I don’t know why, exactly, but I fired up a Ghost blog at rudimentarylathe.org. I’d planned to revivie my old Substack newsletter, so I migrated that content over to the new blog. Now, I’m not so sure I have the energy or discipline to maintain a newsletter, so the site could become a blog for when I’m not in the mood to use the static site generator on this site. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I haven’t felt like working hard enough to write complete blog posts recently, so I did the obvious thing and dusted off my old newsletter. It’s still called “The Lathe” and it’s running on a self-hosted Ghost instance at RudimentaryLathe.org. How’s that for doing the opposite of what I should?
And who knows, maybe I’ll just blog there from now on.
☀️ Clear +60°F
I never feel quite in control of the Lumix S5. Did I reset the exposure compensation? Did I return it to Auto-ISO? On the other hand, one glance at the M3 and I know everything I need to. And I can change them by feel, without menus or anything. It’s calming. The Lumix kind of stresses me out.
I’d be more interested in spending time on the Micro.blog timeline if they’d implement (private) likes. As it stands, my timeline consists almost entirely of things like “@person Nice! 👏” because there’s no other way to acknowledge something.
I really need to clean my (HHKB) keyboard. Need a key puller, first.
I’m typing this in Emacs as an Org-mode file and I guess that means Emacs and I have made up after our little tiff yesterday.
I’m also running an Emacs config based on Crafted Emacs, which is pretty minimal and easy to get one’s head around. It also means I’m continually frustrated by things not being as polished and custom as in Doom. I’m taking solace in the fact that I’m learning real Emacs this way.
This could be a good idea: A Well-known Links Resource. Basically, they suggest indexing your site’s outbound links and making them available.
I’m trying to train my fingers to use pinky-and-middle-finger for C-x and pinky-and-index-finger for C-c. It’s not going well, yet.
I can’t shake the feeling that DALL-E is the beginning of the end. The end of what, I’m not sure, but a lot, I bet.
How about letting me delete a text in Messages with a single gesture and stop asking me to confirm every time. Give me Undo, instead. Please?
I spent many hours yesterday getting my Emacs configuration running (based on Crafted Emacs) so that I could continue using Notmuch for managing email. It worked well enough, until I got up this morning and suddenly mbsync fails with some generic SASL error. I tried editing .mbsyncrc but for some reason everything in my dotfiles has changed permissions to 644 and I’m no longer owner. JFC.
And now, org-return-follows-link doesn’t work. And the list of recent files is showing a bunch of files I don’t remember opening recently, and none of the ones I do. I’m still sick, so I shouldn’t be making decisions right now, but my whole Emacs-based setup can fuck right off today.
The word “dappled” is a signal that you’re trying too hard to Write™.
It feels like I could just sit here all day and type “Nuh Uh!” to everything I read. I’m sick of everybody, so I should go relax and read some poetry. I’ve had the Mitchell translation of Rilke for a couple of months. Maybe I’ll start that.
Sometimes I forget that BBEdit can do anything.
Can you imagine how good I’d be at stuff if I’d stick with said stuff for more than a day at a time? I had to look up how to insert a Markdown link in BBEdit. I first hit C-c C-l because Emacs. Then I hit CMD-k because everything else. Nothing happened, of course, so I had to create a “Clipping” for it, which works fine, and I can assign any key I want as a trigger (e.g. CMD-k). It sucks that one, I didn’t already have a clipping for that, and two, that I had to look up how to make one.
You know what else I tend to forget? BBEdit never ever crashes or otherwise misbehaves and it’s never lost a single word of text in the 25+ years I’ve been using it.
Emacs and I have mostly settled our differences today. That was close.
Today’s photo is of the hammer coral I just added to the aquarium. It looks super cool under the blue “moon” lighting.
COVID Day 3. Cold symptoms about the same. Headache worse. Also, my eyes feel like they’re going to pop out of my head.
I’m slowly coming around to the idea that living in Doom Emacs is a mistake. It occurred to me that I don’t even know how to load a package or change a keybinding in “normal” Emacs. I only know Doom’s wrappers for those functions. This is not good.
Everyone on the internet always talks about the same things over and over and it’s become tedious and a little boring.
Speaking of tedious, is anyone else tired of me doing this every day? I’m a little tired of it.
Sometimes we forget that walled gardens can also be safe, beautiful, comfortable spaces.
This again, hard. C-x C-c
Perhaps I’m better off using software that is less configurable.
I am wildly disagreeable today.
I tested negative for COVID last night but there’s no way this isn’t COVID. Update: If you squint you can see a faint line indicating a positive test this morning. I seem to have even done a half-assed job of catching COVID.
I wonder how long I’ll have the energy and time to do this every day. Oh, I don’t know, it’s been like 20 years already, so.
We sure spend a lot of time on fancy tooling and frameworks for what boils down to the same simple CRUD apps we’ve been building for 30 years.
I have seven years of entries in my daybook.org file. I suppose that means it works for me, but it could also just be inertia.
It’s just that sometimes I tire of staring at (mostly) monospaced text in Emacs. Sometimes I don’t find it fun to have to figure out why some minor behavior isn’t working the same as it was last week. Taking notes shouldn’t be a technical challenge. I don’t always want to M-x my way through life. And yet, nothing else comes close.
Some days I want to live entirely within Emacs. Other days I’d be fine doing everything in a browser. These two modes don’t get along.
I signed up for a year of Hey.com again. I can’t explain why. I think maybe I’m exhausted from spending so much energy and time recently getting notmuch configured. It’s been a blast, but sometimes I just want something pretty and easy.
I don’t feel much like writing full-on blog posts. I still feel like typing words and publishing them, but just not in a cohesive, separate-blog-post way. I am much more into stream-of-thought posts like I’m doing here in the journal posts. It makes me think that the structure here is backwards. Maybe I should show full posts of several daily entries with a simple list of links to recent blog posts. Hmmm.
I spent way too long yesterday trying to figure out why :PROPERTIES: drawers in Org-mode were unfolded by default alluvasudden. I’m sure it’s something to do with the org-fold additions in 9.6 but still can’t make it stop.
