The Art Of Not Asking Why

Another improvement I’m noticing in iOS 26 is for iPhone mirroring. I can copy SMS codes sent to my phone into my Mac’s browser, and other hotkeys work as well (Command + Enter to send a message in Teams, for example). Overall, it’s easier to log into the iPhone as well.

I didn’t realize how many things Apple touched in iOS 26 besides liquid glass. Notes on my watch with export to markdown! Maps now tracks where you go (if you let it) over time! Photos…! And all of these are good added features. I think it’s a must-have for Apple folks.

Robert Birming in a relatable post, The world’s worst blogger:

“I moved my blog from Bear to Micro.blog because, as I put it, it “started to feel limited…”

“…So I moved here. A place with great features for adding photo collections, logging books, writing both long posts and short ones without titles.”

“Now that I have all these possibilities, I can’t seem to do it. No matter how I try, it never feels right to mix things up. And when I tried running two blogs on the same platform, it just got confusing.”

I used to feel this way about my blog. I came to Micro.blog from a static blog that was hosted on GitLab I maintained for a couple of years. Back then, it was 90% tech-related long posts with footnotes and references. When I moved to Micro.blog, I started to struggle.

At first, I wrote long posts like I used to on the old blog, but writing like that is time-consuming and felt like a chore at times. I became a bit jealous of other folks on the Micro.blog’s Discover channel, who posted interesting photos or quick quotes from other places online. At the same time, Micro.blog was offering podcasts, so I tried that out and got overwhelmed quickly. It felt like I lost my way. I was an Emacs-dedicated tech person who writes about Emacs, and now I was venting about meaningless things.

I’m not sure exactly when (if there was such a quick transition at all), but I started enjoying posting photos on Micro.blog. I always liked taking photos, and Micro.blog gave me an opportunity to “just post stuff.” It was easy to do since I had a dedicated photos section (which comes with Micro.blog by default), so it didn’t feel like “cheating” when I wrote long posts on the main blog section.

The other thing that started changing for me was the integration of Mastodon and Micro.blog. I was active on Mastodon before I went “all in” with the blog. This made it easier to tell myself that I’m just posting short “mind farts” (as I used to call those short out-of-place posts) on Mastodon and using my blog as an archive for those. With time, and also after reading Manton’s book about microblogging, I started to switch gears and make my blog the main source of those quick posts. Having an official name for those quick posts - microblogging - helped me to “allow” myself to write short posts.

Other things followed up. With Micro.blog as my online home for blog posts, photos, and short descriptions of walks and meals I had, it was easy to start talking about movies I had enjoyed watching. Again, Micro.blog made things easy. I could review my movies on a site meant for that (letterboxd) and my review would appear automatically on my blog, and even get a dedicated feed. I was further inspired by Chris Campbell after one of Micro.blog’s Micro camps. Now I can say that the reviews themselves add an incentive to watch interesting movies.

Video games, another activity I spend a lot of time on, followed suit naturally with backlogged, where I try (and fail) to keep up with all the games I play. Just like Letterboxd, the RSS from my reviews there feeds automatically to my blog and gets published there without me needing to post anything to Micro.blog directly.

After I switched themes to Tiny Theme, which comes with quick “micro hooks” to add stuff like a static introduction to a page, I included my old blog and wiki in my About and Archive & Search sections because it made sense to fit those there. Now I’m considering explaining how I’ve done some of these things in my wiki again for other people who want to follow suit, which might become yet another section.

But I feel like I still haven’t answered Robert’s original issue, that “mixing paralysis” he describes. Kimberly KG chimed in at some point in the conversation (as a comment) and explained that it’s hard to get down and personal sometimes, which is what a blog is all about (Is it? I guess it depends who you ask), and this is yet another big topic.

If I was writing for profit or for some sort of a goal, I’d say focus is important and “content delivery” is important, because that’s how you get more subscribers and more traffic and more… more. But this is not why I write.

I still struggle to write some of my more personal posts (who doesn’t?), but I try and push through. It doesn’t happen often, but it does happen more often than it used to. I think that’s one of my personal victories, to be able to tell the world my personal stories.

Most people who follow my blog are techies and Emacs/Linux people, and that’s fine, but I tell myself that every now and then, there’s someone out there who stumbled into my blog and reads something personal that hits home. I know this is the case because I sometimes receive personal emails from these readers. I feel that when I write these things, I write them for myself and for them. I love creating those connections. And it doesn’t just happen through my posts. I write to people who make themselves vulnerable and write about their personal lives from my blog’s email address. They always respond in kind, and we can sometimes start a heart-to-heart talk as if we’ve known each other for years.

