I tried, Obsidian, I really did. But I just can't get into you.

For the month of July, I was determined to try again. I went all-in with Obsidian for daily notes, project notes, tasks, journaling, all of it. After two days I knew that it wasn't going to work for journaling or tasks. Then after a couple more days I knew it wouldn't work for project notes. I was left with my "pkm" notes and daily notes.

Obsidian for PKM or a Zettelkasten might make sense^[1]. It's got all the linking, the graph, and the tooling for it.

But it's still Obsidian, and I just don't like it. I don't like how it looks (I've tried like 30 themes). I don't like the way I get sucked into using plugins for everything, whether I need them or not. Most of all, I don't like how Obsidian feels. The word that comes to mind is "Janky". It's much better than it used to be, but it's still off somehow. I'm not blaming Electron, but that's probably part of it.

Plus, this bugs me more than it should every time I see it:

If I'm going to depend on a tool and live in it, it's gotta feel right. It needs to resonate. Obsidian doesn't.

I'll revisit again in a year or so, but for now, I'm back in Emacs.

If I reach for Keyboard Maestro I've already lost.

90% of "Street" photography is absolute crap. Walking around NYC snapping random photos of other people walking around NYC isn't enough. But that other 10% is completely wonderful.

Oh joy, we're at that phase where everyone is either posting about Threads or complaining that everyone is posting about Threads. Oh me? I'm above it all, can't you tell? What I know so far is that after 20 minutes on Threads I already like it more than Bluesky. Probably just the novelty of the vibe, if there is one.

Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their cage.

-- Lewis Hyde

I'm forcing myself to use Obsidian for the entire month of July. It's fine. We just don't get along for some reason. I can't help but think that it's the right answer, though.

I've stopped posting to the top area of the blog during the day and am back to creating one post per day and writing everything there. I don't know where it will land, but I didn't like the work of moving everything every morning. Seemed like unnecessary faffing. Instead, maybe I'll embed something from Flickr or Glass. That way I can simply replace the embed and not worry about managing image files, etc.

The Realforce R2 keyboard is very nice, but not using the HHKB is driving me nuts. I'm so used to the HHKB's weird layout that a "normal" layout feels incredibly clumsy. I'm sure I'll get used to it, but do I even want to?

My Hugo workflow defaults to using "bundles" and therefore is optimized for including images and yet I only use images in a small percentage of posts. I think I'll change it back to

I hate Discord, too. For anything other than gaming or small group chats, it's useless.

I've got HHKB pinky again so I'm switching to the Realforce keyboard for a while, even though the Escape and Delete keys are a mile away now.

What of my wiki?

There are nearly 3,500 entries in my wiki. That's a lot of my life's information, stagnating, and it worries me. Not because there's a risk of losing it, but because it feels like I wasted a lot of time building it and now it just sits there, which is not what a wiki is supposed to do.

For a few years, the wiki was where I wrote the kinds of daily posts that I'm now writing here. Also, I'm now keeping my notes in Org or Markdown files using Denote in Emacs. The wiki is languishing.

Except here's what I've noticed. When I discover something I want to remember, I still reach for the wiki first. Related to that, when I want to look something up that I am sure I'd written down, more often than not I find it on the wiki, and quickly. For some reason, the stuff I put into Denote just sort of disappears. Sure, I can grep/find/ripgrep/ag/BBEdit the dickens out of the plain text files, but I find it to be less useful and more difficult.

So yeah, this is unsettling.

It bugs me when someone in a movie plants a bomb or listening device and there's always a light on it somewhere that blinks. I was watching an episode of "The Blacklist" and when they inserted a tracker in Reddington's neck it was blinking. Blinking! Do they really believe that we viewers are so stupid that we need to be reminded that "Hey! It's a device!"? Apparently so. Maybe there's some real-world reason that I'm not aware of, but I can't think of what that might be.

I hate to admit it, but Obsidian makes a lot of things really easy that would take me much longer in Emacs.

I'm having feelings about my notes being full of denote:NNNN-style links. It worries me.

If you were in a position to get your kid into Harvard, you would do it. I get a kick out of people who claim otherwise.

Hey anyone want a Bluesky invite it's a new site where everyone is just trying so very hard to out-clever each other while smugly poking fun of other social networks.

Lots of smoke still lingering from the fires in Canada.

I spent a good chunk of this morning setting up the new Mac Mini (2014) as a Plex server. Everything seems to work, but it is pretty slow.

DHH descends

The original American promise that this is a country where you can make it regardless of where you came from has always been challenged in practice, but it's a beautiful ideal, and it'll shine just a little brighter now that the Supreme Court has dismantled one of the few remaining systemic impediments to its realization.

David Heinemeier Hansson, The law of the land

I don't know if that's the worst paragraph in DHH's latest piece, but it's one of them. Also maybe the one where he writes, "Like I can imagine Americans coming out of the 1950s Red Scare must have felt." when talking about the "ideological crusade" around diversity. What a shit-heel.

