Once I was done with that, I took a long look at the micro.blog and decided I was done with it. I think I subscribed hoping I was in the mood for the slow-moving community over there, but most people I know from it seem to have moved on since I was last there. So I pointed its custom domain to this one, exported all my stuff from it, and set up shop here again.

micro.blog hews so close to things I think I would really like to exist somewhere in a less elaborate manner. I appreciate the way you can start with what feels like a short-form social-media-style post and end up tipping over into a whole blog entry without having to switch context. What’d be fine, honestly, would be “Mastodon except your Markdown works and you can kinda blog in there, not just toot.” Then sometimes it’d be a pithy little comment, other times it’d be a screed, and you could get kicked out of your instance because a lot of words is violent or whatever.

It is one-way only: Your code is pushed to GitHub, but AI Studio won’t pull any changes back down. So if your bright idea was to seek security review from a human or push your code through a review toolchain, you’ll be copying and pasting any changes back in.

If you make a change to your code (PR, file editor, whatever), AI Studio just makes a commit reverting your changes, adding a commit message calling them “extraneous,” “unneeded,” or (in the case of a security notification I added) “frivolous.”

In other words, it doesn’t actually know how to use GitHub, but takes a stab at gaslighting you into thinking your commits were all pointless and dumb anyhow.

5: How many times in the past ~45 days someone has asked me if they can stick Salesforce tokens in their vibecoded AI Studio app.

n: How many times someone decided to just go do that without asking.

https://gi.puddingtime.net

gi.puddingtime.net

I added some tools over the weekend:

• rss_candidates_assess — Shallow-score candidate feeds from OPML, URL list, or HTML page against my interest profile
• rss_candidates_deep — Deep pass on assessed candidates: fetches real articles, scores through the pipeline
• rss_candidates_dismiss — Mark candidates as not interesting
• rss_candidates_subscribe — Promote candidates to real subscriptions

I’ve been grabbing OPML from sites like ooh.directory and dragging them into Claude Desktop where the MCP does a shallow pass against headlines, suggests some likely candidates, then does a deep pass on the stronger ones by pulling actual articles.

I found some pretty interesting management blogs this way, and it’s helpful for sifting through long, general lists. Because everything hits the scoring queue and triage is easy, it feels less risky to just grab a bunch on their speculative quality and know they’ll get sorted out after a little while.

I also built an endpoint to feed a URL in via a bookmarklet (or eventual browser extension), so the traditional “subscribe to this site” bookmarklet gets a makeover by using the scoring pipeline to offer a quick summary before categorizing and subscribing.

I dunno … it seems to be encouraging me to subscribe to stuff, and my reading list is diversifying. Seems good.

The frustrating thing was having to abandon “did I read this” as a scoring signal. It seems like a good idea to include it, but:

First, feed readers are pretty annoying if you’re trying to measure read state, because it’d be a complex problem to solve for very little payoff unless your reader’s whole project is “help people figure out what’s worth reading,” and almost none of them do make that their project. There’s been this little ripple through the “people who like RSS” world calling out the stale state of RSS reading (“they all look like mail readers”) and none of the “looks like a mail reader” development community seems to have thought “what would the built-in spam filtering of a mail reader look like in an RSS reader?” They just think “did you glance at it? I’ll pass that back to the feed backend so you don’t see it a second time on another client somewhere.”

Readwise Reader kind of does solve this – it tracks how far down an article you’ve scrolled. That could be a great signal but then you’re using Readwise Reader.

Second, I end up reading things in other places: From Linkding, from Linkwarden, in Wallabag, just opening the link in a browser. They mostly have some variant on “read” or “unread,” but they generally require a manual toggle. So tracking what I read and didn’t requires manual interventions.

So with some disappointment I yanked was_read out of the feed scoring pipeline, and I’m down to “did I star it, did I skip it, or did a rule I created block it?” Those are all at least clear behavioral signal that an be combined to suggest the future success of a given feed from past behavior. was_read would have been, too, but I’m not ready to create an entire RSS reader of my own to give myself more guarantees.

And I still have the inference-driven stuff to help auto-triage: Given much firmer behavioral measures, the inference layer is getting stronger signal about the reputational thumb it should put on the article scoring scale. It is also doing a good job with my more subjective, inference-friendly nudges: Project version bumps, crime stories, headlines that make it hard to figure out the subject, etc. all get downweighted.

Finally, I have the topic surge filtering layer: Work requires me, for instance, to keep up with the latest in Gemini. It doesn’t require me to read 20 separate press release rewrites from my Google News search feed.

So … is it working?

Yeah, I would say it is. I’ve got a few tabs in the UI that let me go in and see what inference has ruled out, and I am disagreeing with it less and less. The past few days I just scroll down the reject pile and hit the big red “dismiss them all” button instead of overriding any of them.

I’ve been cautious about letting it recommend, though. As eager as I am to filter out dead wood (anything scoring below 3/10) I won’t let it promote anything below 7/10, and it hasn’t suggested much yet. Makes sense. I’ve spent more time telling it what I don’t like than what I do like, so there’s not much for inference to dig in on to start filling in the high end of curve.

Oh, right. So the unexpected part:

Nothing that unpleasant, really. As I’ve been working on the pipeline tuning parameters, I’ve been in a validation cycle of “tweak -> rescore -> review.”

The tool gives me a categorized list of all my feeds along with an attention score for each, based on how many articles from that source that the system has seen, how many I have starred, how many I have skipped, some recency calculations, and a Bayes smoother that takes its time judging lower volume feeds but gets more opinionated with higher volume ones faster. To pick on The Oregonian again:

• 765 articles seen in the 14-day window
• 307 dismissed (which means 458 hit a filter)
• 41 starred (deemed interesting) for a 5% “star rate.”
• 24 attention score

… or Hacker News:

• 414 seen
• 326 dismissed (88 hit a filter)
• 51 starred, for a 12% star rate
• 29 attention score

… or Daring Fireball

• 82 seen
• 67 dismissed
• 5 starred, for a 6% star rate
• 33 attention score

… or Jacobin:

• 78 seen
• 46 dismissed
• 30 starred, for a 38% star rate
• 52 attention score

I’ve made it easy to get those numbers because I’m still tuning the pipeline and figuring out the assorted weights, but ideal steady state is “I have no idea what those numbers are any more, I just know I see a lot of good things and far fewer bad things; and also I argue with the inference layer less in review.”

Anyhow … what is interesting to me is that I have 60 feeds running through this system, and by introspecting this system a lot, I’ve been forced to see how much of them I actually care to read vs. what I don’t. That has caused me to realize that a lot of my feed list is probably either coming from habit or aspiration, not active interest. Always worth sitting with.

I could have just taken it as a carry on, but I haven’t ridden Amtrak in a while and forgot how storage space works in the compartment. My most recent rail experience was in France, and the train ride from Lyon to Paris involved some genuine chaos in the baggage area, so that was the memory I could summon and I didn’t like it. I think I could have stuck it in the overhead bin on the Amtrak, and if there’d been no space I could have left it at the end of the car. Anyhow, it was $5 to just hand it off, and next time I’ll remember.

For as many bikes as I’ve owned, I don’t really know much about them. I couldn’t predict, based on specs around gearing and geometry, how a bike will really feel. I will say that of all the bikes I’ve owned over the years, the two that have felt the very best are my Brompton and a Trek Crossrip (one of the ones with carbon forks).

What is “best”?

I’d say it’s a combination of easy to understand stuff in the form of my riding posture and how easy it is to feel like I have good situational awareness without paying in a sense of balance, and something tangible but hard to explain in the form of I dunno what I’d call it … time to cruising speed? Smoothness to cruising speed?

I guess it’s just a gearing thing. The Crossrip and the Brompton both felt/feel easy to get up to a speed where I feel like I’m cruising at a satisfying speed and then not pedaling too hard or too fast to stay there.

It doesn’t surprise me that the Crossrip felt that way. It seems to be a well regarded bike whose departure from the lineup is lamented. It does surprise me a bit with the Brompton, given its tiny wheels and foldability. I’ve had other, less expensive folders and you feel the tradeoffs in the ride, and even with 20" wheels they don’t have that sense of smooth ramp and balanced control.

When I bought the Brompton I loved the test ride and was surprised at how good it felt, but I was pretty sure it wouldn’t feel good for a ride all the way downtown and back, which is 10 miles if I take the long way along the Springwater and more like 7 or 8 if I cut through inner southeast. I imagined it as a good bike for stuff inside five miles: Errand runs into Woodstock, maybe trips to Sellwood, but mostly as a last-couple-of-miler from the Max, or a one-way “meet Al for drinks after work, toss it in the back” bike.

In practice, though, nowhere feels too far on it. Spinning back up the hill on Clinton from downtown, and then up the hill on 51st toward Foster can get a little tiring, but it’s not hard to find a gear and go to my happy place until those are over.

And it gets to a nice cruising speed. I overtook some Sunday riders on the Springwater at what felt like an easy pace and one of them muttered “goddamn ebikes” to his buddy as I went by.

Well, whatever it is, it works.

When I think back to 2013—the year 500 miles were enough to win the bike commute challenge at work—I did end up getting an ebike because the 20 mile round trip to work was taking a toll some days. One afternoon someone drafted me all the way from somewhere around Oaks Park to my exit at Lents and said “maybe someday you’ll get a real bike” as she pedaled away. Well, I have one, and still the hate.

For me the tell isn’t em-dashes or particular rhetorical tics, or even extreme changes. A human plainly remains somewhere in the loop. It’s a shift in the tone and what I guess we could call shared agreements or previously understood ground truths.

On that last, I suppose it’s a matter of taking the subjectivity we have to assume about every shared agreement or understanding—the simple wisdom of knowing that nobody ever really sees things exactly as we do—and sensing that the previous delta in understanding is the starting point for an LLM’s stochastic narrative-building and elaboration. A predictable and acceptable standard deviation is stretching to several standard deviations.

There are plenty of stories of people using LLMs to descend into a widening gyre of elaborate and dysfunctional subjectivity. As always, given how mass media works, the stories are lurid and extreme. But they always seem to start with a belief that the LLM managed to crystallize something for the person—seemed to speak to something they suspected but didn’t have language for, or support to believe—and then began to spin out from that initial earned trust into statistically average delusion, and then decidedly abnormal madness, where an NYT or Guardian reporter eagerly awaits.

I don’t think I’m watching someone go mad. I think I’m watching someone set aside their native competence and fundamental epistemic agency in favor of a defective cognitive prosthetic that has no mechanism or feature to mediate its own oscillations: An understanding goes in, the delta in understanding is part of a prompt, the feedback pulls further in some random direction, the delta in understanding widens, the next prompt is even further adrift, the oscillations widen.

But like I said, nobody’s going mad. I’m not concerned for anyone’s safety. I’m just concerned about a relationship, and contemplating my own responsibility in the matter, because I can’t help but wonder if more care with clarity or more patience on my part would have made an LLM a less attractive problem-solving partner.

I would prefer someone trying to find their way to understanding imperfectly but authentically to this.

I’m not sure what to do.

Me, too. I think I get why skills have momentum, and among whom they have it, but MCPs provide a kind of ubiquity across UI’s that skills can’t touch.

https://david.coffee/i-still-prefer-mcp-over-skills/

Me, too. I think I get why skills have momentum, and among whom they have it, but MCPs provide a kind of ubiquity across UI’s that skills can’t touch.

david.coffee/i-still-p…

The triage UI lets me train the triage service on topics, but when I designed it I designed it less as a fine control and more as a rolling, broad collection of signals. I do have a feature that lets me block authors, but I don’t do it the way I think a lot of people would, to get rid of people I don’t agree with but rather because some reporters cover some things I never want to read about, and it’s a way to just whack out big tranches of material once I can see that the author covers a beat I don’t care about. Generally, though, the system is slowly and gently learning from what gets skipped, or very broadly named.

So when a big topical swell comes through, I haven’t had a way to deal with it. I don’t want to downscore the topic du jour because I don’t want to drive it from sight forever. I just want, after seeing the 10th article about it go by in the triage tool, to make it go away for a bit.

So this evening I built that feature in the form of a topic snooze:

I’ve got a Haiku agent doing the scoring on every article that passes into the system anyhow. It’s consulting my existing preferences and attention patterns and providing a little summary about why it’s scoring each article the way it does. So now I’m also using that inference pass to extract three or four likely topics from each article during scoring. The prompt is a pretty simple “figure out three things this could be about at a middling level of specificity.”

Those topics go into a table that records the topic and has columns for when it was first seen, when it was last seen, and how often it has been seen. While the topic is “live,” the system is just tallying and exposing the topic in the feedback UI for each article. If I triage an article, the UI shows me the inferred topics so I can choose to snooze them. If a topic gets snoozed, any articles it’s attached to that haven’t been selected for reading later get triaged out on the spot. For the duration of the topic’s “aliveness” – its rolling daily appearance average is above some threshold per day – articles about that topic get skipped without impacting the overall interest score for that topic. Once the topic slides below the “aliveness” threshold, articles matching it are allowed back into the queue.

I think it will be useful, and I made sure to include UI that lets me tune the params for defining snooze duration and the aliveness state for a topic. The nice thing about a tool like this is that it’s an opportunity to contemplate what harm would be done by not seeing an article I would have otherwise if I get something wrong with this, which is pretty much “none,” and that is a really good thing to remember.

It is also a variation on a theme that continues to emerge and evolve during this current period of vibecoding assorted tools and doing more to work inference into them than I was a year ago:

Even though the stakes are pretty low if the system gets it wrong, I always want my observation port and my knobs:

Inference is great in the spaces, doing things that I’d just consume a dependency to get (e.g. topic extraction) or understanding roughly – well enough – what my assorted likes and dislikes add up to for a given article. But I still want to be in the loop. Human in the loop doesn’t always have to mean “human hovering over the lever,” it can just mean “human nudging the flow this way and that.”

I want the system to gradually attain more and more autonomy as I stick to using it. I actually like it well enough now that I don’t even use RSS readers: I do triage in the mobile or desktop UI, and I use a RiL service to read what comes out the other side. Over the course of the day, about 8 percent of what comes through the system gets flagged for reading, and about 35 percent is auto-skipped before I have to triage it, either due to a deterministic rule (an author) or inference scoring.

When I pull the stats, I see that I’ve only overridden 2.3 percent of the inference system’s decisions. If I doubled the “kill with no review” threshold, I would end up not even seeing 40% of the total volume of content in feeds I’m subscribed to. I had Claude pull the numbers and did a quick sanity check with items I starred for later reading within that threshold, and it looks like I’d probably have 1.9% “regrettable autodeletes” if I just let the system become that much more aggressive.

I don’t have numbers on how much time I spend quickly reviewing kill proposals right now, but having 40% fewer things to even consider in exchange for maybe missing a good article or two a day seems like a decent tradeoff.

I couldn’t contribute anything to the docs themselves: We had two great writers on that, so I just got on with my day. The docs got written, and we staged them for publication, but couldn’t publish until nine or ten that evening. So after a day of feeling a little useless for not being able to help with the docs, I realized there was somewhere I could help: I could send the team home and wait around until we got the word it was okay to release our docs and the accompanying blog post.

So I called Al and told her I’d be late, got dinner downtown, then lurked around the office in the Pearl District waiting for the word so I could pop open a shell and run the deployment.

Someone on the marketing team who was waiting around to ship the blog post stopped by and asked, “isn’t it your birthday?” Yeah, I said, but we had these docs to push and the team had done all the hard work, so I figured I’d wrap it up so they could get on with their evenings.

“That sucks,” she said. “Sorry.”

“Well,” I said, “I don’t know how many users we have but I know it’s a lot. And these docs are going to help them a lot. So it’s hard to complain: A birthday spent helping all those people seems like a good birthday present.”

“Fair enough,” she said, and we sat in companionable silence until we could click our respective “post” or “deploy” buttons and head home.

I got home pretty late that night. Al had gone to sleep, and there was a cupcake on the counter with a candle sticking out of it, and that was it for the birthday where I noted that I could officially round my age up to 50.

Some birthdays I work, some birthdays I don’t. I spent my 25th birthday in Basic Training. My 26th I was in a retransmission station in Korea. My 9th birthday didn’t officially happen because it was suspended over an infraction that caused my mother to believe I should spend the day contemplating what it would be like to not be alive to have birthdays. There may have still been a cake, but the three months leading up to it were spent contemplating the void, which is probably where posts like the one I wrote three days before Heartbleed Day come from.

This birthday I worked, and it was a pretty good day: I had my weekly 1:1 with my favorite work person, I had a quiet conversation with someone on my team where we reaffirmed the best parts of our connection, and the last meeting of the day was spent with a colleague in Australia, figuring out how to help her do a thing she’s trying to do. Nothing that moves any cosmic needle or dents the universe. Just another day.

Today I re-read that birthday post I wrote three days before Heartbleed Day, as I do every year, always wondering if the math is going to come out different for me this time, or if the answer will change, and it has not:

Mostly I think we’re born in a house that’s on fire, and there’ll be a moment between flame and ash.

We’ll need to have been kind.

“… just because you have binarized your thinking does not mean everyone else has.”

“anyway if the mental image you are conjuring for your interlocuters positions them as always knowing less than you by default, that might be something to look into in yourself!”

Sage.

• The RSS triager
  • Lets me set good/bad topics
  • Lets me block, downweight, or upweight authors
  • Lets me block, downweight, or upweight topics
  • Learns from my “starred” links
  • Uses weighting and scoring to filter feeds and and serve them via the Fever API
  • Automatically passes high-scoring articles through to my RiL service
• Wallabag for RiL (Replaces any/all of Readwise, Pocket, Instapaper)
  • Starred in Wallabag passes the link through to the permanent link saving service
  • Decent web app, iPhone app, and looking forward to trying out its Android app on the Boox
• Linkding for my long-term links archive
  • Replaces pinboard.in
  • Has a handy search injection sidebar – see what you’ve already bookmarked alongside new search results
  • Understands the classic bookmarks.html format
  • High quality iOS app

The triager is mine because nothing does quite what I want there. feedly tries to, but why pay for something less reliable and less tailored than what I could make for myself?

The RiL service is fungible. I considered going back to Instapaper or just hanging on to Readwise, but I don’t need to. The bookmarking service is fungible, too. I’ve just had good luck with Linkding. Both come with nice mobile apps and a number of extensions, etc. that I don’t have to make for myself.

So today I sort of flipped the model from triaging incoming articles, taking an incremental approach to learning my preferences, and pattern-matching on authors to reviewing feeds and pattern-matching alternately on authors, URL characteristics, and a bit of inference around topics:

• Visit a feed I’m tracking
• List the articles
• Click an article with the option to block author, URL pattern, or click “I don’t like this”
• If I click “I don’t like this,” I can click “content type” or “topic,” or fill in a field. Then Haiku takes a pass and proposes some heuristics it can apply to articles in the feed.

That’s just a variation on what I’ve been doing anyhow, but now the tool republishes a private version of the feed that is dynamically filtered on the rules and feedback I’ve provided so I can subscribe to it from any regular old RSS reader or service instead of being locked in to Feedly, Readwise, Inkwell, etc. In Inkwell, the tool can even swap in the cleaned up feed automatically, cutting down on how much triage even has to happen.

I’ve also added a couple of tools that have made the experience much better:

Superpowers is a development workflow that adds a set of skills including:

• brainstorming
• writing-plans
• subagent-driven-development or executing-plans
• requesting-code-review

The brainstorming and planning phase involve a lot of helpful, clarifying questions. The spec files it produces are helpful. The reviews it runs catch inconsistencies and gaps. It adds a few minutes to work on any given feature, but the rate of “got it in one” has shot through the roof, and taking a moment to read its specs and plans offers a lot of reassurance that there’ll be fewer misalignments.

On the other end of the process, Impeccable is a set of visual design skills that address gaps in typography, layout, color, visual rhythm, and more. The starting point with an Impeccable session is the /critique skill, which leads to a set of recommendations on which of its many skills to use.

A lot of the stuff Claude Code produced for aSystem/aCloud was very “my first Rails app default view” in quality. A little back and forth with Claude cleaned up the worst of it, but Impeccable acts a lot more like a design partner, asking about the app’s “brand image,” and walking through questionnaires that are a little educational on their own. Pages that felt like long slogs through undifferentiated metadata became a lot more readable very quickly.

Readwise is a nice addition, because its API tracks your percent completed in an article, and the triage tool is watching for that to go to “100” before it considers an article a good recommendation. Inkwell just had “read/unread” via whatever RSS reader, which sets things to “read” on open (or requires a manual mark-read action). There’s also some interesting signal to be mined from Readwise partial reads, too, so that’s on the list.

Honestly, this could just be called “The Oregonianator,” because most feeds I bother with aren’t so godawful on signal-to-noise. I might skip things because they’re not my cup of tea on another feed, but the Oregonian’s catch-all RSS seems designed to get people to swear off RSS: So much filler, junk, clickbait, and syndicated content. When I wrote the outgoing EiC last year she offered a half-hearted defense of it all that sounded more like a hostage statement, vaguely alluding to the idea that the O’s web operation isn’t beholden to the editorial side. It feels like it’s all premised on a 15-year-old conception of SEO that requires high-churn content. It feels familiar to me because I had to do it for a while.

Architecturally, I could reduce this to a worker on a cron job that passes each article through user rules, then passes the survivors through to beefed up inference. Unlike RSS feeds, which have no state, Readwise would support this approach because things it finds in RSS become articles that can be removed from your queue. The other idea I considered was creating and serving a shadow Oregonian feed that’s been through triage.

For now, though, after a few days of training, I’ve pivoted the tool’s primary interface to a review system: There’s enough training data that the tool’s 0.1 - 1.0 confidence scale is pretty good at south of 0.15 and north of 0.7. So I let the app automatically remove articles at 0.15 or lower, and automatically promote 0.7 or higher. I’ll keep on training and see what I can do to narrow the band. There’s also a queue where I can fish a mistaken deletion out within 24 hours. The traditional triage queue remains, as well, for things that fall in between those two scores.

It makes me want to add more sources, because I’ve got a better way to triage them.

I don’t see this as particularly distinguishable from a large volume of social media interactions generally. Maybe we’ve achieved AGI after all.

www.theregister.com/2026/03/2…

youtu.be/xfJfrZ_3N…

micro.blog’s recent-ish Inkwell provides an API. The app hits the API for unread articles, and I can love/hate them (along with a way to train for/against source sites, authors, keywords, and topics) or star them (in which case it hits the Inkwell API and stars the article so it’ll pop up in Unread). In addition to my direct feedback, I’ve also got a topical list that adds weight.

Borrowing from my old project, it’s also tracking the read rates on each site and using that alongside my article ratings to provide an overall score for websites that it takes into account.

So when an article comes in, a cheap Haiku agent takes a look, factors in my previous feedback and my interest list. The fun part is that the app also talks to aSystems notes, ideas, and tasks, so Haiku knows to look for relevance there. Likewise, as AI development articles come in, especially ones about “human-in-the-loop” and ML, it’s looking at my aSystem feature backlog and noting the relevance.

I added a “no, that’s not quite right” feedback loop, as well: Since the agent records its impressions on a given post, I can nudge it. For instance, it downgraded an Oregonian article about a housing policy story because it wasn’t relevant to my interests list, which includes homelessness. I added a “that’s not quite right” feedback, and when an article came in later today, the agent’s take reflected that new nudge:

Relates to user’s Portland interest and touches on homelessness/housing policy context (ICE enforcement affects vulnerable populations), but is primarily a crime/legal story which the user has rejected. Maxine Bernstein is a crime reporter whose work the user may want to filter.

It’s true: I’ve added crime stories as negative signal, and it has picked up on the reporter being associated with those, suggesting I just add her to the filter. The article came in at a score of 0.59, though, which represents a strong-ish score, so my countervailing guidance to be a bit more inclusive worked. It has likewise done a good job with downscoring roundup articles, advice columnists, and headlines that don’t reveal key details. In other words, it is doing a great job getting me to the three Oregonian articles I care to read on any given day.

I guess I should also point out that it doesn’t have a mobile app, but Wispr Flow is yet another example of a good product hobbled by Apple’s sandboxing. I just use Apple voice dictation on my phone and it’s good enough for those use cases.

Bought this so fast.

www.youtube.com/watch

I would argue it depends on what you enjoy: the journey or the destination. I have always enjoyed the journey, I think people having a blast nowadays are enjoying the destination. AI gave us more destinations, but less journey. It is not worse or better, just different.

I like the journey and the destination, thanks.

The journey now goes much faster and more efficiently for me, but that doesn’t actually mean less journey: It means I cover more ground in the same amount of journey time because I am not constrained by fumbling through the syntax to get there.

At the core, though, I am still thinking about a problem I am trying to solve or how to enable a kind of work I need to do and ideating toward a solution to that problem or a tool that better supports that kind of work.

I have a particular relationship with developers and software development:

I learned to code beyond rudimentary AppleScript because some dipshit in IT told me I didn’t need a particular tool I knew I needed, and he was happy to gatekeep tool creation. I learned to write Ruby because while I was looking for a solution to my problem, Ruby happened to be the language someone used in the first proof of concept I could find. Fine. Ruby it was.

Within a year, I was a Rails developer. I wasn’t getting paid to be a Rails developer, but I’d written an entire analytics framework and it was saving 10-15 people four or five hours of toil a month. It was meaningful enough that when I quit that job management dispatched someone from IT to learn how the tool worked.

I was good enough that I was getting technical interviews for Rails work, but I didn’t do too many before I realized I liked solving my own problems, not somebody else’s. If it was some hiring manager’s problem? Not interested. Didn’t want to spend my days that way. My problem? I’d throw myself at it on nights and weekends, too.

Now, I am not a good coder by any professional coder’s standards. I think I am an effective coder because when I make things with code to solve my problems, they always solve my problems.

“Oh, so that means you’re a ‘destination’ person!”

No, it doesn’t. I like the journey coding entails. It means thinking deeply about the problem. Considering the models one can apply to it. Challenging my conception of the problem. Following ideas to logical or illogical conclusions. Realizing there are better ways to think about it all. Realizing there are ways to get so much more leverage now that I have a fingernail under a corner.

But I’m not a good coder, or a particularly fluent coder, so the journey when it was just me and a new buffer in Emacs was long and slow.

Now? Coding with LLMs works for me because I know enough about how programming works generally to steer the LLM toward what I’m after, but I’m not burning all the time on scaffolding, boilerplate and syntax obscurities to get tools as effective as anything I ever wrote “by hand.”

I do spend some time re-specifying, backing out of blind alleys, and catching bugs during behavioral testing. It’s still faster. I still get more robust features. I still get good outcomes. Better outcomes. And once I get to that destination, I am probably going to start a new journey, because I like making tools for myself. It used to be slow and I couldn’t do as much. Now it is faster and my tools can do a lot more.

There is still plenty of space held open for the journey.

59% [of surveyed hiring managers] admit they emphasize AI when explaining hiring freezes or layoffs because it plays better with stakeholders than citing financial constraints

During the dotcom bust a company I worked for spent five or six months sliding all over the road with layoffs because its ad business was collapsing, but it kept underestimating the extent of the damage as non-renewals continued to pour in from tech companies that were bleeding out.

The layoffs – always two or three at a time across all the verticals – were like the old Russian folk tale about the man whose dog had a diseased tail: He couldn’t bring himself to cut the tail off, so he settled on slicing away a chunk of it each day. Every month, toward the end, I’d get a call telling me two or three people had gotten the axe (“but don’t worry – you’re fine! – I just need you to take over …”)

They were taking a public beating for the chronic layoffs, though, so suddenly every dismissal was performance-related. Any semblance of dignity for those people went out the window as mid-level leadership informally let us all know that they had it coming but the company was fine. The company’s GC was happy to inform us all that if we provided references for any former colleagues we would enjoy no legal protection.

My breaking point: Being the last of two people on a former team of around 15, and learning the other guy lost his job because he hadn’t picked up the phone until the fifth ring the day prior. I don’t mean breaking point as in “I said fuck it, I quit.” I mean breaking point as in, “I need my job, so I’ll do what I can to keep it, but this is insane and stupid, so I won’t take it personally when it finally comes for me.”

Don’t get me wrong:

25 years later layoffs still make me nervous. I’ve been through enough, run some kind of operations for enough, or been one of the people going through the layoff rosters enough that I know how they work and what a thoroughly mid-wit or sociopathic cast of characters can end up with power over peoples’ livelihoods.

I’ve sat in a room with a CEO telling all the senior directors she saw everyone else doing layoffs as a good reason to demand more than the business strictly needed. “The environment permitted me to take this opportunity.” The “environment” being the Covid pandemic, the “opportunity” being a rushed operation that went from “we need to cut from next year’s hiring plan” to “we need about 10% of the department” in under 24 hours, with an inept People team creating so many barriers to collaboration that engineering managers were cutting talent Product was roadmapping for. All while CNN was carrying footage of miles-long drive up food lines.

I can’t help anybody with the underlying sociopathy of capital. We’re all going to either collectively address it or not. After 25 years in and around tech, I’m just here to tell you I have no patience for the “get back to normal” wing of the Democratic party, because “normal” was always bad and unjust for working people.

What I can help with, I guess, is suggesting to someone who finds themselves out of work that it is not you.

It’s hard to remember that.

I’ve been on the wrong side of the layoff table once and am open to the possibility it will happen again. I knew when my layer-offer said “this is a business decision” that it wasn’t me. But there was some self-doubt there. I spent a little bit of time feeling a little wounded and wondering about all the ways I might have mis-managed my career.

So, it is one thing to wake up every morning thinking “I caught a bad break in a sociopathic system that uses buffering layers of bureaucracy to help middle managers rationalize the immiseration they’re dealing out,” and quite another to wake up thinking “an efficient and rational market has determined I am somehow to blame for day 189 of my unemployment, and I think it has a point.”

I’d encourage you to stick to the former. The scorpion stung you. That’s in its nature.

You can now describe what you want in plain English and get working Elisp, VimScript, or Lua. ‘Write me an Emacs function that reformats the current paragraph to 72 columns and adds a prefix’ – done. […] The extension language barrier, which has been the biggest obstacle to adoption for decades, is suddenly much lower.

This has been my experience with Emacs. Instantly useful extensions I would have struggled with previously. The only real problem was learning to ignore the guilt.

batsov.com/articles/…

I have become very resigned to people just going around with their own facts, so I guess I’m glad to see a community where people can hear that they’re doing that and suck it back in.

wordpress.org/news/2026…

www.oregonlive.com/politics/…

I’ve got a MacBook Air so I don’t need a Neo, just fascinated to see Gruber “welp” his iPad out the window.

daringfireball.net/2026/03/t…

The goal has been to keep the TUIs I like working with, but make the tools better for use with an agent of some kind. Each comes with a SKILL.md that helps LocalGPT understand how to interact with them, and LocalGPT has some protocols in place to use the skills for daily routine stuff for me.

I also put a React front-end on the whole thing, so there’s a web interface available over Tailscale that gives me a GUI to access my stuff from wherever. It’s all still Markdown and YAML underneath, but simple to manage from a phone.

I’ve built a few workflows with all these pieces to help me plan my week and day. asystem goes out and grabs my calendar, looks at my task/project list, and scans my meetings for who the participants are. I time block my hard meeting times, then dialog back and forth about what to prioritize when and schedule that into the day.

In the React front-end, there’s a daily page that reflects any tasks I’ve signed up for, and it also tosses in links to the contacts asystem found in my calendar for the day. Since tasks, projects, ideas, and people are all cross-linkable, I’ve pretty much got my agenda there in the app, whether it’s a list of tasks or some ideas I’ve been kicking around that relate to that person.

Getting a web front-end built has taken a lot of the pressure off to change the back end, because I don’t really need a db with this arrangement. If I want something tappy/clicky from my iPad or phone, I’ve got aweb. If I want a TUI, those apps are still there from ghostty or Blink. If I just want to edit a file, I can. The underlying execution from any entry point is just the individual CLI apps that ingest and emit JSON when an agent is using them, but present me with a TUI if I want.

A lot of the fussing with this right now is about figuring out how much structure to provide agents to do useful things for me without ending up just writing the procedural code. By putting tasks, contacts, and ideas in hybrid Markdown/YAML files, there’s plenty of structured data to remove some kinds of ambiguity, but enough room for prose and personal notes that it’s still useful and familiar to me. The SKILL.md scaffolding makes sure the agents use the tools the way they’re meant.

I’ve added other scaffolding in the form of LocalGPT’s MEMORY.md file, which contains an org chart, and in relationship: tags in apeople that help guide the agent’s recommendations during planning times: I took about 30 minutes to go through and classify everyone at work based on a few flavors of relationship, so the agent doesn’t recommend rescheduling the wrong people, and it can tell from looking at a given contact if I have any open business with them that might encourage me to keep the current time before pushing back.

I fed the whole thing a few personality tests and used that to work through a work habits and patterns map that is also sitting in LocalGPT’s memory. It looks out for tasks that aren’t getting done and prods a little, and because it has the apeople map with my read on everybody around me, it offers a little “how do you want to show up for this” guidance when doing the daily overview, so I get reminders, like “this is one of your reports, so keep it concrete and not too conceptual.” If I feed it work I need to review from someone, it uses the apeople log and anote idea mapping to draw my attention to areas I should be on the lookout for, or think about better feedback on. And during the day, I just drop log entries into it that it goes through at the end of the day and processes as either potential next steps (aspirations) or things I might or might not know (beliefs), making links between ideas, tasks, projects, and people that further inform how it surfaces stuff and what it recommends.

So slowly there is some stuff emerging from all the linked context across people, tasks, and ideas. Nothing profound. I am not in communion with another mind, I’m just finding a state where the LLM can do helpful things, and is operating in such an introspectable, finite web of information that it doesn’t have room to invent shit but is instead reduced to catching associations and surfacing them in the form of little reminders, or reducing the number of ideas I have to say “no” to as I plan my day.

Oh, helpfully, Claude Code also has access to all the asystem SKILL files, and CLAUDE.md has some light guidance on them. So when I drop an idea into anote about how to evolve the system, I can reference it in a Code session and that helps drive feature development. This part isn’t as rich as I’d like it to be, because the CLAUDE.md instructions and skills aren’t really written around “have a holistic understanding of your operator and his context,” but the plumbing is there if I care to get around to figuring out the prompt.

So … sort of fun turn of the crank on vibe coding this time. Last time around, last year, I built some TUI tools that were sort of fun little throwback exercises. This time around the more interesting part is all the connections I can make with those tools.

github.com/mholovets…

Sit with an engineer who asks as only an engineer can, “how could there even be a principal writer? There’s not that much to know.” I had to.

So, sorry it’s no fun anymore and that people are saying “how much can there be to know” about a thing you cherished.

Learn what I did: Just know it for yourself.

dylancastillo.co/posts/ai-…

Recap:

• anote is a plaintext system for storing ideas. Ideas are (for now) either “aspirations” or “beliefs.” anote manages them in a lifecycle from “seed” to some final state of accepted, rejected, dropped, or implemented.
• atask is anote’s work sibling. It’s plaintext and it stores work as tasks or projects.
• apeople is a contact management system. It helps me keep track of relationships by logging interactions, reminding me when I should reach out, and associating people with tasks in atask.

Each has two aspects: There’s a TUI app built to suit my preferences for keyboard-centric interactions with a tool, and there’s a CLI tool that can emit JSON for all the objects and take batch commands. The former is so a human can use these tools like TUI productivity tools, and the latter is so agents can efficiently search all the data, make programmatic changes/additions/removals, and insert relationships between the objects each manages.

These are all glued together on the agent level as SKILL.md files for each that explain how the tools work and how they are meant to relate to each other.

They’re all used together by a LocalGPT instance.

I work with LocalGPT through Slack, because it allows me to create structured channels. LocalGPT doesn’t naturally do Slack, so I’ve got a bot running locally that hits the LocalGPT http API. Each channel in Slack spawns a new instance of a LocalGPT agent running as a bot in Slack. The Slack bot has some features that allow LocalGPT to see the canvas or pinned messages in each channel and use them as its topmost directive if the pinned message starts with instructions. For instance, here’s the #daily channel:

[instructions]

**Daily Channel Protocol**

This channel operates in **three modes**. Between triggers, it defaults to **log mode**.

---

**Log Mode (default)**
Drop anything in here throughout the day — ideas, reactions, tasks, stray thoughts. No formatting required. I'll acknowledge briefly and hold. No analysis, no riffing, no engagement. Just capture.


**"start of day"** → Planning mode. Pulse check, calendar scan, task triage, daily intention, notebook prompt.

**"end of day"** → First triages the log (promotes entries to anote for ideas and atask for actions, flags process signals, updates records in apeople when they're mentioned), then runs synthesis: what happened, open threads, tomorrow's anchor, energy debrief.

**"process the log"** → Standalone log triage. Same promotion steps as end-of-day, without the full close-out. Use mid-day to clear the buffer.

---

**Key behaviors:**
- In log mode, responses are one line max. Catch and hold.
- Meaning comes later — during triage and end-of-day, not mid-stream.
- Full protocol details: daily-protocols.md in  memory.

So during the day, I can just go to #daily channel and type in a quick note naming people and actions. The logging protocol dumps that into a text file to ensure the context survives a LocalGPT daemon restart or context cleanse, and goes on passively listening. When triggered, it goes through the file and processes.

Today, for instance, it took a recap of a meeting with an internal stakeholder, updated his contact record, and associated him with new tasks reminding me to look into some Cloudflare features. It also captured observations about a call with our privacy counsel, and added an item to chat with my boss about next steps there.

I make all this easier by using Wisprflow: I just go to the channel, press ctrl + opt, dictate a quick note between meetings, and it’s captured. No typing or visiting individual tools in the system. In the event of agent failure, well, there’s a Slack record I can go visit.

All the notes in the system are using Markdown with YAML frontmatter, and they have relationship arrays in the YAML, so as associations are made between people, tasks, and ideas, the agent knows to look for them when one of those things becomes a topic, stitching together context from the existence of a relationship in the frontmatter and scanning the interaction logs for more context.

… and all this context is there at the beginning of the day during my morning timeblocking ritual:

The agent retrieves my calendar, checks the invites for people and projects it knows about, and gives me a small cheat sheet for meeting agendas. Then it looks at my live projects and tasks, their priority, and estimated effort, and helps me block work in my discretionary time.

Ambitions

I’ve been keeping an eye on a vibecoder at work who is currently beginning to brush up against the limits of Google’s AI Studio. Its integration picture is poor and it has its limits, but it does crank out nice-looking little web apps with integration into Gemini. I did a quick sprint on Friday to implement the guts of asystem as a little PoC app I named Hecubus. Hitting my own limits with AI Studio, I learned that if you’re desperate you can store JSON on Google Drive to feed a chat agent you can embed in a Studio App. I’m assuming I could just store Markdown that way, too, and build a web front end for all this, leveraging Gemini for the LLM.

Between the three apps, I get fast, local agent access to people, ideas, and actions that can be related internally and among themselves. So, for instance, once it’s online, during daily planning sessions, brainstorming sessions, etc. the SKILLS for each will allow for associations and connections. Individually they’re also just basic TUI utilities to manage my todos, store contact info, and keep track of things that are not quite ready to be work or action, but I don’t want littering my task list.

Could be the current “screw around with agents” thing will fall completely by the wayside, but I still get to keep portable, transparent, and human readable content with a TUI I like working with (or even just drop the TUI and write an exporter to a better tool someday, because it’s all structured enough to keep that simple).

