I recently recommended Mackup, a Mac config syncronization tool, but I’m having a few issues with it now. In general, it does a pretty good job with most apps, but I ran into a weird bug with Mailmate where it kept forgetting all my settings. After a few go-rounds I opened up the Console and searched for Mailmate messages and found it wasn’t able to write to its prefs file. I put Mailmate in Mackup’s skip list, removed the symlinks and let it write its files again and all was well. Searching Mackup’s issues, I found someone experiencing a similar issue with Xcode and learned it seems to be a thing with Dropbox and iCloud and certain apps. In the case of Dropbox, it has come with that app’s move to the CloudStorage folder.

I’m not sure this is enough to get me quit using it. It works quite well with my Emacs config, gpg, ssh, zsh, and other stuff. I also like using it for syncing my ~/bin. It doesn’t work so well with Terminal.app, and gets a little weird now and then with a few other things.

Just … proceed with caution, I guess is the advice. For now I’ve got Mailmate, Terminal.app, karabiner, and Bartender on the skip list. That’s fine for most of them: They’re generally best configured a little different between laptop and desktop anyhow.

My org-contacts file and Things

I stopped using mu4e. I was uncomfortable with the interplay between several different clients (both automated and user-facing) and my Maildir and IMAP. That left a a small hole in the functionality I’d built into my org-mode PRM: being able to quickly mail a contact from a Doom Emacs menu. So I made a quick function that just turns the email address in the org-contacts record into a mailto: link and open call to the system that invokes my preferred mail client (Mailmate at this point). So if the point is over an org-contacts heading I can SPC C m (“leader - CRM - mail”) and get a new message.

I’m on the record somewhere about not liking the emphasis on URL schemes for Mac automation. I don’t like the ins and outs of encoding values and cramming data into that format. At the same time, it does seem to have kept the idea of Mac end-user automation from fading away. So as I sat there looking at my new mailto function, I wondered about how all the contact data I’m keeping could interact with the wider Mac ecosystem in a sort of “if needed” manner, hence this little thing.

It just provides an interactive menu for selecting a contact activity (ping, call, write, etc.) and an interactive date picker, then makes a Thing todo that includes the tags for the contact, with a “start date.” I can get at it with SPC C g (“leader CRM thinGs”). I don’t mean to use it? I was just curious. I’m not sure.

What I am learning as I use org-mode day-to-day again is that there are things that come naturally to it and that do not come naturally to it. I’ve got working integrations with my calendar, for instance, but calendar syncing is another one of those things that eats the one thread you have to work with when it runs, and sometimes it does mysterious things if you mess with a plaintext representation of a more complex data structure that was never written with direct human interaction in mind.

That’s always the struggle with Emacs: What can it do, and what should it do?

The temptation is to crawl into a uni-environment and torture everything into some kind of alignment, but that’s brittle. It might feel good if your temperament or proclivities lead you to feeling comfortable with that particular shape, but there are tradeoffs whether you acknowledge them or not. In this particular case, the line I am sensing is the line between “getting things done” in a very mixed, tactical, “chores, obligations, and interrupts” kind of way, and getting things done in a very “life is an information problem” kind of way.

I love org-mode as a way of organizing information and thoughts. In particular, I am very fond of all the refiling capabilities it offers, because ideas and information can be shuffled around between different contexts inside the broader org-mode context without lifting a hand from the keyboard. As a day-to-day “chores and household projects” tool, I’m a little less certain about it, mainly because of the mobile piece. beorg is great, but it is also a little bit of work to use, and its syncing model is borrowed, so it’s not as good as a purpose-built solution. Further, it is not consistent with my desktop org-mode environments when it comes to things like the agenda views.

So, you know, the interesting thing to me becomes “how can this sophisticated text manipulation environment fit into a broader toolkit?” How can all these things interconnect and complement each other? What are the kinds of work that makes sense living in a purpose-built tool because their typical context favors less thinking and less complexity, vs. the kinds of work that are broadly the same thing (“a thing I need to do”) that benefit from more thinking and more complexity? What kinds of tasks can be “dead” and in a little purpose-built silo, and what kinds of tasks benefit from a little bit of added complexity to exist in a better context? How could a thing move from one environment to the other?

