It has been supplanted by org-mode.

Final verdict: It’s pretty good. If I had to put all my to-do lists in a proprietary, closed-format tool, it would probably be the one, or at least in the running with Things. I just appear to be due for an org-mode kick, and TickTick happened to be standing around when it happened.

In terms of getting out of org-mode what I was getting out of TickTick beyond a simple todo list, it came down to mobile, habits, and pomodoros.

[beorg][] handles Reminders integration. Doom Emacs lets you pull in org-habits out of the box, so I just did that and set up a habits file. They’re pulled into my agenda, which shows streaks information for them.

I also added org-pomodoro, which works about like you’d expect: Pick an item from the agenda, trigger the timer, and it adds a time entry to that item in its home file for each Pomodoro completed:

** omg.lol Docs

*** Git workflow

**** DONE Beginner section
DEADLINE: <2023-03-24 Fri>
:LOGBOOK:
CLOCK: [2023-03-24 Fri 14:19]--[2023-03-24 Fri 14:44] =>  0:25
CLOCK: [2023-03-24 Fri 13:49]--[2023-03-24 Fri 14:14] =>  0:25
CLOCK: [2023-03-24 Fri 11:25]--[2023-03-24 Fri 11:50] =>  0:25
CLOCK: [2023-03-24 Fri 10:14]--[2023-03-24 Fri 10:39] =>  0:25
CLOCK: [2023-03-24 Fri 09:38]--[2023-03-24 Fri 10:03] =>  0:25
:END:

I found this presentation helpful for figuring out how to add reporting with the time data you can gather.

Always coming home

At some point we have to acknowledge to ourselves that maybe the chaos is the actual pattern, or that the things we think are chaotic are not after all, even if we can’t quite feel the rhythm.

When it comes to tools – especially productivity ones – I am fickle. I’ve been through four or five major “all in on org” moments in my life, and then I’ve fallen out of them.

org-mode can be tough to stick with: Emacs can be crabby, the ecosystem feels fragile sometimes, and you occasionally go through these periods where everyone’s carrying on about some new Emacs build or hotness and you chase after it ten minutes before a day full of meetings where the segfaults start in the middle of a note.

No amount of fluency with the tool or joy in the format can get you around the days where the tool just doesn’t feel steady.

On the other hand, one missing piece from previous Big Org periods has been a habit I picked up during the pandemic of being more circumspect about the tools I pick up and what I want to do with them. I write about what I hope to get out of something. I think about what I want to use it for. Sometimes I learn about a new feature or approach and decide to roll it in, but I’ve gotten a lot better at knowing why I use the things I do, and what I want out of them. I’m also more suspicious of changing them up much.

In assorted parts of my technical life, that new habit has been a real boon, because “tech” in the broadest sense is something I like to play with, and I used to constantly break the rule “Don’t try anything new on race day,” with all the ensuing chaos that comes with it. Like, years ago past Mike got really disgusted at work and swore he was done with his job and applied for a bunch of jobs, and decided that was the right time to change email providers because he heard that the one he was switching to had some cool features. Yes, some mails went missing.

Where my Emacs life is concerned, it just comes down to “one thing at a time, only one thing a day, if at all.”

I self-interpret that to mean “you can turn on one module and snarf up one quick tweak or imported config to go with it.” Adding org-super-agenda? Great – turn it on and add one config change. Doing pomodoros? Okay, don’t change your org agendas to show the timing, just make sure you can record the times consistently, and that it isn’t making things feel wobbly. I usually just do a pomodoro of fiddling at the beginning of the day, which is about enough time to find something, turn it on, and see if it passes the initial use test before it’s time to do other stuff.

I’ve been harping a lot elsewhere on how stable Doom Emacs feels compared to my own init.el ecosystem, but I suspect part of it is just that I’ve been very careful about what I add and how much I add at a time. I think Emacs is in a unique tier of sensitivity to a lot of thrashy change, but just about anything built on a lot of user-generated content (e.g. modules, add-ons, plugins) can be made to misbehave and become hard to troubleshoot.

Another thing that has changed about me over the past few years has been a growing awareness that I can get into a headspace where I prize automation and less overall motion to the point of paralysis. It took seeing other people falling into that pit – believing that they came into work that day to automate something and not to achieve an outcome – to get me to see it in myself and snap out of it a little.

Vim Adventures

I mentioned yesterday that I’ve been enjoying Vim Adventures:

“Enjoying” is sort of relative. It wants you to learn stuff that is a slog, and it has a few puzzle challenges that can be challenging since they not only demand you use the keys you’ve been learning to accomplish the task, they sometimes require you to do a little lateral thinking. You can’t get away with just memorizing a keystroke for a given lesson, use the keystroke a few times, then get on with it. You end up using the keystroke repeatedly trying to solve a puzzle in under n keystrokes, sometimes not realizing there’s another lesson buried in there about cursor motion behavior or what have you.