I’m not really interested in the “order me a pizza,” or “make sure I always have deodorant” end states. And I don’t like the landscape any agentic workflow for a consumer has to operate in. I tossed off a quip about how browser automation to do agentic workflows is turning me into a Maoist not because “I hate capitalist pizza places” or whatever, but because I remember the way I felt after finally torturing AppleScript into doing UI scripting for some Mac app that its slob of a developer couldn’t bother to build an AppleScript library for: It was plainly just the very worst thing in the world. There was nothing human readable about it at all. There was nothing I’d ever be able to turn my back on at all. Brittle and opaque. I was in that stage of my automation journey where I was usually blaming myself for failed experiments, but this was a rare case, for the time, of feeling completely cheated by the tools available.

We’re cheated by the tools today. All these silos. You can make agentic workflows to do things, but the underlying infra sucks for it, and a lot of the things people want to do are forbidden by the silos commercial imperatives create. Want to automate a simple flow for a service you hold an account on? Probably a ToS violation even if you’re paying for a premium tier of some kind. And probably a security nightmare.

So for now, whatever. I didn’t create the problem, I don’t want to think about the problem. I think browser automation is a bad idea. It’s inelegant and wasteful. Rube Goldberg shit. And just try using it with some everyday sites with their either inept or automation-hostile tire fire markup. Just, no thanks. And as a digression, all the hooting and whingeing of the tech press aside, I’m kinda +1 on Apple’s “slowness” to improve Siri with LLMs, because Apple’s fundamental neuroses are on full display, but in a way that is probably better for me as a user. Siri sucks, but we’re in real “frying pan/fire” territory with generative AI. Good for Apple. Take your time.

Anyhow, not worrying about how to order pizzas or deodorant, and not primarily a software developer, so what I want to do with agents is more around persistence, executive function augmentation, connection-making, and pattern-matching.

Oh, also really put off by the way I’m seeing marketing people on LinkedIn doing the whole “it’s a feature not a bug” thing with LLM randomness, intoning that these are “stochastic sytems” that demand a new kind of leadership to avoid getting left behind. I am so glad that my content marketing days, however brief, were spent marketing something helpful and good.

My local rig is running LocalGPT. My primary uses for it involve planning my day/week, capturing ideas, wrangling tasks/projects, and knowing about me. During setup, I fed it a number of corporate personality tests I’ve taken over the years, had it step me through a 20-question “getting to know me” workflow, and gave it a Markdown document with my org chart and a few observational notes on everyone in it.

My initial approach for outside context was pretty exuberant, but I cooled my jets after a day or two because I’d piled too much context in and it was beginning to get weird and scattered.

My initial approach for inside context was to just have a directory of more or less freeform Markdown/YAML. That led to lossiness as the LLM struggled to make sense of the hodgepodge of concrete task/project metadata and human musing. So I woke atask back up to provide more structure: There’s JSON output, better automation for the CLI tool, and a SKILL.md agents can use to understand how to use atask in planning and interaction sessions. My task data remains my own, I don’t have the overhead of an MCP, the sandboxed agent just gets access to what it needs, and it’s pretty fast.

So to anote for the things that aren’t tasks … they’re just ideas and relationships. Same underlying data format: Denote-style filenaming, Markdown/YAML, affordances for humans and machines, but with an ideation/incubation/continuous improvement workflow where the entry point is “hey I had this idea,” the exit point is “I ended up here with this idea and rejected it,” or “I ended up here with this idea and accepted it, implemented it, etc.” The SKILL is there to guide the agent into making sense of, working with, and accounting for that corpus of ideas and understandings without the current approach the assorted -claws take of a flat Markdown file.

As I’ve sat with Claude this morning, I’m up to “working CLI that can capture ideas into Markdown files,” and there are a couple of taxonomies rattling around: Everything is an “idea.” Some ideas are “aspirations,” — things you want to do, make or build. Some ideas are “beliefs,” things you consider and either accept or reject.

The conceptual glue lives in the SKILL, where the agent is prompted to work with these things in distinct fashions depending on their stage:

The thing I’m trying to deal with is that I’ve increasingly found LocalGPT useful for kicking ideas around (I fire up wisprflow and free associate and it chatters back at me using that loose collection of things it knows about me) but sometimes it is just … Jesus Christ. Like, “sorry, that dog was distracting me with its barking” leads to “do you want me to find you contact information for animal control,” or worse.

It took some random work noodling and wanted me to go to HR by the time it was done. It took some additional, unstructured prompting to get it to memorize that senior directors don’t go to HR for that kind of thing, and that the problem I am trying to solve is entirely within me to solve. Now that it “knows” that, it’s a more helpful mirror because it doesn’t suggest stuff I don’t think is okay to begin with, and because I can see it making connections with the existing corpus (e.g. those personality profiles) before proposing ideas.

(I am wondering if there’s an idea to explore that for every technology person of a certain age, there is a foundational or formative BASIC program. Given how many hours I lost to Civilization and Sim City over the years, it makes sense that “Hamurabi” was a fave. And for this line of experimentation right now, it makes sense that I was also deeply intrigued by—then immediately irritated by—“ELIZA.” )

“You know, Mike, you could do this with other humans.”

But I kind of don’t want to. As much as I like to be in collaborative settings and interact with people, there is a part of me that is probably more intensely private than many, and right now at work I am very much in “go it alone” mode for assorted reasons. It is helpful to have a big, connected mesh of tasks, projects, and ideas to ideate with. I am after persistence for things I care about as a human being who does things besides write code.

The SKILL.md is plenty useful for understanding what it is about so far.

LocalGPT was making Markdown files with project content in them. It wasn’t very structured and I had no simple way to quickly interact with a project; just open-read-edit and a sense that it was more cumbersome than I wanted. There was also some “oh, btw, check in a few other inboxes” that was making life harder and slower.

I realized this morning that I wrote a spec for how I think about tasks and projects when I did denote-tasks earlier in the year. It covers all the things I care about, and its TUI is how I prefer to process lists of things to do. At one point I was running a local MCP that understood the denote-tasks spec, but it was slow and I wasn’t very far along on personalizing work management with AI.

So I pulled denote-tasks back out, added JSON output, added better search/query features, and a SKILL.md meant to help agents gravitate toward the machine-friendly parts. No need for an MCP, and it feels a bit more predictable and deterministic. Previously, the quality of interactions over open projects and tasks was more variable. Not exactly hallucinations but just a little sloppier than I’d like.

With denote-tasks I get a TUI for quickly making/managing tasks that operates the way my ideal list manager works, but underneath it’s Markdown-n-YAML so it works for readability but has structured data a machine can deal with better.

From the looks of it so far, just going through and having LocalGPT process those free-form project files, then interact with me to bring order to the resulting denote-task tasks, bolting on the more machine-friendly approach is making things smoother when working through projects.

I ought to change the project name. It borrows the denote file naming convention and format, and I believe it would all parse as clean denote content, but I don’t actually use Denote (or Emacs much lately) and don’t want to give the impression I’ve got anything to do with Prot’s thing.

Not sure how exactly radlibs are gonna see what was an already woeful construction to conclusion, but if the actual mid-century Marxists are an indicator it’ll involve chasing tenure and blaming workers.

I mean, that’s already what radlibs do, so … 🏆🏁

First, it is doing the moralizing thing. We’re introduced to a character whose natural place in the narrative would traditionally have involved bringing them into the action a bit later. But the writers felt the need to insert a beat where they don’t do much but position him on a moral spectrum so we can know how to read him later, where he’d have been a more ambiguous character. Once upon a time, sussing out this sort of character was part of the fun; now we appear to need to be told he’s “bad” for a set of reasons that are orthogonal to his organic place in the story, so that when he naturally enters, we know how to read his behavior and motivations because we’ve already been told he’s bad.

I think this is part “spirit of the times.” There’s a little reaction to the troubled white male antihero trope, and there’s a little bit of plain old moralism under new rules. Everybody thinks they’re better than old ’50s and ’60s morality plays, but we’re not: There was a brief window where moralizing wasn’t cool, but that window has closed and mass-marketed entertainments understand they’d better make their Position on Matters clear. It’s a source of some family discord right now, in that two of us are having allergic reactions to the moralizing even if our values are aligned with the moralizer, and the third doesn’t understand how agreeing with someone while feeling condescended to by them can be a thing.

Another part of it is related to my second issue with Black Rabbit, which is that you can sense the way modern t.v. writers are reacting to binge streaming and competing with phones for attention:

The old saw about stage actors moving to screen was that they had to learn how to pull in a broad style of stage acting keyed to the physical characteristics of the performance space, and become more understated for screen.

Now writers are learning they have to be more overstated and broad, because they know people are only half watching, and for plot-driven narratives probably barely watching until whatever is happening on the screen gets loud enough to get them to look up. Just go read an average recap to understand how little of 50 minutes of a screenplay is even registering with people paid to watch.

One way that broadness plays out is uneven pacing in the takes. Sometimes a scene goes on a little long, or a reaction is held a few beats over its natural length, apparently to make sure it lands.

I just got through The Task and it did that several times. A director who trusted the actor, script, and audience wouldn’t hold some of those takes that long or make such a point to keep the camera on a reaction. Writers and editors are dealing with an audience that is both six feet away from “the stage,” but psychically up in the third row of the balcony.

It’s weird, because Black Rabbit screen editing is paced like any other fast-cutting t.v. thing in the 21st century, but there’s this weird sense of friction or slowness at key moments when it briefly feathers the brakes to make sure the reaction landed. It’s like start and stop rush hour traffic, but for your brain.

I feel weird even writing about television because it suggests I spend a lot of time on it. I really don’t relative to any national average I’ve read about recently, but I think that’s made me more sensitive to modern norms: I used to watch a lot more television and notice the difference.

Comes with a built-in CLI chat interface, a built-in webserver on localhost for web-based chat, and there’s a Telegram interface that hasn’t been attached to a tag yet.

Curiously, it is also less, erm, “aware” of its own existence as a mediating layer between it and whatever LLM it is connected to. OpenClaw handles questions about itself with operating information that it is OpenClaw you are talking to. LocalGPT periodically answers questions directed to “you” in Claude Code’s voice.

I like that, by virtue of running it through the Claude Code CLI, it has access to all the tools Claude Code has: Any cloud MCPs and skills pass through to LocalGPT, so it shares basic-memory with any other LLM talking to that MCP along with its own memory layer (which is fast and transparent).

It is far less likely to induce the kinds of quasi-religious experiences OpenClaw was inducing because it feels more stripped down and the seams show more. That makes it a way better experimental tool to me. There’s less complexity, it’s more transparent, it’s lighter weight, and it’s less aggressive. At the same time, it borrows some of the patterns that make OpenClaw more useful out-of-the-box than the kinds of Jarvises you see people cobbling together.

As with all these things, it is reflective of the discipline that produced it, so I have to steer it toward my “humanist manager” use cases more. But the transparency, speed, and simplicity mean a little less “what on earth is going on in there” and a little more “if I’m not sure, there’s a limited set of Markdown files this thing is using to ‘know’ stuff, so I can introspect and nudge.”

I fed it a bunch of blog posts about management and work, along with a couple of skills assessments, and it has become a good planning aid because it nudges me to remember the things that matter to me during a time when it’d be way easier to embrace my inner asshole.

Corporate leaders who know my biography have said things like, “compared to normal startup people your background probably means you understand the importance of strict control and compliance.”

No, my background means that I operated in a culture where we were given careful plans for operations, but focused on what the plans were for and how any one of us might, at any given moment, end up needing to toss the plan to accomplish the mission.

And that wasn’t just paratrooping. My first assignment out of jump school was a conventional signal unit in South Korea, providing FM retransmission over the southern half of the peninsula. Things were always going wrong, and it was always left to teams of three or four operating in isolation on a series of mountaintops to “adapt and overcome,” regardless of the original plan or what the field manual said. My very first radio watch in the field, something went wrong, I reached for the troubleshooting flow chart, and my team lead sighed, and said, “that’s going to take an hour. Forget what those instructors said. Use your common sense. What do you think is wrong? Fix that.”

Micromanagement, strict alignment, and deep discomfort with creative interpretation and execution are way more common in the businesses I’ve worked in than they ever were in either a conventional Signal platoon, or an airborne unit.

The challenge for me, as a leader in a corporation, has been to understand I have that formative experience and am just stubborn and naive enough to believe it was a good operating model that left me feeling empowered even if I had to keep my uniform pressed and hair short. Out in the civilian world, not everyone had that experience and often will interpret “here’s a rough plan, improvise as needed” as “execute in this manner, don’t deviate.” Or rather, it’s a mindset that appears at some frequency above “uncommon.”

In that retransmission platoon, and in that airborne unit, we all knew better than to think like that. We knew we needed to just get the shot and keep comms flowing.

“The Gap Through Which We Praise the Machine” remains the best expression of what I keep learning with each wave of “no, it’s different this time” with this stuff: OpenClaw addresses things I was trying to cobble together for myself in a coherent, intelligent, useful way that I personally do not have the wherewithal to build for myself; but the underlying tech on which it is built still requires scaffolding, kludges, and computationally expensive workarounds, and you still end up having to do work to get it to work.

It is a definite step forward. It’s a proof of concept that is a few steps closer to what I think a lot of us imagine when we talk about the possibilities of agentic AI. I really appreciate that it is a bit more proactive in its way around proposing and implementing tools that reduce the burden on me to craft hyper-specific prompts or continuously redirect it. But you’re still doing work to get it to work.

The religious rapture with which it is being greeted is not a comment on the technology. It is a comment on the narcissism the tech industry is goading us all into with these things.

My OpenClaw instance is operating in a personal Slack account, btw. I have a few channels set up where it provides slightly different kinds of assistance depending on context and the kind of help I need. I picked Slack because the integration picture is good with several tools I use. If OpenClaw can’t solve a problem with a tool it made, or if I need to make a quick update to state on a given piece of information, it’s a /command away with the appropriate integration. As I get ready to start a bake-off on agentic AI tools at work, this is helpful validation for a few ideas I have about where Slack fits into it all.

I gave Chrome’s new “run the browser with Gemini” feature a try with a pretty mundane task: Starting from my Amazon Kindle account, find and remove the samples from my library of 400+ Kindle documents.

It was an exercise in utter misery. Amazingly bad. I made it stop after watching it “think” for two minutes just to ask me four times before it would remove the first sample, at which point it said “well, this is a bad website so it’s understandable this was not a good idea.”

I mean, who knows what Amazon’s web team has done in its quest to thwart a few common workflows people use to automate Kindle management (and de-DRMing). It probably had a point.

“Let’s see in a year!”

Sure, dude. What IT knows is that we have to use software made by people like you, which means we leave a lot of room for nothing to work like you tell us it will. Forgive me for doublechecking.

The World Is Drowning in Tourists. Who Should Pay the Price?

The benefit of traveling with another introvert is that you can round a corner with them, realize neither of you are going to like this situation, utter a low growl, and go somewhere people are not. I suppose you miss the opportunity to recreate postcard photos, but you also get to just see the place a little more as it is lived in, not traveled.

What else besides that?

• Be ruthless toward needless occurrences of “that” (thank you, Martin L. Gibson).
• Never call something a “misspelling” when it’s obviously a typo.
• Passive voice bad.
• “You’re doing fine. Clear thinkers make for good writers, so don’t overthink it and keep going.”

I think a lot of it came down to a fraught relationship to writing: Some middle school diagnostic administered by the state of Indiana declared me a mediocre fifth-grader in writing aptitude. What did I know? The test said so.

I self-selected into the remedial composition course when I got to college. A week later the prof said, “I don’t know what you’re doing in here. Did someone tell you that you had to take this course?”

“No, I’m just a bad writer.”

“Well, you’re actually a good writer. You can stay if you want. You can help the people who are struggling. My husband’s the school paper advisor and I think you should go talk to him.”

It kind of came down to “what did I know” all over again, just with a message it was nicer to hear. I did go visit her husband, and he did give me a column, and I won a few college newspaper awards for my columns. I liked it enough that I dropped out my senior year because I just wanted to go work at a newspaper.

I wouldn’t say I applied myself to writing. I was thin-skinned and fragile about feedback because the coaching I got amounted to “you’re actually good at this, just trust your instincts and write.” Much later on, dealing with new writers, I realized how much I felt my quality as a writer was externally conferred and hence vaguely magical or spiritual … a thing that was conferred upon me by some authority and that could be taken away or disproven by some other authority.

So my sense of myself as a writer wasn’t really bound up in any personal grounding in “what is good writing.” I didn’t think about it much. A friend who was editing my work said in a state of mild exasperation, “writing is something I know how to do, and I’m good at it, but you have to do it.”

I had to do it, and I was always waiting for someone to say I was no good after all.

So when I started doing more editing work, I felt like an imposter with a bag of small tricks I’d learned at the feet of a very angry regional editor at a small midwestern newspaper chain whose first guidance to me was “quit reading philosophy and read only Hemingway until I tell you to stop,” and whose next piece of feedback after that was “keep up with the Hemingway.” Or it might have been him faxing a copy of a story back to me with the word “NO” written through the second paragraph.

Anyhow, as an imposter editor who remembered very acutely what it felt like to be “good” at something I didn’t personally understand, it was important to me to encourage new writers to just pay attention, learn a few ideas about how to be clear even if you can’t Write Amazing Sentences, and otherwise just believe that if they were clear thinkers and knew what they were talking about, they’d probably be fine.

I say that with a little shame, because I have known so many stellar editors. People who had, as I once explained to someone who didn’t believe there could be a principal-level writer, “advanced degrees in this shit, dude.” People to whom good writing was science, vocation, and passion. Leading a tech writing team? Jesus Christ. I had no place. But I did love that period on a marketing team where I drove an internal contributor program, because I could just tell these bright, thoughtful people, “write about what you know. It’s interesting. I can tell you’re thinking clearly, so you’ll probably write clearly.” And I took joy in running into them in the hall and saying “oh, that blog post did a few thousand views! Top post of the quarter so far!”

The tech writers, on the other hand, tolerated me with good grace. That was a good team and a good time.

Anyhow, I suppose my last point on all this, what inspired me to start typing, is that I saw yet another post about em dashes and AI, and how this person was with immense regret no longer going to use em dashes because they’re the mark of an LLM. Reading that kind of post, of which there are many, makes me feel sad for good writers who feel pressured to drop a tool from their self expression toolkit for fear of stigma. And it makes me angry at people who go around calling out em dashes, because it combines the worst elements of phrenology and witch trials, then wraps it all in social media histrionics.

For what it’s worth, and speaking as a former dirtbag editor with little useful knowledge of what makes writing good, I will say that Wikipedia’s guide to signs of AI writing is interesting and educational. It puts names on things I’ve felt but couldn’t name (“negative parallelisms,” for one) and is much more useful for critical reading conducted with the intent of catching a bot.

I’ve never felt in sync with Google’s whole ecosystem. I have a lot of appreciation for GMail as a standalone product. I’m so used to Google Calendar at this point that I’m resistant to anything that doesn’t act like it, but I don’t really calendar my personal life. I tolerate Drive, hate Slides, get along with Docs, and have developed a grudging respect for Sheets. Meet has gotten better over the years. Tasks is super simplistic and its apps are bad, but I’m going to get back to it. Keep – I’ve never stuck with it.

But being under a mandate to use AI in prescribed tools, I sat down to a Gemini prompt and started poking around. You can give Gemini the run of your Google Workspace stuff with one configuration switch. So I enabled that and started playing. As with anything like this, I started with the calendar because I’m in that more than any other app during the day.

The integration with Workspace apps is faster than any MCP that offers the same integration via Gemini CLI. It’s quick to tell you what your day looks like, and Gemini tries to be helpful with interpretation, looking out for opportunities to optimize or figure out when the best work might be squeezed in between events. I put together a custom Gem named “Hecubus” that helps with day and week planning. I can’t see myself using it regularly (though I might if Gemini on the desktop had a live mode that allowed me to dialogue with it as I poke at emails and invitations and skim documents).

And calendar wrangling … I dunno. It’s a natural use case, and there are a million AI apps to help with that now, but I think they probably work better with less dense calendars. Given some up-front work to provide Gemini with more context about my priorities I might eventually leverage it more to help with a hectic week, but it’s just easier at this point to work it out myself. That one year I had an EA was pretty nice.

Keep ended up being more interesting than I expected. I’ve known a few Keep adherents, but I could never get past the way it presents like Post-It notes — which are finite things — but allows them to be bottomless. The thing is, Gemini understands them and can search them quickly, so they’ve got a potentially powerful place in the ecosystem as little nuggets of context you can farm. I experimented with hijacking Basic Memory’s knowledge format and Gemini did an okay job understanding “relationships” and “observations.” Gemini also responds well to just being told a fact about something you have a note about in Keep and adding it without needing an exact title.

In terms of personal organization, the mind-meld between Gemini and Keep is promising in a way that Apple is not managing with Siri and Notes. For instance, Gemini in Live mode responded perfectly (and predictably) when I’d put a bottle of wine in front of the camera and say “add this to my wine list, I got it at Bread and Roses” perfectly transcribing the label and adding it to the right list. Likewise, it ingested a bunch of products I showed it, and then knew how to respond to spoken queries about which beard shampoo is in my products list. Next time I’m at Bread and Roses, I’ll experiment with a Live Mode query to tell me which wines I can pick up there.

Years and years ago I had an Emacs extension called “remembrance agent.” Its whole schtick was that it would vectorize your documents then hang around monitoring a small context window around the point in the current buffer, suggesting a list of related documents you could jump to. I always liked the very ambient way that worked. I’ve struggled a lot more with systems that are about deliberate maintenance of a taxonomy — I’ve struggled with systems in general — but I can totally live with my main Keep window being generally clear of non-archived notes, and just quietly hucking bits of data into Keep’s weird little tesseract Post-Its, where they just go live in the Gemini Overmind as knowledge loam. I’m not trying to write 70 books here, I’m just trying to remember where I bought that one good beard balm, and which scent it was, or what the dimensions of all the windows in the house are.

While I was trying to learn more about how Google Workspace hangs together I came across this productivity guy/ex-Googler who is all in on Google stuff and built a “Capture, Organize, Review, Engage” workflow using Tasks and Keep. He gave me the idea to keep the Keep “desktop” fairly clean, and he also drew all the connections between Tasks and everything else in the Google Workspace ecosystem. There are hooks between Tasks and Mail, Docs, and Keep that are super useful. If you’re in that stuff all day, the case to not move to Tasks is a hard one to make because every Task you add from those tools includes a link back to the originating tool for instant recall of the context. (Gemini also labels Keep notes it creates with a little Gemini icon that takes you back to the chat session it came from.)

Anyhow, that all has less to do with Gemini and more to do with Google’s integration game, which is stronger than I realized a month ago. But Gemini is able to leverage or access all of it quickly and effectively.

The net effect of the past 28 days has been that I have largely migrated to Tasks for day-to-day work organization. It is the simplest todo system I can imagine outside Markdown checklists in terms of its up-front functionality and curb appeal, but it is omnipresent in my tools, and its simplicity is a real strength: Less systeming, more capturing, but the capturing is to concrete things, not abstract ideas that never get turned into an action or an outcome. The thing it doesn’t do well is maintain focus on projects, but I’m getting great support from the ops team at work to use Jira more consistently and effectively. Anything that ascends to the level of an epic starts generating messages about things assigned to me, and they get turned into Tasks that link back to the thing that generated the message.

Personally, it is much more useful to me to have all this stuff under one roof. I have my individual beefs with each component, but the integration is too good to ignore.

On the AI front, in my ideal world I would probably be happier using Claude with faster MCPs. Gemini itself is good, but Claude Desktop and Web are better, and Claude knows how to use MCPs, which makes it more versatile. But Gemini’s deep interlock with all these daily tools makes it easy to get over in a work context.

Giving Shadowdark a serious look. Looks light and simplified but thoughtful.

ask.metafilter.com/388561/Lo…

At its core, Soylent feels like an extension of capitalism & a byproduct of one of Silicon Valley’s most harmful ideologies: that we ought to forgo the human experience in favor of productivity. Why spend precious time on Earth connecting with friends and family over drinks and dinner when you could just throw back medical-grade slop alone at your desk instead?

The Soylent guy got to be a goat farmer. And I guess they fixed the part about diarrhea?

www.sfgate.com/food/arti…

• Making little fleeting notes or having an inbox where just crap can go in without a lot of thought.
• Having a concept of a note that is representative of a more settled idea.

Today, spending a little time between pomodoros on some weekend work I incurred for myself, I revisited my habit of steadying my handwriting by grabbing a note card or sheet of paper and just writing whatever comes to mind until I feel myself slowing down and getting into a more deliberate mindset. In this case I wasn’t so much trying to get my handwriting steadied as I just wanted to kill five minutes between work blocks and didn’t want to get up and do something else. In the middle of doing that, a few things happened:

First, I had an idea I wanted to hold on to, and second I had a feeling about a thing I am dealing with.

I happened to be doing my handwriting fidgeting in my Supernote, and I was in the mood to be distracted by gadgets. Supernote has these ideas of keywords and headings:

Headings: Lasso a word and the Supernote highlights it and makes it visible in a ToC view for a given notebook.

Keywords: Lasso a word, and the Supernote does some text recognition and proposes a tag you can correct and then apply. That tag then appears in a special index view of a given notebook, so you can see what pages it appears on and tap them to jump to them.

I focused on the keywords idea, because I had just written a little about a topic and written a little about a feeling. I circled each and assigned them keywords. Now they’re findable in that scribbles notebook via the keywords screen. That seems cool.

Having done that, I sat there for a few minutes thinking about it, and realized when I’m doing my handwriting steadying, a lot of things can come up. I just usually don’t do much with it if it is a concept or a feeling. I usually only respond to tasks or actions I’ve suddenly remembered. Video games are another activity where things come up for me that I don’t do much with. It’s why I like simple, repetitive games: They soak up some of my available environmental awareness and leave me free to process stuff, which always surfaces after playing for a while.

That caused me to do a little research and I learned about the idea of the “default mode network”:

… best known for being active when a person is not focused on the outside world and the brain is at wakeful rest, such as during daydreaming and mind-wandering. It can also be active during detailed thoughts related to external task performance. Other times that the DMN is active include when the individual is thinking about others, thinking about themselves, remembering the past, and planning for the future. The DMN creates a coherent “internal narrative” central to the construction of a sense of self.

… which seems to be what’s going on when I’m free-associating while I steady my writing or letting my mind wander when I’m playing a game.

So I made a pinned a notebook in my Supernote that’s just for doing that writing. It’s a swipe and a tap away from anywhere in the notebook. For the rest of the morning, as I did my work and took my breaks, I tried out “just writing” for my breaks. When the pomodoro would time out, I’d scan for ideas/keywords and lasso them for indexing. Then get back to it.

By the end of my working block, I had several pages and a few ideas. That led me to wonder what, theoretically, I would do with conclusions from those. So I made another notebook that I think will just have topical pages. If I were doing a Zettelkasten I would be making cards, etc. I think I am doing something more like a commonplace book. Since the Supernote has linking, I made a page for the general theme for these ideas and made links to the source writing.

I was talking to a friend at work about her daily routine and realized in passing that she’s sort of like me in that we both talk about things we’re “doing” that are probably best framed as a series of experiments that come and go, and stick or don’t. The idea of doing this sort of free-writing, DMN-activating activity in an electronic notebook is interesting for now, and it suits how I work during the day given I’ve got a big desk, can keep the notebook handy, and am trying to timeblock with it. But I can see foregoing the tablet and doing this with a physical notebook to helpful effect as well. If I had to pick which was nicer, I’d say writing in a nice notebook with a good pen is a bit more satisfying, but the Supernote is pretty nice on its own. (Not as nice as a reMarkable, which does a much nicer job of replacing paper, but is not nearly as good for linking or finding your way back to things you’ve written.)

I know someone else who takes a lot of typed notes. I find that overwhelming, and have noticed a few times that there seems to be some disconnect between what was captured in the detailed, heavily nested notes and what is remembered or effectively applied. I am a believer in the value of friction at capture, so if I stick with this the Supernote might not remain central, but the act of writing will.

For most personal tasks I really care about it has been a seamless replacement: Personal writing, photo editing, mail, news, YouTube grazing, etc. I like being able to plop it into the keyboard or take it out depending on use. I got an inexpensive folding stand for it when I’m using it at the table.

I finally broke down and got a mosh server running on my Mac mini because I’m running a few MCPs on Gemini CLI, which I can’t do from the Gemini iPadOS app. With the Blink term app I can get to the mini and run the CLI.

It still feels like a number of apps aren’t as robust on an iPad as a Mac. It comes up sometimes, when I want to do something on the iPad in an app I also have for the Mac and the option just isn’t there. I suppose that’s the signal to pivot to work:

I don’t like to use it for many work tasks at all. It’s fine for Slack, the Gmail app, the Google Calendar app, and Zoom. I don’t like the app versions of Google Docs, Sheets, or Slides at all. The mobile web version of Google Tasks, which I use as an inbox for a lot of work stuff, is much better than the app.

So that’s created a dynamic where I don’t use the iPad much during the day for intense work. I prefer to just go up to my office, sit down to my Mac mini, and have a full computer experience on a big screen: As much as the window management has improved with iPadOS 26, it is still too fussy and the 13" display is too small to work comfortably.

At first, my ADHD-driven perfectionism made it very hard to manage those transitions between machines. I can get very focused on wanting things to work just one way across everything, but I stuck with this experiment past the initial uncomfortable stages, and now I don’t think about it much. I just realize that what I am doing needs more immersion and better “real work” affordances than I am getting on the iPad, and I go upstairs.

That’s turned out to be a real improvement for general work mental health anyhow: I ended up spending so much time in the office that I reinvested in its tidiness and organization, and I really enjoy going up there to a secluded, quiet part of the house to get things done.

With a Pomodoro timer, the Endel app, and headphones, I can work steadily in the time I have between meetings. When I remember my Slack hygiene, a two hour deep work block is a meaningful investment and not just a polite fiction. Shifting my time blocking practice away from apps and screens to a notebook and pen has been salutary, too. Writing has a very centering and calming effect when I attend to it, and I have come to look forward to the 8 a.m. planning/blocking ritual.

If the iPad didn’t feel a little bit limiting, I wouldn’t spend as much time at my desk as I do, and I don’t think I’d do some of the rituals I do, or work the way I do, if I were working out of my lap in the living room. It’s more comfortable to sit in a recliner with a laptop, but it’s harder to jot things into a notebook, rearrange planning blocks, keep a physical timer handy, etc. Working out of a laptop in an easy chair creates a lot of pressure to do things with digital tools because they’re easier to keep at hand. And personally — just me writing about my experience of the world — working out of a laptop makes my brain feel cramped and boxed in. I like a large screen, a work surface I can spread things out on, and a space to retreat to.

This combination of storytelling, articulate language, and occasional profanity suggests a confident, seasoned, and highly integrated senior leader who is comfortable with his authority.

There is, indeed, a lot of profanity.

To be frank, we tested weather sealing before starting the GR IV development but that definitely makes the model bigger. Additionally, sealing materials trap heat inside the camera, making heat management another challenge. To address this, we would then have to make the camera bigger or reduce the speed at which the camera can capture photos. Both of those are against our concept of snap shooting. In that way, we are trying to balance customer demands but we always give priority to keeping our GR concept

I appreciate that. The GRs are a particular kind of machine, and I get why they have their loyalists. I couldn’t believe they were as flexible as they are until I had one for a while.

petapixel.com/2026/01/0…

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”

— Upton Sinclair

www.oregonlive.com/opinion/2…

So I took the opportunity to write a custom gem for Gemini that ingests the kind of reporting I have to do once or twice a quarter and does the kind of analysis I end up doing each time. That’s how to automate, right? Just after being badly offended by someone else’s incompetence, and high on your own expertise, you get it all out into code. Or after being badly burned by your own incompetence, and realizing you need to take a deep breath and describe what to do step-by-step.

Anyhow, we’re supposed to get gud at this stuff, and I’m dealing with the novel sensation of having done a deep dive into something before being told I should, so I’m casting about for problems to solve, and trying to contort myself into the approved tool.

On the one hand, I completely understand the appeal of the sort of magical oracle approach a chat interface provides, where you feed it a spreadsheet and tell it what to do, and it chats its analysis back at you. But on the back-end, to keep it from hallucinating, it has to write a Python script each time to read the input, and it’s not really doing anything besides some counting. The Gem layers on some interpretation, but I think you could just as easily get a table of output saying “These are the two broad percentages you care about, and this is a list of things you should investigate further.” That seems more deterministic and analyzable. When I was experimenting a lot with AI-driven tool-building, that was my preferred approach. I’m not super florid when presenting the kind of reporting I was working on today, so I felt a little resentment having to build into the prompt some “… and please don’t make a whole thing out of your findings.”

The custom gem approach came with a few of its own issues: Sometimes it crashes in the middle of the analysis. Just loses its mind and freezes. And before I explicitly told it had to write scripts to do the counting, it would decide that it knew how many kinds of a certain record there were, and it would state that number with a sort of thought-terminating authoritativeness. For something that needs to pick those values out of JSON, that’s sort of a drag.

So there’s the option to do a custom gem and create a magical oracle that tries to fuzz your analytical radar because it takes this know-it-all clankersplaining tone, or there’s the option to just code something up that’s just going to do the analysis and spit out a table. One feels sort of mysterious and murky and cool, but periodically decides it has no context window left to give; the other is introspectable even if it’s terse. Given a decent vibecoding platform, it’s way faster than managing the vagaries of stating and restating what you’re after, and still getting random shit back sometimes.

Which is not to say Gemini is dead to me, because it’s much faster at cranking out the kind of script I need to run: I’m an indifferent coder at best. I just have to think about how to teach this stuff to my team, among whom I am more like a creature from a mysterious and ancient computing culture than a friendly guide who will take them over the rainbow bridge to The Singularity.

So I signed up for some courses. I don’t have a knowledge or skill problem so much as I have a pedagogical technique problem, so I’m gonna sit still and allow myself to be trained, the better to train.

Part of my day right now involves time-blocking on a legal pad. I had been doing this with an app, but it was too clicky and fussy. A nice pen and pad at my desk over coffee is a much nicer experience to start the day.

I realized this week that I’ve been gauging my state of centeredness and focus on my handwriting:

If the first few lines of my time block sheet are more cursive than block, with a bunch of unclosed characters, it’s a sign I should stop, put the pen down, take a few deep breaths, and reapproach. If I’m still being a little messy, it’s helpful to grab a note card or piece of scrap paper and just write arbitrary stuff until my writing becomes more block-like, and I’m closing all the characters. Then I can turn back to the task, which is giving the day ahead some thought, and considering my priorities.

Cheaper than Adderall and it seems to make my blood pressure go down.

www.oregonlive.com/business/…

“You are a reflexive contrarian. You are always in search of your next flex ….”

Fuck that.

Things I’ve tried with it:

• Dictating problems I’m trying to solve and letting it summarize. Its voice recognition is better than what I get with Gemini Pro at work.
• Dropping quick reminders as a capture inbox.
• Recording vendor demos.
• Developing action plans/next steps on some routine business stuff.

I have mixed feelings about it.

It does a good job capturing dictation. It does a good job extracting todos, tasks, and next actions from a given note.

I imagine, over time, with a corpus larger than the four or five dozen notes I’ve created this week, the “Ask AI” feature, where you can query your collection for insights, would get more useful. As it is, it’s still in that state of any new corpus where there’s not a lot of insight to glean.

That means I’m more interested in what it can do in terms of structured output, and that is just okay. It has a bunch of canned formats it can apply to a given note, but no way to build one (you can do a one-off prompt with a given note, but I don’t think you can save it). And its “todo list” output, oddly, is an ordered list.

My other use case, besides pulling actions out of a note, is getting a rundown of the day’s notes and tasks. It can’t deal with any prompt along those lines: It summarizes the last note you took. If you specify the date you want a summary for, it picks notes from other days. It does have a way to get that summary from a set of notes, but that means opening up a picker and clicking each note you want in the summary. Fussy.

It also has an integration picture: Todoist, Notion, Zapier, webhooks, and Readwise. The Todoist integration (I tried it with a free account) is primitive, and creates more work. Webhooks and Zapier seem promising.

I heard someone recently say that with AI assistants, dudes want Jarvis.

I guess maybe I sort of do want Jarvis, just for what seems like a trivial use case: “Tell me what I told you today at a high level, and then with any specific tasks, etc. I need to capture.” VoiceNotes can do that, but not without some friction. And given the friction, why not just “Hey, Siri, remind me to do this thing I have to do?”

I really wish Apple would get its act together with Apple Intelligence: All the pieces are there, but the glue isn’t. You should be able to just capture voice memos with the native tool all day long and have a variety of outputs via Notes, Reminders, etc. As it is, you’re stuck recording things, then explicitly generating a transcript, then explicitly pasting it into a Note, then asking Apple Intelligence to do stuff it sometimes manages and sometimes mysteriously fails at.

This “empty your mental pockets into a little valet tray at the end of the day” thing is something I’ve wanted for a while. When I was first learning Ruby I wrote a thing called “panopticon” that just traveled things like Pinboard, Evernote, the Safari history sqlite db, NetNewsWire’s read/unread AppleScript API, my starred inbox, etc. and dumped out a report into Evernote that let me see what I’d captured or looked at on a given day. I’d like an assistant that did something like that.

Also, some guy from Singapore who helped him said, “only buy gift cards from Apple,” which registers with me as “just don’t buy Apple gift cards.”

hey.paris/posts/app…

voicenotes.com

It’s like when they’re reading Balin’s final words in Moria.

www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/…

Twitter: Moderation? lol

Mastodon: Really who is to judge? Thirsty people need followers, too.

pixelfed: It’s monochrome. I’ll allow it.

Threads: Whatever. It’s a DAU.

I think I’ll leave it on. I’ve gotten so used to having megapixels to spare that any time I take pictures in the city I rush a little to minimize how much time I’ve got the camera to my face, and I just fix composition and straightness in post. Maybe this’ll shame me into rectitude. Back to the basics. Sent to the farm for fresh air and hard work.

I recently chatted with a college age person about photography and social media. He has a friend who is very considered in her Instagram posting and tries to take nice pictures. He mentioned always noticing when her phone goes horizontal because it means she is composing. I think – he didn’t say this but I think I understand the dialect – those are probably considered “aesthetic” pictures in the way “aesthetic” has become an adjective.

My informant, on the other hand, prefers an aesthetic. He sort of wants his pictures to look a little tossed off and messy. Capturing the moment is a higher priority than taking a nice picture, and enjoying the moment is a higher priority than capturing it. Or at least those are the values the picture is meant to convey. If his Instagram was too curated and his photos too considered, it’d be saying the wrong thing about him.

I can’t generalize too much because I probably only read a few dozen X half reviews, but “responds to the idea of spontaneous capture with little regard for the niceties of composition, lighting, and focus” was a definite class of reviewer, in some contrast to the “tourist/walkabout snapshot” people, and in stark contrast to the “staid urban still life” and “arty jank aesthete” people.

In every case, the little orange timestamp sort of pulls the image into a little persona. The oblivious party snapshot shooter, the film-burning tourist clicker, and the Goodwill $2 camera find, battery-held-in-with-electrical tape art crank. There’s a dweebishness to the time stamp – I associate it with a traveling companion who stole salt and sugar packets and secreted them into a ZipLoc “just in case” – but also maybe obliviousness, and also maybe disinterest in that particular detail in a “the best artists are a little slovenly because they’re laser focused on the muse” kind of way.

