The other half of the “get more mobile with Denote and Emacs” conundrum — outside the stuff where you can read notes — is the capture part: Being able to get things into the system when you’re out and about and maybe don’t have a laptop along.

The glue for everything I’m doing to address the mobile stuff is Syncthing, with all the nodes connected via TailScale. On my iOS devices, I use Mobius Sync as my Syncthing client. Since I’ve got Syncthing running on a Synology, that provides me with a central node to compensate for mobile or seldom-used desktop devices coming in and out on the TailScale network as they sleep and wake up.

To make my Denote setup more mobile, I’ve got SyncThing updating my published notes folder more frequently than the default, and I’ve got a save hook for my Denote directory that both publishes my Denote notes as HTML and runs the note indexer script that FusionJS depends on to make search fast. Since org publishing is incremental, there’s not a big hit when I save a Denote file: It recreates the notes index and runs the Python script, which takes about a twentieth of a second to complete at this point because all it cares about is the filename and the tags (which are built into the filename.)

Over time, as my notes scale, that script might take longer, and that’s fine: It is also running on the Synology where performance isn’t as big of a deal. Running the indexer on the client nodes just means when SyncThing kicks in it is shipping an updated index along with the new files to the Synology.

Anyhow, that’s the background infra stuff.

To handle the other part, capture, I turned to Drafts. It needed a little bit of Javascript to create a few variables for the output template, and it can write out to on-device storage, so it was trivial to create a Drafts action that takes this:

Some note about agriculture
fruits vegetables
I am going to write today about fruits and vegetables and how important they are to our way of life.

… and turns it into a file called 20230612T121326--some-note-about-agriculture__fruits_vegetables.org with the content

#+title:      Some note about agriculture
#+date:       [2023-06-12 Mon 12:13]
#+filetags:   :fruits:vegetables:
#+identifier: 20230612T121326

I am going to write today about fruits and vegetables and how important they are to our way of life.

… and then deposits it into the on-device storage path for Mobius Sync and ingestion into the Syncthing network.

The use case for something like this is pretty small: I’d like to be able to make Denote notes on a phone or iPad when I’m not near a laptop or desktop machine, and it was easier to automate that up front even if Denote’s naming and formatting convention is pretty simple. Following the “convention over configuration” mindset of Denote, the top level of my notes hierarchy is empty, so it becomes the de facto inbox for when I’m back in front of a “real computer” for triaging incoming notes captured while mobile – moving them into the right folders, updating metadata, etc.

The action writes to a Drafts “bookmark,” so you can use whatever storage back end you like: If you keep your Denote notes in Dropbox, Box, Google Drive or whatever, the action will prompt you the first time you use it (on Mac or iOS/iPadOS) and you can choose the right thing for you. I suppose for Git people something like Working Copy will probably also work.

Anyhow, seems to be a fine v1.

And I guess, going wide for a few seconds, another comment on what I like about Denote generally: It’s a good convention! As I was working on the search stuff over lunch, I realized that the Python script that creates the index.json file that Fuse.js has to consume was using file creation times to record the date of a given note in the index. That’d be fine if those notes were never regenerated, but they are. But whatever! The Denote naming convention embeds the date in the filename. So I just parse that to create the date entry for each file in the index.

If all my plaintext notes were saved with that naming convention for all eternity, it wouldn’t be the worst thing. If the space goat comes and eats Emacs, the convention-over-configuration approach means that if you understand regular expressions and any commodity scripting language, you can pipe your stuff through pandoc and be on your way in a new tool. It’s not much more complex a lift than, say, switching from Jekyll to Hugo. If you’re willing to use a tool you have to use lisp to configure, this isn’t a big thing.

The one “looking over my shoulder” question I have is around markup and future-proofing. There’s a case to be made for using Denote with its Markdown-and-YAML format and not its org-mode format. That would provide close to perfect portability into something like Obsidian without needing to run anything through pandoc first. There’s an argument to be made that parsing that format is easier, too, because YAML is a thing and “org mode file variables” are kind of not.

Eh. Whatevs.

I might need to write a script. Please don’t throw me in the briar patch.

A bit more on the Leica Q3 and the Fujifilm roadmap

I loaned my Leica Q2 out, which prompted some comments from the lendee, which made me think about the Q3 in clearer terms. It sounds like actual general availability will be quite delayed, and I’m in no hurry to buy new gear anyhow, but I think I’m more curious about what’s next for Fujifilm’s X100 lineup and the eventual X100 – VI? 6? Whatever it is.

I’d love to see IBIS and I’d love for it to have the X-T5’s sensor. It feels like a faster lens is probably too much to hope for: The size difference between Fujifilm’s two faster 23mm lenses — the original XF23/1.4 and the WR remake — and the lenses you find in the X100 series and the XF23/2 WR is pretty drastic. I think an f1.8 or 1.4 would bulk the X100 up considerably.

