Hi! I'm Jack 👋

I'm trying to reel things in a bit, blog-wise, so I'm focusing my blogging at baty.net for now. See you there.

I created a new, empty Tinderbox document today.

It's meant to be an antidote to the Emacs Fatigue I've been feeling recently. A nice outliner and map views, timeline views, fancy exports, smart agents, etc. I want it to make my notes more immediately useful. We'll see.

There's a difference between "having my notes in plain text" and making that text immediately useful. I focus a lot of attention on the former, when the latter is more important.

There's a new macOS email client in town: MailMaven.

I downloaded the beta and played with it for a few minutes. Looks fun, and really customizable. Thing is, I'm happy with reading my email in Emacs, or Apple Mail if I get all pointy-clicky. Is it possible my phase of futzing with various email clients is coming to an end? I kind of hope so.

🎶 “Absolute Elsewhere” by Blood Incantation.

When are we going to get past this period of Metal sounding like call-and-respond between Backstreet Boys and Cookie Monster with the flu? It’s been self-parody for a decade.

I have to admit, my recent email fiasco has really taken the wind out of my Emacs sails. If I'm using Emacs, I want to use Notmuch. If I'm using Notmuch, I want to use it on both Macs. If I can't do that, I kind of don't want to use Emacs. Those things don't necessarily follow, but that's how I'm feeling.

One of the qualities I like about the way this Tinderbox blog works is its lack of necessary decisions. There's only one kind of post. The only choice is whether or not to display a title. I suppose the option of writing directly in the daily parent note, (which isn't included in the RSS feed), is a decision, but still. Over on baty.net I choose between a main daily note, a sub-note, or a full-on blog post. I find myself often starting in one place, then changing my mind later. This site is easier to deal with that way.

Dave's bramble photo is prettier than mine. I hope his post's title is a Led Zeppelin reference :).

I made some Journaling changes like 3 days ago. A lot has happened since then. The important thing is that I got mad at Emacs again. Not Emacs, specifically, but what Emacs does to my system. So, I fired up Tinderbox and started putting stuff in my LifeBook.tbx document instead of my Daybook.org file. I do this occasionally, and, while I don't regret it, it's not a good idea.

There's simply no chance that I'll pick one and stick with it. I wish that wasn't true.

At this point, with Emacs I'm falling for the sunk cost fallacy. I've got too much invested to change.

It makes me twitchy when I don't use Tinderbox for too long. It's one of the most interesting, powerful, and flexible apps I've ever known. It's a pointy-clicky graphical counterpart to Emacs. It may not be quite as tweakable as Emacs, but it makes up for it with ease of use.

And it makes a great blogging tool. You're soaking in it.

I think it's time for another sabbatical from social media. There is so much terrible shit happening right now, and social media just amplifies it. If I thought that was helpful, it would be one thing, but it's not helpful. It's debilitating.

Curio is such a great bit of software. For a while, I used it for everything. But, as I do, I stopped because it doesn't make sense for everything. One fun way to use it is as a journal or blog. It's not for making a real blog, but its completely blank canvas makes for a fun way to build a sort of scrapbook. Here's the thing I did yesterday, exported as HTML: 2024-12-28. It's fun.

When I showed my dad the original Toy Story and talked about how unbelievable and difficult and amazing the 3D rendering was, he shrugged and said, "So? They just use computers, right?"

That's how I feel now when seeing anything created using AI.

I have to be honest, I tend to prefer looking for stuff via a search using an HTML form on a web page. My wiki, for example. Or this site. Or my blog. As good as Emacs can do searches, I find the experience to be clunky. Even with Deadgrep, etc. When I want to look something up, I go to some web page instead of Emacs. Weird.

I am incapable of making a decision. Or, more accurately, I am in capable of sticking with a decision I've already made. I hate it.

I tend to either want complete control of the thing, or I don't want to have to think about it at all. I end up in some awkward place between those two options and it's crazy-making.