I think, as I get familiar with it and quit trying to understand how everything works I am going to end up drifting into the jankier end of the spectrum. I really enjoyed Jana Mänz’s Wabi Sabi Photo School few years ago. I put a little toy body cap lens on my X-Pro3 and lived with the fixed focus slow lens limitations. I still like seeing the things that came out of it once I got on a roll with it.

Which sort of raises the question, where does the creative spontaneity lie, anyhow? In a moment of abandoned capture, or the singlemindedness of letting the time stamp get cut off and tilted in pursuit of the thing that should look just so?

I got caught up on the (slightly dated) chatter about the Fujifilm X half and then decided to buy one. After a brief spin around the block, I think it is a keeper. The outrage it has generated is a little entertaining.

I have been buying stuff in the Instax ecosystem for years, including the assorted mechanical cameras, the digital hybrids, and a few of the printers.

On that side of the portfolio, they sort of nod over to the X series now and then, but stay grounded in the target demographic with big, colorful, rounded designs and simple supporting apps. They take a little advantage of the low expectations of their customers by introducing odd limitations with the digital hybrids, e.g. limiting obvious sharing options just to photos you have printed out of the camera (though if you decide to bother, you can always get them off the optional micro SD card, if you knew to install one in the first place).

I have a sweet tooth for toy and novelty cameras. There was a brief period in the early aughts where there were some genuinely fun designs, like one that was shaped like a thumb drive and came on a lanyard. I really loved the camera module on my Handspring Visor. For a brief period I had a shared photo album site set up I called “crapshoot,” and it was devoted to snapshots with bad early digital cameras.

I think because I learned photography as a supplemental skill to my small town reporting, I’ve always had a small inferiority complex about it. I learned how to do a very functional “will hold up well in a bad darkroom and newsprint environment” style. When I rediscovered how much I loved taking pictures, the thing I most loved about it was learning how to get into a particular frame of mind and treat photo outings more like a kind of walking meditation. So I went straight from “this is a task I do that involves a kind of simple craft” to “this relaxes me. I like what I see doing it.”

So I love taking pictures, but shy away from wanting or needing anyone to believe or think anything about what I’m producing. I make things that are to my taste. I like to have a supplement to my memories. Every now and then, when there’s an odd confluence of a story and me being around when it happens, I’m glad to capture it, but I am not really a street photographer in that sense, even if I sort of favor urban settings.

Toy cameras and bad cameras make it easier to always be taking pictures. They don’t attract a ton of attention, they don’t permit some kinds of rigor and control, and they do things/have artifacts that lower expectations – mine and everyone else’s.

Back to the X half, I really like the small subreddit for it, because you can see an array of styles and approaches. The “light leak effect + digital timestamp” people fully lean into the bit, and those are the features that seem most outrageous to the people who hate the X half (and probably hated Instagram filters). One commenter explicitly called out the softness of the images from the small sensor as a mark in its favor.

Reading assorted fora and subreddits, I see a number of people who are considering switching to the X half as their main camera, or comparing it alongside Fujifilm’s lower end ILCs as a simpler, more approachable option. One person sold a bunch of gear, spent some of the proceeds on an X half and just pocketed the remainder.

So there are people who take the camera very seriously despite thorough documentation of its limitations. I can’t get myself there: I want to have a camera that is in the “nice” tier, and that means the specs will probably start at M43, weather sealing, and a lot of control. I’d be very unhappy with an X half as my sole camera.

At the same time, look at the wider context of being a person who likes to take pictures, and the hustle-ification of everything. I’ve sold a few prints to people who’ve asked for them because I use SmugMug to host and it’s dead simple to turn on the cart and do literally nothing to sell a print at cost. I auctioned a few off for MetaFilter a few years ago, too. But when people ask if I want to make the whole thing into a side hustle, I’m a little resistant: When I restarted my writing career in the late ’90s, it took a lot of the joy out of writing for me, and it took a few years after I was done doing it for a living to be able to write without feeling a certain dull resentment.

Where photography is concerned, I just packed up the last of a big lens and body sell-off. A lot of it was gear I acquired because I was curious about a certain style of photography I thought a given lens would benefit, or because a certain body had some feature that would get me this or that thing in the pictures I took.

I feel immensely relieved about being down to a single “real” body and a few lenses for the kind of photography I continue to do despite all the side quests. I have two other bodies and two lenses: One’s my Fujifilm X-Pro3, which I feel very attached to. I kept my 23mm and 35mm Fujicrons to go with it. I am not sure it’s forever, but I didn’t like the thought of parting with it. The other body is my old X-T2. I don’t shoot with it anymore, but I have a sentimental reason to hold on to it. Some part of me wants to keep a foot partially in that world, and I’m just going with that.

But again, back to the X half, which is also in the collection now: I think I understand why someone would consider it as a main camera, because it’s a low-pressure device. There’s only so much it can do for you, and only so many choices you can make with it outside the act of simply shooting with it. I’ll spoil my first impressions by also saying that people have called it “plasticky” but it has enough heft and solidity that it feels “real.”

First impressions

Taking it out tonight to put a few dozen shots through it before I met Al for dinner, I noticed a few things:

It really is very small. Easily jacket pocketable. Close to “pack of largish playing cards” size. People keep posing it alongside an X100 and it is hard to explain, but when you take a picture of them next to each other, it somehow doesn’t convey how small this thing looks and feels in real life.

It feels very solid. Dense. There’s a sense of weight to it.

People complain about not being able to see the little indicator LED to the left of the viewfinder. I was able to. By default the camera is set to center focus, and I could tell when it had lock when I composed through the viewfinder.

Where autofocus is concerned, since it does center focus out of the box and offers no AF feedback through the OVF (besides the green lock light to the side), you can just sort of treat that as liberating and do the old “focus and recompose” thing with it. I once read an extensive treatise with pixel-peeping proof of why that is bad, and it was early enough in my time with autofocusing digital cameras that I sort of internalized “compose, move the focus point; don’t focus and recompose.”

Once I realized that the half would utterly thwart any focus perfectionism, I just muttered a cheerful “well, fuck it” to myself and got on with focusing and recomposing.

(On reflection, this was a problem I had with the Ricoh GR IIIx. I had a little OVF that went in the hotshoe, but didn’t have center AF set up. It was annoying. And stubbornly dense on my part. Because I had way too many cameras, it was easy to just set the Ricoh aside and not try to work with it. If all my gear disappeared tomorrow and I woke up to a GRIII on the kitchen table, I’d re-order the OVF, set it to center focus, and use that for all my street photography. I’d bother with EVF and focus point setting for, like, portraits or things where nailing focus really matters. Not for “f8 and be there” sorts of deals.

I was a little leery about the fact that it is all touch/slide control. It’s perfectly responsive. Much better than the old XF-10. The screen(s) are readable despite being so small. Enough to compose with and quickly review. You can pinch/spread to zoom in and out of an image.

There’s very little to control. You have a grain setting, an exposure control knob, an aperture ring, a simple Auto ISO function, a few autofocus modes, and face detection. There are no tone or saturation settings. You can manage white balance. You get a bunch of film simulations and a bunch of special effects. I think the color may be goosed a little but I can’t be sure.

I think there’s enough there to make nice jpegs. Not enough to go into a super deep rabbit hole.

I haven’t yet done a “roll” of film in the film mode.

The app pairs with the camera pretty reliably. Downloading pictures from camera to phone is as slow here as it is ever with any app/camera combo, so that’s what a USB-C SD card adapter is for. I did a firmware update with the app when I got it home and it was painless.

Now what?

Well, I have this thing. It was $200 off, which made it pretty hard to ignore. I am not going to return it. I don’t even have a twinge of remorse. I sold off so much gear that this was a small percentage of the proceeds, and it truly is what I wanted the Instax hybrids to do, meeting me on the X series side of the product line while being simple and fun. So, Fujifilm granted me my wish and I’m gonna go with it.

I don’t imagine it to be a travel camera, exactly. That’s the OM-3. But it’s a fine downtown camera, a running errands camera, karaoke night camera, etc. etc. Too small to not just bring along where I might balk with the OM-3. Just toss it in a sling or stuff it in a pocket and know I won’t have to suffer the indignity of taking pictures with my phone. Seems okay.

The heart of the Woodstock neighborhood is about 40 blocks—2 miles—away. Over three seasons it’s a pretty nice walk, in the winter it’s not great. It’s okay by bike, but the main drag has really aggro drivers, and the unimproved roadways in that neighborhood mean you can’t really just assume a safe grid to evade the arterials. In the winter, the aggro drivers, dark conditions, and narrow areas where bikes and cars have to squeeze together make it pretty daunting.

Also, forget taking a car. Parking is not actually too bad—nobody seems to be policing the giant Safeway parking lot—but it’s really not a fun neighborhood to drive through. Lots of people on their horns, sorta slow going.

There is, on the other hand, the 19 bus line. The nearest stop is a five block walk, and there’s a shelter. When I need to run an errand into Woodstock I grab the Transit app and figure out when I need to go out the door. The ride itself is maybe 10 minutes. If I time my errands right I can probably hop off the bus, do what I need to do, and cross the street to catch the bus headed home with time to spare. Today I headed out the door at 3:15, ran through the UPS store to ship something, and had a ten minute wait for the return ride. I was home by a bit after 4.

Woodstock is a nice neighborhood to have this easy a connection to: There are two grocery stores, a hardware store, a bakery, a legit butcher, bars, restaurants, a newish food cart pod. With a big Banjo Brothers backpack I can haul a lot of stuff.

It’s pretty easy to knock off for the day, hop the bus to Woodstock, grab groceries for dinner, and be most of the way through prep before Al gets home.

There’s also the 14, which runs up Foster. It’s a bit longer walk to catch it, but also a quick ride to the good stuff on Foster in the 50s and 60s: Bread and Roses Market, Bar Carlo, Bruno’s, and a new kitchen consignment shop, among lots of other stuff. Also fine for walks or bike rides in nice weather. Also not somewhere I like to drive for as short a distance as it is.

And there’s the 72, which goes up and down 82nd. It’s a busy line, but the nearest stop is five or six minutes away, and it’s another quick ride down to the Johnson Creek shops, where there’s a Trader Joe’s, our pharmacy, a FedEx drop, and a few other things. Biking around there is not great. Walking is atrocious. Taking a car is frustrating. The bus is pretty nice. /r/Portland lives in superstitious dread of the 72 because there are a lot of poor people on it.

Anyhow, it took me a long time to understand the short-range benefits of the bus service. It just seemed easier to hop on a bike or plan for a leisurely walk. Now that winter is here, though, and it’s dark and wet, I really like running errands using the bus, especially into Woodstock. There’s a short, blustery walk, a wait under a shelter, then a quick ride. No worrying about getting run over or getting soaked.

The 14 & 19 will also go downtown, eventually. In terms of total trip time, they’re about as fast as the Green line (I have a longer walk to get to the stop), slower than a determined e-bike ride, and much slower than a car, but you can have that second Old Fashioned at the Tear Drop with any of the TriMet options. I tend to prefer the Max for downtown trips because it’s quieter and smoother.

Anyhow, tonight I signed up for a bunch of TriMet newsletters. I’m a fan of our transit system. It felt sort of prosocial.

“This is no time to be driven by ideological rigidity given the current economic and political climate.”

Signed,
People driven by ideological rigidity who just don’t realize it.

www.nber.org/papers/w3…

#highonfire #metalmondayonsunday

In the process of canceling my feedly subscription it reminded me I have over 30 feed filters enabled. Hm.

Oh, right: The Oregonian, my hometown paper. I pay for a subscription. The website itself borders on unusable, and the RSS feed is a nightmare. There’s only one. At some point they had feeds by section—there’s evidence of that in their outdated help documentation—but no more. You just get everything:

• Astrology
• All the advice columns (not sure how many, maybe four or five?)
• “Most expensive house in Lake Oswego this week”
• Online sports book promotions

… plus the actual news news, but good luck finding the kernels of corn in the pile.

And if you do manage to spot a news article you’d like to read, their paywall has the memory of a goldfish and godawful session handling: You’ll land on your story, get directed to the paywall, go through the login, then get kicked out to somewhere besides the story. It’s really, really bad.

I wrote the paper’s editor about this a while back, before she retired. As you might expect, the online publishing division doesn’t answer to the editorial division, and there was also the same “that stuff gets views” rationale I remember from my online media days, when we thought “views” was the prime metric.

Last month as I was cleaning up subscriptions Apple informed me I could get News+ added to my existing Apple bundle and end up paying less per month than without it, so I went along. The Oregonian is one of the publications in the News+ package, so I follow it (where they still dump a lot of junk, but not quite as much). And if you just add Oregon and Portland as topical areas to follow, the Oregonian gets pulled in to that. So I just dropped the RSS feed from my local folder (but still have WWeek, because they don’t show up in Apple News).

Some people are, like, “drop that centrist rag already … the Mercury and Willy Week are all you really need.”

Honestly, kindly, gently: lol.

I’ll always read their coverage—media literacy is about understanding and balancing a diversity of inputs—but they’re just not enough, and their reporting can be weirdly incurious if they can’t find a salacious or spicy angle. The Oregonian has its own biases and general slant, but it provides more coverage, and more diverse coverage. It’s essential.

Anyhow, I am guessing the Oregonian gets a lot more money from my paid, direct subscription than they do whatever revenue sharing Apple gives them for a content license, but their website is atrocious, their RSS feeds are unusable, and their editorial staff is held hostage by a web team operating on 2008 rules.

I wish they’d get nonprofit status so I could just budget them under “charity.”

In the case of anything to do with a calendar, where Google Calendar is providing the back end, there’s going to be a certain amount of split living if you don’t want to just go live in Google Calendar’s web and mobile apps: Any video conferencing integrations you’ve got will require a manual tweak for events created outside Google’s web or mobile apps, and I’d argue Google’s own availability widget is better because it is more transparent.

But at the boundary of working with your calendar as opposed to working on your calendar, Apple’s stuff is fine. You can tell where stuff is scheduled, you can use the iOS and macOS widgets and alerts, you can get the benefits of Siri and Apple Intelligence integrations, etc.

Structured is a timeblocking tool. It shows you your Reminders, it shows you your calendars, and you can drag reminders into a list of your appointments for the day where they fit. It offers a few extra things, like assigning an energy level to each item so you can keep track of how sustainable your day’s plan is.

Yep, there are other ways to time block. Reminders and Calendar integrate with drag-and-drop now, so you can literally drag a Reminder out of a list and into your calendar to schedule it if you like. Structured refines the idea a little:

To start, you can configure which calendars and Reminders lists it can work with. I’ve got some “to-read,” “to check out,” etc. Reminders I don’t care to ever time block, so they stay out. I’ve got a few other things that are super granular, and generally opportunistic, so they stay out. I leave in Reminder lists for broad areas of concern: Each of the three functions I direct at work, a few lists for broad initiatives or concerns, and a couple of domestic sphere things.

In the main Structured screen, you get a day view that shows all the scheduled blocks from your calendars.

• Any Reminders tasks with a scheduled date but no time appear at the top of the day. They’re candidates for time blocking that you must have previously decided needed to happen on or by today.
• Any Reminders tasks with a scheduled date and time appear blocked into the day’s schedule.
• You can view any Reminders tasks without a date/time by opening an “Inbox” sidebar.

The Reminders from the top of the list and the Inbox area can be dragged in to the day’s schedule. That’s the core idea.

For instance, just now as I was sitting here typing, I couldn’t unsee a Slack notification from someone working over the weekend. I made a Reminder in my inbox, gave it a due date of tomorrow and kept moving. Tomorrow morning, when I triage and block my day, it’ll be in the list at the top of the day ready to be dropped in and time blocked.

For $15/year to unlock access to your calendars and Reminders instead of just using its internal appointment and calendar model, that seems fine: It’s an overlay that lets you manage your time in a certain style.

There are a few other things that are potentially handy:

First, you can add subtasks to a calendar item. They’re visible only to you and they don’t turn up in Structured’s task model. GTD people will probably grind their teeth at the idea of having another inbox, and that’s reasonable. I think these are probably useful less as a whole unit of work and more as ticklers or reminders. The immediate idea I had for them was to add them to 1:1s and other meetings where I need to check in on something. There are other ways to do that.

Second, there’s an AI assistant (using Apple Intelligence) that helps with subtasking a given item. I gave it a try on a few things where I had a loose list of next actions copied into the task note from somewhere else, and it did okay picking out the work items and making subtasks out of them with the prompt “subtask based on the notes.”

Third, there’s a “Replan” feature that lets you visit the purgatory of tasks that have passed their due date and put them back into circulation (either by turning them back into Inbox candidates or giving them a new date).

Oh, it also provides a web app with a Pro ($15/year) subscription. I am trying it out on my iPad Pro with a keyboard (more or less my laptop replacement) so I haven’t used that much.

There’s also one glaring oversight: No search. That’s on their roadmap. If you want to find things, you need to either pick through future dates or go back to Reminders and search from there. I wish it had search, and it should have search, but the app didn’t start life as a task manager, it started life as a time blocker.

Structured is interesting because it can break either way in terms of how much of your task management life it takes over:

Because it starts from its own internal task and planning model, you could use it as your sole todo app, understanding that it won’t lend a lot of support to your conception of task containers, whether those are “Areas,” “Projects,” “Lists,” or whatever. If you have a bunch of plates spinning in disparate areas, I don’t think it’d be a good desert island tool, because you’d probably end up shimming in some kind of meta layer that would end up hiding work or making it fussy to manage.

(There is, btw, a ticket in their roadmap for filtering, folders, etc., and the comments on that thread tell you all you need to know about how many ideas people have and what a recipe for UI messiness containers (projects, areas, whatever) could be. Good luck, Structured team.)

As an augment to Reminders, it sort of shrinks in ambition but gains in enabling easy timeblocking the work you’re deeply organizing elsewhere. For instance, my Reminders set up has several groups:

• Work
• Interesting Stuff
• Home

Within those groups you might see lists like:

• Enterprise Security
• Application Management
• Business Operations Support
• donation roundup
• administrivia
• shows to watch, things to read, music to try
• the packing list for some trip

The groups provide high-level segregation of the modes I operate in. The lists are either very tactical enumeration of a bunch of little things to get a household project done, or just work items that fall under a broad area of concern. Because I like my “big dumb list,” the Reminders “Scheduled” filter lets me see everything I put a date on, and the “All” filter just shows all of it by list. That more or less gives me the best of both worlds: Filtering to preserve attentional resources, and broad visibility to reassure myself nothing is hiding somewhere.

Structured just provides a sort of last mile for turning those things into action within the constraints meetings and 1:1s introduce into a given day.

Yesterday I wrote up GoodTask , which is more of a Reminders UI enhancement skin than a time blocker. It has some time blocking capabilities, but nothing quite this refined for timeblocking specifically. It’s more like a way to wedge a lot of OmniFocus’s Perspectives into the Reminders database while providing some ways to add metadata that are less fussy than Reminders itself. You could use the two together and never even look at Reminders itself if you wanted.

Ecosystem digression

Because I try very hard to keep third-party apps out of my life, Structured and GoodTask are interesting edge cases. Because they’re inexpensive and don’t mess with the underlying data in Reminders and my calendars, I’m okay with them. They’re just augments. If they stopped working tomorrow, I’d be left with the basic tools again, and still on a footing of having my data and being able to work with it in tools that are good enough. They’re sort of like Greasemonkey scripts I can rent cheaply, just for apps.

I could choose a second order of rabbit-holing about whether or not the Apple ecosystem is forever. I’ve decided that if the Apple ecosystem ever ends up not being forever, some change in life circumstances must have made any todos I was tracking irrelevant to the current moment.

Okay. Enough. The problem I’ve been thinking about this weekend is “where to keep things to do.” I’ve made a choice (Reminders) and have a couple of tools to augment it.

It promises “From Simple Checklists to Complex Project Management,” but I don’t really want a complex project management tool and need just a bit more than “simple checklists” and just a few more smart list options than Reminders provides.

Doing an inventory today, I realized how much I’ve allowed the language of projects to slip into my mental model. I don’t have “projects,” I have areas that occasionally involve things that have a couple of other things nested in them. When something gets so complex that it’s a project, there’s a staff program manager sitting right there who can help with wrangling the work streams.

GoodTask includes a Smart List feature that works close enough to OmniFocus’s Perspectives for my purposes: It took about two minutes to make a Big Dumb List of date-sorted tasks in my Work group. If all hell broke loose and GoodTask stopped working tomorrow, it’d sort of suck but it separates its organizational metadata from Reminders’ enough that the real fallout would be “well, I need to drag some of these groups I made into new Groups in Reminders.”

It also lets you tell it to leave some lists in Reminders out of its reckoning. I have a few shoebox lists that just gather recommendations, items of passing curiosity, to-read, to-watch, etc. I don’t want them in a tool I’m using to manage things I have to actually do, so GoodTask hides them for me.

This is all coming after a reorg I did with my group at work. I’ve got historical reasons to be a little averse to reorgs, but this was one of those times where I was watching managers tripping over each other to get capacity for their projects, unpleasant “everybody in the org is at the same meeting” experiences, and a realization two-and-a-half years into this place how few professional development opportunities we’d made for people. So we spent a month as a management team, talking about where we wanted to go and what we wanted to do, and how we could think beyond “this team is full of people who do this kind of work, and that team is full of people who do that kind of work.”

And for me, I felt mired in the day-to-day of the managers under me, trying to sort out what went where and playing a glue role all the time to hold us together at one level, with no room to figure out new levels.

Shifting from a very rigidly functional structure to a delivery-oriented structure is creating some definite short-term pain. We inventoried all the things we’re doing and decided that we could allow one particular kind of work to be much more distributed in order to concentrate management attention on other kinds. That distributed work needs some supporting rituals and routines to keep on track.

But for all the short-term tradeoff pain we’re dealing with, I came out of the planning cycle for next year with sign-off to build a new program and a new governance structure, and with a mandate to add a role that seemed out of the question a month ago. I have to refine my model of what I think work is.

I thought this was gonna be, like, when “typography nerds” complain about kerning or something.

fxrant.blogspot.com/2025/12/t…

What is YOB? YOB is love.

(And Buddhist doom metal)

www.youtube.com/watch

www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025…

puddingtime.org/denote-ta…

Using it on iPad would entail hosting it where I could get at it from a mosh or ssh client.

Sounds unwell.

“the story of the most miserable person on Earth who must save the world from happiness.”

… which would have affected my read a little. I haven’t been clear for the first six episodes that the world needs to be saved. 📺

“The bad news: You’re falling through the air with no parachute. The good news: There’s no ground.”
— Chögyam Trungpa

I’m going to keep this first part short:

I got my first account on a Unix machine some time around 1991 or 1992. Up until that year I’d almost solely used 8-bit computers at home, but had some experience using a DEC PDP-11 in college to work on the school newspaper.

“Unix” became my home environment – the place I wanted to be regardless of what I had to use. I was a little late to Linux, finally getting it installed on a machine in ‘95 or ‘96. I lucked into a freelance gig where I could write about Linux. I co-authored a book about Linux. I got some gigs helping complete books about Linux during the heyday of tech books, when Borders or Barnes and Noble had large tech sections. There are a lot of people in the world who read my chapters on how to use the command line in Linux. If they didn’t read about it in the original edition of a doorstop-sized “Unleashed” book I contributed to, which I think was about Red Hat, then they read the mildly revised editions for other distros.

I completely subscribed to “The Elements of Style: UNIX as Literature”:

“UNIX system utilities are a sort of Lego construction set for word-smiths. Pipes and filters connect one utility to the next, text flows invisibly between. Working with a shell, awk/lex derivatives, or the utility set is literally a word dance.

“Working on the command line, hands poised over the keys uninterrupted by frequent reaches for the mouse, is a posture familiar to wordsmiths (especially the really old guys who once worked on teletypes or electric typewriters). It makes some of the same demands as writing an essay. Both require composition skills. Both demand a thorough knowledge of grammar and syntax. Both reward mastery with powerful, compact expression.

“At the risk of alienating both techies and writers alike, I also suggest that UNIX offers something else prized in literature: a coherence, a consistent style, something writers call a voice.”

Like a lot of people, I ended up migrating to Macs once OS X came out, but I did so because there was Unix in there somewhere.

But today I don’t live in a work world where it’s a meaningful skill set. I spend a lot of time making decks and working on documents. I use a lot of browser-based SaaS for work. There’s pretty much nothing to script at work, and when I do spot things where I could, the right play is invariably to drop a few suggestions about how to best write that script to the person I’m paying to do that.

I’ve worked on a few personal projects over the past few years that were meant to help me keep my hand in: TUI apps, a CLI interface to the SmugMug and flickr APIs, etc.

But I have also had to admit those projects haven’t been particularly sticky, even though I spent a lot of time making sure they mapped to my sense of How Things Should Be, because a command line/shell orientation makes less and less sense to me. There’s friction getting things in and out of a shell environment when so much of the work you have to do doesn’t live in there. And once you start cobbling together tools that might let you live in both worlds, you’re in a UI wild west, with myriad configuration conventions and differing ideas about ergonomics.

It has not been easy on the ego to slowly transition out of that Unix orientation. I have the career I have because of that first account on an Ultrix box and years spent in and out of the Unix and Linux orbit as a writer, sysadmin, web developer, consultant, and manager. It has been almost as much a cultural identity as a skill set, and possibly more.

But it also feels increasingly awkward and shoehorned into my day-to-day life, and clinging to it bothers me because I’m at a stage of life where I want to be less set in my ways, not more. I think about how to maintain my fundamental plasticity as a matter of aging gracefully, remaining a learner, and embracing the ways the culture around me is changing in ways I’m not always chill with, but need to accept.

As hard as it is to set aside or let go of something that was such a big part of my life, though, it’s also nice to lose that sense of obligation to a past self who’s indifferent to my present self.

I find Alan Watts engaging. He was a gifted explainer who could make heady, paradoxical ideas flicker into solidity and coherence. There are a few moments in the show where his ideas do come together and you get a sense of what he was about, particularly about teaching and spiritual practice.

It ended up giving Al and I something to think about afterward. She’s a member of a local Zen center. I’ve never really felt very compelled to take up a formal practice. Certainly nothing like Soto Zen. I have some contradictory feelings about it that the show resurfaced, because Watts saw some spiritual practice and relationships with teachers as a sort of revolving door one could never get out of if they don’t push us toward our “oh, it’s in here” moment.

I guess I’ve always felt like big changes and shifts are “it’s in here” moments. There are lots of techniques and approaches to get us to those shifts, and a skilled coach, mentor, teacher, or counselor can help us to or through those shifts, but my moments of radical clarity have always come just bumping into life. It’s interview season right now, for instance, and I have been reminded of the “pouncer” and “stalker” learning styles. I think in life matters I’ve turned out to be a “pouncer.”

But I also think there’s value in spiritual community – even having a teacher – because to be raised in a liberal society in the 21st century is, regardless of your ideological tilt, to be coached toward profound egoism and a kind of selective sollipsism. Finding someone to trust and someone willing to work through our egoism and self-protection can be helpful. I know I’ve benefitted from it when I’ve been stuck on something, even if the benefit I got wasn’t a resolution, so much as an ability to sit with the discomfort of a lack of resolution.

I titled this post “What is practice?” because I’m not always sure. If I ask that question of a Soto Zen practitioner I’ll get a kind of answer. If I ask three Soto Zen practitioners, I will likely get three different answers. If I widen my survey to different sects, still more answers. If I ask the person trying to sell me a mindfulness app, there will be another answer, and since there seem to be dozens of those people, probably dozens more answers.

I think for now my working definition is “whatever grants you the most ability to sit with your thoughts and feelings in a place of remove from them, but engagement with them.” For some people, that will involve very austere forms – Al says at her Zen center you can opt in to a firm rod on the shoulder if your form slips – and for others not anything like that at all. I’m most in a “practice mindset” when I’m running, doing some kinds of writing, and playing some kinds of games.

Those aren’t buttons I can push – click I am running so I am correctly engaged with my thoughts and feelings – because I find myself sometimes a mile down the trail having been eaten by a narrative instead of understanding where a narrative came from – but they’re the most reliable cues to get to the right relationship.

So, I don’t know, I said I wouldn’t recommend that dome show. I suppose if you have a few Alan Watts books sitting around, or care to undertake some internet research and are careful to avoid what appears to be a recent trend of people making Alan Watts deep fakes that spout mysticism, you could sort of rig something up for yourself with headphones and a good screensaver. But it did remind me of a few questions about practice and mysticism I hadn’t thought about for a while. It did smell a little like weed in the dome theater, though.

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 could take a sort of naive position of, “look, a repo on GitHub is just a repo on GitHub. There are no promises in this world.” And I’ve chosen the MIT license for everything, because it has such a “do whatever you want with this” vibe. But I got a PR on one of the projects, read it and the problem the user was trying to solve, and realized “oh, right, it’s a GitHub repo and even though Claude is signing all the commits, there’s an expectation here that the act of having this code in a public repo on GitHub sets with at least some people.” Making it worse, the PR tripped my “I don’t think this PR sounds safe, exactly,” instincts, which meant I had now incurred work by being unclear about what it is I am up to here.

The other thought that crossed my mind came from a conversation with a VP of UX years ago, when I told him we were struggling to make the CSS for our very oldest Puppet documentation work with recent design changes.

He asked me, “do you maintain those docs anymore?”

“No. And we say so.”

“Are the releases they cover supported anymore?”

“No. We mention that, too.”

“Can you still read the docs, even if the CSS is broken?”

“Well, it’s ugly and a bit distracting, but the content is there.”

“Good. Then it sets the right expectation. Let it serve as signal. You’ll probably get less complaints about it because you’ve made your position clear with the non-support message, and backed it up with obvious neglect.”

So instead I’m going to disable PRs to just foreclose on potential for misunderstanding, and also do my own version of a “Made with AI” Dubious Housekeeping Seal.

I’m going to also make a commitment to make my language about these experiments less twee:

I did not “work with the robots,” “ask the robots,” “torture a bot,” etc. I used an LLM, used AI, used Claude, etc.

Whether it shows or not, I am in some fairly serious internal discussion about what these tools mean, how we should use them, how/if there can be ethical use of them, etc. The spectrum of takes on AI covers a range of people I know, care about, and respect. It feels disingenuous and a little dishonest for me to use diminishing or faux naive language to describe what I’m doing here, as if to me it is a matter of idle amusement or something I don’t understand I should take seriously or be thinking about.

So, this is the new README edition. And once I resolve the issue the PR I got against one of the projects is resolved, I’ll turn off PRs: More signal.

Important consideration before using this code or interacting with this codebase

This application is an experiment in using Claude Code as the primary driver the development of a small, focused app that concerns itself with the owner’s particular point of view on the task it is accomplishing.

As such, this is not meant to be what people think of as “an open source project,” because I don’t have a commitment to building a community around it and don’t have the bandwidth to maintain it beyond “fix bugs I find in the process of pushing it in a direction that works for me.”

It’s important to understand this for a few reasons:

1. If you use this code, you’ll be using something largely written by an LLM with all the things we know this entails in 2025: Potential inefficiency, security risks, and the risk of data loss.

2. If you use this code, you’ll be using something that works for me the way I would like it to work. If it doesn’t do what you want it to do, or if it fails in some way particular to your preferred environment, tools, or use cases, your best option is to take advantage of its very liberal license and fork it.

3. I’ll make a best effort to only tag the codebase when it is in a working state with no bugs that functional testing has revealed. Tags just mean “seemed to be in working order.”

While I appreciate and applaud assorted efforts to certify code and projects AI-free, I think it’s also helpful to post commentary like this up front: Yes, this was largely written by an LLM so treat it accordingly. Don’t think of it like code you can engage with, think of it like someone’s take on how to do a task or solve a problem.

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.

So I didn’t like its chances. But I had Claude write a quick importer for me that turned all my denote-task tasks into OmniFocus tasks, and I was able to quickly get some production data to work with.

My sole objective was to see how amenable – despite all its gears, buttons, and blinking lights – OmniFocus would be to just giving me my river of tasks and then providing ways to filter the river down.

To be honest, pretty well. The tool to use to get to the base view is Perspectives, and you can make a simple one that just shows all your open tasks and lists due dates, tags, and parent projects. I added a group-by-date to give me “today, the next week, the next month, beyond” grouping.

For project view, there’s a Projects perspective that’s fine. I just dragged them all into order.

To clean up the view a little I just collapsed the inspector sidebar on the right and the … sidebar sidebar? … on the left. That got me pretty much the view I have in denote-tasks, which I’ve taken to thinking of as “the big dumb list view.”

I still think OmniFocus is probably overkill for me, but I have a new appreciation for its flexibility.

I also did this exercise with Things, which I’ve always felt more warmly toward.

It is not really able to do the Big Dumb List view because it wants to show you today, upcoming, and anytime in discrete areas. I prefer seeing today + upcoming in the same place because sometimes I don’t want to do a today thing right now and like just looking down the list for a one- or two-pointer I can pick off.

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.

I chose plain text instead of a database because you can just pop open a task or project and make notes in it, or link to other notes, or whatever. There’s a (l)og hotkey to drop a quick timestamped note into any project or task. I use it when I close a task out or have new context to add.

I do need to go in and straighten out some of the hotkeys, because it started life as an extension to another notes management TUI, but that got a little cumbersome and complex.

Either way, it’s very keyboard-centric: Hotkeys let you change priorities, dates, and tags from the task list. No need to open a metadata window or sidebar, which drives me crazy with a lot of todo apps. You can navigate the task list with j/k/gg/G.

There’s a plain old CLI, too, for scriptability and because I like having an alias that just pops out today’s todos without opening an app, but it needs a bit more work – the syntax is a bit mangled from going a couple of wrong directions.

I liked TaskWarrior’s conception of “contexts” but borrowed Things3’s “areas” to name it. You can filter by area at launch, so denote-tasks -t --area=work will open up the task list to your work tasks and projects.

And I liked TaskWarrior’s core UI: A big list. Partly because it feels grounding. A lot of task management tools hide tasks away behind whatever their organizational containers are (projects, etc.) and while I get that this is meant to be a calming design decision, it doesn’t work for my particular brain. I take a little of the potential sense of overwhelm out with a simple horizontal rule that underlines the block of tasks due today, and have filters for priority, estimate, tag, etc. so I can quickly narrow things down if I need.

It also has the core task states I tend to think in: open, done, delegated, paused, dropped. There are little visual indicators for those states, and the list is filterable by those, too.

Oh, there’s also fuzzy search and tag search. Great for 1:1s if you take the time to tag tasks with people.

So, I think mooooost people who are super into Denote would probably tend to just use org-mode for tasks. Moooost people who are into Denote would just tend to use Denote in the context of Emacs. I just really like Denote naming conventions conceptually, and like some of the portability baked into them and I don’t want to go live in Emacs right now. I’m still really digging Helix because since first setting up LSPs for it and doing basic configuration, I haven’t felt the urge to fiddle with it. Launches super fast, doesn’t need a daemon, does everything I want.

And denote-tasks does everything I want. I really wanted to like TaskWarrior, and like a lot of its ideas. But other parts of it were a little hard to swallow and there’s a ton of complexity there. This gets me the parts I liked, inflected to suit my particular mental model a bit better.

Oh … also I did this one with Claude Code as opposed to Claude Desktop. It is a lot more eager to take credit when it makes commits, and I think that’s a good thing. It’s fine and probably good if people know they’re getting code churned out by a bot.

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 know some ESL folks who like the pixie dust button when it stands for “writing aid,” because they want help with their writing. Because they’re on their second or third language, while they may not be experts about English they have a proven skill in language acquisition, so they’re not naive about what the button means. Not nearly as naive, at least, as people who speak one language and don’t give a fuck about that one, let alone any others. So they scrutinize the output. One of them consults unfamiliar words in the dictionary before accepting them, but appreciates the help with basic structure.

I also know people who want help with their effectiveness. Like the ESL people I know, they’re coming into that interaction less from the perspective of “I barfed some shit into a form and the robot made it good.” They’re coming at it with a use case like, “my boss is think-skinned, defensive, reactive, and mildly paranoid so how can I tell them something they don’t want to hear without triggering an episode?”

Having typed in what they want to say, then prompting for how they want to be received, when a more diplomatic revision comes out of the little pixie dust slot, they read it carefully, think about using it, then maybe massage it a little, or just use it as a suggestion. In other words, they apply their judgment, but benefit from the slight frame shift to imagine better alternatives.

One person I’ve talked to who uses AI in that mode has had a lot of success with the approach. It takes a little extra time because she never just copy/pastes the output, but it has gotten her good results: She truly struggled to express herself in a way that her thin-skinned, defensive, reactive, mildly paranoid boss could hear, and now she’s getting better outcomes in those interactions.

“I feel like I’m cheating,” she said. “Like I’m not doing my job.”

I said, “you’re a senior director for one of the largest Medicaid consumers in the state, and your job is to communicate effectively enough that your 100 employees can get shit done without you triggering a diplomatic incident or your boss losing her shit because you decided fuck it, she doesn’t need to like what she’s reading.”

So I don’t really judge the pixie dust button or the edits it sometimes suggests to be an unalloyed social ill.

It was in that spirit I clicked the Greenhouse button.

I was hoping it’d be something novel or different. Like, maybe it would offer some insight particular to this kind of writing, or would analyze my commentary for unconscious bias, or even warn me that I was about to commit a hiring practices violation to a corporate system of record. Instead it just mostly repeated my writing but replaced a few turns of phrase I chose very intentionally with more cliched ones that altered my meaning.

I don’t know how many hires I’ve done, nor how many hundreds of interviews I’ve conducted. Lots. Lots and lots. When I’m the hiring manager, I’m a close reader of interview notes. I pay attention. When I’m on someone else’s panel, I write carefully and want to be clear.

Today was the first day that I acutely felt the impact of AI fucking with two things I care about: Hiring and communicating. It took my words and Business Englished them into something other. It altered meaning, and to no good end. Nothing was more clear. There were no syntactical, grammar or punctuation issues to call out. It just, I dunno, blorped them. There’s no word for it. It didn’t, like, insert sexist slurs or generate a picture of a Black Nazi. It just sorta gnawed the input like a slobbery, toothless dog and left a saliva-covered pile of verbiage normalized to some inscrutable standard. It was sort of like how when you have shake reduction on a camera, you’re supposed to turn it off when you put the camera on a tripod because it counter-intuitively risks blur: Feed the LLM good enough English, just not statistically congruent English, and it’ll just sort of cock its head then spit on your sandwich because it’s supposed to do something when you click the pixie dust button.

So my mind went immediately to some recent examples I’ve caught go by in other parts of my job where someone was plainly hucking their shit into a form and pressing the pixie dust button. The tells were the tells we’re all learning to spot – the sorta flowery lilt, needless explication, and obtuse summarizing; the gratuitous length that reminds me of early efforts to use CG in superhero movies, where it’s just obvious that it’s CG because human bodies just can’t articulate like that, and would rip their own arms off or snap their own necks moving with that kind of speed. Like, nobody in their right mind, asked for a quick outline of a modified five step process you could fit on half a sheet of paper, would spend the time it took to extend that to five pages.

But as much as it was a waste of my time, it was easily addressed because it was obvious and gratuitous. The perp owned it, reminded me of their insecurities about writing, and agreed that they’d lost sight of the problem they were trying to solve because for a few seconds it felt really good to not struggle quite as much to make words come out. I don’t think it was meant to be a knife-twist that they said they fed it some of my writing as a guide.

