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Weeknotes 7

  • Because linkding is so good at managing bookmarks, I’m not going to include a kitchen sink list of potentially interesting links in the Weeknotes series anymore. I will include a shorter list of stuff that I’ve actually tried and adopted or read fully, or things that have made the internal compass recalibrate itself. The rest are in my linkding instance (also at the Bookmarks link in the menu above).
  • I went back to Safari after using Arc for a good long time. I will say that Arc kept me out of a lot of open-tab bankruptcy, but I always felt like I never knew where something would open when I used it. I never cared for the way the login page for my bank’s website would stay open in the background while the accounts page would open in a floating window above it after I signed in. And I don’t need my downloaded files renamed with A.I., although that was neat the first time I saw it work. With Safari, there is one row of tabs, nothing closes by accident until I close it myself, and my phone and laptop are always in sync.
  • “Jack Baty” is a cool name!
  • Hearing Luc Beaudoin on Hookmark on The Informed Life makes me want to understand Hookmark, which I have never gotten. I like his belief that you should be able to get to anything you need within two seconds. Also that relying on search to find emails, notes, and documents (instead of direct links) can too easily distract you from the thing you were looking for.
  • 50.5% of voters elected President #45 again. I don’t have much to add that isn’t already covered in someone else’s hot take. I realize Democrats are out of touch and Trump voters are playing an entirely different game, but he also wouldn’t spend so much time being a belligerent racist, xenophobe, queerphobe if he didn’t think that would appeal to a lot of people. Whatever was behind it, I was blindsided, got through the stages of grief in record time, and now I’m just resigned. Getting wound up every day of his first term was completely unproductive. I have things to learn about all the reasons that got others to the point where voting for him didn’t make them want to vomit.
  • Deleted my Twitter account. Don’t miss it.
  • The bathroom mold remediation began today. Our sole toilet is disconnected and we’re using a camping toilet — a seat with a hole and a bio-bag — on the screened back porch. It’s not as bad as I thought it would be!
  • The Diplomat on Netflix is so, so great. I needed something this well-shot and expertly acted.
  • And Leave the World Behind (2023) on Netflix is incredible. Gonna take me all night to calm down from it.

Music

November 9, 2024 weeknotes bookmarks

Using linkding for bookmarks

I saw everyone hopping on the linkding train for keeping bookmarks and figured there must be something there. It turns out, there is! I’m using a PikaPods trial to host it and have a couple more months left using their $5 credit. My list is at: https://bookmarks.twelvety.net/bookmarks/shared

Before that, I used Bear because it was so trivially easy to add things to it from a Shortcut. Instead of “Markdown notes you’ll love”, Bear became a place to hoard links to websites, apps, and services that “might be useful someday”. TiddlyWiki used to serve the same function, and it also became unwieldy, although less so than Bear because there’s no Shortcut to make a tiddler. You have to put in an ounce of effort. But no matter how hard or easy it is, there’s no reason to pollute otherwise useful notes and tiddlers with ephemeral URLs you’re never going to need again. Get that shit out of your working/thinking area and into a tool that’s better at storing and sharing it. Pick out the best stuff and point people to it only after it sticks with you.

November 8, 2024 bookmarks linkding

Bear isn’t great at Daily Notes, but org-journal is

I don’t want to bend Bear into being a Daily Notes repository. If I’m gonna do that, I may as well use Obsidian (don’t wanna go there, either). Plus, if the Bear developers had wanted us to do daily notes in it, they would have designed it for that. But org-journal is very good at collecting an arbitrarily large number of daily notes in sequence in one giant, immutable file. Or in my case, in one giant file per month. And with Drafts’s ability to understand org-mode, I can write right in today’s org-formatted note from anywhere and paste it into real org-journal when I get to the computer at night. I could do that with beorg and Dropbox sync, but as many times as I add to a day’s notes, I don’t want to rely on beorg to not mess up my files. And I don’t want to edit real org files when I’m only using the phone, so I’m cheating and using Drafts with its iCloud sync (not iCloud Drive) to do the work. Drafts is so ultra stable that it feels like a local/paper file on my phone anyway.

Now I just need to make an org-mode formatting keyboard row in Drafts.

October 26, 2024 Bear.app org-journal Drafts org-mode beorg

Weeknotes 6

  • Maybe I should just start calling these “Occasional Weekendnotes”.
  • We now have one or two foxes with mange who sleep on chairs or in the DIY cat shelter on our porch. Every night, Sarah puts a raw chicken wing out in a metal bowl for one of them to find and grab and eat. Our hope is they’ll get comfortable enough that we can get the wildlife rescue people to loan us a humane trap and they can retrieve and rehabilitate these little guys.
  • Last weekend I installed next to my desk a corner shelf that had been sitting around for a long time. Having a cassette deck, VHS VCR, Focusrite audio interface, and the fresh experience of seeing a sea of undifferentiated old audio and video tapes in the basement lit a fire under me to get back to logging and digitizing. I don’t know what I’m waiting for.
  • Today I used TiddlyWiki to update some notes about cataloguing audio recordings and it was immediately useful and shareable and required zero activation energy, unlike my beloved org-mode or this here blog. TiddlyWiki is probably a better place to collect and share “interesting links” because I don’t hoard them for 21 days at a time, and they’re easier to connect to other things. In fact, I just scrolled through all the random things I saved to Bear over the past three weeks and I don’t care enough about any of them now to list them here.
  • We saw the Tom Petty documentary Heartbreakers Beach Party this afternoon and it was excellent. Cameron Crowe knew what he was doing even when he was 25 or however old he was when they shot it. And it made me love Tom Petty even more. Music just flowed out of him.

