Our near-blizzard conditions continue today. Alice had a hard time finding a place to poop on our walk this morning.

Oh, by the way I’ve switched back to Hugo for the blog

After yesterday’s Kirby->Hugo-Kirby debacle, I’ve been thinking about why I spend so much time farting around with and on my blog. Fair question, and one I don’t really have an answer to. I guess it’s my little place on the internet and I like to have the furniture arranged just so. But “just so” changes all the time, so I keep trying new configurations. It’s fun. Also useless, and nobody but me cares, but still.

Have you ever been so enamoured with plain-text-static-html publishing that you’re willing to burn down a month of implementing a blog using Kirby CMS in order to go back to using Emacs and Markdown and Hugo?

I have.

I spent some time in Obsidian again yesterday. I do this once a month or so just to see if somehow it’s changed into something I’d like to use. Obsidian is great software, in theory, but I still find it boring and unpleasant to actually use.

A few months ago I became twitchy about my aging Synology so I replaced it with an old Mac Mini. The idea was that I understand how Macs work and if something breaks I can more easily deal with it.

I never unplugged the Synology, though. You know, just in case.

A week ago I started getting emails from the Synology that Drive 1 was failing. What I should have done is to unplug the thing and move on. But what I did was to order a new 8TB Seagate Ironwolf drive.

If forced to come up with a theme for 2024, I’m going with “Reduce & Simplify”.

I haven’t formally defined it yet, but the gist of it is to use what I already have, remove things I rarely use, and rely on fewer, simpler things.

Having many choices is great, until it’s not. I crossed that threshold a while ago and it’s not good for my brain.

So, one app per task. One notebook. One bag. Less software. Consolidate and remove. Those sorts of things.

The more I lean into using Org-mode files for everything, the more isolated I’m feeling. It may be irrational, because “plain text”, but having to export or otherwise translate everything when I post to my blog or other tools is becoming less fun. Org-mode Island is beautiful, but lonely.

Later: Jeremy Friesen reacts to the above with his take on the isolation of using Org-mode. Here’s some follow up.