Misc

Cory Doctorow The availability of a deep, digital, searchable, published and public archive of my thoughts turns habits that would otherwise be time-wasters — or even harmful — into something valuable. What a great piece by Doctorow. It inspired my previous post and made me want to write here more (in addition to pouring stuff into the wiki).

Things have been stagnating around here. I haven’t felt like doing any capital-B Blogging. Rather, I’ve been pouring stuff into rudimentarylathe.wiki. It’s just easier to have the daily notes tiddler open and type as I go. No need to come up with titles or worry about whether I have enough words put together to justify a new post. Writing blog posts is a Whole Thing™. This blog started out as a place for me to share photos and their supporting processes and gear. Later, I combined it with my other blog(s) in an effort to consolidate my “presence”. Instead of writing more, which is what I expected to happen, I write almost never. ...

I take all my notes in TiddlyWiki now, and publish most of them to rudimentarylathe.wiki. For the past few years, I’ve published my wiki using TiddlyWiki. I write daily, publicly sharable notes there. Private stuff goes elsewhere…or did, until yesterday. It’s the “elsewhere” part that drove me nuts. I have a private Roam database in which I would track things I don’t want to share. Or maybe I should write it in Org mode. Or Obsidian, or Craft, or or or. The difficult part for me has been that I want to take a note about, say, a new camera purchase. There are two components to it, the information about the camera itself, and information about the purchase. The former is public, the latter is private. This means I create one note in TiddlyWiki and one in, let’s say, Roam. There are dozens of examples like this, and it’s crazy-making. I thought I could manage this using links or copy/paste but it sucks trying to do that. I could also make everything public or private. Neither of these are feasible. ...

I wonder what I would choose to do with my time if I didn’t share every detail of my life? Let’s find out.

Software-wise, this incredibly powerful iPad is as capable as a 2014 iPad Air 2 (the oldest iPad model that can run iPadOS 14). There is still, in my opinion, a substantial software design gap preventing iPads from being as flexible as they are powerful. Software-wise, iPadOS still lacks flow. Don’t wave Shortcuts in my face as a way of objecting. Shortcuts are a crutch. A good one, no doubt, but a crutch nonetheless. Software automation can do great things for an operating system, but if an operating system comes to depend on it to become usable, then maybe you have to rethink a thing or two. ...

It’s 2021; structured data and ~transclusion~ are still the sidewalk around the quad, while screenshots are the diagonal desire path, worn to bare dirt https://twitter.com/robinsloan/status/1388325221514432514 It’s embarrassing how true this is. His tweet was part of a short thread about Multiverse, which is something else entirely, and it’s adorable.

I’m exhausted. I think it’s because I haven’t been working in more than a month and my brain has had too much free time to “figure stuff out.” (Yes, I know how it sounds to complain about exhaustion while not having a job!) As an experiment, I’m going to live the month of May in “Easy Mode”. This means I’m going to solve problems with quick, obvious, easy solutions. I’m going to use the easy-to-use tools. And I’m going to make various processes as easy as possible. ...

I’ve been using the reMarkable 2 tablet for almost three months now. I’m often asked what I think of it. The short answer is this: I use the reMarkable tablet every day. I love writing on it, but it won’t be replacing my paper notebooks. If you are thinking about getting one, I have no reservations recommending that you do. The hardware is very nice and the experience of writing on it is terrific. It’s not exactly like paper, but it does feel analog. It feels “real”, unlike using the iPad and Apple Pencil, which feels like writing on a computer screen. ...

Here’s my star rating system for everything: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Loved it! ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ It was good ⭐️⭐️⭐️ It was OK ⭐️⭐️ I didn’t like it ⭐️ Hated it With me, everything gets 3 stars by default. Books, movies, photographs, everything: 3 stars right off the bat. I always assume that this new thing or person or conversation will be OK at the very least. This applies to more than just media. It applies to people, too. Sometimes I’m disappointed and end up with 1 or 2 stars, but more often than not I’m surprised and delighted and my opinion of something or someone goes up rather than down. ...

…skip any definitive conclusions, as we know you might change those at any time. ???? @ron on micro.blog Ron was referring to my still-forming opinions about the reMarkable tablet, but he could be referring to any number of things. I have a reputation for frequently changing up my process/tools/systems/workflows/what-have-you. This reputation is not unfounded, but for some reason I feel the need to explain (defend?) myself. Or perhaps it’s easier to describe what I’m not doing: ...

