… was on sale on Steam. Ben recommended it, so that’s the new game for the Steamdeck this week. So far … you know … there’s a little Blade Runner, there’s a little Minority Report, there’s a little AI. It moves at a pace that works for me, with a few things that require some timing, but mostly just making decisions and dealing with the outcomes.

Config cloning with Mackup (again)

A while back I learned about Mackup, which uses whatever you’ve got in the way of a syncing filesystem to sync config files between systems. It has a library of hundreds of apps from Mac and Linux that it understands out of the box: You can either let it sync everything it can find, give it an allow list, or give it a disallow list. By default it expects to use Dropbox, but I took a little time to set it up in syncthing this evening.

At the moment I’m using it for zsh, kitty, git, ssh, and the GitHub CLI tool, which led me to figure out …

Machine-specific configs with kitty

As I play with kitty more I’ve been bumping into the display differences between all my different machines. That makes finding a consistent font size a little annoying. I learned that kitty can take environment variables in its config, so for machine-specific stuff I can do something like:

include ${HOSTNAME}.conf

… then in foo.conf put machine-specific settings:

font_size 18

Making kitty your default GNOME terminal (sort of)

This shell script just concedes to my muscle memory: When I invoke the GNOME launcher and type “terminal” before I can stop myself, this just makes sure kitty is the thing launching.

My Linux life

I think it has been over a week since I last switched over to the Mac Studio. It’s just sitting there. I copied my photo library over to a drive attached to the Linux desktop, but haven’t taken the time to start playing with darktable in earnest.

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.

Doom Emacs

I made it a point to give myself a bunch of fussing around time yesterday, and decided to spend it on installing Doom Emacs. In its own words:

Doom is a configuration framework for GNU Emacs tailored for Emacs bankruptcy veterans who want less framework in their frameworks, a modicum of stability (and reproducibility) from their package manager, and the performance of a hand rolled config (or better). It can be a foundation for your own config or a resource for Emacs enthusiasts to learn more about our favorite operating system.

There’s a small omission: It also starts from the assumption you want to use Evil mode.

So, the highlights?

• You get a splash screen with the option to restart your last session, open your org agenda, go to your config files.
• You get a modal interface with handy menus you can open up by tapping the space bar.
• You get a more terse config up front by uncommenting functionality in an init file and letting Doom handle a lot of presets.
• You have to take a few more steps when you make a change because you have to run an external command to compile your config.
• You get a little more verbosity in parts of your config because you have to frame any custom changes as post-instantiation variables for a given module.

My subjective take thus far:

• Initially hated it because of course I did: I’ve got Stockholm syndrome around my multi-file Emacs config, and Doom even cuts you off from using Emacs’ native Customize.
• Went to bed thinking “if this feels god awful tomorrow morning, when it is time to get things done, I am going to get rid of it ASAP.”
• Woke up feeling curious and a little eager to try it out.
• Currently in the painful “develop muscle memory” phase for some basic operations, still stumbling with modal editing, but not having a pinkie poised over the control key is nice.
• I kind of like the whole doom sync workflow when I make a change. A lot of weird Emacs things-that-go-wrong seem to come down to package weirdness and compile errors, and Doom does a lot to clean that stuff up.
• A little more empathy for the ortholinear and Planck people when the space-bar is what initiates actions and there’s less emphasis on the control key.
• I like the preset configs for features I wouldn’t have bothered with otherwise. I’ve come to appreciate minimaps, and wouldn’t have bothered with one if it weren’t something I could simply turn on and expect to work without a lot of fiddling.
• The theme I settled on (“Nord”) is coherent and well thought out, and it covers all the UI I’ve encountered so far. One challenge with Emacs themes is the challenge with any theme, I guess, which is that you can’t always know what’s out there with its own notions about a good palette. As a result, you sometimes get disappearing UI elements as the foreground of something coincidentally matches the theme’s background, etc.

You don’t have to do the whole Evil thing, either: It can be toggled off and you still get a lot of Doom affordances, but with more complex keystrokes to invoke them. I’m keeping it on because I have time to mess with it, and because my foundational Unix user myth re: my editor religion is a matter of freak happenstance I’ve never really reconciled myself to.

