Found Negative #017. 1910s
Tuesday, May 26, 2026
What if I didn't even have a computer? Wouldn't that be something?
"What is the point of this?" is a question I've been asking myself, lately. Sometimes when I'm writing a note. Sometimes when I'm posting to my blog. Sometimes when I'm testing some new software or workflow. Sometimes when I'm just gazing off into space. I usually don't have a good answer.
I made it 30 minutes. Good cast, but the movie adds nothing and was almost aggressively unfunny.
Great cast. Not great writing. Started off strong but petered out for me. Too many plot holes. Geena Davis is attractive and all, but that was quite an age gap. I don't understand the entire sequence with the peach.
Monday, May 25, 2026
I've been having so much fun playing with software that I've accidentally over-complicated everything. Again. Time to dial it back. Again.
I'm re-staining the deck and it's not going smoothly. I thought it would be a simple scrape/clean/stain. I scraped, and I cleaned, and I cleaned again. Still, some of the old stain flakes off. I'm going to strip the whole thing down to lumber and start over. I don't love that.
Do my choices have to be black and white?
You can spend all your time scrutinizing every decision, slicing your options thinner and thinner until there's nothing left. You can reject every imperfect tool and flawed platform and compromise until you die a slow death of inconvenience, isolation, and frustration.
And when that happens, the easiest thing to do is give up entirely
Repost, but I was reminded of it yet again today.
🐹 Deep clean and optimize your Mac.
It's like a CLI version of CleanMyMac
Want to see the earliest resident monitors? The ancestor of all modern OSes (CTSS)? The earliest versions of Unix? The first OS with a desktop metaphor GUI (Xerox Star Pilot/ViewPoint)? Early versions of mainstream OSes? If you want to explore historical OSes and platforms without having to worry about configuring/installing emulators and OSes or corrupting emulated installations, you’ve come to the right place.
Amazed that this exists. I'm not an OS nerd, but maybe I will be after downloading this.
The Emacsification of Software — Quarrelsome
If you look at /r/emacs, it’s 0% Product Hunt, 100% show-and-tell.
Monday, May 18, 2026
It's getting to the point where many of the blog posts I read all say the same things. Whether it's about A.I. being good/evil, how everything is being enshittified, using the word "enshittified", that film photography slows me down and feels more real, how the "Smol web" will save us (It's spelled "small" btw), that Apple isn't what it used to be, billionaires are terrible, and so on. I often stop reading posts the minute I recognize a trope. It's not fair to the authors, really, but for now I've had my fill.
Hurray: elfeed: Fix compatibility with latest elfeed (#73). Elfeed-protocol stopped working after recent Elfeed updates. It's been fixed.
Sunday, May 17, 2026
I made a few improvements to the home page layout. Earlier attempts at distinguishing post types only made things worse and more cluttered. Now, spacing and typography is similar for all types. I think it looks less staggered. I moved metadata beneath titles and made tag links more subtle. Removed the date on Journal posts, since it was redundant. It's fun making little tweaks like this.
Thinking of starting a routine of "Unsocial Sundays" during which I avoid all social media. Today is Sunday, it's 05:52 AM, and I'm already twitchy about it. Worth a try, though.
Stick with it
A link from an earlier note lead me to:
you can stick with it | ava's blog
Trying out new tools and things is generally cool and I love reading the hands-on experiences, but in this case, I just see people running through things anxiously with no direction seeming stressed and sad.
The behavior Ava describes fits me, but only to a point. I'll tell you why.
Ascetic Computing - ratfactor by Dave Gauer resonated with me. I have been unable to "Reduce & Simplify" or "Use What I Have", even after years of trying. My definition of what "simple" means changes daily. Still working on it.
Saturday, May 16, 2026
I changed the body font here to Instrument Sans. For some reason, I find that serif fonts in blog posts feel pretentious. It's not me.
I asked Claude Code to convert my entire denote directory to use Org-roam style links. I wanted to try Org-roam again, but without losing work. Took Claude 20 minutes.
Logging life in Tinderbox
Dave wrote about his Captain's Log, into which he logs information "too trivial to remember, but too important to forget." It's a Tinderbox document.
A later post from Jacob Evans described his own "LifeBox" kept in Tinderbox.
These two posts resonated with me, as I've used Tinderbox for the same thing since 2008. See my post, Tinderbox as a Daybook, from that year.
Last year I revamped the Daybook and went all in.
Sunday, May 10, 2026
This morning started off as another "Emacs tripped me up again so I should use something else." mood. It passed, because everything else is worse in more ways.
I don't mind tinkering with Emacs, but I can't stand fixing Emacs when something goes pear-shaped. It seems like something is always going pear-shaped.
My corner of the internet this morning is nothing but navel gazing and hand wringing. I may need to go do something else for a while.
What a day for networks. My UGREEN NAS suddenly dropped off the network. Reboots didn't help, so I moved ethernet cables around. It works now, but I wish I understood why. Mostly I either jiggled or restarted everything and it started working. You just know this is going to blow up again some day.
Then, while at my parents' celebrating Mother's Day, we noticed his internet was down. Turns out his WiFi had stopped working, so Xfinity sent a new router. It seemed like the network was insisting that he set it up. So I did. Different network name/password, which meant updating every wifi-dependent device in the house. I'm just glad my dad isn't a nerd. It was mostly iPhones, the TV, and a camera. Still took an hour and a half.
FAQ: How do you use your typewriters? | Chris Aldrich
Below are some various recent uses I’ve made of my typewriter collection
I have a handful of nice typewriters that sit unused. I would really like to change that. Chris' list gives me a few ideas.
taken. — Since You Arrived Vol. IV
You opened this page. It already knows the following.
I already knew most of this, but it's still alarming to see it all at once.
Thursday, May 7, 2026
I get a lot of newsletters, the traditional way, via email. Those newsletters often contain links to interesting things. Unfortunately, people love metrics, causing many of those newsletters to obfuscate the URLs with tracking links. I don't usually bother clicking those, because I can't hover over a link and see where it's really going. The ones I do click are usually blocked by my network filters. I'm not paranoid as much as just annoyed. Parannoyed?