“Nuke & Pave” typically means wiping a computer’s hard drive and installing everything from scratch. That’s not what I’m doing (although it is tempting). What I’m doing is more like a precision strike. (I’ll stop using military analogies, now. They’re gross.)

Things get out of hand, and when they do I need a reset. Right now my blogs, email, file-storage, and note-taking are all very much out of hand. I’m writing this post as a way to sort it out in my head.

Blogging. I’ve been posting to four websites for a couple of weeks. It starts innocently enough, but then I get to a space where I want to write something but don’t because I can’t decide where it should go. I’m dropping everything but the wiki and this blog at baty.net.

Email. OMG Mutt is so great. So is Notmuch and Mu4e and even Apple Mail. I’ve been switching between them for a while now and it’s done nothing but mess with my muscle memory and cause weird sync issues. I don’t get that much email, so I’ll be dropping back to Apple Mail in the near term. I’ll still be running mbsync daily just to have a nice local Mailbox copy of all my mail.

Note taking. Good grief, it’s been a rough couple of weeks on the note-taking front. Face it, I’m an Emacs guy. I’ve been an Emacs guy for more than a decade. And yet, I found myself spending many hours installing and configuring NeoVim and LazyVim for some reason. It’s not completely crazy, as I still use Vim as my $EDITOR, but that’s only for popping in and out of simple text or config files. I need to stay in Emacs. I’ll keep the Vim stuff around because I’ve done all that work, but there’s no way I’m going to live there. And Obsidian can fuck right off.

I got mad recently because I wanted to jot something down and didn’t know where to put it. I launched Obsidian because Daily Notes work great there. Stop it! To help avoid that urge, I’ve added some quality of life improvements to my Org-mode/Denote setup. Let’s hope that works.

I don’t know where this leaves Tinderbox. Still noodling on that one.

Otherwise, my notes go in Denote files using Emacs or in TiddlyWiki.

File Storage. This one I haven’t dealt with yet. I have files scattered everywhere and it’s crazy-making. There’s the Synology with my archives, but there’s also the Mac Mini with what was going to be my Archives until I chickened out. Now there’s some files in both places and some in one or the other. Not cool. I’m currently leaning toward punting on the Mini and putting it all back on the Synology.

There are a few more areas that need a reset. I’ll get to them later.