Interesting to me, anyhow, because my tendency, at rest – my unconscious tendency – is to want everything in one tool, but I continue to learn over time that the one-tool outlook breeds its own kinds of complexity.

Anyhow, here’s that function. It works okay so far. The one glitch is that the Things URL scheme won’t make a tag if it doesn’t exist, so I had to go in and tag an existing todo with all my contact types (friend, network, recruiter, etc.) to get the function to properly tag a contact todo.

(defun mph/org-contacts-to-things (contact-kind)
  "Create a Things to-do item based on the current Org Contacts record.
   CONTACT-KIND is a string that specifies the kind of contact ('ping', 'call', 'write', 'schedule', or 'follow up')."
  (interactive
   (list
    (completing-read "Contact Kind: " '("ping" "call" "write" "schedule" "follow up"))))
  (let* ((name (org-entry-get nil "Name"))
         (email (org-entry-get nil "Email"))
         (phone (org-entry-get nil "Phone"))
         (note (read-string "Note: "))
         (notes (format "Email: %s\nPhone: %s\nNote: %s" email phone note))
         (start-date (org-read-date nil nil nil "Start Date: "))
         (start-date-string (format-time-string "%Y-%m-%d" (org-time-string-to-time start-date)))
         (tags (org-get-tags nil t))
         (tag-string (if tags (mapconcat 'identity tags ",") ""))
         (title (format "%s: %s" contact-kind name))
         (url (format "things:///add?title=%s&notes=%s&when=%s&tags=%s"
                      (url-encode-url title) (url-encode-url notes)
                      (url-encode-url start-date-string) (url-encode-url tag-string))))
    (start-process-shell-command "open" nil (format "open \"%s\"" url))))

Conversations, not interviews

Refreshing interview closer of the month:

“We have a few minutes left, any questions of me?”

“No. I came into this thinking you’d either say ‘did you even read the job description? Now good day while I go fire the recruiter,’ or you’d see something that would lead you to want a conversation, which I hope we’ll continue so I can learn more.”

And there we were, having a conversation.

I’ve been very lucky to have had several conversations recently. It’s reminding me of the times I had interviews and how those things went wrong down the road. It’s great to end a conversation hearing the person you were conversing with say “wow, the time flew by … but this felt so organic.” You can enter a conversation with curiosity, and with a good conversational partner you can see where things go, make connections to your experience in the moment, change course or call up other experiences when they say “well, that’s not quite what we’re dealing with here.” That’s much better than pre-thinking a bunch of answers and poring over “ten most common questions” or (if Nigel or Chris are reading) “you’re trapped in a 20’ blender” scenarios.

I’ll include that below, but the other thing to link to before your eyes glaze over with a hunk of Ruby is this useful post on using consult-ripgrep with org-roam for fulltext search from the org-roam Discourse. I’ve been careful to tag everything I’ve put in so far, but I won’t get to that with this batch of files, and I usually remember a keyword, anyhow. So they’re just tagged with “quotes” and “commonplace” for now.

The script just consumes the JSON that DayOne’s export function provides and coughs out formatted org-roam nodes. It uses DayOne’s uuid’s, but tacks on a few words – just in case? Maybe over time I’ll go clean up the titles but for now they’re just there to provide a hint when I search.