I’m also curious about whether there’s any life left in the X-Pro series. I thought the “no chimping” design of the X-Pro 3 was a gimmick, and I am not sure what the real audience even is for an optical viewfinder. I read someone recently who put the X-Pro OVF in the context of early mirrorless technology, pointing out that it helped people get around the performance problems with early EVFs. Personally, I feel an aesthetic connection with it but prefer to just shoot with the EVF. The one exception to that is when I’m out with my little Funleader fixed-focus pancake: I use the EVF now and then to spot-check exposure, but it’s fun shooting super lo-fi with a toy lens and an OVF.

It feels to me like the X100 line could be coming close to rounding out a phase: Get IBIS squeezed in there, break the f2 barrier on the lens, and what else do you do besides iterate on the sensor as it makes sense to do so, selling it as a travel/street compact all-rounder? They added WR last go-round. There’s not much left to do if it is to stay a fixed-lens kinda-rangefinder. If they killed the OVF to make room for IBIS, and bulked it up a little for a faster lense, I think I’d take that deal. It’d just be an APS-C Leica Q-series at that point.

Fright Night (2011)

We watched the 2011 Fright Night remake last night after a weekend conversation about vampire movies. I wouldn’t call it a paragon of the form, but by the time we were able to settle down for a movie it was a little late and we wanted something fizzy. I … didn’t remember Colin Farrell having so much fun the first time I saw it, which must have been in the theater or not long after its run. But he does have fun. And it left us wanting to go back to the ‘85 original, because the remake raised a few questions we couldn’t answer. It was nice of them to let Chris Sarandon turn up long enough to get eaten.

That conversation also has me wanting to do a few more pairs/trios. Like, Murnau’s Nosferatu along with Shadow of the Vampire, but also Cabinet of Dr. Caligari to get a good dose of German Expressionism.

Old man coos at cloud

Possibly lost in the Denote shuffle because I’m using them and they seem to just work:

Syncthing, NextDNS, and TailScale are really doing it for me.

There’s the occasional glitch with Syncthing, but nothing too bad and probably because I have some things writing to the sync folders a little too often. But it works really well for how I’m using it:

• Syncing org files
• Syncing the HTML output of org publishing to the Synology
• Syncing back end for Mackup (configuration syncing)
• Syncing back end for my Doom Emacs configuration
• Syncing ~/bin

I haven’t been using it quite long enough to rule on whether it’s as good as Dropbox, but it’s not nearly as needy as Dropbox, and it works great over …

TailScale. I came this close to setting up a VPN on my Synology when I remembered that I meant to look into TailScale. I went in expecting I’d bounce off something about it, and didn’t expect to be able to connect iOS/iPadOS devices to it, but it’s almost magical in its just-works-ness. I’ve got a few things on Heroku I could probably pull back to the Synology at this point.

Another bonus is that I can use my NextDNS account with it, which spares me conflicting profiles on my Apple devices and hence removes the need to keep separate ad blockers going on anything: I’m subscribed to a few filters on NextDNS and it is more than adequate.

I need to take one last pass at making sure I don’t have something syncing its config on Dropbox, and get all my Dropbox stuff out, but I think that’s one more account I can kill thanks to Syncthing and TailScale.

I’m remembering back to when my world was NFS mounts and DynDNS, and this is all so much better.

I, gamer

The fun part of the PS4 has just been catching up on whatever has been going on in console gaming over the past while. I remember being a very avid gamer once upon a time – during the PS1 and PS2 era – then I was just really into the Nintendo DS, and then I didn’t play much anymore. My 3DS never saw a lot of use, and I don’t get much time in on the Switch. It has always felt like games on the Switch are too big to just pick up and put down between meetings, but too small to really invest discretionary time in.

So I got a PlayStationPlus membership and I’ve been taking advantage of how cheap everything I’m curious about is.

I took a detour into the Doom remake, and I am not sure if it’s okay to say so, but I find it hilarious.

I remember Doom from when it was the slightly grittier evolution of Wolfenstein 3D, and it always to me to be solid execution with an excellent vibe. The remastered version I downloaded to my PlayStation is also pretty well executed, and the vibe benefits from the graphical advancements.

The first time I killed a demon by running up to it, tearing its arm off and beating it until it spilled ammo and health like an infernal piñata made me howl.

The whole thing is sort of hilarious that way. You end up in hell fighting demons to a grinding, thrashing soundtrack, there are demonic runes everywhere, bodies, flames, blood all over the place. It’s just hilarious.

I, handyman

I just fixed our garage door sensor for the third time in fourteen years. I predicted it would go differently this time the last time I fixed it, because the recurring problem is a pair of wires leading to the sensor that periodically get snagged by … something — a yard tool, a piece of bicycle, a carelessly plopped laundry basket — and one of them breaks.

Whoever built the house and installed the garage door provided as much wire as was needed to connect the sensor, then covered the wiring in dryall. If there is any spare wiring available up there in the wall somewhere, it is smashed in place behind the drywall and I’ve tugged at it as hard as I dare lest I break off the remaining bits coming out of the wall.

