Posts

Cricket Capture Is Live! A New Beginning for the Cricket Productivity Suite

Image
One cricket at sunset is easy to miss. Ten thousand crickets at sunset have the world's attention. Cricket Capture is live on the Chrome Web Store! This is a special moment for the Cricket Productivity Suite: our first tool is available for everyone to try. Install Cricket Capture from the Chrome Web Store Read carefully. Keep what matters. Share it thoughtfully. Cricket Capture brings highlighting, smart bookmarks and a personal research Library together in a browser extension for Chrome and Brave. Highlight while you read. Select a passage, use the floating Highlight button, the right-click menu or Alt+H, and add a note. Saved highlights reappear when you return to the same page. Some pages may not support highlighting. Save smart bookmarks. Capture the article's title, author, date and link when available, edit the details, and add your own notes and tags. Find your research again. Search your local Library, filter by tag, and export JSON backups, Markdown or CSV....
Post a Comment
Read more

How To: Get Started with Cricket Capture

Cricket Capture is a browser extension that lets you highlight articles on any website, save them as "smart bookmarks" with the title, author, date and link, and turn a good highlight into an email or X post. Everything stays in your own browser. There are no servers and no tracking, and nothing is ever posted for you. 1. Install it The Chrome Web Store listing is still under review, so for now you install it from the cricket-capture.zip file: Right-click cricket-capture.zip , choose Extract All… , then Extract . Leave the cricket-capture folder somewhere permanent, such as Downloads, because the browser loads the extension from that folder each time it starts. In Brave, type brave://extensions in the address bar and press Enter. (These steps are written for Brave on Windows 11. In Chrome the page is chrome://extensions and the steps should be the same, but we haven't tested it there.) Turn on Developer mode (top-right switch). Click Load unpacked and pick t...
Post a Comment
Read more

How To: Bridge iPhone Messages, Email and Windows

For anyone with an iPhone and a Windows PC. Checked November 3, 2026. Apple and Microsoft don't connect their messaging. No outside app can read your iPhone Messages history. Below is what works today, and where it falls short. Part A: Send new iPhone texts to email automatically What works: the iPhone Shortcuts app has a Message automation. It can run Send Email on its own, with no tap, even when the phone is locked. One-time setup (about 5 minutes) Add your email to Apple Mail. Go to Settings > Apps > Mail > Mail Accounts and add your Gmail or Outlook account. The Send Email action sends from Apple Mail. Create the automation. Open Shortcuts , then Automation, then + , then Message . (On iOS 27 go to Library > Automation > +. If you see "Describe a shortcut," tap Edit.) Choose who it applies to. Sender: pick the contacts you care about. To catch nearly everything, leave Sender alone and set Message Contains to a single space. Set it to R...
Post a Comment
Read more

How Microsoft Was Built: What the Record Shows, and What's Still a Question

Cricket has its roots in the fight over open document formats, the belief that your documents belong to you. To understand that fight, it helps to know how Microsoft was built. This post comes from a sourced timeline I put together. It keeps documented facts apart from open questions and includes my own firsthand account from the contact-manager wars. DOS: Bought, Not Built Dec 1980: Microsoft paid Seattle Computer Products (SCP) $25,000 for a non-exclusive license to Tim Paterson's 86-DOS (QDOS). Jul 27, 1981: Two weeks before the IBM PC launched, Microsoft bought all rights for another $50,000, or $75,000 total. Aug 12, 1981: The IBM PC shipped with PC DOS. Microsoft's license to IBM was non-exclusive, so it could sell MS-DOS to every clone maker. That term built the fortune. 1986: SCP sued for $60M, saying Microsoft hid the IBM deal to buy DOS cheaply. It settled while the jury was deliberating, with Microsoft paying about $925,000. Open question: Did 86-DOS copy...
Post a Comment
Read more

Welcome to the Cricket Productivity Suite

One cricket at sunset is easy to miss. Ten thousand crickets at sunset have the world's attention. Hello, and welcome. This blog is the home of the Cricket Productivity Suite, a small set of tools for people who read a lot, think about what they read, and want to keep it. The first tool: Cricket Capture Cricket Capture is a free extension for Brave and Chrome. Version 1.0.2 is finished and waiting for Chrome Web Store review. Here's what it does: Highlight while you read. Select text and click Highlight, right-click, or press Alt+H. Your highlights come back when you return to the page. Smart bookmarks. One click saves the article with its title, author, date and link already filled in, plus your tags and notes. A private, local Library. Everything stays in your browser. Nothing leaves your computer. Search, filter by tag, and export to JSON, Markdown or CSV whenever you like. X post composer. Pick a highlight, add your take, and Cricket opens X's post page with...
Post a Comment
Read more