Notes

“The dogs bark, but the caravan moves on”

I sometimes tire of hitting C-x C-c C-this C-that all day in Emacs. When that happens, I think about Evil mode. When that happens, I think about Doom Emacs. I installed Doom this morning and started merging it with my config. It lasted a few minutes. Doom is fancy and refreshing and ultimately frustrating. Back to vanilla.

A nice little thing: The light in my toaster oven comes on automatically when there’s 30 seconds left on the timer. It makes me smile every time, for some reason. It’s as “smart” as an appliance needs to be.

Yesterday, I exported all of the content from the wiki and converted it into an Obsidian vault. Why? I’m not sure. Just to see if I could, I guess. I kind of wanted to see how it “felt” having all 4000 of my wiki notes in Obsidian. It’s different.

“We must not admire those who own great possessions, but those who have the strength to do without them. For it is not he who has little, but he who desires more, that is poor. The man who is not in need is not the one who has much, but the one who can go without much.”

Musonius Rufus

I keep seeing comments like, “I don’t use community plugins in Obsidian because I don’t want to be dependent on something one guy works on in his spare time.” Then they go about the rest of their day using a dozen other things made by one guy in his spare time.

After years using various “Read Later” apps and services, I recently decided to go simple and just use Safari’s Reading List feature. It works as well as the others…in that I never read anything later there either.

I’m in a weird mood today, so Wet Leg is appropriate.

#NowPlaying

Before I went out of town yesterday, I mentioned that I might be moving back to Hugo from Ghost (again). I wasn’t sure I’d actually do it, come the light of day, but I did it.

I swore off Evil-mode in Emacs a while ago. It often feels like a kludge and some packages I use, namely Howm, don’t work with it at all. But I still spend time in a terminal, terminal apps, and Vim, and bouncing between Vim and Emacs bindings is crazy-making and I’m not enjoying it.

So my little essay about the computer, why I’m not going to buy a computer, was just a part of my strategy to try to keep myself whole as a human being. I don’t want my life to be lived for me by a machine."

– Wendell Berry, referring to his 1987 essay, “Why I am Not Going to Buy a Computer”

I just want to choose a service without feeling like I’m also committing to an ideology.

I can’t seem to read fiction anymore. Every time I pick up one of the novels I’ve started recently, I find myself saying, “Don’t care.” and I put it back down. Non-fiction is faring much better.

Ghost is nice, but it still makes me feel like I’m living in someone else’s space. There’s a sort of background hum of “this isn’t really yours”, and it bothers me. I haven’t decided yet if it bothers me enough to do anything about, though.

I find that I’d much rather look at these janky Polaroids than any super-sharp-and-clean hi-megapixel digital image.

It’s funny how when I move something for like the fifth time, I think to myself, “There, now I never have to move that again!”

I’ve noticed that I’ve started posting things with an eye toward getting more attention online, and I hate myself for it. Might be time to pull back for a bit.

Why can’t they make players with big, obvious, differentiated Play/Pause/Stop buttons. My CD and Blu-ray players require a magnifying glass and a flashlight to find the right buttons.

Here’s a stupid idea I’m thinking about trying. What if I were to write all my posts in Emacs and render them locally using Hugo. Then, copy and paste the rendered HTML into the Ghost editor for publishing? A bonus with that approach would be that when I inevitably end up back to using Hugo for the blog, all the content will already be there 😁.

I’ve been using my new MacBook Air for a few days. I just now did a search (using Google, by default) and noticed that I’d not yet installed the Kagi extension. If I didn’t notice, I must not have missed it, so I canceled my subscription.