I have always had questions around Affirmative Action (mostly out of ignorance), but I read his post with no small amount of anguish as (another!) of my tech heroes revealed themselves to be selfish, ignorant, racist, and wildly wrong about so many things. His increasingly disgusting political/social views have finally tainted my usual alignment with his technical opinions to such an extent that I'm no longer comfortable giving him any of my attention at all.

It's hard to know what is a defect, and what is merely a surprise. The cult of usability has enshrined the belief that anything a novice doesn't expect is a defect.

Mark Bernstein, Neovictorian Computing

I spend my days sharpening my knives but never actually cut anything with them.

People are claiming it would be stupid and foolish to meet with Meta about their Fediverse plans and sign an NDA. I dunno. I might rather know something and not be able to share it than not know the thing in the first place. Besides, it's almost always better to talk with someone, even your enemy, than not.

David Foster Wallace, on tourism:

To be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a pure late-date American: alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way you can never admit. It is to spoil, by way of sheer ontology, the very unspoiledness you are there to experience. It is to impose yourself on places that in all noneconomic ways would be better, realer, without you. It is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful: As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing.

DFW, Consider the Lobster

I'm increasingly weary of complexity in any form. I can't decide where Emacs lands on the complexity scale.

I think I've figured out why I never seem to stop using Emacs. It's because Emacs resonates with me in a way that no other tool has.

Can we stop saying, "This is The Way" now? If not, in retaliation I'm bringing back Mork's "Nanu Nanu".

Thanks to a post from Brett Terpstra, I've gone and ordered a 2014 Mac Mini (16GB/1TB) for $100 cleaned, tested, bootable, and shipped from Orchard Resales. The intent is to perhaps replace my overwrought Synology setup. Or maybe I'll just set it up separately for other "stuff".

...when I live in the same place for everything, I start feeling sort of tool-sick.

--Mike Hall, "Mingling notes and todos"

I like his phrase, "tool-sick".

With all the huffing and proselytizing and scolding, on Mastodon specifically, I care less and less about the "Fediverse" with each passing day. I feel a little guilty about that, but feelings are feelings.

If I'm lucky, I should have around 20 good years left. Do I really want to spend them getting angry at people on social media? Or worrying about which note-taking tool I should use? Or Lightroom vs Capture One? Or WordPress vs Hugo? Really?

Unfortunately, we love to group people into generational buckets so that we can assume things about a person without actually knowing anything about them. For example, I'm technically a "Boomer" (1964, the last year). This means that I, and my generation, have destroyed the future for everyone by making the decisions we made in the world we were born into. Fine. As a result, I've decided to call everyone born since then "Hindsighters".

Occasionally I would like to send a few bucks to the author of a newsletter or blog. When I click the link in an email to their Paypal or whatever, and the request is blocked by my filters (NextDNS) due to the link using some click tracking service, as often as not I just don't bother. I'd say it's worth considering how much that click data is costing you.

The subtext here seems to be that Denmark doesn't want DHH either.

"Hahahah I'm so clever, I made ChatGPT say something WRONG see how stupid the whole concept of AI is hahahaha."

Somehow CTRL-e stopped moving the point to the end of the current line in Emacs because it's mapped to evil-copy-from-below for some unfathomable reason. Could this be the last straw?

I'm typing this in iA Writer because it's so damn pleasant and it never surprises me.

I have been switching between note-taking apps so frequently that I feel like I'm going to vibrate apart into tiny pieces.

When someone says, "I use photography to find beauty in the mundane." I hear, "I don't have any ideas so I just shoot whatever boring crap I find nearby and call it Art."

Looks like the RudimentaryLathe.org Ghost blog isn't going anywhere, eh? I'm not surprised. My pointy-clicky phases are usually short-lived.

What if I were to just drop words and photos in the main content area up there on the top every day? Transient stuff that stays out of the feeds. It would be a kind of easter egg for those few souls who actually visit the site. Then, if I choose, I could move anything especially juicy into the daily post. Worth a try, I think.

Thinking is not doing.

I decided to channel my anger. And by channeling, I mean combining it with drinking.

Jack Handey, "The Stench of Honolulu"

An unscientific observation: The most creative and productive people I know don't have a note-taking "system". Many of them just use Apple Notes all willy nilly and never think about it.

I have notes from 10 years ago in Apple Notes. A decade of "But what if...?!" anxiety around future-proofing. I'll probably worry about it for another 20. All this fretting feels more and more like a giant waste of time.

I spent (and by "spent" I mean "wasted") an hour and a half this morning trying to get my custom delete command mapped to the "D" key in notmuch. Reading that sentence only reinforces the fact that I've once again lost a good portion of a day on something that would be a non-issue in anything other than Emacs. My key binding still doesn't work. I've given up. Next!

