Yesterday I asked, “Where would you like to see daily notes?”. I received more replies than expected (thanks!) and they overwhelmingly preferred that I keep the daily notes here at baty.net and provide access via RSS. Well OK then! Note that journal posts aren’t included in the main RSS feed, but rather at /journal/index.xml. That way you can easily opt-out if you’d prefer only seeing the “real” posts. Or maybe I’ll find a way to delay the inclusion of journals into the main RSS feed until later in the day. Still noodlin’ on it. I mean, one post per day shouldn’t be too noisy, right?

Anyone with kids or who was once a kid remembers getting that fancy, shiny, complex, expensive new toy and loving it…for a day or two. Then, it was back to sticks and cardboard boxes. I feel like this might be a metaphor for something. 😆

I cannot tolerate an even mildly active Discord server for more than 5 minutes. Can we go back to using forums now, please?

I don’t want to follow #trends. I just want to offer something useful to people in their actual lives. Does that make sense? I feel like it makes sense.

RSS people are my people.

I don’t need more sharpness. I need more pictures.

October 13, 2022 Journal Reply by email

I’ve been testing the hot new Tana app for the past week, and I’m exhausted.

First, I don’t need a Zettelkasten. If you’re being honest, you probably don’t either. And yet, we spend hours or days learning the “proper” way to build one. Then we set up our new system, using paper or digital or both, roll up our sleeves, and waste time putting stuff into it.

The worst part isn’t the putting of stuff into my PKM (Personal Knowledge Management) system. The worst part is all of the tinkering around where to put stuff and how to classify/tag/organize it.

I made the mistake of reading “How to Take Smart Notes” by Sönke Ahrens and browsing the forums and that sent me on a spiral of worrying about atomicity, what to do about “fleeting” notes, how big is a Zettel? and so on. In other words, I was more concerned with finding the proper method of managing my notes rather than focusing on what was actually in them and what they were for.

This week’s tinkering with Tana hasn’t helped. Tana is the next iteration of tools based on things like Roam Research, Notion, etc. I like it. It’s a bit like TiddlyWiki and Tinderbox in that it allows for additional attributes to be associated with each node and makes these ontologies easy to search, link, parse, summarize, etc. It makes some complicated workflows pretty easy to implement. I think a lot of people will dig it.

The problem is that this flexibility leads to a lot of hand-wringing over the best way to utilize all this power. The Tana Slack channels are teeming with questions about workflows and structure and attributes and on and on. It makes me tired just reading about it.

I’m not sure I need a system around, for example, the best way to surface the minutiae from interstitial journaling. In fact, just using the phrase “interstitial journaling” is a dead giveaway that I’ve already been overthinking it. Settle down, Jack!

Anyway, I’ll keep playing with Tana for fun, but I’m probably not going to continue using it for my notes. It’s not something I will benefit from, especially considering the amount of effort I’ll put into setting it up and getting everything “right”. I’m exhausted and I think I’ll go back to using paper. Or maybe Emacs.

October 10, 2022 Notetaking PKM Workflow Reply by email

I’ve not decided what I should do with this Blot blog. I’ll think of something.

October 9, 2022 Journal Reply by email

In mastodon.technology Shutdown, Ash Furrow writes:

I have sad news that I have decided to shut down the mastodon.technology instance. In accordance with the Mastodon Server Covenant, the server will be shut down no earlier than December 1, 2022.

Ash Furrow

I’ve been on the Mastodon.technology instance for nearly 5 years. It’s been great, but given the coming shutdown I needed to find a new instance.

I almost gave up on the whole Fediverse. After all, I’ve been on Twitter for nearly 20 years already. Never had to move or change anything. That’s of course no guarantee, but you know. Plus, it’s Twitter.

Anyway, I’ve settled on the Fosstodon.org instance. I’m not a 100% FOSS person, but I find that group to be interesting and “my people” so I’m hoping they forgive the occasional reference or recommendation around proprietary tools.

I’m @jackbaty@fosstodon.org there.

Thanks, and best of luck to Ash.

October 7, 2022 blogging social Reply by email

Part of my Org-roam graph

The more notes I put into Org-roam, the more I want to put there.

