It happened again and it was so satisfying.
Canceled my SetApp subscription
At $10/month, SetApp is a good deal, especially if you use more than a handful of the included Apps. I've been a subscriber since early on.
I have two Macs, so the subscription is $15/month. Still a good deal, but I did the math and realized that I could purchase most of the apps I use outright for less than a 1-year SetApp subscription for a single Mac.
This wasn't always the case. For a while there, I had a couple dozen apps installed. My goal this past year has been to whittle that down to the essentials. Here's what I ended up with as of this morning.
Not bad, but after this morning's App uninstall fiasco, I thought I'd see how many more apps I could live without. After all this, I feel like I only need Forklift, and Popclip, so those are the only things I've purchased individually so far.
Eventually I'll probably cave and buy Soulver, because it can be super handy for some things. And I'm sure I'll miss HoudahSpot, but for $6, Find Any File is a reasonable substitute for the way I use it.
So, I've canceled my SetApp subscription. This has already given me the FOMO jitters, but I'm trying to resist the feeling as long as I can.
[Repost] My new notetaking system: Don't take notes
I wrote the following in 2021 but can't find where I posted it, and I'm feeling it again, so I'm recording it here
It feels like everyone (or at least those in my bubble) is consumed by the “how” of note-taking. Tools, workflows, processes, backlinks, and on and on. Obsidian? Roam? Paper? It’s fun to explore and interesting to read about and there is no end of things to distract myself with.
None if it really matters, though. We endlessly split hairs and wring our hands and gaze at our navels over irrelevant minutiae around taking notes. It’s exhausting.
As an attempt to extract myself from this loop, I think I'll stop taking notes for a while. This doesn’t mean I’m going to stop writing/blogging. Blogging isn’t note-taking. Nor is journaling. I’ll still do that. What I won't be doing is jotting down my recent thoughts about minimalism or digital record-keeping or the details of a conversation I had with a colleague or how much I paid for the printer paper I just ordered. Who cares?
No more Org vs Obsidian vs Tinderbox vs The Archive or what-have-you until I stop obsessing over which is better or more private or more open source or if it uses the right flavor of Markdown. No more worrying about whether I’m taking “smart” enough notes or if this note should be “evergreen” or not. How long should a zettel be, anyway?
There are lots of smart, productive, happy people around who take very few notes and aren’t missing anything. I'd like to be one of those people for a minute.
I want to just walk around the seaside village all day, making small watercolor paintings of things I observe. I would do that, but I rarely leave the house in my boring midwestern suburb and I can't paint for shit.
It's gotten out of hand.
Thursday, June 05, 2025
Maybe I'd blog better if I was a more gooder writer.
I took a roll's worth of frames today, but on four different film cameras, so I still don't have anything new to process.
I can't even be bothered to blog about it
The past week has been weird for me, blog-wise. Normally, I fire up a daily post every morning because I want to. I then keep my eyes peeled for interesting things to post about. I like posting stuff on the blog. Lately, though, I haven't felt like it.
Examples?
After many years of wanting a Rolleiflex, I bought one a couple weeks ago. I'm excited about it and I have thoughts about it, so why haven't I posted anything?
I've started using Howm (rather than Denote) for most of my notes. This is big, right? Yet as far as blogging about it? Crickets.
I don't know what's wrong with me, but I just don't feel like doing the work. This would be fine if I was doing something else instead. But I'm not. Instead of writing, I'm not writing, is all.
Anyway, I'm sure this is just a phase. At least I hope that's all it is. For once I'm not changing platforms again as an excuse to post something, so that's good, I guess.
Kazuyuki Hiraoka, author of the Howm Emacs package:
If you don’t organize notes, it’s wearisome to read them.
If you try to organize notes, it’s wearisome to write them.
got that right.
I know people throughout history have successfully used Rolleiflexes for all kinds of documentary photography and photojournalism, but have they ever tried following a toddler around?
I've not quite gotten the hang of the Rolleiflex, apparently.
This is expired Kodak Portra 400 (Expired 2012).
Monday, June 02, 2025
While visiting my grandson this morning, I finished a roll of expired Portra 400 in the Rolleiflex. When I got home, I didn't feel like developing the roll. C-41 processing is a whole thing. It's not hard, but I don't love it. Still, I'm usually excited to at least see what's on the roll. Today, I wasn't. Not a great sign.
Sunday, June 01, 2025
There are things I want to talk about, but I don't feel like writing any of it.
Mike Hall: There's an addressable market of 1.
What finally made it "work," if our definition of "work" is "make code that does what I want with about as many obvious bugs or issues as if I'd devoted months to this project starting from scratch..."
You see, that's what LLMs are good for. They may not be smart enough to write production-level, professional code, but goddamn if they're not great for helping normal people whip up things that would have been next to impossible for them just a year ago. I do it all the time.
LLMs today are like desktop publishing software in the late 1980s. Using Claude feels like when I first got hold of an Apple LaserWriter and PageMaker. Suddenly, I could make things, all by myself. Didn't matter whether I was "qualified" or not.
Running on FreeBSD
As of Sunday, June 1, 2025 at 10:00 AM, all of my sites (including this one) are being served using Caddy on a FreeBSD server from Vultr.
Yesterday everything was on an Ubuntu server at Hetzner. I would have prefered to stay at Hetzner, but they don't seem to offer FreeBSD.
Why have I done this? I don't really know. Many years ago (early 2000s), I ran FreeBSD for all our client's servers. We only moved to Linux because "that's where everyone was headed" at the time. I'd always liked FreeBSD, so I wanted to try it again.
So far, it's as simple as I remember. Everything feels tight, if that makes sense.
Anyway, it was a good excuse to learn something new.
Looks like I accidentally took a photo of a hole in the universe.
(Either that, or there's a problem with the film negative.)
I can't explain why I like listening to my old cassettes so much. All I can say is that I'm having a blast.
Now Playing: Rush, "Roll the Bones"
In 2010 I would walk around with the Hasselblad and a roll of Tri-X and take photos of just about anything. This is a spring from a train car. I like how it turned out.
Friday, May 30, 2025
I've been going through my Lightroom library and noticed a couple things. First, I used to just walk around with a camera and take pictures of things. Some of them are pretty good. Second, my Lightroom catalog has everything and I'm wondering if abandoning it was a good idea.
My mates at lunch today are all in with AI. One works at a startup, the other for a large manufacturer. Both manage development and product teams. Both claim to be "10 times more productive since using AI." One said, "I get things done now that I'd never even attempted before AI."
A counterpoint to all the "AI is useless and stupid!" discourse out there, I guess.
A new Notes section
One of the reasons for my Ghost/ActivityPub experiment was to try to better integrate both short and long posts. Since that didn't pan out, I started thinking about how I might manage it with Hugo.
It turned out to be relatively easy. I added a /content/notes folder. Then I made a tweaked Hugo list template that doesn't render a title and instead displays the entire post content rather than just a summary. And finally, I added a custom RSS feed just for notes.
To create new notes I use a small Emacs lisp function I wrote which creates the proper folders and Markdown file and populates the YAML front matter. This makes posting quick notes quick and easy.
Here's the Notes page. /notes.
Everything that goes in /notes is cross-posted to Mastodon using EchoFeed. All in all, I like how it works.
I spent hours yesterday watching YouTube videos about photographers. Ernst Haas, Winogrand, Helen Levitt, Irving Penn, Tish Murtha, etc. I loved it, but so help me if I don't get out and make some of my own pictures soon what am I even doing?