hi, it's mike

What is practice

Mon, 14 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Al and I went to a dome show at OMSI called “Trust the Universe: The Philosophy of Alan Watts.” Up front, because reviews are thin on the ground, I would recommend against it: It’s only 45 minutes long, feels pretty disjointed, and the psychedelic visuals are sometimes a little campy. When the lotus position guy sort of gets sucked up into the mandala having dissolved his own ego I was annoyed.

About this project

Sun, 13 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I’m adding a section to my Claude Code-driven project READMEs (below).

I came across someone’s attempt to create an “AI Free” badge people could adopt for their projects, and decided that while I appreciate the sentiment, it is not actually helpful to anyone besides people whose position stops at “I don’t want to use code produced by an LLM.” That’s a fine position I take no philosophical issue with, but it doesn’t help people who come across my projects, which are plainly excluded from using that badge, to understand what it means to use them or interact with the code base if their position is not reflexively anti-AI.

OmniFocus through a new lens

Fri, 11 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I got a notification that the OmniFocus subscription I forgot all about was about to expire, so naturally I had to go see what I made of that. It was sort of interesting reapproaching OF through the lens of having spent a bunch of time trying different task management tools before deciding to make my own that did everything I wanted.

My past reaction to OmniFocus has traditionally been “no, get it away from me.” Some of that reaction is to the tool itself and some of it is cultural: I remember OmniFocus when it was a bunch of AppleScript meant to make OmniOutliner do unnatural things, and I remember the culture it came out of. And some of that reaction is from thinking it is just too much, but that “productivity wang overkill” is pretty much its most loyal niche.

denote-tasks

Thu, 10 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

denote-tasks is pretty much “what I hoped to get with TaskWarrior but didn’t.”

Rather than using sqlite it uses Markdown files named using Denote conventions, with some extra metadata in the YAML frontmatter for priority, due date, and project associations.

I chose to use the Denote naming convention because it gives me a reliable index for making associations between normal tasks and projects and can be the foundation for subtasks at some point. That also means you can use it in the context of a normal Denote notes corpus and take advantage of Denote stuff like dblocks if you like.

Trying to figure out how to live with LLMs at work

Thu, 03 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Today I was writing an interview summary in Greenhouse, the recruiting tool, when I noticed one of those little “pixie dust” icons I have come to understand means “AI here!” It made me curious, so I carefully saved my work elsewhere then clicked the button.

Because I sit on my company’s AI governance committee, I have spent a lot of time over the past 18 months or so wondering what that button does in its many manifestations in all the apps where it appears. Sometimes it suggests some stuff you might want the LLM to do for you, like help plan a project, and other times it just does some sort of rewrite based on … ideas? … about “helping” you with your writing.

I think I'm finally over the savage wound that was GNOME 2.

Wed, 02 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I finally remembered after a lot of “it must be in here somewhere” through each tiny little submenu of GNOME Tweaks that the “swap fn and ctrl” option is actually in Framework’s BIOS settings, not somewhere near “swap meta and super” in GNOME Tweaks.

I got so used to GNOME’s overview being under my thumb with only x percent of thumb curl instead of the pre-tweak y percent that the Framework 12 felt actively hostile. Now it matches my other Linux stuff and the slight change in the number of milimeters my thumb curls to invoke the overview/launcher feels like much less effort.

Just me, my list, and a day with no meetings

Fri, 27 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Today was the first day in a little while that I had a true “heads down” day to truly dig in on the backlog I’ve been storing in Taskwarrior: No scheduled meetings, a painful awareness I’m behind on a few things, and a vague unease over the fact that unstructured time is my biggest enemy.

It was off to a good start, though, when I just made sure I was in the right context in TW and got ready to dig in: task context:work filtered out the non-work stuff, and all my “today” stuff was red, with tasks from my current focus project in yellow. Very easy to be clear on what I’d committed to or what the best things to pull forward would be if I exhausted the day’s list, and it helped me spot things that I knew I’d need to rethink as I worked through the focus project and future tasks were affected by current work.

Well, I remember kind of what I was thinking

Fri, 27 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I forgot I even ordered a tinyPod until it showed up at my door Wednesday. I ordered it a very long time ago. (Checked the mail after posting this: 10 months ago!)

It, uh, it turns your Apple Watch into an Apple Watch encased in plastic with a scroll wheel.

I think the logic of this purchase was:

I don’t really like my Apple Watch as a watch anymore. I am wearing my field watch these days.
It seems like a neat idea to have a little iPod-like thing with cellular connectivity.
I like the idea of having access to things like calendar, weather, directions, etc. without having my phone along.

One could say, “if you’re getting all that utility out of the watch anyhow, one easy way to carry it would be on your wrist.”

More on managing Taskwarrior (and integrating with mutt and notes-tui)

Thu, 26 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

After a few days of fiddling, I almost feel like Taskwarrior is dialed in.

I’ve got a pair of aliases that take away some of the wordiness of task entry: twa and twp for things that get either the work or personal tag. If I want to add metadata I can, but if I need to just dash something in, it’s fast.

I’ve set up a work context, a personal context (which is just not tagged work), and a contacts context. So it’s easy to cut away the noise from different areas of concern.

On Monokai Pro

Thu, 26 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I really like the Monokai Pro theme. I’m using it in Helix as I write this post. Specifically, I really like the “Ristretto” sub theme, which hits a really nice note with its browns, oranges, and cyans. (Green figures heavily in it, too, and it’s one of those things where it can be used well or used too much, so I won’t use kitty’s version of Ristretto because I’d need to go in and figure out how to swap out the green in my shell color scheme and haven’t yet.)

Seeking the right kind of friction

Tue, 24 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I picked TaskWarrior as an entry point into CLI todo tools. There are a lot of them, and the struggle between Danny-O’Brien-style “just write it in a text file” minimalism and … the other extreme … is real.

I picked TW because it has been around forever. I will not presume to judge its design decisions. I can tell a few strategically placed aliases would do a lot to remove the sense of crushing overhead. I also picked it because it is super scriptable, so it was easy to build a tasks backend into my contacts TUI with it.

Helix and Marksman LSP server

Mon, 23 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The Marksman LSP server experience with Helix is so smooth. Given a directory of Markdown files, dropping in a blank .marksman.toml or running git init . puts the directory on Marksman’s radar as a thing to work with. Provided Marksman is in your path, there’s no need for additional config.

Drop into insert mode, start typing wikilink brackets ([[) and it invokes autocomplete on every file in the directory.

Placing the cursor over a wikilink, you can use gd (go to definition) to open that file in a new buffer.

Integrating notes and contacts

Fri, 20 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been plugging away at another TUI app, this time for notes. It’s very much in line with the thing I was trying to do with bash and fzf, but instead in Go. Right now:

Fast search for notes in either a configured directory or one named on the command line
Tag search, either in-line (#tag) or in YAML frontmatter
Open to-do search
Hotkey to make a daily note of a given format
Alternate note template. If you see the point in YAML frontmatter, it’ll do that. If you prefer “l1 heading from the title” it’ll do that.
It does a very basic sort of Markdown rendering on its own for note preview, or you can configure it to shell out to bat, glow, etc. I am using glow because it has an option to edit a file under preview.

It works really well with Helix or other LSP-aware editors, because you can add the Marksman LSP server and have your own connected notes system with wiki-linking without having to adopt another app, like Obsidian, if you don’t want that whole ride.

Helix

Thu, 19 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I had insomnia a few nights ago, so I started fiddling with different things, including the CLI tasks tool dstask, which is sort of TaskWarrior without the misanthropy. (I kid.)

So a kind of nice thing about dstask is that with dstask #{note number} note you pop open $EDITOR in a Markdown note attached to the task. dstask is aware of any Markdown checklists inside the task note and blocks completion of the task if there are open ones.

Integrating task trackers with contacts-tui

Wed, 18 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

One of the best parts of my org-contacts setup was that when I moved a contact into a given state (followup, call, write, etc.) it’d become a task in my org agenda, along with all my other todos.

I added integrations with TaskWarrior, dstask, and Things to contacts-tui this evening:

Put a contact in a given state, the tasks backend creates a todo in your configured tracker with that contact’s label as a tag.

Contacts management in a TUI

Tue, 17 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I haven’t really liked social networking as a development. Sometimes I’d even say I mourn its existence. I used to have people with whom I shared a great email correspondence who abandoned that in favor of the Eternal Holiday Newsletter mode of Facebook, or the “oh, I tweeted about it last week if you want to look it up” of the assorted microblogging services.

The kind of conversation we can have at a BBQ you invited your high school friends to is different from the one we can have over coffee. The kinds of things I’d say to you on my front porch might even be different from what I’d say at the cafe.

The One-Armed Bandit

Sat, 14 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Well, I’ve spent a few weeks now playing around with Claude on two projects:

An MCP for Remember the Milk
An MCP for contacts management

I haven’t read a lot of commentary on how to code with AI, and I’ll say a little more on the kind of AI-related commentary I have read in a bit. Instead, I just let myself stumble into the challenges and try to figure out my way around them. The biggest ones were:

Remember the Milk MCP

Sat, 07 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I have a lot of todos and a lot of meetings. I hate playing task/calendar Tetris. Sometimes my task list gets way out in front of my calendar. I got pretty curious about “what is an MCP and how do they work?” So this morning, when I woke up early anyhow, I set about to work with Claude to make a Remember the Milk MCP using some stuff I learned from making imgup.

imgup v0.12.0 (flipping the script)

Thu, 05 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

One of my bigger annoyances with Lightroom CC is how magestically indifferent it is to anything a normal human being using a Mac in 2025 might want to with it in the way of sharing your pictures. It is a literal void on the desktop: AppleScript? lol. Even the standard macOS share sheet? Nope. You can export out to disk, and you can share things to Adobe’s own services. If you want more extensibility or flexibility well, go use Lightroom Classic.

imgupv2 0.9.0 - Bluesky, multi-image, caching

Tue, 03 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I pushed out imgupv2 0.9.1. It’s what I’d call feature complete:

multi-image posting to Flickr, Smugmug, Bluesky, and Mastodon
world’s crabbiest, most indifferent caching strategy
GUI for posting straight from Apple Photos or Finder selection

I kinda like where it ended up with multi-images from the command line. They were super clunky using standard command line switches and positional arguments, and I think that’s a weird use case for the command line, but it’s a normal use case for automation, so the tool biases in favor of machines talking at each other in those instances:

Well, I'm less likely to subtoot, anyhow.

