This week MacSparky is sponsored by Making Light Candles, my favorite source for candles (both as gifts and for myself). There is something special about lighting a candle. It’s a ritual we humans have been doing for a long time, and I find it an excellent way to stay focused and in the moment.

Making Light Candles are great for this. It’s a small family business with over forty years of experimentation and a solid commitment to sustainability. They use all-natural soy waxes, cotton wicks, reusable and recyclable containers, and a carefully curated collection of beautiful fragrances.

With a Making Light subscription, you (or your loved one) will get a monthly delivery of several Making Light candles, matches, and a nice note.

And when you gift a Making Light subscription, you’re helping spread the idea of focus. The subscription is based on using the candle as a ritual to do something you love. I treat these candles as special and burn them only when working on my most important projects. The ritual of lighting the candle, the smell, and the entire process now triggers my brain into focus mode. It’s like a shortcut but for your brain. When I’m done, I blow out the candle, and it waits for the next time I need to engage in that project.

These rituals work on our brains. They help you stay focused and more in the moment for the most important things you do. When you give a Making Light subscription, tell your recipient about this idea and how this is your small way to help them with their essential work. They’ll appreciate that.

And while you’re doing it, you’ll know you are helping a small family-owned and operated company that focuses on making the best products and giving back. (One of my favorite things about the company is their focus on teaching kids to make candles and burn wax instead of their brains on social media.)

Best of all, use the code “Sparky” and get a $10 discount code on any new subscription. This offer is time-limited, and the holidays are approaching, so don’t miss out.

This week MacSparky is sponsored by a killer Mac utility, TextSniper. TextSniper is a Mac OCR app that can extract text anywhere on your Mac’s screen and automatically save it to your clipboard, so you can paste it anywhere you need it. It can even read the text to you. The whole thing works a lot like the built-in screen capture on the Mac, just way more powerful. You know those websites that won’t let you copy text? With TextSniper, you can. Do you know the pain of getting a phone number out of a document? It’s easy with Text Sniper.

That’s not all. With TextSniper, you can:

• Quickly get text from PDFs, Zoom calls, Presentations, and Videos.
• Read QR codes and barcodes.
• Get text out of just about any image format, including JPG, PNG, GIF, TIFF, and BMP.
• TextSniper also doubles as a QR code and barcode reader. It can even read the text back to you with its Text to Speech Engine.

I use this app often. It’s made by a developer who spends much time making it the best capture utility on the Mac. You can even use your iPhone or iPad camera to take a photo for TextSniper to perform its magic. Just last week I used TextSniper to pull text out of a paused YouTube video. Yup. You can do that.

Moreover, in an era where so much software is more about data mining than giving you a service, TextSniper doesn’t collect your data. The text recognition is processed on your Mac and does not require an internet connection.

TextSniper works with macOS Catalina and later and also works with Parallels Desktop

Get TextSniper now and enjoy the fastest way to copy uncopyable text, wherever you find it. Use promo code TSMS2023 to get an additional 25% off.