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.

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.

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.

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.

“Oh,” I thought to myself, I bet it’s the v1 I demoted to tool pouch when I got a v2.

Turns out I had it backwards: The first pouch I found and wrote about was a v1, and the one I’d just found was a v2.

“Huh. Well, I bet it’s better!” so I started the process of moving things over from the v1 to the v2.

It also turns out that the v2 moved backwards in a few ways that are important to me:

• There are storage pouches in the main storage area and they’re more shallow.
• There are more pouches in the zip area, but they’re even more shallow and narrow, fit for little more than memory cards.

The problem with the former is that the main pouches in the v2 are too shallow to clip in a multitool or flashlight. They barely work with my tiny Space Pen and they definitely won’t hold my Magsafe battery. From the color stitching, it’s clear they’re meant for camera batteries.

The problem with the latter is that what extra partitions there are won’t help with anything I’d put in them.

It seems likely Peak Design decided to push the Field Pouch in the direction of a more narrow photography use case. Maybe, with the advent of the Tech Pouch, it made sense to specialize it a little more. I don’t know.

Anyhow, I would not recommend the Field Pouch v2 as an EDC bag.

North St. alternatives

But, you know, never identify a problem without having a solution on hand, so I’ll happily offer an alternative: The North St. Pioneer with a few accessories.

North St. is a bag company here in Portland. They make a lot of bicycle-forward stuff, and they make a line of hip packs that come in 8, 9, and 12-inch-wide sizes. The nine- and twelve-inch models can accommodate small, velcro-backed waterproof zipper pockets with internal pouches.

The Pioneer 8 is a little too small for my tastes, and the shoulder/waist strap is sewn on. That doesn’t work for my own use case of wanting something I can carry standalone or drop into a bigger bag of some kind. If you just wanted to carry a battery, a tool, and a few other small things it could work really well.

The Pioneer 12 is a little large to fit in a backpack gracefully, but it can hold a lot.

The Pioneer 9 hits the sweet spot. It is about the size of the Peak Design Field Pouch and is only a little more thick, so anywhere you’d put the Field Pouch you can put the Pioneer 9. You can order it in a waterproof material and it has a rain-sealed main zipper. You can also order a handlebar carrier or shoulder strap for it. It also has a front pocket that’s great for stowing a few things you want to get at quickly without rummaging. I put my Machine Era wallet in it.

Walking around with them you can use them as a waist pack, a cross-body bag, or a tiny sling, and with one strap you can flip between those modes easily. The clips for the assorted straps and carrying attachments are fiddly, but one solution for that is to add small ‘biners or Peak Design anchors to the strap eyes.

I still give the Peak Design Field Pouch v1 a bigger nod:

• It seems more durable.
• Its internal storage suits my tastes.
• It’s more expandable.

But the North St. Pioneer can be ordered in nicer colors and has more versatile carry options.

Either way, I’d stay away from the Peak Design Field Pouch v2. I love Peak Design and I’ve bought more of their v2 stuff than is seemly, but the second generation Field Pouch was a rare regression.

I spent a bunch of time online trying to find an “EDC” carrying … pouch? baglet? case? … and I ended up going with the thing that fell on my foot after I gave up and decided to get a scarf out of the closet.

I put “EDC” in scare quotes because the entire product category is a drop-ship grifter’s paradise of overpriced junk and product shot VSCO filter abuse marketed to operator culture tacti-cool wannabes and preppers who have decided to burn all fiat currency one Amazon order at a time.

But it has also become shorthand for a whole category of useful things that have existed forever on the edge of diverse markets: surplus stores, outdoor stores (both middle class peddlers like REI and high prole outlets like Sportsman’s Warehouse), and even book stores. So any search for things in this category must eventually include punting and tossing “EDC” into your search terms.

Anyhow, I was looking for some kind of pouch or carrying case for a set of things I both want to have on me if I go out, and want in one place when I am home:

• Leatherman Skeletool
• Wired earbuds
• Lens wipes
• Spare camera batteries
• Spare SD cards
• A mask
• Small flashlight
• Pocket notebook
• Space Pen
• MagSafe phone charger
• Glasses case

(EDC influencer conventions dictate that I lay all this stuff out in a neat grid, preferably on a rustic wooden surface, and take a top-down picture. They also dictate that every single one of those things be an Amazon affiliate link. I am going my own way here.)

It’s a healthy amount of small but varied stuff, and keeping it all in a single, predictable place is an ADHD adaptation:

When things find their way out of the collection, as they will, I know where they go the second I spot them a day or two later on a bookshelf, or the bedside table, or the kitchen counter, and I can rally my executive function to grab them and head straight for whatever I’m keeping them in.

Some people just keep this stuff in a single bag that goes with them everywhere. I admire these people, but that doesn’t work for me. Too many “out of the house” scenarios: Everything from “five mile round-trip walk for groceries in Woodstock” to “bike ride to northeast for lunch” to “weekend camping trip” (when the Garmin InReach gets clipped to a loop) to “ten mile longboard ride down the Springwater,” to “backroads motorcycle ride out to Estacada.”

And there’s Portland weather, too. The best, most stout waterproof bag is okay in winter but bulky and sweaty in summer. As a result I’ve slowly accreted a collection of bags and backpacks over the years: A smallish REI daypack, a selection of Peak Design slings and backpacks, a Kavu rope sling, a North Street hip bag, a Tom Bihn cross-body satchel, and a Banjo Brothers bike backpack. Moving my collection back and forth between those things is kind of a drag.

