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.
Weeknotes 5
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.
∵
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.
∵
Went down a bit of an Elvin Jones rabbit hole:
- Elvin Jones | Fresh Air Archive: Interviews with Terry Gross
- He said that hearing Dizzy Gillespie’s Salt Peanuts (1945) with Big Sid Catlett on drums was one of the most beautiful things he’d ever heard. I don’t know if that was the exact recording, though.
∵
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”.
∵
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.
∵
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.
∵
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.
∵
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
- Set up a table of contents or an index.
- A table of contents is too much work? Set up an edge index.
- …an edge index requires too much hand-eye coordination? Enter the date on all of your notes.
∵
feedle is a search engine for blogs and podcasts. Each search generates its own RSS feed.
∵
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.
∵
I’d like to try Mike Hall’s twist on Making a plaintext personal CRM with org-contacts.
∵
special.fish is a community word processor for writing poetry, journals, and logs, supported by users like you.
∵
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:
- The Fall: Grotesque (After The Gramme) ‘Live’. “Sourced, mastered and designed by the musicians who played on the original LP, and with insightful liner notes by Henry Rollins, ‘Grotesque Live’ presents fascinating versions of all the seminal 1980 album tracks.”
- Sabrina Carpenter — Taste
- Sonny Sharrock — Many Mansions. Jesus Christ, I instantly knew this was Elvin Jones playing. Just listen. It’s like he has four arms. (This is what started the rabbit hole.)
- Lizzy McAlpine — Pushing It Down and Praying
- Wardruna — Himinndotter (Sky-Daughter) (mainly for the video)
- Sepultura: Beneath the Remains (from 1001 Other Albums)
- SS Decontrol — Boiling Point. (from Matt)
- Centro-Matic: Love You Just the Same. (from Doug)
- Steve Gunn — Ancient Jules. (from Matt)
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
Weeknotes 4
We just rented a dumpster for a week to help/force us to clean out 14 years of detritus in the basement. This appears to be the only way.
Did:
- Dumped a bunch of mp3s on a thumb drive to play on shuffle in the Honda Fit. It works, but the shuffle in the car is not smart enough to not repeat the same song too soon.
We’re An AmeriKihn Band — photo by Dave C.
- Played drums on two Greg Kihn Band songs with my buds at Nutstock this past weekend. We called ourselves We’re An AmeriKihn Band and it was fun as hell! After that, I played in a rock improv duo called Jazz Brunch that I had forgotten I was supposed to be in. Both of those bands made me wonder why I don’t play drums more often.
- And then we were treated to Martin Roach, who hadn’t played together since they were a band in Blacksburg 35 years ago. The memories!
Music:
- Jack White: No Name (from Matt)
- Translator — I Need You to Love (from Will)
- Wussy — The Great Divide (from Matt)
- Wussy Duo — Indiana Wants Me, Too
- Cassie Ramone — Together
- April Varner — I’ll Remember April
- Martin Roach: Satan Doghair Shirt
Found:
- Great stuff in here about having a personal blog, using your blog for accountability and to document what you learn, and taking detailed notes in GitHub issues on a large number of projects to document what you were thinking, tried, and decided. I need to watch his Django talk.
- Also, the idea of saying “what are my options” in a prompt does work great when I try it, which also sucks. Like this: “In Emacs orgmode, what are my options for showing search results from all orgmode files in their respective headings context?”
∵
mclear-tools/consult-notes: Use consult to search notes
consult-notescan be used with any directory (or directories) of note files. It easily integrates with note systems like zk, denote, or org-roam. Additionally, it may also search org headings in a set of specified files.
∵
Music industry’s 1990s hard drives, like all HDDs, are dying | Ars Technica
One of the things enterprise storage and destruction company Iron Mountain does is handle the archiving of the media industry’s vaults. What it has been seeing lately should be a wake-up call: roughly one-fifth of the hard disk drives dating to the 1990s it was sent are entirely unreadable.