Mon, 02 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I’m currently on my second life in Mastodon. I deleted my omg.lol account after a long period of having 30-day self-destructing toots anyhow, then sort of pulled myself together and reinstated it. I turned off the self-destructing part, too.

But part of the reason for getting rid of almost all my social accounts was frustration over seeing things go by and rinsing/repeating the whole “someone is wrong on the internet” cycle, except I’m way too retiring to do anything other than delete the post or turn it into a homeopathically vague subtoot. “If a tree falls on Jupiter and nobody is around to hear it” levels of vague.

There's an addressable market of 1

Sun, 01 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Years ago when I was first learning to write scripts, I’d come up with stuff that made my life much better and would have helped other people on my team, and I’d run into the kinds of distribution problems you’d expect: I was a Linux/Mac guy, everyone around me was a Windows person, etc. I am guessing the 20th anniversary of the first time I said “well, it runs on my laptop” is right around the corner. Even people who could download the OSAX I was using for an AppleScript weren’t necessarily interested in doing it.

imgup v0.13.0 (Fedi-Ready)

Wed, 28 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Over the weekend I roughed in support for posting to gotosocial or Mastodon imgup, but made a decision about UI that my old jazz band director would have called “a choice that was not as good as the other ones,” and it took trying to wire the new functionality into a Raycast script to catch how it was a problem.

So this morning was “untangle that mess” and I think it’s in a way better place:

Exposure therapy

Mon, 26 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I should probably apologize to a few people on the Fediverse for double-follows or weird Mastodon noise, but I’m not entirely clear on what kind of noise a small experiment might have generated. If you know me and noticed a weird follow, it’s because a quick automated trawl of my timeline flagged you as low-noise, high-signal for photography-related stuff and dropped you into my Photographers list.

The reason for the trawl was to get back to a practice I used to follow a long time ago where I’d wake up in the morning and load up Flickr’s “Explore” feed in Flipboard and make myself flip through it for a while. It was a little hard to do some mornings, but I stuck with it, adopting a mindset of:

Focus Guardian

Mon, 26 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Claude has enabled a sort of exuberant play recently, as I’ve figured out what it is good for and how it can help me do stuff that I’ve thought would be interesting or fun to play with, but not practical to implement on my own. That’s been fun, but also it has felt a little weird because it has led me fully into the territory of doing things because I can, not because they’re really useful.

imgup v0.10.0 - sharing is caring (fedi support)

Sun, 25 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I started the day working through the setup for a gotosocial server. It took a little fussing with the Synology, but it’s up and running. There’s a little more to it than “because I could,” but not much. I think I’ll find a few things to follow from there that are not humans with feelings and see how well it runs before moving there.

But that made me start thinking about imgup and how it’d be kind of cool to be able to use it to post to Fediverse services. So imgup 0.10.0 does that by adding a way to enroll it with gotosocial as an app then adding it as an option when posting to Flickr or Smugmug.

lmno-blog-capture bump (adds and polishes 'drafts')

Sat, 24 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I rolled the lmno ‘drafts’ stuff into lmno-blog-capture, which is sort of like org-capture for a monolithic lmno.lol blog file: Invoke it, get a little transient window with a pre-populated heading, do your thing, C-c C-c to save/exit.

With the drafts feature added, you can configure a drafts file (e.g. drafts-lmno.md), position the cursor inside a draft you’re working on in your main blog file, and teleport it to your drafts file. If you’re done with a draft, you can send it back over to the top of your lmno.lol file.

The FujiFilm half made me think about the XF10

Fri, 23 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The new #fujifilm #half looks sort of fun. I checked its dimensions against the XF10, and they’re quite similar.

I re-read some release reviews of the XF10, then looked it up in Lightroom. I didn’t take too many pictures with it: I’ve never really done well with cameras that don’t have a viewfinder, and I got mine during the summer, when working with an LCD on bright beaches, etc. was a challenge.

The Priorities app

Fri, 23 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

A long while back I had a small falling out with a boss. I was a green manager and we were trying to figure out what I needed for headcount. I had no idea how to have that conversation: I just knew “more people == more work done.” After a few back-and-forths, he finally realized I wasn’t getting it, and he said, “Look, I need to know each thing the team is doing, how important you think it is, and what it takes to keep the lights on. Tell me that and we can figure out if there’s something we could be doing differently, or slow down on, or reprioritize.”

Plain text is calming

Wed, 21 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I managed to get too many plates spinning again, and made it worse for myself by trying very hard to use Asana, because it’s what we use for a few things at work and it’s easier to send todos back and forth in 1:1 and team boards. My own personal project board isn’t great and I vacillate between a column view and list view, but the fact is Asana just makes my brain freeze. I do not like it. It doesn’t matter how I arrange the view.

Hoarder

Tue, 20 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I started to write about Basic Memory this afternoon, and that gave me an idea that turned into an evening of coaching Claude into helping me do some stuff:

I took my corpus of old micro.blog posts and migrated them into my notes. They’re all YAML-n-Markdown, so they could just be imported.

I did the same with my mono-topic Hugo posts. Same idea.

I made a script for the many, many daily posts I wrote over a few years, grateful that I stuck to a convention of organizing them with l2 headings: Each heading became a title of a new, atomized post. I did that because my daily posts could cover a lot, so now it’s all more searchable.

The eglot/lsp/apheleia rabbithole

Tue, 20 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

… I went down it last night and this morning.

I’m back on Doom after patiently dismantling a bunch of cruft I’d added to it. I set a goal of getting my package count under 200 (including all the batteries Doom includes). Because its default stance is that you want emacs-lsp and not eglot I went along with that initially, and it drove me a little bonkers. I think these things assume a much more organized person than I am, and LSP began to nag pretty much constantly until I made the mistake of telling it to blocklist ~/, at which point it pretty much stopped working, because there’s an implicit -r in there.

Simple 'drafts' for lmno.lol

Mon, 19 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

lmno.lol does have a feature for hiding posts, but the last time I did blogging out of a monolithic file I struggled to remember to toggle that, so when I started working on a post that got longer and longer I ended up moving the work into a scratch buffer. That was annoying to me, so there’s this:

(defvar mph/blog-drafts-file (expand-file-name "drafts_lmno.md" "~/journal/blog/"))
(defvar mph/blog-published-file (expand-file-name "lmno.md" "~/journal/blog/"))

(defun mph/move-heading-between-draft-and-published ()
 "Move current Markdown L1 heading to the other blog file (drafts_lmno.md or lmno.md).
If in drafts_lmno.md, moves to lmno.md. If in lmno.md, moves to drafts_lmno.md.
Always inserts at the beginning of the file."
  (interactive)
  (let* ((current-file (buffer-file-name))
         (target-file (cond
                       ((string= (file-truename current-file) (file-truename mph/blog-drafts-file)) mph/blog-published-file)
                       ((string= (file-truename current-file) (file-truename mph/blog-published-file)) mph/blog-drafts-file)
                       (t (user-error "This file is not drafts_lmno.md or lmno.md")))))
    ;; Save and cut the heading
    (save-excursion
      ;; Find the beginning of the current L1 heading
      (beginning-of-line)
      (while (and (not (looking-at "^# ")) (not (bobp)))
        (forward-line -1))
      (unless (looking-at "^# ")
        (user-error "Not on a Markdown L1 heading"))
      (let ((start (point)))
        ;; Find the end of the current heading (next L1 heading or end of buffer)
        (forward-line 1)
        (while (and (not (looking-at "^# ")) (not (eobp)))
          (forward-line 1))
        ;; Cut the heading and its content
        (let ((heading-text (buffer-substring-no-properties start (point))))
          (delete-region start (point))
          ;; Paste into target file at beginning
          (with-current-buffer (find-file-noselect target-file)
            (goto-char (point-min))
            (insert heading-text)
            (save-buffer)))))
    (message "Moved heading to %s" (file-name-nondirectory target-file))))
;; Doom leader key setup
(map! :leader
      :desc "Blog commands"
      "l" '(:ignore t :which-key "blog")
      :desc "Move heading to other blog file"
      "l r" #'mph/move-heading-between-draft-and-published
      :desc "New lmno blog entry (md)"
      "l b" #'lmno-capture-post)

Just, SPC l r on a given l1 heading to shuttle it to either the drafts file or the main blog file.

So many brooms, so many buckets (Updated)

Sat, 17 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I started the day playing around with MCP’s for Claude Desktop. I found one for Emacs and one called Basic Memory.

emacs-mcp-server sends evals to your running Emacs instance via emacsclient. It’s sort of fascinating to watch in progress. Not the fastest thing on the planet, but it was a jolt the first time I turned my attention to something else and came back to realize it had created a new function and added it to my configuration.

A cautionary Syncthing tale

Thu, 15 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Over on the other blog I recently enthused about SyncTrain, an iOS SyncThing client. I still maintain it is very good, but wow did I end up foot-gunning with it:

I set Journelly up to use a SyncTrain share on my iPhone, promising myself I’d make sure to do the occasional manual sync, never leave my Journelly file open when not editing it on one of the real computers, etc. I still managed to end up with a sync error, and SyncThing dutifully created a sync error file. The Journelly app picked up that file and started using it as the default file to write to – I’m assuming iOS filesystem arcana is involved – which I wouldn’t have noticed if I hadn’t manually peeked in the directory instead of just using an org-capture template to make Journelly entries on my Mac.