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

require 'json'
require 'date'

# Set these up before running
src_json = "/path/to/file.json"
destination_dir = "/path/to/export/dir"

# Read the JSON file
json_str = File.read(src_json)

# Parse the JSON string
data = JSON.parse(json_str)

def write_json_to_org_roam_files(json_str, path)
  data = JSON.parse(json_str)
  entries = data['entries']
  entries.each do |entry|
    created_date = DateTime.parse(entry['creationDate']).strftime('%Y%m%d%H%M%S')
    title = entry['text'].gsub(/^"/, '').gsub(/"$/, '').gsub(/[^a-zA-Z0-9 ]/, ' ').squeeze(' ').strip # replace non-alphanumeric with space, remove extra spaces
    first_words = title.split.first(5).join(' ').gsub(/[^a-zA-Z0-9]/, '-') # replace non-alphanumeric with dash
    uuid = first_words + '-' + entry['uuid']
    content = JSON.parse(entry['richText'])['contents'].map { |c| c['text'] }.join("\n")
    filename = "#{created_date}-#{first_words}.org".gsub(/^-/, '').gsub(/-$/, '').gsub(/-{2,}/,'-') # remove leading/trailing dashes and collapse multiple dashes
    file_content = <<~ORG_NODE.gsub(/^\s*/, '')
      :PROPERTIES:
      :ID: #{uuid}
      :END:
      #+title: #{first_words}
      #+filetags: :commonplace:quotes:

      #{content}
    ORG_NODE
    file = File.open(File.join(path, filename), 'w')
    file.write(file_content)
    file.close
  end
end
# Iterate over each entry
data['entries'].each do |entry|
  write_json_to_org_roam_files(json_str, File.expand_path(destination_dir))
end

Anyhow … as I was about to post:

I am in one of those liminal places people find themselves in from time to time. I suppose the best thing you can say about them is that it’s better when you know you’re there than when you don’t, because you at least have a fighting chance of arresting the worst of your bad habits.

Good Sudoku is real Sudoku, I guess

For instance, sometimes it’s good to stop moving around so much and just wait the thing out. Sudoku has always been good at that for me, but so much of my conception of Sudoku involved mandatory tedium. Like, I didn’t even fully embrace the “logic” parts of the game because some of what made it soothing was the dull repetition of pre-filling all the gimmes, and you don’t need hard puzzles to waste a bunch of time on that while you fight with a virtual copy of your office nemesis.

Good Sudoku for iOS/iPadOS is several years old, now. I saw it come out, downloaded it, and honestly thought there was some sort of catch to it. It has a few provisions for automating or at least bringing focus to the early stages of a puzzle, and I found that with those affordances I can reliably complete puzzles at the “advanced” level without getting out of my comfort zone in terms of logical patterns. I can finish some “Expert” ones without a hint, and maybe half of them with just a single hint. It was so jarring to me that I even went looking for evidence that there might be people who hate it for spoiling a tedious and frustrating but essential element of the game. Like, maybe there are people out there who like that you have to do all the paperwork. If there are, I didn’t see them in the first few pages of a DuckDuckGo query asking if Good Sudoku can even be considered real Sudoku.

So the revelation, I guess, is that Sudoku remains fun with those affordances in place. You still have to, like, use logic and stuff … you just have to learn more advanced things more quickly because the quality of life enhancements get you there faster. But there’s still plenty of challenge left. For the first time, though, Sudoku is a question of “how good do I care to become?” instead of “how much tedium can I take?”

Maybe more importantly than being “fun,” Sudoku remains absorbing. When my brain spins up too far, and I find myself stuck in those things I do when I’m in a liminal space, it’s a way to background the things that feel like distractions, soak up some excess cognitive capacity, and process the thing that is eating me at a level I can deal with while I give over some spare cycles to spotting a new pattern I’m still trying to internalize.

org-journal

I’ve had a daily journal practice going for a little while now, partially cribbed from a pre-made paper daily journal I tried out a few years ago. In its most recent form, the day starts with three prompts:

• What’s today’s biggest challenge?
• What are you happiest about?
• What are you most nervous about?

… and it ends with three prompts:

• What happened today?
• What went well today?
• What could you improve?

I include my morning and evening entries in my habit trackers so I can get a reminder, and I set up a template in DayOne to pre-fill the entry for the day.

I’ve been pretty good about sticking to it, but I noticed recently that it was not working on a few levels:

First, it has become perfunctory – a task to accomplish. When I tap back through past entries I didn’t have much of a sense of “me” in there because the entries were brief and suggestive of me just being very much in my own head and not doing much written thinking or processing.