This means so much to me. This is what the small web, the personal web, is all about. And it will always be small, it will always be just a small group of people at a time, one reader or two, who reach out about one of the weirder posts, the one you didn’t think much about when you wrote it. It’s hard to describe how good it feels to get a personal email from someone.

So if there’s one reason to justify writing short posts and personal posts, you know, one of those “why am I writing about this” kind of posts, it is this. And Micro.blog is definitely a good place for that.

I love org mode, I do, but as I read through my tiddlywiki pages – the way I constructed the table of contents, the explanations, the log explaining what I did and when, the way you can open the tiddler and see what makes it work. It’s just makes sense. With Emacs, I sometimes have to scratch my head for hours if not days.

Had some time to think about writing micro.blog documentations, and I’m considering TiddlyWiki again. @jbaty@social.lol would probably agree with me: when it comes to presenting technical documentation and instructions to others, TW is much better than org-mode.

The same issue as I had in the past though: writing in Emacs is how I do things, and how I work on my notes. Converting org-mode to TW format (tiddlers) adds friction. I’ve been in this spot several times before…

I fixed another issue I caused myself with my blog: I accidentally switched my blog’s theme when I thought what I selected on the back end was just a preview of that theme.

This happens about once a month. A new feature comes hot out of the oven, I want to try it, and I break things. That’s how I learn. Micro.blog is a pretty forgiving environment, and I have backups and options to rebuild when this happens. The community is great and Manton himself (the guy who made Micro.blog) usually jumps in to help as well.

But that doesn’t mean there isn’t room for improvement.

Manton has been working hard and keeps improving and adding things to Micro.blog at a pace like never before, anything from polishing up on the dedicated macOS and iOS apps to adding brand new features, like encrypted notes or maybe (in the future) the option to host videos on the platforms. He’s a prolific individual who is passionate about what he does, and it’s hard to keep track.

I respect Manton, and I love what he does. I’ve been working with people who share a similar mindset for years: software engineers, system administrators, and IT managers. My job has been—and to an extent still is—to explain what they do, why they do it, and how it affects their users and community. I’ve been wanting to do the same for Micro.blog since I joined (one of my earlier attempts has been in my wiki, which is still around, though neglected).

In truth though, I can’t keep up with Micro.blog updates. Not with my full-time job and other obligations. By the time I’m done working, I don’t have much energy left to do even more tech-related stuff and documenting things, but I do want to. I know I can do a decent job at it, and if nothing else, it might help people and make Micro.blog a bit more inviting to non-techie newcomers. I’m just not sure how to fit it into my day, and where to start. Do I go back to the wiki? Do I just start on my blog? Do I write documentation on GitLab, as I used to? I don’t know.

Listening to a familiar piano piece in the office, and I’m thinking “I hope this is not Mozart” because I’m trying to stay away from here and enjoy other composers too. It is Mozart. Concerto for Piano No. 20 KV 466. Man, I don’t want to be that guy who just likes Mozart, but dude has some skills.

Not sure I get the new quoting thing from Mastodon. I understand how it works more or less (I can’t use it, not on my insistence), but what’s the point? Is copy-pasting not good enough? I usually just “@” someone if I want to mention them.

A good article about BookFinder, a pirate torrent site on books that went down. I still need to finish reading it:

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I Came, I Typed, I Downloaded - How a Pirate Librarian Became an FBI Target * TorrentFreak torrentfreak.com

I don’t know, with the state of how knowledge and books are treated today in the US, I think websites like these are actually leaning more toward the good guys than the FBI.

I actually don’t hate liquid glass. At least not yet. And the new colored icons look fine to me, in case I get tired of it. What tools and gizmos do you use to customize your iPhone better in the year of our lord iOS 26?

Brandon is annoyed at commercials these days:

Commercials brandons-journal.com

when is it too much? When is the line crossed where the entertainment stops being worth the commercials?

Good question. As a person who never cared for Football, the NFL commercial craziness never bugged me. But I hate commercials in general. My threshold is always between low and very low. Whenever a commercial comes up, I usually just quit on the movie/show (or the streamer if I’m watching Twitch) as soon as they come on.

Reddit is shit. It was said so many times, and it will be said many more times.

The problem is that many of the users there just sit and accept it, and you can’t find these communities in alternative places. Mastodon comes a little close, but not really.

Sal doesn’t think that justifying text on your blog is a good idea. I tend to agree, though it would be an interesting experiment.

Re: justify sals.place

My Anker USB and screen switches came today. So far so good. My gaming keyboard and mouse switch between the Mac and the PC with no problem; there’s just a second or so of delay. The HDMI switch also works, and it’s better than changing the input with the tiny screen-joystick.