Journal

I swear some days I want to single-handedly bring back single-use devices.

Remember when I used wttr to show the weather like this?

   _`/"".-.     Light snow
    ,\_(   ).   8(-7) °F
     /(___(__)  ↗ 14 mph
       *  *  *  3 mi
      *  *  *   0.0 in

Historically, the day after getting a COVID booster, I would feel pretty crappy. So far this morning I'm only suffering from a sore arm. This one was from Pfizer rather than Moderna, so we'll see.

I waffle between wanting a boring, simple, clean blog and one that's fun and wild and odd and playful. My heart says the latter but my head says the former. Head wins for now, I guess.

Could I have a Denote plugin for Logseq please? I don't even know it should do, but I want one.

Yesterday I wrote that I've lost interest in everything. A few people reached out to make sure I was ok. That was so nice. The blogging community is wonderful, isn't it?! I just want to say that, yes, I'm fine. I was just noticing that I was feeling in a bit of a funk and writing about things helps me think through them. Thank you all for the encouraging words.

Watching my GoAccess logs on the new server, it looks like around 50% of the visits to my blog are via RSS. And there are surprisingly few 404 errors.

I had my annual physical today. I left with the Doctor saying, "I have no concerns." which I'm happy about. My mom's family has a history of Cardiomyopathy, also known as "Dutch Heart Disease", so I mentioned this again and this time he sent me for an EKG and chest X-Ray. The results already came back with "I see no issues with your scans" so whew. My blood pressure is a little high but my Cholesterol is normal. Now if the blood work comes back clean I'll feel pretty good.

Rolling my own theme?

I like the PaperMod theme, but I don't want it to look like the PaperMod theme. Or at least not like everyone else's PaperMod theme. It's just that I suck at layout/CSS so if I decide to dive in I'll get frustrated and things will break.

Right now I've installed the theme as a Hugo "module". This is an easy way to do it, but it might be too much an abstraction for my taste. Another option is to check it out as a git submodule, but that has its own issues.

A third option, and the one I'm considering, is to install the theme in my themes/ folder but not as a submodule. I'll just roll it right into my repo and pretend it's mine :). This makes updates more work since it'll no longer be a simple "hugo mod -u" or "git submodule update --recursive --remote". I'll need to diff and merge by hand. This is fine, since sometimes themes break after updates.

This way I'll have local copies of all of the theme's templates and I can edit them at will.

I've lost interest in everything

Please allow me to gripe for a moment.

Over the past month or so, I've noticed that my reactions to things are generally, "Meh".

I used to eagerly fire up my RSS reader to see what fun, cool things I could learn about. Lately, I just scroll aimlessly through my feeds, skim a couple of posts, shrug, and move on. Nothing is interesting enough to stop me in my tracks and send me on an adventure. That used to happen at least once or twice a day.

I roll my eyes at each new "crisis" on social media. Not because I don't care about things, but I'm weary of people posting their (typically uninformed) takes on every little thing.

I haven't picked up a camera in weeks. My photos are boring. And I'm finding other people's photos boring as well, and that never happens.

Finding a show or movie to watch is an exercise in time wasting and scrolling and watching trailers. I'll find something, watch ten minutes of it, and quit. Same thing with books, and I love books.

The only reason I'm still blogging every day is for lack of anything better to do. I switch blogging platforms all the time, but it's just a distraction with no real goal.

Winter doesn't bother me. The short days are fine with me. I can't blame the weather. I'm just in a funk and I need to pull out of it because this isn't much fun.

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

Editing Kirby content via the server's panel

I can't remember why I switched to managing the blog via a local Kirby instance. Probably because I was doing so much customization that the content vs code syncing was confusing me. Now that development changes have settled down, I'm using the server panel for publishing. I'll cross the how-to-sync-code-vs-content-changes bridge with I get to it.

Sync is where it gets tricky

My OpenBSD experiment that I (almost) ended has been going surprisingly well. I've got most of the basic settings configured and I have a real window manager (xfce) running. The whole idea of setting up the laptop is that it will be a bare-bones system for mostly writing/blogging/browsing. Should be easy, right? Just Emacs and my org directory. Except no. I need a bunch of dotfiles, espanso macros, passwords, git, and some shell scripts all synched. Lots of work still to do, it seems. Syncthing is running, but that was a trick. Now to work on dotfiles, since I hadn't been worrying about synching those for years now.

RSS feeds and daily notes

This should show up as an update in the RSS feed. I'm mostly just testing here.

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.

Yesterday, I powered down the Synology, pulled out the bad drive (it required no tools) and put the new drive in its place.

I booted it up and was told that the pool was degraded and needed repair. I clicked Repair and 8 hours later everything is running smoothly. I didn't need to restore files from a backup or anything.

Of course this means that I'm second-guessing my move to the Mini. The Synology has always been easy to manage and has just worked. My unease about how to fix it if something breaks is probably unnecessary.

Great, now I have two servers to deal with. This is how I "fix" things and I need to stop it.

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 "simplify" part means I should choose the simple option. An example of this is that I'll be narrowing my eyes at anything that needs to be paired, synced, or charged. Opt for the other thing where feasible.

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.