I talk about gear and process a lot because it helps fill the gaps left by a dearth of ideas. All of the handwringing around AI or Apple or [trending topic here] has become boring. So has the naval gazing around blogging and social media and everything. I need a new thread to pull.

Abandoning the hours I spent making little scripts and shortcuts to do the things I normally do in Emacs, but in Bear, etc. instead, I spent time yesterday doing the same thing with the Emacs versions. I feel better about that, because I’m better at Emacs to begin with, so this feels like adding on to something I have rather than starting over with something new. Speaking of Emacs, I’ve added evil-mode back into my Emacs config. Now I’m really confused. I have two conflicting sets of muscle memory, both of which I quite like, but they can’t really coexist peacefully. I tried Demon-mode and other kinda-evil-but-not-really modes and none are what a want. I’m going to need to decide. ...

Backing away from my move away from Emacs again. I just can’t quit it.

I went to post something just now, but stopped to make a teeny tweak the Hugo frontmatter. Now I don’t remember what I was coming here to write. Good morning, I guess ¯_(ツ)_/¯. On the plus side, I woke up feeling actually relieved that the blog is on Hugo. Can’t explain it, but it seems like a good thing. Neither my wife nor I have been to Europe, so I’m planning a trip there for later this fall. I don’t even know which country we should start at. I’m thinking Italy. ...

Fighting my Johnny Decimal plans.

A roll of Kodak Gold 200 was languishing in the Nikon F100, so I used it up taking photos of Alice on our deck. Turns out that’s what I did with the first half of the roll, too :) Processed C-41 in the JOBO and scanned on the V850 using SilverFast.

Wouldn’t it be great if all I needed was Emacs, a browser, a terminal, and Finder? Why then do I end up with this? And it’s only 6:00 a.m.

A bit of navel-gazing around workflows

I’ve been trying to hang on to using DuckDuckGo as my default search engine, but the DDG results have become less and less useful for some reason, so I frequently head over to use Google search. Which, blech. I’ve been back to using Safari as my default browser, so I installed the new “Lucky” extension from And a Dinosaur. I don’t really understand how it works yet, but here’s what the search results look like: ...

Mostly just personal journaling today. Roger Waters t-shirt. Credit reporting. Ella’s move

Busy day today. We’re moving Ella into her new apartment. I’ve been taking it easy since hurting my back last week, so I feel like I’m good enough to be useful. The best thing about being busy is that it prevents me from second guessing my move to Hugo for the blog. I love that I’m here in Emacs typing this post, but the threat of some update breaking things, or that I break things, looms. And It’s mostly stock PaperMod theme, so this is just another boring blog that looks like a lot of other boring blogs. It’s fine for now. ...

A bit about moving back to Hugo

Fortunately, my old lisp functions still worked, so creating this daily post for Hugo was just a matter of M-x jab/hugo-new-daily and here I am. You’ll have noticed (if you’re not viewing via RSS at least) that I moved the blog back to Hugo. This was unexpected, since I swore off Hugo months ago :). Anyway, I have started migrating the last six months of content over from Kirby. It’s slow going, so there’ll be some 404s for a bit.

I was bored and feeling some nostalgia about Hugo so here we are again.

A portrait session with my aunt and uncle’s family. Taken using the Hasselblad 500C/M and 80mm Planar. HP5.

The Overstory, winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, is a sweeping, impassioned work of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of—and paean to—the natural world. From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, Richard Powers’s twelfth novel unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. There is a world alongside ours—vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe. ...

I may have solved at least some of my problems caused by taking notes too many different apps. I moved all of them into ~/Documents/Notes, with subfolders per app. So… ├── Denote ├── Howm ├── Obsidian └── SilverBullet You’ll notice SilverBullet in there, my newest infatuation. But here’s the trick, I just point the default target for HoudahSpot searches at the enclosing Notes/ folder, and I can find most anything right away. You’ll note that this means I am restricted to apps that allow me to configure where notes are kept and that they’re kept in some form of plain text. That covers most of my tools. I had been using DEVONthink for this, but it’s been giving me trouble lately so I’m looking at simpler options. I’m digging it.

The viewfinder is kind of a mess right now. I have been thrilled to be able to use my little GR1 again, after pulling it off the shelf and finding that it does actually work. Except this morning I was reminded why I’d retired it before. The viewfinder becomes blocked by something loose in there or perhaps some sort of separation. Either way, it’s not usable when this happens, so I may have to document the issue and re-retire the camera.

Today I learned about SilverBullet SilverBullet is a note-taking application optimized for people with a hacker mindset. We all take notes. There’s a million note taking applications out there. Literally. Wouldn’t it be nice to have one where your notes are _more_than plain text files? Where your notes essentially become a database that you can query; that you can build custom knowledge applications on top of? A hackable notebook, if you will? ...

Whenever I change blogging platforms or domain names or simply post to several places, I feel a twinge of guilt. How will my “audience” feel about the changes? Does it confuse things? I sometimes get comments like, “I have trouble finding things you’ve written because they’re all over the place.” I don’t get a lot of traffic, but it’s also not zero traffic, so I feel some responsibility. But why? I am not writing for money or influence or popularity. I write to better understand what I’m thinking about, and sometimes share the result. I write so that I have a record of those things. I write, almost entirely, for me. ...