And for a lot of business writing tasks, I worry less. If my helpdesk manager wants to send a quick nastygram to three engineers who won’t send back their old laptops because they’re too lazy to get their shit off of them and put them in the return box, I don’t care. “My director is going to tell your director, then he said I can lock that fucking thing and delete all your shit” is going to be clear no matter what the pixie dust button does.

But I benefitted from Puppet’s outstanding emphasis on interviewing and hiring a long time ago, and every detail of those things has mattered to me ever since. I’ll cut corners, let myself have bad days, fudge, procrastinate, take unwarranted mental health days, accidentally nap through the first 30 minutes of a QBR, and generally be a slob about a lot of other things, but interviews matter. Period. They’re an absolute. When I have one coming up, I pull my shit together and go do it. When I sense someone else isn’t invested, or they’re phoning in their feedback, or they didn’t pay attention during the kickoff, I judge.

Greenhouse provides a button to fuck with something that matters. A kind of writing that matters. It was just a stupid fucking five-pointer to some dev, plopped in the backlog by some product owner who might not even see the sense in it but knew they needed a third bullet for the AI features list, mandated by some director of product who got it loud and clear from someone above them that the market demands moar pixie dust buttons.

Anyhow, it was sort of clarifying. I’ve been a little paralyzed when I get the weird AI documents, because sometimes they’re non-objectionable. Maybe too long, or too wordy, or with odd little nuances that aren’t wrong but are off, but I ask myself “for everyday dumb bloodless business writing meant to detail a process, explain a system, or document some steps, is this okay?”

Usually yeah. It’s fine.

But this got me off the fence a little. I know some people like to announce total bans on AI assistance. I think that’s risking losing sight of some things, and I actually can’t because we’re under a mandate at work to use exactly the kinds of integrated assistance these things offer via all the Google Gemini integrations. (I did overhear a team mentioning that something they were given to work with by their leader would need careful review “because it came straight out of AI and probably has mistakes,” and that made me cringe.)

So I just told my folks that I’ve needed a reason to follow the thirty percent rule a little more, anyhow – ask for review when you think you’re thirty percent done – and that I want the 30 percent they put in front of me to be just them, not a bot. I just want to know they thought about the core of the thing they’re doing, and that they’ve chosen a direction we can discuss further if needed, before pressing the pixie dust button. If that runs afoul of the “use this shit” mandate, because we’re also supposed to be offloading our thinking, I’ll see ya on the soup line.

If I could burn that button out of Greenhouse though, I totally would.

Coda, bright spot: I listened to a C-level exec from a major software company say that the biggest challenge they have with AI features is that uptake is really poor. People don’t like a lot of it, or technology leaders are resistant. That sort of tracks with the tools I’ve got in my portfolio at work. AI was pitched as an expansion or upsell a lot last year. This past several months, three pretty big ones I manage just said “fuck it, you win,” turned the features on for me, and rolled them into the main SKU without charge. That’s some money and time down a hole.

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.

Now I’m eyeing the Mac Studio. It’s a first-gen M1 Max model and it is still going strong, but when I’m being realistic, my main tether to macOS is Lightroom, and my main tethers to Lightroom are a. it has 24 years of digital photos in it that and b. a few raw profiles I’d need to figure out how to replicate with another tool.

I like the occasional abrupt swerve into more Linux usage because it’s got that whole “slightly parallax world” thing going on. My mindset in front of a Linux machine is much less interested in hucking stuff on it than I’m willing to do with a Mac, and I’m less willing to keep stuff on it just in case. It’s a much more down to business or, at least, down to the task at hand mindset.

I remember being furious over the turn GNOME 2 took in the naughts, after Sun did a usability study and the team started unbolting shit and tossing it out the back of the plane. Years of configuration equity and tweaks went out the window overnight, and the project leadership just did. not. care. if you were mad about it.

Over 20 years later, though, when I sit down to a fresh GNOME instance where I haven’t yet had an opportunity to add “missing” features with assorted tweaks, I appreciate the mindset. It’s a very calm interface.

It’s not entirely the fault of Apple or macOS designers that macOS feels more and more busy to me these days. It’s that most macOS apps seem to feel entitled to taskbar real estate, so you spend a lot of time finding the “show in task bar” option as you realize your taskbar situation is out of control.

It’s clockwork predictable that after I set up a new Linux machine or start using one after time away I will go through my Macs and do everything I can to remove anything that detracts from a sense of a blank slate when I start a session.

If you asked me if, in the abstract, which desktop ecosystem would produce the more consistent, calm behavior on my part, I’d probably reason that the edge macOS has in uniformity would lead to more ordered behavior.

In practice, my Linux machines seem to be the more restrained ones, and a little time on one of them causes me to pare back the widget creep that happens on my Macs.

I wonder if some of that is that my formative years on Linux well preceded the iPhone era and the way it kind of “appified” the macOS mindset. Like, when I look at what’s in /Applications on a long-lived Mac, I wish my biggest problem was that I can never bring myself to drag Pages into the trash “just in case.” My biggest problem is that I’ve got a ton of unneeded single-purpose things it was easy enough to add and inoffensive enough to leave, letting the clutter pile up. I just don’t act like that on a Linux system.

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.

It’s one thing to sort of develop a model in your head and get it set up. It’s another thing to nibble around the edges with a little use here and there while you’re figuring out the model. It’s a completely other thing to have a long stretch of time in front of you where it’s just you and the system and an opportunity to do all the things with it.

So glad I took an axe to the default color scheme and made a much more simplified one. I felt pretty relaxed having only maybe four status colors to deal with for “today,” “next few days,” “projects,” and “all the rest.”

I’m glad I’ve taken the time to set up simple shell aliases to make some tagging implicit. It was easy to capture stuff as it came in via Slack, etc. and when I took a pause mid-day to triage some of the incoming it was easy to start from the bottom and retag/add to projects/etc. I’m okay with a very linear list of tasks with high resolution at the top and very little at the bottom.

I wasn’t sure how I’d deal with the wall of tasks I get when I have a minimal filter in place and run the basic list. But after a day of checking in with it, I realized I really like it: Yep, there’s a lot to do, but I do really poorly with tools that tidy things up, hide next steps, etc. I know GTD theory says “don’t try to keep it all in your head,” but I appreciate the reinforcement and feel less likely to have something languish because it’s out of sight, and I like the opportunity to make a random connection.

On that last point, for instance, one of the folks on my team shared some concerns about their career growth. I made the concern a task, because I owe a conversation about that, and I made it a p1 so it gets a brighter color treatment, and as I worked through a couple of strategic projects today, whenever I checked back in with my list, there was that bright orange, unscheduled p1 sitting down there reminding me that as I think about the big picture I’ve got to also pull some things into its wake. There are some things you can’t compartmentalize.

I think TW has some features that would allow me to get to a bit more of a “only see as much as you need to take the next step” state without losing sight of stuff, but one piece of meta awareness I’m bringing to this iteration is that leaving features on the table is healthy. The mental complexity people describe when they talk about their “productivity methodologies” always leaves me feeling skeptical that the system they’re describing is sustainable or helpful. One reason I’ve always appreciated Things in the Things/OmniFocus debate is that Things does a better job of sort of tucking away all the options unless you choose to use them. Maybe OmniFocus has improved in this regard, but it always felt more willing to expose all the knobs and dials.

So, great experience. I don’t have a ton of them next week owing to the compressed holiday timeline, but I do have a few stretches of time, and I’m already feeling a little less of the nervousness I feel when I see I’ve got some hours to fill.

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.”

Fair point!

In this case, I had just sort of moved on from wearing any kind of wearable and was back to my trusty titanium field watch, and I couldn’t bring myself to sell the Apple Watch because I doubted I’d get much for it. The <$100 I paid for the tinyPod meant I could have a little connected device that wasn’t a phone, and do something with the watch that I kept not selling.

I think the natural niche for these is probably “get a deal on a used Apple Watch, convert it to one of these things to have a smart iPod nano.”

Oh, details, I guess:

A few of the buttons are a little stiff/vague, but the main one works well enough. The scroll wheel is fine; though you sort of want the middle bump to be a clicker and it isn’t. The natural way to operate the screen is with your thumb and that works fine. There’s a cutout in the back so you can use your watch charger with it. It feels very nice and solid in the hand. They did a nice job with most of the design: It fits right in with an AirPods case.

I’d really like it if someone just made something like this that was a purpose-built connected smart device in a tiny, non-phone form-factor. There is some serious wasted space in this thing that could go to battery. In low power mode with all the health detection features turned off, it sips power. I think a solid week from a charge could be a reasonable expectation.

And the why is just “I don’t like carrying a slab around in my pocket, and I don’t like all the things that slab does, but I do want access to a limited amount of data now and then.”

A few years back I got into a habit I liked of just leaving my phone and not having it around the house, and leaving it behind sometimes when I went out for coffee or whatever. My job affords me some roaming and flexibility, and it’s nice to be able to go, “oh, when’s that thing I’ve got to be back at my desk for?” without having a phone to do that.

I guess it’s partly an esthetic thing, partly a bent kind of over-optimization, and partly contrarianism. I guess I like some of the things that smartphones allow, but sort of hate that smartphones continue to get bigger and do more.

Anyhow, I guess I have a tiny connected device that can do all that stuff now, and I don’t need to haul my phone around or have it to fuck around with when I’ve generally been happier when, sitting and waiting for my order, or for the movie to start, or whatever, I’m not doing anything but sitting quietly and thinking about whatever.

Okay. I guess I’m okay with this thing. Thank you past me. You were momentarily inscrutable and mysterious, but you made a good call.

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 customized priority to p1, p2, and p3 and I customized estimate to ye olde Fibonacci sequence.

I tried using the start/stop functionality and it created an overwhelming amount of visual noise, so I promptly quit doing that, and had such a bad reaction that I ended up radically simplifying the color scheme:

• red: overdue
• paleish orange: due next 48 hours
• yellow: active tasks, which by convention I am limiting to my most important project
• normal text: the rest
• cyan: a “project container”

On that last, Taskwarrior doesn’t really have subtasks. It does have dependencies and it does have projects. I’m not sure where I’m at on the lack of subtasks. Right now I’m feeling my way through. One way I’ve adapted is to make a task that I tag with project that states the outcome of the project. Something like “Turn off Otter Integration.” Then I set the date I want that to happen and tag it project as well as add it to, e.g. project:otter along with all the related tasks.

When I run the big task list report, the project deadlines/delivery dates all show up in cyan, so I can get a sense of relative timing of everything I have going on, or will have going on, and how much stuff is between me and getting that thing done.

I’m trying to be sort of roadmappy/backloggy about all this. I am trying to avoid prematurely assigning due dates until I feel pretty confident I can honor them, or until I’m getting close enough to “due” on a project that I better make a plan.

Since I due-sort everything on my lists, it means there’s sort of a pool of undated tasks down at the bottom of the report just bumping around. That’s fine. They’re the backlog. The meaningful action is the stuff to the top of the list with light color-coding for the stuff I’ve decided needs to happen right now. If I want to start more detailed scheduling on a given project, I can just run the list for it, e.g. task project:otter, and then assign due dates on as much as I need to keep going. If I want to go prospecting, I can run task undue to find things without dates.

I once knew an engineering director the project managers dreaded because he wanted to plan out and schedule the next six sprints in detail, then re-ripple the plan at every sprint close. Basically pantomime horse Agile, I guess, shoving Jira tickets around a board. It was tedious make-work in the service of a fundamental hypocrisy of the place we were working, which was that we’d “gone Agile” but weren’t at all Agile.

I am not making software. I’m just running an IT org in the middle of a pre-IPO tech company. That company has four or five processes for everything and has the usual struggles around alignment and prioritization that 600 people are going to have. A lot of deadlines are negotiable. The hardest deadlines tend to be based on contract cycles or compliance motions. So there’s no sense in me deciding I’m going to be utter death about turning off the Otter integration on time: It isn’t costing money, it’s just making Legal nervous and it’s annoying me. So planning it all out is pointless, unrealistic, and fussy.

On the other hand, there’s that one app I’ve been gunning for two years running, I keep missing the window to run a sunsetting motion, and this is the year for it. That requires some detailed dates.

I’m leaving some Taskwarrior stuff on the table:

It has a calculated “urgency” score that I have disabled on all the task lists and taken out of the color scheme. It’s information overload and I don’t need it.

You can make things active and inactive. That also makes more visual noise than adds clarity, though I am experimenting with making all the tasks in the highest priority project active and giving them a different color treatment so I can keep them in easy view.

There are dependencies. Yet more detail that I don’t need to manage. If I get into something so deep that I need to do dependency mapping, the staff program manager will probably be insisting she be allowed to get involved, and all that shit is going in Jira.

So I think what I’m left with is a task list that has some nice ways of storing task metadata (tags, projects, due dates, priority, estimation) without needing to manage fussy plaintext syntax: Taskwarrior uses sqlite, so while you need to type it in correctly, you don’t have to worry about an errant semicolon blowing up your carefully manicured plaintext todo list.

You can leave a lot of features on the table if you like, and everything is amenable to customization.

Tying into notes-tui

Today I spent some time working on integrating this with notes-tui, which is now mostly compatible with Denote, meaning every file has an identifier.

• I added a feature to notes-tui to open a note by identifier
• I added a custom data type to Taskwarrior to store a note identifier
• I added a command to notes-tui to create a Taskwarrior task storing the note identifier
• I have a wrapper script that lets me type tasknote 52 (or whatever task number) and open the associated note.

Tying into mutt

Likewise, I have a mutt macro that creates a task with the subject and sender and stores the msgid in a custom field in the task, and a wrapper script that finds the associated message for a task in mutt and opens it.

So today I made Monokai Pro Ristretto themes for mutt and Taskwarrior, and in the process discovered that there’s a business entity that licenses an icon pack and themes for a few editors. It grants an endless demo license or you can pay a few Euro to license it for your editor, so there’s not exactly a heinous money grab involved. If Monokai has been involved in cease and desists against terminal theme authors, feel free to inform me.

But I’ve been seeing Monokai, Monokai Pro, and the assorted variants around forever, everywhere, and never realized anyone was selling licenses. I’d be gobsmacked if any of the people shipping Monokai Pro themes (as opposed to plain old Monokai) licensed them for distribution. I get the impression the designer is happy to get a few euro for his efforts and more pleased to have made a thing that is literally everywhere.

Anyhow, I guess there’s sort of an applied ethics thing here, which is “now I know,” so I’ll keep what I came up with to myself and slide a few bucks to the designer, because Monokai and/or Monokai Pro has been a goto for me on every terminal app and editor I’ve used that supports it for a while, and the creator has signaled that he’d like some money for his work.

You can read about Monokai Pro’s history from back in TextMate days to today if you’re curious. I think if my theme had screen time on an episode of Silicon Valley I’d be jazzed, too.

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.

I decided, alongside implementing TaskWarrior support, that I’d probably better implement Things support. Of all the task management tools I’ve ever used, Things has been the most sticky, because it’s always lurking around whatever device from the last time I used it, and it is so easy to ramp back up. Whenever I pick Things back up again I collapse the sidebar and live in the Inbox list until it gets to the point I’m setting up projects again. So I added Things support in case TaskWarrior turned into a misadventure, as these things can.

The best way to describe my relationship to any task management tool is probably “anticipated decay” I never get into one thinking “this is it forever.” I know it’s going to follow a cycle:

• Tentative first steps, barely justifying its existence over a legal pad or Apple Reminders with just one todo list
• Creeping complexity: Projects, areas, tagging, subtasks
• Data entry simplification. If there’s a hotkey, widget, Raycast thinger or whatever, I’m all about it. This is always the beginning of the end. It really should not be easy to make work for yourself.
• Fully operational battle station. A sense of pleased familiarity when I review what’s in it each day.
• Minor vibrations and oscillations as priorities shift; increasing in intensity until I dread reviewing what’s in it each day.
• Collapse. I go into crisis for a few weeks and write a few hasty export scripts to at least remember what plates were spinning. Then I walk away.

Inevitably, somewhere between the “things are getting real with this thing” and the “I need to make the process of making work for myself buttery smooth,” the mobile or multi-platform questions rear their heads.

I imagine life without being able to consult my many deliverables from my phone and some unpleasant part of my personality sends a jolt to the pain and nausea centers, hitting the intersection of old work trauma and pigheaded nerd completionism.

The old work trauma is simple to explain:

My first well-paying job was for an online content play whose leadership utterly failed to anticipate the devastation of the dotcom bust in the early aughts.

When they hired me I was a recently discharged paratrooper splitting my days between running a database for a school and doing secretarial work. The pay was miserable, but my half of the rent came out to $250 a month so I spent my time screwing around with that database and getting called “four-eyes” by the kids who got sent to the office. I wrote a long comment about man pages on Slashdot that caught the attention of a Linux.com editor who turned it into an article, and that caught the notice of a website editor who offered me 3x the pay to come write a story a week, moderate comments, and keep a newswire site running.

So when the good times began to run out the next year, and the layoffs started, my little workgroup went from 15 people to just me in about six months because, I later figured out, “3x part-time database, part-time secretary pay” was still pretty cheap in the online content world at the time.

But I was terrified of losing that job. Terrified at the prospect of being laid off. I spent one nine-month stretch working every single day of the week. I got good at a very primitive sort of early 2000s mobile computing because if I wanted to leave the house on a Sunday afternoon, I needed to at least moderate comments from a device, somehow.

Eventually some things went really, really wrong with that place and I quit caring whether I kept the job or not, and I finally just left and went back to school, but I never really lost the habit of thought that some mobile access is very, very important.

When I pause for a moment and have a thought, I realize that is mostly ridiculous.

At work, I live on director time. I’m struggling mightily to imagine a scenario where I would need to know the details of some particular task on the spot, or where it would not be okay for me to say, “you know what, I know that’s in my tracker. When I get home I’ll Slack it to you.”

In my personal life, again, no. Groceries, I guess, but those go in Apple Reminders because we’re an Apple family, as do most little one-offs.

Someone, somewhere mightily disagrees with all this. That is fine. I’ve been reading about peoples’ assorted “systems” and “methodologies” for, like, decades. Everyone needs what they need.

And what I need is “less,” because my unchecked impulse is to optimize for things that I don’t need to optimize for just because I can, and because the correct direction for anything having to do with work and a mobile device is toward little more than “whatever I need to answer a management on-call page or do backup 2FA for Okta.”

So as I was fussing around figuring out the useful aliases to set up for TaskWarrior I had a brief “but how do I check tasks on my iPhone?” thought that yielded gratifyingly quickly to “I know there are ways, but just don’t allow for that use case this time.”

So I’m not.

There’s a tiny bit of friction in the system as a result, and I think that is fine.

I do some extra data entry: During the day I have a daily note with Markdown checkboxes for todos I acquire during meetings and 1:1s. I have a calendared reminder called “clear the decks” around five on weekdays that is my cue to sweep the tasks from my daily note into my task system, when I can think about describing them better. My notes tool has an “unchecked box” search I can use to make sure I haven’t missed a stray item.

This afternoon’s deck sweeping netted a few things that I shouldn’t have written down in the first place, and a chance to catch a pattern from reviewing the day that I missed in three separate moments during the day.

As with any CLI tool, a certain amount of practice is in order, so I’ve invested some time doing a lot of manual task entry just to get the basic syntax burned in. Yes, I briefly considered scripting an import, but decided to do it the hard way for the practice, so no AI-fueled moral hazard for me!

(While I was puttering around, I was briefly reminded of when I was a really big fan of the old Remind app, too.)

Anyhow, it’s been sort of interesting rewiring my brain around CLI/TUI tools the past few weeks. My sense of what it means for something to be discoverable, scannable, or legible has shifted a little as I’ve built interfaces that suit my particular sensibility about how to be keyboard-oriented. Things that initially felt a little opaque or closed-in have begun to feel more expansive.

I’ve tried to be mindful about how much time things really take, not just how long we’re sort of conditioned to think things take, or conditioned to believe are more easy or discoverable.

It led to a curious iteration where I got sort of tired of dealing with Emacs as an uneasy citizen of macOS, to deciding maybe if I pared back Obsidian’s UI a ton I’d be happier there, to wandering into my own notes app backed by Helix, where I’ve been able to define what is most legible and discoverable to me.

It is pretty nice to just fullscreen Helix in a kitty session, or split my notes into one Zellij pane and my tasks into another. There are some tradeoffs living that life, but it feels less cluttered.

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.

In other Helix progress notes, I briefly had a bunch of vim keybindings set up to quit stumbling over the evil muscle memory I picked up from Doom Emacs. Over the weekend, sitting in a hotel room waiting for a concert to start, I decided I wasn’t so proficient at vim that I should cling to it, so I got rid of them.

That is definitely making for a few mistakes here and there, but Helix isn’t that hard to pick up.

Other Helix stuff I picked up:

You can hack in Markdown auto-increment for unordered lists and tasks by saying they’re comments in your languages.toml file:

[[language]]
name = "markdown"
comment-tokens = ["-", "+", "*", "1.", ">", "- [ ]"]

… and this lets me check off Markdown tasks with spc x:

[keys.normal."space"]
x = [
  "extend_to_line_start",
  "flip_selections",
  "extend_to_line_end",
  "extend_line",
  """:pipe awk '{
    if ($0 ~ /^- \\[ \\]/) {
      sub(/^- \\[ \\]/, "- [x]"); print;
    } else if ($0 ~ /^- \\[x\\]/) {
      sub(/^- \\[x\\]/, "- [ ]"); print;
    } else if ($0 ~ /^- /) {
      sub(/^- /, "- [ ] "); print;
    } else {
      print "- [ ] " $0;
    }
  }'""",
  "goto_first_nonwhitespace",
  "collapse_selection",
  "move_line_down"
]

When I kick off the day with a daily note I like to check whatever I’m using for tasks to figure out the most pressing stuff, and it goes into a checklist where it’s not an official todo, just a priority I’ll keep seeing as I go in and out of the daily note to log stuff during the day.

It is a little disorienting to have a full-featured editor that launches so quickly without worrying about daemonizing it. I mean, micro is pretty full-featured and has some nice plugins, but at some point evil-mode won me over to modal editing and micro doesn’t do that. It’s got a remarkably flexible keymapping system, but not so flexible that you can go modal with it.

• 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.

This morning I realized there is an opportunity to integrate it with contacts-tui via tag searching, so I added a command line switch to search for a tag and launch with that tag search: notes-tui --tag=@label. On the contacts-tui side, I added a command to launch that search by tapping O on a selected contact.

Launching that tag search from contacts-tui, I end up in the notes app with all the related notes for that contact in view. I can cursor around, read the notes, etc. and when I ESC out of the notes app, I’m back at the contact record in the contacts app. Tap t and I get a list of open tasks for that contact in TaskWarrior, Things, or dstask.

Or do none of that, because both tools work fine on their own.

It kinda gives me the idea to move contacts out of its sqlite backend and just move to plaintext serializing for contact info, with ripgrep to manage contact search.

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.

That’s maybe bad for me because I am a compulsive subtask-maker with a bad habit of opening a task, loading the subtasks into my buffer, and just doing them all without looking back. So if I stick with it dstask may shape my habits that way.

For some annoying reason, dstask also barfs if $EDITOR has an argument, e.g. emacsclient -nw, and I found myself once again writing some kind of wrapper for emacsclient. That is not Emacs’ fault, but it raised the perennial question “when does $EDITOR come into play and do you need a whole-ass Emacs config for those times?”

So I think “your go-to for this used to be jed, which acts like Emacs where it matters.” But I’ve been using evil in Emacs for years now: If I want to keep my muscle memory between quick CLI edits and my whole-ass Emacs config, what I really need is something from the vi family.

It being 3 in the morning, I embark on a tour of modern vi’s, looking for some sweet spot of “nimble” and “feature-packed.” I burn through a few neovim tutorials and starter kits (nooooooope) before stumbling into a feud between neovim people and Helix people on reddit.

So around 4 I’m running brew install helix and going through :tutorial.

It’s pretty nice! It launches quickly. No plugin system so the futzmonkey sort of has to stay in its cage, but it’s very batteries-included. I found a tutorial for setting it up for Markdown that wasn’t overwhelming and helped me get a sense of how its config works.

It is not “just a batteries included vim.” It has its own keybinding grammar (subject/verb, not verb/subject), so after bonking my head on those changes a few times I cheated and lifted a few vimisms.

I guess I also went through a quick consideration of micro, but the CUA-style default keybindings confused me the way nano often confuses me.

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.

• The task view on each contact includes tasks with their contact tag. You can close them out from within contacts-tui with a note.

This bridges the gap between contacts-tui and my todos, which is pretty important to me: If I want to be good at keeping up connections, I need the reinforcement that this is a thing as meaningful to me as any other thing I’m willing to commit to a tracker.

The connection isn’t truly bidirectional: If I close a task in contacts-tui, it’s closed in the tracker. If I close a task in the tracker, it’s still open in contacts-tui, but there’s some incentive to just close it out there: When you do, you can include a quick note about the call, email exchange, followups, etc. to keep the system up to date. (The note you enter in contacts-tui gets added to the Things note when it closes, so you keep the information both places, fwiw.)

The task backends are pretty modular and follow a simple pattern with just three calls (make, find, close), so just about any CLI task tool or scriptable tool could have a backend.

I started with TaskWarrior last night out of curiosity. I’ve never really warmed up to it but it’s sorta the big CLI task tool. I like dstask a little better and learned how to use it through a bout of insomnia last night. But cold light of day thinking told me that when I go on these CLI kicks for productivity tools they don’t usually last, so I added Things support as the realist option.

v0.5.0 has all the new stuff.

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.

So the net effect has been to have a higher volume of very lossy connections at the cost of some very meaningful and higher-fidelity connections.

As I get older, that has gone from something I don’t like to something I feel very concerned about. Alison is constantly on me to stretch before and after our morning runs because she’s right: I do not have the body that once came off a six-week layoff from a parachuting injury to run in the Ft. Bragg 10-Miler the first day I was allowed to run again. Likewise, as much as I have a few habits of thought I try to cultivate to keep from turning completely inward sometimes, there are some parts of the world that don’t become more comfortable to deal with as we age. Some days, my reaction to whatever is going on out there is to wish people would just shut the fuck up about it. I think that’s a fair, reasonable, understandable reaction, but I also think that’s not a great place to go live.

As much as I’m introverted, politely contrarian, and completely over some of the fucking takes I’m reading, I have to stretch. As much as there are some people I’d love to hear more and different from, at some point you just have to acknowledge that for whatever reason, those vibrant email threads petered out and are not coming back, so you have to replenish the supply of human connection.

During my unplanned sabbatical a couple of years ago, I realized I was going to need to settle in for a few months of being at loose ends while I figured out what was next and started to drum up opportunities. I knew I needed to network, and I also knew I needed to just interact with people. Left to my own devices, and without a plan, I knew I’d just go full introvert and I didn’t want to go full introvert.

So I set about leveraging org-contacts to build what I called the plaintext CRM: A bunch of functions that made it easier to keep in touch with people. The core ideas were:

• Different kinds of relationships need different kinds of attention
• It’s easy to lose track of a thread, so it helps to have some workflow management when you reach out to someone
• It’d be nice to have a log of contacts so you could remember where you left off
• It’d be nice to integrate this with org-mode so ticklers to ping people or follow up, or just mark a contact “timed out” would show up in my agenda each day.

I used it for plain old social stuff during my layoff, and also to track recruiter pings. It helped me feel (and behave) a lot less transactionally about reaching out to people, because while I did have a small pitchfork at my back to get out and network, it reminded me to follow up on social stuff as well.

It was a good system for where I was at, because I was living in Emacs, it was sort of a fun and stunty layoff project to implement something like that in Emacs, and I was able to stick to it because it was right there in my todo system.

Usage fell off once I was back at work and got busy again, which has bothered me on and off for a while now.

Several weeks ago, I fed the elisp to Claude as a proof of concept for an MCP. The repo for that is private because I did put it into production for a period and the security studies on MCP are a little dire. They’re just modulations on common security issues other protocols can present, but I’m not gonna lay bare my vibe-coded contact management infra.

The MCP itself worked as well as a chat-based interface can, and did what a lot of AI stuff does these days: Points to something that is both pretty cool and simply not there yet.

The pretty cool part was making Claude aware of my contacts database and the state of contact with everyone in it. During day-planning, I had it set up to check in on the state of contacts and drop a few pings, followups, or calls into my calendar for the day. That was a small proof of concept for MCPs as a kind of executive assistant.

The parts that were not there yet:

• It’s a slow interface. An MCP is just API calls, which are fast enough over a local network and hitting a sqlite db, but there’s some overhead to get an LLM to invoke the tool, interpret the results, and do something with them.
• It’s a lossy interface. I spent a few iterations tuning instructions to get Claude to do the right thing with certain language, but there was still an element of the one-armed bandit effect: Make a comment the wrong way, and Claude would add to a contact’s note instead of recording an interaction, for instance.
• It’s an opaque interface. Some of the better MCPs include some kind of CLI component so you can directly manage their state. I was stuck with telling Claude to change this or that thing once I realized it had done something I didn’t like – a whole lost several minutes to “show me what you did; change what you did; no not that way – this way.”
• It’s a bad idea to let an LLM near this kind of information.

On that last point:

You see people advertising their MCPs as “running locally and completely in your control.” Well, okay, but what the LLM is doing with that data is not completely in your control. What the LLM’s owner is doing with that data is not completely in your control. And for a homebrew sort of hobby implementation of a new protocol in a fast-moving technology, you’re assuming extra risk.

Second, I’m just curious, not completely obtuse. I want to learn about these things – work actually requires me to learn about these things – but there are people with heartfelt, sincere, thought-through objections to the AI industry whom I know would not like that even innocuous data about them is being fed into an LLM maw. I’m sorry I picked a project that involved that. I stopped at “actual need and well-understood problem” and didn’t think past that.

So I took the MCP down, which left me a little frustrated: I really did not want to go back to managing contacts in Emacs, and I really do not like any of the alternatives I’ve found for contact management: Finding the sweet spot of actually managing contact information and also managing the workflow of interacting with contacts has been a little hard.

So I teed up one last session with Claude to use the existing MCP workflows, data structures, and actions and turned them into a Go TUI that just repurposed my existing sqlite-hosted data into a database on my local disk. It does pretty much what my original elisp implementation does, but it’s written in Go so it’s a compact binary (and Claude is sort of a Go prodigy compared to experiments in Typsecript, Ruby, and bash).

I’m pretty happy with what I got:

• It’s fast.
• It does all the contact lifecycle stuff I used to do in Emacs.
• It adds the ability to define a custom cadence and style for some individuals, because there are folks you don’t need to reach out to much but if you see they had a nice life event or career development, it’s good to drop in a reminder to ping them with congratulations (or condolences).
• It has hot keys for most interactions, so there’s not a lot of cursoring around the interface.
• It has some nice state-setting and filtering hot keys: Quick to find overdue contacts, filter down to family, friends, or professional network.
• It has archiving, so for that one recruiter from a few years ago at the place you walked away from, you can get them out of the contact management cadence but keep the context for later, just in case.
• It’s completely local and un-networked. Not only is everyone’s data not going into the LLM maw, it’s not getting sucked in by anyone else trying to build their graph on your friends’ data.

This version is publicly available and pretty easy to build and install on a Mac, at least:

pdxmph/contacts-tui

There are a few features mentioned in the docs for creating a fixtures db you can kick the tires with, or just onboard with a blank db and start using it. There is no contact import tooling. Given the simplicity of the sqlite backend, it’d be pretty easy to lash up a CSV importer, and iirc it is not terribly hard to write some AppleScript to do that from the Contacts app or from a format like VCF.

I’m not sure it solves anything for anyone else the way they’d like, but it hits an intersection that’s useful to me by creating structure to be better at something I often neglect and wish I did better.

• 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:

• Session length. Once either project got into complexity, the amount of progress I could make in a session slowed down. Claude would end conversations for going on too long in the middle of a debugging session, and all the context would get dumped.
• Context preservation. If you have to chain together a series of sessions to get one feature done, then you need some way for Claude to remember what it was up to.
• “Behavioral.” Sometimes Claude does dumb or misguided things. Describing them would be as fun for you as making you listen to me talk about a dream I had, so I won’t.

So as I’d pick up on a problem, I’d look for a way to address it, and largely landed on:

• User preferences that stress collaborative testing, step-by-step examination of a problem, and limited ability to move on until the user has said it’s okay to move on.
• Specific project instructions that explain what the sources of truth are, where the local code lives, how to go about selecting what to work on, and further reinforcement that we don’t write scripts to test scripts that test the code, etc.
• Reliance on continuity tools of some kind.
  • Markdown notes of what it has gotten done so far, what it needs to know to return to work on a problem, etc.
  • Continutity notes in GitHub issues, so it can pull the original issue, then record and catch up on its own progress with comments on the issue.
• Remembering to explicitly dig out API docs and include them in the prompt with little nudges: “I see a parameter asking for a location id …”
• Continuity prompts: “You were doing this, you recorded progress here, as always you can read about this entire project here.”

Luke sent me an article that very thoughtfully dissected this process:

“… the people I’ve seen most excited and effective about agentic work were deeply involved in constantly correcting and recognizing bugs or loops or dead ends the agent was getting into, steering them away from it, while also adding a bunch of technical safeguards and markers to projects to try and make the agents more effective. When willingly withholding these efforts, their agents’ token costs would double as they kept growing their context windows through repeating the same dead-end patterns; oddities and references to non-existing code would accumulate, and the agents would increasingly do unhinged stuff like removing tests they wrote but could no longer pass.

“I’ve seen people take the blame for that erratic behavior on themselves (‘oh I should have prompted in that way instead, my bad’), while others would just call out the agent for being stupid or useless.”

… then turned it around:

“It may sound demeaning, like I’m implying people lack awareness of their own processes, but it absolutely isn’t. The process of adaptation is often not obvious, even to the people doing it. There are lots of strategies and patterns and behaviors people pick up or develop tacitly as a part of trying to meet goals. Cognitive work that gets deeply ingrained sometimes just feels effortless, natural, and obvious. Unless you’re constantly interacting with newcomers, you forget what you take for granted—you just know what you know and get results.”

“By extension, my supposition is that those who won’t internalize the idiosyncrasies and the motions of doing the scaffolding work are disappointed far more quickly: they may provide more assistance to the agent than the agent provides to them, and this is seen as the AI failing to improve their usual workflow and to deliver on the wonders advertised by its makers.”

Phil Agre wrote about this years ago: “Most user interfaces are terrible. When people make mistakes it’s usually the fault of the interface. You’ve forgotten how many ways you’ve learned to adapt to bad interfaces.”

Both the contacts MCP and the Remember the Milk MCP were easy assignments: The contacts MCP just keeps a sqlite database and operates under some rules about when to nudge the user to check in on a contact and what to do when the user reports a contact. The RTM MCP takes advantage of a comprehensive, mostly straightforward API, mapping each tool to an endpoint with a pretty obvious purpose.

I won’t go into a ton of detail about the bad derails that still happened. The content of those derails is less the point than the simple fact that over a couple of weeks of evolving a pretty elaborate set of rituals to avoid memory issues, session length issues, and behavioral issues, there was still always a nagging sense of “when will this go wrong and how?”

For instance, the underlying Claude service itself is flakey. After a while I’d developed a pretty good sense of when a conversation was going long, but every now and then I’d get two or three messages into one – right at the point where the furniture had been rearranged in some function – and get a session length error. There went the context and all the sources of truth were out of sync with the code base.

Or it’d report writing the continuity note but truncate it. Or, or, or.

A boss of mine once said about an early scripting effort of mine, “it’s not that the bear dances well, but that it dances at all.”

That’s sort of where I’m at. In the end, I agree with this:

“… what is imagined is powerful agents who replace engineers (at least junior ones), make everyone more productive, and that will be a total game changer. LLMs are artifacts. The scaffolding we put in place to control them are how we try to transform the artifacts into tools; the learning we do to get better at prompting and interacting with the LLMs is part of how they transform us. If what we have to do to be productive with LLMs is to add a lot of scaffolding and invest effort to gain important but poorly defined skills, we should be able to assume that what we’re sold and what we get are rather different things.”

“That gap implies that better designed artifacts could have better affordances, and be more appropriate to the task at hand. They would be easier to turn into productive tools. A narrow gap means fewer adaptations are required, and a wider gap implies more of them are needed.

“Flipping it around, we have to ask whether the amount of scaffolding and skill required by coding agents is acceptable. If we think it is, then our agent workflows are on the right track. If we’re a bit baffled by all that’s needed to make it work well, we may rightfully suspect that we’re not being sold the right stuff, or at least stuff with the right design.”

… because as I painstakingly evolved my “get working code out of this thing” workflow, there were two things on my mind:

• Learning how to write all this for myself would keep me from having the tool I’ve imagined any time soon.
• If I’m sitting here in my living room working through this process with these readily identified limitations, other people who are starting from a place of more sophistication and more ability to do the meta-work of hiding all this tool-building I’m doing will probably be getting on that. In fact, they are. I added an MCP called “vibe check” that arrested a few spinouts before they happened by making the LLM ask what its original prompt was before it does anything. The number of memory persistence MCPs is growing.

On that latter bullet, I guess this puts me on the vaguely optimistic side about all this: My Brompton is a great implementation of a bike. Penny Farthing bikes are – given all we know today – a terrible implementation of a bike. If I tried to do an eight-mile ride downtown on a Penny Farthing bike, I’d say “bikes don’t work for commuting shortish distances.” With the Brompton, on the other hand, the gearing is excellent and does a lot to offset those 16” wheels. It’s fine for six or eight miles. Given the kind of Schwinn I had in grade school, with a banana seat, a big lever for a shifter, and high handle bars for that cool chopper look, I’d probably say “bikes aren’t great for commuting medium distances, but are fine for a spin around the neighborhood, and I can see how a few design changes could make them better.”

The metaphor breaks down quickly the second you shift out of “does it work” questions and move into asking “what is the return given the consumption of resources?” whether that’s electricity, water, developer hours lost to correcting spinouts, support tickets, or the human toll of inevitable misapplications at all levels of society.

The one-armed bandit

So, I’m glad to be sitting here writing instead of sitting on top of Claude, waiting for it to invent a non-existent API call, forget that a given parameter is an id and not a string, crash and burn with a partially edited private function I hadn’t realized was in there, or take it upon itself to push a broken image into production.

My two MCPs work pretty well, harmonizing with each other the way I hoped they would, giving me a conversational interface into personal planning that does a good job of “remembering” stuff and getting it back in front of me when I need it to. Claude itself has written READMEs that vastly oversell what it is accomplishing, because it has never met a project it has worked on with anything other than intimations of brilliance and completeness.

I had a good experience working on these things in a few ways. I got working tools, learned a bit more about what the tech is good for and not, and just as I was deep in the process, MCPs flared up as a security topic at work. It was very, very useful to be able to listen patiently, knowing something about how these things work, and have a useful opinion or two about how to characterize the risk they pose.

During this period, there was no avoiding The AI Discourse, and that was less fun. The discursive environment is up to the same shit it is with everything, and my deep annoyance with rhetorical moves that involve psychologizing people with whom we disagree has found no relief.

But for as much as the experience was edifying and interesting, the image that kept coming to mind was a slot machine, or a video poker game.

