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Photographers deal in things which are continually vanishing and when they have vanished there is no contrivance on earch which can make them come back again -- Henri Cartier-Bresson ✍️ Reply by email

"I'll be curled up under my bed all day because I got an unexpected and (IMHO) unnecessary Emergency Alert on my phone that one time. But not before I complain about it on social media for a few hours, first." 🙄 510 Pyro: The Best First Developer - by Derrick Buckner One dilution, one bottle. No drama. I’m going to explain why this belongs in a beginner’s arsenal as much as it belongs in mine. I've always been leery of Pyro developers, but based on this article, I've ordered a bottle from…

My ~/org/notes folder had nearly 4,000 files in it this morning. It now has 170. I deleted the rest. Having lost my religion around "zettelkasten" and "second brains", my notes started to look a little silly. Hundreds of nearly empty files with carefully-curated front matter are not helpful, no matter how many links between them have been created. I mean, what use is a note for, say, "Docker", which contains a link to the Docker website and Github page with a one-sentence summary like "an…

STATUS: Trying to simplify everything TODO: Review both Mac and Linux backups (Re)READING: "Devoted" by Dean Koontz WATCHING: Reacher Season 4 I'm about a third through "Devoted", by Dean Koontz and I've been enjoying it. I finally decided to add it to my Hardcover list. When I did, I saw that I'd already read the book in 2020 and gave it 3 stars. It's not uncommon for people to re-read books, but I honestly have no recollection of any of "Devoted". None of it sounds remotely familiar. That's…

I had to buy a new watch so that I would stop wanting more watches. I know it's counter-intuitive, but hear me out. I like watches. It started after I bought a nice Tag Heuer automatic to reward myself for some achievement (which I've forgotten). It's a nice watch. Expensive. It's fifteen years old and I've never wound it or replaced a battery. This was my window into automatic watches. Then came the Apple Watch, which I wore for years, dutifully upgrading every couple of years. I grew to…

You’re Pointing Your Camera the Wrong Way (NYTimes): “There is no simple way to banish the ennui of our age, but maybe it would help if we stopped looking at our own faces and turned instead to documenting the vanishing natural world in all its manifestations.” – Margaret Renkl ✍️ Reply by email

I'm definitely going to try littleFedi | A small ActivityPub server written in Go, the minute it ships. (h/t Mark Hysted) ✍️ Reply by email

I feel like relaxing on the couch all day with my laptop, Linux, and some music in the background. Maybe I'll take a break from this keyboard and go write on one of the typewriters for a while. That's been fun, too. Typing directly onto paper is cool, and something everyone should try, imo. Speaking of Linux, on my desktop I'm running Fedora w/KDE, but here on the laptop it's Fedora w/Dank Linux and Niri. I'm getting comfortable with it and it's pretty nice. ✍️ Reply by email

MarkText — The Markdown editor that gets out of your way is available for macOS, Windows, and Linux. I grabbed the Flatpak today and first impressions are good. Worth a look. (h/t Alex) ✍️ Reply by email

I've gotta try pico.sh, don't I? I mean, I already deploy all my sites via rsync, so I'm mostly there, anyway. (h/t Sal) ✍️ Reply by email

Yes, I know, "Substack is horrible..." etc., but I'll set that aside for a moment to point out that Photoni.st has created a collated list of more than 600 photographers on Substack. Lots of them I'd not seen before. ✍️ Reply by email

You may have noticed that I haven't been putting images atop these journal posts. There are a couple reasons for that. First, it's kind of a pain to find a photo I want to use and then add the date/weather overlay. It's not hard, it's just friction that I'm finding difficult to overcome. Second, they're mostly decorative, and I dislike using decorative images on posts. Sure, it is a way to share photos, but I have other ways of doing that. If I want to highlight a photo, I can just make a post…

You said it, Jim. ✍️ Reply by email

STATUS: Back on Linux, today. TODO: Nothing planned. Isn't that wonderful?! READING: Still working through "Middlemarch", but I've slowed down WATCHING: "Gone" on BritBox As repetitive and unimpressive as this blog can get, it's still the one place I have consistently put things for nearly 26 years. When I ask myself, "When did THING happen?", I often find the answer here. Maybe that's enough of a reason to continue, even though I haven't really been feeling like it, lately. My stepson writes…