In the end, though, the puzzles are well constructed. New stuff comes in at a steady pace, and each new set of challenges provide a mix of what you’ve already learned with the new stuff, so you have to constantly adapt. I tried another, less gamified vim tutorial to see if it would work better for me and it was disorienting after a few hours with Vim Adventures: I couldn’t see how any of it could possibly stick in any meaningful timeframe.

I’m typing this in the space between writing pomodoros this morning. This is the first day I’ve had all week to be deep in a writing/revision cycle using what I’ve been learning. It’s been interesting to realize how much stuff Vim Adventures has taught me to “just do” with minimal delay, but I can still sense the occasional spike in cognitive load when a few decades of muscle memory collide with newly learned things that are still up there in the thinking layers.

It’s also interesting, as someone whose first deep Unix experience dates back to an Ultrix box and VT100 in 1991, how much these assorted UI ecosystems have come to acknowledge each other. Doom understands the basic Mac text keybindings, so when I’ve exhausted my vi keybinding knowledge and just need to do a damn thing to a block of text, cmd-x and cmd-v are right there.

I have asked myself a few times “why are you doing this at all,” and as near as I can figure it comes down to:

• Finding I prefer hand positioning that involves fewer control key chords.
• Enjoying the learning experience. It’s stimulating.
• A recent encounter with the mythical “vi only” system in the form of my EdgeRouter X. Dinking around with files in that thing was a pain, just as the vi bigots have always warned. Completely doable with my limited repertoire of vi skills, but clumsy.

I suppose I should also sing Doom Emacs’ praises once more: It does a lot to make Emacs feel more stable by taking care of housekeeping and providing some reasonable defaults. It’s a good learning platform because there are fewer random things going on out of the box. I don’t know if I’d be able to tolerate the learning curve with my own init.el in place.

Probably time to wind down on micro.blog

A few months ago I took this site and moved it from Jekyll to Hugo. Jekyll was fine and all, but the more I dug into Hugo’s features the more it seemed like an interesting direction to go. I also wanted to move the site from looking personal marketing heavy to just being a blog that also has stuff in it about work/business sometimes.

That was a liberating move: I was able to get myself into a pretty easy writing/publishing workflow that was perhaps a little more computer-bound than what I could get away with on micro.blog, but not so bad.

I kept sticking to my micro.blog presence partially because it has robust cross-posting features I hadn’t bothered to suss out using something like IFTTT or Zapier. At the same time, I have a little too much web producer left in me to be comfortable with two domains that are roughly doing the same thing. I once automated a consolidation, content migration, and re-canonicalization of four dozen websites. People sneer about SEO and all the evils of the SEO industry, but there are search engines in the world and there are reasons to care about what they make of your web presence.

If all I wanted to do was have a blog in the most traditional “reverse-chronological-ordered posts” sense of the word, I’d probably stick with micro.blog. Its Hugo foundations allow just enough flexibility to do the basics, and your content can be exported with relatively few idiosyncracies – no worse than any other Hugo theme. You can write shortcodes and customize a lot of the way the site works.

It’s kind of a frustrating platform for iterative development, though. There’s enough variance between a basic Hugo theme and what micro.blog needs that you have to do some trial-and-error. Using vanilla Hugo on a laptop, iterative learning is lightning fast and the feedback loops border on instantaneous, especially with hugo server --navigateToChanged. With micro.blog, there’s a build time delay to figure out if your thing worked or not, or to get feedback on how it is failing.

I have also found I prefer the free-wheeling nature of Mastodon a little more appealing than the social layer of micro.blog. I’ve written about that elsewhere, so we’ll leave it alone here.

Anyhow, it’s time to go through the past couple of years of micro.blogging and work out how to manage that migration. One idea I want to explore is the creation of a “microblog” content type that would allow me to just move all that stuff into its own silo largely untouched, with some design work to cope with the titleless posts over the years, and with some logic in my Atom feed to allow for ongoing microposts that stay out of Atom but still get syndicated over Mastodon. Similarly, that could be a quick path to getting all my old dot unplanned content moved over under its own “vintage” content type.

At some point I am not going to have the kind of time on my hands that I have now, so my thinking is beginning to shift to “what’s expedient” vs. “what could enhance your career as a Hugo consultant with yourself as your only client.”

When I got my PlayStation 4 a little while back I thought I was buying into the same sort of thing going on with my Nintendo Switch in terms of game selection and cost.

I like the Switch just fine and haven’t had a huge issue with the Nintendo online market. It’s slow-loading and frustrating to shop through if you don’t keep up with it weekly, but it’s fine. I don’t tend to buy too much stuff when it’s new, but I’ve bought a few of the big ports over the years, and I do catch the occasional sale. All in all, selection is okay and cost is what I guess I expect for using an online store instead of buying used stuff.