I once ended work early during a week in Las Vegas, gave myself an allowance to try gambling, and had a pretty terrible experience with it all. Years later I read that humans are succeptible to gambling addiction because we’re very inclined to seek patterns, and very inclined to misinterpret things as patterns, and easily unhinged by rewards we believe we can unlock if we just figure out the pattern.

If you’ve never gambled but have sat up all night trying to beat that one boss, getting worse and worse at it as you get more and more tired and frustrated, that’s sort of how a bad session with Claude felt, because yes, these things “work,” but for particular definitions of “work” that have to include the derails, setbacks, workarounds, constant vigilance, and ever-present awareness that Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, or whichever could twist some tuning screw down in the clockwork and alter the thing’s operating model in a way that throws it all out of sync, creating more digressions to unwind.

In the end, that level of engagement with the toolmaking tool to get the tools I was trying to make was sort of exhausting. I kept thinking of Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, waking up every morning to Sonny and Cher, wondering how far I’d make it.

Funny enough, Claude itself sort of pointed that out to me, because a few weeks ago I added something to my user preferences called “Focus Guardian,” which is a set of directives to catch me spiraling on stuff that is not what I want to spend my time on. Diving into yet another session to add just one more feature, with all the uncertainty of whether it’d be a quick walk in the park or a long slog, the focus guardian protocol kicked in and asked “are you doing this because it furthers one of the things that brings you joy or because you’re curious about some new tool or over-optimizing? Is there a writing project you could tackle instead?”

I guess AI “works.”

I set a goal of getting enough functionality in the MCP right away to start using the MCP to help manage development by keeping the project backlog in it.

And my long-term (for as long-term as “get this done before lunch” can be) goal was “get this into a place where I can use Claude’s connection to my calendar and RTM to do a planning session.”

A couple of things went well, a couple of things did not:

I did a test implementation of an MCP for Things last night. It went really quickly because the Things scripting API is pretty simple overall, until it didn’t go quickly because there are blind spots in either the Apple Events (Applescript/JXA) or URL scheme APIs. But a lot of time was eaten up by the fact that Applescript APIs are a bit more opaque to Claude than a published API. RTM on the other hand, has a pretty thoroughly documented one that Claude was able to grok in one shot most of the time.

I set aside the Things implementation because RTM is, overall, a more feature-complete tool, and its mental model is a bit more like mine. I think when I got to the part of the Things doc about prioritization that read sort of like a climb-down from an orthodox position, I felt a little impatient.

So, getting the foundations layed in for RTM worked well.

At one point, my very methodical approach to keeping project context intact worked against me, because I let Claude pick what to work on next and it rabbitholed on something it had done, but hadn’t marked as done in the project todos, because I have pretty rigid Project Instructions to keep things focused on preserving context. It managed to exhaust its chat length spinning out, left some half-complete work in place, and it took a lot of screwing around to sort out the damage.

At one point mid-morning the Claude API started getting irritable and dumped a few chats mid-session. I downshifted from Opus to Sonnet and that helped it move faster, but at the expense of having to get very controlling about its test cycle and occasionally needing to go look up API calls and explain them to it.

But by lunch time it was pretty far along. Far enough along that I set up Project Instructions for a personal organization project that:

• Allows Claude to work with my Google calendar and RTM to examine priorities and figure out good start times given my time estimates
• Catch when people, tasks, and meetings intersect, flagging those for a daily note
• Create Markdown project notes out of projects I have it create in RTM so I’ve got a place to hold more context
• Reprioritize, defer, flag, and remove assorted tasks

I’ve tried a few variants of this kind of workflow over the past month with different tools and approaches, and this is the most fluid I’ve managed to get it, combining calendar access, a todo app, and an LLM with structured guardrails on what goes where and what does what.

In the background, I’ve woken my plaintext people relationship manager idea back up, because once I realized MCPs are not the most complex things on the planet, and that I’ve got a working way to talk to an LLM about things I need to do, it’d be pretty simple to move the contact management workflow into sqlite for state, and delegate the contact workflow to whatever task backend I want to use. The last time I came at this idea I felt pretty sharply at odds with other peoples’ ideas of what a good contact manager on the Mac is for what I want to keep track of.

Anyhow, here’s the MCP. Just a hunk of Ruby with a script-driven OAuth onboarding workflow. I mean to just live with it for a while and see how it goes.

LR CC does offer one out, though: It has this idea of “Connections,” of which there are very few. One of them happens to be SmugMug. So as I ponder whether I want to stick with Lightroom as my DAM – and I am leaning against, but feel very fluid with it as an editing tool – I realized I can save a tiny bit of the wasted motion Lightroom’s blinkered refusal to participate in a normal “share this image to these desktop endpoints and services” by using imgup to not just push up to backend storage services, but pull from them as well.

So I’ve added pull to its list of things it can do as a cheap and cheerful way to squirt a few images from Lightroom up to a SmugMug album, then make a post from the CLI.

imgup pull takes a few arguments: the number of images to pull, any post text you care to add, which storage backend, which album on that backend, and which destination social media services (Mastodon or Bluesky right now).

So:

imgup pull 5 --service smugmug --album "uploads" --mastodon --post "Pictures from the show"

… will trigger a pull from the last five images. If you’re using a plain old terminal, you get a list of image filenames and the description metadata if you took the time to add it at some point. Pick the index numbers of the ones you want to post and imgup will make a post to Mastodon pulling in the tags from each image.

If you’re using kitty and set kitty_thumbnails": true you get thumbnails to help you make the right choice.

If you leave out the --post switch, you get the same list and can make your selection, and imgup generates JSON and opens it in $EDITOR. There you can add the post text, tweak alt tags, etc. before closing the file, which pipes it back in for sharing to Mastodon or Bluesky.

pull has one other thing it can do, which is filter by tags with the --tags switch.

v0.12.0 is up on GitHub.

If you use Homebrew, the easy way to get it is:

$ brew tap pdxmph/tap
$ brew install --cask pdxmph/tap/imgupv2

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:

# Create JSON and pipe it
echo '{
  "images": [
    {
      "path": "/path/to/image1.jpg",
      "title": "Sunset",
      "description": "Beautiful sunset",
      "tags": ["sunset", "photography"],
      "alt": "Orange sunset over mountains"
    },
    {
      "path": "/path/to/image2.jpg",
      "title": "Moon",
      "description": "Full moon",
      "tags": ["moon", "night"],
      "alt": "Full moon in clear sky"
    }
  ],
  "social": {
    "mastodon": {
      "enabled": true,
      "text": "Some photos",
      "visibility": "public"
    },
    "bluesky": {
      "enabled": true,
      "text": "Hello, thirst-trap bots."
    }
  }
}' | imgup upload --json

The GUI poster is sort of nice: Little thumbnails so you can catch it if you meant to upload from Finder but have Photos selected (and v/v), and while it won’t force you to add alt text, you get an affirming little green check if you add it to each of your multi-post images so that you don’t have to go back and check.

The caching thing … it’s okay. Basically, you upload something and its URL and some metadata get written into a sqlite db, so if you ever try to upload the same image again, you just get your snippet back without a duplicate. If you delete the image from SmugMug or Flickr, you’ll just get a broken image link in your clipboard, so if you’re a volatile Flickr or SmugMug user, just:

imgup config set default.duplicate_check false

And it’s installable with Homebrew:

brew tap pdxmph/tap
brew install --cask pdxmph/tap/imgupv2

… assign the imgupv2-gui.app a keyboard shortcut from Shortcuts or FastScripts or whatever you care to do and invoke it on a Photos or Finder photo selection.

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.

But having picked up and stuck to an atomic writing practice over the past few weeks, I have taken to just letting myself feel my first reaction and commit it to a note that I might drop a few tags into if I have recently written notes about similar things, and I then I keep going with whatever I was up to. The impulse to “say” something is honored, I waste no time crafting it down to a mild subtoot, and it’s actually better for later thinking, because it’s way easier to process a very brief, unfiltered observation than it is to process an overcooked one. The atomic note is just a hunk of raw ore for later.

One piece of advice I gave myself this time around was to not think about how all the notes would hang together, but to just write, tag a little, and periodically link back to the top of a topical tree or nearby note, not in a rigid folgezettel kind of way, but in a “this is part of a cluster” kind of way. I will not have a very awe inspiring graph view. That’s fine. This is more of a mental health exercise than a “walk in the footsteps of Luhmann” exercise.

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.

I learned Sinatra and HAML because I wanted to make work I was doing accessible to other people, and the best way to solve the distribution problem was to just build a web GUI and plumb all those Ruby scripts in as controllers.

When I wrote the first imgup, I did it in Sinatra and got it going on Heroku well enough that I could document how someone else could grab the source and run it for themselves. When I decided to pivot it into a command line app, the distribution problem came back, but I’ve learned enough over the years that if there were any issues with someone else using the code, I can’t really blame it on distribution woes, just my own disinterest in a test matrix bigger than “the OS running on the machine I am testing on.”

So after deciding to quit futzing with imgup – that it was as done as it can be – I started writing a blog post about the experience of doing the migration from Sinatra/Web to a command line tool using Claude.

The development loop I landed on over a few weeks of intermittent fussing had come down to leveraging the Basic Memory MCP to preserve more project context between sessions, and to chain project context with a special project architecture note in Basic Memory and what I came to call “continuity prompts.”

Basic Memory is just an archive of Markdown/YAML files kept on your disk with light markup to create persistence: You can annotate Basic Memory notes with “Observations” and “Relationships” that it uses to build a graph out of notes.

Observations look like:

- [architecture] Direct API metadata is cleaner than file embedding
- [performance] Removing exiftool dependency significantly improved upload speed
- [simplicity] Upload-then-set pattern is more maintainable than metadata embedding
- [consistency] Aligning Flickr with SmugMug's approach simplified the codebase

… and they work, to the extent that when I would turn on Extended Thinking and watch Claude talking to itself, it would mention them as things it “knew” or was trying to take into account when working on a chunk of code.

My Project Context note provides all the things Claude needed to know to start each session without going through rediscovery each time we worked on a new feature or bugfix. I devised a continuity prompt that reminded Claude to check out the project context:

I'm working on imgupv2, my fast image uploader for photographers. Please read the project context first:

memory://imgupv2-project-context-working-preferences

Key reminders:

- The GUI is Wails (Go + Web), NOT Swift
- External dependencies need full paths (GUI apps don't inherit shell PATH)
- Always ask before making changes
- Work incrementally and wait for confirmation

The Project Context note includes things like:

### 1. CLI Binary (`imgup`)

- **Location**: `/Users/mph/code/imgupv2/cmd/imgup/`
- **Binary locations**:
  - Development: `/Users/mph/code/imgupv2/imgup`
  - Installed: `~/go/bin/imgup` or `/usr/local/bin/imgup` or `/opt/homebrew/bin/imgup`
- **Purpose**: Core upload functionality, authentication, configuration

### 2. GUI Application (`imgupv2-gui.app`)

- **Location**: `/Users/mph/code/imgupv2/gui/`
- **Technology**: Wails (Go + Web frontend, NOT Swift)
  - [architecture] GUI uses Wails (Go + Web frontend), NOT Swift #imgupv2 #wails (correcting common misconception)
- **Frontend**: `/Users/mph/code/imgupv2/gui/frontend/` (HTML/JS/CSS)
- **Features**:
  - Detects selected images from Finder/Photos.app
  - Metadata review before upload
  - Mastodon integration with dynamic form
  - Seamless white window design

and …

## Project Structure

/Users/mph/code/imgupv2/ ├── cmd/imgup/ # CLI entry point ├── pkg/ │ ├── services/ # Service implementations │ │ ├── flickr/ # Flickr client │ │ └── mastodon/ # Mastodon client │ ├── config/ # Configuration management │ └── metadata/ # EXIF/metadata extraction ├── gui/ # Wails GUI application │ └── frontend/ # Web frontend (NOT Swift!) │ └── dist/ # Must copy files here for build ├── homebrew/ # Homebrew cask definition ├── build-macos-release.sh # Release packaging script ├── release.sh # GitHub release automation └── build-and-release.sh # Complete release automation

That is, btw, a Go project. Because in the midst of writing up my notes about what I learned working with Claude, I realized ways in which I’d made a very useful workflow that would have saved me a ton of time doing what should have been a simple migration of some controller logic out to a command line script, and that if could use Claude poorly to get a mostly okay reimplementation in a language I know, maybe if I used it well I could get a good reimplementation – and a more portable, accessible one – with a language I don’t know so well.

So I started with a clean slate, started a new Claude “Project,” and set out to make imgupv2 in Go using everything I learned to work with Claude and the Basic Memory MCP.

I would have been happy to just have a distributable binary I could share, but the approach I took to the whole thing let everything move super fast. To the point imgup can be installed with Homebrew, and ships with a little (optional) popup GUI so you can just select an image in the Finder or Photos, invoke a Shortcut with a hotkey. Its backward compatible with the old Ruby version, so it can be wired into anything you’d care to script, like Raycast Script Actions or Hazel folder actions.

I also added some new features because the core feature set went in fast. Oauth registration with Flickr, SmugMug, and Mastodon works without pasting URLs, etc. because imgup config fires up a little callback server duing onboarding. And after Jack Baty mentioned wanting to customize another little flickr script I had come up with, I added snippet templating:

  "templates": {
    "html": "\u003cimg src=\"%image_url%\" alt=\"%alt|description|title|filename%\"\u003e",
    "json": "{\"photo_id\":\"%photo_id%\",\"url\":\"%url%\",\"image_url\":\"%image_url%\"}",
    "markdown": "![%alt|description|title|filename%](%image_url%)",
    "org": "[[%image_url%][%alt|description|title|filename%]]",
    "url": "%url%"
  }

… so instead of living with my particular idea of how an HTML snippet should look, you can roll your own and override the default.

I also added accessibilty prompts and support (you get a reminder if you don’t specify an --alt flag, but the snippet will degrade from alt to the image description to the image title when making a post.)

… and I successfully used Claude itself as a sort of consultant. I was miserable about the way I’d added flickr support because it was dog slow due to my own limitations, but I was able to use Claude to reimplement flickr uploads in a way that makes them super fast and removes external dependencies on exiftool: I told it the pain point, which involved extracting images, writing them out to disk, and embedding the metadata from Photos then uploading them; and it suggested a pair of API calls: One to upload the image, and one to write the metadata over the API.

And the last “feature” is an automated build and distribution pipeline, complete with Apple notarization. One build script compiles the macOS and Linux binaries, signs the macOS binaries, builds the GUI, tags a release, and updates the Homebrew cask:

brew install --cask pdxmph/tap/imgupv2

… but also just …

go install github.com/pdxmph/imgupv2/cmd/imgup@latest if you don’t care about the GUI or want to build something in Raycast, Apple Shortcuts, Alfred, etc.

But why tho

Just curiosity, I guess. AI is a big deal at work right now, and my job puts me in the middle of a lot of it: Working through security issues, thinking about how to onboard and configure the flood of new AI features rolling out from all our vendors, and lately helping out with a training program. Our product is going to be using AI a lot more in the coming year.

There are a lot of folks around me at work who have a lot of takes, good and bad, realistic and unrealistic. One person scoffed, “I tried to get AI to write a program for my kids and it couldn’t! Smoke and mirrors!” Plot that take on a skepticism -> credulity bell curve, and I can probably think of equal and opposite occupants on the other end that I’ve heard.

Up until this past month, I’d mostly used LLMs as a coding augment. When I was writing the first, Sinatra-based imgup, I struggled with the syntax for building and tearing down OAuth sessions in Ruby, so ChatGPT helped me out there. I did a few proofs of concept for things like “write some Ruby that uses the TriMet API to tell me when the next three trains are due at my Max station” just to understand how it worked and what it could do. And if I’d come across an error, I’d use it to paste in the error, provide a little context, and get something as serviceable as a direct visit to Stack Overflow.

I’d never tried to use one to do a whole project with multiple discrete pieces.

Could I have, as that one person apparently tried, just said “make a thing called imgup. It needs to post pictures to flickr or smugmug from the command line, operate on the selected file in the Finder or Photos, and optionally post to Mastodon,” well, no, that would not have worked.

It didn’t even “work,” in my early first attempt to allow for its shortcomings, to make a thorough project prompt and keep sessions concise: It was incredibly inefficient, forgetful, and self-defeating, constantly introducing regressions as it forgot how one piece connected to the other, even when it had a copy of the repo attached to its project memory.

What finally made it “work,” if our definition of “work” is “make code that does what I want with about as many obvious bugs or issues as if I’d devoted months to this project starting from scratch,” was leveraging Basic Memory to give it some persistent project knowledge, careful marshaling of its limited session lengths, fastidious continuity prompting, and the occasional “go describe this problem to another instance outside the project to see if an evil twin can poke holes in the solutions offered by the other AI ‘developer.’”

So my curiosity is satisfied, for the most part.

Less public than this project, though, is all the writing I’m doing for myself right now not about how to make it work, but what to make of it – “AI” – generally. Because as surely as there’s a wide and varied distribution of takes on whether AI can do this or do that, if it’s “real” or “just smoke and mirrors,” the social issues are at our doorstep. This almost felt like me saying to myself, “well, you know what it can do; so now you can figure out what it means.”

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:

• Post to flickr or SmugMug and get back a Markdown, org-mode, or HTML snippet, same as before.
• Post to Mastodon or gotosocial with post text and visibility settings
• Optional tags, title, and caption (which we use as alt text for image tags and social posts)

I have a couple of Linux laptops, so the core tool is written for the command line to make it easily scriptable, but remain amenable to working in demi-GUI workflows, such as a Raycast shell script action or something like Shortcuts or Automator. Here’s a sample Raycast action to upload the selected image in Photos. You can even hook it up to a Hazel folder action that knows to pull the title and caption from metadata.

To add an image to this post, for instance, I:

• Found a photo in Apple Photos
• Triggered a Raycast script and added title, caption/alt, and tags
• Got back a Markdown snippet on my clipboard: ![Asphalt factory machine shack](https://farm66.staticflickr.com/65535/54550622732_10eb18d114_b.jpg)
• Pasted it into this post

The original impetus for all this was “blogging providers don’t care about image quality and it shows,” and that was why imgup started as a little Sinatra-backed web tool. The impulse that eventually took over was “reduce as much friction to uploading and sharing images as possible.”

For my own use, I’m trying to build surrounding tools that reward good behavior: The Hazel upload action, for instance, will grab existing metadata: That’s a great reason to include title and caption in my editing workflow in Lightroom. In the short term it makes posting simple and frictionless. In the future, I’ll be more grateful for the title and caption than the 30 seconds I saved by not posting “the long way.”

One semantic thing I need to back out of or address: Photo tools are all over the place on the metadata they expose and allow you to edit. At some point LR CC added an alt text field, but imgup’s “caption” flag acts as the alt text for the image tags it produces or the social media posts it makes. I need to look at the SmugMug and Flickr APIs and think about the logic there.

And I want to add Bluesky to the list of supported services.

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:

• You don’t have to like all of it.
• There are better and worse choices, so figure out why you think which is which.
• You’re not as good as a lot of these people, but you do your thing for your own reasons, not Flickr’s (or anyone else).
• Figure out why things work or don’t work for you. Don’t do the things that don’t work, learn how to do the things that do work.

I think this is just basic self-development for people, I just had to learn it for myself because … well because.

So the trawl was to find accounts with a high percentage of media-only posts along with the absence of a list of stopwords in their posts, and the reason was to put them in a Mastodon list so I can wake up my Exposure Therapy approach, just using Mastodon instead of Flickr Explore. I just looked in on Explore, and it is about the same as it was. I think it could serve the same purpose, but I think the photography I see on Mastodon is a little more to my general taste, but not so much I’m closing myself off from learning opportunities.

Several years ago I read Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism, going into the book thinking it would be one thing and learning it was something else I was much happier to think about, which was “why am I doing any of the things I do?” I spent a lot of time inventorying, thinking, and writing about that question, figuring out what my purpose was.

Some of that was painful to do. A few weeks ago Al asked me for some advice on a problem she was dealing with at work, and my opinions on the matter were so reflexive and so anchored on what is turning into a big portion of my life thinking about management problems that I felt a little dizzy and had to just stop and reflect on where that all even came from.

“I wish,” I said, “that I knew less about solving management problems than I seem to know. I could have been doing something else with all that bandwidth.”

So “what is my purpose? Why do I do these things?” were hard to ask because I had to spend a lot of time thinking about what the answers might have once been, and consider what I thought of being pulled away from that.

But from the exercise came some clear answers about what I do: I write, I take pictures, I read. Almost everything I screw around with, fiddle with, experiment with, or futz with has something to do with one of those things and some idea I have about how it will make one of those things better somehow. My reasons for doing those things are going to remain my own. I could share the ones that don’t feel super personal to me, but they’re the kinds of reasons you probably have yourself if you do any of those things much.

I’ve made a sort of mantra out of that list.

My rabbit holes are adjacent to my interests most of the time, but their utility is never completely guaranteed: Sometimes parts of my personality come to the fore that make my rabbit holes and digressions feel wasteful. They don’t pan out, or they do and they aren’t as useful as I hoped, or they triggered a bunch of fussing around with something that was fine as is. When I’m done, I feel a little dulled and uneasy, and I think “I could’ve been writing, or reading, or taking pictures.”

When I’m feeling very reflective I feel pretty self-conscious about those time-sucks. They feel like failures. I try not to be too hard on myself, because I’ve also come to realize there is probably something going on it’d be good to try to tease out. Like, I can tell you exactly why I haven’t been reading or writing much lately, and it has been helpful to know that and remember it.

So back to Claude: It has powered a sort of “oh, that’d be cool” digression factory that is always in sight of what I care about, but is always not doing the things I care about. It got really bad with one small project that spun out until I’d burned a whole evening on it. The time was just gone. And I wish I’d noticed for some reason besides “this didn’t pan out, why did I spend this time on it?”

So today I made the “focus guardian” prompt and stuck it in Claude’s user instructions. I think people tend to use that for facts about themselves, or the tone they prefer in responses, or whatever. I decided to use it to get a little help with my digressions. It’s a little lengthy, and I’m saying enough about the inside of my own head to even discuss this in public, so I’ll just outline what it does in the 350 words it takes:

• Looks for red flag expressions and requests
• Intervenes with a mix of questions and principles
• Suggests some alternatives

It caught me this afternoon, asked an intervening question, and provided some suggestions. I folded my laptop shut for a few minutes and wondered what I had been about to do, and decided I might as well enforce this new protocol I’m trying to implement in my own skull by writing about it.

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.

Nothing has changed about the way it has traditionally worked:

imgup -c "Some caption/the alt text" --tags some,tags -b flickr imgfile000.jpg

… but if you register it with gotosocial, you can add the --post and --fedi switches to compose the post text and make a post.

imgup -c "Some caption" --tags some,tags -b flickr imgfile000.jpg --fedi --post "the text of your post"

You can run the OAuth setup for that up with imgup setup fedi.

v0.11.0, which I have not full tested offers a simplifed flow to sign imgup to use your Mastodon instance, and adds the --mastodon switch, which behaves the same way.

So, it’s becoming a little bit of a Swiss Army Knife:

• Use it to upload photos to Flickr or SmugMug and get back a snippet you can paste into your blog
• Use it to post photos to those services and also make a Fediverse post out of them
• Use it to just post to the Fediverse

When you use Flickr or SmugMug alongside creating a post, you get to take advantage of their image resizing, which is nicer than a lot of blog hosting services: The images being shared are optimized without being turned into mush.

I’ve got a few ideas about extending it to support Bluesky and Pixelfed. Bluesky would behave a lot more like the Mastodon or gotosocial functionality. Pixelfed has a few other features around albums and stories worth considering. Adding those sort of turns it into an image cross-posting tool for services open enough to work with one.

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.

I added a bit of polish/a potential shoe-gun to the draft thing since I last wrote about it: When you shuttle something out of the drafts file, it overwrites the date stamp with the current date.

That’s me thinking more like a writer-who-publishes than a diarist-who-logs, and also keeps me from having to contemplate sorting the headings in the monolith.

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.

But still: APS-C sensor in a genuinely pocketable camera, similar to a GRIII, and it had a snap focus setup I didn’t appreciate at the time but got better at when I did get a GRIII, which has a similar feature.

I think, at the time, I was perturbed that it didn’t have Acros, and I was still all in on the notion that X-Trans sensors were dipped in unicorn juices before getting seated in the camera. Still, I never got rid of it, so I dug it out yesterday and charged the battery. I think the trick with it might be to re-learn the snap focus feature and dial in a decent film simulation preset.

I also don’t see a half in my future too soon. I own one of the digital Instax hybrids. It’s far too bulky to just carry around, and the … hybridity? … of the thing feels grubby: They don’t let you use the camera to its fullest without forcing a film purchase on you. The half isn’t that bad about it, but the most thorough review I’ve found suggests they’ve committed to the bit a little too hard for the money. What I’d like would be an XF10 successor with an optional OVF or EVF and a little more wherewithal. Or maybe not. I eventually sold the GRIII because it wasn’t so pocketable that it made a ton more sense than an X100.

Anyhow … the XF10 is sitting there. Seems like fun to mess around with it.

Oh, the comments in the Petapixel review are tragicomic. The worst part of photography sites is truly all the photographers.

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.”

Oh.

At the time I was full steam ahead on a Rails app that helped manage technical docs. We’d grown the page count 3x in just over a year, and we were starting to miss things like product screenshots that didn’t change. We also had problems with internal customers telling us they weren’t sure how to tell us about issues. So the Docs Decomposer offered up a rendered view of all our Markdown docs. You could leave a Google Docs-style comment on a selection, and you could also use a bookmarklet with it that let you select a problematic passage and file a Jira ticket with it. It also tracked screenshots and reported on which ones hadn’t changed between versions so we could look in and make sure the product hadn’t changed too much.

Since it was already up and running on internal infra, I just went home and started modeling how my boss had told me how to think about prioritization, and I made a tool that sat in an unlinked page in the Decomposer. You could enter a list of the stuff your team did, then tell it the priority of the item, how well you thought you were doing it, and how much effort it took. If you said something was a P1, but you weren’t doing it well, you got a little “this is on fire” treatment on the priorities report.

So at our next 1:1 I put my browser on the screen in the conference room and walked my boss through what we were up to. We had a great conversation. He thought some stuff we were doing was better left to developers to work on, and he had some stuff he wanted me to emphasize more, and he agreed two more writers for the coming year would be a great idea.

I ended up turning it into an app of its own, adding accounts and separate projects. I developed a practice around it with my teams:

1. Dump what you’re doing into the tool.
2. Set Priority, Support, and Effort.
3. Look for disconnects.
4. Renegotiate priorities.

I kept it pretty simple. Each priority has a page that shows similarly prioritized or supported items to give you an idea of what you’re ranking similarly, and there’s a notes field to capture whatever.

It works well with some teams, not so well with others. I’ve learned over the years that you have to help the team keep from spiraling into minutiae, and you need to keep an eye on guilt reactions. But when it works, it’s very clarifying and you can cut a lot of junk out of the backlog.

It’s such a simple idea that it didn’t really need a Rails app. One manager I hired just made his own version in a spreadsheet. Another did Jira reporting with labels. The value isn’t so much the app as it is the thinking process, and having a supportive, thoughtful conversation with your team about what they’re up to, what you can take off their plate, and where their time could be better spent.

Tonight it took about 30 minutes with Claude to get it turned into a PWA that does about the same thing. It uses local storage and you can save it to your phone’s homescreen. I don’t think the app interface is good for a tool like this. It’s meant to be a “put it on the screen and let everyone talk about it,” but I wanted to see how simple it would be to talk through the design and turn Claude loose on it. It took about 30 minutes of back-and-forth. Enough to get it working and convince me it’s not a great idea for phones, but could be a simple webapp that doesn’t need any infra.

People have asked me if I could dig out their logins to it years after we’d worked together, so it works for some kinds of brains. And I’ve thought a lot more about how prioritization works (or doesn’t) since I built it. I like the idea of treating it less like AN APP YOU USE and almost more like an educational tool for people who are new to thinking about prioritization and don’t really have their own model yet.

For instance, just looking at the little report, it could do more to suggest overall backlog health, and it could offer ways to think about disconnects. One thing I never got around to coding in last time but was able to add in two minutes tonight was what to do when something is low priority and getting a lot of effort. It used to be those items got a green checkmark … now they get called out.

Anyhow, fun.

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.

I think it is extra infuriating to me because I recently tried to add a project status field and noticed that easily ten of my coworkers had each created their own custom “red/yellow/green” status fields and added them to the collective library. They’re all just red/yellow/green. Not other metadata, no nothing. You can’t have not seen the other nine in the library in the process of deciding to make your own, but here we are. People are animals.

But too many plates, and I was feeling miserable and behind, so I opened up a fresh org-mode buffer and started outlining it all instead of trying to make it into little tasks or cards or whatever.

I keep coming back to something I love about org-mode: You can dip in and out of planning and writing about what you’re planning so easily: One second you’re defining a TODO, the next line down you’re writing about it. No dipping into a notes box, etc. If a paragraph into the whole thing you think of a few extraneous tasks, make them checkboxes, keep writing, and add a cookie to the parent when you think of it so you can see completion. Decide a thing needs to get parked … org-refile it to the * Parked heading and keep moving. Setting priority is just S-up or S-down.

The only thing I regret is having to re-learn this over and over. There is a little extra overhead to keep an org project file and also do the necessary ticketing in Asana to keep things going with the team, but I can’t think in Asana, I can just track there. Different things.

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.

And I finally sat down with my DayOne journals, all exported as JSON, and turned them into Basic-Memory-ready Markdown (which is to say “Markdown”). That included not just my journals from as long as I’ve been using DayOne, but also the entire collection of 2,000 posts from my original blog – the one that started as MovableType, then became WordPress.

Oh, I also imported my Scribbles blog.

I’ll put the source material up somewhere safe, but for the first time I have about 25 years worth of journals, diary entries, blog posts, and other personal writing sitting in a repo in a mostly standard format, organized by source.

It all also caused me to look at a 15-year-old project I worked on when management came around and told my team we’d have to spend three weeks classifying 17 years worth of articles from 40 sites in a spreadsheet. I mustered my rudimentary Ruby and wrote autotaxonomizer in an afternoon, got a friendly dba to give me an article dump, sold my boss with a proof of concept, and reduced a three-week slog for 12 editors to each of them spending maybe 30 minutes filling out a spreadsheet with the keywords for their site categories.

Maybe the best part was after I talked the rest of the team through what I was going to do and noticed a text from my best work friend, Amy. I thought it was gonna be “awesome!” but it was “This sucks. I was looking forward to three weeks of just filling out a spreadsheet.”

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.

So I toggled eglot in init.el, and the nagging stopped. It seems to need less explicit guidance.

Something I like about eglot as it works in Doom vs. emacs-lsp is that if it doesn’t have a needed server for a given mode, it just tells you that in the minibuffer. It doesn’t steal focus, demand action, or try to download anything for you. emacs-lsp (at least as Doom handles it) does all of that stuff and it’s disruptive. I think it’s an attempt to help you keep flow by just handling the matter, but about 1 time in 10 in the past it causes a hang and that sucks way worse than “first time editing this code, pause, install, resume.”

That brought me to “now that it is not driving me to distraction, why do we even want LSPs?”

With Markdown it’s to have Marksman, which does this very cool thing where if you lead with [[ it offers autocompletions of all the Markdown files in your project and creates a wiki link to the file you can then hop over to with C-c C-o or just by tapping return if you toggle wiki links in markdown-mode.

With everything else, it’s just sort of educational to have something smarter about the code than me providing running commentary.

Next up, I had turned on Doom’s support for code formatting/prettification, and that was causing everything to barf errors on save, most because I hadn’t installed an expected formatter. Doom uses apheleia, which is pretty well behaved but was not working with Ruby. That got annoying because you have to grab the formatter (prettier), then deal with some errors that’d seem to have nothing to do at all with the fact that it wants a .prettierrc either in project root or ~/.

I knew I got it working because I ran it on this:

#!/bin/env ruby

fruits = ["apple","banana","orange"]

fruits.each do |f|
  puts f
end

apples = ["golden delicious", "honeycrisp", "fuji"]

apples.each do |a|
  puts a
end

… and got back:

#!/bin/env ruby

fruits = %w[apple banana orange]

fruits.each { |f| puts f }

apples = ["golden delicious", "honeycrisp", "fuji"]

apples.each { |a| puts a }

I sat with my feelings about that for a few seconds and decided it was educational. It’s never really been about being particularly good or sound or correct, just about getting the thing to run.

(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.

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.

It was an even bigger jolt when I went after the problem of Emacs not being properly associated with a number of file types on my Mac:

It wrote a script to use duti to make all the associations, and when I reported that they weren’t “sticking” it decided to write a systemd agent to periodically re-run its duti script. I didn’t realize that had happened until macOS sent me a notification that something new was running on my behalf.

I … am not sure what to make of this, entirely.

Well … a little I am.

For about an hour, this seemed very cool. I haven’t used Claude much, but with it able to pilot Emacs we got through a small reimplementation of org-capture for Markdown files that built on a few recent projects and allows for simple templating. Neat. Pretty complex. Functioned correctly.

Unlike previous sessions with an LLM doing this kind of thing, though, it was a little dulling and weird to have Claude and Emacs quietly collaborating to write all this. It got me to a fundamental understanding of how I am feeling about LLM-driven development:

I have one eye cocked over my shoulder because most people I know personally do not like to admit they perceive any utility with these things, often seem uncomfortable mentioning it if they do use them, and seem to feel a small, almost ritualized compulsion to shit on them even if they do perceive utility. There are any number of reasons someone might be there with these things. They activate a whole catalog of anxieties and irritations.

But I am able to make things with these tools I couldn’t make without 10x the time and effort, and the things I make let me get to what I want to do and spend less time doing the toil of supporting activities more quickly.

I guess I think that they are labor saving devices with the same caveats riding lawnmowers are. Like, I’m glad to be free of the scythe, but also once I have a new John Deer riding mower I understand I can’t sort of tie the steering wheel to a 15 degree angle, put a brick on the accelerator, and get back to my nap.

And I understand they’re not people replacing. Even with the modest projects I work on I can see that.

But one thing I’ve come to enjoy is the part that involves playing to their weaknesses:

I can’t sit back and say “make this thing for me that does some broad directive.”

I have to ask for something simple, then slowly layer things on, redirecting from blind alleys or unwanted optimizations. It’s a creative, iterative process and I enjoy it. It’s a way to engage with a problem I’d like to solve that involves patiently working through the steps of the problem, having second thoughts, realizing that I want things that are at odds with each other, sometimes realizing there’s a much more elegant way to do something. The things I end up with are maybe not the best in terms of their coding craft, but they’re tailored to my mental model.

So Claude and Emacs working in concert removed a small amount of friction I actually welcome in the process of looking at code, moving it over, reading it before evaluating it in a buffer, etc. I didn’t care for that. It was alienating.

The other MCP server I mentioned, Basic Memory, sits in Claude Desktop and remembers what you tell it by writing Markdown notes in a directory. They’re basic “Markdown-n-YAML” files with light structure. You can have the usual sort of “talk to a robot” conversation for a while, then prompt it to make a note, and it does. Then those notes become part of its persistent context. There are db-backed services to do this at scale, but it suits me very much to have something like this. It’s super transparent and introspectable.

In addition to notes, you can record “Observations” in your Markdown files. Observations are simple lines of Markdown, as these examples from the project repo:

- [method] Pour over extracts more floral notes than French press
- [tip] Grind size should be medium-fine for pour over #brewing
- [preference] Ethiopian beans have bright, fruity flavors (especially from Yirgacheffe)
- [fact] Lighter roasts generally contain more caffeine than dark roasts
- [experiment] Tried 1:15 coffee-to-water ratio with good results
- [resource] James Hoffman's V60 technique on YouTube is excellent
- [question] Does water temperature affect extraction of different compounds differently?
- [note] My favorite local shop uses a 30-second bloom time

These become grist for the MCP, alongside your notes, creating a sort of synthesizing glue, and it persists from session to session.

It is still far too early to say much about this. I’ve got a few ideas about how to use it in some work and personal contexts, but haven’t paused long enough to think of a workflow to facilitate those ideas.

( Note: Updated this post to narrow down a little more finely the kinds of social responses to LLMs and their use I have noticed.)

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.

This was only going on for two days and three short entries, but it was pesky: I had a Journelly.org file that went up to Sunday, then a Journelly.sync-error.org file that had grabbed those three short entries, and also spawned a Journelly media folder with the same name. The fix, in the end, was to move my Journelly.org file and media folder into an empty iCloud folder, delete the Journelly app, then reinstall it and immediately tell it to use the new iCloud location. Then I was able to go in and tack on the three entries from the conflicted version. So no data lost, but in hindsight it was a bad move to try to use SyncThing on iOS for app data: There is no reliable background syncing on iOS, just semi-manual workarounds, so it’s inevitable that there’ll be a conflict.

The recommended non-in-app storage method for Journelly is iCloud, and I’d endorse that if being able to edit your Journelly file on the desktop is mandatory.

It’s not a ding on Journelly. It can only work with the files it tells you to. It’s not a ding on SyncThing, which I use for several other applications. It’s not a ding on SyncTrain, which does the best it can with the limitations iOS imposes. And it’s not a ding on iOS, which we all understand quite well at this point: It doesn’t really tolerate long-lived background services and nobody has ever pretended otherwise. It’s on me for thinking it was a good idea in the first place.

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.

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.

I’m sensitive about my writing time, because my first team is in town this week and I’ll be spending most of my days and a chunk of my evenings downtown doing strategy stuff with some great people, but I won’t have any writing time. So that time I could have had today is lost.

… and I guess I’m annoyed because it was such a stupid little rabbit hole: I thought something sounded sorta cool, figured it’d just take a second and then poof. And such a violent poof that stuff I’d had working just fine an hour earlier suddenly wasn’t working thanks to some mystery of I don’t even know what.

So, back on track again. In the end I just had to clean up some of my config’s hygiene, and that was probably for the best anyhow.

But still down over an hour of writing time.

Spending this much time writing about it probably seems like a bad reaction to a small thing, but part of what I have liked a lot about my increased journaling and personal writing output has been the opportunity it affords me to learn and internalize. So this is sort of a public exercise in re-learning something: I’m happier when I’m making a thing, not when I’m fucking around with the tools to make things.

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.”

Since then, I’ve tried to just … put things aside when it occurs to me.

My collection of digital photographs is not something I feel able to simply set aside. I got a reminder of that this afternoon, when I noticed Arq complaining about a failed Lightroom backup that, on initial investigation, appeared to be a tanked drive. The drive had not tanked, but there was a moment of uncertainty about whether data was lost, and how much that might be, what it would take to recover it, etc.

I’ve got my Lightroom stuff split into two vaults. One runs from ca. 2000 to 2014, and the other covers 2015 to now. The vault with older stuff just sits there. It’s poorly curated, with duplicates and culls all mixed in. I am sure most of what I care about at all is in the equally desultory shoebox that is my iCloud Photos collection. It’s all backed up both to NAS and my B2 account (though, you know, B2 seems less ikely to outlive me than I’d hoped) but it’s not usable to anyone in my family, really. It’s just a mess that happens to be backed up. The newer vault is in a little better shape, but it’s still not great.