I just paid $25 for 24 ePub books in the Essential Knowledge book bundle. I'll start, ironically, with "Analog" from Robert Hassan. The bundle seems like a good deal to me.

Usually I can’t afford Glenriddance, or even the cheaper version, Glencockie.

--The Stench of Honolulu by Jack Handey

Of course it was a tragedy, but they weren't "explorers". They were tourists.

I have been wondering if the benefits of using ox-hugo just so I can write posts using Org-mode format is worth the extra layer of abstraction. I prefer Org-mode to Markdown, but Markdown is fine. In fact, Markdown-mode makes editing Markdown in Emacs quite pleasant. Ox-hugo is a great package, but increasingly seemed like a clever but unnecessary abstraction. One of its best features is that it makes creating new posts super easy. I never liked using the Hugo CLI, so ox-hugo solved that problem.

I started looking for a way to make generating posts easier, but without using Hugo. At first I figured I would need some kind of wrapper around the CLI's hugo new post/... command, but then wondered if I should do something right within Emacs. I mean, someone's had to solve this problem before, right?

I'd used a package called Easy Hugo before, but it's way overkill for what I need.

After a brief search, I spotted a post from Jeremy Friesen which included a function that does something very close to what I needed. (Thanks, Jeremy!).

My theme at the time of this writing is Congo. Congo pushes one toward using Hugo bundles for posts, meaning rather than posts being in a file named my-blog-post.md I need to name them index.md in a folder for each post. I tweaked Jeremy's code a bit and now I can just call jab/post-new and I instantly get the proper folder, file, and front matter and can simply start typing. Here's the code:

(defun jab/post-new (title &optional)
  "Create and visit a new draft blog post for the prompted TITLE."
  (interactive "sTitle: ")

  (let* ((slug (s-dashed-words title))
         (default-directory (concat "~/sites/blog/content/posts/"
                                    (format-time-string "%Y/%m-%B/%Y-%m-%d-")
                                    slug "/"))
         (fpath (concat default-directory "index.md")))
         
    (make-directory default-directory)
    (write-region (concat
                   "---"
                   "\ntitle: '" title "'"
                   "\ndate: " (format-time-string "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S %z")
                   "\nslug: " slug
                   "\ncategories: [\"\"]"
                   "\ntags: [\"\"]"
                   "\ndraft: true"
                   "\n---\n")
                  nil (expand-file-name fpath) nil nil nil t)
    (find-file (expand-file-name fpath))))

I create two slightly different kinds of posts, regular posts (which are created using the above function) and "journal" posts, which use a different file name and URL structure. Rather than modifying the existing functions with a bunch of conditionals, I did what all professional programmers do, I copied and pasted the existing function and tweaked it to suit. It's called jab/post-daily and looks like this:

(defun jab/daily-new ()
  "Create and visit a new j blog post for the prompted TITLE."
  (interactive)

  (let* ((slug (concat (format-time-string "%Y-%m-%d") "-journal"))
         (default-directory (concat "~/sites/blog/content/posts/"
                                    (format-time-string "%Y/%m-%B/")
                                    slug "/"))
         (fpath (concat default-directory "index.md")))
         
         (make-directory default-directory)
    (write-region (concat
                   "---"
                   "\ntitle: '" (format-time-string "%A, %B %d, %Y") "'"
                   "\ndate: " (format-time-string "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S %z")
                   "\nslug: " slug
                   "\ncategories: [\"Journal\"]"
                   "\ntags: [\"\"]"
                   "\ndraft: true"
                   "\n---\n")
                  nil (expand-file-name fpath) nil nil nil t)
    (find-file (expand-file-name fpath))))

The only real difference is the folder name and slug are different and the title is pre-determined so there's no need for a prompt.

I'll miss the one-post-per-heading-in-one-big-file approach of ox-hugo, but editing the Markdown files directly has fewer dependencies and feels cleaner to me.

Nothing inspires arrogance like a lifetime spent controlling machines that are incapable of criticism.

--Edward Snowden

I've stopped using ox-hugo for writing posts and started Editing Hugo's markdown files directly

Another change to the blog is that I'm no longer assigning "featured" images to posts. The Congo theme does a great job of handling them, but I don't like feeling like I have to include a featured image with every single post, and I don't like how the home page renders when some posts have them and some don't.

I don't have anything to say here today. Here's a photo of the likely cause:

There was something about the PaperMod theme I was using here that didn't sit right with me. It's a nice theme, but off somehow. So I've gone back to Congo. I have some issues with Congo, too, but it's well-supported and being actively developed, so I'm hopeful I can sort it out.

What am I going to do with this thing?

I'm still working on my from-scratch Emacs config. I don't know yet if I'm wasting my time or if this is the future.

Bluesky isn't really doing it for me.

I swear that if the "You're using it wrong!" and the "Block Meta / Don't block Meta!" or similar arguments don't stop over on Mastodon I'll go back to Twitter.