Offsite's over

Thu, 15 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Rainy afternoon here on the last day of the work offsite. We all went down to Pine St. Market and had ramen at the end of the day, and I said goodbye to some of the folks who came in from out of town. A few I’ll see once more for dinner tomorrow.

This kind of work function is always a little draining by the time it’s over. Spending days in a small room, even with pretty good people, just takes some battery, and this one was a little melancholy because one of my teammates is moving on.

trying to get org-capture to work is nature's way of telling us to slow down

Tue, 13 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been so happy with my emacs-plus install that there was an when-not-if element to the whole thing. It came today when I tried to get org-capture to work and it … just wouldn’t. So I tried an alternate build and lost over an hour I could have spent writing to uninstalling, reinstalling, troubleshooting, rewriting a launchd agent, etc.

Digging in on the photo project

Mon, 12 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I abhor feeling attachment to things.

Years ago I was out in the garage going through some old boxes at the same time I was thinking about some people I knew who seemed very connected to what they had been, and uncertain of how to go about being who they had become. So when I reached into the box and pulled out some old object I thought, “I don’t want this thing anymore,” then I thought “oh, but it’s a reminder of …” and then I thought, “I’m in no danger of forgetting that time.”

Experiments in atomic writing

Mon, 12 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I am not sure how this will go and it could be this is futzing under another guise, but this evening I did improve on my futz pattern a little by choosing to devote a journal entry to some thinking I’ve been doing about The News, how to consume it, how much to consume, etc. etc. IOW, instead of diddling around with a tool or a toy, I started writing about something that matters to me.

Eugene

Sun, 11 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

We took a trip to Eugene to visit Ben. Walking around this morning we came across the Shelton McMurphey Johnson House, and then picked up the trail up Skinner’s Butte.

flickr's alright

Sun, 11 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been using SmugMug for a while, and really like how well it has worked for my pix subdomain, but it has always come with a little feeling of “what am I even doing on SmugMug to begin with?” It’s meant for people who want to sell their photography, and everything about its customer comms reminds you of that.

In the process of getting imgup to broaden its horizons and work with flickr, I remembered that I actually like flickr (which is owned and operated by SmugMug now). It’s just more oriented around “you want to put photos up online,” without any emphasis on being a “pro,” and without Glass’s … whatever it is about Glass’s vibe.

The futzes

Sun, 11 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Yeesh. So, re: imgup. It is pretty much “done” to me as a tool. Meaning, it does exactly what I want it to do, plus a few things I didn’t start out with. There’s maybe one more tweak (“just give me the URL”) I can go add in five minutes when I get around to it. But today I was thinking “oh, it’d be cool if it had a history,” and “oh, it’d be cool if it could show thumbnails in kitty.”

writeroom-mode

Sun, 11 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

For whatever reason I have an allergic reaction to the phrase “distraction-free,” but as I’ve waffled back and forth between org-mode and Markdown as the starting point for prose I’ve also thought about how my model writing app on macOS is probably iA Writer, because it’s just so easy on the eyes. I kinda buy the limited choice it offers, too. That might be why it edges out Ulysses.

Missing Mixel

Sat, 10 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Does anyone else remember Mixel? It was a collaborative collage app that arrived early in the iPad era, was amazing for a little while, then pivoted into online postcards or something, then slipped under the waves.

You started with a blank canvas and a collection of images that sort of acted like stickers you could plop on the canvas and manipulate into a collage. The collection was socially driven, so for periods something would find its way into collective consciousness, spawning a bunch of riffs on a theme.

I don't miss lockdown …

Fri, 09 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

… but I do miss that it exerted tremendous pressure to figure out whatever it took to do things I cared about, and that sustained me.

So for a long while there, almost every night, it was just “grab a camera and go somewhere.”

I guess I’m thinking about it because when we were walking on Foster Road last night I noticed that three places that had kept their outdoor areas all the way through now have taken them down in the space of a week.

imgup 0.6 (flickr!)

Fri, 09 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

flickr’s API is way more comprehensible than SmugMug’s, so adding flickr support went down much more quickly. Just get an API key/secret (links in the README) and step through onboard to auth your copy of imgup.

Otherwise, it’s the exact same interface and UI. You just have to add a --backend argument to use flickr when you run it:

imgup -b flickr -t "The Title" -c "The Caption" -f md img_123.jpg

imgup-cli 0.1.0

Fri, 09 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been using imgup as a cli tool for a few days and it has worked pretty well. A few things bothered me about it:

The OAuth situation was janky and not very portable. You had to have a .env file with very little help in the way of configuring it.
Onboarding via oauth was non-existent.
Configuring a target album involved fiddling around in the API or knowing exactly where to hover your mouse on the website.

So I spent some time just cleaving the CLI out of the core project and working on cleaning some of that up.

Bar Carlo

Thu, 08 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

We decided to walk down to Foster Rd. for dinner at Bruno’s tonight, and walked past Bar Carlo. I still haven’t adjusted to the new red paint job, but it’s pretty striking.

Black mist filters

Thu, 08 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Late in the season last year I started getting into black mist filters on my cameras. They’re just glass with little black flecks that end up creating a really nice halation effect with night-time lighting; and they soften digital images a tiny bit, in a way that pairs well with the right preset if you like a kinda vintage look.

I forgot I had one along on my trip to the Mutoid Man show and that was a mild bummer: The light was so low that the X100VI’s perfectly serviceable 3200 ISO had more of an uphill battle. On the other end of the spectrum, during bright daylight, they turn the highlights into a glowing mess.

lmno-export

Thu, 08 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I packageized lmno-export, which just lets you work on your lmno blog in org-mode then export it to clean Markdown. Mainly I wanted “real” org-capture instead of my hacky alternative, and I like being able to reuse my org-mode notes as-is instead of extracting and converting them.

Write your blog in a monolithic org-mode file (set in Customize).
Export it with lmno-org-export-blog .
It opens the target file (set in Customize).
If you’re a Mac person, drag the proxy icon into the lmno.lol uploader.

Here’s the org-capture template, which reuses the source file variable:

Make a Markdown or org snippet from the flickr image in your browser (Raycast)

Thu, 08 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I don’t think I’ll use this a ton day-to-day because I haven’t put anything in flickr for a while, and generally use SmugMug these days for embedding stuff in a blog, but I’ve been learning how Raycast script actions work and this was an exercise in how to pass arguments in an action instead of going out to osascript dialogs.

Visit a flickr image in Safari or Chrome
Invoke the action from Raycast and:
- select a snippet format
- type in some alt text
Get a snippet in Markdown, org, or HTML with your alt text, suitable for pasting into a blog post

Why you want to do this:

Maybe it was the shell scripts we made along the way

Thu, 08 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The fundamental mania at work here is basically “wring all the motion out of a thing you can.” I wrote imgup because I hated what Microblog was doing to my photos, but also hated the whole shuffle of “upload an image to SmugMug, hand-write the markup to embed it in a post.”

So it was an incremental improvement to build a web UI that stripped all the extraneous motion out of that workflow using the only thing I knew very well, which is Ruby/Sinatra.

imgup CLI improvement

Wed, 07 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I added a format option to the imgup CLI, so it’ll provide a snippet in either org, Markdown, or HTML markup now, matching what it can do from the web interface. Also realized I don’t have a “picture of the week” feature anymore, so I replaced that part of the menu with a direct link to the Smugmug target album in the Smugmug management UI. Great for quickly getting to a bunch of test photos and removing them.

In which I solve a food bank communications problem

Wed, 07 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I volunteered at the neighborhood food bank/pantry again today. Like last week I was put on what I guess is the “starch and carbs” station:

One from a selection of a bag of flour, a bag of baking mix, or a bag of generic corn flakes cereal
One or the other of a packet of spaghetti noodles or rice
a can of pureed pumpkin

I had more to keep track of this week, and there was something in the air. The first people to draw numbers for their place in the line got high ones: in the 90s and 100s. They didn’t want high numbers because the better items are long gone by the last 25 or so people, but the food bank folks don’t allow do-overs. Then a general mood hit and everybody started crowding for their number, a few people darted past the line control people and tried to get a second number, and it got a little rowdy.

Uploading to imgup from Photos

Wed, 07 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Woof. It involved some AppleScripting, shell scripting, and some ugliness due to RayCast not wanting to inherit my login shell environment (circumventing rbenv to run imgup), but I finally got it:

Pick an image in photos
Fire off the action in RayCast
Select a snippet format of `org` or `markdown`
Provide an alt tag
Get a copy/pasteable snippet back from imgup I can drop into the blog

I have a matching one for a selected file in the Finder.

imgup and org-mode (and lmno.org)

Tue, 06 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This morning I woke up wondering “what if I could do my lmno blogging from org-mode instead of Markdown?”

Partly “why not” and partly “you get real org-capture and it becomes easier to shuttle text around.”

That led to this:

(defun lmno/org-export-blog ()
  "Export ~/notes/blog.org → ~/notes/lmno.md."
  (interactive)
  (let* ((input-file  (expand-file-name "~/notes/lmno.org"))
         (output-file (expand-file-name "~/notes/lmno.md")))
    (with-temp-buffer
      (insert-file-contents input-file)
      (org-mode)
      ;; turn off all the bells that inject TOC, numbers, dates, etc.
      (let ((org-export-with-toc            nil)
            (org-export-with-section-numbers nil)
            (org-export-with-author         nil)
            (org-export-with-creator        nil)
            (org-export-with-date           nil)
            (org-export-with-priorities     nil)
            (org-export-with-timestamps     nil)
            (org-export-with-smart-quotes   nil)
            (org-export-with-broken-links   'mark))
      (org-export-to-buffer 'md "*lmno-export*" nil nil nil nil))
      (with-current-buffer "*lmno-export*"
        ;; strip the anchors org's export insists on inserting
        (goto-char (point-min))
        (while (re-search-forward "<a id=\"[^\"]+\"></a>" nil t)
          (replace-match ""))
        ;; strip the overhelpful datestamp spans
        (goto-char (point-min))
        (while (re-search-forward "</?span[^>]*>" nil t)
          (replace-match "")))
      ;; write out the clean Markdown
      (with-current-buffer "*lmno-export*"
        (write-region (point-min) (point-max) output-file)))
    (message "Clean export complete → %s" output-file)))

It has to do two things I wish it didn’t:

git-auto-sync (and LaunchControl, and the Jurassic Park kid)

Mon, 05 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I don’t think it’s as magical as whatever nb is up to, but for wandering from machine to machine and not getting too out of control with it, git-auto-sync seems to do an okay job of periodically syncing up with a remote behind your back. When you target a directory with it, it creates a launchd agent, so the syncing daemon persists over reboots, etc.

