Notes

I had an urge to give Gnome another go, so I installed Fedora Workstation over the KDE Fedora spin. It took two hours from installation to writing this post in Emacs. I’m getting better at it.

I become equally excited about moving out of Emacs for everything as I do deciding that I like using Emacs for everything. A week ago I left Emacs after a frustrating day of broken packages and configs. What a relief! This morning, I needed something from an old Org mode file so I launched Emacs and, well, now I’m back in it. What a great feeling!

See what I mean?

“Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.”

— Oscar Wilde

Well that stings a little.

Thoughts about coding with AI - 82MHz:

Using AI can lead to impressive results in no time at all, but it leaves me feeling hollow and discontent. Satisfaction and happiness comes from doing something myself, even if it may be difficult and uncomfortable in the moment. But if I avoid doing everything that’s hard and outsource all the thinking to AI, then I will pretty soon turn into a lazy and stupid blob who isn’t capable of thinking for himself anymore, and that’s a fate I want to avoid at all cost.

I understand the sentiment, but I don’t worry that I’ll become a “lazy stupid blob” if I use AI to do some gruntwork for me. I have Claude write me all sorts of helpful little shell scripts. It means I don’t have to care about how to write things like regular expressions for use in sed or whatever. I used to find that sort of thing fun, but now I just want to get to the thing I wanted the script for in the first place. It’s like, do I really want to do the long division by hand or should I just grab the calculator? Now, if learning long division is meaningful to you, then go for it.

I understand that I can seem unreliable, specifically around apps and tools and processes. Why would you invest time with me if I’ll probably change everything tomorrow? I get it.

Status: Today, I prefer Linux for everything other than photography and messaging. Those are important, so I remain conflicted.

I only write in Org mode or Orgmode or Org or org-mode or .org files.

Let me get this straight. To write a blog post, I create an outline in an Org mode file and write the post, which exports to a Markdown file, which exports to an HTML file, which I upload to a server. Got it.

I’ve added the /notes section back to the menu here. I also reformatted the templates for notes so that the full post content is displayed, rather than just the summary. This was more difficult than expected because the PaperMod theme was being clever. Too clever. I almost switched back to the Blowfish theme, but figured it out.

Looks like I’m out of the Leica SL system. I just sold the 70mm Macro lens and that’s the last of it. I’ll probably miss having a big, interchangeable-lens Leica system, but the Q2 should arrive today and that ought to help take my mind off it.

I am once again using ox-hugo for posting here. It’s been a minute, but I found my old config and yasnippets, so it wasn’t to onerous bringing it all back. So far I’m only doing these /notes this way, but I intend to roll it into the main blog also.

Greg Storey, Slop doesn’t slop itself:

If people genuinely put forth the effort to avoid digital distractions and actually create and make—not as a lifestyle hack, but simple decision making—then we’d have a much better place to live and work. Slop is deliberate, not inevitable.

Well if what we need is for people to “put forth the effort” then I guess slop is inevitable.

I went to my regular gas station yesterday. I was happy to see that they’d upgraded their pumps and now take Apple Pay. They also added giant screens that show me ads and play elevator jazz while I’m pumping gas. That’s the last time I’m going to that gas station. I’ll drive 20 miles out of town to find one that doesn’t talk to me.

One of my resolutions for 2026 is to never even launch Obsidian. It’s a red herring and a distraction.

In a newsletter I just read, the author wrote:

“If reading a book isn’t on the radar, here’s a video…”

I say, if reading a book isn’t on your radar, fix your radar!

If you want to feel like a failure when it comes to keeping a journal, check out this 700+ page chunk of Michael Palin’s diary entries from between 1969 and 1979. It’s Volume One! Not only is there a /lot/ of it, but it’s fun to read.

Excuse me while I go fill one of my pens.

I wanted to see if my my/hugo-new-note function still worked. It does. 👋

I’ve been posting over on baty.blog instead, so these notes have sort of stopped happening. How long until I’m back, do you suppose? (This one not included).

I’m not clear what I’m supposed to put in these Notes vs what I might just drop into a daily post. At one point I was syndicating them to Mastodon, but once I stopped doing that, these notes have become less useful. Still noodlin'.

Stop expecting the bare minimum:

Apple’s waited a long time to do this. Apple is known for rarely being first, but coming in and doing it right when they do enter the fray. Why do we think they’ll phone this one in when it finally does happen?

I think it’s because that Apple isn’t this Apple. I think it’s because they phoned in AI and as far as I can tell they phoned in Liquid Glass. Why do we think they won’t?