I’m not convinced that much has improved meaningfully since we started optimizing for digital.

June 11, 2023 Journal Reply by email

I woke up from my trance and bailed on my disjointed bricolage of Fastmail->Gmail->Mimestream. Cobbling various pieces together just so I can use a single mail client on my Mac seemed…shortsighted. Mimestream is nice, but not that nice, you know?

So I’m back in MailMate and/or Mu4e. Oh, and sometimes Apple Mail. But I’m thinking about switching back to notmuch from Mu4e. Now that I say it, I’m not sure this is any better :). At least I’m not relying on Gmail now, I guess.

June 11, 2023 Email Workflow Reply by email

June 11, 2023 Reply by email

Dammit I just lost an hour on Mastodon even though I’m supposed to be “off” social media. I have nothing to show for it, either. It’s insidious!

I lost my head for a second and thought maybe I’d do the whole “Emacs from scratch” thing again. This time, I tried the new beta branch of Crafted Emacs because I like their approach on the new version. But yeah, it’s beta and things broke and I’m not good enough to troubleshoot. Back to Doom for now.

There’s a difference between “The simplest thing that could possibly work.” and “The simplest thing that might actually work.”

I’ve stopped using subheadings with multi-paragraph contents in these daily notes because I like scanning a list of titles as a way to find stuff. Burying them in daily notes makes it harder.

June 10, 2023 Social Email Emacs Journal Reply by email

Mom

I understand why people are upset about Reddit’s API changes. People are always upset about something Reddit is doing. And I feel for Apollo’s developer. The whole thing sucks. I’ve never used Apollo. I go to the website and visit a few of my favorite subreddits every once in a while. I just don’t feel any outrage about the whole thing, sorry. I am attributing this to my recent withdrawal from social media. I guess since no one has been telling me to be upset, I’m not.

Some days I fully enjoy managing email within Mu4e. Other days, I hate it. Today is the former.

June 9, 2023 Journal Reply by email

June 9, 2023 Reply by email

Alice

I started reading the MPU forums this morning and was immediately reminded that I should never read the MPU forums. I do plenty of navel gazing around note-taking and software workflows and everything else already. I don’t need more of it, thank you.

Day 2 running Sonoma on my MBP. I’ve not noticed any significant issues so far. Maestral crashed a couple of times at first, but seems to have settled down.

June 8, 2023 Journal Reply by email

I don’t get many emails these days. Nor do I send many. And yet, I spend an inordinate amount of time futzing with how I get and sent emails. I’m doing that thing again where I overthink my email process.

The only hard requirement I have with email is that it uses my own domain name. Hence, jack@baty.net. Email is still the key to many things, so allowing someone like Google to control that key is a no-go for me. My wife still uses a Comcast address, can you imagine? I get hives just thinking about it. She gets a lot more email than I do, and never gives any of this a second thought. ¯_(ツ)_/¯.

I’ve been using Fastmail for my personal email for years. I have no complaints or issues with the service. I pay $50/year and it comes with 30GB of storage. It’s fine. I don’t love Fastmail’s web UI, but I nearly always use either Apple Mail or Mu4e (Emacs) for reading mail, so no biggie.

Except along came Mimestream, which for some reason I’m completely enamored with. Mimestream only works with Gmail, so I’ve unadvisedly configured Fastmail to forward to my Gmail address and my Gmail messages to send via Fastmail’s SMTP service so they’re From: jack@baty.net.

I can’t figure out what it is about Mimestream that I like so much. There’s no filter for “Unread”. There are no smart mailboxes at all. I can’t drag and drop messages into other apps or my Desktop. When copying links to emails, it uses the URL for the web version of Gmail instead of a link to the message in Mimestream. Oh, and it will (eventually) cost $50/year so I can use a mail app with a free service. WTF, dude!?

I’m never going to use only my Gmail address (remember the first requirement), but I may convert my Fastmail account to a forward-only account from the (Fastmail owned) PoBox service. That’ll save me like $30 a year, but I’m not convinced it’s a good idea. Point being that I’m considering all of this. This is what I mean by overthinking my email.

And so here I am, contemplating a transition from Fastmail to Gmail. It’s as if I’ve forgotten that this whole thing started because I wanted to play with a new Email app. I was hoping that writing this down would trigger my “Use What You Have” mechanism but instead I’ve started pulling apart my mbsync/Mu4e config to work with Gmail, because I’m a masochist with too much time on my hands.