I got it from Homebrew, and discovered one issue with it, which is that the agent it sets up wants to log to /usr/local/var/log, which is locked down in at least recent versions of macOS (and ignores /opt/homebrew/var/log, which is already correctly permissioned, so now I’m wondering if I have the wherewithal to submit a patch somewhere). So you can either make that directory and set the right permissions, or twiddle the launch agent.

git-auto-sync, Raycast, and terminal-notifier

Mon, 05 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Raycast has a nice setup for making shell scripts into actions. I have one wrapper for emacsclient that just invokes a GUI Emacs window from a running Emacs server and then foregrounds the window:

#!/bin/bash

# Required parameters:
# @raycast.schemaVersion 1
# @raycast.title Emacsd
# @raycast.mode silent

# Optional parameters:
# @raycast.icon 🤖
# @raycast.packageName Emacs

# Documentation:
# @raycast.description Launch Emacs
# @raycast.author pdxmph
# @raycast.authorURL https://raycast.com/pdxmph

/opt/homebrew/bin/emacsclient -c --no-wait
osascript -e 'tell application "Emacs" to activate'

… and I made another one that lets me trigger git-auto-sync operations when I’m going to step away for a while and want to make sure everything in my notes repo has been pushed:

Taking the X100VI to shows

Sun, 04 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I guess every music venue has rules for cameras and photography, and the nice thing about the X100VI is that it manages to avoid the “no interchangeable lens cameras” and “no lenses over 4 inches long” rules while also avoiding scrutiny as a “professional camera” because it’s small and vintage-looking. And it’s great for carrying along because it’s easy to cinch the strap up and have it close without a lot of bulk or weight.

emacs-plus

Sat, 03 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I switched my Homebrew Emacs package to emacs-plus@30 this past week. I am sure there are nuances that are escaping me, but I was mostly after something with a tested launchd service I could manage from brew services, and I thought the built-in support for system appearance changes seemed pretty cool, since it let me retire 20 lines of elisp that wasn’t nearly as effective as this build is at detecting when Dark Mode is on or off.

Ignoring the plumbing; Journelly and hashtags for mindful journaling

Sat, 03 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

It’s fun watching the threads around what people have been doing with Journelly.

A lot of people are very into the fact that it uses org-mode underneath. I am, too, because unlike Markdown, org-mode is super amenable to a variety of plaintext workflows that you could probably pull off with Markdown but without all the supporting infrastructure to make it easier.

Take, for instance, the small problem of recreating reverse-chronological posting to a file:

lmno-blog-capture v0.2 ('won't somebody think of the windows' edition)

Sat, 03 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

My initial idea for lmno-blog-capture was “for dashing off super small posts in a transient window.” I wanted something org-capture-like so I could be writing about something, have a thought, and keep whatever I was working on in sight.

So it never occurred to me to test what would happen if I had ended up going long and deciding to give myself more screen real estate with C-x 1.

Then I did that and Emacs started squawking about having only one window to close, so even though it was saving my lmno.md file, it was complaining and not closing the posting minibuffer. I thought I fixed it once, but turns out I was fixing the wrong file in the wrong place for another project. Then it complained at me again today so I fixed it for real this time.

Music night: Mutoid Man and Silver Lake

Sat, 03 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Last night ended up being kinda “music night”:

Alison’s friend Patricia Rojas played a set with her band, Silver Lake, at a guitar shop/bar in Buckman. Really nice Americana.

Then we headed to the Twilight Cafe for Mutoid Man. I was super-excited for that one because I love just that band, and because all three members are in other bands I really love: High on Fire, Converge, and Cave In. They were really, really good and it was a great audience.

cielagonote v0.11 (Home of the Whopper)

Fri, 02 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I sat for a day with the nb daily plugin support question, a little torn:

I do not like the daily file-naming convention (yyyymmdd.ext), especially since other files have datestamps in the names.
I much prefer the daily-yyyy-mm-dd.ext for scanability and fuzzy-finding, and I like the way cielagonote titles the daily file, which matters in some parts of the Markdown ecosystem.

So my initial approach was to tell nb people to just not expect the daily functionality to work in cielagonote, or that they’d just get a daily-yyyy-mm-dd file dropped in their nb instance that wouldn’t work with the daily plugin. I didn’t like that much.

cielagonote v0.3

Thu, 01 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This version just gets rid of a terminal reset after exiting the editor. It slowed things down, felt laggy, and seemed to be down to a thing that comes and goes depending on the combination of terminal, editor, and sunspots. Maybe I’ll add it to the configuration options.

It also adds a warning in the README that nb support is incomplete. I do want to make a config switch for that.

cielagonote v0.5 (No Really)

Thu, 01 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Well, my lunch date canceled, so … with this version, nb support is switchable:

notes_dir: ~/notes
default_extension: md # or org
exclude_dirs:
  - denote
  - .git
hide_hidden: true # hides .files when enabled
editor: micro # will be overridden with `nb edit` if nb_support == true
nb_support: false # if true, overrides your editor: setting and enables nb file management

So you can either just use cielagonote as a standalone note manager with no supporting ecosystem, or you can flip nb_support: to true and it’ll use nb’s native commands to create, rename, and delete notes, ensuring that nb’s underlying git repo stays clean and in sync with remotes.

Everyone gets a number. Choose one. We're great on Funyuns, but the rice ran out.

Wed, 30 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I did my first volunteer shift at a neighborhood food pantry today. It was over at the elementary school across the park, where Ben went. The person running things seemed a little harried, but did take the time to show me how to stand behind several bins and ensure proper distribution:

One or the other of a packet of spaghetti noodles or a pound of white rice
One can of tomato paste, sauce, or diced tomatoes
One jar of peanut butter
One or the other from a box full of ramen, canned fruit, and other stuff or baby food, apple sauce, white vinegar, soy sauce and cooking oils

The station to my right had Funyuns and Nerds candies, and they were allowed to give away three of either. The station to my left had assorted meats: Hamburger, chicken thighs, and a few racks of ribs. Further down the way there was a vegetable person who had purple onions and some other vegetables.

Post-haircut drink at Bruno's

Wed, 30 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

cielagonote 0.2.1 (changed daily notes and an nb plugin)

Tue, 29 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I did some quick fixups to daily notes in cielagonote this morning.

You can start or add to a daily note in cielagonote with C-t. That opens a file named daily-yyyy-mm-dd.ext (where .ext is either .org or .md depending on what you set in .cnconfig.yml).

That’s the naming convention I’ve been using forever for daily notes, and is at odds with nb’s own daily plugin, so I forked that and added it to the cielagonote repo as an extra.

Headspace

Mon, 28 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I spent today in my pretty stripped down Emacs config. In the end, setting aside dependencies that got pulled in, I’ve installed:

LSP
Vertico
osx-clipboard
exec-path-from-shell
recentf
company
orderless
which-key
marginalia
evil
prescient
undo-fu
lmno-blog-capture

There are 269 lines in my tangled config file to make it all work, and it seems to take somewhere around 0.7 seconds to launch from the shell (more like 1.3 seconds as a GUI). I had 387 lines in my Doom config, which is honestly a decent reflection on Doom: You can go totally “kid in a candy store” with that thing and it’s doing a lot to help you suffer less for that impulse.

Making an nb bookmark from iOS

Mon, 28 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Couldn’t resist figuring this out. You can run scripts over ssh with Shortcuts and iOS:

The script on the receiving end:

#!/opt/homebrew/bin/bash
url=${1)
/opt/homebrew/bin/nb ${1}

Tailscale makes this kind of thing easier. (And yes, use an ssh key.)

Bolting a CLI interface onto imgup for SmugMug uploading and blogging

Sun, 27 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

imgup is a project I worked on a few years ago to solve the problem of where to put photos for my blogs after experiencing a few weird things with different services: The image files being renamed into something illegible, or suffering from crappy compression. Since I have been using SmugMug for years and keep everything there, I decided to create a non-browseable album I could upload images to, then share from there.

All along the watchtower

Sat, 26 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I used to have a chief engineer on my team whom I loved dearly, because when I’d be in the throes of my worst managerial contortions, he’d quietly ask, “Mike, what problem are you trying to solve?” He was very good at winding things back and resetting.

At the beginning of our relationship I would feel attacked, because it’s so easy to get so far out to sea that you lose sight of that initial thing that started the process of piling up fixes and solutions and almost feel like you didn’t even know what problem you were trying to solve, you just sort of got caught up in all that change-agent energy and felt like doing something.

cielagonote is what I woke up yesterday morning wanting to find

Fri, 25 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

My kick has reached some kind of logical conclusion in the form of cielagonote.

This morning I started off with a zsh wrapper around fzf and nb for finding and editing notes. nb is fine and all, but I really like the sort of speedy narrowing you get from something like deft or other members of the Notational Velocity family tree.

So I was looking for something to wrap around nb to keep taking advantage of its git syncing and a few other features, but also warily eyeing too much dependence on it. If the Giant nb-Eating Space Goat were to pull into orbit tomorrow, I would want to simply watch it magestically devour nb, then have a quick way to write a note about my impressions of the experience without accidentally naming that note the same as another about a similar experience.

cielagonote v0.2.0 - WMD Edition

Fri, 25 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

cielagonote 0.2.0 adds some basic file management and a convenience feature for daily notes.