I still think about this from Rakhim (2020): ✍️ Reply by email

I've stepped away from blogging and social media for nearly a week. RSS feeds have been my only consumption engine. I like it this way. Mastodon starts to feel repetitive after a while. My blogging has been repetitive for 20 years. It's a little depressing how little has changed. How little I've changed. I may decide to quit blogging altogether, but, repetitive or not, I feel invisible when I'm not writing somewhere. ✍️ Reply by email

My desk (2007)Have you ever felt like you've simply run out of things to say? ✍️ Reply by email

Coffee (2008)I don't know what's worse: the whining about macOS from Mac users or the constant bickering between Linux users. Well, I've retired the saltwater tank. I just couldn't keep ahead of it. Bad algae, unwanted critters, water changes, chemicals, testing, etc. It got to the point where the effort I was putting in wasn't worth the pleasure I was getting out of it. It was a good four-year run. ✍️ Reply by email

I wanted it to be better. It dragged a few chuckles out of me. I gave it an extra star because I love Mary Steenburgen. ✍️ Reply by email

Remember that time I had 3 dogs?MojoPad is kind of amazing. I've been following along for a while now and boy howdy the updates are coming fast and furious. Perhaps too fast. I mean, he's shipping major updates every few days. The app is certainly being vibe coded. In fact, I'm starting to notice that nearly everything about the project is LLM-generated. The release notes, obviously. The website with its almost cartoonish illustrations is off-putting. More and more I'm thinking even the…

My old darkroomWhat does one do when nearly every topic they've always found interesting now bores them to tears? I find myself skimming my RSS and Mastodon feeds and just shrugging everything off because I'm tired of it. Let's hope it's just a moody phase. It feels like a moody phase. ✍️ Reply by email

Fence (2015). M3 testing Tri-X at 1600Suddenly this morning, my Org Agenda was empty. It should never be empty. Emacs had already been running, idle, so I've no idea how it happened. A restart fixed it, but it was unsettling enough that I created a separate blog script to replace the emacs-dependent parts of my blogging workflow. Now I can do blog journal or blog post or blog cover in a terminal, and it does the right thing, then opens the file in $VISUAL. Feels safer this way. The Emacs…

What I should be doing is creating new things rather than constantly rearranging the things I already have. Maybe I like to switch between operating systems because it feels like rearranging my office. A fresh view feels good. Today I'm running Dank Linux as my desktop. It's so weird and I dig it. ✍️ Reply by email

Neal Stephenson: Writing by Hand is Good for your Brain - Here's how to do it: About twenty-five years ago I stopped composing at the keyboard and switched over to fountain pen on paper. Since then I have written many thousands of pages that way. The manuscript of The Baroque Cycle was a stack of handwritten pages 42 inches high. Good lord, how cool is that? As a fountain pen using, hand-writing sort, I found this to be a great read. (h/t Sal) ✍️ Reply by email

I've heard so many people complaining about Disclosure Day that I expected to be disappointed. I wasn't. It was a fun ride. It gets a little Spielberg-ey at times, but I didn't mind. ✍️ Reply by email

My one vice. Speed Graphic. HP5+. New55 Monobath R5I can hardly be bothered writing things anymore. I get an idea for a blog post and thinking about all the words I'd have to come up with makes it just sort of fizzle out. It's a phase, right? Mainspring could be handy. "Mainspring reveals the settings macOS hides — as one-click, fully reversible power-ups. Wind it up exactly how you like it; unwind any change just as fast." I would probably buy it, but it overlaps a lot with Supercharge which I…

Stella's Lounge (2019)I must be in a funk because I plugged the Mac Mini back in and I'm typing on it now. I just didn't feel like thinking about the computer and macOS does a better job of being an appliance when I need one. The Linux machine is still plugged in, too, so I'm back to one cable swap away from the other OS any time. It's maddening, but I can't seem to claw my way out of it. Worse on Purpose | How Corporate Greed Killed Product Quality What an interesting site! Also rather…

I still have both eyes.I don't know why I bother trying other tools. I'm just going to end up back in Emacs, anyway. ✍️ Reply by email

I was really looking forward to "The Hawk". I usually get a kick out of Will Ferrell. Not this time, I'm afraid. I don't mind if a show is silly, but it also needs to be funny. This is not funny. The problem is that the actors, especially Ferrell and Molly Shannon, seem to be playing themselves, not the actual characters. I gave it two episodes, but that's all I could handle. ✍️ Reply by email

Me windsurfing in the 80s STATUS: Family Reunion, today TODO: Get through the reunion. I like everyone, but it's way too much peopleing I've really gone and over-complicated things now. ✍️ Reply by email