Weeknotes 10: RAW photo processing, Wet Leg, Lou Barlow, the collapse of the U.S.
We were waiting for our food at Pho Luca’s on Thursday night and this giant parade of cyclists rode by. I used the Not Boring !Camera app to snap a RAW photo and later ran it through RNI Films set to Agfa Optima 200 Warm. I like the result!
Making things vs. just sitting around
Wouldn’t it be better if the rest of this post included stuff I had actually made myself instead of random things I found and listened to? Huh.
Music
Wet Leg — davina mccall
Bill Callahan — Cowboy
Lou Barlow playing “K-Sensa-My” on his podcast — Hearing Lou get out the baritone ukulele again is a cosmic event like when certain planets only align every 40 years.
Unheard works by Erik Satie to premiere 100 years after his death | The Guardian
Painstakingly pieced together from hundreds of small notebooks, most of the new works are thought to have been written in the bohemian bistros of Montmartre in Paris where Satie worked as a pianist in the early decades of the 20th century.
Links
Liberty Lost podcast — Easily the most wrenching podcast I’ve ever heard. Leave it to Jerry Falwell to twist any potentially good parts of adoption into something evil.
2025-06-30 Emacs news :: Sacha Chua — When you read Emacs News, visit the blogs and Mastodon profiles of people who write things that stick out for you. You’ll find interesting folks this way!
https://awfulwoman.com/ — I love Charlie O’Hara’s homepage layout. Just a list a posts.
Framework 12 and ElementaryOS — This guy covered all the things I was wondering about: build quality, the keyboard, assembly, and the comparison of Elementary OS to macOS. Plus, those laptops aren’t that expensive.
Andy Craig on H.R.1 — 119th Congress (2025-2026) | Bluesky
Tax cuts for the wealthy are not and should not be the headline focus here. They just voted to create, on an incomprehensibly massive scale, a combination of secret police and occupying army dedicated to a project of ethnic cleansing and suppressing dissent. That’s where we are.
Weeknotes 9: Day One, Easy Mode, music, links, etc.
Day One again
I’m still absolutely re-obsessed with Day One. I have Journelly to thank for this. Journelly reminded me how useful it is to get into the habit of logging things without thinking too much about it. But I missed the easy calendar view and various other niceties Day One has: multiple journals, easily adjusting the location metadata on a post, On This Day, the ability to hide certain journals from On This Day, the possibility of making a book (someday). Also, the talk about Easy Mode vs. Hard Mode had an effect. Not that Journelly is anything like Hard Mode, but I need Emacs to make it fully work, and Emacs is Hard Mode with a capital H.
Bye, Linkding?
I get such a charge out of seeing other people link to random stuff in their weeknotes that I think I’m going to get rid of the (wonderful) Linkding and just start sharing links here again. Drafts makes it easy create a running weeknote and add links to it as I run across them. No reason to have another bucket sitting out there.
Music
Tropical Fuck Storm: Live at Le Guess Who? – So this is what it’s like to be the best band in the world.
Laura Stevenson – I Want to Remember it All – Her new album sounds confident and sprawling. I especially like this urgent track.
Found
The Day One podcast – Kristen Webb Wright does such a quietly great job as the host, making each guest and topic relatable and approachable. Her love of journaling and the app come through in every episode.
Winnie Lim » platforms, attention spans, paragraphs – Part of the joy of reading Winnie’s blog is the personality the website has. She thinks deeply about how to structure it. Makes me want to make an actual effort with this here blog.
Mike Hall: Just me, my list, and a day with no meetings – I will not download Taskwarrior. I will not download Taskwarrior.
WFMU: Techtonic with Mark Hurst: June 23, 2025 — Lori Emerson, author, “Other Networks: A Radical Technology Sourcebook” – I’m a Lori Emerson fan and this is one of my favorite WFMU shows. Just ordered her book.
Platform reality | Robin Sloan
On an internet crowded with creators eager to obey each platform’s demands, follow their Best Practices (which harden into mandatory genres: quick-setting concrete), there is, I believe, an incandescence to stubborn specificity.
The Simple Immigration Economics: Bigger is Better episode of the Optimist Economy Podcast:
So, $185 billion for immigration enforcement dwarfs the just over $2 billion that we spend on labor law enforcement. So, $185 billion going to keep 11 million people out of the country who don’t have legal authority to be here anymore, versus $2 billion to keep 170 million working Americans protected by the labor laws that Congress has enacted.
Three nights later, still no charges for Rumeysa Ozturk
This past Tuesday night, Rumeysa Ozturk, a Tufts University PhD student, was kidnapped by ICE agents on the street in Somerville, Massachusetts. We can only guess that they were agents because they had no badges nor uniforms. It is three nights later and we still don’t know what she was charged with. The closest thing we can speculate triggered this was a very un-incendiary 2024 op-ed she co-wrote in the Tufts Daily. You should read it.
You already know all this from the news. She’s one of many people who have been rounded up for murky reasons recently. It’s just that this case grabs me because she was an easy target and they whisked her away to the South Louisiana ICE Processing Center without telling her counsel. Trump and Rubio and whoever else want everyone to be too scared to speak out against them, Netanyahu, Putin — take your pick of whichever deplorable they’ll side with next.
The Department of Homeland Security has accused Ozturk, without providing evidence, of “engaging in activities in support of Hamas,” a group which the U.S. government categorizes as a “foreign terrorist organization.” — Reuters
What activities in support of Hamas? Do they mean the op-ed, which is legal, protected free speech (and says nothing about Hamas, by the way, but it wouldn’t matter if it did)? I don’t see anything about her being violent or inciting a riot. I doubt she even got the chance to yell over a bullhorn, “I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard”.
