Journal

I have an irrational urge to get a 19-inch CRT and a VCR.

I spent several hours changing emacs to startup as a daemon. It turned out to be frustrating, over-complicated, and I didn't really gain anything. I then spent more hours changing things back to how they were before I started. So, that was fun.

I'm fascinated withl Anddo. "A very simple todo package for Emacs"

I love the first day of a new month. I get to print new calendars, review photos from last month, create a new monthly spread in my notebook, etc. It always feels like an opportunity. I usually squander it, but still.

To create a post like this one, I run an emacs function to create the markdown file. Then I pick an image to use. Then I run a script on that image to add date and weather info. Then I rename the image. Then I copy the image into the proper img/ folder. Then I copy the file name. Then I type the path and paste the filename into the front matter. It's a lot, when you think about it. Some days it makes me want to switch to Ghost or some other "real" CMS. I should ask the robots for help streamlining the process.

I'm kind of exhausted by everything online right now. Seeing that I have nearly 1,000 entries in 1Password was depressing. Everything wants an update or an upgrade or something from me that I don't want to give or receive. I just want to have a few nice, useful things and use them without interruption or ongoing costs.

I cleaned and sanded the entire deck yesterday and now my back and knees are yelling at me. Today might be a do-nothing kind of day.

Finally emptied the storage unit. It's not a good idea for me to have too many places to store stuff.

Testing the interesting new macOS photo app, Iris Photos. The idea is sound. Surfacing things from a deep photo library is helpful. I pointed it at my 2026 photos folder and it pulled everything nicely. Then, I got cocky and pointed it at everything. Crashed after about 15 minutes. One thing holding me back (even if it didn't crash and wasn't macOS-only) is the ability to edit metadata. A photo viewer is where I frequently spot things I want to include in the metadata. Iris doesn't touch the photos, so this isn't possible. Still, it's a nice-looking app that's worth keeping an eye on.

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'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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

I gotta start bugging Claude Code to help me make adding images here easier, before I'm sucked backed into Ghost.

I have many ways to listen to music. Vinyl, cassette, streaming, etc. Lately I haven't been listening to much music. I don't know why.

I cut myself on both edges of the Emacs sword. Even so, I've been having so much fun with Emacs I can hardly stand it.

I'm on my own this weekend, which isn't good for being productive in real life. I am on such a roll cleaning things up, digitally. My Emacs config, my Read Later process. Next up, backups. Or maybe more Emacs! I did make time for laundry, a water change in the fish tank, and cleaning the interior of my wife's car. Not a lot, but enough for me to finish the day doing some guilt-free farting around.

Could I just scroll your web page without shit moving all over the place, please?

The last couple days have been a whirlwind of changes to my Emacs config. I have to admit that Claude Code made quick work of things I've been avoiding for too long. My config is now cleanly cross-platform. I've removed hundreds of lines of unnecessary lisp. I removed the complexities around using the minimal-emacs starter kit. My fonts work correctly. I cut startup time in half. Tons more. I'm pretty happy with it.

I was going to post something cool I did with Claude Code's help on Mastodon but the Never LLM! hoards would scold me and I don't want to deal with it.

Someone mentioned org-roam and it reminded me how cool it is. I moved away from org-roam a couple years ago, shortly after denote was released. Denote felt lighter and less dependent on Emacs-ey stuff. Denote is great and I'm happy with it, but that didn't stop me from digging up my old org-roam config today, just to play around with it. That was 3 hours ago and I've not slowed down. I may need to revisit Using both Denote and Org-roam.

The dog's surgery went well yesterday. She had several large masses removed from her skin. This is the third time we've had to do this. The vet convinced me to send a sample out for a biopsy, even though the aspiration looked benign and cyst-like. The fact that they regrew on the same scar line as last time is concerning. Alice is recovering, but is in a lot of pain. It's killing me to hear her whine. She never whines. It'll get better, slowly.

I am (mostly) down to two blogs. I've spent a lot of time recently dialing things in with both of them. I'm enjoying both of them equally, which means it's hard to decide which one to use at any given moment. Been here before, many times. After De-ghosting my Ghost theme, I quite like that one. This one is static and has a fresh redesign. Now what?

There won't be much time for farting around today and I'm already feeling twitchy about it.

People who can do stuff like this are not the same species of human as me. Redbull downhill urban biking POV

It's not that I'm unhappy with what I'm using or doing with it. It's that I want to try something new, like, every day.

I was able to prove my ownership of a copy of DaVinci Resolve Studio so they finally sent my activation code. That was A Whole Thing, but B&H and Black Magic came through. Now to properly test the new RAW editing features in v21.

I thought I would get along fine with Ubuntu, but I've found it unreliable on my Framework 13. Same with Mint. Anyway, I'm back to Fedora/KDE, which I've come to prefer anyway.

I should probably write a long, excuse-riddled blog post about it, but I have been committed to using Obsidian on macOS for nearly a month. Thing is, I have not been able to let go of either Emacs or Linux. I can't quit them. Using macOS again has been nice. It has the software I love and, Tahoe aside, the macOS is great. What's weird is that I prefer using the Framework 13 instead of the M4 MacBook Air, so I tend to grab that when away from my desk. The final straw has been that Linux doesn't (by default) use Emacs key bindings system-wide, like macOS does. I can't live like that, so I dragged Emacs along and here I am, writing this post using Emacs on Linux.