So I’ve known for five years now that there was no more wire coming out of the wall … that the next break would be the one where I’d have to splice more wire in, because there wasn’t enough left to cover the space from the wall to the sensor and still get it wrapped around the post.

Anyhow, this time Gorilla Tape is involved in making it all sit there more snugly and less likely to be snagged and I can close the garage door without standing there holding the button. That has created a surprising amount of friction where taking my bike anywhere is concerned.

I had the time to do this today because the half of the house that hosts all our networking infrastructure and my office sits shrouded in darkness. The breaker for that circuit failed last week as the winter storm was happening. It didn’t fail in the “it just blew, you can reset it” kind of way, but in the “fails and doesn’t even seem to have blown and you can’t even trip the test switch” kind of way.

I felt it coming – the UPS for all the infrastructure was making the click it makes when the supply is getting frisky, but never tripped over into “I’m running on battery power now.” When everything did finally go dark I went down to the garage, couldn’t seen a tripped breaker, flipped the two candidates (both are labeled the same thing and I’ve never taken the time to label them “front” and “back”) and went back upstairs to … nothing.

Then eight hours later it all lit up again. Then failed again.

Same symptoms: Not tripped, can’t test.

I called the home warranty company and they promised a 24 hour window for a contractor, but by then Portland was covered in ice. They finally texted this morning, asked for availability, and are on their way.

For now the router, Wi-Fi, and switch are running off of a long extension cord running out of my office, down the hall and into an outlet on the not-blown upstairs circuit.

The last time we had an electrical problem like this was maybe 10 years ago during a pair of 100-degree-plus days. A light fixture that was a little heavy pulled itself free of a softened nylon anchor and the clash of wires tripped the arc breaker (on the same circuit that’s bothering me now). That was when we learned that whoever wired the house had run the range hood in the kitchen downstairs into the same circuit as the two bedrooms and bathroom on the other, upstairs end of the house.

“Some Russian, probably,” opined the contractor who came to have a look.

I destroyed an Airport Extreme that week by bringing it down from my office and putting it the only place it could rest near the only open outlet, in a window.

I say “destroyed,” but what really happened was that the Ethernet port stopped working.

The “Progress!” note in all this is that during the period where all the networking and Wi-Fi was down, we just flipped to the 5G hotspots our phones provide and carried on with our business. It doesn’t outperform the new MOCA/EdgeRouter/CenturyLink setup, but it is faster than our Xfinity/Eero-as-wireless-only-mesh setup was.

Last time, I would imagine all we had was 3G, and there was no “all you can eat.” I remember because we burned through our cap, decided to go to the mall for the air conditioning, and my attempt to transfer some spending money to Ben using the mobile bank page took five minutes because AT&T dealt with data hogs by dropping them to EDGE speeds until the month was over.

TickTick

I’m giving TickTick a try this week. Stuff I like about it:

• The interface looks as simple or busy as I want it to be. Something I appreciate about Things 3 is its ability to fall back to “just a nice todo list app” during those times when I don’t feel like messing with it.
• It has a habit tracker that integrates with the rest of the app. If you set up a habit and it’s due, it turns up in the “Today” list, or you can interact with it in its own “habits” area.
• It has a built-in Pomodoro timer. That method works pretty well for me (using it now!) and it’s more than a superficial integration: You can specify what on your list is getting the time.

Stuff I’d rather it not:

Everything is framed as “how productive” you are. I’m just tired of that language.

I am tired of that language because after a couple of years of watching people burn out and then thrash around trying to figure out what was “wrong” with them, I came to the conclusion that as much as the gentrification of mental illness annoys the living hell out of me, it doesn’t outrage me the way the modern workplace turns workers on themselves (and deepens that gentrification feedback loop, because the only help you’re going to get as you thrash around, worrying that you’re falling behind your peers in the company’s “performance culture,” is a non-ironic invitation to take your woes to the EAP).

And, more importantly, not every single thing you want to do has to be “productive.” It is not, for instance, a matter of “productivity” to remind myself that I want to read a chapter of a book every day, or learn how to make my own mayonnaise, or take a picture every day.

Anyhow, it’s pretty easily ignored if you stay away from the reporting, which I intend to. I just want something more ergonomically sound than Apple’s Reminders, and the purpose-built habit and pomodoro stuff rolls a number of things into one context.

Tailscale

I spent a while not bothering to play with tech stuff, so when I heard about Tailscale I never did anything with it. Once I got my new network stuff going I decided to start doing more with my Synology NAS just because it’d be easier to network and secure with a decent router in place.

Poking around the VPN packages available for it I saw the Tailscale app and thought “oh, that.” In just a few minutes I had all my stuff added to it and talking to each other, and a whole set of problems I was willing to create for myself went away.

I haven’t done any testing with it out in the world yet, but internally it integrates fine with my internal DNS. It’s so smooth.

Design fiddling

I spent a little time fiddling with site design today, too, just to make the front page a little more lively. I took a swing at some responsive design, as well. It’s crude, but the front page is way more “just the essentials” on a phone, were someone to wander out to it.