Apple My Mac is awesome, so why worry? Nearly everything about my Mac experience is wonderful. macOS is, in my experience, far superior to the alternatives for my needs. My new iMac is big, beautiful, and a joy to both look at and use. My 2016 MacBook Pro is solid, svelte, gorgeous,
Blogging Coping with the mechanism I am fully aware that putting together the copingmechanism.com blog is probably a mistake. I couldn't help myself. But what is it? I feel like it has to be more than just another tool I use to post the usual stuff. That's what
Analog A few favorite objects I noticed that a few of my favorite objects had arranged themselves on a corner of my desk. Clockwise from left: General Electric alarm clock. I had a clock just like this on my desk when in high school, maybe earlier, and have used
Books Essays of E.B. White Reading Essays of E.B.White is a pleasure that never dwindles. Reading his essays makes me want to write essays. They make me want to move to the country and enjoy a quiet, purposeful life. I want to wake up early, drift down
Hardware FiiO M9 Portable High-Resolution Audio Player I'm old, and thus prefer my music to be either pressed onto vinyl or carefully filed into folders on hard drives. Ever since I started using Roon for managing and playing music, I've been more aware of the advantages of using higher-res, lossless files.
Windows Installing Windows 10, just for "fun" I thought it would be fun to install Windows 10 on my old ThinkPad Carbon X1. I was wrong. I had Manjaro i3 on the ThinkPad and was getting weary of having to look up everything I wanted to do. The nerdiness of it
Workflow Text File Fatigue I originally wrote the following in 2015 (on a blog I seem to have misplaced). Text File FatigueI've spent years using Vim, and more recently Emacs/Spacemacs. When I go plain text, I go all text. This makes me feel great for a while.
Web Dynamic and Startling Interactive Media (circa 1996) I finally found a copy of our first fusionary.com website from 1996. It looked like this: Fusionary.com v1, 1996 I love that we called it "The Atomic Age Page: Dynamic and Startling Interactive Media". And I really love the original artwork (by
Orgmode Sending an Emacs buffer to Day One I have mostly given up trying to keep my digital journal in anything other than org-journal. I do also use Day One as a photo log, and sometimes I consider moving my daily journals back there, but it doesn't happen. In order to hedge
Productivity Seeking the productive life - Stephen Wolfram Stephen Wolfram: Often I’ll do a meeting where I have lots of people in case we need to get their input. But for most of the meeting I don’t need all of them to be paying attention (and I’m happy if
Social The Communal Mind, Patricia Lockwood A few choice sections from Patricia Lockwood travels through the internet: White people, who had the political educations of potatoes (lumpy, unseasoned and biased towards the Irish), were suddenly feeling compelled to speak out about injustice. This happened once every forty years on average,
TiddlyWiki Logging books in TiddlyWiki For the past several years I've maintained a text file listing all of the books that I've read. The simple text format makes it easy to, for example, quickly see that I read 27 books in 2017 by doing something like... grep "2017-" books.
Analog Blackwing Natural pencil I was running low on pencils at work when @hjertnes told me about the new Blackwing Naturals. I find the graphite is too soft in the very popular Blackwing 602s. The Naturals use "extra-firm Japanese graphite" which should be an improvement. I think they
Social Scaling back so I can think There was no internet at my house for two days last week and I don't like the way it made me feel. I felt lost without the constant drip of new stuff to read. Once the connection was restored, I was reminded that every
Productivity Power outage as productivity booster Ice storms took power out for miles around yesterday. We got lucky and our house was only affected for about 12 hours and temperatures weren't too far below freezing. I get so much done when the power is out. Closets get cleaned, paperwork gets
Emacs Saving time with Emacs, or not Garrett Hopper Using Emacs easily saves me hours every dayI'm sorry, but no it doesn't. If it saves him more than ten minutes a day I'd be shocked. I prefer to keep my hands on the keyboard as much as possible, and it seems
TiddlyWiki Displaying the most recent Journal entry in TiddlyWiki I've been using a Pinned tag as a way to keep my latest Journal entry visible in the story list. It works, but requires that I add the tag to each new Journal entry and delete the tag from prior entries. I created a
Media In Baltimore, the future of film culture is an old-school video store The Outline: You cannot trust the internet to keep media available, and you cannot trust corporations to commit to supporting film culture.I love the idea of keeping video stores alive. Unlike vinyl, there's really no advantage to the physical media of films. That's
Emacs What I'm using Emacs for My use of Emacs varies with my mood, but this is how I'm using it today. I'm using Emacs for...creating formatted documents (proposals, etc.)daily journalinglogging events in my daybookwriting blog postsmanaging my finances with ledger-modetracking weightrecording mealsand general text editing.I'm no
Analog Things I want - Jamie Todd Rubin Jamie Todd Rubin: I want a classic barometer that I can refer to for changes in the weather. I have three different weather apps on my phone, none of which agree with one another, nor with what I can see outside my window on
TiddlyWiki Displaying a random quote in TiddlyWiki Oh goodie, another post about TiddlyWiki[1]. There was a recent thread on Micro.blog about surfacing older content in order to find things that might have otherwise been forgotten. I love this idea, so I added a Random Quote tiddler to my wiki.
Emacs A new way of including the weather in my Org Journal I nearly forgot about wttr.in. Curl wttr.in in a terminal with a few parameters and you get a nice "graphic" weather forecast. I use it in my Org-Journal to show the weather for the day Here's the bit I insert at the
Emacs Living with only Emacs and a browser I was thinking earlier about trying to get by with only Emacs and a browser. How much of my general daily computer work[1] could be done primarily with those two apps? Not enough, but it's a fun thought experiment that may turn into
Wiki Backlinks in TiddlyWiki A nice feature of wikis is backlinks. A good wiki will keep track of which pages link back to a given page. TiddlyWiki does this, but does not display them by default. I set out to add them and it was way more difficult