June 8, 2023 Email Workflow Reply by email

Reef Tank, June 2023

I’ve had my salt water reef tank for nearly a year, so I thought I’d post an update. The gist is that it’s been both easier and more difficult than expected.

It’s easier because I was worried that doing water changes and parameter checks would be complex or difficult. They are neither. I do a 15% water change every week, and test for Nitrates, Nitrites, Phosphates, and Calcium every 10 days to two weeks.

It’s more difficult because pest control in a salt-water tank can be a bitch! Algae is a constant thorn in my side. I just can’t seem to be rid of it. The tank has suffered outbreaks of green hair algae, red slime “algae” (quoted because it’s actually Cyanobacteria and not algae), and now bubble algae. I’ve also got a little Aiptasia that I’m keeping an eye on.

Everyone talks about a tank’s “ugly” phase and now I know what they mean. I think I’m coming to the other side of it, though. Algae is often caused by too many nutrients and/or waste, causing the Phosphate and Nitrate levels to rise. Algae love Phosphates and Nitrates, so the trick is to reduce them. To do this, I’ve drastically reduced how much food I introduce. After conversations with some experts, it’s obvious that I’ve been over-feeding. The other change I made was to shorten the period during which the tank lighting is at full. I’m now only running full lighting from 11:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. rather than from 10-6. I think I’m finally starting to see the algae weaken and recede.

As for fish, I hadn’t added any because of Tony, the Royal Gramma. Tony was an asshole. He was constantly picking on Pierre the Cleaner Shrimp, and I love Pierre. He also flared up and fought with anything new in the tank. Tony was beautiful, but I kicked him out. Messing with Pierre was his last mistake. I gave him to the local fish store so they could re-home him.

With Tony gone and the algae on the decline, it was time to start adding things. This week, I’ve introduced three new corals: Palythoa Grandis¹, Acan Red, and Green Star Polyps (GSP). I also got a little Emerald Crab. We named him Craig.

Even though it can be frustrating at times, I enjoy the tank very much. It’s so much fun to just sit and watch things happening. It’s like a whole world in there and it’s amazing.

June 7, 2023 ReefTank Reply by email

For the few of you who’ve been following along, you’ll have noticed that I’ve changed blogging engines several times recently, even more frequently than my usual pace.

The most recent moves happened over just a few weeks. I went from WordPress to Blot to Hugo and back to WordPress. I wrote this about moving away from WordPress only two months ago:

Mostly, I switched because I don’t enjoy using WordPress. WordPress is powerful and easy and everywhere, but the editor is unpleasant and everything just feels heavy and overwrought. I also tire of plugins nagging me to “Upgrade to Premium!” all the time. I tell myself I can live with it, but in the end I never can.

It’s no different now. I am less than two days into using WordPress and I’m already frustrated. It’s so damn janky and the editor sucks hard. For example, if I select all the text in a block and cut it, only one character is actually deleted, but the whole block ends up in the clipboard. Similarly, after selecting text, hitting the delete key does nothing. It’s maddening.

What about Hugo, then? Hugo is a great SSG. It’s fast, capable, and mature. It’s also difficult (for me) to tweak. I find its go-based templating format to be unfathomable. Yesterday, I couldn’t figure out how to make “page bundles” with relative image paths work in the RSS feed. It’s death by 1,000 cuts.

In theory, both WordPress and Hugo are the best choices for me, depending on if I’m feeling like using easy or hard mode, respectively. But neither work in the long run. I’ve written all this down so many times, but I never listen.

So, after re-reading Blot is just right, I feel like I was right. I looked at the old blot site and the way it looks appeals to me. It’s simple. It’s calm. I like it. I moved to Hugo because I was in one of my moods where I want to be in total control over everything. With Blot, the biggest thing I lose is that I can’t touch the rendered site. But, I have all of my content locally, so what’s the big deal, really?

I’ll miss built-in comment and analytics, the easy management of images, and the infinite supply of plugins. I won’t miss the janky editor, the heavy rendered pages, or plugins constantly upselling themselves.

Stand by while I re-do everything. Again.

June 7, 2023 Blogging Workflow Blot WordPress Reply by email