Thursday, December 30, 2021

Good morning. It's 4:30 am. What a lovely walk through the fresh snow this morning.

I hate the fact that I still have two (active) blogs. Moving copingmechanism.com to a more blog-friendly template made things confusing. And now this Tinderbox blog is getting so nice that the problem is even worse. They're now both very similar. Too similar. I think I have to put copingmechanism.com back as a photography-focused blog with an overwrought template, just to differentiate it from this one. I'm also considering moving this blog to baty.blog and eliminating the Ghost instance running there. And I kind of want to bring back the rudimentarylathe.org domain. The elephant in the room, of course, is that you just know I'll change things again in a week or a month or a year. Then what? Broken links, RSS noise, confusion, etc. Anyone reading care to chime in?

Note: This was originally posted over at copingmechanism.com but I thought it belonged here instead.

I kept a “daybook” using Tinderbox for years. I drifted away from Tinderbox for a while after becoming infatuated with Linux or iOS or other “cross-platform” systems. Right now, I’m back with a vengeance.

While rebuilding my Daybook, I wanted to make logging my weight easier. It’s not like it was difficult, but I wanted to tweak it.

Tinderbox is an outliner, so my weight entries are collected under a “Weight Log” node. It looked like this (I obviously wasn’t consistent with tracking last year).

The weight is stored in a numeric User Attribute called, surprisingly, “Weight”. The outline shows a custom “DisplayFormat” so that it reads nicely:

$Weight + " pounds on " + format($StartDate,"MM D")

To enter a new weight, I’d select an existing item in the outline, hit Return to create a new note, type in the weight, hit Return to save the note, then use the mouse to click the “Weight” attribute and re-enter the weight there. So much clicking!  😀.

What I wanted to do was to type the weight once in the note’s Name and have the Weight attribute populated automatically. Tinderbox notes can have “Rules” which are commands that run periodically and can update a note’s attributes based on just about any criteria. I could have created a rule that set the Weight based on the Name, but that seemed like overkill since this only ever needs to happen once per note.

With some help from Michael Becker, I think I’ve got it. (You should check out his video series on Mastering Tinderbox for all sorts of great Tinderbox content.)

There’s an OnAdd action which sets the Prototype, Date, and Name of the note. (Setting the Name of the new note to “Enter Weight” is a nice touch.)

$Prototype="pWeightLogEntry";$Date|=date(today);if($Name=="untitled"){$Name="Enter Weight"};

Then, the new note gets a Rule (via the pWeightLogEntry Prototype) which sets the Weight attribute based on the value of Name:

$Weight|=$Name;
if($Weight>0){
$Name=$Date("l");
$RuleDisabled=true};

The trick here is setting $RuleDisabled=true. What this does is force the Rule to run only once, which is all I need. I wasn’t aware of the $RuleDisabled attribute, so thanks to Michael for that tip.

Now, to add a new Weight Log entry, I hit Return, type my weight, and hit Return again. Couldn’t be any easier! On my Daybooks “Dashboard” I can graph my weight over time, like so…

For those of you unfamiliar with Tinderbox, I’m sorry if I made too many assumptions here. Explaining Tinderbox can be an entire job in itself!

I'm reviewing my lens situation. The Leica 35mm Summilux-M ASPH is a pricey lens, so I'm rethinking it. I bought the Summilux for the M10-R, which I've now sold. I figured this was fine, since I could still use it on both the film Ms and the SL2-S. On the other hand, I've really been missing that APO Summicron-SL 35 . I've been considering trading the Summilux M for the Summicron SL. That would leave a 35mm gap in my M kit. Since it's film, I can get away with a Zeiss or Voigtlander, right? So I shot a roll with the 50mm Summilux-M and then with the 35 to see how they feel on film. Well, they're both terrific. So now I don't know what to do. For now, I'm just going to shoot more and ignore the entire problem.