There are two things that I would love to polish up but probably never will:

Since I am a heavy emacsclient user, I run into some interactions between it and kitty that leave the terminal in a disordered state. I’ve solved that with a reset after exiting an edit operation. It adds a small bit of latency to an otherwise zippy interaction.
The rename and delete operations drop you back into the command line for a second. It’d be a lot spiffier if that were handled more nicely.

On the other hand, this is 233 lines of Ruby and an off-the-shelf cast of supporting characters. It was pretty delightful to use it in anger a few times with my topic logs this morning, and it did what I wanted by feeling way less in the way and less “now I am entering into some other place and descending down into a corner of it and doing a thing and coming back up out of it.”

Emacs keybindings for micro

Fri, 25 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The biggest problem I’ve had with micro has been getting used to its very CUA-like sensibility. Sticking these in ~/.config/micro/bindings.json looks like it is relieving the worst of it, leaving me with a just-fine zippy little editor that doesn’t need Emacs infrastructure to operate.

{
    "\u001b\u003c": "CursorStart",
    "\u001b\u003e": "CursorEnd",
    "\u003cCtrl-x\u003e\u003c0\u003e": "Unsplit",
    "\u003cCtrl-x\u003e\u003c2\u003e": "HSplit",
    "\u003cCtrl-x\u003e\u003c3\u003e": "VSplit",
    "\u003cCtrl-x\u003e\u003cCtrl-c\u003e": "Quit",
    "\u003cCtrl-x\u003e\u003cCtrl-f\u003e": "OpenFile",
    "\u003cCtrl-x\u003e\u003cCtrl-s\u003e": "Save",
    "\u003cCtrl-x\u003e\u003ch\u003e": "SelectAll",
    "\u003cCtrl-x\u003e\u003co\u003e": "command:fzf",
    "Alt-/": "lua:comment.comment",
    "Alt-a": "lua:snippets.Accept",
    "Alt-b": "WordLeft",
    "Alt-d": "lua:snippets.Cancel",
    "Alt-f": "WordRight",
    "Alt-s": "lua:snippets.Insert",
    "Alt-v": "CursorPageUp",
    "Alt-w": "Copy",
    "Alt-x": "CommandMode",
    "Ctrl-a": "StartOfLine",
    "Ctrl-e": "EndOfLine",
    "Ctrl-g": "Escape",
    "Ctrl-k": "CutLine",
    "Ctrl-r": "FindPrevious",
    "Ctrl-s": "Find",
    "Ctrl-v": "CursorPageDown",
    "Ctrl-y": "Paste",
    "Ctrl-z": "Undo",
    "CtrlP": "command:palettero",
    "CtrlSpace": "command:palettero",
    "CtrlUnderscore": "Undo",
    "F1": "command:cheat",
    "F12": "command:makeup",
    "F4": "command:jumptag",
    "F5": "command:runit",
    "F9": "command:makeupbg"
}

I used to use jed for this, until something went wrong with it for a while. It seems to be operating correctly again to judge from my latest pull down from Homebrew, but I just went to this trouble with micro …

lol

Fri, 25 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Just nb install fzf.nb-plugin and nb fzf.

alias nbf“nb fzf”= if you’re feeling frisky.

Done.

I mean, not really, because cielagonote does the whole “make it if it doesn’t exist” thing, and it’s doing full-text search. But if the thing you don’t like about nb is “list, get a number, enter a number” to operate on your file, this does the job.

#!/usr/bin/env bash
###############################################################################
# fzf.nb-plugin
#
# FZF Plugin for nb
#
###############################################################################

# Add the new subcommand name with `_subcommands add <name>`.
_subcommands add "fzf"

# Define help and usage text with `_subcommands describe <subcommand> <usage>`.
_subcommands describe "fzf" <<HEREDOC
Usage:
  nb fzf
  Description:
    Search through current notebook using fzf and then edit sepected item.
HEREDOC

_fzf() {
  local note=$(_ls -t note --filename -a --no-footer --no-header --no-indicator --tree | fzf --ansi --header "$(_notebook current --name)" --preview "echo {} | sed '"'s/\x1b\[[0-9;]*m//g'"' | awk -F'[][]' '"'{print $2}'"' | xargs -n 1 nb show -p | ${NB_MARKDOWN_TOOL:-bat} -" | awk -F'[][]' '{print $2}')

  if ! [[ -z "$note" ]]; then
    command nb edit "$note"
  fi
}

nuhtizhunal veblocitrix

Fri, 25 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

fzf is a command line fuzzy finding TUI thing that gives you really fast progressive narrowing on a directory full of stuff then invokes whatever on the target. This morning’s science experiment is wrapping it in a zsh function for my nb that pops up a fuzzy finder with incremental search, or offers to start a new note in nb. If you take the New Note option, you get a prompt for the title and can start typing. The whole thing is wrapped around nb so I get the benefits of its autosync infrastructure, just with a search interface that is way faster for finding things.

log2file.el for quick logging into md or org (pencils down, back to work)

Wed, 23 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In the process of diddling around with a bunch of different kinds of logs and formats, I realized I had two things that did the same thing, more or less, for org files and Markdown files. The org version bothered me because I went down the wrong track and ended up using org-agenda-files with a given filetag to populate the list of potential targets and get out of some stuff I couldn’t get right. The Markdown version was better, but didn’t have a non-fiddle-with-your-config-file way to get new files added.

lmno-blog-capture.el and the whole lightweight text thing

Tue, 22 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Yesterday I made a little thing to quickly capture lmno.lol blog posts from a little window in Emacs. I’m kind of having fun package-izing these things, so today I bundled it up into pdxmph/lmno-blog-capture, with a customization group (with one option).

I’ve been on a small tear with these things lately, and whenever I go on a small tear I think “this is happening for a reason,” and the reason is usually “because there’s something you don’t want to go do,” and that is true here. But I like times like this, because they exercise part of me that doesn’t get exercised much: I spend a lot of my day thinking “will this scale,” and “but do we really need to do this,” and “what is security engineering going to do when they find out this happened,” and “did I make Compliance angry.”

By-host configs in Doom. Custom starting window sizes.

Mon, 21 Apr 2025 11:10:53 -0700

Removed a little conditional logic from config.org

Hugo posting in Emacs

Mon, 21 Apr 2025 08:37:39 -0700

ox-hugo is nice and all

Okay. We made a snippet. ✂️

Mon, 21 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This may be my consolation prize for ox-hugo going south on me.

blog-text-art-banner

 _____  _____  _  _____  ______  _   _ ______ ______  _____  _   _  _____  _____  _____ ___  ___ _____  _
|_   _||_   _|( )/  ___| | ___ \| | | ||  _  \|  _  \|_   _|| \ | ||  __ \|_   _||_   _||  \/  ||  ___|| |
  | |    | |  |/ \ `--.  | |_/ /| | | || | | || | | |  | |  |  \| || |  \/  | |    | |  | .  . || |__  | |
  | |    | |      `--. \ |  __/ | | | || | | || | | |  | |  | . ` || | __   | |    | |  | |\/| ||  __| | |
 _| |_   | |     /\__/ / | |    | |_| || |/ / | |/ /  _| |_ | |\  || |_\ \  | |   _| |_ | |  | || |___ |_|
 \___/   \_/     \____/  \_|     \___/ |___/  |___/   \___/ \_| \_/ \____/  \_/   \___/ \_|  |_/\____/ (_) 🔥🤘🏻🔥

blog-about

Hello 👋 I’m Mike. Regularly blogging at mike.puddingtime.org, tooting @mph@social.lol and wandering around in Portland, OR.

Saw X in Portland

Mon, 21 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This was an opportunity to try out my Smugmug/upload/image snippet app imgup (which it turns out is an amazingly common name for things that make images go up to somewhere else.)

Solving the Denote/Gollum links quandary

Sun, 20 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

My whole “thing I wish Denote would just do” issue has been around its custom linking format: If you use Denote’s kind of awesome org-mode dblocks, you get denote: formatted links. Prot is very careful to say custom links are perfectly legal and supported by Emacs, but that leaves out the reality that there’s an ecosystem of non-Emacs org-mode tools (e.g. Plain Org) that don’t understand custom link formats.

So I had this very cool thing going on with Gollum running on my Synology. Gollum is mostly the same engine GitHub uses for its own wikis, and it can understand a variety of plaintext formats (including Markdown and org). With Gollum you’ve got a web front-end with search, version control, and inline editing if you’re away from an Emacs-capable machine or just want to look a note up on a phone.

SyncTrain for Syncthing on iOS

Sun, 20 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

A few years ago I gave Mobius Sync a try as a Syncthing client on my iPhone and iPad. That went about as well as you’d expect for an iOS adaptation of something that wants to be an always-on filesystem-watching daemon. It wasn’t really worth the stress of wondering what quantum state of sync everything is in, and I hated having to explicitly open it up to nudge it to sync.

Hugo Bear, ox-hugo, etc.

Sat, 19 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been feeling envious of the bear people.

posting elsewhere

Fri, 22 Nov 2024 11:05:21 -0800

I’m living the ‘just start typing’ life at Scribbles

Know when to sleep

Tue, 05 Mar 2024 22:59:28 -0800

During times of change, stay in your cot.

Intersitial logging

Tue, 05 Mar 2024 21:39:24 -0800

In which we clear the air of the scent of burning plastic and self-delusion.

Daily notes for 2024-03-02

Sat, 02 Mar 2024 09:50:26 -0800

The perils of too much and too little friction. Dune 2. Running shoes day.

Daily notes for 2024-02-29

Thu, 29 Feb 2024 20:33:53 -0800

Trying out commafeed for RSS. Dropping Wallabag. A handy tiddlywiki plugin. The Fujifilm X100VI. What’s traditional IT?

