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”.

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.

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!

(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?

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!”

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.

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.