I'm still working through what goes into daily notes vs separate blog posts. My old rule was that anything longer than a short paragraph got its own post. Now, though, I think I prefer keeping things in the daily posts unless they need their own post. All that's left is to define what I mean by "need".
Controversial opinion: Not everything needs to be in Markdown.
I'm looking forward to when AI becomes boring and we spend our time using it for stuff rather than talking about it incessantly.
I am quite enjoying Mimestream for managing email. It's fast, looks nice, and feels good to use. However, there is one thing I miss and one thing that irritates me.
The thing I miss is smart mailboxes. I want, at minimum, a smart mailbox for "Unread". Smart mailboxes are on the roadmap, at least.
The thing that irritates me is that when I process (Archive/Delete) a message, the message immediately below is then selected. I process my email from oldest to newest, so, from the bottom up. There's no option to sort messages showing oldest first. I scroll down and start reading unread messages and when I hit Delete, the next older message is selected. I've already dealt with that one, so I'd prefer if the next newer message was selected. I either need to start at the top (newest), which I don't want, or I have to click/move up a message every time. Drives me nuts.
Otherwise, I like Mimestream enough that I think I'll pay for a year during the discount offer.
Memorial Day with family with the Leica MP, 50mm Summilux, and a roll of HP5.
You may have noticed that these daily journal posts have been expanding to include what would normally be separate blog posts. This has been an organic process, and continues to evolve. Part of me prefers this one-a-day writing process. It's easy to manage and lets me combine short and long-form content as well as images, quotes, etc. This can all be in a day's journal. On the other hand, I no longer have an easily-parsable list of posts. It makes the Archives less useful. At least the PaperMod theme automatically generates links to each heading.
I switched to Arq backup a couple weeks ago because it feels like I have more control of things using Arq. However, after a few days of successful backups, I'm no longer able to either back up to Arq's cloud, nor can I see the current backups. Support is working on it. I'm able to back up to a Backblaze B2 location, but not to Arq's cloud. See what I get for "improving" my process?
In another example of solving a problem I don't have, I'm testing the Mimestream email client for Gmail. I'm a sucker for new ways to use email, and also for rave reviews, so I've made a few changes to my email setup in order to test Mimestream.
The "problem" for me is that Mimestream is currently only a wrapper for the Gmail API. It doesn't do IMAP, so in order to test it, I have to use my Gmail account. Since I don't get email to that account, I am forwarding my Fastmail email to Gmail. I'm using Fastmail's SMTP service to send from Gmail so that my From: address remains jack@baty.net.
So far, I like Mimestream. It's got that clean, fast, fully macOS feel that I love. I don't receive enough email to merit spending an extra $50/year on a subscription, but that doesn't mean I won't. I like nice things, and Mimestream is a nice thing.
Every time I try a new theme, I promise myself that I won't tinker with it. That promise lasted just over one day this time. I haven't done anything drastic, but here's the list so far:
I love Blot. It's just right.
But you know how sometimes you just want everything on your own server where you can touch it? Where you have access to the server redirects and access logs and everything? That's what happened to me this weekend, so I'm once again publishing using Hugo and hosting on my DigitalOcean VPS with Caddy.
Another factor driving the switch was wanting to use ox-hugo for writing posts. I know I've said that using Org-mode to write and then convert to Markdown for Hugo can feel like too many moving parts, but I had a nice setup going before tossing it for other platforms. It's really easy to create new posts as new headings in my blog.org file.
Plus, I was bored this morning and had a few hours to kill, so here we are. I'm sure there will be a flurry of unwanted RSS spam due to the new redirect. Sorry about that.
I'm using a new theme, too. I've gone with the PaperMod theme as an alternative to the Congo theme I'd been using. I was already using PaperMod on my micro.blog, so it seemed like a natural fit. It certainly wasn't because I stole the idea from Mike Hall's blog[1]. I like it so far.
Or was it? 😜 ↩︎
(I had originally posted this on Sunday's daily notes but it's kind of grown, so I split it into a separate post. Apologies if you've already read it there.)
Oh goody, another "Why I'm leaving social media post"! Feel free to skip this one. We've all read many like it.
For a week or so I’ve been back to posting on Micro.blog and syndicating to Bluesky and Mastodon. It has reminded me that although I enjoy sharing things on social media, doing so requires that I spend time on social media, and that no longer gives me much joy. In fact, it's often the opposite. I'm just so tired of being told who I'm supposed to like and what's OK to enjoy. Or worse, what or whom I simply must be angry about this very minute. There's a lot to be troubled by and angry about in the world, but spending my time listening to people pointing it out to me and yelling “Look how bad this is, yo!”, but not actually doing anything about it, is not something I'm interested in. No amount of feed curation seems to help.
