⚠ Content warning I talk about using AI to do stuff in this post. I know some of you want nothing to do with that. The parts actually written by AI are indicated.
I worked with Claude Code, using the amazing Impeccable skills, to clean up the layout and typography here. We spent about an hour and a half and I'm pleased with the results. Things are cleaner and more consistent.
The thing that scares me about how good LLMs are getting is that before long, everything is going to look good, and sound good. Everything will be well-written. The world is gonna be boring as hell.
I used Kevin's Boring Weather app instead of my janky shell script for annotating today's image. It's 90% of what I need. I might beg for the remaing 10%.
I'm a little ashamed to admit that I may have finally done it. I've been using Obsidian for notes/planning for a couple of weeks and it's working really well. I don't love the UI or editing a lot of text there, but the tooling around it makes it quicker and easier to get to useful than Emacs and Org mode. For me, anyway. Although I'm writing this in Emacs, so I'm obviously still working through the details :).
I'm testing MacWhisper for dictation and translations. Sometimes I don't feel like typing. You're soaking in it.
I really need to clean up some of the typography and layout around here. It feels off in a bunch of small ways. Remember that time like a week ago when I completely rebuilt this blog and then stopped posting here? That was pretty much the definition of me. Update
I don't like the way I feel when Claude is down.
I guess I'm posting this here, today. The past few days have been all about Ghost over at Coping Mechanism so that's enough of that, right?
I don't suffer from burnout, but I might die from fizzle-out, though.
synapsmedia/ghost-theme-editor:
Edit theme files directly inside Ghost Admin with a completely client-side editor.
This solves a real problem with running a Ghost blog and just wanting to make a few little tweaks to the theme.
Now that I have the various post types sorted here, I'm pretty sure I can live without the daily blog. The wildcard now is Coping Mechanism. I like using Ghost. I like the ActivityPub integration, built-in comments, emails, and analytics. I even like the editor, most of the time. And I really like just dragging images into it. I'm not sure I want to give it up, but I'm even less sure that I want two blogs that do essentially the same things.
I plan to avoid most news and all social media for a week. It's to the point where, between the daily barrage of horrible, incompetent people doing stupid, horrible things and the incessant misinformed chatter about all of it on social media, I'm going to lose my shit. I need a brief respite in order to reset.
Since I'm mostly only using macOS right now, I've punted on the NetNewsWire <--> Miniflux connection. There has been something off about it for a while. I've moved all my NNW feeds into the iCloud synced collection and it's working better.
Jane Bown is one of my favorite photographers. She commonly used an Olympus OM-1n with the Zuiko 85mm f/2 lens. I happen to have that exact setup, so I went Jane Bowning with a roll of HP5.
Alan Jacobs on the Iron Laws of the Comment Section:
- Those who have read and understood the post, whether they agree with it or not, will email you if they have something to say.
All of the rules sound right, but that last one nails it. It's one reason why I have a "Reply by email" link instead of comments.
"README-driven development" is a phrase Simon Willison used and it's kind of perfect.
I'll never understand why people get such a boner over ridiculing someone else's code. It's not a good look.
I've been using macOS exclusively for about a week and I'm a little embarrassed to admit how smooth things have felt. Not because of macOS specifically, but because I don't need to worry about keeping things set up and synced on Linux, too. I've been worrying about it a lot lately. More than that, I've spent a dizzying amount of time on it and taking a break from all that has been a relief.
The advantage of using macOS is that all of the comfort food software I love is there. I get my photo processing workflow the way I like it. I get all my little utilities like PopClip and Keyboard Maestro and Alfred. I get Tinderbox and DEVONthink. I get dead-simple sync via iCloud and backups using Time Machine. Trying to replicate this is an unrealized dream for me when using Linux.
There's a lot of friction introduced by managing two OSes on two or three computers. I don't enjoy it and I'm not sure it's worth the trouble.
The benefits I get from Linux are real, but they are more about philosophical alignment than about practical day-to-day computing. I'm convinced that one day I'll switch fully to Linux, but I'm not quite ready yet.
I'm spinning today. I want to do everything at once.
One of the things I did was completely revamp my Obsidian vault, with Claude Cowork's help. I wouldn't have done it without the help. Made the whole thing consistent, easy, and complete. Don't ask yet why I'm even looking at obsidian.
Last week I impulse-ordered a FiiO Echo Mini because it's cute and isn't expensive.
I've been listening to it daily. It's a fun and rather good audio player for the price, but as a device it is nowhere near in the same league as the iPod Classic. Maybe I'll pair it to the car and use it on the road. For around-the-house listening, the iPod wins.
If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.
E.B. White
Good lord, just look at all the 3D-printed cameras! I had no idea.
(via 82MHz)
Much of yesterday was swallowed by converting this blog from Hugo to Eleventy (Like Twitter, I'll probably never call it Build Awesome 🙄). I wondered if I'd wake up today feeling like I'd made a mistake. So far, I don't miss Hugo. It's only been a day, though. Whether I continue to like the design is another story. I meant for it to be basic and simple, then decided to put everything on the home page. I like the individual pages, but home is pretty messy. That's probably OK, since most people read this via RSS anyway.
It has been 0 days since I changed blogging platforms on baty.net.
That said, for $200 a month (or $20), you have a team of cybercriminals on tap that you can call at any time. You are now an absolute elite hacker, if you take time to learn some basics. Congratulations! Seeing state-level cyberweapons become a commodity is kind of a new thing, and I thought you should know about it.
It's a wild world out there. I'm a little nervous about it.
Today has been a whirlwind of indecision. It started with wanting to write a daily post (you're soaking in it), but I couldn't decide which blog to post it on. There are three good candidates. I'm choosing this one.
And then there's Emacs. I've spent a lot of time tidying up my config and it's still kind of a mess. It's starting to wear on me. Sometimes I want things to be clever and cool, but sometimes I just want it to be easier. I launched Obsidian yesterday, if that tells you how bad it is. Thankfully, I've come to my senses and I am typing this in Emacs. Phew!
I think it's time to stop worrying about where I put notes or in what format. I record my weight in daily Denote files. It's a simple line like "Weight: 208.2". I asked claude code to help me generate reports based on it, and in 10 minutes I had a fancy HTML page with dynamic charts and stats as well as the emacs lisp function to update it on demand. Kind of wild. Seems like these days I could parse just about anything and put it just about anywhere.
