you own. The killer feature is bidirectional linking: notes reference each other and the graph view shows how ideas connect. I use it for the bee-hub vault itself, long-form notes, and anything I want to keep permanently searchable. The plugin ecosystem is enormous, covering everything from kanban boards to Dataview queries that turn your notes into a database. Syncs across devices via Obsidian Sync or a folder-based solution like Resilio.

Peek extends macOS Quick Look to support file types it doesn’t handle natively — including Markdown, plain text with syntax highlighting, archives (zip/tar), strings files, .env files, and more. Install it and Quick Look just works for those types. No interface to learn.

Radial is a gesture-triggered circular menu that launches apps, runs shortcuts, or fires system actions. Summoned with a mouse gesture or hotkey, it presents options in a ring around the cursor — faster to target than a linear menu because every option is equidistant. Pairs well with a drawing tablet or trackball.

Yoink solves the awkward problem of dragging files between windows or spaces — instead of juggling both source and destination visible at once, you drop files onto Yoink’s shelf, navigate wherever you need to go, then drag them out. It also works as a quick clipboard for files, staging multiple items before pasting them elsewhere. Small app, very specific job, does it perfectly.