Another component is that I find myself reaching for social media the second I'm not doing anything else. Any pause in "real life" and I'm back to doom scrolling or looking for something to entertain me. This seems unhealthy, so I hope to tame it by forcing myself to ignore social media entirely.
I don't know if it's possible for me to just quietly write things here on the blog and never share them where they might actually be read, but I'm in the mood to pull things back and just live quietly by myself for a while. I reserve the right to change my mind at any time.
I expanded the paragraph I'd written earlier about social media in a separate post: Withdrawing from social media
Instead of posting directly to social media, what about posting a short summary and a link on Micro.blog each day? That might feel too much like advertising, but should reduce the need to monitor replies quite so frequently, but still allow me to more likely share things. Something to think about.
Creative tools based on generative AI are amazing and feel like technological miracles. They allow people who may not have an intrinsic ability to create things using existing tools to express their creativity in all sorts of new ways. This opens up so many doors. On the other hand, I find that when scrolling through feeds, I skip over images that look (too) amazing because they're "probably just from Midjourney". And now, after playing with the Generative Fill features in the new Photoshop, I am impressed but also melancholy. Nothing is real anymore. The urge to tamper with an image and the ease with which it can be done is going to mean that fewer and fewer images will remain authentic. It doesn't matter how cool a photo is, if it's faked, it's fake and therefore meaningless to me.
Some say that only providing an email link for comments on a blog will prevent readers from benefiting from any conversations that might be had on a topic. I agree with this, but it doesn't offset the negative effects caused by the performative nature of public comments. So, send me an email. If I feel like others are missing something valuable from our conversation, I'll update the post with a summary. How's that?
I've started unsubscribing from feeds/people who offer little other than barely-informed hot takes, snarky commentary, or "That's BAD!" finger-pointing.
No matter how you look at it, the Leica Q3 design team made a classy product feel cheap and inelegant.
Well, that seems like quite an exaggeration, no?
Some folks are not going to like that Leica introduced a flippy screen on the new Q3, and Om is one of them. I haven't handled the Q3 yet (has Om?), but I'll reserve judgement. There's no arguing that a tiltable screen isn't handy, but it's fair to argue whether one is necessary. Leica apparently thinks it is, as does every other manufacturer.
Late in the article, Om writes:
I am not a Leica Q guy. I have never liked the Q range of cameras...
Well then, thanks for your take I guess. I'm a big fan of Om and his work, but this all seems a bit reactionary. All this talk has me really missing my Q2, though.
The other day I wrote this:
Knowledge should reside in the notes, not in the software used to manage the notes.
I'm feeling like software has been hindering me more than helping me. I spend too much of my time building overly complex workflows in Emacs or Tinderbox or Obsidian or whatever. These crazy workflows often introduce dependencies and push the actual knowledge up into the process/software. This seems like a bad idea.
As a respite from all the complexity, I've been putting notes and logs into Bike Outliner. I tested Bike when it launched last year, but I was so deep in Emacs-for-everything mode that I quickly dismissed it. Too quickly I think.
I've always preferred writing in an outliner, and Bike is just so damn nice to work in. And it's ridiculously simple. This simplicity might normally turn me off, but for the moment it is keeping me focused on the notes and not the tooling. I mean, there's nothing much I can do in Bike other than write notes. This is a feature.
Sure, complex software can be used simply. Just ignore all those unnecessary features, right? Maybe, but there's always the background hum of "what if I just...", and I often underestimate how much that noise undermines the work.
I recently found my original Fujifilm X100 in a box in our storage unit. I have such fond memories of the camera, so I knew I would enjoy using it, even today.
I was surprised to learn that I didn't enjoy it as much as I thought I would. It still feels great to carry, but it's not quite as nice to actually use as I expected.
It's kind of slow. Slow to power on. Slow to focus. Slow to navigate. This shouldn't bother me, as I often use old, manual-focus cameras and I'm used to working slowly. I guess the difference is that if I'm going ask the camera to do things, it should be faster than I am. The X100 isn't. It's not unusable, but it takes a bit of the joy out of using the camera.
I can live with slowness, but what I'm finding the most troublesome is the tiny, awkward controls on the rear of the camera. Specifically, the Menu/OK button. I cannot seem to press that button without accidentally pressing one of the surrounding buttons first. It's maddening.