TL;DR: I’m sticking with HEY for my email, but there’s a surprise twist: I’m also sticking with Fastmail. Hear me out. I was initially disappointed with the implementation of custom domains in HEY. You can read the whole almost-rant here, but the short version is that I thought I was going to lose both my @hey.com address and my access to HEY World for quick blogging. And it would cost me $20 more per year for the priviledge. If I wanted to keep my address and HEY World, I’d have to pay for both accounts at something like $199/year. That wasn’t something I was interested in. I later learned that there is a discount for current users. This put the total at a much more reasonable $123/year for custom domains, my old address, HEY World, and the additional features of “HEY for Domains”. ...

(Updated with notes about the custom domain discount) Other than having a couple of nits to pick, I really like using HEY! for my email. After considering the pros and cons and waffling between dropping the service and going all-in, I’ve been leaning toward all-in. HEY offers an opinionated, clever, and pleasant set of features that’s not found elsewhere. A big missing piece for me has been custom domain support. ...

A New Guild System | THR Blog | Blogs | The Hedgehog Review: At a time when, as Levin points out, people tend to see participation even in such august institutions as the United States Congress as a platform for building their own personal brand, the solo-proprietor world can all-too-easily become branding all the way down and the personal website a device for constant ego-feeding. “Branding all the way down” indeed. ...

Dante Stella, The Machine Planet: Spot meters help you sort out the various tones in a scene so that you can spend 1000x the effort to get a picture that is 10% better than an averaging reflective meter used correctly. Spot meters, like communism, seem like a great idea until you try to use them on an everyday basis. I once said that spot meters are for posers. Dante seems to agree :). Other than some fine snark, the rest of the article contains a lot of good information about light meters. ...

I got my first Kindle in 2007. I had given up on Amazon letting me do the Most Obvious Thing, which is to use the current book’s cover on the lock screen. But, after 13 years, I finally can! Finally! (I’ll probably decide to disable it when reading “Fifty Shades”, though)

Writers spend way too much time and money seeking out their “grail” pen and paper combo — the tools that will make their work so much “smoother.” It’s a pattern we’ve seen repeated in all creative pursuits. CJ Chilvers Why does he quote “smoother” here? Is that from something? It’s an odd word for describing creative work. I’m happy that Chilvers has a setup that works for him and that he doesn’t feel a need to try anything else. A little envious, even. On the other hand, I don’t love the insinuation that people who try different tools are somehow on a futile and unnecessary quest that can never lead to anything other than frustration and reduced creative output. OK, that might be me reading too much into it, but, isn’t it possible that some people simply enjoy trying new things? Can the search for better or more enjoyable tools never be more than just blind consumerism or creative procrastination? ...

Everything in my life has become overwrought, overthought, overdone, and needs to be unwound. Today, I’m dealing with this blog at copingmechanism.com. A few weeks ago I decided to go back to using WordPress (again), and dammit I’m going to try sticking with it this time. But, I don’t like any WordPress themes. There are thousands of them, and I can never find one that works for me. Oh, I find a lot of them that make me say, “Ooh, cool!” and install immediately and say, “There, that’s nice!” ...

It feels like the entire world (or at least my corner of) is consumed by the “how” of note-taking. Tools, workflows, processes, backlinks, and on and on. Obsidian? Roam? Paper? I read it all. It’s fun and interesting and there’s no end of things to distract myself with. A distraction is all it is. None if it really matters, though, and yet we endlessly split hairs and wring our hands and gaze at our navels over irrelevant minutiae. It’s exhausting. I’m not one of those people who wear “I never change my system” as a badge of honor. I can’t seem to stop. I’m too curious for that. FOMO and all. ...

Dante Stella pokes accurate fun at videos about still photography. Or check out their stylish walking around, contemplating… stuff while wearing messenger bags. Sir, we all know that’s a camera bag and that it will crush the life out of even the most carefully basted sportcoat shoulders. A gentleman would never carry anything larger and cruder than a Contax T, which slips handily into the pocket of any pocket of any piece of clothing. ...

When I started using Roam, I found the way it handled backlinks to be a revelation. Other software does backlinks, but Roam’s implementation made it feel new. Suddenly, backlinks felt necessary. I started writing everything in Roam’s Daily Notes, and I’d link things by putting brackets around each word or phrase that I thought I might want to review later. I made lots of links. After a while, I noticed that many (most?) of these linked words and phrases would end up as empty Roam pages containing nothing but backlink references. ...