Software

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. ...

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

Canceling things brings mixed feelings

I spent some time in Obsidian again yesterday. I do this once a month or so just to see if somehow it’s changed into something I’d like to use. Obsidian is great software, in theory, but I still find it boring and unpleasant to actually use.

Generating yearly and monthly calendars using Pcal on the command line

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

I always come back to using TheBrain.

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.

A long list of my current subscriptions.

Why would anyone host their own Git repos when Github exists?

Mike mentions disabling Alfred and going back to using Spotlight as an app launcher. I’ve been having similar thoughts. I use Raycast, and its latest release notes are mostly around features of the $8/month subscription version. I thought, there’s no way I’m paying monthly for what’s basically a glorified app launcher, which brought me back to thinking about Spotlight. My first app launcher was Quicksilver and it immediately became an intregal part of using a Mac. From there I moved to LaunchBar and then to Alfred before settling on Raycast. I still sometimes fire up LaunchBar because it’s great for navigating the filesystem. And it’s faster. ...

Bike Outliner 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. ...

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: alias faa 'friends add activity ' alias faf 'friends add friend ' alias fla 'friends list activities'

This is not a review, but I wanted to jot down some notes after a few days in a new app that I’m enjoying very much: Wavelength Messenger. You might like to read John Gruber’s post for details. My wife believes that I have some kind of processing disorder that causes me to quickly become overwhelmed by too much simultaneous input. She discovered this after several visits to the local Costco. After a few minutes in a busy Costco, I sort of shut down and become surly. I can only think about leaving. I’m no fun in a Costco. ...

UPDATE: I’ve had trouble getting GoAccess to parse the logs consistently after changing the date format. I’ve been using GoAccess on the VPS running my static sites for keeping an eye on web server access logs. It works great and requires no tracking scripts. I run a cron job every five minutes to process my site logs and generate an HTML report. This is fine, but GoAccess always processes the entire log file and offers no way to filter the results. Sometimes I only want to see stats for, say, today or for the past week. ...

The jAlbum UI I’ve been a Flickr user since 2004 and a SmugMug user for nearly as long. For some reason, I prefer looking at my photos via online galleries rather than, say, my Photos library, and both Flickr and SmugMug have helped me do that. I’ve also kept standalone static web galleries for the odd side project, such as a memorial to my dog Leeloo. Recently, I’ve been creating more of these, so I started looking for easier or better ways of generating static web galleries from a selection of photos. There are what feels like a thousand options. Everything from giant GUI apps to the nerdiest little command line utilities. ...

You all remember Evernote, right? For years (beginning in the late 2000s), Evernote was the note-taking tool for many of us. Then, they got weird, started selling merchandise and branded scanners, and made odd tangental mobile apps for some reason. Evernote seemed to have lost focus. After a couple of years of that I, as someone who loves trying new software, didn’t hesitate to move on to newer, shinier tools for my notes. ...

For example, currently, we don’t have likes. If and when we launch a feature in that vein, it’ll be private. We’ve intentionally avoided any public counts. We don’t want Glass ever to become a popularity contest. We’re not home for influencers. We are a home for photographers. Tom Watson – On my Om Wouldn’t it be nice to have a reasonable alternative to Instagram? I wish it could be Flickr, but I doubt that’ll ever happen. ...