Anyhow, the brief not-incident reminded me of the project I’ve meant to for a couple of years:

• Go through year by year and figure out the 50 or 100 images from each year that get five stars. I’ve done that for a few years, but when I went way back it got hard.
• Opportunistically delete the culls and duplicates when I spot them.
• Make an artifact out of the five-star images. Right now I’m thinking photo books.
• Organize those “best of the year” images somewhere they’re easy for family to find. flickr has an actual non-profit foundation now, and it’s not expensive to maintain a Pro account.
• Establish 3-2-1 backups terminating in Glacier, and quit thinking about it all as a potential thing. Rather, realize the potential as best I can imagine living with, and then set it aside.

There are a few other moving parts I identified as I was outlining how to set the project up and actually do it, but it’s definitely time.

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.

Ordinarily, writing like that either gets punted into a blog post pretty quickly or gets a few sentences then peters off. Worse, it sometimes becomes a blog draft that I kill because it’s not a viable blog post for whatever reason, but now it’s too other-oriented to be a good journal entry any longer.

Tonight I started drifting in that direction – the blog post that would not come to a good end– and I didn’t like that. But there’s more to think about because when I look at my behavior toward news media in the past several months something has definitely changed very profoundly, and while we can all guess why I’m not sure how to feel about that yet.

Last time around, post-2016, I picked up a lot of baggage about media consumption, what I made of other peoples’ apparent patterns, what I thought that was doing to them, where I thought it was coming from, and what I thought of all the rationales people deploy to justify their choices.

This time around, I can feel some of those thoughts rolling around inside, but I feel a little more detached from them, it feels a little less personal, things that seemed very urgent seem less so, and some stuff just can’t be allowed to matter. It turns out someone is still wrong on the internet.

But I don’t want to write an essay about all of it. I’ve never liked outlines much. So I decided to experiment with atomic notes on this topic, just committing little nuggets and chaining them off of each other, but when I could tell I was headed out of the narrow confines of one atom – say, “what’s good about the news?” – and into another atom – “how much news is enough to get the good parts?” – I made a new atom and picked up there.

It helped me in one way that didn’t occur to me going in, which is that it’s much easier to resist having a narrative of some kind, or an urge toward a conclusion. When I asked “what’s good about the news?” and wrote about that, and then thought, “probably a good idea to make a sibling to ask what’s bad about it,” that got its own node and I didn’t have both sets of things sitting there right next to each other jostling for head of the line, or demanding I steer toward the conclusion.

Because I don’t have a conclusion. All I know is that something has definitely changed in my thinking and behavior around a core part of most college-educated peoples’ ideas about how they’re supposed to behave in the world, and I’d like to think it through without having a conclusion in mind. So we’ll keep at this for now.

Oh, right, what’s the toy: Denote and denote-sequence. Of all the note frameworks, etc. that I’ve played around with, my org-based Denote notes are still the most legible, useful, and navigable. Still getting the hang of how to wrangle a sequence, but not so much that I’ve had to stop writing and screw around with it to the point of a derail.

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.

In the end, it’s not about flickr being a permanent “home.” I wouldn’t trust any commercial entity to be home for my photos. But it’s a fine place to put photos to share.

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.”

No real utility to those things, exactly. Well, the history idea kind of has utility. The kitty thumbnails thing is sheer “what if I could …” pointlessness I’d never take advantage of. I was just riding in the car up I5 from Eugene, sort of daydreaming, and I imagined what the feature would look like and got a little curious.

But making it do that would just be noodling I could do to noodle. It’s not doing the things I made that tool to help me do, which are write and share photos.

I’m glad I realized I didn’t need to do anything more with it. I guess I just wish I didn’t have the impulse to begin with. I’m sitting around the house, maybe a little bored, not wanting to do anything in particular … I’d rather my first impulse be “pick up a book,” or “work with some photos,” or “listen carefully to some album.”

I think some of this is recent back problems. I let myself stop running for a few weeks and tightened up, so now it’s a back-and-forth process to get the stiffness worked out, and it feels great to spend a lot of time in a chair with a heating pad, being acutely aware that I don’t want to do much. But “not doing much” has seeped into things I could be doing, not just things it’s probably not a good idea to do a ton of.

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.

So I’ve given writeroom-mode for Emacs a spin and it does a nice job of presenting a simple, clean writing screen. No modeline, pulls the margins in, and you can enlarge the font (and pick a variable pitch one).

On a macBook with Emacs running in full screen mode it is, indeed, pretty distraction free. Using the monokai-pro theme, it’s plenty contrasty, but not glaring.

It’s sort of nice having a good Emacs build again. When I have an overloaded config with too much going on, things feel sort of rickety and weird and there’s an underlying sense of non-calm under the surface that makes it hard to use as a creative tool.

When it’s set up for simplicity and stability – when there’s less junk going on – it’s able to just sort of look nice and feel comfortable.

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.

You could import someone else’s Mixel and get access to all the little clips and elements they created.

There were some genuinely gifted people on Mixel, making little collages out of tiny, intricate parts. There were a lot of goofballs. For periods someone would drift through your field of view, and maybe you’d start playfully volleying ideas back and forth, then one or the other would drift off.

Possibly one of the best creative-apps-with-social-component ever.

All the ones I managed to preserve before the service tanked.

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.

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

You can skip any of them except the image itself, but you probably want to set --caption to get a description/alt text back.

pdxmph/imgup-cli (Gem on the release page)

I also added a pair of extras:

• A Hazel folder action script: If you set the “caption” field in LightRoom or Apple Photos, then export an image into the watched folder, you’ll get a snippet back to your clipboard with the caption as description/alt text.
• A Raycast script action: (Needs to be fixed to use the new backend selector, so hardcode that if you want to just get it running with flickr by adding the argument in the script)

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.

There’s a new repo, and a better onboarding deal:

• Install the gem (available from the release page)
• Run imgup setup
• Go through a not-great but viable oauth setup
• Reply to a prompt to pick a target album
• Get your config file written for you in a normal place
• Start using

No more .env files or any of that. It behaves way more like a normal app you can just go install.

I wanted to get it into that shape because I like how it is working now: It’s a little bit of plumbing you can fit into all sorts of possible workflows to make it easier to do a small thing that can involve fiddling and typos when all you really want to do is put an image in a blog post. At the same time, while SmugMug is cool and all, I’d like to fold in support for flickr, imgur, and maybe a few others that are more common, and also leave the web UI behind.

So as I have time and feel like messing around, I’ll probably go after flickr next, since I have an account and plenty of albums to play around with.

(I was hoping to include omg.lol’s some.pics, but there’s no API to talk to.)

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.

I’m on the fence because I like the effect, but don’t like remembering/forgetting that the filter is on there at all.

• 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:

(add-to-list 'org-capture-templates
  '("l"
    "LMNO blog post"
    entry
    (file lmno-org-input-file)
    "* [%<%Y-%m-%d>] %?\n\n"
    :prepend t))

Under the hood, it has to do some footwork: org-export wants to wrap anything that looks like an org-mode date stamp with spans, and there is no configurable option for that. Likewise, it applies anchor id’s to every heading.

I am not sure what was going on with image attributes in all that, either, but they weren’t surviving the export with alt tags in place, so I found this custom link format in a Stack Overflow answer that somehow sidestepped the issue:

(org-add-link-type
 "img" nil
 (lambda (path desc backend)
   (when (org-export-derived-backend-p backend 'md)
     (format "![%s](%s)" desc path))))

1. Visit a flickr image in Safari or Chrome
2. Invoke the action from Raycast and:
   • select a snippet format
   • type in some alt text
3. 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:

1. If you’re all in on Flickr, then your blog becomes more easily portable if you ever move it, because the image tags have a stable URL
2. Flickr cares more about the quality of the embeds than a lot of blogging providers.
3. You’re using lmno or some other service that doesn’t manage image uploads at all, and you have to have a third party host.

Pick your poison: If you’re a forward-thinking SSG kinda person who has made it easy to ensure image tag hygiene in the event of a domain or platform change, this might not be appealing. If you’ve been doing this for 25 or 30 years and occasionally stray into the less portable corners of the web, but are willing to hitch your wagon to flickr, this is an option that compares favorably to “all your images were ingested, compressed into a mealy, blurry mess, and given an indecipherable path to some S3 bucket.” If you’re constantly playing around and moving posts back and forth between providers and frameworks, this could also be a helpful strategy.

#!/usr/bin/env bash
# Required parameters:
# @raycast.schemaVersion 1
# @raycast.title  Flickr snippet from active tab
# @raycast.mode silent
# @raycast.icon 🌄
# @raycast.description  Grab the URL of your frontmost browser tab (Flickr only) and copy a Markdown/Org/HTML <img> snippet
# @raycast.argument1 { "type": "dropdown", "placeholder": "Format", "optional": false, "data": [ { "title": "Markdown", "value": "md" }, { "title": "Org‑mode", "value": "org" }, { "title": "HTML", "value": "html" } ] }
# @raycast.argument2 { "type": "text", "placeholder": "Alt text (optional)", "optional": true }

set -euo pipefail

FORMAT=$1
ALT_TEXT=${2:-""}

# 1) Get frontmost browser’s URL
APP=$(osascript -e 'tell application "System Events" to name of first application process whose frontmost is true')
case "$APP" in
Safari)
    URL=$(osascript -e 'tell application "Safari" to return URL of front document') # :contentReference[oaicite:0]{index=0}
    ;;
"Google Chrome" | "Brave Browser" | "Microsoft Edge")
    URL=$(osascript -e 'tell application "Google Chrome" to return URL of active tab of first window') # :contentReference[oaicite:1]{index=1}
    ;;
*)
    echo "⚠️ Unsupported app: $APP"
    exit 1
    ;;
esac

# 2) Validate it’s a Flickr photo page
if [[ ! $URL =~ https?://(www\.)?flickr\.com/photos/ ]]; then
    echo "⚠️ Not a Flickr photo URL: $URL"
    exit 1
fi

# 3) oEmbed → JSON
ENC=$(python3 -c 'import urllib.parse,sys; print(urllib.parse.quote(sys.argv[1], safe=""))' "$URL")
OEMBED=$(curl -s "https://www.flickr.com/services/oembed?format=json&url=$ENC")

# 4) Extract direct image URL
IMG_URL=$(echo "$OEMBED" | /usr/bin/jq -r .url)
if [[ -z $IMG_URL || $IMG_URL == "null" ]]; then
    echo "⚠️ Failed to extract image URL."
    exit 1
fi

# 5) Build snippet
case $FORMAT in
md)
    [[ -n $ALT_TEXT ]] && SNIP="![${ALT_TEXT//\"/\\\"}]($IMG_URL)" || SNIP="![]($IMG_URL)"
    ;;
org)
    [[ -n $ALT_TEXT ]] && SNIP="[[${IMG_URL}][${ALT_TEXT//\]/\\]}]]" || SNIP="[[${IMG_URL}]]"
    ;;
html)
    [[ -n $ALT_TEXT ]] && SNIP="<img src=\"$IMG_URL\" alt=\"${ALT_TEXT//\"/\\\"}\">" || SNIP="<img src=\"$IMG_URL\">"
    ;;
esac

# 6) Copy & notify
printf '%s' "$SNIP" | pbcopy
terminal-notifier -title "Flickr snippet" -message "Copied $FORMAT snippet" -sound default

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.

My recent journey into better note management reminded me it’s not terrible to work in a shell scripting environment, so that’s why I dusted off imgup, which was nothing but a web front-end until this week, and bolted on a CLI interface. I started that thinking “well, you usually just export photos from Lightroom or Photos onto ~/Desktop before uploading them with imgup, so just save a trip to the browser.”

Then that became “why even open a shell when you have Raycast there and understand how to work on selections in Photos or Finder with AppleScript?”

And then I remembered that an early pass at imgup extracted the exif caption to provide the alt text (since then Adobe has exposted a literal alt text field in Lightroom) because I was thinking “why not just embed that in the photo itself once, when you’re already processing it?” I don’t know why I abandoned that, but this evening my thinking took me toward “why even work on a file in the Finder from Raycast when you could just export the image straight from Lightroom to Smugmug via this shell tool you’ve built?”

So I wired imgup’s CLI to a Hazel folder action:

• Edit the photo in Lightroom
• Make sure to edit the caption field (this is the only thing Photos and Lightroom expose in common)
• Export to a Hazel-watched folder
• Set up a folder action that grabs the photo, extracts the caption, and feeds that as an argument to imgup
• Copy the resulting SmugMug link/markup/etc. to the clipboard
• Hazel dumps the copy in the trash

Barring Adobe doing something freakishly helpful, like adding a scripting library, I can’t think of any way to wring any more motion out of this thing: Type in a caption, press cmd-e to do the last export action, and the photo goes from Lightroom up to SmugMug and back to a snippet in my clipboard.

There’s one small tragedy in this, which is that Apple Photos both tells you that you are setting the “Caption” for a photo, then seems to fail to actually store that anywhere in the EXIF data. exiftool can’t find it, anyhow. OTOH, now that I have the Hazel/imgup folder going, I can process images-to-snippets from any photo tool, and Photos was at least amenable to making a QuickAction to dump the selected photo into the upload folder. I just end up having to add the caption after the snippet is made, and my SmugMug photo hygiene suffers.

(Update: Apple Photos actually does seem to set the field, but my code was exporting the original photo, and Apple seems to treat any metadata you add in Photos as a non-destructive change, so you have to disable the “original” flag in the AppleScript export.)

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.

Next on the todo list:

• Wire it into Raycast for quick “upload this image and return a snippet” action.
• Figure out if there’s a way to make a Photos sharing action out of it, too.

To restate the problem imgup started out solving:

You never know what your blog hosting provider is going to do to your photos when you upload them. Gnarly compression, weird image renames, path rewrites, maybe they don’t even support image uploads and you’re left to your own devices for hosting. Move your blog, and the images are probably going to break if you were depending on any provider magic at all.

So … skip all that. If you have an image hosting service you already like, and if they specialize in treating your photographs well, use ’em!

imgup just takes a photo, uploads it to a hidden (but not private) album, and returns a snippet of Markdown, org, or HTML you can paste into your blog post, complete with alt text if you provide it.

The command line tool is a recent addition because the “open web UI, select, upload, copy, paste” workflow is fine given how many steps it saves otherwise, but a CLI option is even more efficient (and automatable).

The thing imgup can’t solve is using it to do something besides share screenshots of things that make blogging easier. Lately we’ve been verging into “blogging about things that make blogging easier” territory, and that feels icky.

• 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.

Once things settled down and people started coming down the line I found it pretty hard to communicate “one from this group of three, one from this set of two.” Most of the patrons are elderly Asian folks, so there’s a language barrier that both sides of the table try to mitigate with broad gestures and repetition.

I realized about five minutes in that the line is just sort of set up wrong for those conditions:

When you have a pair of crates side-by-side with bags of rice in one and bags of noodles in the other and no way to communicate what “one” means in that context when “one or the other” doesn’t mean anything to the other person, there’s a lot of gesturing and a few attempts to just take one of each, and then some unhappiness when you ask for them to put one back (with a lot of gesturing and repeating and some of the other volunteers weighing in because nothing breaks down language barriers like everyone yelling in unison).

So I rearranged my station:

• The flour, cereal, and baking mix all went in one column.
• The rice and noodles went in another column.
• The pumpkin puree just sat there. I said to the coordinator at the start of the shift, “guessin’ that’s not gonna fly off the shelves” and got a wry smile.

Set up thus, I could just make eye contact, hold my hand out over a column, say “one,” and it seemed much more clear that I meant “one from this column.” And that was great, partly because it just helped things move along and partly because having removed the overhead of gesticulating, repeating, and the hurt feelings of people having to put things back, people were more inclined to say thank you, or make jokes about wanting more than one, and I had more time to help them load their bags or remember to hand things over with both hands when they preferred that I hand things to them.

It did mean I had to keep more stuff readily at hand and I had to more frequently re-up my columns, but I think a concentrated 60 or 70 minutes of moving a little quickly for the sake of making it less sucky was a good tradeoff.

This week we ran out of rice early. Plenty of Funyuns, same as last week. The coordinator tells me the money has been drying up, so they can’t buy the staples, but donations of junk food tend to be plentiful.

• 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.

Now I just need to go take pictures.

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:

• Find and replace a bunch of anchor links org’s HTML export drops onto headings
• Find and replace a bunch of spans org’s HTML export wraps around what it considers datestamps

But then it just plops the whole monolith into the Markdown file I can drag into lmno’s uploader.

… then I noticed “the images have no alt tags,” so I found someone wrote this custom org link type:

(org-add-link-type
 "img" nil
 (lambda (path desc backend)
   (when (org-export-derived-backend-p backend 'md)
     (format "![%s](%s)" desc path))))

It just registers a custom org-mode img link, and exports to Markdown with an alt tag, so this in org-mode:

[[img:https://photos.smugmug.com/photos/i-rnGMdNb/0/K3vtM5mZMTn4s9zVwkhdGBXdcBgNPzD74g957cG6J/XL/i-rnGMdNb-XL.jpg][Some alt text]]

becomes this when exported to Markdown:

![Some alt text](https://photos.smugmug.com/photos/i-rnGMdNb/0/K3vtM5mZMTn4s9zVwkhdGBXdcBgNPzD74g957cG6J/XL/i-rnGMdNb-XL.jpg)

… so then I thought, what if imgup could provide not just Markdown and HTML snippets, but also org-mode img link snippets?

(It’ll do that from the command line version, too.)

Fifteen years later, still true.

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.

So if one wanted to use something like cielagonote with Gollum and didn’t care for nb as an intermediary, this might be a way to go.

In addition to the daemon, you can also manually fire off a sync, so I can see making a little script for Alfred or RayCast that does a sync before stepping away from a machine.

In the process of debugging the log issue I discovered LaunchControl, which does a lot to make launchd a little more legible with a mildly busy but helpful GUI.

Through this I learned that launchd is pretty irritable with jobs it considers “inefficient” for reasons I am not completely clear on, so I saw watching the Homebrew emacs-plus service failing/starting/failing/starting over and over. From the point of view of someone who is just launching emacsclient -c --no-wait from RayCast, there is nothing untoward going on: It launches in an eyeblink. I did a little reading about what the throttling/inefficiency issue might be, but we’re rapidly getting into the ineffable wisdom/hatred of experts that informs the macOS ecosystem and I think I’m gonna just close that window and pretend it’s fine.

Us: “It’s a UNIX system! I know this!”

Apple: “Whatever, kid.”

#!/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:

#!/bin/bash

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

# Optional parameters:
# @raycast.icon 🤖

# Documentation:
# @raycast.description Run git-auto-sync on notes directory
# @raycast.author pdxmph
# @raycast.authorURL https://raycast.com/pdxmph

set -euo pipefail
IFS=$'\n\t'

# ——— set up a user‐level log directory ———
LOGDIR="$HOME/Library/Logs/git-auto-sync"
mkdir -p "$LOGDIR"
LOGFILE="$LOGDIR/sync.log"

on_error() {
    local exit_code=$?
    local lineno=$1
    local msg="ERROR on line $lineno (exit $exit_code)"
    echo "$(date '+%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S') ▶ $msg" >>"$LOGFILE"
    logger -t git-auto-sync "$msg"
    terminal-notifier \
        -title "🔥🤖🔥 git-auto-sync FAILED" \
        -message "See Console.app or $LOGFILE" \
        -sound default
    exit $exit_code
}
trap 'on_error $LINENO' ERR

{
    echo "=== Sync started at $(date '+%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S') ==="
    logger -t git-auto-sync "Sync started"
    cd "$HOME/notes"
    /opt/homebrew/bin/git-auto-sync s
    echo "=== Sync succeeded at $(date '+%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S') ==="
    logger -t git-auto-sync "Sync succeeded"
} >>"$LOGFILE" 2>&1

terminal-notifier \
    -title "🤖 git-auto-sync" \
    -message "Sync complete" \
    -sound default

It uses terminal-notifier to let me know things either worked:

… or didn’t:

I pinned both actions to the top of my Raycast window:

Left to its own devices, git-auto-sync does its thing every few minutes. This is just a way to know it’s safe to close the laptop if I’ve been working in my notes.

I really like Raycast. The number of supported apps in the store is pretty impressive, and there’s a nice SDK/API for making GUI tools. My work Asana is much easier to deal with when I can make a card without having to actually be in the Asana web app, and without having to deal with a plaintext syntax to express which project/board, who owns it, the deadline, etc.

I took it to see X a few weeks ago and it was fine from the front row. There was a guy standing a bit forward of me who also had an X100VI, and he was doing a lot of double-exposure stuff that involved waving the camera around for a slow exposure, then taking a faster one. I’m sure the effect is neat, but one drawback of the X100VI is that the rear panel doesn’t fold in, so if you’re a “preview via the rear panel” person, everyone’s getting a face full of that unless you turn off the rear display, which I will do once I remember all the possible combinations.

Anyhow, I got a lot of shots I was pretty happy with for being behind a rail, and the 40MP sensor lets you crop a ton.

I also took it to see Mutoid Man at the Twilight Cafe, and that was a much bigger win for the small size. It was a pretty crowded, excited room and I was pressed against the low stage, so I kept the camera close with an eye out for the mosh finding me. I guess, as that picture shows, I also liked that the small size let me do some discrete documentary shooting waiting for the show to start.

The stage at the Twilight Cafe was much less well lit than the Crystal Ballroom, and I keep auto ISO set to go as high as it needs while holding the shutter speed to 200. That meant an ISO of 3200 for most shots, which is noisy but fine for the subject matter.

I experimented a little with face detection AF and got mixed results. I was much closer to Steven Brodsky than I was Jeff Matz, and sometimes – maybe due to the lighting and motion – the AF would target Jeff, which wasn’t great with a wide open aperture. I think I may map one of the buttons to toggling that on and off if I see it getting flaky. I don’t tend to trust AF much beyond “set to a small point, set that point manually, don’t do subject detection.”

Then there was Silver Lake, who performed in a small bar/guitar shop. It was super crowded and I hadn’t meant to take many pictures, but Al asked me to for her friend. The light was mixed and it was super crowded so I had to shoot over peoples’ heads. I was glad for plenty of megapixels to crop because I was so far away, and I was glad for the small size because it was a pretty intimate setting and there was already a videographer at work. Face detection was much more reliable in that setting, too. Every now and then it sort of hunted between the lead singer and the bass player because they were right next to each other.

For both Mutoid Man and Silver Lake I could have brought along either my Olympus with its f1.4/20mm or my Fujifilm X-T5 with its f1.4/33mm and might have liked having a little more light-gathering, but the X100VI works fine for what I’m doing and doesn’t look threatening to security. I just want to work on quieting down that rear screen.

With emacs-plus, I think I’ve found the thing that most conforms to what I’m willing to be patient with. Enough so that I was able to make a simple Raycast launcher that wraps emacsclient -c --no-wait (and could easily make something similar for Alfred or just an Automator app) then hide the Emacs.app from possible completions, and I can get a fresh Emacs frame as close to instantaneously as I care to imagine, without a lot of hassle. I tossed in a quick osascript at the bottom of the Raycast launcher script to make sure my new frame gets focus right away.

Unlike running (server-start) inside my init file, the combination of emacs-plus and a service is immune to accidentally bonking my entire Emacs instance: The daemon still toils away in the background even with errant cmd-q’s. I know there are recipes for homegrown launchd services and that none of this is new. I guess the nice part is knowing that this is all packaged up and tested.

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:

Part 1. Content authoring vs. information management

When I wanted to do that with org-capture and Journelly, it just took this:

(after! org
(add-to-list 'org-capture-templates
'("j" "Journelly" entry (file "~/journal/Journelly.org") "* %U @ Home\n%?" :prepend t)))

… because org-mode provides a ton of infrastructure, including the ability to assume that if I tell an org-capture template to prepend to a given file, it will know to skip all the metadata at the top of the file and just plop the new level-1 entry on top of the top-most heading. Done. (Though I didn’t realize prepend was that clever, so I’ll just not show the eight or ten lines of lisp I thought I needed to do that with before Álvaro kindly straightened me out.)

I guess the thing about org-mode is that it’s not just a kind of markup, but is also an information management framework and its internal tooling has grown up to reflect that.

But when we take the use case of reverse-chronological posting to a Markdown journal, it can get dicey. The infrastructure really isn’t there, because at its core Markdown is just there to ease authoring, not management. I once ran a team of technical writers who struggled with The Markdown Revolution, because technical writers are also technical information managers who want to think in terms of efficient content reuse and refactored and recombined information. They ended up migrating to DITA (sit with that home page for a while), which was hugely alienating to the developer teams they worked with, but which allowed them to do stuff like localize their docs or effectively refactor documentation for a bunch of different kinds of presentation. I still grind my teeth on their behalf when I run into Markdown reductionists.

Anyhow, the reverse-chronological posting thing in Markdown:

There are three ways assorted Markdown systems I’ve come across handle how to set the title of a file.

YAML (or TOML) frontmatter:

---
title: "This pretty good file"
---

“The first H1 is implicitly the title”:

# This Pretty Good File

… and even one “piece it together from the slugified file name” case I spotted somewhere:

this-pretty-good-file.md

… which makes my gums itch.

All of those require some footwork to get a new Markdown H2 wedged into a file, and because Markdown is fragmented all to hell in part to solve information management problems it wasn’t designed to consider in the first place, there is no general-purpose solution. The best you can do is pick how you’re going to do it and build your tools accordingly.

In a situation where you’re making a logging tool, I imagine most people would just punt and append to a log file and live with chronologically-ordered entries. I happen to like reverse-chronological logs, so I made md-capture.el to recreate the org-capture experience in Markdown, and it is 105 lines of Emacs lisp that is to org-capture as a donkey in a dead lion’s pelt is to Aslan. If anything, md-capture convinced me that I should just use org-mode for any writing I care about and that needs to be part of a larger body of writing or interact with other parts of that body.

Part 2. You don’t have to care about any of that with Journelly

org-mode’s “problem,” to the extent it has one, is that it’s a creature of Emacs and lisp, so it inherits their marginalized status. It was sort of fun when Puppet started using Clojure, because overnight I started seeing Spacemacs start popping up on developer screens: lisp was back! As someone who’d been thinking of Emacs as home since 1992, I felt vindicated!

Talking to a Puppet product manager in the ensuing years, how much of a win that shift was for anyone is an open question: Even Puppet’s traditional Ruby foundation was a touch exotic for the average sysadmin who might also be willing to submit a PR, but was way more legible than Clojure. I don’t know if Puppet was cooling off anyhow, or if Clojure just made it impenetrable to would-be contributors, but the claim was made that community contributions to the core seemed to drop off with Clojure.

Well, anyhow, you don’t need to understand org-mode to get benefit from Journelly. This is the third tool Álvaro has made that bridges the world of org-mode with iOS, and does so in a way that lets “app people” just have an app they can use, while “org-mode people” can take advantage of the wider org-mode ecosystem if they so choose.

There are other org-mode “bridge” apps out there, but my observation has been that even with a touch-driven GUI they seem to prefer to expose the functionality in a way that is still visually anchored on org-mode as a way to markup text for information management. Journelly, along with Plain Org and Flat Habits, does a great good job of “just working” without needing to know about all the infrastructure available to you if you care to use it, and without making you deal with UI elements that want to remind you of their plaintext counterparts. Technically its use of hashtags probably counts as an extension of org-mode, since they’re not, as near as I understand, in the org-mode spec. In day-to-day use with standard Emacs tools, I’m not sure how much it matters.

So with Journelly we get an app that a non-Emacs person who just wants to have a flexible, elegant journaling tool can pick up and use: It has hashtags, you can add pictures to your entries, there’s search, etc. etc. and you don’t need to know about the plumbing that holds it all together. You still benefit, because if Álvaro announced tomorrow he was done with it and pulling it from the market, your stuff could be exported into a format that might not be popular but that is easily processed into something that is by Pandoc.

Part 3. Forgetting the plumbing helped me use Journelly better

So I mentioned that I’m not sure about the place of #hashtags in the org-mode specification.

“Tagging” in org-mode happens at the heading level:

** This is a sub-heading about particular fruits :grapefruit:citrus:

When you search for tags in assorted parts of the org-mode ecosystem, you are searching for :tag:, and :tag: occurs at the end of a heading.

The social-media-era #hashtag doesn’t exist in org-mode, so you don’t get any of the org-mode infrastructure benefits of using them in an org-mode file. They’re still perfectly searchable as a matter of being a string that starts with #, but org-mode has no place for them semantically. People have behaved unpleasantly to each other about this.

When I first picked up Journelly, I remember seeing the little # button, and not even knowing how to process it, because I knew Journelly was using org-mode underneath. So I ignored it. I was sort of excited that there was this very friendly journaling tool that I could use as a plain old mobile app, and that underneath it had this familiar, feature-rich format if I wanted to do something with my data in Emacs. In my mental model of how to use a tool that uses org-mode underneath, I was doing the same thing some other org-mode app designers have done, which is try to exist inside org-mode’s markup model.

I don’t even know why I decided to see what the # button would do. I think I had just downloaded the latest Testflight beta and maybe tags were mentioned. Maybe I was bored. So I tapped it and added some text and saved the entry. Oh … huh … that text had become a tappable link that listed my one entry with that #tag. So I went back to some past entries and stuck some tags in and proved to myself that #tags do something in Journelly that is technically a divergence from org-mode proper, but which are useful and intuitive in the app context.

It was the “technically a divergence from org-mode proper” part that stuck with me, because in the moment I had to make a decision, I guess:

Ignore #tags because they wouldn’t work quite like :tags: in Emacs, or accept them in the context of Journelly because they’re useful.

An exchange I’d had with Álvaro gave me another useful nudge. I was trying to solve the problem of how to edit my Journelly file from the desktop without blowing it up in a sync error, and sort of problem-solved my way into thinking it’d be interesting if Journelly could handle multiple files and maybe interleave them since the entries are all predictably time/date-stamped. He said he liked having a monolithic file because he could find everything with swiper searches. I’d never used it myself, but I had my Doom config going and it’s already wired up with SPC-s-s (or SPC-s-S to search for the thing at point), so I learned it’s a fuzzy search tool.

Well, there’s your “how a #hashtag would work in org-mode” solution: It’s just text. Use a native tool in the context of a monolithic journal. And there are plenty of other fuzzy search tools for multi-file search.

So I got unstuck on using hashtags in Journelly and decided Álvaro wasn’t trying to embrace/extend/extinguish org-mode to build his app empire.

Part 4. mindful journaling with hashtags

Which is what brings me to something I’ve never used a journal for before: Checking back in on how I think or feel about something, which I stumbled into.

Once I decided to start using hashtags in my Journelly entries, I wasn’t sure how to use them. Semantically, in a social media context, they are a discovery tool. I’ve read it recommended that if you’re using Mastodon you should really lean into them, because say what you will about the toxicity of algorithmic discovery, without it you need to figure out some other way to discover stuff.

I won’t use Microblog because it has taken the position that hashtags aren’t okay, and the one time I mentioned the discovery use case I got a snide “why is it so important to be discovered?” from the founder that was just … like … because I want my writing to be discovered by people who may share my interests or even express appreciation for my writing or photography or other endeavors. Why the fuck do you have a first and last name, asshole? For a period I wedged hashtags into my Microblog blog with a Hugo shortcode that linked to a Mastodon search for a given tag and a custom social posting feed that made sure the tags were injected into the description, but decided if a service has set aside a very basic and commonly understood tool for discovery because the founder thinks hashtags ruined Twitter, why bother?

So I was just putting tags on all sorts of things to see what would stick: People, moods, places, kinds of events, themes, etc. etc.

The most useful pattern to emerge was completely coincidental:

I was struggling to manage interactions with someone at work, to the point I was dreading every call or meeting. I had deeply internalized the idea that this person was impossible. If asked “what do you think of this person,” I’d have described someone who could not be worked with, would not respond to basic interpersonal communications strategies, and for whom I’d resigned myself to merely co-existing.

Over a few weeks, as I’d come out of meetings or interactions, I’d do my best to remember the positive parts of the interaction: Things where maybe they were their usual intransigent self, but had surprised me by showing up better, or responding well. But when talking about them over dinner, after work, my “they’re impossible” narrative would crowd out any in-the-minute observations.

Then one day, having just finished a post-meeting entry, I tapped on their name hashtag and got all my past entries where I’d mentioned them, and had a ton of evidence in front of me that for weeks I’d been seeing good things, positive signs, indications that they were not, in fact, impossible or hopeless. That most of the time they were showing up okay. The “omg nothing good came of that” entries were pretty sparse.

I guess if I were faced with a solid cube with no apparent openings that didn’t respond to anything I did to find out what was inside it, or a solid cube with a small number pad that required a eight-digit pin to open, I’d probably complain that seven digits is a documented boundary of our ability to memorize a string of digits, but would prefer that to not being able to open the cube at all. I would probably save the eight digits in 1Password or write them on a sticky or make a snippet of them.

Which is sort of what using hashtags for a difficult human being helped me do in Journelly.

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.

The Sublime distraction

While I was In the midst of thrashing around with Emacs configs I wanted to keep working on another project, so I dusted off Sublime Text to just keep moving while I worked through my feelings about Emacs (again). I’ve always had an uneasy relationship with it. I love that it’s fast and smooth and runs on everything in the house, Linux and Mac alike. I love that it’s got a good package ecosystem. I’m not a Python person, though, so if I had an itch to scratch in the form of making my own plugin for it, I’d be back at the bottom of the hill. I liked Textmate back when because I could write my own plugins in Ruby, and I like BBEdit for similar reasons: Text filters can be any scripting language.

But I’m not actually good at Emacs lisp. Not on the level of something like making lmno-blog-capture on my own. Instead I fire up whichever LLM I want to play with and go through a sort of iterative process of describing what I’d like to see happen, then testing it out, then layering on another idea, etc. etc.

That’s time that could be spent getting gud at Emacs lisp, I guess, but when I think about making that investment … it just doesn’t strike me.

I asked ChatGPT to translate lmno-blog-capture to a Sublime Text plugin for me, just to see the code side-by-side, and it was pretty legible. It also took zero iterations to have a working version. Getting an LLM to kick out working lisp on the first go is often hilarious, which makes sense.

Anyhow, nothing to do with it for now. I’ve got this emacs-plus setup in a good place, and there’s usually something that does what I want already in the ecosystem.

Update: I did go ahead and make a package out of the Sublime version because why not. There’s a package file you can download and install in the releases. It’s funny because it is just not my conception of Sublime Text that you’d live in it in this manner, but it seems completely right and proper that the exact same functionality would exist in Emacs.

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.

• 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.

I had a fork of the nb daily plugin anyhow so that I could have my preferred file-naming convention for daily notes using stock nb and I’ve added some configuration logic that lets people go a few ways:

• Use completely stock nb and its daily plugin in or out of cn. On first daily entry of the day, you get dropped into a command line where you can type in your first log.
• Use stock nb with the forked plugin and get the same behavior, but with a more readable file naming scheme.
• Don’t use nb and get the more readable file-naming scheme.

This is all managed with a new daily_format: setting that can be set to either nb or cn to drive how files are named.

Personally, I’m going to use the forked plugin so I can keep using nb for management and git syncing but have more legible filenames for daily notes.

You can install it from the command line with the URL and use it either in the context of cielagonote or just use it alone to pretty up your daily note filenames:

nb plugin install https://github.com/pdxmph/cielagonote/blob/main/extras/cn-daily.nb-plugin

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

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.

One bit of config logic: if you enable nb support, the editor cn invokes will be based on your nb setting, not what you configured in .cnconfig.yml. That’s just to be compliant with nb’s expected behavior to keep the underlying repo clean.

… and there’s one tradeoff: nb’s daily plugin expects you to just provide it with an input argument and logs the entry for you in the daily note. I wasn’t aware of the daily plugin when I started using nb and settled into my own daily-yyyy-mm-dd.ext convention. I think there’s a way to address the whole thing that leaves both approaches intact if you choose to turn on nb_support, but for now the README just says “don’t use the ^t keystroke if you’re using nb because it doesn’t honor the nb daily file naming convention.”

I think I’ll stop messing with it for a while now. It does what I want either as a standalone tool for anyone, or as a way to use nb with a slightly different twist on its native behavior. There is an fzf plugin for nb that gives you a fast way to access notes, cielagonote just adds a few conveniences so you can stay in its interface and manage notes a little more visually and a little less “dig up a number, enter a number” to do operations.

Update: Oops. Introduced a regression. 0.7 is the way to go:

Link

• 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.

The shift started with number distribution: A bit over 100 people lined up, and each got a token out of a plastic bin. The first person got number 1 and that made everybody laugh. The coordinator asked me to please keep an eye out for people slipping past the guy controlling the line to get a second number. Once the numbers were distributed, everyone came back into the area in front of the tent we were set up under and starting filing past.

I spent about an hour pointing to the spaghetti and rice bins and saying “this or that, only one” a lot. Some folks tried to grab both, and at first I’d say “oh, no … just one or the other” but the people on either side of me faced with similar situations just firmly took the second item out of their hands, so I started doing that.

There was a small ripple down the line when someone lifted a pound of white rice out of the bin and discovered a different kind of rice with a more colorful label and maybe more of it. That caused a few people to double back and swap their rice out. When I ran out of peanut butter to distribute one of the other volunteers dumped a box of small Nutella knock-off jars into the bin, which didn’t move super fast. Eventually, I was out of rice, but the Funyun station was in fine shape. I spotted a ton of extra boxes of that behind the line. Thanks, Funyun patron.

After distribution was mostly over a few people who couldn’t get numbers came through, then I helped break down the tents and haul what was left back to the supply room, then grabbed some gloves and disinfected all the meat storage tubs. The coordinator was curious about what I was doing there. Given the application process and time sheet, I guess some volunteers are fulfilling a community service obligation. I just explained that I’d searched for volunteer opportunities, wanted to support the Oregon Food Bank, and saw this location, which is just a five minute walk away. So I think I’ll be going back every Wednesday: I’m giving up my lunch and the company is giving me up from 1-2 in the afternoon.

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.

$ nb plugin install https://github.com/pdxmph/cielagonote/blob/main/extras/cn-daily.nb-plugin

$ nb help daily for usage, but nb daily 'log text' will get you going.

I think next up should probably be the config switch for “fully in the nb world” vs. “just doing your own thing.” That would just mean adding a line to the config file to set that switch and changing the behavior for:

• deleting notes
• renaming notes
• daily notes (to conform to the stock nb plugin)

… to use the stock nb commands for those things under the hood, which will trigger nb syncs and reduce the chances of collisions if you’re the type to walk away from an open buffer.

As a matter of tools therapy, I’m enjoying this little project. It all starts from the assumption that you shouldn’t care too much what you called the things you stuffed in the shoebox, you should just be able to find them, and you should be able to make new ones that might as well be consistently named but don’t have to be. That has created a sense of lightness in daily usage, even as I enjoy thinking about how to keep it all that simple but layer on ways to interact with it efficiently.

• 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.

I am probably not done adding stuff. Most of what’s in that list is stuff I got used to in Doom (in significantly less engineered form than you get there). I was mildly surprised to realize how much I’ve gotten used to evil, but after an hour of blundering around and leaving stray ^, $, x, and p in my documents, I broke down and installed it.

The net result of the whole thing today was one of feeling uncluttered. Like, there are things I never really learned how to do with Doom because there was so much to do, and because I couldn’t understand why it was doing some of what it was doing out of the box. The value of taking a step back and just putting back the things I noticed and liked includes knowing why things are doing what they’re doing, and feeling significantly less like my editor is a mysterious box of perils and wonders. And less like an attentional honeypot.

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.)

