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.
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.
2024-10-19
Mei Semones. (per Duncan)2024-10-18
Beach Bunny — Clueless2024-10-16
Junior Murvin — Police & Thieves2024-10-15
Death Doula — Loom2024-10-15
Bill Callahan: The Holy Grail: Bill Callahan’s “Smog” Dec. 10, 2001 Peel Session2024-10-12
Twen — Infinite Sky2024-10-11
Dehd — Dog Days. (from Matt)2024-10-11
Ulna: Gazebo. (from Jen Kelly)2024-10-06
Sprints — Literary Mind. (from Matt)2024-10-04
Lesley Duncan — Love Song2024-10-04
Elton John — Love Song2024-10-02
Baroness. (from Mike Hall)2024-10-01
Dysrhythmia. (from Butch)2024-09-29
David Bowie’s Favorite Albums | Vanity Fair2024-09-28
The Reds, Pinks and Purples — Don’t Ever Pray in the Church on My Street. (from Matt)2024-09-27
Aerial M: The Peel Sessions2024-09-27
Nick Cave — Stranger than Kindness. (from Strength Through Failure 2024-09-03)2024-09-27
The Jesus Lizard — Puss2024-09-27
Matchess: Stena2024-09-26
Elvin Jones: Live At The Lighthouse2024-09-26
Blue Oyster Cult — Take Me Away2024-09-26
Allegra Krieger — Lingering
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.
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.
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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:
- 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.
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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
- 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.
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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 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:
- 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?”
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mclear-tools/consult-notes: Use consult to search notes
consult-notes
can 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.
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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.
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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.
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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:
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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.
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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.
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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