So I spent a bunch of time searching. I read through review sites, watched a video or two, followed shopping results links, searched on retailer sites, and just generally poked around, and couldn’t find the sweet spot:

• Can hold all my stuff.
• Can close tightly enough to keep things from jumbling around or rattling.
• Can fit in my bags and slings and leave room for them to perform their main purpose.
• Can provide enough internal organization that opening it up and finding the thing I need won’t involve rummaging and can probably be done by touch in the dark.
• Has enough room to add a specialty tool. I don’t, for instance, always want to carry my skate tool, but do like to have it toward the start of the longboarding season so I can adjust the trucks while I get my balance back.

At a certain point there are some things in my bag/sling collection that have to be excluded from consideration. My 5l Peak Design Everyday Sling, for instance, could accommodate this collection all on its own, with a little room left over to fit an iPad mini and maybe my Ricoh GR3x, but it is bulky and doesn’t have great internal organization, so it’d swallow too much of the space of anything I carried it in.

After looking around long enough, I just gave up.

Most stuff in the “EDC pouch/case/whatever” category was too small:

Enough room for the holy trinity of multitool, pen, and flashlight plus a few small incidentals. That doesn’t feel like enough to actually bother. I’d solve that with a valet tray in a central location I could sweep into a side pocket.

There are some handy bigger things that were a little too big. The Peak Design Tech Pouch is nice and I have one stowed in the trailer for a collection of adapters, cables, and other camping incidentals during the season, but it’s basically a redesigned toiletry bag. It’d work great for backpack-sized things, but not slings or satchels.

I also looked at tool rolls, but didn’t like the ergonomics of getting things out of one.

Stuff in the bicycling category tends to assume you want to stick the kit in your back jersey pocket or maybe a wedge pack, and tends to be focused on repairs plus one or two doses of energy goop of some kind.

There is a massive amount of tacti-cool operator culture stuff, but it is usually overbuilt and bulky. The ratio of surface area to useful storage space is poor, and by the time you add all the little molle attachments and mounting points it’s going to snag anything else you put in the bag with it.

The last time I went at this problem I even considered going Full Nerd on it with a Scott-E-Vest, but a. no and b. they have solved the seasonal problem in a way that excludes Oregon’s climate and involves paying them north of $1000 before they’re done with you. Plus no amount of artful product photography can hide the fact that if you used that stuff for real you would look like you were hiding a raging case of cuboid Borg tumors under your khaki vest.

Can we just pause. Go hit that link, look at the product photography and the models, and ask yourself how deep-seated your fear of being seen carrying a bag must be if wearing an inside-out fishing vest even in summer is the answer to having too much shit.

Years ago I came across the insight that “carrying a lot of stuff around” is an inverse economic privilege marker. The idea was that a middle class person’s thought process about the possibility of rain in the afternoon involves a shrug and walking out of the house hands-free because they can always duck in and buy an umbrella if it does start raining. The Scott-E-Vest company disagrees and will sell you a vest with 26 pockets that can, they want you to know, hold an umbrella, for ~$184.

Actually, someone in the Scott-E-Vest marketing department must have read the same article, because the brass telescope stand in the background reads as almost reassuring.

So like I said, I just gave up and found a little basket where I could keep that stuff, and selectively add or take things away from whatever bag I was going to head out with.

Then we decided to go to a movie this weekend and it was cold outside. Ben bought me a nice scarf for Christmas I’ve been meaning to wear, so I went upstairs to my closet to pull it down. Something came off the top shelf with it and landed on my foot:

A Peak Design field pouch I bought when I first learned about the brand, six or seven years ago.

This is a product shot from Peak Design showing one stuffed to the gills:

I had used it on and off for long weekends, mostly as a way to carry batteries, charger, and small camera bits, then stopped using it much and put it on the top shelf of the closet. It had a certain “a little big for how I was using it, too small to use for carrying anything extra” quality I never got over.

It turns out that it is the perfect size for all my stuff. There’s a zipper pocket inside, a few stretchy internal pouches, a pair of stiff pouches on the back wall, and a main storage area that’s generous enough for the basics plus an extra thing or two. It’s enough to keep everything organized and findable by touch.

When I fold it down it’s held shut by strong velcro. There’s a belt passthrough on the back for strapping it to the outside of a bigger pack. I had previously put two Peak Design anchor links on it, so I can even use it as a small bag on its own, but quickly convert it back to just being a carrying pouch I can toss in something else without having the clutter of a strap.

Theoretically you can stick a Peak Design Capture on it and use it for camera carry. I’ve never warmed up that particular use case for any of their stuff: I use the Capture on my backpacks for when I need to scramble over rocks or logs and don’t want my camera hanging loose from its strap. That’s owing to a 15-years-past trauma that involved my camera achieving a perfect, lens-first pendulum motion into a jagged rock. (Always buy a UV filter, kids.) But for carrying a camera around, I’ll just live with having a strap for my bag and a strap for my camera.

In terms of size, it’s a little large: It’s about the width of a trade paperback and maybe a little longer, but only three fingers thick at its widest with all my stuff in it.

It also ticks the weather resistance box: It folds down tight and is made of the usual Peak Design materials, so it’s thick and could survive in a non-weather-resistant bag in a sudden downpour.

• With my Peak Design Messenger, it fits fine in one of the foldable compartments, leaving room for body and lens or two lenses in the other compartments.

• With my daypacks, it fits neatly on the bottom, or could rest on top of whatever cargo ends up in there by the end of the day.

• With my Kavu Rope Sling it fits in the secondary zipped compartment as if made for it, leaving room in the main for a few books, etc.

• With my Tom Bihn satchel it easily fits in the back-side pocket, leaving room in the front for a book or two, an iPad mini, etc.

• At home, it just sits on a small shelf on the hall tree by the front door, close to my battery chargers, looking unobtrusive.

So, we’ll see? It looks good on paper? I won’t really know until this time next year, when it has been through all the seasons.