Johnny Martyr, who's blog I enjoy, writes:

So when I look at the Tesla Cybertruck, in all it’s bulletproof, four wheel steering, environmental art and (intended) function-over-form middle-fingering to tailgating traitors of democracy, I can’t help but forget all the noise surrounding it, and just smile.

This is like the Cybertruck of blog posts: 90% wrong, ill-considered, and probably should be recalled.

I'm kidding! (but am I? Is he?)

The function-over-form argument only applies if the thing actually functions properly. Anyway, I got a kick out of it.

I'm seeing a lot of sync errors with my Tinderbox files and exports. I use Syncthing, and I am careful not to have the same document open on both machines, so I don't know what's causing it. Troublesome, though.

I've not been living in Emacs for a week or longer. Jumped in this morning to look for something. Then this...

load-with-code-conversion: Cannot open load file: No such file or directory, emacsql-sqlite

I'm sure this is a Doom thing, but still, this is probably why I went with Denote for so long. I've kind of lost interested in tracking down Emacs issues.

My God I'm weary of the hand-wringing and navel-gazing on Mastodon about other networks. I'm closing the tab for a while.

My new LifeBook Tinderbox document is coming along nicely. However, I am reconsidering the idea of combining that new document with this blog document. There's so much going on with this blog that migrating it to a new document will be fraught with errors and will likely take me too long to be worth the trouble. I may pick at merging them, but for now, they remain separate.

Tinderbox has an export code that renders links to any other notes that link to the current note. I've (conditionally) added the links to the bottom of every post. It got me thinking about differentiating internal from external links. I did that with a bit of CSS, so now internal links are black/grey (based on not visited/visited). It's not something that will be immediately obvious, but it's a nice touch once you notice it. Example.

I've switched the Search page to use Pagefind. It's ridiculously simple to get things working with Pagefind. No more generating a separate index.

...are we just making products? Are we just making an End Result.

Stop it.

Put yourself somewhere safe, turn off all distractions, turn on all stimuli, and just do something with stuff that you like to do.

Jeremy Mann

Jeremy Mann is kind of crazy and amazing. His newsletter is great.

I got way back into Tinderbox this week. It's not like I ever actually stop using Tinderbox, (the blog is built using it, for example) but I do get distracted by other tools for a while.

Other than for managing this blog, the Tinderbox document I've used consistently is my "Daybook". I started keeping this Daybook, which is a sort of journal, since before 2008. I wrote a short walkthrough in 2018.

At one point, I tried combining the blog and daybook files, but things got muddled and I lost interest. Eventually, I split them again.

Well, yesterday I started a new Tinderbox document, from scratch, and I (optimistically) named it "LifeBook.tbx".

The plan is to once again keep everything (or mostly everything) in one giant document.

I have structured it so that I write all notes in a single YYYY/MM/DD/Note outline. By default, each note is of type, "Journal". But, I can easily change any note's "Prototype" to something else, so that it behaves differently. For example, I have a "Meal" prototype. I can then collect (using Agents) and analyze my meals over time, without needing to maintain a separate outline just for meals. Same thing with my Weight log or contacts or "permanent" notes. I find that having to "go find" an outline before writing in it often prevents me from bothering to write things. Now, I just hammer away in the day's outline for everything.

Today, I plan to explore the idea of bringing the blog back into this document. The idea is that I can be in the day's outline, write some notes, and by checking a box, that note will automatically be included in this blog. See An urge to combine my Tinderbox files from earlier.

Wouldn't that be neat?

All the hand wringing on Mastodon about Bluesky has been nominated (by me) for "Most Boring and Useless Topic" of 2024.

I've re-enabled the RSS feed for full daily posts. If you would prefer seeing one post per day rather than each individual note in your reader, the feed is /index.xml. The downside is that I update things throughout the day, so if your RSS reader doesn't look for updates, you could miss some good stuff 😁.

I hate how good Obsidian is at so many things. This would be cool if I enjoyed using Obsidian, but we just don't get along. I don't like how Obsidian feels. Still, I was able to post from Obsidian to Ghost after about five minutes' work.