Music:

Yep, this is way more than one week’s worth of music.

October 20, 2024 weeknotes music inertia archiving audio TiddlyWiki

What is it about people who write Weeknotes?

I follow the #weeknotes tag on Mastodon and find it very hard to not dive into every post tagged with that. If you write weeknotes, I feel like we’re already almost friends because of the format, the commitment, and the humility. Weeknoters are loggers, not always bloggers. I can get behind this! I collect, organize, archive (hoard?), and share for fun.

A weeknote is rarely the chance to say, “Here’s what I think about important issue X”. They’re typically more pleasantly mundane: a list of what you did this week, maybe what you did at work, things you saw and heard, and a list of interesting links you came across. Weeknotes put us all on an equal footing. Everyone just had a week. What you noticed and how you spent the time and energy is what makes yours different. If your interests are even remotely up my alley, I’m adding you to the groaning load of my RSS reader.

October 3, 2024 weeknotes

Weeknotes 5

Tiger and me

Tiger and me

  • I savor the weeknotes that other people put out there. I don’t read them in an RSS reader, but I do jump out to all of your websites from RSS. And I don’t read them on my phone. I haul out the MacBook Pro and drink them in that way, usually during lunch at work on Mondays or Fridays when no one else is in the building.
  • I’m frustrated with myself for not getting these out on a more regular schedule. The purpose of weeknotes was to just go with whatever was ready each week and not overthink things. Here I am overthinking things. But, I think the benefit of weeknotes is that it keeps water flowing through the pipes and lowers the activation energy for cranking up an “actual” post.

Did:

  • Cleared out an immense amount of pure crap from the basement. A dumpster changes the equation by exerting a gravitational force on things you know you need to let go of. The bigger the discard pile gets, the more everything else you’re keeping looks like trash that’s just not thrown out yet.

Found:

general.el is an Emacs package to make creating and managing keybindings easier.

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Learned about the Richmond Synth Collective. Hmm. Venture out of the house and meet people who are into the same weird things as me? Could work.

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Went down a bit of an Elvin Jones rabbit hole:

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Molly White: AI isn’t useless. But is it worth it?. This is an even-handed, non-alarmist essay about AI and how it’s kind of good at some things, and also how much it sucks that it wastes so much energy and steals from human endeavors.

Still, I do think acknowledging the usefulness is important, while also holding companies to account for their false or impossible promises, abusive labor practices, and myriad other issues. When critics dismiss AI outright, I think in many cases this weakens the criticism, as readers who have used and benefited from AI tools think “wait, that’s not been my experience at all”.

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Jeremy Keith: Adactio: Journal—What price?

If large language models are going to improve their ethical shortcomings (which is debatable, but let’s be generous), then that’s all the more reason to avoid using the current crop of egregiously damaging tools.

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‎Steps - Activity Tracker for iOS and Apple Watch. I got this because I wanted an Apple Watch complication that would show how many flights of stairs I’d walked in a day. It does that in the “flights climbed” mode, but only shows a chart of one day at a time, although it’s worth it for that alone. I wish it would show the last 7 or 10 days.

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Oh no. Giorgio Sancristoforo has a new-ish app called No-Fi (scroll, scroll, scroll) that is “one mixer, five cassette recorders, one handy reverb and one delay. That’s it!” There’s a YouTube demo.

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Analog Office by Anna Havron is a deep well of to-be-read pages. I love blogs that lay it down for you authoritatively, like the first section of her “How To” Directory page:

How to Find Stuff in Your Paper Notebooks

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feedle is a search engine for blogs and podcasts. Each search generates its own RSS feed.

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Salesforce’s New AI Strategy Acknowledges That AI Will Take Jobs

The new iteration of Salesforce’s AI products is meant to run without supervision “in contrast to now-outdated copilots and chatbots that rely on human requests and struggle with complex or multistep tasks,” the company said in a statement.

Go to hell.

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I’d like to try Mike Hall’s twist on Making a plaintext personal CRM with org-contacts.

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Special Fish

special.fish is a community word processor for writing poetry, journals, and logs, supported by users like you.

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If I ever get around to trying desktop/laptop Linux, I’ll install Harmonoid for managing a music library, as BSAG mentioned in Exploring desktop Linux: Part 2.

Music:

Looking forward to:

  • Ordered a RealForce R3 White TKL Dye Sub PBT Topre 45g keyboard. I felt like my recent extra work hours deserved a non-annoying keyboard. I’m living on the edge and going non-silent Topre. If it’s too loud, I’ll keep the Leopold FC660C 45g silent at work and use the R3 at home. You can go nuts watching YouTube reviews, listening to videos of switches, and imagining whether some r/MechanicalKeyboards commenter’s definition of “tactile” matches your own. Even worse if you start searching for “Topre-like MX switches”. Once you’re in that deep, you will likely spend more than you should for something worse. And that’s when you go for a stock Topre keyboard.
  • Getting more sleep this week.

September 29, 2024 GenAI Emacs music paper Linux keyboards weeknotes