Daily notes for 2024-02-25

Sun, 25 Feb 2024 12:18:06 -0800

Daily logging in Tiddlywiki with Streams. Espanso regexp expansions.

Truce declared in Tiddlywiki struggle

Sat, 24 Feb 2024 15:45:05 -0800

Okay. Now to start putting things in it.

Daily notes for 2024-02-22

Thu, 22 Feb 2024 18:26:57 -0800

Brief attempt to get Tiddlywiki to parity with my Obsidian vault. The nut milk machine.

The notes bakeoff

Wed, 21 Feb 2024 12:28:55 -0800

The agonized ego is a ring of defense around nothing. And should not interfere with note tool selection.

Daily notes for 2024-02-19

Mon, 19 Feb 2024 15:29:14 -0800

Meta sickness

Daily Notes for 2024-02-14

Wed, 14 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The Org Borg.

Daily Notes for 2024-02-13

Tue, 13 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I gave Logseq a shot. Migration Day. Kill It With Fire.

Daily Notes for 2024-02-05

Mon, 05 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Poking at Logseq. Dusting off the camera. Wallabag bookmarking script.

State of the self-host

Sun, 04 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

What has stuck and what has not from recent self-hosting experiments.

Daily Notes for 2024-02-01

Thu, 01 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Contributed my Linkding plugin to Newsboat. The collaborative introvert.

Daily Notes for 2024-01-30

Tue, 30 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The AI I am supposed to babysit insists that I just ate a sundae.

A Wallabag bookmarking script for Newsboat

Mon, 29 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Ruby and httparty worked where a simple bash script wouldn’t. Letting Newsboat have two bookmarking commands.

Daily Notes for 2024-01-28

Sun, 28 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Wallabag is a self-hosted Pocket alternative. Recreating the Pocket/Kobo integration with it.

Keeping secrets with 1Password's CLI tool

Sun, 28 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

A couple of ways to securely reference your secrets in scripts and apps using 1Password’s CLI tool (and a detour into gpg-based approaches.)

Daily Notes for 2024-01-26

Fri, 26 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Sorta the mutt of RSS readers. Scripting the Linkding API.

Daily Notes for 2024-01-25

Thu, 25 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Applied empathy. GNOME Chrome profile launchers revisited. Fence day. The pruning saw.

Daily Notes for 2024-01-23

Tue, 23 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

My GNOME Weather location odyssey. Chop wood, carry water.

Daily Notes for 2024-01-22

Mon, 22 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

FreshRSS seems close enough to feedly. Kitty on the Synology. E-readers vs. tablets.

Daily Notes for 2024-01-21

Sun, 21 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

A possible self-hosted pinboard replacement. Synology reverse proxies.

Daily Notes for 2024-01-19

Fri, 19 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Self-hosted Calibre-Web.

Daily Notes for 2024-01-18

Thu, 18 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I snarl because I care. In which PikaPods and Calibre-Web teach Mike there’s a 308 redirect.

Daily Notes for 2024-01-17

Wed, 17 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Calibre-Web, Pikapod, paying for books. Small regrets. Patched patch.

Daily Notes for 2024-01-16

Tue, 16 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Mutual of Omaha’s MIME Kingdom. Another browser picker.

soldier always

Tue, 16 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Pay it forward.

Daily Notes for 2024-01-14

Sun, 14 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Junction, xdg-open, mutt, and html attachments. Launching Chrome directly into a profile.

Daily Notes for 2024-1-13

Sat, 13 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

offlineimap. neomutt.

For I have no screen and I must scream

Sat, 13 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

An accidentally long remembrance of my time among the Linux reactionaries.

Daily Notes for 2024-01-11

Thu, 11 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Secrets of the ancients.

Daily notes for 2024-01-09 (mutt noodling edition)

Tue, 09 Jan 2024 10:41:05 -0800

Multi-account, GPG-secure mutt configs. Mutt message scoring with Ruby, and score color-coding.

Daily notes for 2024-01-04

Thu, 04 Jan 2024 08:05:34 -0800

More Zellij. Stardew Valley.

Daily notes for 2024-01-03

Wed, 03 Jan 2024 16:04:07 -0800

More a/v messing around. Zellij: A tmux alternative.

Daily notes for 2024-01-01

Mon, 01 Jan 2024 13:18:52 -0800

Auto-disowning in zsh. A little CLI ditty for scheduling work blocks in Google Calendar.

Daily notes for 2023-12-31

Sun, 31 Dec 2023 10:11:06 -0800

Suffix aliases in zsh. More Remember the Milk from the CLI.

Daily notes for 2023-12-29

Fri, 29 Dec 2023 15:08:36 -0800

kitty and denote. Terminal maximalism? A few fun CLI app directories. Autojump for better CLI fs navigation. More Vampire Survivors.

Daily notes for 2023-12-28

Thu, 28 Dec 2023 11:30:38 -0800

A CLI for Remember the Milk. Vampire Survivors. A little on Substack.

Daily notes for 2023-12-27

Wed, 27 Dec 2023 17:13:08 -0800

Todos and agenda with kitty. Better Zoom audio. Roy Clark, guitar god.

Daily notes for 2023-12-26

Tue, 26 Dec 2023 21:17:33 -0800

Detroit: Become Human. Linux config cloning with Mackup. Machine-specific configs with kitty. Making kitty your default GNOME terminal (sort of).

Daily notes for 2023-12-25

Mon, 25 Dec 2023 13:06:19 -0800

Kitty (and GNOME generally) with the Monaspace fonts. My first game of Cards Against Humanity. Emacs as a systemd service.

Daily notes for 2023-12-23

Sat, 23 Dec 2023 10:57:59 -0800

Customizing trackpad stuff outside desktop environments. I’m over realism. Cozymas.

Daily notes for 2023-12-20

Wed, 20 Dec 2023 09:11:35 -0800

Green tea. Deciding is work.

Daily notes for 2023-12-19

Tue, 19 Dec 2023 21:07:32 -0800

Better Wayland taskbar icons in GNOME. Assigning MIME types to xdg-open.

Daily notes for 2023-12-18

Mon, 18 Dec 2023 07:22:26 -0800

Inhibitor Phase. The macOS kill ring. The Mac Studio. StarCraft on Linux via Steam.

Daily notes for 2023-12-16

Sat, 16 Dec 2023 14:42:04 -0800

A soft KVM switcher for Dell monitors and Linux. Photo housekeeping.

Daily notes for 2023-12-13

Wed, 13 Dec 2023 14:06:30 -0800

It’s the year of Linux on my desktop. Simple GNOME window tiling. Racism word play is unhelpful and confusing. New-to-me Alastair Reynolds novel. How’s the job going?

Daily notes for 2023-12-12

Tue, 12 Dec 2023 12:55:14 -0800

Okay, fine, Fedora. Getting AirPlay 2 with shairport-sync. Fixing Flatpak Zoom fonts. LocalSend for x-platform AirDropesque sharing.

Daily notes for 2023-12-11

Mon, 11 Dec 2023 11:24:37 -0800

Pop!_OS redux. Bad company in Emacs. You are not my spin doctor. A fun documentary about the Star Wars Holiday Special. Hugo previews in Emacs.

Daily notes for 2023-12-10

Sun, 10 Dec 2023 20:35:56 -0800

MCU: The reign of Marvel Studios. Doing nothing.

Daily notes for 2023-12-09

Sat, 09 Dec 2023 11:04:21 -0800

The continuous glucose monitor.

Daily notes for 2023-12-08

Fri, 08 Dec 2023 21:55:23 -0800

Tomb Raider. Steam Deck OLED.

We will always have Voodoo Donut

Wed, 19 Jul 2023 06:47:43 -0700

Two articles on the local drug and homelessness response. Are we tired of outsourcing our fundamental human obligations yet?

Daily notes for 2023-07-18

Tue, 18 Jul 2023 22:10:57 -0700

Apple Notes and a legal pad.

Daily notes for 2023-07-17

Mon, 17 Jul 2023 18:54:06 -0700

A few notes on conflict. The INT650.

Mission: Incomprehensible

Sat, 15 Jul 2023 16:05:05 -0700

A few thoughts on spy film villainy and the double-backflip of ideological sanitization this one does, notable in part because sitting around thinking this stuff up was more entertaining than the actual experience of watching something this insufferable.

Daily notes for 2023-07-14

Fri, 14 Jul 2023 11:55:24 -0700

I forgot that micro.blog is pretty nice. Firing the marketing team. The Playdate came. M1 love.

Daily notes for 2023-07-13

Thu, 13 Jul 2023 07:20:30 -0700

The nonprofit and outrage clown industrial complexes. reddit and lemmy. Our atavistic fear of tankies. The taxonomical and emotional valence of the daily post.

Daily notes for 2023-07-11

Tue, 11 Jul 2023 06:01:33 -0700

Garmin GPS stuff, trying Wikiloc, calming down about notes, settling in at work.

Daily notes for 2023-07-10

Mon, 10 Jul 2023 11:55:10 -0700

Something lost along the way.

Daily notes for 2023-07-03

Mon, 03 Jul 2023 08:54:41 -0700

John Gruber might be Satan. magit-wip-mode. I can never tell when NYT is being obtuse or unintentionally helpful. New Himalayan loom – fingers crossed.

Daily notes for 2023-07-02

Sun, 02 Jul 2023 10:38:55 -0700

First Thorns match. A little more on Lemmy. Secret Invasion. Tagging Hugo posts in Emacs. Looking for monitor recommendations. Ben in France.

Daily notes for 2023-07-01

Sat, 01 Jul 2023 08:24:29 -0700

Swapping Zoom for Golden Ratio (Emacs window resizing). Life after reddit. First poke at Lemmy. Himalayan Day. Thorns game.

Daily notes for 2023-06-30

Fri, 30 Jun 2023 10:37:54 -0700

Google Reader. Aliens at the Hollywood. Pickelball noise. Apollo.