The thing I wasn’t expecting with the PS4 was what I guess I should have been expecting for a superseded platform that’s mostly still on shelves because of supply chain problems: There’s a ton of stuff that’s great for a casual like me at prices I find incomprehensibly low. It’s stuff I saw ads for a while back and thought “looks cool, too bad I hate games now” over the years, and it’s $4.99 or even free if there’s a bunch of DLC they can still sell for more.

As someone who’s gamed on:

• VIC 20
• Atari 2600
• Nintendo NES
• Atari 5200
• Commodore 64
• Amiga 500
• PC (8088,386,early Pentiums)
• Sega Genesis
• Gameboy, Lynx, whatever Sega’s handheld thing was in the early ’90s
• PS 1, 2, 3
• Nintendo DS, 3DS, Switch

… the value I’m getting as a casual gamer is just beyond anything I’ve ever seen. I haven’t felt this way since I went to a flea market where some guy was selling grocery bags with a Sega Genesis and a few fist-fulls of cartridges for $20. I’ve got more games than I know what to do with sitting on this thing, with a PSPlus subscription that delivers even more.

I know there’s better, cooler, and prettier out there, and I have briefly experienced the tug of seeing a new release and not seeing my system listed, but not enough to get me to care. This thing is pretty fun for a 10-year-old product. It makes me curious about the economics of the whole market. I assume at some point someone at PlayStation Central will decide they’ve indulged people like me long enough and their digital marketplace will fold up and herd us all along, but for now I kinda feel like I’m getting away with something.

TickTick Progress

Today I found a Draft action for getting stuff into TickTick. Not much more to say about TickTick generally. I’ve been fine-tuning the focus stuff and adjusting the reminders and find it very usable. Being able to fire-and-forget a Draft into my inbox is useful and makes me more likely to keep using it.

AirConnect

We went Sonos a while back, but just before AirPlay2 support came along, so there are a few devices in the house that require the Sonos app. The last of them – a pair of Sonos 1’s, are sitting in my office so Al and Ben don’t have to deal with them because the Sonos app is infuriating.

This morning I gave myself a 30-minute pomodoro to go find something to help me with this problem and ended up with AirConnect, which just sits on your network and advertises Sonos speakers (and Chromecast devices) as AirPlay devices.

I went in a little warily when the first post I found was some guy talking about running it in Docker, but a quick DuckDuckGo search netted me the AirConnect-Synology project, which just makes packages for Synology.

Configuration was amazingly simple: I uploaded the package, ticked a few boxes, accepted a few defaults, and it was working.

I’m glad it’s just for these two speakers in a room nobody else uses. I don’t trust anything until it has been “just working” long enough for me to forget it exists, and I hate forgetting about tech things that affect Al & Ben.

People like to jokingly refer to themselves as their family’s IT department. I prefer to think of myself as our family’s tech sin-eater.

New printer day

My little Brother laser printer, which worked pretty well through grade, middle, and high school for Ben, has always made me tense up when it wakes up. The UPS on the same circuit senses the sag of a laser printer heating the drum on startup and makes ominous clicks and increments the fault counter and sometimes the lights flicker. I did enough reading to know laser printers do this to everybody.

With our recent electrical problems, something had to give: There’s a little too much load on the “office and entertainment” wing of the residence. My new MOCA stuff gives me some options for moving bits around the house, but the two power-hungriest rooms are on the same small circuit (inexplicably also including the range hood downstairs) and there’s not a lot that can go anywhere else. It’d make the most sense to move the laser printer, but it’s a pre-AirPrint model, so it’d be a pain without the NAS going along with it (which has served it up as an AirPrint endpoint when it’s connected via USB.)

So I replaced it with a Brother inkjet all-in-one everybody says is fine. For some reason, everyone’s top pick being consistently rated 4/5 stars is comforting to me. Like, lots of people think it’s fine and a few other people are disappointed by some pedestrian hangup or another.

It came today and I admired a few things about setting it up:

• The display walks you through onboarding - installing the cartridges and paper, getting it networked, etc.
• It does a quick calibration test where it prints a page then scans the page to check nozzle alignment.
• It’s the first scanner I’ve personally owned that works natively with Apple’s Preview to do over-the-network scanning.
• AirPrint just works with no need to get the NAS involved or any other hacks.

And unlike Epsons and Canons I’ve owned, reviews suggest it’s better about sitting and not ruining its own ink cartridges if you’re not constantly using it.

The fax part is useless. I guess I’m a little surprised there’s not some sort of e-fax thing built in, but whatevs.

Job progress

I went from radio silence for the past five or six weeks to two interviews next week. The hang time on one of them after applying was close to 30 days. Thinking back, I don’t think I ever ran a search that slow, but it’s happening a lot from what I hear.

I’m also glad I built the job tracking setup I did: I knew going in that long gaps in contact, slow responses, etc. would all be part of the process, and that it’d be good for my morale if I could quantify what I was seeing. So when I heard back today and thought “that was fooorrrrreeeever ago” then looked up the card, I could see that I opened the card on the 1st of last month and submitted an application the next day.

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.