The problem with that idea was how cumbersome/tedious it was to upload things to SmugMug, grab the URL for the image, etc., so I made imgup to solve that: You just give it an image, a caption, and a title, and get back a link to the SmugMug-hosted image along with all the markup for copy/paste into a post, either as Markdown or HTML. There’s a history page with recent uploads, too.

I recently migrated it off of its Heroku hosting and into Docker on my Synology, and I’ve been especially glad for it since starting to blog on lmno, which offers no image hosting of its own, but I’ve also wanted to be able to run it as a CLI app, so this evening I got around to making that interface for it.

It just takes a --title and --caption along with a filename and returns a Markdown snippet:

$ imgup -t "Breakfast at Grits 'n Gravy" -c "Saturday morning breakfast" /Users/mph/Desktop/IMG_0627.jpg

![Breakfast at Grits 'n Gravy](https://pix.puddingtime.org/Uploads/n-47GBfb/i-CDnXqDV)

… which gives me this:

The home screen of the web interface:

… and recent uploads, with snippets ready for copy/paste as either HTML or Markdown image tags:

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.

So, re: fiddling around with micro to make it behave more like Emacs, the real problem I was trying to solve was how to get in and out of an editor quickly without dealing with a lot of infrastructure and assumptions.

So I moved my Doom Emacs config out of the way and made a very small one.

I know, I know. We’re in Battlestar Galactica territory. This has happened before, it will happen again: Then the layering on begins and soon we have a teetering edifice of bespoke config that becomes harder and harder to manage so we cry out for help to one of the frameworks to save us from ourselves.

I think the interesting thing about the past several days of iterating on cielagonotes is that once I had it into a useful state and was not only iterating on it but using it to jot things down, I felt sort of relieved. And once I found that fzf plugin, I felt even more relieved, because just typing nbf into a shell prompt and getting to what I wanted to get to felt like a reconnection with the problem I was trying to solve. I like some of the stuff I’ve added into cn, but that plugin solves the vast majority of the problem.

And it’s not that I don’t want an Emacs-class editor in the mix somewhere. As I was writing down some stuff I’d learned yesterday I found myself missing stuff you wouldn’t think twice about in an Emacs-class editor, but that isn’t really stuff you need massive infrastructure to achieve. Like inserting another file into the current buffer.

So, here we go again.

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.

So you just get the basic “fuzzy-searchin’ notes” thing:

• Start typing
• full-text search narrows your options
• Hit return to pick one and start editing or ^n to make a uniquified duplicate title for whatever reason I was worried about that.

It doesn’t do deleting or other management (yet).

There’s a config file:

notes_dir: ~/notes
default_extension: org
exclude_dirs:
  - denote_archive
  - .git
hide_hidden: true
editor: nb edit

If you set your editor to nb edit you can be assured your stuff is getting synced. Pick something else and it’ll just manage a directory of notes.

hide_hidden: just means “no dotfiles.” exclude_dirs means what it says.

One thing I probably ought to do is ask what file extensions you’d like to see. Since this is for me, it just has .org and .md hard-coded.

Down here way under the fold, probably also good and proper to note that this was mostly me fumbling around and getting help from ChatGPT. I knew the pieces I wanted to glue together, and I knew how I wanted it to behave, but it took a lot of prompting and nagging. And it’s not a new idea. I just couldn’t find anything that did exactly what I woke up imagining in a terminal.

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

1. 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.
2. 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.”

This has also been piquing my interest in micro. There are some good features there, and it is super fast from a standing start, but it feels less like a rabbit hole.

Oh, right: cn 0.2.0 is also set up as a gem now. That was sort of fun to figure out, too.

{
    "\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 …

Anyhow, I realized a few things got left out there, so here’s a gist with a more complete set including Emacs-style C-_ undo and Alt-< Alt-> top/bottom of the buffer.

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
}

Getting this to work with emacsclient wasn’t great, and in fact it does not work with emacsclient right now. I’ve been playing around with micro and that was great for getting this far with the experiment. Not sure I’ll keep it but one of the things I was trying to figure out when I stumbled across nb (again) was “has anyone done a TUI Notational Velocity”? I haven’t found anything like that, exactly, but it is pretty cool to me that with fzf, fd, and micro, you can get most of the way there with a zsh function.

Anyhow, I need to catch up on some stuff today.

# ~/.zsh/functions/znotes.zsh

zn() {
  local notes_dir=~/notes
  cd "$notes_dir" || return 1

  local files
  files=$(fd --type f --extension org --extension md --exclude denote . "$notes_dir") || return 1

  local file
  file=$( (echo "[New Note]"; echo "$files") \
          | fzf --prompt="Edit or create note: " \
                --preview='[[ {} == "[New Note]" ]] || bat --style=numbers --color=always --line-range=:100 {}') || return 1

  if [[ "$file" == "[New Note]" ]]; then
    echo -n "New note title: "
    read -r title
    [[ -z "$title" ]] && echo "Aborted: no title given." && return 1

    nb new --title "$title"
    echo "Note created. You can run \`nb list\` to see it."
  else
    nb edit "$file"
  fi
}

So log2file takes both of them and adds a few functions + Custom settings to add and remove files from your list of targets: No fiddling with your org agendas, no editing your config file if you decide to add a file as a target, and it speaks both Markdown and org, picking a log heading format based on the file extension, and enforcing the presence of either a first-line l1 heading or org #+TITLE: line based on the filename if it doesn’t find one.

I don’t think I’ll do much more with it. The point of embarkation on all this, as I sort of failed to come back around and make clear yesterday, was that I have a simple set of requirements:

• Keep it in plain text
• Favor a logging/journaling approach
• Avoid anything that feels fragile or complex

On that last point, almost everything these days feels fragile, where “fragile” is a function of:

• Depending on rigid formatting conventions (filename, metadata, inline syntax of any complexity)
• Depending on a specific app to interact with the data

… and from those requirements I didn’t feel like much of anything these days works for me. My grandmother once got very, very angry with my father for splurging on a $10 Christmas tree when we went home for the holidays, because she was a dirt-farming Depression survivor and frugality had been etched into her bones. I’ve just had seemingly simple shit break on me in a way that is stupidly and frustratingly disruptive when you suddenly realize the underlying complexity of the tools supporting the workflow is going to make it hard to just pick up with a text editor and no supporting automation.

So where I started with this was just a collection of yasnippet and Espanso snippets that aped the Journelly log format:

• Open a log file
• Trigger the snippet
• Enter the text
• Save/exit

But I was really inspired by org-capture, which wrings out a ton of the friction in routing text to a sensible endpoint. The problems with org-capture were:

1. org-mode dependent
2. Complex, in that it was beyond my skill to populate a custom list of targets, and I hated the idea of manually keeping a target list in a capture template.
3. org always beguiles me into more and more complexity and “just one more thing”

So this is a way to get some speed back into the interaction … no finding/opening/snippeting … but in a way that doesn’t leave me dependent on a bunch of fragile stuff.

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.”

And I’m feeling sort of engaged with the problem of “what’s just enough structure for the few notes I keep without freaking out and tipping over into Some Whole Paradigm,” because every time I tip over into Some Whole Paradigm I’m, like, “well now what?” All my brain power went to Learning the Whole Paradigm and I don’t have any left to do stuff I should be doing.

Citing inspirations

A few people and things have been inspiring for me on this week’s jaunt into plaintext living:

• I really dug an old take from Jack Baty on using Deft to manage little topical journals. Just, “make some files about topics, write logs in them.”
• I am really into lmno.lol maker Álvaro Ramírez’s Journelly. As an app it’s great, and as a concept it’s cool: Underneath the friendly iOS skin, it’s just dropping entries into an org file that you can also work with from a desktop machine if you like.
• lmno.lol itself is a variation on that theme: Just put a datestamped entry in a Markdown file that your entire blog lives in.

These things are all very simple to do. Jack’s approach just wants text files. They could even be just text files with no markup.

Journelly has to have some markup, and it is a whole app that relies on a ton of assumptions about how to move files around over a network, etc. but if your phone broke and all you had was, like, nano, you could keep on journaling.

lmno.lol? Your whole blog is in a single Markdown file. You have to know the date and the “#” key, and you’re in business.

How it all went to hell

Let’s travel back in time to, like, 2004 or so:

Danny O’Brien gives a talk describing “life hacks,” the spirit of which is probably best captured by Cory Doctorow’s contemporaneous notes. Everyone went bananas over the idea that you’re really better off not complexifying the shit out of everything, then set about complexifying the shit out of everything.

I mean, we’re dealing with a population that does the whole knowledge work thing, and a distinguishing characteristic of knowledge workers is that they spend a lot of time learning and living in systems. We have the whole idea of a professional managerial class:

“… salaried mental workers who do not own the means of production and whose major function in the social division of labor may be described broadly as the reproduction of capitalist culture and capitalist class relations.”

It was once suggested to me that where “professional” once meant “a job where someone could get sued for malpractice” (doctors, lawyers, architects), it has come to mean “someone who is reliably aligned with the values of the capitalists they work for and behaves in a manner that is comfortably predictable to capitalists.”

Point is, tech industry people live within kind of complex systems: They have to manage complex models to do their actual productive work, and they have to navigate complex functional relationships to deliver things. I still get a little swimmy in the head when I think about one place I worked deciding to embrace Scaled Agile, and I get outright nauseated when I remember a dear friend excitedly talking about “taking the whole business Agile. All of ’em! Especially the marketing team!”

So they can’t really be expected to keep things simple. Part of their value is in their ability to behave predictably when confronted with complexity, so they have to like it at least a little.

So I’m stealing

I’m not sure where I’m going to end up, but I do know at this point:

• Plain text files are good.
• I’ve had success in the past with variations on interstitial journaling, which is what Jack’s idea is most like.
• I really took to the “stick something in a file and keep moving” opportunity Journelly afforded me.
• I don’t want to live in a single text file for everything, but I do want to live in a few text files for most of the things.
• I don’t mind investing some time in a little automation to make it faster to do this kind of stuff with text.

org or Markdown

What I’m really not sure about at this point is the question of doing it in org-mode files or Markdown.

org pros:

• It’s a little easier to add a light layer of metadata to content.
• That metadata layer is optional.
• At its simplest, org is as simple as Markdown

org cons:

• There’s so much there in the way of opportunities to complexify the living shit out of it
• Despite a few things like Plain Org, there are not a lot of ways to work with it without Emacs.

Markdown pros:

• It’s everywhere.
• Weirdly, even though there are ways to make it more complex, they almost always suck because there are so many variants that nobody ventures much past the basic spec + a few niceties like checkbox lists when building tools for it, and those extensions are often hideous to look at. They really damage the readability. (org does this, too, but it has things like properties drawers to hide some of that)
• Yes, the previous bullet is a “plus,” because Markdown is sort of antagonistic to much complexity and I think that’s good: I’m a knowledge-workin’ PMC dillhole, too.

Markdown cons:

• Wedging metadata into it is sort of a challenge outside maybe adopting an inline hashtag convention or bolting YAML/TOML frontmatter on (which not all tools will deal with well.)
• Eventually you’ll end up thinking “fuck it, might as well do this in Obsidian,” and then all hell breaks loose: Welcome to “org mode without Emacs, just in an Electron app, but with Markdown.”

Not sure what I’m gonna do, but in a little frenzy of ChatGPT co-piloting, I did come up with a few ways to make life in a few plaintext silos easier:

• org-topic-log just pops open an org-capture-like window that lets you select from any agenda files that have #+FILETAGS: topic in the frontmatter. You can pick any word you like for the filetag. Super simple to invoke it, drop in a log entry, and keep going.
• md-capture does the same thing, except Markdown doesn’t have all the infrastructure org-mode does, so you can either tell it “just use anything in this directory” (messier and messier over time) or specify a file list (a hassle to manage if you make new topics a lot).

I’m just wavering on whether to do it with Markdown knowing, I will regret any attempts to make those notes more complex, or org because it might be nice to have a few of its conventions (knowing its portability will nosedive the more of them I embrace).

Also: This post written with lmno-blog-capture. If you have an lmno.lol blog you can just put it in your load path. If you want to keep up with it, you can add it to Doom’s packages.el:

package! lmno-blog-capture :recipe (:host github :repo "pdxmph/lmno-blog-capture"))

I used to have a bunch of conditional logic in config.org to manage all this, but it was sort of a pain to pick through when adding a machine, so I wanted to isolate the individual machine configurations a little. I’m guessing it could be useful for other stuff in the future, but for now it handles some appearance stuff.

For by-host configs, I added this to my config.org:

(let ((hostname (system-name)))
  (let ((hostname-file (expand-file-name (concat hostname ".el") doom-private-dir)))
    (when (file-exists-p hostname-file)
      (load-file hostname-file))))

That just looks for a file in my Doom directory with the hostname.el naming convention.

A sample hostname.el file looks like this:

(setq doom-font (font-spec :family "Fira Code" :size 14.0 :weight 'medium))
(setq mixed-pitch-set-height 15)
(set-face-attribute 'default nil :family "Fira Code" :height 140)
(set-face-attribute 'fixed-pitch nil :family "Fira Code")
(set-face-attribute 'variable-pitch nil :family "Helvetica Neue")

(setq initial-frame-alist
      '((width . 171)
        (height . 66)
        (left . 728)
        (top . 166)))

(setq default-frame-alist
      '((width . 171)
        (height . 66)
        (left . 728)
        (top . 166)))

The initial-frame-alist and default-frame-alist dimensions came from this function:

(defun my/print-frame-setup-snippet ()
  "Print a config snippet for setting the current frame size and position."
  (interactive)
  (let* ((w (frame-width))
         (h (frame-height))
         (pos (frame-position))
         (l (car pos))
         (top-pos (cdr pos)))
    (with-temp-buffer
      (insert (format "(setq initial-frame-alist\n      '((width . %d)\n        (height . %d)\n        (left . %d)\n        (top . %d)))\n\n"
                      w h l top-pos))
      (insert (format "(setq default-frame-alist\n      '((width . %d)\n        (height . %d)\n        (left . %d)\n        (top . %d)))"
                      w h l top-pos))
      (kill-new (buffer-string))
      (message "!!! Frame setup snippet copied to clipboard! Paste it into your config.el."))))

So, set the Emacs frame up the way you want, then run that function, and paste it into hostname.el.

ox-hugo lets you keep a monolithic org file where each post is an org heading:

** SyncTrain for Syncthing on iOS :syncthing:ios:iphone:
:PROPERTIES:
:EXPORT_FILE_NAME: 2025-04-20-synctrain-for-syncthing-on-ios
:EXPORT_HUGO_DATE: <2025-04-20>
:EXPORT_DATE: 2025-04-20
:EXPORT_HUGO_SECTION: blog
:EXPORT_HUGO_CUSTOM_FRONT_MATTER+: :cover '((image ."" ) (caption . "" ))
:EXPORT_HUGO_CUSTOM_FRONT_MATTER+: :images '(/mph-logo.png)
:EXPORT_DESCRIPTION:
:END:

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.

If a heading is marked as TODO, that translates to “draft” for Hugo. If you use org tags in the heading :tag1:tag2: those become post tags.

If you set up org-capture and a few hooks correctly, it takes a lot of friction away by exporting the Markdown files when you save the file.

Something has changed since I was last using it regularly, and some bugs crept into my setup. I was willing to live with a few of them, but last night I came across some goofy thing where Hugo’s Markdown renderer (goldmark) and ox-hugo were interacting strangely, and the org-to-markdown conversion was indenting unordered lists enough that goldmark picked them up as indented code blocks. I did some poking around and saw that a lot of people have been vexed by that: goldmark uses the CommonMark specification, which includes indented code blocks, and goldmark offers no toggle for it as a workaround.

How many seconds do we have of this precious life?

I do like working out of Emacs and not switching around to do stuff, so I found an old Ruby script I wrote to make generating a Hugo post with all the stuff particular to my setup and worked with a co-pilot to convert it to a lisp package.

When you invoke hpost-new it prompts for whether to follow the “daily” or regular post style, then asks for title, tags, and description, then plops the new file into the right place and opens it for editing.

This goes in ~/.config/doom/lisp:

;;; hpost.el --- Create new Hugo posts from Emacs  -*- lexical-binding: t; -*-

;; Adjust this to point at your Hugo or ox‑hugo content directory.
(defcustom hpost-posts-dir "~/blog/content/posts/"
  "Directory where new Hugo posts are written."
  :type 'directory :group 'hpost)

(defun hpost--slugify (title)
  "Convert TITLE to a URL‑friendly slug."
  (let* ((s (downcase title))
         (s (replace-regexp-in-string "[^a-z0-9]+" "-" s))
         (s (replace-regexp-in-string "^-\|-$" "" s)))
    (truncate-string-to-width s 60 nil nil ""))) ; hard cap at 60 chars

(defun hpost--today () (format-time-string "%Y-%m-%d"))
(defun hpost--now   () (format-time-string "%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S%z"))

;;;###autoload
(defun hpost-new (title tags summary &optional daily)
  "Create a new Hugo post.

Interactively prompts for TITLE, TAGS (comma‑delimited), and SUMMARY.
With prefix arg, treat it as a daily note (pre‑sets title and tags)."
  (interactive
   (let* ((daily (y-or-n-p "Daily note? "))
          (title (if daily
                     (format "Daily notes for %s" (hpost--today))
                   (read-string "Title: ")))
          (tags  (if daily "journal"
                   (read-string "Tags (comma): ")))
          (summary (read-string "Summary: ")))
     (list title tags summary daily)))
  (let* ((slug    (if daily "daily-notes" (hpost--slugify title)))
         (fname   (concat (hpost--today) "-" slug ".md"))
         (path    (expand-file-name fname hpost-posts-dir)))
    (when (file-exists-p path)
      (user-error "File %s already exists" fname))
    (with-temp-buffer
      (insert (format
"---
title: \"%s\"
date: %s
draft: true
tags:%s
summary: \"%s\"
---

" title (hpost--now)
        (mapconcat (lambda (t) (format "\n- %s" (string-trim t)))
                   (split-string tags ",") "")
        summary))
      (write-region (point-min) (point-max) path))
    (find-file path)
    (message "New post created: %s" path)))

(provide 'hpost)
;;; hpost.el ends here

… and the config:

;; --- Hugo post helper ---------------------------------------
(use-package! hpost
  :load-path "lisp/"
  :defer t
  :custom
  (hpost-posts-dir "~/blog/content/posts/")
  :config
  ;; Optional keybinding:  <leader> n h
  (map! :leader
        (:prefix ("n" . "notes")
         :desc "New Hugo post" "h" #'hpost-new)))

It goes well with a few helpers I made to fire up or shut down the Hugo preview server within Emacs:

(defun my-start-hugo-server ()
  "Run Hugo server with live reloading."
  (interactive)
  (let* ((root (projectile-project-root))
         (default-directory root))
    (compile "hugo server -D --navigateToChanged" t)))

(defun my-stop-hugo-server ()
  "Stop Hugo server."
  (interactive)
    (kill-compilation))

(map! :leader
      (:prefix ("H" . "Hugo")
       :desc "Start Hugo Server" "S" #'my-start-hugo-server
       :desc "Stop Hugo Server" "s" #'my-stop-hugo-server))

So, SPC H S to start the test server, and SPC n h to start a new post. When I save the buffer, the preview server jumps to the newly written page in the browser.

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.

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.)

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.

And Denote has its very cool org-mode dblocks: You can use a regexp to pull files matching a certain pattern into a dynamically updating block to create things the Zettelkasten folks might call a MOC, Prot refers to as “metanotes,” etc. I have made a set of index files on high-level areas I tagged with “topic,” so a Denote dblock with this syntax:

#+BEGIN: denote-links :regexp "_topic" :not-regexp nil :excluded-dirs-regexp nil :sort-by-component nil :reverse-sort nil :id-only nil :include-date nil

… will dynamically create an index of links to all my “topic” notes, and within each of them I can make Denote dblocks that pull in notes with their tag.

In the context of Gollum, or even just an entry point into my notes collection, that means my Home page can provide a dynamic index of topic notes as I create them. Except, of course, the whole problem that a Denote dblock uses its custom denote: link scheme, and Gollum can’t understand that.

You can manually use Denote’s denote-org-convert-links-to-file-type command to convert those links to standard file: links, but I’m forgetful and hate the thought of having to remember to do it. So I fixed it with a .dir-locals.el file that does it for me with a pre-save hook:

((org-mode . ((eval . (add-hook 'before-save-hook
                                #'denote-org-convert-links-to-file-type
                                nil t)))))

So I can update my topic pages, save them, the hook runs for me, and I can push into the Gollum repo. I get to keep all of Denote’s convenience features around link-making, backlink lists, etc, and Gollum knows what to do with it all.

It’s even more annoying now that I’ve got an Android-based DAP, and the Syncthing client I’ve got running on that to keep my music files in sync comes with options like “don’t do this over cellular connections,” “don’t do this when you’re not connected to power,” and a few other things that let you just sort of manage for yourself and accept the potential tradeoffs.

Today I came across SyncTrain, which is going to have a lot of the same problems anything that should be running in the background all the time(ish) on iOS is going to have, but includes a nice workaround: You can make an Apple Shortcut to give it a nudge to sync for 10 seconds if it fell asleep on the job. That’s enough to check in with other nodes and pull in changed stuff. Since everything is on Tailscale, it ought to work wherever I have connectivity.

I’m going to try it out to manage my org-mode todo lists and inbox via Plain Org, which can read files off the device storage.

I’ve tried a few other things:

SMB shares on my NAS via Files.app. That has worked somewhat well, but there are occasional permissions freakouts.

sftp shares via Blink Term via Files. Also permissions freakouts.

iCloud, which is sort of mysterious (and not available to my Linux machines)

Besides letting you nudge it, the UI for Synctrain is pretty nice. It’s clean and native-looking. If you thought Mobius was all there was, SyncTrain is worth a look.

Senior leadership has taken a position that it’s not time to communicate, but big changes appear to be coming. Nobody knows what’s going on.

“How are you dealing with it?” I asked.

“Well, everybody’s worried. We’re planning for a bunch of scenarios so we know what to do and can get moving when we know what to do.”

“How’s the team handling it?”

“Not well. They’re worried and I can’t tell them what’s going to happen, so they keep spinning out on worst-case scenarios.”

“So instead of doing their jobs they’re planning for how to deal with their jobs changing, even though they don’t know how they’re going to change, and they’re making themselves sick anticipating the worst?”

“Well what else are they supposed to do?”

“Their current jobs.”

“What am I supposed to do?”

So, when I was still a private in Korea I was the First Sergeant’s driver. One day during a field problem we decided to pay an unannounced visit to one of our hilltop sites. We took the morning, drove up the mountain, and arrived just after lunch.

It was a pretty standard FM retransmission site: High on the hill, set up in an old concrete bunker. Two OE-254 mast antennas, someone sitting on radio watch, a few people playing cards over in the corner. The rest of the squad were in their cots when we got there. One of the card players got up and shrugged on his BDU jacket and told everyone Top was here. The cook offered us plates of leftovers. The site chief came out wiping the sleep from his eyes and gave Top a briefing.

We kept the visit brief and headed back down the hill.

“What did you think, PFC Hall?”

“Pretty bad, First Sergeant.”

“Bad?”

“I guess they had a radio watch … but half of them were napping! The two who weren’t were playing cards! Pretty bad site discipline.”

“What did you think they were supposed to be doing?”

“It’s a field problem! Be ready!”

“Ready for what?”

“I don’t know … range control to call in an incoming attack.”

“That’s what radio watch is listening for.”

“Well they should still be ready.”

“They were. Good soldiers know when to sleep.”

A recent tasks-n-notes tool spinout felt like the liminal moment between deep sleep and awakening to some disturbance. That sense before you’re fully conscious that there is something going on, but your consciousness hasn’t engaged with it yet. It’s just a weird externality in whatever dream you’re having. It was gnawing at me by the time all was said and done.

There are times when I feel okay with all the screwing around and futzing, but things have been hectic recently and I was spending my discretionary time fucking around with tools. I’m not gonna go into the why of it, but once the week had wrapped I had some clarity.

However, one thing I was doing, or at least outcome that was happening was that as I was slowly waking up to the fact that I was deferring a serious conversation with myself, I was reminded that I used to do really well when I journaled. I’ve taken several approaches to that over the years:

• Essay-length writeups about what’s going on in my head
• Quick little notes during the day about whatever passed through my field of view
• Letters to myself at the beginning and end of the day
• A “what’s going well/what’s not going well/what’s the big task for today?” morning exercise

All are fine. All work better or worse depending on what’s going on with me.

But the idea I came across was what everyone seems to be calling “interstitial logging,” which is really just … logging?

(8:00a) Looking at the calendar. It’s going to be busy.
(9:00a) ITENG standup. Someone needs to look at the Meraki/Envoy thing
(9:33a) Caught a ping about the Zoom renewal. Need to find the MSA from last time.

Some people like to toss todos in. Other people seem to just have a little diary.

I picked it up partially because I remembered that diaries help me focus and clarify what matters, and partially because I was so busy trying to figure out where to put all the stuff that I had to do that I was afraid I’d miss something if I didn’t write down everything in the simplest form possible.

Brief digression about how I’d like to behave for a bit

I’m consciously not going into how or where I decided to keep my log. Just the process of figuring that out was slightly agonized and wasteful. It’s enough to say it was sort of a grand tour of everything I’ve played around with in the last … 10 or 13 years? To write down little time-stamped notes? The meta got pretty vertiginous by the time I was done.

I did end up making myself pick something though, and it is sufficient to this narrative to say “it is just fine for writing down little time-stamped notes.” More than fine, because you could do that with any number of things, some backed by extensive cloud resources, some operating in a container on a Synology, some running on a way over-provisioned desktop machine, some, like … 3x5 cards or a giveaway vendor swag notebook or a legal pad. I picked something in between “an expensive subscription SaaS” and “the blank side of a piece of cardboard I tore off a soda can case.”

I want this to be the last time for at least a while that I comment on the tools I am using for keeping myself in order. For a few reasons:

1. After watching enough videos from people who desperately want to be tools influencers I am saturated and tired of the entire frivolous scene. Nobody should take tools advice from people whose job it is to write about tools. I say this as a former tech journalist who wrote an ungodly number of articles about tools whose efficacy I could attest to because look at how prolific I was writing about tools.
2. As with a few other creative endeavors I share, I could begin to feel the distorting effects of getting attention for the stuff I was writing about and resenting the effect it was having on me. Like, it was super cool to get a few links from an Emacs eminence, and it blew up website traffic, and I was reminded that I don’t do well with that kind of feedback.
3. There are other things that are more important to me than documenting how I tortured an AI into writing some lisp for me.

I write all this down as a sort of accountability exercise with the ever-shifting procession of faces coming in and out of focus that I think of as “whoever’s going to read this.” I am not sure who that will be because I ripped all the analytics out of my site. For at least a while, I don’t want to know.

So back to what I was saying:

I started keeping my “interstitial log.”

At first there was a little ocean boiling: How do I account for tasks? Do I use this tool or that tool? Which markup format?

I made myself knock all that off and landed on “just make a date heading, then make timestamped entries and write something when it occurs.”

Even then, for a bit the entries were about writing entries. Throat clearing. Like a dog circling its bed 20 times before it finally lies down.

But things began to improve. The entries were what they were meant to be. I got rid of an overoptimization I allowed to creep in (elaborate todo stuff) in favor of making a little annotation either for a thing I wanted to come back to and rethink later, or manually transfer to my task inbox.

The equilibrium I’ve come to is more or less “keep an outline of the day, annotate for followup/recapture, allow the outline to take shape, make sure to sweep it all up to end the day, because you’re starting a new log tomorrow and don’t want to forget anything.”

Looking at a stretch of logs, I feel a lot of affection for them. They’re easy to scan. I can see all the stuff that happened. At the end of the day, because I have made it easy on myself, I can collect everything up that needs to be sorted and take a moment to do that with care, teeing up the next day.

I would like to stick with it for a while for the same reason I buy my underwear, socks, and t-shirts from three single sources, and have in the last few years bought multiples of other things that work for me but are subject to the vagaries of global supply chains and profit-squeezing sourcing fuckery: If it works, just go with that and remove another thing from the list of things you think about.

The tool isn’t why you work.

The process isn’t why you work.

The outcome is why you work.

Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism has left a lasting impression with me. A lot of his ideas around technology were incredibly useful and helped me come down from some kind of lockdown-inspired extremism into something a little more grounded, and a little less bingey. Whenever I’m in the grips of meta/tool-sickness, once I figure out that’s what’s going on I’ve probably forgotten something useful from that book.

He has a podcast, but I don’t listen to it much. A recent epidsode, however, had some stuff about note-taking and I have been deep in the grips of fussing around with that so I used it for my dishwashing and coffee making soundtrack this morning.

His key take is “get rid of friction,” which … yes. Back in the heyday of 43 Folders, most of my impatience came less from the content itself and more the constant riffing on “methodologies” that sounded more and more abstract, overthought, and overwrought. I just stopped believing any of it. Because there are only a few occurrences of the word “yarn” in my 20-year-old blog archive, I was able to find an entry in the non-public archive:

Date: November 14, 2005 at 10:05:06 PM PST

I’ve never hit a gtd adherent. I need to be up front about that.

I thought about picking fights with a few, I guess, but it’d involve barging into the comments over at 43 Folders like Bruce Lee in “Fist of Fury” and fighting with people who want little more than to be more efficient and get more work done. They don’t deserve to be antagonized for that.

Sometimes I read a comment from someone who insists that his routine involves some insanely arcane and convoluted use of yarn and a special shell script he whipped up that reads crap down from his Backpack account and then squirts it into his Palm, makes a redundant backup on the server he maintains in Malaysia and produces printed 3x5 copies in triplicate, one of which he pins to his infant son’s sleeve before leaving for the morning (“If I died, I couldn’t live with him thinking his father went out the door without an action list and a plan!”).

Sometimes, I was saying, I read something like that and I want to find that person and give him a noogie or burn two of his four backup copies. One, because I imagine that the “system” being described is a giant lie concocted by someone caught up in the thrill of inventing systems instead of actually, you know … using them to get stuff done. Two, because if these people are making these systems work for them then they’re surely VERY POWERFUL BEINGS we should hate and fear because we’re all going to end up working for them.

Newport’s take in 2024 is a little more kind, but comes down to “if you like building systems, build ’em, but, like, acknowledge that you’re indulging a hobby.”

He shared another idea I’ve come to appreciate in slightly different form: While you want to remove friction from the note-taking process, it’s not a great idea to hyper-atomize your notes and truly empty your brain of ideas in the hopes that The System will glue them all back together.

There is such a thing as too little friction. Whenever I’m playing around with a todo thing now I seldom enable “quick capture” or “get this into the system by forwarding an email into it” unless my overall operating state is pretty mindful and deliberate, because I know what it means to capture something without considering it much. At best, congratulations, you’ve just added a puppy to the box without a plan for feeding it or taking it to the vet for shots. At worst, it slips into the bowels of The System and becomes an ongoing source of guilt until you burn the system down and start a new one. The remedies for those possibilities just add more friction at point of capture (so great, you managed to launch capture with a single keystroke, but you still have a metadata chore), or require a disciplined maintenance approach.

That is todos, which are not notes, but the challenges seem similar. I’d also have to fiddle around with org-roam and a few other systems a little more to weigh how much discovery they offer at point of capture. He was wise to keep his criticisms vague, because differing feature sets + extensibility makes generalizing fraught.

I will say that mastering org-capture was a mistake for me, personally, because it became too easy to create a proliferation of atomized, siloed entry points into the system. Friction is a sweet spot thing, and I still struggle to find that sweet spot.

Dune

I rewatched Dune last night to feel prepped for the second part. Initial reviews for the new release have seemed positive, saying that it reaps the rewards of the world-building and groundwork done in the first installment.

I didn’t like part 1 very much. It was fine, but the break-point didn’t work for me and there was just enough deviation from the source material right around that part of the story that I got distracted by it.

That was a bummer, because I’d built the coviplex partially in anticipation of Dune, but between streaming issues that made the picture quality poor and not-unseeable differences of opinion, it was a little bit of a letdown.

Last night it worked much better for me. I was able to shut off the part of my brain that was busy reconciling source and adaptation, and the picture quality was way better thanks to a solid stream, so I caught more. I’d still prefer some slightly different choices here and there, but this is an adaptation of a book I read yearly from age 13 to some time in my 30s. And, tomorrow this time I will be parked in the theater finishing the story. Not watching the (occasionally glitchy, low-res) credits roll and thinking “nobody’s even sure he’s going to get to make part 2.”

Running shoes day

Al wants to start running. I told myself I’d pick it up again when I got my weight down. Well, it’s down and I’ve got a potential running partner. So we’re going to find running shoes today. I do well with Brooks Addictions, but they have changed a few times over the years. I’ve really liked my Hoka Speedgoats for fast walks and hikes on less technical terrain. Curious to see what the shoe people recommend. Anyhow, looking forward to trying to pick that back up again. Endurance running is the physical thing I seem to be built to do competently without a ton of focus, and it’s time to shake off winter.

I have been giving Commafeed a try as my self-hosted RSS service. It’s got a very simple presentation, decent keyboard shortcuts, presents the Fever API to RSS clients like Reeder, and has filtering capabilities (though I am having some challenges understanding their ins and outs).

The main issue I have with it is its somewhat limited set of sharing options, but that actually helped me decide to decommission Wallabag (which is not one of them). I’ve found that pretty slow and not as easy to deal with as Pocket across platforms. I wanted to like it, but it’s hard to justify for a kind of tool I’m glad to have but don’t feel a deep attachment to. So I’m switching back to Pocket, and Commafeed works just fine with that.

Stories for Tiddlywiki

The Stories plugin for Tiddlywiki lets you create a second column and divert tiddlers to it so you can have things side-by-side. I don’t use it much for my personal wiki, but for my work wiki it’s a great way to have my interstitial journal sitting open and ready in one column, and my active tiddler open in another.

This appears to be the closest to a link I can find.

Fujifilm X100VI

I am not made of stone. I preordered one. I took my X100V to San Francisco a few months ago for a work trip and renewed my affection for the series. As with Portland, I much prefer the X100s to a larger ILC for street carry. I did keep thinking, as we walked around Chinatown at night, “man, I wish this thing had IBIS.” I still liked the shots I got, but you’re managing harder tradeoffs. With any luck I didn’t preorder too late to get one before next September, but we’ll see.

I’ve long held that the X100 series could stop iterating once it had weather resistance (solved with the V) and IBIS (solved now with the VI). I suspect a faster lens would make the bulk unacceptable, so I will not hold my breath on that one. I’d like the series to match up batteries with the X-T series, too, but that might be another bulk issue, and I have accrued a collection of the WP-126S batteries between the X100F and X100V, so I’m set. I have a very thin Wasabi charger that’s great for travel. During my SF trip I had all-day walking around juice on the battery in the body and a pair of spares at the bottom of my sling.

I wonder if the X-Pro series ended with the X-Pro3. I liked mine a lot but also felt like the “anti-chimping” display was a little gimmicky, and it didn’t have IBIS. Returning to a normal rear panel of some kind and IBIS would be great, but I’m good with the X-T5 and not so hung up on the rangefinder-esque design that I’d run out and buy an X-Pro4. And if I did, I’d slap my nice 23mm on it and have … an X100 but a little bigger and more conspicuous and a few stops faster. Nope. I think the X100VI has the makings of a desert island camera.

Work

Today was IT steering committee day. I was asked if I thought my crew does more or less than traditional IT. Interesting question. My current place sells SaaS, my last place had a lot of on-prem estate (and a hyper-overbuilt network given the size and nature of the business).

At my last place I presided over the last of a desultory teasing apart of corporate IT and something we called “SRE” for a period before settling on “developer services.” For reasons I will avoid enumerating, we had some struggles with that teasing apart that persisted over four years – I left engineering, did IT, went back to engineering, then went back to IT one more time. Each time I’d chip at the problem from my new perch. It all came down to loosening some death grips in IT, reassuring corporate security that the engineers wouldn’t wrap the car around a tree, and eventually just being a little bit of a prick with the one remaining IT person who felt it right and proper to require security engineering to petition for log dumps so they could audit their own services.

“If you make him give them self-serve access to Splunk, he’ll quit,” warned the manager I had over that team.

“Well, good. He needs to be this tall to ride. If he can’t handle letting people see logs for their own services, this is probably for the best.”

I wrote a memo (the only “Mike uses his directorial ex-cathedra voice” memo I’ve ever written) explaining that everyone needed to be this tall to ride. He couldn’t handle it and quit. Wasn’t tall enough to ride.

Anyhow, I have a lot less complexity to deal with at the current place. There are still some weird “why does this route through IT” issues that pop up, but they’re pretty easily resolved by visiting my security colleagues and asking “did we do this for a reason” (seldom) and then asking engineering “would you like to remove me as an external dependency?” (usually, but sometimes I wonder if they think I’m trying to trick them).

What it amounts to is an interesting inversion of value. When I presented today about the year’s big initiatives it was mostly about portfolio governance, access management, and providing administrative uplift to the vendor management process. We still have to deal with traditional IT admin stuff, but it’s pretty contained. Not nearly as sprawling and perilous as it was at the last place.

Anyhow, “traditional for where” is the real answer. I’m glad to be doing my job in a context and era where the parts that are simple and the parts that are complex have sort of shifted around.

I fiddled around with Workflowy a while back, and it has been in the back of my head, since. There is something about the whole outliner thing that is compelling, but when I see examples from people who are heavy outliner users in the wild I get this sense there’s a sweet spot between “useful chunking of information” and “stilted and hard to consume/digest,” and … we all have different cognitive styles, I guess is all I’ll say.

As near as I’ve been able to piece together some ideas out there in note-taking land, I’d like my personal notes setup to involve:

• A daily log
• A daily personal task list
• The ability to digress from the log

I’d like my log to be somewhat structured, meaning timestamped entries of a consistent format.

I don’t care if my personal task list for the day has much metadata, because we’re closer to the “shopping list” end of the spectrum than the “project management” list. I guess it can have no metadata besides “have I done it yet.”

Digressing from the log doesn’t mean much besides, “is it easy to think of something, quickly make a new node/page/tiddler and start typing.”

The apparent term of art for all this stuff is “intersitial logging.” That is fewer syllables than “keep track of what you’ve done during the day,” but has the benefit of higher syllabic density.

An outliner is a pretty good tool for those things because it brings some structure, favors the terse, and frees you from worrying about managing the arrangement of the text in favor of managing the arrangement of the content.

Outlining with Streams

Digging around for outliners for Tiddlywiki I came across Streams, which sticks a little outliner widget in each Tiddler. Click the “+” button, and you’re in a node in your outliner. Tab to indent, shift-tab to outdent, grab the nodes by their handles to reorder. Each node, in turn, is its own Tiddler.

I am not entirely sure how I feel about that last part, and if it were not for a filter you can apply to your sidebar to hide all the subtiddlers Streams produces in the open and recent lists, I am pretty sure I would hate it. But you can drop some code into the sidebar shaddow Tiddler to clean all that up and only see the root of a stream.

There’s enough there to play around, anyhow.

I made a simple Espanso trigger to timestamp my log entries:

# Make a timestamp
  - trigger: ":log"
    replace: "''[{{mydate}}] '' "
    vars:
      - name: mydate
        type: date
        params:
          format: "%r"

So, open a new node in the outline, type :log, start typing.

Finding the escape hatch with Streams Fusion

Because I’m a nervous soul who is always wondering how to back out of things like this, there’s also the Streams Fusion plugin, which gives you a little icon at the bottom of a stream to merge all the sub-nodes in a stream into a single, unified chunk of text.