Daily notes for 2023-06-29

Thu, 29 Jun 2023 08:59:25 -0700

RE Himalayan stuff. The hideousness of motorcycle marketing. Obsidian daily page automation with Shortcuts. Camera bags. Automation for slowness.

Daily notes for 2023-06-28

Wed, 28 Jun 2023 07:55:41 -0700

Ugh, Apple News. Ugly, functional shoes. Selling the Himalayan. Band of Brothers.

Daily notes for 2023-06-27

Tue, 27 Jun 2023 07:16:03 -0700

Making Denote more legible in Obsidian. Ethical Uber reviews. The strangeness of being new somewhere.

Daily notes for 2023-06-26

Mon, 26 Jun 2023 10:34:50 -0700

We are all beta testers now. Obsidian sync and its discontents. Living in the remote future. Travel. The NYT gums reddit. Yeah, I guess the NYT is irritating me badly today.

Daily notes for 2023-06-25

Sun, 25 Jun 2023 16:44:12 -0700

How to mix todos and prose. An Obsidian Today page. Woeful MetaTalk. Getting ready to say goodbye to Apollo. Markdown blogging. BBEdit and LSP. Goodbye reMarkable.

Daily Notes for 2023-06-22

Thu, 22 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Alright, sweethearts, you heard the man and you know the drill: Assholes and elbows!

Denote-formatted Obsidian redux

Mon, 19 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I guess I just needed to go to the woods for the weekend to come back with a better idea of how to make Templater do what I wanted, which was make Obsidian notes using Denote’s naming convention with a single command. On Friday I got things as far as “make a Denote-formatted note,” but I couldn’t completely automate the file renaming. This afternoon I finally figured that out.

Here’s the user function I made, same as the last post:

Templating Denote-style naming in Obsidian

Fri, 16 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Still on the how-to-make-Denote-more-mobile kick from another direction.

Daily Notes for 2023-06-15

Thu, 15 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Excruciating Multiplicity of Approaches to Cat-Skinning. I slay me. Denote-org-to-Denote-Markdown. Golden Ratio window management.

Daily Notes for 2023-06-13

Tue, 13 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Figuring out connection points between Denote and non-Emacs apps like Things with custom links and elbow grease. Automating org dblock rendering. Making org-export output more amenable to SimpleCSS. Text expansion with espanso.

Daily Notes for 2023-06-12

Mon, 12 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

A Drafts action to make Denote notes on the go. Fright Night 2011. Leica Q3, Fujifilm X100/X-Pro. Old man coos at clouds.

Daily Notes for 2023-06-11

Sun, 11 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

First week at my new job. How I made a searchable web interface for my Denote notes with FuseJS, a Synology, and TailScale.

Daily Notes for 2023-06-04

Sun, 04 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Denote and encrypted notes plus the whole mobile angle. Hugo preview server and ox-hugo. What happened to V.

Daily Notes for 2023-06-03

Sat, 03 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Poking at Mimestream. Picking at Emacs.

Leuven is more pleasant than I thought it would be.

Mon, 29 May 2023 20:40:59 -0700

I don’t want to be soothed any longer.

Daily Notes for 2023-05-29

Mon, 29 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

More writing about a camera I both covet and find unfathomable. All in on Denote. Keycast for influencing and debugging. Succession ended with integrity.

Succession Finale Hot Take

Fri, 26 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Least hot of all takes, but the Recap People are wrong and someone needs to say it.

Daily Notes for 2023-05-25

Thu, 25 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The Leica Q3 and some absurd back-of-napkin X100v comparisons, Denote silos.

Daily Notes for 2023-05-24

Wed, 24 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Cleaning up results in literate config files. Portland and the JOHS. Some Doom discontent.

Daily Notes for 2023-05-23

Tue, 23 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Doom’s UI-building affordances. A little more on Denote. Fences are weird.

More plaintext primitivism with Denote

Mon, 22 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Denote wants you to stick with the native tools you already have for a stripped-down PKM system.

Daily Notes for 2023-05-21

Sun, 21 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The joy of longboard dancers. The objectively superior operating system, diagrammed. Go upstream of AI content farm horror stories.

Profit motive

Fri, 19 May 2023 19:15:59 -0700

Apple News quickly takes you from “all this affiliate stuff is annoying” to “our whole economic order is broken.”

Daily Notes for 2023-05-19

Fri, 19 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Helping org-edna out when you’re using BeOrg and the limits of hyper-automated plaintext primitivism.

Daily Notes for 2023-05-18

Thu, 18 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Changing how Vertico opens projects in Doom: A shaggy dog story. The security system. They Live!

Full content in the RSS feed (and how to add a second Hugo feed)

Thu, 18 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

There’s finally a full-content RSS feed here.

Daily Notes for 2023-05-17

Wed, 17 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

MailMate and org-mode bundle, more org-gtd, the dysfunctional orbit of Windows and Linux UX, my weird Electra Townie.

Daily Notes for 2023-05-16

Tue, 16 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

org-gtd, liminal state, The Fugitive and class politics, homeless sweeps vibe shift.

Daily Notes for 2023-05-14

Sun, 14 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

org-mode evolution, fixing mu4e/Doom’s busted leader key, Guardians Vol. 3, not taking pictures lately

Daily Notes for 2023-05-12

Fri, 12 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Automation vs. Augmentation, ChatGPT and ideology, day one of the Things/org experiment.

Daily Notes for 2023-05-11

Thu, 11 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

BBEdit turns 30, Emacs update, Things, OmniFocus, etc.

Daily Notes for 2023-05-10

Wed, 10 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

org-babelified API noodling with verb, org-sticky-header, Amazon’s Citadel

Daily Notes for 2023-05-08

Mon, 08 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

More on org-reveal - general goodness, custom CSS. Zoom and Mac display mirroring, scrum and kanban.

Daily Notes for 2023-05-06

Sat, 06 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

If you’re going to work on a deck on a Saturday, at least play with org; making catppuccin work with Doom’s helm; @andycarolan@social.lol reminds us longboarding season is here.

Daily Notes for 2023-05-05

Fri, 05 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Mac plainttext primitivism, Superkey, Bladerunner 2049 criticism, the end of Brydge.

Daily Notes for 2023-05-04

Thu, 04 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Better task-switching with Charmstone, vim for zsh, our neighborhood slumlords, and the helpfulness of YNAB.

Daily Notes for 2023-05-03

Wed, 03 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

A Ruby/CLI-based plaintext PRM, Robert DeNiro on exporting org-mode to JSON, blogging with ox-hugo, that Royal Enfield Himalayan

Daily Notes for 2023-05-02

Tue, 02 May 2023 00:00:00 -0700

A Mackup/Dropbox glitch, integrating org-contacts and Things, conversations not interviews.

Finding an org-contact record's emails in MailMate and events in Google Calendar

Tue, 02 May 2023 00:00:00 -0700

Looking up email histories and past Google Calendar events from org-contacts, and a few ideas about how to schedule time with people.

Exporting a DayOne commonplace book to org-roam

Sun, 30 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

A very cheap and cheerful DayOne-to-org-roam exporter and a link to a useful org-roam search function.

plasticity and org-roam

Sun, 30 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The more a thing tends to be permanent, the more it tends to be lifeless.

Daily Notes for 2023-04-28

Fri, 28 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Fixing mixed-pitch in Doom, Carlson’s fake populism, ethics in affiliate linking.

Were you to attempt something like this in AppleScript

Thu, 27 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I started down the path of building some sort of PRM in org-mode because I couldn’t find anything that worked the way I wanted. I did briefly look at Apple’s Contacts app, and also at Cardhop, which builds on top of your Contacts database but still makes some assumptions about how good you are at all at remembering to reach out to people.

I also looked at Monica, an open source PRM. The promising part of Monica is its API. The web UI itself shows comprehensive data for each contact, but does not do anything in the way of bulk editing and has no automation at all. It’s laborious to bootstrap.

Daily Notes for 2023-04-26

Wed, 26 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

A little on me and Zettelkasten, getting the TW200 out for spring.

Daily Notes for 2023-04-25

Tue, 25 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Mail restlessness alights on MailMate, editing web forms in Emacs with Atomic Chrome, org-recur for simple and readable recurrence, GUI org-capture with Captee, more on my org PRM.

Quick mu4e notes

Thu, 20 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The bear dances! And it dances … pretty good?

Extending the plaintext CRM to mail contacts

Tue, 18 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Added a little automation to contacts.org with a function that auto-populates a message buffer in mu4e.

Succumbed to mu.

Mon, 17 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This had to happen eventually.

An org-contacts source for lbdb

Sun, 16 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I modified a Perl lbdb backend by ‪@publicvoit@graz.social ‬to use my org-contacts with mutt

Making a plaintext personal CRM with org-contacts

Thu, 13 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I don’t like the looks of any of the personal CRM software out there, so I’m making a plaintext one.

Daily Notes for 2023-04-12

Wed, 12 Apr 2023 16:01:09 -0700

More ChatGPT and org, using the org agenda, Yellowjackets again, Doom keybindings

Dungeons and Dragons threads its needle

Mon, 10 Apr 2023 10:58:34 -0700

I went in unsure how it could work, came out pretty sure it did work, and I think I understand why.

Writing elisp, Puppet code, and Ruby with ChatGPT.

Mon, 10 Apr 2023 09:36:26 -0700

I finally took the time to play with ChatGPT to configure Emacs and write some Ruby.

Macros to score mail in mutt

Sun, 09 Apr 2023 10:11:27 -0700

Some ruby wired up to mutt macros allows for on-the-fly sender scoring and a color-coded message index.

Daily notes for 2023-04-08

Sat, 08 Apr 2023 10:26:49 -0700

As always, a plaintext revival means a mutt revival.

Considering Twitter

Fri, 07 Apr 2023 15:54:47 -0700

Cross-posting is failing and I’m not sure why I am keeping a Twitter account.