∵
Re: Overwhelmed and Need Help with Organizing | Protesilaos Stavrou
My recommendation to you then is to forget about the advanced features of logging, plotting, linking, drawing, stamping, clipping, extracting, summarising, analysing, et cetera, and focus on the one and only basic thing that matters: you set a goal and you do it. If you cannot do this with consistency, then all that other stuff is just a glorified mini-game to make you feel better about the fact you are not actually doing what you are supposed to.
∵
Archive.today is a time capsule for web pages! It takes a ‘snapshot’ of a webpage that will always be online even if the original page disappears. It saves a text and a graphical copy of the page for better accuracy and provides a short and reliable link to an unalterable record of any web page including those from Web 2.0 sites:
∵
Why I prefer rST to markdown | Hillel Wayne
The most important difference between rst and markdown is that markdown is a lightweight representation of html, while rst is a midweight representation of an abstract documentation tree.
∵
Challenging The Myths of Generative AI | TechPolicy.Press
The productivity myth suggests that anything we spend time on is up for automation — that any time we spend can and should be freed up for the sake of having even more time for other activities or pursuits — which can also be automated. The importance and value of thinking about our work and why we do it is waved away as a distraction. The goal of writing, this myth suggests, is filling a page rather than the process of thought that a completed page represents.
∵
BEM — is a methodology that helps you to create reusable components and code sharing in front‑end development
Looking forward to:
Someday installing Linux on the 2014 MacBook Pro after seeing bashbunni demo how to turn a MacBook Pro into a Linux server | YouTube. And her homepage has the coolest loading animation.
September 19, 2024 Nutstock GenAI org-mode archiving Linux weeknotes
Caleb Southern
I just found out today that Caleb Southern died in July 2023. I never met him, but in the early 90s it seemed like every other album that came through our college radio station had his name on the production or engineering credits. Just to name a few bands he recorded (and these are only some of the ones from North Carolina): Polvo, Picasso Trigger, Bicycle Face, Southern Culture on the Skids, Superchunk, June, Flat Duo Jets, and Geezer Lake. (Caleb Southern | Discogs)
After that, he had a whole other career as a computer science professor at Georgia Tech:
Beloved Computing Lecturer Caleb Southern Dies | College of Computing
“To say that Professor Southern shaped my experience at Tech would be an understatement. He always insisted that students call him Caleb, but I couldn’t bring myself to do so given how professional, brilliant, and truly prolific he was as an educator. The loss of Professor Southern means the loss of a truly great mind, full of computing hacks and secrets many of us will never know. But the greater loss is that of a friend, and a genuinely kind soul. He is already missed by those of us lucky enough to have called him a mentor,” said teaching assistant and student Nikkolas Glover.
“Professor Southern loved what he taught and that was a passion he shared with his students. In every class, no matter the topic, whether it was data path circuits or the functionality of a doorknob design, he taught with joy. It was in his smile, the excitement in his voice, and his wild hand gestures,” said student Samantha Burger.
Southern completed his degree in mathematics and computer science with honors at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and was a recipient of the prestigious Brooks scholarship.
His Ph.D. research focused on mobile-human-computer interaction, and he created the app Braille Touch, which allows visually impaired users to text.
September 15, 2024 music recording Georgia Tech computer science
Weeknotes 3
Did:
Wasted hours and lots of gas visiting Staples, OfficeMax, and Wal-Mart to try out desk chairs. I’ve spent too much time looking at r/OfficeChairs, so most of the ones in those stores feel terrible and the ones that don’t are fantastically overpriced. In the end, I came back home and brought up my 1967 Army-made steel tanker chair from the basement and it’s fine other than needing to be reupholstered.
Found:
Creativity is made, not generated — Procreate®
AI is not our future.
Creativity is made, not generated.
Generative AI is ripping the humanity out of things. Built on a foundation of theft, the technology is steering us toward a barren future. We think machine learning is a compelling technology with a lot of merit, but the path generative AI is on is wrong for us.
