Posts

Tinderbox is an unusual, powerful, quirky, and amazing piece of software. I don’t understand why more people don’t use it for everything. Maybe because it costs $298 and that’s expensive by today’s app store race-to-the-bottom pricing situation. It’s worth every penny, though. Before Emacs came along, I put everything into Tinderbox. These days, I use Tinderbox for specific projects that benefit from its unique features. I also maintain my blog at daily.baty.net with it. ...

Recent versions of the new Lightroom (Desktop, not “Classic”) have added features making it feasible for me to use.

I’m tired of moving things around on my computers

My brain isn’t necessarily fast, but it’s always in a hurry.

I want things to be simple and without distraction. I want to avoid futzing all the time. To this end, I often try to move away from using Emacs for everything. Emacs is not simple, no matter how hard I try to force it to be simple. So I pull out the usual inventory of simple writing and note-taking apps, trying to make them fit. Telling myself that this is better for me. ...

I like the way Bear limits my options<

There are times I don’t feel like blogging the hard way1. When that happens, I look to simple, hosted, CMS-based blogging tools. Recently, I’ve been experimenting with Pika and Scribbles. I like both of them. They are both simple, clean, easy, and inexpensive. Choosing either of them for a blog would be fine. There is one thing that concerns me a little, and that is the hobby nature of these tools. I don’t mean to be dismissive by calling them “hobbies”, but I can’t help but feel that these kinds of tools are always at risk of being abandoned when their authors’ attention shifts to something new. ...

How about I stick QR codes on index cards as a way to quickly find the original reference?

My on-again-off-again relationship with Hey email is off again

So far today, (as of 9:57 am) I have installed three apps that I had deliberately avoided installing on the new Mac Mini. MailMate because I just quit Hey but still wanted something different to play with. I’ve used MailMate on and off since sometime in 2013 I think. It’s a powerful, flexible, text/Markdown-first email app. TheBrain because I’m still looking for the “Everything” app, and in my experience, TheBrain has been the best at that. If I’d never stopped using it, I’d be able to find every single thing and everything associated with that thing. ...

Howm and TiddlyWiki share some features that I like

In the spirit of /Now and /Uses and /Hello pages, I’ve created a /Nope page. It’s for keeping track of things I don’t like or want to do. It’s a work in progress, but it’ll probably see more updates than my now page 😄

Software doomsday scenarios take the fun out of everything

Reducing complexity is never accomplished by adding complexity.

I like this calculator better than the one it replaces

Look what I found in the garage: Apple Extended Keyboard II It’s my old Apple Extended Keyboard II from 1990 or 91. I last used this one in 2015. The AEKII uses an ADB port, so I had to dig out my ADB->USB-A adapter (save everything!). I’m typing this post on the keyboard right now. The Alps switches are as great as I remember, and might be my all-time favorite switches. ...

I switched from using Lightroom Classic (LrC) to Capture One Pro (C1) “for good” back in 2021. It wasn’t because of Adobe’s subscription model, or because I had some vague aversion to Adobe, the company. It was because I felt like I was getting better images, faster, with C1. I kept a few notes on Lightroom Classic vs Capture One but haven’t updated it in a while, so here are a few notes about why I have moved back to Lightroom Classic. ...

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