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. ...
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. ...
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 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. ...
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 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. ...
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. ...
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.” ...
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. ...
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.) ...