You know what, I like that I’m bald. I can always joke with other folks at work (“Are you sure you want to make this a regular meeting? You’ll end up like me!” - at which point I point my head and get a laugh or two).
If there was any period in my life when someone judged me for being bald (say, a potential date) then screw it, I didn’t need them anyway. It’s a low-level “no shitty people” filter in that regard, kind of like being short (which is another thing).
It’s easy to take care of and it’s cheap. It’s cooler in the summer, but easy enough to warm up in the winter (I love beanies and hoodies). My nieces love petting my head after I shave it, a way of saying hello to Uncle JTR. I think it makes the beard and mustache stand out more, and when I wear my leather jacket, it makes me a bit more of a badass on the outside (on the inside I’m always nice of course)
I think I started balding in my 20s, after the army. My mom was worried and took me to a “hair doctor,” who showed me diagrams of how I would look in a year, 3 years, 5 years… I looked, and I remember I just didn’t care, something I guess he wasn’t really used to. Just a part of me that I always accepted.
Managed to get there in time. It was actually kind of quiet and nice, and the evening walk in itself was worth it.
I enjoyed Amelie Lens and Charlotte de Witte so much yesterday at work, I logged back into my Bandcamp account. It’s been a while, and I forgot what it means to own music.
I have a music folder in my Synology, which mostly contains electronic FLAC files I bought from Bandcamp. Because these are artists who passed the “OK, you’re actually worth my money” threshold, it obviously means I have a good selection there to choose from. In contrast, YouTube Music (yes, it’s my streaming service since I got grandfathered in along with my YouTube account for a cheap price) considers what’s popular, and what’s popular is not always what’s good.
While I did find Lens and de Witte on YouTube Music yesterday in my office, it’s not the best place for discovery, especially when you just go through their mixes and lists trying to find something. Exploring music takes time. It’s something I enjoyed doing with Bandcamp, until they were bought by Epic, anyway. I’m not sure what I’ll do when Bandcamp goes away in its current form—as I always say, it’s not a matter of if, but of when.
There are two kinds of music I usually spend more time, money, and effort on. Classical Music (I took some time to learn about it, it’s best approached as a history class) and Electronic Music. Both genres are too big for their own definitions (Classical music may also be current, so by definition it can’t still be “classic”, Electronic music basically means anything done with a computer, which today means everything…), and I love getting lost and discovering new music. At some point, I even considered getting into Electronic music myself, but the path there is too long and intimidating (and expensive). Still, if there’s one area in my life I feel I’m missing out on right now, it’s this.
Micro.blog wiki: Freshing up
A new wiki for Micro.blog has been created to distinguish it from the existing personal wiki. It now includes a log feature to document changes and updates.
When I need to sleep at night but my brain won’t let me. There’s a soundtrack for that:
Ughh. I’ve been playing with Synctrain since the morning, with non-consistent results. Even with the Shortcut in place, the files don’t sync constantly. It’s not reliable. I really don’t want to use iCloud for syncing…
Really want to try pixelmator but don’t want subscription or something that would be included in Apple photos soon
So affinity is now free… hmm. Maybe that’s what I will end up using.
If you’ve been using Emacs on macOS and iOS for a while, you probably know Álvaro Ramírez, the maker of Journelly and dwim-shell-command. I’m a fan of both.
Turns out Álvaro has a sponsorship page on GitHub. If you benefit from his work and look for a way to help out, this is it!
Moved Journelly to sync only through Syncthing for now (using Synctrain). Only hiccup was ensuring Synctrain on the iPhone is configured to sync automatically (by default, it asks you each time if you want to sync files).
One thing I already appreciate: if there’s a conflict, it tells me, and saves the conflicting changes in another file, just like in Syncthing. Meanwhile, iCloud just “resolves” sync conflicts for me, and I have already lost important notes because of that.
I keep having issues with iCloud syncing recently. It’s probably my fault, because I also have Syncthing working with the same folder, so I can sync files from my iPhone and my Mac to my Android and Linux machines. It used to work OK, but I just lost a chunk of information that was important.
With Syncthing, I have an option to turn file version history on. With iCloud, I’m not sure if that’s possible. I can use Synctrain (a syncthing client for iOS), and I hope this will resolve the issue.
Emacs and mental challanges
As part of a trip to see her friend, my mom went to a show of Porsche cars last week. This is a group of enthusiastic Porsche owners from different years. One of the stories she shared was about a proud Porsche owner who drives in countries that require the driver’s seat on the right (I’m assuming the UK or Ireland?) The driver, instead of abandoning his Porsche, had his beloved car set up with an adjustable steering wheel that can shift to the right or left side of the driver’s seat.
Emacers already know where this is going. We are all, in our own way, drivers just like this guy. The difference, of course, is that we drive Emacs, not a Porsche (though I’m sure there are a few of you out there who drive both!). I find this story inspiring because the laws that dictate where the driver should sit in the car are imposed. There’s nothing the driver could do about the law itself, so they came up with their own solution to work with the law in a clever way. Again… Emacs.
Emacs is not easy to drive in 2025. It has a steep learning curve, especially if you don’t have a good computer background. The other big problem is the outside restrictions. This blog is riddled with challenges I have with Emacs and different workarounds I came up with. I think this post I wrote earlier this year summarizes it well. To recap quickly: my work environment forces me to use applications that don’t play nice with Emacs. The biggest issue I have is with emails (only Outlook is allowed), but other cloud-based software is also problematic, usually because the only interaction with it is through the browser.