What about image quality? It's fine, I guess. Honestly, I prefer the look of the files from my little Ricoh GRIII. Coming from the 50MP of my SL2 makes the 12MP X100 files feel a little limited. I'll keep tinkering in Lightroom to find the right mix of adjustments, which will probably help.
I do like the black and white conversions I'm getting, though. I don't know what it is, exactly, but they have a certain grit to them that I like.
Will I use the X100 every day? Probably not. It's a fun, cute, small, rangefinder-style camera with an optical viewfinder, so I'm sure I'll bring it out occasionally.
I'm mostly stuck at home this week while our kitchen is being remodeled, but I did take a few snaps with the Fuji. Here are some samples.
I've been head over heels in love with Arc for a long time now. So far, the only thing I don't like about it is that there is no support for bookmarklets.
Convert bookmarklet to Chrome extension to the rescue.
I've tested it with two bookmarklets so far, and it seems to work fine.
I restarted my Micro.blog this morning. I was feeling lonely all by myself here at baty.net, so I thought I'd revisit some old friends. I expect this will affect the types of things I post here in my daily notes, but I don't know in what way, yet.
Micro.blog is a great blogging service, and I've been using it almost continually since the original Kickstarter campaign. I sometimes put the account on pause when I'm feeling Subscription Fatigue or when I'm suddenly all into some new platform or if I just don't feel like sharing quite so much on social networks. It's usually some combination of those three.
I haven't decided about cross-posting yet. Micro.blog does a great job of cross-posting and I could easily use it to send posts to Bluesky or Mastodon, but I'm not sure I want to. UPDATE: I see that now I can configure cross-posting on a per-post basis, which I'd wanted forever, so I think I'll configure both accounts and decide as I go.
I'll be keeping the default jack.micro.blog domain name rather than my own. First, because I have no qualms about not "owning" what I post there (I own it enough). Second, the domain is perfect for what it's for. Oh, and I don't mind a bit of "advertising" for Micro.blog.
If you're looking for a calm, friendly, simple way to publish short or long posts, Micro.blog fits the bill.
UPDATE May 29, 2023: I've decided to withdraw from social media, so my Micro.blog is on hold.
Mike Hall wrote about friends, a personal CRM for the command line. It's a ruby gem that does most of the things I was trying to do using Emacs.
It seems worth a try, so I installed the gem and created a few shell aliases to make things faster:
baty.net
alias faa 'friends add activity '
alias faf 'friends add friend '
alias fla 'friends list activities'
I go through periods during which I don't feel much like making "art" with my cameras. This is normal, but lately I haven't felt like taking photographs at all.
For example, I met my parents yesterday to celebrate Mother's Day. This, being an Event™, prompted me to bring my two good cameras, one film and one digital. I wanted to be sure to make a nice record of the day in both formats. In the end, I took a single photo as we left. I took it with my iPhone.
While doing some spring cleaning this week, I ran into a box of old cameras that I had marked "To Sell" but forgot about. The box had an old Olympus digital and a bunch of beat-up OM-2n film cameras and accessories. This was neat, but what I was most exited about were two cameras in particular: An original Fujifilm X100 and an Olympus Stylus Epic.
Here's the Epic:
I bought this little camera for $75 in 2004. I bought another in 2012 because there were problems with the original. Still, I put a roll in it and so far, so good. I just love them. I hope the two that I have last for a while, because I refuse to pay the $200-$300 they fetch these days.
The second camera is even cooler: an original Fujifilm X100 from 2010. This was such a nice discovery because I couldn't remember selling it, but also couldn't seem to find it.
The Internet says that the CMOS sensor on the OG X100 has some kind of magical qualities, but I've never really seen it. It's a wonderful little camera that still takes nice enough 12MP photos. It's pretty slow to focus compared to current models, but it's fine in most conditions.
I charged the battery but the camera wouldn't power on. I paid $12 for a replacement battery and the camera seems to work fine now. Can you tell I'm excited?
“I'm like, are we in a fucking movie right now, or what? The fuck, man?… Shit, what the fuck? I'm lost. I don't know.”
Snoop Dogg, Ars Technica
Me too, Snoop. Me too. This might be the first honest take I've read.