First stab at literate config with Doom Emacs

Wed, 05 Apr 2023 08:53:21 -0700

My historic pattern for descending into Emacs hell has always started with the kitchen-sink init, and the path to recovery has always involved a patient refactoring into multiple files: Some kind of “the basics,” something just for org, something for odd little quality of life things, and a quarantine file where new stuff can enjoy a probation period where I can bisect it first when something goes wrong. If I add a big chunk of functionality from a new mode, that might get its own file, too.

Daily notes for 2023-04-03

Mon, 03 Apr 2023 11:00:40 -0700

Vimari, my Emacs origin story, a 24-year-old free sample chapter, and my Jurassic Park moment with a pizza box. John Wick 4, Diego Sanchez has lessons.

Daily notes for 2023-03-31

Fri, 31 Mar 2023 07:01:43 -0700

Journaling with org-roam, exploring Zettelkasten to inform writing, spring camping shakedown.

Daily notes for 2023-03-29

Wed, 29 Mar 2023 11:42:01 -0700

Trying org-journal, Good Sudoku, blog content migration tools.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds

Mon, 27 Mar 2023 09:37:08 -0700

‘Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’ suggests there is a point to all the struggles we deal with today that lies beyond living in a state of permanent cultural dominance.

Daily notes for 2023-03-24

Fri, 24 Mar 2023 10:04:10 -0700

More on learning with Vim Adventures, TickTick is out, time to pack it in on micro.blog.

Daily notes for 2023-03-22

Wed, 22 Mar 2023 10:42:33 -0700

Succumbing to org-roam, the pleasures of a straight razor competently wielded, Decline of Western Civilization.

Daily notes for 2023-03-21

Tue, 21 Mar 2023 11:03:54 -0700

Back to org-mode, a decent C25K Apple Watch app, custom Hugo RSS.

Daily notes for 2023-03-20

Mon, 20 Mar 2023 09:33:02 -0700

Doom Emacs, Mackup for config backups, Rocky IV, Jedi: Fallen Order.

Bring everyone along with inclusive leadership practices

Wed, 15 Mar 2023 13:46:25 -0700

Steps to effective, inclusive cross-functional work by leading with clarity, curiosity, and generosity.

The Pleasures of a Small Mastodon Instance

Mon, 13 Mar 2023 09:36:41 -0700

Not a firehose and not a tiny village.

Post-Creed Rocky I-III viewing

Sun, 12 Mar 2023 22:13:58 -0700

Strange to realize this franchise is almost 50 years old.

Heat at the Hollywood

Sun, 12 Mar 2023 17:23:17 -0700

Nice night at the movies with one of the best American crime dramas ever.

Daily notes for 2023-03-10

Fri, 10 Mar 2023 09:22:34 -0800

Reading and watching Sharp Objects, Panic’s Nova, lens corrections defended, forced institutionalization, NPR.

Daily notes for 2023-03-09

Thu, 09 Mar 2023 22:11:33 -0800

Interviews & job search stuff, Jedi: Fallen Order and Pokemon Sword, weblog.lol writing about Git.

Retail Manager, Wholesale Manager

Tue, 07 Mar 2023 09:18:20 -0800

Some managers never get over high-touch, small-team management habits. Others forget the humans in their organization as they adopt a “scaled mindset.”

Daily notes for 2023-03-06

Mon, 06 Mar 2023 09:31:57 -0800

New theme, old posts, new photo management tool.

Daily notes for 2023-03-02

Thu, 02 Mar 2023 09:27:24 -0800

Tech industry resentment, language wars & PMC piety, how I write these, CSS of Theseus, Playdate cometh-ish, CNET and the PE people.

Daily notes for 2023-03-01

Wed, 01 Mar 2023 09:25:39 -0800

TickTick & Drafts, the tech sin-eater, I casual, new printer day, job hunt news

Daily notes for 2023-02-28

Tue, 28 Feb 2023 21:23:55 -0800

Declining games journalism, inclusive Git docs, Sublime as your git editor, electricity, TickTick progress.

About old posts

Tue, 28 Feb 2023 10:22:04 -0800

Over time I am going to start bringing in older and older posts from my old blog, dot unplanned. I took much of it down several years ago during a big web reorg, but I want to start putting some of it back in place.

Daily notes for 2023-02-27

Mon, 27 Feb 2023 10:52:37 -0800

TickTick and productivity, the hilarity of Doom, an electrical failure, Tailscale, design fiddling

Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, 24 years later

Sun, 26 Feb 2023 19:02:20 -0800

A rewatch of Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai 24 years later causes me to re-appreciate 1999 in movies, and reappreciate on odd but poignant consideration of purpose.

A little more on versatile bags and pouches

Sun, 26 Feb 2023 14:52:39 -0800

There’s a difference between the Peak Design Field Pouch v1 and v2 that has caused me to reconsider my recommendation.

I think my EDC solution fell on my foot.

Sun, 26 Feb 2023 09:56:45 -0800

Note: Just after posting this I realized I wrote about the older version of the Peak Design Field Pouch. I also realized I had both versions and was able to make a quick comparison. This followup cautions against the newer version of the Field Pouch and offers an alternative.

Picture of the Week: Billboard

Fri, 24 Feb 2023 16:39:52 -0800

Picture of the Week: Billboard

My MOCA and EdgeRouter X makeover

Tue, 21 Feb 2023 14:15:37 -0800

Come April I will have lived in this house for 14 years, and if there are two facts about it that I do not like, it is these:

Whoever built it didn’t install Ethernet connections, but did see fit to wire up every room + the living room with coax drops.
Depending on how you look at it, it is either very wide or very long. Either way, it is incredibly hostile to plain old Wi-Fi.

When we first moved in it was plain that the traditional Wi-Fi router that had worked well from a central location in our last house was not going to fare so well tucked away in the far corner of the house with the Comcast drop.

omg it's a weblog.lol quick start guide

Fri, 17 Feb 2023 06:59:02 -0800

We pushed out the weblog.lol quick start guide today. It’s a “zero to something you can use” document.

Picture of the Week: Frost on rusty bolts

Thu, 16 Feb 2023 22:02:22 -0800

Picture of the Week: Frost on rusty bolts

Hi, omg.lol

Mon, 06 Feb 2023 16:35:29 -0800

Today I’m starting a contract gig writing some technical documentation for omg.lol’s weblog service. It seemed like a fun idea when I came up with it, so I sent the site’s founder, Adam, a quick note with a simple proposal. He liked the idea, too, so here we are.

At the moment I’m busy looking for work doing what I’m best suited to do, which is operations or chief of staff work somewhere in the software industry. Looking for work always triggers some reflection. This most recent period of time off and now spinning the job search back up has been no different.

Picture of the Week: Crow

Fri, 03 Feb 2023 10:45:14 -0800

Picture of the Week: Crow

Picture of the Week: Profit from the Panic

Thu, 02 Feb 2023 10:32:53 -0800

Picture of the Week: Profit from the Panic

Making a Picture of the Week feature on Hugo (Updated)

Thu, 02 Feb 2023 07:25:02 -0800

Updated: See the last section

I wanted to take advantage of the flexibility I gave myself with Hugo to have a “Picture of the Week” (PotW) feature on my new site. It took a few iterations to get it to where I liked it, and there are some things about Hugo I learned along the way, but it’s done enough for now.

The basic idea is that I want to take advantage of the streamlined upload and metadata workflow I’ve set up between Lightroom and imgup to share photos without a lot of repeating myself when it comes to writing titles, alt text, etc.

The problem with doing it right.

Wed, 01 Feb 2023 11:58:41 -0800

Make more, fret less.

A lot of 'experiments' aren't.

Tue, 31 Jan 2023 10:23:20 -0800

What we often call “resistance to change” is really resistance to bad or poorly considered change. The word “experiment” turns up a lot in these moments.

About

Wed, 25 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Hi, I’m Mike Hall. I live in Portland, OR. I do IT for work. I do photography, movies, and metal for entertainment.

Colophon

Wed, 25 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The site it built with Hugo, a static site generator.
The theme is Hugo ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ Bear.
Source is hosted on GitHub
The site is hosted on Cloudflare Pages.

Pausing to consider smallness

Tue, 08 Nov 2022 10:54:17 -0800

I appreciate omg.lol and micro.blog for making space for small things. The early web was like that. We can talk down GeoCities sites if we wish, but in GeoCities it was okay to be small and human. We lost that sense of the web as a place that was made up of humans … a perpetual boom shot sweeping across an infinite small town with lights in all the windows. You can fly. You can stop to look at what you will, or move on. If you experience envy over anything you see, it is at least envy over the creativity, or skill, or passion bound up in someone’s little house.

Some initial impressions of the Opal C1

Mon, 15 Aug 2022 13:32:14 -0800

After some issues with delivery, my Opal C1 finally arrived. It is a pretty good product, but it exists in an odd nether-region between other fairly well executed webcams that cost less and just repurposing a mirrorless camera. I wouldn’t recommend it to people who don’t think of webcams as something fun to play with.

Once I got a tracking number for it, I reinstalled my Fujifilm X-T4 using the new 23mm/f1.4 lens just to have something to index with. My daily driver for a while now has been an Elgato Facecam, which costs $100 less and provides a sharp, consistent picture that requires only a little fiddling during the day as the light coming through the window I face changes.

Book note: Elite Capture by Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò

Mon, 20 Jun 2022 10:50:02 -0800

An attempt to reconcile the identity politics of the Combahee River Collective with the materialist left. Probably something to bother everyone in there.

What Remains of That Digital Declutter

Sat, 28 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Back in March I started a digital declutter. There are lots of posts about how those things start, but not many about how it’s going. These are some things I have been doing that have helped me feel more focused and intentional.

That Didn't Happen!

Thu, 19 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve got a life-long habit of spinning up virtual people and arguing with them, which is to say a life-long habit of telling stories to myself that aren’t true. It’s tough to break, and I haven’t broken it. But I’ve added a little thing to the loop.

How to Listen to People