That’s cool, because in a daily log you can be creating a proliferation of digressions and sidebars, not all of which qualify as full-fledged chunks of thought or interesting directions. So, click that button at the end of the day and all the nodes in the outline are turned into normal markup (links intact, if you added any) that looks like an outline, but all the child tiddlers from the root are removed and nodes you linked in a digression become backlinks to the newly merged daily log.

Alternately, you can turn the outline nodes into simple paragraphs. This morning I came across something while I was reading, started outlining, said all I’d had to say about that stream of thought, and went ahead and merged it all into a normal tiddler.

In evolving practice I don’t know whether I’ll fuse many daily pages or not. The part of me that doesn’t like the underlying sprawl of nodes even if I’ve hidden it from myself is still paying too much attention to what’s going on underneath. It’s a fine line between due diligence and unhealthy perfectionism. The benefit of fusing logs will be improved searchability for log entries themselves, since search results will go back to a single day’s log page instead of its child nodes. That seems to be kinder to future me.

Tasks in my log with Espanso and regexps

Once I decided to let the Streams experiment run, I waffled around about how to integrate tasks into my log. The “interstitial logging” people encourage a single, unfified stream of log entries and tasks created as they come up. Tiddlywiki’s core conception of tasks is that they should be nodes (“tiddlers,” yes) with a todo tag. That’s a little cumbersome in the Streams workflow.

So I did a quick experiment with the Sticky Todo plugin as a way to make a Streams node a task.

Sticky Todo uses markup like this to turn any text into a todo that appears in your sidebar:

<<sticky "Take out the recycling">>

That’s not too hard to remember, but it’s sort of type-y, so I made an Espanso shortcut that leverages its ability to do regexps:

- regex: ":todo\\((?P<todo>.*)\\)"
    replace: "<<sticky \"{{todo}}\">>"

So I can start a node with :todo(some task) and Espanso replaces it with <<sticky 'some task'>>

It’s 7 keystrokes minus the task content instead of 13? Plug it into the table and bask in the efficiency!

Espanso is useful for stuff like this where there’s no way I could figure out how to get Tiddlywiki to automate this in any reasonable timeframe.

Al is off in Mexico, so I’m being more verbose than usual over social media because I am trapped in this house with myself, a list of a few things I ought to be doing, and plenty of discretionary time.

Today I went on a small posting tear over last night’s movie (The Caine Mutiny, 1954) and that led to a cascade of other thoughts, all dutifully dropped into a Mastodon thread that I immediately thought better of, but will allow to stand. The nice part about self-destructing toots is that nothing remains regrettable for long.

But I thought “I wish I’d just written that stuff down somewhere else,” because there are things in there that are part of a broader thesis I’ve been worrying at for a while, and I hate the tightrope walk of saying partially thought-through things in public.

So I thought about my Obsidian vault but realized how purpose-made to work it is. I thought about a second Obsidian vault and that would probably be perfect, but no fun. I picked Obsidian for work because it strikes the right balance of free-form text and enough task management stuff that I can do the thing I like to do there, which is make in-line tasks in my notes. It is also sort of dull.

Then I thought “you sort of have a commonplace book in DayOne,” but DayOne is a Mac and iOS thing, and I have exported it but not found a home for it. (Yes, there’s a web option now. I don’t know how I feel about that, because I don’t own that server.)

… and there’s Tiddlywiki, which is super compelling, but wasn’t super compelling for my work notes bakeoff. I needed to set up too much too quickly, and there are things it does not want to do, or that it can do but I do not want to figure out. But it seems fun and simple, and something about it is very compelling even if it wasn’t quite right for how I’d like to use a tool for work. Different headspaces, I guess, and I like the idea of supplementing the boundaries between headspaces through the subtle effects of tools.

So I blew up my half-started Tiddlywiki and started afresh with something I think will meet my needs:

• Daily pages are titled by ISO 8601 (2024-02-24)
• Daily pages have a “log” heading
• Daily pages have a “made today” section (<<list-links filter:"[sameday:created{!!created}!is[system]]">>)

Those are the out-of-the-box things.

I added two plugins:

• Shiraz. It has a node explorer that drops a table with backlinks, transclusions, and common tags at the bottom of a note.
• Stickies. Select some text, hit the keystroke, and the text becomes an inline todo that shows up by filename under a tab in the sidebar. Perfect for “this reminded me of something, I want to get back to it, here’s a reminder and a link back”

Seems like a good foundation, addreesses a hangover I had from shifting away from Mac for so much day-to-day stuff.

I was very, deeply bothered by Tiddlywiki’s failure to yield on a few points, so I took some time to work on them wondering how much of the Obsidian workflow I’ve come up with could be repeated in the context of a single-file wiki. Mixed success, I suppose, that could be less mixed if I were less automation-oriented.

But basically:

Area and People pages

I keep a standard page format for areas, people, and projects. Areas are non-timebound, non-project areas of concern or relationships. The GRC org is an area, as are “portfolio management,” “security engineering,” and “the people team.” Projects, Areas and People use the same template because they need pretty much the same thing: A list of tasks, a list of related tasks from outside the page, and a simple log. I guess these are tickler files in some parlances.

In Obsidian, a standard page for these things has a “tasks” section, a “related tasks” section, and a “log” section; and it has a primary_tag property. “Tasks” are ad hoc, one-off things specific to each entity, while “related tasks” are any tasks anywhere else in the system bearing the area or person’s primary_tag. The “related tasks” block just looks like this:

tasks
tags include grc

So if I’ve got a project somewhere else in the system, or drop a GRC-related task in some meeting notes, it gets sucked into that list. By convention, my primary tags are terse abbreviations, always in lower case. I could drop that convention, but it’s helpful for setting up pages in a standardized way that lets me just start using the page vs. modifying places where I want to pull in the primary tag. Turbo-laziness, basically.

The “log” section is nothing special. I do use the Quickadd plugin to make it easy to log something from anywhere by running a Quickadd log anywhere action from the command menu. So I invoke the keystroke, get a prompt for the file to append a log entry to, start typing “Areas/” or “People/” and pick the autocompletion, enter the log entry, and I’m done. The snippet itself is - {{DATE:HH:mm}} {{VALUE}}\n and QuickAdd allows me to target the ## Log heading to append the entry. I’ve got a clone of it for my daily journal page, just to shave off selecting the page.

In Tiddlywiki, I cobbled together a few things to get this rough effect:

I use the TodoList plugin, which provides the ability to drop in a snippet that creates a little ad hoc log widget:

<<interstitial-ui caption:"! Log" width:"" base:"$(currentTiddler)$_log">>

The base property gives the list a unique name, either to isolate the log entries to that page (with no base, all log items appear everywhere the snippet is used) or to allow reuse of the log elsewhere in the wiki.

The drawback of the log is that the widget stores everything in JSON, not as part of the page itself. Were one committed to using Tiddlywiki forever, that might not be so bad. I know myself better than that, and believe this pattern essentially recreates the drawbacks of any database-driven site. Maybe there’s an export option, but it’s also an impediment to simple search of the live wiki: You get back the associated lump of JSON, not the page that is presenting the lump of JSON.

The real answer is probably “don’t use that logging widget, figure out how to automate this some other way.”

TodoList allows the use of a todo list widget as well, but I couldn’t figure out how to surface its todos anywhere in the wiki. I am okay with violating Prot’s advice about mixing ephemeral tasks with notes, but only if there is a way to sweep up todos in one place for review and safety. So instead I use TiddlyWiki’s native task functionality, which involves a button that modifies the basic “New Here” functionality for a given Tiddler, but appends the primary tag of a given Area or Person page to a todo tiddler. When I click the task button, it makes a new tiddler with a todo tag and the current tiddler title as a second tag.

Then I have some template code to enumerate todos for a given Area or Person page:

! Tasks

<$list filter="[!has[draft.of]tag[todo]tag{!!title}!tag[done]sort[created]]">
  <$checkbox tag="done"> <$link to=<<currentTiddler>>/></$checkbox>
</$list>

! Completed tasks

<$list filter="[!has[draft.of]tag[todo]tag{!!title}tag[done]sort[created]]">
  <$checkbox tag="done" checked="yes"/>
    <$link to=<<currentTiddler>>/>
</$list> 

I don’t have enough Tiddly-fu to do in Tiddlywiki what I can do in Obsidian, which is drop in a task on any page from anywhere in a single keystroke. Not the worst limitation, and the proximate workarounds aren’t that bad.

What you end up with is that todos are just tiddlers with a todo tag. As opposed to the widget solution, they’re more searchable, and you can add notes about a given task in the body. You can also make a big todo page that lists every single unclosed todo in the system for review. I like it as a concept, especially since you could associate a given task tiddler with a variety of pages by adding the right tags.

Projects

In Obsidian, project pages are the same as area and people pages. In Tiddlywiki, the limitations of the native task management are such that I decided to get another plugin: Projectify.

It bolts a nicer GUI onto Tiddlywiki’s native task management to provide some project structure around the tiddler-as-task pattern. It includes a global entry widget for an inbox you can invoke from anywhere in the system (maybe that code will help me understand how to get the logging I want).

It’s a pretty nice plugin! I think I would be willing to use it full time, since it could even blow up but still leave me with data in files I could figure out how to migrate or continue to use. Unfortunately, development of the fork of the stalled original project seems to have stopped as well. I don’t have enough of a sense of how the Tiddlyverse works to know how much that matters.

Bottom line

We’re all spoiled for choice. With a few tweaks, I think I could make a go of Tiddlywiki. I just don’t know how to get some of the automation/ease of data entry I can get with Obsidian. If I lifted my notes out of Obsidian I would lose a few things that currently connect notes via the tasks and dataview plugins, but I limit use of those things to nice-to-haves.

Other Obsidian details

I’ve got a smallish list of plugins holding my Obsidian stuff together, easing data entry, and making my templates smarter:

• Custom File Explorer Sorting: Just lets me put the file explorer sidebar in a better order (pushing utility folders to the bottom, raising my task list to the top)
• Dataview: For pulling in related notes in my people, area, and project pages.
• Front Matter Title: Lets me use Denote’s “metadata-in-filename” convention but see the human-readable title of a note in tabs and the file explorer
• QuickAdd: A way to add content to pages. I can pop open a dialog to select a page, type in some text, and it gets plopped at the bottom of a given heading.
• Tasks: The standard Obsidian task management plugin
• Templater: Lets you add JavaScript to your templates at initial render. It’s how I enforce the Denote filenaming scheme.

If pressed, just Tasks would be the must-have. QuickAdd would probably make the list. Templater and Front Matter Title mostly exist to enable the Denote file naming, which is on my “nice to have” list.

The Milkmade

I got a nut milk maker. It looks sort of like a Mr. Coffee, but instead of a coffee basket there is a nut/grain threshing chamber. You fill the reservoir, dump maybe a quarter cup of your preferred nut or grain into the threshing chamber, and press a button. 12 minutes later there’s a 20 oz. carafe of nut milk.

It’s a little grainier than what you get at the store, and a little less creamy. Letting it chill in the fridge (it comes out at 180F) and drinking a cup of it wasn’t as good as store bought – maybe a little bitterness in comparison – but I did some reading and made another batch where I dropped in a pinch of salt, a splash of vanilla, and a teaspoon of monkfruit sweetener, and that was pretty good.

The CGM has taught me that cow milk in any quantity past “a splash in my tea” has a drastic effect on my blood sugar. It’s the kind of spike I never would have noticed with finger stick testing – tends to be fast and well within the two-hour post-prandial window – but I couldn’t unsee the spikes, and I don’t neeeeed cow milk, but like it over my cereal or with protein powder. So if I’m gonna be a nut milk lifer, I’m glad I can make my own.

I know that is easier said than done.

“Bits of our identities” are conversation starters, signifiers, hints, badges, clues to deeper things about us, personal reminders, and anchors.

“Anchors.”

“That was a very anchoring conversation.”

“This is a real anchor around my neck.”

Which is a weird way to start a post about note-taking apps, but here we are.

Like, Emacs is part of my “Unix person” origin story. I can’t name another software tool I’ve used as consistently for 33 years. I suppose the Unix paradigm itself edges Emacs out for personal longevity, but not by much. And when I think about everything I was doing with that first Ultrix account in 1991, “running Emacs” is the only thing that remains from the list. No more Netrek, I don’t use USENET in a way that would be recognizable to Past Me, and if the work I did on the Landsraad assembly hall for the DUNE MUD remains – getting cones of silence to work felt like a real triumph – I haven’t been around to visit it for a few decades.

It is a bit of an anchor in the putatively good sense of the word “anchor.” Technological comfort food. One of the first things that goes on any new machine, and one of the first server-side things I test when I’m trying out a new remote access tool. But also a bit of an anchor in the not-great sense of the word, in that I will pay the “figure out how to express this in elisp” tax for hours, well beyond practicality or reason.

Most recently, I was ignoring some excellent advice from Prot regarding people who want to use his excellent Denote for task tracking:

“If you want my opinion though, be more forceful with the separation of concerns. Decouple your knowledge base from your ephemeral to-do list: Denote (and others) can be used for the former, while you let standard Org work splendidly for the latter—that is what I do, anyway. … “Do not mix your knowledge base with your to-do items.”

… and the complexity was piling up and up, the tradeoffs were getting worse, and there was simply no joy in the experience because I had gotten myself into that bitter “make this problem yield” mindset that eventually leads to less understanding and more hacked-up, suboptimal stuff.

I just don’t have time for it right now.

So it makes sense that my fallback position was “maybe Logseq would be fine,” because it’s got the whole “supports org-mode syntax” thing going on – leave the door open for a return to Emacsland once I have more time – and perhaps because it is just odd enough to tickle another bit of my self-image. Mercifully, the second I tried to solve a problem of moderate complexity I realized how much time I’d have to invest to do anything besides pick code samples up off the sidewalk and pop them in my mouth. So I backed away slowly.

And after that it makes sense that Tiddlywiki got a look because it has been around forever and there is a sort of cheerfully prosaic attitude among its users. But the plugins started creeping in and I was trying to get it to do stuff it doesn’t really want to do without a lot of third party assistance, so the whole “it’s very simple” thing was not allowed to find much expression.

So there I was, and I’m sort of glad that I chased my tail over the past few weeks because it tired me out a little, but left me with an idea of what I wanted to do: Take notes in a connected manner, blend a little of PARA with space for a slipbox approach, and have inline todos, and I wanted it to sync across a few devices.

Obsidian does all that very well. There is always the risk of plugin creep, but in past Obsidian experiments that has been less about extending the core feature set and more about removing repetitive work. The simple mission of “write notes, link between them, keep track of tasks” doesn’t take much, with mobile and sync managed competently. It runs on every platform I’d care to run it on.

It’s a little dull. But after a few days of “just using it” and adding little affordances here and there from past vaults as I’ve remembered them, it has the benefit of just working in a non-dramatic, non-head-desking, simple way. I haven’t had to really think about it much. I haven’t inadvertently broken it or misconfigured it in such a way that I’m scrambling around a minute before a meeting trying to get back into my own notes. It’s of sufficient maturity that you can look up the answers to things and they are often in written form, which minimizes the whole “if I see one more YouTube poster frame of a slack-jawed influencer taking 30 minutes to explain something I could have copied and pasted in ten seconds I’m going to do a murder” thing.

I was inclined to say “and it says nothing about me, at all.”

But it does say a few things: “Doesn’t want to think about this problem he created for himself in any more detail,” “will settle on Markdown even though it is inferior to org,” “can stand being associated with people who think a graph of their notes is interesting and useful if it means not having to think about this any longer,” “will pay for sync,” “considers seven plugins normal and reasonable, would not admit to nine,” and – most likely and eventually – “always seems to creep back to Emacs even though it seemed like he knew better last time he did this.”

For a few years, roughly coincidental with the arrival of Covid, then lockdown, then the sort of crappy year leading up to my layoff, I was struggling to do a lot of the creative things I had once done a lot. In hindsight some of it was lockdown stress, some of it was work stress + depression over the work stress, and some of it was probably about an illness I didn’t know I had yet.

It all added up to not making much new stuff, not feeling very creative, and maybe worst of all feeling very crabby and reactive toward the new or the novel. I didn’t like the way the inside of my head felt. I felt sort of old and inflexible.

Once I settled into the reality of being laid off, addressed my health stuff, and chilled out enough to legitimately rest and relax a little I bounced back and that gave me a burst of creative energy. Once I got a new job and had that soaking up some of that energy I faded back a little, but recently I’ve been feeling it again. I can tell because I’ve been experimenting with tools, dusting off stuff I’ve built in the past, and just generally futzing around with stuff.

There’s a lens to it all, though, which is whether these things are doing anything for me: Are they providing utility and what exactly is that utility.

I’ve also thought back to that unpleasant fallow period. A lot of things I had made or depended on fell apart during that period, because I didn’t have the mental energy to keep them going. If something I’d depended on for a while broke because I attempted a minor tweak, or because an upstream changed underneath me, I’d just toss it aside. It was tiring to consider concentrating long enough to fix it.

I guess the broad theme was sustainability. I was lucky to find a good counselor who helped me gauge my own resources and remember to honor commitments to myself. So when I’d have a brief burst of nervous energy or motivation, she’d help steer me back to things that were practical and sustainable as opposed to overthought, overengineered, and unmaintainable.

org-mode has been one bottomless sink of time and energy for me. I’m not a particularly skilled elisp person. Not an elisp person at all if we’re being honest. So nothing really comes easily to me when I’m trying to squeeze some neat idea out of Emacs. When I compare my rate of progress to the period when I was extending BBEdit or TextMate with Ruby plugins, it seems glacial.

And every now and then I just break shit. I am measured and careful enough with my changes that it’s usually easily to isolate, but there are those days when I’m just doing a bunch of things by hand because I blew up some piece of automation or some bespoke UI I built. On those days I wonder to myself, “if you ever hit a trough, or don’t have the kind of discretionary time you have now, or just lose a few more degrees of neural plasticity (as you must), what will this be like?”

I think I know the answer, because I’ve been walking the earth long enough to know that there will be some kind of extinction event, a bunch of shit will go out the window, and I’ll end up with three or four new SaaS subscriptions I’m scrambling to cancel in a year provided the vendor does me the courtesy of telegraphing that they’re reaching for my wallet.

Philosophically and intellectually I’m okay with that. A few moments in my life have offered me crash courses in the value of acceptance in the face of impermanence. I’ve had the benefit of object lessons in the form of being around people I love and care about, but who are perhaps fatally anchored by an identity they might do well to discard, the better to begin growing again.

But also what I want to care about ebbs and flows. Some days, weeks, months, years I want to care about things like org-mode, elisp mastery, and interesting techniques for taking notes. Other times I do not at all, and feel a little crabby about the time spent on these things. Especially because it is not lost on me that my energy is both finite and unevenly distributed. If I’m deeply involved in a bunch of tech stuff, I am probably not taking many pictures or writing about certain things. When I am crowding out certain endeavors closer to my creative core in favor of things I am perhaps a little obsessive about but that are further from my creative core I feel a little out of sorts.

“You’re getting the meta sickness,” I say to myself, and I beat myself up a little.

It was great to spend a week in Vancouver the week before last, then a long weekend on the coast with nothing but an iPad. I couldn’t mess around with much very easily, and when I did try to tentatively poke at something during a lull in the conversation with our fellow travelers I broke it and was left realizing that trying to fix it over coast vacation rental Wi-Fi on an iPad soft keyboard would be far more infuriating than knowing it was fucked up for a few days.

Those twin interruptions knocked me out of a tool fixation ramp-up and made me think a little about whether I was doing what my old Irish boss used to call “polishing the pipes” (we did eventually convince him that didn’t work for US English speakers) and perhaps setting myself up for another round of meta sickness.

Now I’ve got a week ahead of me where I have three plates spinning and people need me to quick dicking around and make a few things happen so they can go do their jobs. That will also help keep the futz monkey off my back for a bit.

I like the ideas I get from taking a tour of a tool like Logseq, even if I don’t think the whole thing is going to work for me. It’s a chance to fold ideas into what is practically my forever tool, which is org-mode/Emacs, or at least rethink things I thought were more bothersome to fix than they sometimes end up being.

The last few weeks I’ve been intrigued by PARA as a simple organizing principle, I’ve wanted to continue to mesh prose and tasks in the way org-mode excels, and I’ve wanted to de-gunk my Denote setup.

I gave Logseq a try, looked at Workflowy again, and briefly dusted off my last Obsidian setup. Logseq and Obsidian are pretty good at surfacing tasks from all over your notes collection. org-mode can manage that but it is very oriented around the org agenda as a way to see your tasks, and the agenda doesn’t scale well with large collections of notes.

There are a few ways of coming at that problem, ranging from “just be selective about which files go into the agenda” to functions that pre-scan your corpus cheaply then assemble a list of agenda files only from things with active todos.

I am still a long way away from having a notes collection large enough to slow the agenda down, but it’s growing.

So, in the midst of poking around and trying to decide whether or not to add one of several possible lumps of lisp to my config, I came across Jack Baty’s post on his own solution, which is limiting your agenda files to just project files, based on Denote’s naming convention.

My own Denote hierarchy has a bunch of little atomic notes, then a collection of project files, area files, and people files. It also has a home file that indexes the project and area files, and an inbox file. I’ve been experimenting with a foundations type that I use to define core concepts. For instance, my team’s work a specific tool migration might be a project file; while portfolio management generally is an area file. Defining what even is the portfolio, what it means for someone on the team to own a piece of the portfolio, and what expectations are for portfolio owners is a piece of foundation thinking.

I can see putting tasks in those special-purpose files, and will tend to avoid putting them in tinier atomic or fragmentary notes files. Feels like a reasonable compromise that discourages littering my notes with tasks, keeps org’s agenda efficient, and provides a little bit of structure that I feel can go missing in a strictly anti-hierarchical note setup.

The code Jack shared defines denote-to-agenda-regexp to make a decision on whether or not some supporting functions should include a file in the agenda. He limits his to files with _project in the name (derived from having project somewhere in the filetags). I wanted to include area and people, too, so I expanded the regexp (inelegantly):

(defvar my-denote-to-agenda-regexp "_project\\|_area\\|_people\\|_inbox"
      "Denote file names that are added to the agenda.
    See `my-add-denote-to-agenda'.")

I’ve also added the project/area/person name as the #+category: property in my agenda-ready files, since that cleans up the far-left column on the agenda, which is the (very long in Denote) filename by default.

Forsaking mobile

I guess the other development of all the cleanup and fussing was choosing to not care about the mobile use case for this stuff at all.

I think I have shared elsewhere that one of my formative work experiences included being handed the keys to a portfolio of websites with zero supporting staff and being expected to keep comment moderation going seven days a week. I developed a small fixation around mobile work that predated useful technology for mobile work by a good number of years. It made sense because it allowed me to be out and about and doing little moderation micro-tasks whenever.

Since then, I’ve had this scar or kink or crease in my brain about making sure the mobile bases are covered, but the more I think about it the more I think it’s a bad idea. It’s bad enough that I let Slack or Gmail on my phone, let alone wanting all my work notes and tasks available wherever I am. I suppose in a truly, truly dire situation I could use Blink to sign in to the desktop machine and run an agenda or look up a note, but that’s a ridiculous scenario and the better answer is probably “yeah, sorry, away from my computer rn.”

… I really did. I don’t think it’s gonna take.

There’s a lot to like about it, and if your whole thing is “I’m gonna go try this new model of thinking about things,” it’s a fine representative of the smart/connected/non-hierarchical etc. notes market. It is very outline-centric, so org-mode and Workflowy people will feel more at home.

The approach I took to my trial was to just go with its preference for daily journal pages as the starting point. I did do an overlay on that using PARA, more or less.

• Daily pages included a section for meeting notes, a task inbox, and a section I called “facts” that was just meant to be “random snippets of this and that flowing in throughout the day.”
• My project pages included project notes and project-specific tasks.
• My area pages included notes and tasks that I knew were related to a given area when I created them.

Logseq includes a built-in TODO page that gathers all your open tasks, which you really need if you’re dumping todos into daily pages. On a desktop monitor it feels manageable. On a laptop panel, especially one with a 16:9 ratio, it feels overwhelming if you have many open tasks.

I came across a number of strategies for dealing with the problem of “loose tasks flying around in your note volume” including review of the TODO page, custom queries, and the use of a plugin that offers a way to quickly scroll through available tasks and inject the ones you want to tackle today into your journal.

Another plugin provided a way to automatically roll daily journal tasks over with the creation of a new daily page, but it threw me a few curveballs after a day of trying to use it without having to think about it.

Two obvious comparisons to make are org-mode in Emacs and Obsidian.

If you like the thought of a very outline-oriented notes and tasks manager, but wish there was a more robust and purpose-built sync capability than org-mode offers, Logseq offers org-mode syntax and has a paid sync capability that seems to work pretty well. If you don’t care about a mobile use case I don’t know why you’d pay for sync when there are things like Dropbox and Syncthing. But if getting at your stuff on your phone matters and you’re sort of over trying to make Beorg or Plainorg work, Logseq might be interesting.

Obsidian is the real competitor, though, and as I read through forums and subreddits I saw some hair-splitting over which solution was “better” based on features that come out-of-the-box. Logseq does have better built-in task management stuff, but a single, very mature plugin in Obsidian closes that gap and then exceeds Logseq’s out-of-the-box experience, and you’re back to finding plugins to get parity.

I’d be remiss to leave out org-roam (Emacs) and Denote (also Emacs). If your use case is just notes with no tasks, either of these will work pretty well, too. You’re just left with the sync challenge, and neither is suitable for mobile (IMHO … livable, but not great). I said “just notes with no tasks” because org-mode’s agenda, which is generally how you’re going to aggregate todos across a bunch of connected notes, has known scale issues over time as you add more and more files as potential sources of tasks. If you don’t mind adding more custom lisp and a package or two you can overcome that. You’re still left with the mobile problem.

What about one big page?

I thought about that, too, after a little Ed trolling. I’ve done the whole “one big org file” thing in the past, but that was a simpler time.

I did model PARA into a single org file, tweaked a few org-capture templates, and made some conventions to take advantage of the :CATEGORY: property and tags inheritance. That made the agenda a lot more digestible and useful.

The single-file approach also lets Beorg and Plainorg work pretty well.

That isn’t exactly a “connected notes” thing anymore. It’s more like Workflowy, and that’s if you’re doing it in org. I can’t imagine doing it without org-mode’s assistance. Too much going on.

Migration day

I’m sitting on a call with a migration specialist from Jamf, having promised the team that I’d be available to yell or threaten if they requested it. This is our third go at effecting a migration off of self-hosted infra and into their cloud. Fingers crossed Went fine. We’ll be able to decom a load balancer along with several compute and db nodes. We’ve also observed that a few backoffice integrations work much better in their cloud instance, meaning better reporting about the state of our end user compute fleet.

We’re sort of in a change season right now: In the coming half we’ve got a new password manager, a VPN refresh and some bits and bobs to improve our SSO situation. Getting Jamf in the rear-view mirror means a significant amount of headspace opens up for the team and will vastly improve our chances of success on one major initiative I pulled forward by two quarters and have sitting on the dock, awaiting a more reliable endpoint management setup to take advantage of it. Better reporting also means we’ll be able to make good on a major change we made to laptop fleet management that has improved our hardware budgeting situation a lot, but has needed better insight to really sing.

I took this job knowing there’d be a lot of simplification work to get through, and it hasn’t disappointed. There are days I want to pull my hair out – like the first and second times we had to scrub our Jamf migration – but there are also plenty of days when things come together and I clock out knowing we took a step forward.

Most days I also ask myself what’s compelling about all this to me. IT’s generally thankless work. But “run services orgs” is pretty much what I do, even when I’ve led engineering teams who probably didn’t want to think of themselves that way. I think the simplest answer is “you can help a lot of people and make a lot of things better,” including for the people who are also asking themselves why on earth they’re in IT every couple of days.

I also happen to like unknotting Christmas tree lights.

Kill It With Fire

Through this change season, I’ve been noticing and appreciating my Readwise notes from Kill It With Fire, Marianne Bellotti’s excellent book on dealing with legacy systems. I read it thinking it would be more “technical,” but it’s as much about the leadership and cultural challenges of dealing with legacy systems. Right up there with Camille Fourier’s The Manager’s Path.

Poking around with note-taking options, I finally came back around to Logseq, which I’ll reduce to “org-mode and Workflowy gang up on Obsidian.”

I was primed to not like it, but the org-mode syntax option and some relatively strong opinions about how things should be were compelling enough that I played around with it, then tried to implement a PARA-like structure, then watched a few videos to try to internalize how it wants you to behave.

The page link syntax is interesting. You can do either a traditional wikilinks double-brackets, or you can use #hashtag notation to link to a page, which – thanks to the inbound links section of each page – serves as a tag index.

Logseq solves the blank page problem by … well, it sort of doesn’t. It’s opinionated enough about its “everything is an outline, every line is a node” thing, as well as its “start from a journal page each day” thing, that you can tell it wants you to do something besides “make a page and start typing,” but you can’t be sure what.

I ended up deciding to just go with it. Sitting in the living room, staring at the blank daily journal page, I just made a node in the outline for the first thing that came to mind and dumped out my big projects and OKRs for the coming quarter. Then I dumped a packing list for a trip this week. Then some miscellaneous tasks to get done before I fly out.

Entering tasks, then thinking ahead to how I’d find them once I moved on to a new journal page the next day, led me to the Unfinished Business plugin, which will roll yesterday’s todos into today’s journal page. I think there are other ways to gather todos but my initial read of journal page todos vs. project or area todos is that they should be more ephemeral and bound to the day.

But I guess my summary, having messed around with this for all of 18 hours, and after a morning of using it for work, is that Logseq is very, very into the non-hierarchical, “networked notes” approach. It wants structure to be a matter of emergence.

Its main competitor for my attention is Denote, which is more of a collection of Legos with opinions that are less about your workflow and more about the metadata. I like the way Logseq provides a built-in backlink block automatically, though I could implement that with a capture template for Denote. I like Logseq’s more wiki-ish page creation conventions. I like that there’s a mobile app devoted to Logseq’s point of view, as opposed to the general-purpose mobile org clients.

It’s important, for org-mode people, to not go into this thinking it’s “org-mode with a native toolkit GUI.” You can use org-mode syntax in a list. There are some familiar org-mode conventions (e.g. src blocks). If you like everything being an outline, as in org-mode, you’ll be in familiar territory. But there’s a layer of plumbing that finds its way into the markup that org-mode is not going to make sense of if you ever depart Logseq. It’s instructive to set up a few pages where you’re transcluding nodes, etc. and then open those pages in Emacs to see what it does with them. In some cases, it can’t do anything because Logseq has its own markup overlay.

Dusting off the camera

I’ll be in Vancouver, BC this week for a work event, then staying over for a few days to do some tourism. Given the time of year and likely subject matters it’s an X-T5 kind of week. I’m just taking the 23mm/f1.4 WR. I considered the X100V, but I’d like the extra speed and the image stabilization.

I have not been very excited about photography lately, but the prospect of a new place and interesting scenery got me a little more excited. Looking forward to being out on the streets at night.

Wallabag bookmarking script

I submitted a PR for my Newsboat Wallabag bookmarking script. As with the Newsboat one, you can just run it from the command line, too, if you’re interested in some pre-written plumbing for Wallabag bookmarking. Just takes a URL as ARGV[0] and lets the Wallabag service pull all the metadata.

Linkding

Linkding is a bookmarking tool. It has a UI similar to pinboard.in, can import bookmarks.html files, and has a decent API. It’s working very well. I’m particularly fond of the Linkding injector addon for Firefox, which injects Linkding search results into the sidebar of most popular search engines.

This one seems to be a keeper.

I briefly considered shaarli as an alternative. I didn’t like the UI as much, but it has a bigger list of third-party extensions than Linkding.

Wallabag

Wallabag is a self-hosted Pocket alternative. It also has a useful API, an iOS app, and a Firefox extension. I wasn’t too sure about this one going in, but once I got the Docker stuff and some reverse proxy weirdness sorted it worked quite well. It has a few more smarts than Pocket, and it provides Atom feeds of simplified articles you can use to create ebook digests via Calibre or just consume with your everyday RSS reader, given the formatting is cleaned up.

It also lets you share a public-facing version of a saved article, and its clipper extension seems to be able to see around a few paywalls if you’re saving from a subscription site.

I think this one is a keeper given I can automate the ebook exports: That essentially recreates the Pocket/Kobo integration.

calibre-web

calibre-web is a HTML5 front-end for Calibre libraries that allows you to edit metadata, organize your ebook collection into shelves and, most importantly to me, act as an online sync source for Kobo e-readers, allowing you to browse your collection and download to your Kobo, then keep your reading location in sync.

Some people live in calibre-web full-time, uploading ebooks and managing their metadata. I prefer to pair it with Calibre itself due to an ongoing content conversion project.

It’s definitely a keeper. I recovered a ton of books from another device and converted them to Kobo-friendly epubs. Better yet, when downloaded to a Kobo, calibre-web serves up kepubs, which are optimized for Kobos.

Calibre

Calibre is an ebook conversion/management tool, ordinarily used on the desktop. I found a Docker recipe that lets me run it on my Synology and access it via a web-based VNC tool. With a little fiddling, I added mountpoints that let me install downloaded extensions and import books from a bookdrop directory as I pull them down from their assorted vendor sites.

It works alongside calibre-web, allowing me to install books from assorted formats and export them to epub, where they’re almost instantly available from the calibre-web web interface or Kobo integration.

Even if sync didn’t work, you can access a content server that uses the OPDS protocol for browsing. So with a reverse proxy and authenticated user, you can get at your library from anywhere and side-load books to your reader.

I’m going to keep the Dockerized version.

Vikunja

Vikunja is a todo app that includes a traditional list view and a card view. It serves up CalDAV, so it could theoretically work with any CalDAV client, but its doesn’t work well with iOS Reminders. The responsive Web UI isn’t bad if you want to install it to your iPhone desktop.

I installed it and tried it for a day, but I am not sure about it. I’m a little uneasy about self-hosting my todos, and was hoping for some kind of native client.

Joplin

Joplin is an Evernote-esque app with a ton of cross-platform support that I couldn’t quite bring myself to trust in a self-hosted context. It’s a good tool and all, but I’d prefer to just have my notes in a plaintext, version-controlled setup.

MariusHosting

MariusHosting isn’t an app, it’s a site run by Marius Lixandru with a ton of recipes for Dockerizing common self-hosted apps on a Synology. It’s my first stop when I want to try something out. I was resistant to a lot of his earlier stuff because he had an idiosyncratic way of getting containers set up, but he has since begun to use Portainer for his recipes, which has simplified them a lot. If you find a Docker recipe that uses docker run, you can convert that to Docker Compose with composerize.

I shared my Linkding bookmarking plugin to the Newsboat project. It’s in the contrib directory. It works fine as a standalone tool, too, if you just want to push a bookmark up from the command line. I submitted a PR for the Wallabag version, too.

Collaborative introvert

Today had some unpleasant aspects to it. I had to do one of those things where you both don’t want to get a lot of practice at it, but feel grateful you’ve had the practice.

I also felt grateful to have partners to work with on the whole thing who were both willing to share ideas and tools, but also let me plot my own course. It felt like the right balance of “not up here completely without a safety net” and “able to follow my instincts.” When things went a little off-road, I felt able to improvise and adjust without looking over my shoulder.

I think I am an okay collaborator, but I know there are times that my internal models take over and it’s hard for me to shake myself out of whatever I had in my head as The Right Thing. My introversion sometimes makes it hard to read the room when I’m going too far that way. When I realize I have, I usually pull back unless I’ve gotten into a headspace where I feel unyielding on the matter. That’s rare. I wish I had a little better sense of how I come off. Even the times I’ve thought I must sound like I’m close to exploding, people say “no, had no idea. Really? You just seemed your normal self.”

I mentioned that to Al this morning, because as I was getting ready to do the unpleasant but needful, she said “you seem pretty calm.” My wrist vibrated and I looked down and it was my blood glucose monitor telling me my blood sugar was spiking. I’ve learned that correlates with stress a lot of the time. I held up my watch and read her the number.

“There’s a lot going on in there,” she said.

There is.

My continuous glucose monitor works with an app. The app is mostly cool: Good historical data, great for developing day-to-day awareness, and it’s hooked into other stuff so I can make connections between sleep, exercise, and blood sugar.

It also has a meal diary. When I first started using the app, you could choose between a photo entry or a detailed entry for each meal. If you chose a photo entry, it’d just let you take a picture of your meal and timestamp it. If you felt like going back and filling in what you ate, it would provide a link to a database on kinds of food and their potential metabolic impacts. If you chose a detailed entry, the picture became optional and you could fill in more detail on the spot.

I preferred photo entries. I know what’s in a given meal so it was fine to look at a week of historical data and check in on photos of the meals that seemed to be connected to spikes or dips.

Recently the app succumbed to the AI fad, so the photo log UI changed: Now the app tries to guess what you’re eating by analyzing the photo. I don’t think, in over a month of meals, it has had a better than 10 percent success rate. Some of its guesses are simply wild. It isn’t learning from me specifically, because I have a very consistent breakfast choice and no amount of correcting the same basic picture taken almost daily has swayed the app.

There’s no way to turn the AI assistant off, though. They wedged it into the workflow and your choices are “correct it” or “ignore it.”

I tried to correct it for about a week then snapped out of it: There is no way the damn thing made it out of beta without everyone realizing it is infuriatingly bad at what it does. I’m sure they intentionally released this half-baked thing counting on people to train it by correcting it for the sake of accurate records.

So I just accept whatever it proposes. You think that bowl of lentil soup is a chocolate sundae? Sure. Yes, now that you mention, I thought I was eating a tasty omelette, but I can see now that it was a ham.

I’m happy to send them an invoice if they’d prefer different behavior on my part.

Now I have two scripts for bookmarking in Newsboat, but it only has one reserved key for bookmarking a post. It does have macros, though, so you can use one to set the bookmarking command to a given script and bind it to something memorable. My mutt convention is to lead macros with a period, so I kept that here by unbinding Newsboat’s default macro prefix (,) and setting “.”.

So, .l to save to Linkding, .w to save to Wallabag:

# macros
bind-key . macro-prefix
unbind-key ,
macro w set bookmark-cmd "op run --env-file=\"$HOME/.env\" -- ~/bin/wallabag.rb"; bookmark
macro l set bookmark-cmd "op run --env-file=\"$HOME/.env\" -- ~/bin/linkding.rb"; bookmark

And here’s the Wallabag bookmarking script:

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

require 'httparty'
require 'json'

entry_url = ARGV[0]

wallabag_url="https://reader.example.net"

client_id = ENV['WALLABAG_CLIENT']
client_secret = ENV['WALLABAG_SECRET']
username = ENV['WALLABAG_USER']
password = ENV['WALLABAG_PASSWORD']

token_params = {grant_type: "password", client_id: client_id, client_secret: client_secret, username: username, password: password}
token_req = HTTParty.post("#{wallabag_url}/oauth/v2/token", body: token_params)
access_token = token_req["access_token"]

headers = {'Content-Type' => "application/json", 'Authorization' => "Bearer #{access_token}"}
params = {url: entry_url, starred: 0, archive: 0}
resp = HTTParty.post("#{wallabag_url}/api/entries.json", body: params.to_json, headers: headers)