If it eventually becomes clear that she’s guilty of a real crime then I’ll admit I was wrong. I don’t think I am. If there were a charge here, we would damn well have heard about it by now. You can hear the foundation of sand Rubio has built his house on when he glosses over the reasons they revoked her visa. His voice telegraphs that he wants us to stop asking him what she’s charged with. He’s flailing. They’re all dug in now. The longer they hide from their overreach, the more dangerous it becomes for Ozturk. The more dangerous it becomes for any immigrant, visiting student, and natural born citizen.
I’ve heard people say you have to pick your battles with this crass joke of an administration. You can’t get wound up about every piece of shit they flood the zone with. That’s probably a decent way to preserve your own sanity, and so this is the hill I will die on.
Weeknotes 8
- Sarah got me a Fujifilm Instax 99 for my birthday and it is the coolest thing! She knew I would never indulge in one for myself, but now I have free license to buy a bunch of film for it.
- So, the people who howled non-stop about learning loss and the horrible disservice we were doing to students when Covid shut down the schools are also very cool with Trump wanting to dismantle the Education Department. Ok.
Music from this past week:
From Sophisticated Boom Boom with Sheila B. 2024-09-30:
- B-52s — Mesopotamia
- Clinic Stars — I am the Dancer
Meat Puppets — Reward (Matt says their first few records are great)
Slaughterhouse — State of Emergency
Georgia Harmer — Little Light
From Surface Noise with Joe McGasko 2025-03-10:
- Kool & The Gang — Hollywood Swinging
- Trees — Polly
- Marianne Segal & Jade — Mayfly
Wes Montgomery: The Incredible Jazz Guitar of Wes Montgomery from Wes Montgomery At His Most Incredible | Tracking Angle
Olga Anna Markowska — Dawn
Third Eye Blind — Like A Lullaby
Laura Shumate — Indandesce (or Incandesce? wondering about the spelling here)
March 23, 2025 weeknotes music photography Fujifilm Instax 99
When macOS Spotlight doesn’t find files in the current folder
Just went to scan some negatives and was about to make a new folder for them. At some point in the past I chose the unfortunate folder-naming convention of:
yyyy-mm-dd FilmShorthand-RollNumber CameraBrand CameraModel FilmManufacturer FilmType
which results in things like this:
2022-12-31 trix-0036 leica m2 kodak tri-x 400
I guess it works in that it’s sorted by the date of the first exposure (if I can recall it) and then the trix-0036 part is a uniquely sequenced proxy for a roll number.
When I want to start a new folder, I have to look for the highest roll number in my film scans inbox folder and add 1 to it. Spotlight usually works fine for that, but just now I saw that trix-0036 roll in there and wanted to make sure there wasn’t a something-0037 roll that I missed. Spotlight didn’t report a 0037 match when searching the Name of items in that film scans folder, but it also couldn’t find the 0036 match, though I could plainly see the matching folder sitting in there.
The fix is to tell Spotlight to exclude the folder (or the drive) from search, then re-add it. I didn’t have to exclude my whole drive — only the folder in question — but still. Isn’t this the kind of thing you’d expect Windows to do, and on macOS it should just work?
Using the treetrum Amazon Kindle Bulk Downloader on macOS
The clock is ticking on downloading backup copies of your Amazon Kindle books. You have through Feb. 26.
Just in time, I happened to see Jack mention Sam Davis’s Amazon Kindle Bulk Downloader:
Designed for downloading your Kindle eBooks in a more automated fashion than is typically permitted, this tool allows you to create backup copies of the books you’ve already purchased.
Here’s what I did to get it working on a MacBook running Sequoia:
First, make sure you see the pre-requisites about having a physical Kindle or Fire Tablet of the right (not too new) vintage.
In Terminal, go to whatever folder you clone repos to. I use a code folder in my home directory:
cd ~/codeClone the repo to that folder:
git clone https://github.com/treetrum/amazon-kindle-bulk-downloader.gitInstall Bun by going to https://bun.sh/docs/installation – I did the plain option:
curl -fsSL https://bun.sh/install | bashOpen a new Terminal window and check your Bun version:
bun --versionThis next part is important. You have to go the folder where the Amazon Kindle Bulk Downloader is installed:
cd ~/code/amazon-kindle-bulk-downloaderThen install the dependencies the bulk downloader needs:
bun installLook at all the files in that folder:
ls -allYou’ll see an .env.template file. You could copy that file to an .env file and customize it with your Amazon username, password, and one-time-password, but I didn’t have good luck getting that to work. I did this instead and logged in manually. I’m using a baseUrl of https://www.amazon.com :
bun run start --baseUrl "https://www.amazon.com" --manualAuth "true"After you put in your username and password and authenticate with either your Amazon iOS app or with a 6-digit code, Google Chrome for Testing will appear to hang for a minute or so while Amazon figures out who you are. Don’t bail out. Once you’re in, you’ll see your digital content items.
Now flip back to Terminal and you’ll see a prompt in bold that says:
✔ Press enter once you've logged in
Press Enter.
Then you’ll see:
✔ Select a Kindle device (note, eink devices are preferred)
Select your device and hit Enter.
Then all of your stuff will download super fast to the ~/code/amazon-kindle-bulk-downloader/downloads folder.
Wow! Now go save all those downloaded books somewhere safe. You should extract every cent of value out of what you’ve already paid Bezos for. He can suck it.