Second, the questions have some issues. In particular, I noticed “what are you most nervous about” was putting me in a mindset where I had to cast about to think about something to be nervous about. That’s … that’s something to do when maybe you don’t have an amygdala. It took me some time to get around to understanding how much that question was infusing my thinking with the idea that I was “anxious.” Glad I did.

So I did the thing I do when something I do isn’t working for me and I made it a set of documents. It was a good excuse to try out org roam as a Zettelkasten replacement for Obsidian. The three nodes I made were:

• Journaling: tools
• Journaling: practices
• Journaling: experiments

All of them link back to a “Purpose: Writing” node.

Then I put down some time on the schedule to write some notes about each, asking what I want to get out of the practice, what tools I have under consideration for continuing it (e.g. Obsidian, DayOne, assorted Emacs stuff), and which experiments I mean to run for how long to see what works.

I’ve just started a “use org-journal” experiment. I use the vanilla config from Doom, and I added a morning and evening entry template using yasnippet to keep the investment in automation light for now. The one minor disappointment I’m experiencing is how org-crypt works, which is entry-by-entry, and manually. Maybe there’s a different way to protect the content anyhow, but org-crypt seems to be the Doom-blessed approach, and I was hoping for something a bit more transparent. I’m also guessing there’s a way to make it more transparent at the cost of eating someone else’s elisp off the sidewalk.

Playing with tools is just sort of the fun part of it. It was immensely useful, once again, to sit down and write about why I even cared and wanted to do this, and when I sat down this morning to write my first entry of the day the renewed sense of purpose did as much as anything to make the entry more rich. I can imagine “me in ten years” getting something out of that entry, which is a vast improvement over the bulk of the past quarter’s worth of entries.

Migrating content from micro.blog

I downloaded the smaller set of archives from micro.blog this week and started seeing what it would take to move the content into place and start chipping away at a few generations of thinking about image hosting and markup. It’s all Hugo files, so that’s good, and the assorted idiosyncracies are all distinct enough from each other that there’s not a lot of “this regexp is going to wipe out something completely unrelated.”

A few useful tools in this process:

• A Better Finder Rename is wonderful for traversing a directory and … renaming things. Being able to rename files three levels deep in a hierarchy based on their parent folders is pretty handy. I had a license years ago. It was worth the reup.
• EasyFind is great for fast searches of files in a way that works better for me than how Spotlight operates, then makes them available for bulk operation. In this case, it helped in quickly segregating files by certain metadata and moving them off into subdirectories. Great value for no cost.
• BBEdit is such a champ at bulk file processing. Having a visual regexp tool to pre-flight operations across a collection of files is great. Saving those operations is great. It’s fast, stable, and doesn’t blink when you toss thousands of text files at it.

I wanted to go at some of the migration challenges with scripting, but there seems to be a single Python lib that groks YAML frontmatter in Markdown, and that’s not one of my good languages, so I’d be hand-rolling something that I’d rather not. The three tools I listed above are all pretty capable and have the advantage of offering some sort of pre-flight feedback, sometimes with syntax highlighting, etc. I’ll take those shortcuts.

And wow is this all so much better than the stuff I used to make money dealing with: Legacy blogging systems with a database backend and a bizarre blend of “yes, there’s the body of the article right there in the body field, but where on earth is the title? I can see it on the front end but it does not exist in this db dump.” (A: The title was in a separate table from the content table – which was specific to the site – and that titles table covered every site under management by that CMS, and no they wouldn’t export that for my client when they left the service. I got super creative with the Bing API to reunite all the articles with their titles for that gig.)

Anyhow, that’s plenty for today and I need to get a run in. Ben’s home this week and we’re taking him out tonight. It is still sometimes strange to have become a person who lives in a home that a 19-year-old man comes home to now and then, and it was also strange to realize two hours into a conversation with him yesterday that he is just this person it is great to have a conversation with. But it’s strange in the most wonderful way.