I usually prefer reading my email using Mu4e in Emacs, but the Vim ("Evil") keybindings have been broken since upgrading to 1.10.x. (See this PR for background). This added so much friction that I went back to Mail.app and Notmuch. Recent changes in evil-collection have fixed the issue but weren't available yet when updating Doom. The fix for now was to (unpin! evil-collection) in packages.el. Much better!
Another snag I've run into while using Mu4e was that sometimes I also use Apple's Mail on macOS and iOS and any messages I delete there would only be flagged as "trashed" in Mu4e, so they would show up in the inbox, cluttering things considerably. The fix for this was to set Expunge Both in my .mbsyncrc file. Also much better! That one has been bugging me for a long time.
So the good news is that I'm back to using Mu4e for my email, and it's now better than ever.
I try to name all of my files using the file's creation date as a prefix. For example:
20230504-MyNewFile.txt
If I forget, it's a pain to rename them, so I created a short AppleScript to do it for me.
-- Prepend Creation Date to selected files
-- Install Location: ~/Library/Scripts/Applications/Finder
-- Last Modified: 2023-05-04
tell application "Finder"
set selectedItems to selection as list
-- Loop through each selected item
repeat with selectedItem in selectedItems
set creationDate to creation date of selectedItem
set fileName to name of selectedItem
-- Prepend the creation date to the file name
set newName to my stringFromDate(creationDate) & "-" & fileName
-- Rename the file with the new name
set name of selectedItem to newName
end repeat
end tell
on stringFromDate(_date)
-- yyyymmddhhmmss
set _string to ""
set _string to _string & my stringFromNumber(_date's year, 4)
set _string to _string & my stringFromNumber(_date's month as integer, 2)
set _string to _string & my stringFromNumber(_date's day, 2)
return _string
end stringFromDate
on stringFromNumber(_number, _digitsToPad)
return text -_digitsToPad through -1 of ("0000" & _number)
end stringFromNumber
I put the script into a Finder-specific folder, so it's made easily available when Finder is the frontmost app: ~/Library/Scripts/Applications/Finder. (I use FastScripts to make things, er, faster).
I've also created a version for use via Raycast, which is identical but not "compiled", as that seems to break things in Raycast.
Since I use DEVONthink Pro (DTP) to index and store my notes and documents, I sometimes revisit the idea of using it to create notes.
DTP includes a variety of built-in scripts for creating new content. These are mostly written in AppleScript. I was interested in the "Daily Journal" template. By default, running the Daily Journal template would create a new Markdown document containing a random quote and a list of the 4 latest headlines from the New York Times website. I was OK with the headlines, but I didn't feel the quote was necessary, so I replaced it with the current weather.
This turned out to be simple. I edited the existing script and added a getWeather() function:
on getWeather()
tell application id "DNtp"
try
set theWeather to download markup from "https://wttr.in/90210?0q&format=%c+%C+%t"
end try
return theWeather
end tell
end getWeather
The script calls the wttr.in weather website using a few parameters and that's it. Here's what it looks like here today:
⛅️ Partly cloudy +53°F
Then, I replaced the random quote bits in the script so that it now reads[1]:
set theWeather to my getWeather()
set myNews to my getNews()
set theContent to "# " & theHeadline & return & theWeather & return & return & "# Headlines" & return & return
...
I'm not sure I'll continue to use DTP for daily journals, but it's nice that I can tweak it if needed.
It's happening again. My love of powerful, complex software has overrun my ability to avoid tinkering.
For example, I've spent several hours this week working on my Org-mode agenda display. Configuring org-super-agenda is tons of fun. It can make one's Agenda absolutely sing and dance, which is not ideal for me because I've spent way too much time trying to teach it to sing and dance. I could have finished all of the tasks on my todo list in the time I've spent getting them to display just right.
I did the same thing with tweaking Elfeed for my RSS feeds and Notmuch for email. They're just so cool and they can do so much. But they're not really better than, say, NetNewsWire or Apple's Mail.app. They're just cooler.
Basically, I've been feeling like the more powerful the tool, the less effective I become. This seems counterintuitive, but it's real. I get so deep into the weeds that I have a hard time finding my way back to wherever I started.
I'm not sure how to fix this. I've been down this road before so I just want to talk it through.
At times, I fall back to Apple Notes and Reminders and Mail and THAT's IT! But nope, that frustrates me almost immediately. The ideal solution would be to find tools that are just right. But what? Probably Things, BBEdit, DEVONthink, and TheBrain. As much as I love Tinderbox, it's second only to Emacs on the Powerful Software scale, so I'm backing away from that for now, too.
Stay tuned.