It shouldn’t take so much time to keep my stuff running smoothly.

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. ...

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 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.

Generating yearly and monthly calendars using Pcal on the command line

Following up after reading Jeremy Friesen’s response to my earlier post

I’m using using Denote’s silo feature for accessing my Beyond the Infinite folder

I have never regretted taking a photo, but I always regret not taking one.

My current thinking is that our little blogging society doesn’t need secrecy, it needs visibility.

After using Arc for months, I’ve made Safari my default browser.

I mentioned that I should create a lisp function for sending my org-journal entries to Day One. Turns out I’d already done it. The only problem was that the original version assumed I was using a new org file every day. I’m now doing monthly files, so I needed to change how the text selection was made. Here’s the new function. (defun jab/dayone-add-note () "Sends current subtree as Day One entry" (interactive) (org-mark-subtree) (shell-command-on-region (point) (mark) "/usr/local/bin/dayone2 -j=Journal new" nil)) It’s not perfect, since it includes any PROPERTY drawers and leading stars, but it works and was easy to make.

How I reimplemented my Daily Notes feature from my Tinderbox blog to baty.net in Kirby

Let’s not overthink it, eh?

I always come back to using TheBrain.

Why I sometimes prefer taking noted in TiddlyWiki instead of Emacs

Prot’s Spacious-Padding Emacs package adds some room to breath in the Emacs UI.

This morning, I had trouble finding something that I was certain I’d written yesterday. I was pretty sure I’d written it in one org-mode file or another, but it seemed to be missing. Turns out it wasn’t missing. I just couldn’t see it because of the way the results show up when searching for something in Emacs. The display of search results when running projectile-ripgrep is pretty awful, and I missed what I was searching for. Here’s what it looks like in Doom Emacs by default. ...

I often want a list of attached files displayed right in the org-mode file.

C’mon, everyone’s doin’ it. Here is my list of default apps (in alphabetical order by task): Backups: Backblaze, Arq Blogging: What day is it? I mean Kirby. Calendar: BusyCal, Apple Calendar Chat: Apple Messages, Signal Clipboard Manager: Raycast Code Editor: Emacs File Manager: Forklift, Dired (Emacs) Journaling: Org-journal (Emacs), Day One Launcher: Raycast Mail Client: Apple Mail, notmuch Mail Server: Fastmail Music: Roon, Qobuz, Apple Music Notes: Org-mode (Emacs), TiddlyWiki, Tinderbox Password Management: 1Password Photo Editor: Capture One Photo Management: Capture One, Apple Photos Podcasts: I don’t listen to podcasts RSS: NetNewsWire Read It Later: Omnivore Screenshots: Cleanshot X Search Engine: Kagi Shopping List: Apple Reminders shared with wife Social Networking: Mastodon (web UI) Terminal: iTerm, Kitty Text Editor: Emacs, BBEdit Task Manager: Things, Org-mode (Emacs) Weather: Hello Weather Web Browser: Arc Word Processing: Emacs Org-mode -> LaTeX

A list of my current subscriptions, priced per month.