There are several community solutions for these issues. One of those is Emacs Everywhere, which I need to try to play with again (the issue I have there is creating a keyboard shortcut invoking a terminal command in macOS, which proved more challenging than I thought it would be), and there are more. But there’s also a bigger issue: there are plenty of new shiny apps out there, and next to Emacs, integration is always easier and nicer. Some of those, if I go deep into the rabbit hole, survive a day or two, even a weekend - but usually I go back to Emacs gasping for air. The overall issue with other apps is that they work nice, as long as you play by their rules and restrictions. As soon as you need to customize something, you’re out of luck. They are usually also all cloud-based, which is something else I don’t like. I know I’m old-fashioned, but I like that the cloud is there as a secondary place when I need it, not forced on me to use.
Some notable examples I visited again recently are both Apple tools: Notes and Journal. Notes got a few more tweaks, making it a useful as a personal database. I love how you can scan documents directly into the App, which works seemingly with the iPhone, and I love how I can now use it on my Apple Watch to check off items when I go grocery shopping. But I would never trust Apple to store my private notes on their servers. Journal has the same issue. The app itself matured nicely, with the addition of a macOS app. It comes with useful reminders, a map to see where entries were entered, a timeline, and a surprisingly good export option to HTML, including all the entries. But it’s also a good reminder of my point above: the date format.
I don’t like the US date format, especially in my personal notes. Org-mode automatically writes dates in a yyyy-mm-dd format, which has always made more sense to me (by the way, if you know a good app that can do that for the top menu in macOS, let me know. I’m surprised Apple doesn’t include that option natively. I’ve tried to change the region and play with the clock options in the past.)
The mindset that long-time Emacs users share with the Prosche driver is what got us into Emacs in the first place. We need things working out our way. In my case, I always liked checklists and bullet points, and I used several tools to help me organize things until I discovered Orgzly, and from there, org-mode and Emacs. I mentioned several times before that I owe my current professional successes (which include promotions at work, beyond just staying sane in a pretty chaotic environment) to org-mode, but that’s not exactly true. It’s the other way around: Emacs org-mode is a tool that enables me to use my mind the way I need to use it to work out information. I believe that if there were other tools that allowed me to change things as much as I can in Emacs, I would work with those too. But, in the age of the cloud, the opposite is true. Workflows are imposed, and customization to fit personal needs usually ends up being limited to dark and light themes.
Emacs is a rare tool that allows you to do whatever you want if you just look under the hood and tweak it to your needs. There aren’t many other programs like it, and I suspect that for most people, they are not needed. But for someone like me, adjusting to other tools doesn’t work well. And it’s not a good thing. I tried to force it a couple of times; believe me, if I were happy with Outlook, OneNote, and SharePoint, my work life would be much simpler. But I get disorganized, and I can’t work without my tools. If I like tinkering with something like Emacs, it’s not just for fun: if I don’t, I’m going to “glitch” until I fix it. It’s a battle uphill, a challenge—always was, and always will be. The benefit, however, is that it keeps me on my feet, and when I get something that works for me, it really works. Better than any other easy solution offered.
I found a potentially useful package that creates a visual calendar inside Emacs. It seems to be mostly abandoned, at least in its current form. It now requires ugly workarounds in order to work.
Does anyone know something like it that works currently?
Update: From the comments, I’m learning that taking the requirements for compat seems to be the official fix. This is a pretty nice package. I’m exploring it more in depth, and I might change some workflows I have accordingly. I find it amusing that I stumbled into it by chance, as I was writing my other post.
A 40-minute video explaining how to edit videos from the folks behind MKBHD…? Yes, that’s something I’d like to watch:
I’m sure I’ll find a couple of useful nuggets in there at least.
So what’s the deal with Pixelmator Pro…?
Is it still updated regularly? Is it now something you buy through Apple? Stand alone? Does it mean that in X amount of months its features will be integrated into Apple Photos? Does anyone have an idea?
InvokeAI bought by Adobe
And as if I I needed one more reason to leave Adobe…
InvokeAI, who’s one of the leading and top-quality Stable Diffusion frontends, was aquired by Adobe.
Invoke comes in two flavors: the cloud-based subscription-based, competing with the likes of DALL-E, Gemini, Midjourney, etc, and the open-source community version. I’ve been using the open source version for a while.
There are the usual empty promises that the open-source version will live on, but with Adobe leading the core team, it means just a fraction of the original creators behind Invoke will stay, and the product will quickly fall far behind to rot in the dust. Unlike other frontends like Automatic1111 and ComfyUI, Invoke offered a polished UI with advanced drawing features, including a launcher that made installing and upgrading the product a breeze, and I’m sad to see it go.
For me, AI projects that utilize users' computers instead of corporations like Adobe are important. Instead of paying for companies that don’t respect their users' privacy and artists' work, it’s up to the individual user to decide what to use and how to use it. It offers a level of control that the likes of Google and Adobe would never allow. Unfortunately, most non-tech folks are not aware of this side of machine learning and never will.
I watched the first 3 episodes of Splinter Cell: Deathwatch Season 1 📺. Yeah… not great. I didn’t expect something amazing, but I guess I had hopes for this one. The story fills flat and a bit cliche, rushed. I’ll probably finish it since there are only 8 episodes.