We’re here for the humans. We’re not chasing a technology that is a moral threat to our greatest jewel: human creativity. In this technological rush, this might make us an exception or seem at risk of being left behind. But we see this road less travelled as the more exciting and fruitful one for our community.
∵
Importing all of your orgmode notes into Apple Notes for mobile access. - vxlabs. This is crazy enough to work.
∵
Part Four of My Battles with Emacs - Bicycle For Your Mind. I never get tired of reading about how people struggle with and prevail over Emacs.
∵
“Also, what goes along with me putting those roots deep for 20 years without social media is I have a following and fans who are not desiring me to put a picture of my face up every three days on Instagram. I have an audience that has been there with me for all this time.”
∵
∵
The entire Pro Git book, written by Scott Chacon and Ben Straub and published by Apress, is available here.
Music:
- Saw Guided By Voices play at the Broadberry. The band was fine as usual, but it sounded like Pollard’s mic was broken for the first five or six songs, the lighting was so dim it was as if they were afraid we’d be able to see the faces of the band members, and the layout of the club is more narrow than it is wide. It has never made sense. I hate the Broadberry.
- The Jesus And Mary Chain — Pop Seeds. (from Doug)
- Death — Freakin Out. (from Tina)
- First two Atomic Rooster albums. (from Will)
- George Antheil’s Ballet Mécanique. (from Richard)
- Blondshell — What’s Fair. (from Matt)
- Dean Roberts — Sugar Got a Cocaine Heart (from Strength Through Failure 2024-08-20)
- White Winged Moth — Kayo (from Strength Through Failure 2024-08-20)
- Nick Cave: Wild God
Looking forward to:
Broadcast - Distant Call - Collected Demos 2000 - 2006
Distant Call is a collection of early demos of songs that would subsequently appear as finished productions on the albums Haha Sound, Tender Buttons and The Future Crayon. The album also includes two songs discovered by James after Trish’s passing: “Come Back To Me” and “Please Call To Book”. These were her response to Broadcast’s 2006 ‘Let’s Write A Song’ project, where fans were asked to submit lyrics on a postcard which would then be worked into a finished song. Distant Call is a closing of the door on Broadcast and will be the last release from the band. Distant Call - Collected Demos 2000-2006 will be released via Warp Records on September 28th and available on standard black 1LP and CD.
Although I’m sad that it’s “a closing of the door on Broadcast”. Trish Keenan will be regarded as one of the towering songwriters of our time. Gone way too soon.
Weeknotes 2
I already wish I had been doing weeknotes my whole life. Throwing down anything into a Markdown file once a week is a manageable schedule, it keeps the blog from getting stale, and it gives me something to frame events into. It helps time slow down a little.
Found:
Brian A. Anderson is writing a book on the Grateful Dead’s Wall of Sound!
∵
Bill Wear: Why I’m in Sync with Emacs
Emacs is just a text editor, right? A tool for writing code, drafting documents, or taking notes. But, as with most things that touch the depths of what it means to live authentically, it is much more than that. In my journey, I’ve discovered that Emacs is less a tool and more a philosophy, a manifestation of a way of thinking that resonates deeply with how I choose to live my life. It’s a digital reflection of my own approach to existence—one that prizes adaptability, continuous learning, community, and a profound respect for both simplicity and complexity.
∵
Sketch and take handwritten notes. Rnote is an open-source vector-based drawing app for sketching, handwritten notes and to annotate documents and pictures. It is targeted at students, teachers and those who own a drawing tablet and provides features like Pdf and picture import and export, an infinite canvas and an adaptive UI for big and small screens.
∵
Austin Kleon and Jerry Saltz on being a good assistant to yourself.
∵
AeroSpace is an i3-like tiling window manager for macOS.
∵
Reading about BSAG exploring desktop Linux makes me want to explore desktop Linux. And:
Talking about my opinion on generative AI would be a whole other post, but let’s just say that I don’t like it, I don’t want or need it, and I don’t want to be party to wasting energy and water, just so that I can have AI summarise something for me that my human brain is already capable of doing pretty well. I certainly don’t want it forced on me.