No verdict yet, really, besides “gonna keep using it because it has some very sane defaults that make Emacs feel more cohesive than my hacked-together “init.el of Theseus” that started its life on an Amiga 500 in 1996.

Mackup

Mackup is just this backup config thing. On a Mac you install it from Homebrew, run it, and it backs up configs for over 550 applications: Everything from Adium to zsh, with ssh, Emacs, tmux, Sublime, git, rubocop and hundreds more in between.

Basic features:

• A variety of cloud stores: Dropbox, iCloud, Google Drive, and your own filesystem.
• Exclude lists, for the things you don’t want backed up/syncing across machines.
• An Include list, to narrow what it touches to explicit apps.
• Custom files, so you can tell it to, e.g. backup your ~/bin or something with an odd location for its config.

It has a dry-run switch so you can review what it would do, and a “no, this is awful, put it all back” argument.

There are some bugs. It did something weird to my iTerm config after I forced it to, reasoning that the only reason I use iTerm is because some YouTuber told me to and so didn’t care if I learned a Mackup limitation the hard way. It also believes that the Doom Emacs config is somewhere it is not, so I wrote a custom config for that in two minutes:

[application]
name = My Doom Emacs

[configuration_files]

[xdg_configuration_files]
doom

Verdict so far: It’s fine and I’m going to keep using it. I recently started putting more config stuff in Git and was beginning to think about how to make something similar. Glad I don’t have to.

Rocky IV

We finished up our run of the OG Rocky movies I was willing to watch with Rocky IV last night. The one with the Russian. Al was in her phone after the first montage/music video (of four? I lost count). I knew it was going to be awful, but I haven’t seen it since my dad took me and Cousin Scotty to see it in the theater in 1985 and a mild spirit of completionism had descended on me.

It was sort of interesting to see the music video editing sensibility in the direction. Like, you could spot music video tropes in the angles and cuts. It served to make Drago, the Russian, weirdly sympathetic because some of it is bewildering, or at least seems designed to provoke feelings of bewilderment and maybe a little nausea. I think the tempo of editing is generally faster these days, but perhaps less jumpy and discontiguous.

Anyhow, I found myself wondering when they were going to show Drago being injected with steroids with a brief closeup of a dripping needle, then wondered how, almost 40 years later, I remembered that passing detail, then learned it was because they show the needle four or five times in case you were looking away and didn’t get that the Russian was cheating.

Also, wow, this weird conflation of Soviet and Nazi ideologies where the Russians start bragging that Drago is of superior genetic stock.

And the lyrics in one of the music video tracks about how it feels like “freedom is on the ropes.”

Finished Jedi: Fallen Order

I wrapped up Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order over the weekend. : I get the impression it is very much A Kind of Game with a lot of the conventions people not only tolerate but even look forward in that kind of thing.

I found some of it frustrating until I dug into the configuration menu and found I could turn on some accessibility features that made a few recurring tasks (e.g. grabbing while jumping) less fiddly, and that allowed me to spend more time exploring and letting the story unfold than repeatedly falling to my death or tumbling to the bottom of some puzzle.

I learned to live with Jedi Wall Running, but never warmed up to all the moments where you have to slide down a slick mud or ice path and time jumps/grabs/wall-runs/bounces. That all felt less like Jedi Bad-Assery and more like someone decided to reskin a snowboarding game.

I was also a little over all the planet-hopping. You have to revisit things several times. I get that part of the way you make the power fantasy aspects of these games feel more acute is by presenting an impossible obstacle then letting the character skill up and overcome it. But that could take the form of presenting an impossible kind of obstacle and letting the player skill up and overcome one just like it somewhere else?

As a Star Wars property, I really enjoyed it. It’s a lightweight story, but the whole time period between the fall of the Republic and SW:ANH has good story-telling potential, and I liked what they did with it in this game.

The upcoming sequel won’t be on PS4, so … so much for all my gloating about being a trailing-edge casual who doesn’t need the latest.

Anyhow, I think my next game is going to be Ghost of Tsushima. I went into Fallen Order thinking it’d be a good way to get a little more grounded in modern Big Games, and Ghost is what I had in mind specifically.

Okay. We’re at time. This was more of a tool for procrastination today than it should have been. I want to put in two hours on some overdue work.