Hi, I'm Jack

I’ve been watching the new season of Monarch on Apple TV. It’s fine, I gues, but I’ve noticed that I tend to fast forward through the giant fight scenes. The monsters look awesome, but they are entirely CGI so of course they do. Also, they’re CGI so I kind of don’t care. In contrast, I’m very much enjoying the verbal sparring between Young Sherlock and Moriarty in that new series. Way more interesting.

I’ve seen some people “going back to Alfred” recently. Robb Knight for example. I used to love Alfred, but was called away by the new/shiny Raycast. Just for kicks, I installed Alfred, just to see how it feels. I’ve had a PowerPack license for as long as I can remember. It says “Legendary Supporter” but I’m not sure what that means. Anyway, I’ve spent too long already making some custom workflows that I don’t need. Alfred is so fast, and doesn’t nag me about AI features, which I appreciate.

After migrating the guts of this blog into a brand new Tinderbox document, one thing remains…content. I’ve decided that bringing the old content in will be a ton of work. I reviewed some of it, and there’s not much there worth moving. That’s 991 notes that are going away. See ya, old notes!

You may have noticed that things have changed around here. It’s true! The Tinderbox document that has been managing this blog for years had become, well, messy. I got tired of working around all of the cruft, so I created a brand new document and built it up from scratch.

I wanted the same basic layout; Each day contains the individual posts for that day. It took forever to get that wrangled, but I think I’ve done it.

There’s a lot missing or broken, but I promised myself I’d ship by the end of the day, so here we are. I’ll start backfilling content…eventually.

Next up is search, the changelog, small post images, OpenGraph tags, etc. But not today.

The RSS feed is at /feed.xml. I’ll put in a redirect from the old one at some point. See? Lot’s to do, but it was fun.

Gruber writes about a small macOS utility that I’d forgotten about called HazeOver, the “Distraction Dimmer™ for Mac”. I’m happy to have been reminded of it, because it really does help distinguish active windows, which has become increasingly difficult in recent years.

Of course on Linux, KDE has this built in.

I had the bright idea this morning to start this Tinderbox-generated blog from scratch. The current document is littered with loose ends, copy/paste markup, outdated code, markup, etc.

4 hours later and I’ve bailed on that for now. There’s a lot going on here that would be difficult to recreate. Maybe I’ll try cleaning up this version instead.

I can’t imagine having a blog without daily notes. (Like this one). I’ve tried all sorts of ways of doing them. My favorites were Fargo (when it existed), TiddlyWiki (before I took it down), and now, Tinderbox. I like the one daily note container, with multiple individual notes within it..each with its own URL. It doesn’t hurt that the blog generated using Tinderbox is fully static. Anyway, you may have noticed this site is back to being generated using Tinderbox.

My views have never totally aligned with Ben Thompson’s, and his latest Stratechery piece reinforced that. Gruber asks:

Who sets our defense policies? Our democratically elected leaders, or the CEOs of corporate defense contractors?

Normally, I’d acknowledge that it should of course be the former, but lately, not so much. Is there a third option? I hate that I think like this, now. Thompson’s hypothetical is dumb, anyway.

All forms of cultural activity have collapsed into a single, overriding imperative: “getting attention.”

Pluralistic: Deplatform yourself