My Org-roam directory has always been in ~/org/roam, meaning that my database was limited to files I put in that directory. The rest of my org files have been in ~/org, so they’re out of “reach” of Org-roam. Sometimes, though, I wanted link from, say, my Daybook.org file to one of my Org-roam files, thereby making that daybook entry part of my org-roam database.

I started wondering what would happen if I put everything into Org-roam. Or, at least made everything available to Org-roam. To that end, I changed my org-roam-directory to my top-level ~/org folder. Now anything can be an Org-roam node. All I need to do is add an ID property to a heading or file by running org-id-get-create.

So far I don’t see a downside to this approach. I have made Org-roam nodes out of Daybook headlines, Journal entries, even TODO items. All linked up and networked as part of my database. I don’t know how well this will scale over time, but I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it.

September 30, 2022 Emacs PKM Org-roam Reply by email

I think I’ll try moving these daily posts out of baty.net. Perhaps they belong on the wiki. Perhaps they don’t belong anywhere at all. I do know that I don’t like them in my RSS feed. In a related event, I restarted my micro.blog subscription. That’s where I used to post random thoughts and images. I also cross-post from there to Twitter and Mastodon, which I’m sort of opposed to but there we are. So, click Like and Subscribe, I guess?

Part (most?) of me wants to be separate from that whole thing, but I wonder if it’s just my version of “I don’t even have a television!”

September 29, 2022 Journal Reply by email

I just spent 2 hours watching YouTube videos of other people doing stuff. What a waste.

I want the medium and the subject to make the image, not the computer.

20220928-P1020987

I bought an Apple Magsafe Wallet for my iPhone 12 Mini and so far I hate it.

September 28, 2022 Journal Reply by email

This is humbling and amazing. The Tripitaka Koreana

The Tripitaka Koreana - carved on 81258 woodblocks in the 13th century - is the most successful large data transfer over time yet achieved by humankind. 52 million characters of information, transmitted over nearly 8 centuries with zero data loss @incunabula

I make fun of the cool-but-mostly-useless graphs produced by the various “Tools for Thought”, but I can’t deny the cool part. Here’s part of my Org-roam graph, produced by Org-roam-UI.

Org-Roam UI

90% of what I need emacs for is configuring emacs @brendancully

If I spent my time getting better at using Emacs instead of trying every single alternative (multiple times) I’d be so good at Emacs by now.

It’s cool that there’s a new status tool from the OMG.lol folks but it’s really adding a lot of static to my feeds. Maybe things will settle down once the novelty wears off.

September 27, 2022 Journal Reply by email

Me: when is your birthday

Her: March 1st

Me: walking around the room when is your birthday?

— m@thew (@TweetPotato314) March 1, 2020

Every time I log in to Rudimentarylathe.org and see the Ghost dashboard it annoys me. I like the post editor and theme, but overall Ghost and I don’t share the same goals. Of course this has nothing to do with my lack of recent posts.

I ordered my 2023 Hobonichi Techo planner today. I’m not sure why I keep buying them, because I only use them sporadically each year. Still, I love the idea of them, so you know, just in case.

Nearly a decade of being Docker-adjacent and I still don’t understand it. If I play my cards right I’ll never have to.

September 26, 2022 Journal Reply by email

I have tried several alternative Dropbox clients and they’ve all failed. The latest was Insync. It behaves oddly, shows a bunch of folders that shouldn’t be there, and my messages to support have not been responded to. I run this blog using Blot, which relies on Dropbox. This meant I had to install the Dropbox app on my Mac. It’s even more gross than the last time I tried. I’m looking into migrating my Blot sync method to Google Drive instead.

I’ve hit another wall with Emacs this morning. I ran doom upgrade as I do several times each week, but after that Emacs wouldn’t launch and none of the doom commands would work either. I re-installed from scratch but it still failed unless I used a completely fresh and empty configuration. I don’t feel like dealing with this shit today, so I’m typing this in iA Writer, which always works.

Some days living in text files and a terminal feels like I’m working underground and I want to come out into the sunshine once in a while.

I am sitting in a lovely space surrounded by quality tools and expensive devices. I have no excuse for my lack of decent output.

The voices in my head, they don’t care what I do, they just want to argue the matter through and through.

Leonard Cohen

I want Ghost’s editor combined with WordPress’ ecosystem combined with Hugo’s hosting requirements.

September 25, 2022 Journal Reply by email