∵
Ultimate-64-Elite-MT is an FPGA implementation of an entire Commodore 64.
∵
This person on Reddit uses Areas in Things as project statuses. Interesting way of approaching it!
∵
How to live without your phone - by Sam Kriss
Technologically, there’s nothing your phone can do that an ordinary computer can’t. These machines haven’t changed the world because they have any very notable capabilities. They just have the right shape for latching onto the soft part underneath your mind. … Not using a phone taught me what a phone is really for. It’s not for communicating with other people, getting directions, reading articles, looking at pictures, shopping for products, or playing games. A phone is a device for muting the anxieties proper to being alive.
Music:
- Obsessed with Shudder To Think this week after years of not thinking about them very often. Get Your Goat is perfect and better than I remembered. Especially love the re-recorded version of “Red House” on Pony Express Record where they just went full-on rock. Live From Home sounds like Niagara Falls. I’ve been listening to them so much that I haven’t played a podcast in the car in days, which is progress!
- The Hard Quartet — Rio’s Song. Per Matt.
- Throbbing Gristle: A Souvenir Of Camber Sands. “A Souvenir Of Camber Sands is a live album by Throbbing Gristle released on the night of the performance - Dec 3, 2004.”
- Quivers — Oyster Cuts. Per Matt.
- Chad VanGaalen — Samurai Sword. Per Matt.
- Roy Ayers — Everybody Loves the Sunshine. Per Sarah.
- Mitski — My Love Mine All Mine. Per Matt.
Learned about:
“All Projects” in Things | Reddit
Type “All projects” when you are anywhere in the app (not in a text field). This will bring up the search menu and you can press enter when it shows up. It’s a hidden list you can only access via typing
∵
How to get JPGs out of Halide’s Process Zero | Reddit
Process Zero is how Halide converts the RAW file into a JPG. Until you convert the RAW image to JPG in Halide, the image isnt Process Zero. Each app has to decide how to display a RAW image, and each one does that a little differently. Convert to jpg in Halide by using the +/- button at the bottom. If you open that RAW file in different apps, each is making its own decisions on how the image should look. The JPG should then look the same in each app.
∵
How to log medication for past days in the iOS Health app | Ask Different
∵
“Chesterton’s fence” is the principle that reforms should not be made until the reasoning behind the existing state of affairs is understood.
From G.K. Chesterton: The Thing | Internet Archive
In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: ’If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”
Saw:
- PBS News Hour. Because we’re old now? It’s so slow and thorough.
- Binge-watching Only Murders in the Building. It didn’t stick the first time we watched a few episodes. I don’t know what’s different now, but we’re hooked. Maybe because we realize it’s a drama set in a life-sized dollhouse?
- WWE Bash in Berlin with our friends C + D.
Did:
- Bought a lifetime account on Voicenotes. $50 was too good to pass up. This should be fun to play with.
- Played music with my dudes. They indulged my request of Foreigner’s “Hot Blooded”.
- Walked up and down Cary St. before dinner at Pho Luca’s last Saturday. Spotted a man a little older than me walking with a mirrorless camera and long lens. He saw the X100T hanging on my shoulder and we gave each other The Nod. On our walk back down the street at Cary Court, we crossed paths again and he stopped and we compared cameras. I thought he had some flavor of Panasonic LUMIX but it was a Fujifilm X-M1. He said he had an X-20 before that. He was in town dropping off his son and said how much he liked Richmond. He’ll probably retire here at some point. If I hadn’t taken a camera with me, I would have missed that whole conversation!
Looking forward to:
- Someday getting the Sony TC-D5 overhauled by someone who knows what they’re doing. It would sound so good in the car and through headphones.
- Receiving in the mail: The Radio Phonics Laboratory by Justin Patrick Moore.
September 1, 2024 weeknotes music Carytown Fujifilm X100T Grateful Dead Emacs Linux Commodore 64 Things TV