I know, I know, the reMarkable 2 tablet is designed as a digital replacement for writing on paper. It’s not necessarily meant as a document reader. But that’s what I’ve been using it for. Reading PDF on reMarkable 2 For years now I’ve saved web articles as Markdown files, converted them to PDF, and printed them for reading later. See My read-later service is made of paper. I wanted to see how reading PDFs felt on the reMarkable, so I copied a few of my saved article PDFs to it. It turns out that I liked it very much. Highlighting text with the stylus works great, and I can even choose the color of the highlights, which don’t display on the device, but they do on the actual PDF. ...

howm is an Emacs package for taking notes. It was recommended to me recently, so I thought I’d take a look. The project page says “howm: Write fragmentarily and read collectively.” Worth a shot, right? I haven’t seen too many people talking about howm. The best introductions I’ve found are from Leah Neukirchen and Andrei Sukhovskii. I installed it via use-package with the following ;; howm package config (use-package howm :ensure t :config (setq howm-directory "~/Documents/howm/") (setq howm-home-directory "~/Documents/howm/") (setq howm-keyword-file (expand-file-name ".howm-keys" howm-home-directory)) (setq howm-history-file (expand-file-name ".howm-history" howm-home-directory)) (setq howm-view-use-grep t)) ;; (setq howm-view-grep-command "/opt/homebrew/bin/rg")) ;; Fix for help bindings (define-key howm-menu-mode-map "\C-h" nil) (define-key riffle-summary-mode-map "\C-h" nil) (define-key howm-view-contents-mode-map "\C-h" nil) ;; Sensible buffer names (add-hook 'howm-mode-hook 'howm-mode-set-buffer-name) (add-hook 'after-save-hook 'howm-mode-set-buffer-name) I couldn’t get the rg settings to work, so I’m still using grep. It’s fast enough for this test. ...

I bought a miniStack STX to go with the new M2 Mac Mini

Things would be easier if I stopped worrying about all sorts of meaningless computer things

As much as I would love a new X100VI, I don’t actually need one.

I don’t like the way Glass shows images in a desktop browser when the browser window is wider than around 1,000 pixels. I prefer the layout in narrower windows, but I never have mine that narrow. This means whenever I’m browsing Glass, I have to shrink the window. Left: What I want. Right: What I get The Arc browser has “Boosts” that let me easily adjust the CSS of any website, so I created one for Arc. This is it: ...

This morning it took over 30 minutes to copy a 70MB file from my MBP to the Synology over WiFi. The wait resurfaced my thoughts about having an always-on computer on my desk with some fast, attached storage. I just ordered an M2 Mac Mini (Pro) with 16GB RAM and a 512GB internal drive. Since 2021, I’ve had an over-spec’ed MacBook Pro (M1 Max) with a 2TB internal drive and 32GB of RAM. I don’t do much that requires all of that oomph, but I figured it was nice to have anyway. With the Mini, I went with the Pro version mostly for the additional ports. A smaller, 512GB internal drive should be fine, since I’ll have a number of fast SSDs always attached. I’m not worried about not having enough room for my stuff. The thing I’m most worried about is “only” 16GB RAM. I’ve had 32GB for so long that I don’t remember what it was like working with less. I’m almost certain that 16GB will be plenty for my purposes, but it still makes me a little twitchy. Plus, $1,299 still feels like relatively cheap compared to the $3k+ I spent on the MBP. ...

More like Perfect Movie_

A tactical, localized reset of my system(s)

I used to use Evernote as a junk drawer. Now what should I use?

I’ve been tinkering with keeping offline copies of websites (mostly mine), and have always used either wget or httrack. I wasn’t aware of the WARC format until recently, so I thought I’d try creating a few WARC archives. wget, as it happens, has WARC support built in via the –warc-file option. I added that to my usual set of switches and put it all in a shell script, like so. #!/bin/sh # warc-archive.sh https://example.com warc-file-name wget \ --mirror \ --warc-file=$2 \ --warc-cdx \ --page-requisites \ --html-extension \ --execute robots=off \ --directory-prefix=. \ --wait=1 \ --random-wait \ $1 This creates a compressed, self-contained WARC file along with a mirrored set of files comprising the entire site. ...

Derek Sivers posted about how he handles backups and it got me thinking about how I handle backups. I feel like I’m mostly covered. I use Backblaze on my MacBook Pro for continuous, off-site backups of both the internal SSD and the attached “Media” drive containing my photos, videos, etc. I clone “Media” to a separate external drive once a week. iCloud syncs my ~/Documents and ~/Desktop folders, so that should be covered. The headless Mac Mini is also using Backblaze. The Synology is synced nightly to Backblaze B2 storage. ...

For many years I’ve put every new folder full of anything into a new Git repo. I never questioned it, I just did it because that’s what you do. I’m thinking about no longer doing this. This morning I was daydreaming while waiting for a folder to finish rsyncing to a server and I was mesmerized by page after page of lines like “.git/objects/fb/70e546350cc4106caf1225706b44c85087ed27” scrolling by. I checked a few of my projects and was surprised by how much space all those .git/ directories use. ...

I’m just coming off a week using Obsidian. Obsidian is really good and powerful and easy to use and extensible and probably the correct answer to the question, “Where should I keep my notes?”. I love Obsidian for a minute because of what it does and the fact that it’s not whatever I’d been using previously. It’s refreshing and finding new plugins to play with is good fun. But it’s janky. Why don’t more people complain about it being janky? It’s just blech to actually live in. It feels weird and loose and sloppy to me. ...

When is trying to avoid futzing actually just more futzing?

In which I think about using Lightroom again.

Notmuch can be used as a search engine from within Mutt and it’s super fast.

Using Mutt for email is awesome, but it makes me want to do everything in a terminal

After 12 years of using a Hobonichi Techo, I’m giving it up.

I’m really into paper-based tools lately. This is often a reaction to over-thinking my (digital) note-taking process. And oh my have I been over-thinking that process lately. Using paper is more work, but it’s worth it. Here are a few random thoughts I’ve had about it recently. Paper’s immutability is something you’d think one would put into the “Cons” column, but I find it to be its greatest feature. I’m fickle and uncertain and my digital notes suffer because of it. When I write something in a (paper) notebook, there it is, forever. I can scribble it out or copy it onto later pages, but I can’t change my mind and move it somewhere else based on whatever “system” I decide upon that day. It’ll always be right in that spot, in that notebook. I love this. ...