I'm dizzy. Yesterday I had An urge to combine my Tinderbox files. I played with that for a couple hours. Then I tried making a Tinderbox Stamp for posting to Ghost. It worked, but only partially. Then I posted from Obsidian to Ghost which sent me down my every-six-weeks-or-so Obsidian rabbit hole. It's all fun and interesting and potentially useful. The problem is that I want to try everything at once, but can't.

Several years ago, I started a single Tinderbox file with the intention that it would be a personal journal, notebook, and blog, all wrapped up in one document.

It was a neat idea, and I had fun wrangling things together for a while. Eventually, though, it became overly complex and I was breaking things regularly. Not a good look for my everyday/everything notes tool.

I split the files into individual Daybook.tbx and Blog.tbx files. It felt cleaner, with less chance of doing things that broke other things.

I'm having second thoughts. Tinderbox performance has improved over the years. Computers are really fast. I don't think it matters how many notes I throw into a single Tinderbox document. And I know more than I did then about how to isolate and export notes.

Tomorrow morning, if this still seems like a good idea, I'm going to work on refactoring and combining those documents again. That way, I can just hammer away at the day's outline and, by setting an attribute or two, have it appear on the blog, or the changelog, or the movie log, or wherever I need it. I get a diary and a blog and a notebook all in one.

That's the idea, but I'm going to sleep on it.

It occurred to me while I was once again working through issues with having Emacs run smoothly on both my Macs that there are too many things that I have to think about, just to do my thing every day. This isn't only an issue with Emacs, but that's the big one. Sync, packages, Doom issues, configuration options, etc. The place where I take notes should not come with that kind of overhead, is what I'm thinking.

I'm not going to rail against the election here or on the blog. I'm not going to point out all the terrible things that our new asshole-in-chief is going to do. Can't swing a dead cat without hitting someone who has that covered.

What I am going to do is quietly join CTCT (Citizens To Confound Trump). And if there's no such organization, I'll start one.

There are a million things I could be doing and a thousand things I should be doing. I don't feel like doing any of them.

I still can't seem to consolidate the blogs. I've been writing all day and publishing as a single daily post on baty.net. That's worked OK, but I quite dislike the way it makes my blog look like a wall of dates. With the new Ghost theme, there aren't even featured images on the home page to help hint at what's inside. I think I know how it should work. This site at daily.baty.net is for writing about myself, in sort of journal form. This leaves baty.net for writing about other things. They could be things I've done, but less about how I'm feeling or the minutiae of my day. Let's run things that way for a bit.

I am 70 pages into Gibson's "Neuromancer" and will probably stop there. I know it was seminal and revolutionary at the time, but I'm not enjoying it enough to finish.

I don't like any of the characters. I'm also realizing that in Sci-Fi, I dislike when the author throws too much in-world jargon around like I'm supposed to know it already. I used to think it was clever, but now find it annoying.

My nerd cred just lost another 10%, probably.

I pulled the trigger this morning on my move to Ghost for baty.net. Some details are here.

One thing I haven't done is migrate all the daily journal posts I've been putting there recently. I ran out of steam after everything else that needed migrating. I may get to them eventually, but maybe I won't bother. It made me think about moving the journal stuff here again. No one but me prefers that I have two places to post, though. Still thinking it through.

I'm really digging for silver linings here, but one thing I appreciate about the election is that I no longer have to feel stressed about who's going to win and whether things are going to get shittier or better. The answer is shittier, but at least I have an answer. The second thing is that I'm no longer getting endless political fliers and texts. Feel better? Me neither.

This is getting old. No fix in sight.

UPDATE: I'm suppressing the warnings by including the following in custom.el:

(warning-suppress-log-types '((org-element org-element-parser)))

It started late morning. Headache, tired, weak, and chilly. It's probably nothing, so I forced myself to take a brisk walk. I think it helped a little, but now I feel like taking a nap.

I try not to eat too much beef, but the Blackstone has forced my hand. It's my version of corporate climate goals vs the arrival of AI.