The Art Of Not Asking Why

A Minecraft Movie, 2025 - ★★½

Mon, 06 Apr 2026 07:47:50 -0400

Solid fun, a nice plot for a movie based on a video game. Highly expected, nothing too special, but a somewhat confusing plot - the one that is based on the real world feels almost as fantastical as the Minecraft one.

Sat, 04 Apr 2026 23:58:21 -0400

I seem to have fixed the issues on my blog. This required a deeper dive into my template and understanding how Hugo prioritizes pages. Qwen3 helped by answering my clarifying questions from the documentation and gave me a bit of confidence, which did the trick.

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 18:00:28 -0400

Some of the pages on my site are not working properly. I’m trying to figure out the problem and get it sorted out, but so far it’s a lot of head scratching. I’m replicating the same structure to a new, similar theme, with a newer Hugo build, so we will see how that works out.

Mushroom Soup 🍜

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 18:05:40 -0400

This was my first attempt at making mushroom soup from scratch - well, with vegetable broth. All from vegetables I got from the farmer’s market (I usually go on weekends). Up until now, I only made Butternut squash soup, and these are pretty good, so I decided to expand a bit.

To make it, I used:

5 King Oyster Mushrooms
1 small yellow onion
4 regular Yukon potatoes (1 large, 3 small ones)
4 garlic cloves
Fresh Parsley (a few leaves, about a spoonful)
Olive oil (about 1/3 of a cup)
Water + vegetable vegan broth

I wanted to create a creamy-like soup, and I thought the potatoes would work. They did, and it made a good thick soup.

To prepare any soup, I usually work from the “hard” veggies that need more cooking toward the soft ones. In this case, the diced potatoes (big chunks, each potato cut three to four times) went in first with the garlic and onion, and let it stay on medium-high heat (not boiling) for about 10 minutes. It’s important to remember that for this kind of thick soup, the liquid (water+oil+broth) should not cover the vegetables completely. I’d say about up to 2/3 or so, maybe a little more. Less liquid = more thickness, naturally.

The potatoes got soft fast. I added the chopped parsley and mushrooms next for another 5 minutes or so, adding salt and some black pepper - I wanted the most basic ingredients, since I wanted to taste the basic soup first, building on that and thinking what to add later.

After everything was ready (give or take the 15-18 minute zone), I poured it into my blender in two batches (too much for one batch). The Vitamix makes quick work of everything in seconds, but I let it run for about 20 seconds, then poured the thick, yellowish-cream mixture into a bowl.

The soup was hearty and good, very easy to make. For next time, I took a couple of notes:

The consistency was good, but I want to improve on the mushroom flavor. I should increase the amount of mushrooms, probably from 5 to 8 to try.
For texture and flavor, I want to try chopped mushrooms at the end after the blender phase. I could also use a different kind of mushrooms for this finish, perhaps.
Some recipes I found suggested using fennel. After tasting this soup, especially with king oyster mushrooms, I tend to agree. I think it would add a good flavor.
Salt and black pepper were a good idea. I have a lot of spices, but this soup is good in its basic form, and I think that if I were to add anything too sophisticated, it would take away from the mushroom flavor.

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 09:01:44 -0400

‘Tis the season…

Gesundheit!

Sun, 29 Mar 2026 09:23:00 -0400

Seems like some of the pages on my blog are now working as they should. There’s supposed to be an introduction for the Archive page and the Emacs page. I’m using Tiny Theme, and the HTML for those micro-hooks is in place, which makes me think something went wrong with the update I did about a month ago.

I guess rebuilding the blog is the next step - which usually breaks the movies page… stand by….

Sun, 29 Mar 2026 09:03:24 -0400

Hank Green on why AI scares him:

“People tend to prefer their choices to be taken away.”

(The link below will take you directly to that part)

It’s an hour and a half long video with a long introduction and a video thrown in the middle, probably one of the longer rants by Hank Green, with an interview in the middle by Cal Newport, a computer science professor at Georgetown University.

I’m still watching this conversation. It’s a lot to take in, but I think it keeps going back to the sentence I quoted above. It has been true for a while (forever?), on different platforms (not just AI), and one of the most apparent examples for me is dating apps. Tinder started the trend of “swiping people” left and right, emphasizing how people look and present, and not who they are.

It’s easy to blame the app, but we who use them are not much better. Going through profiles on a dating app (even those that allow more detailed ones), the person usually sums up their being into a single sentence, with a “bumper sticker” style emojis presenting whatever ideology is popular this time around.

The very concept of a dating app today is a joke when you think about how impossible it is to summarize who the person behind the profile is. Yet, this is what we prefer and what we use. We all have decision fatigue, and it only gets worse as we get bombarded by even more information, so we rely on technologies like AI to summarize that for us as we grow lazier and our capacity to retain information and make knowledge decisions based on that information is diminishing every day.

Sat, 28 Mar 2026 11:52:18 -0400

I find myself highlight gems like these every 2 pages or so. The Cunning Man

Of Frued:

mankind, as always through history, has half-heard the call of the prophet, half-understood what he says, and vulgarized and cheapened whatever of his teaching may come its way.

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 06:59:06 -0400

Oddly Satisfying. 📷

Thu, 26 Mar 2026 07:22:10 -0400

Yesterday morning, I imported an old-blog post of mine, which discusses org-id and UUIDs in org-mode. It’s a bit of a deep dive into how org-mode works. I find that I don’t do those as much anymore - probably because I mostly use Emacs “as is” with a few packages I use day to day, and my workflow has been pretty much the same (capture templates not included) for the last two years or so.

Thu, 26 Mar 2026 06:40:28 -0400

I was a paid subscriber to 404 media, but I decided to let my subscription run out this year around. They started to feel too one sided and tend to focus only on AI. Still excellent reporting though, for those things.

Mon, 23 Mar 2026 20:59:43 -0400

I found a post on my old blog that I wanted to bring over, but I ran out of time today. I could copy it as is, but I want to read it again and probably update it.

It was a jolt to get back to work today. Feels like my job is to poke different people to do different things, and they poke others. if you have one or two projects like that, that’s one thing. If your entire agenda revolves around email chains like this, nothing gets done.

At least I managed to exercise today, after a nap. Made some tofu and beans after. Nothing special, but nutritious and filling. Tomorrow is an office day.

Using AI to edit and polish posts

Sun, 22 Mar 2026 13:47:54 -0400

I use Grammarly to correct typos, grammar mistakes, and sometimes some style issues. I’ve been using Grammarly for years, as I have a paid account through work.

Since Grammarly doesn’t work on Zen on my Linux desktop for some reason (it refuses to sign into my account, and I suspect it’s my VPN I have there, which I’m not going to turn off), I was looking for a solution. There is the pretty good LanguageTool, but I got curious about using AI to do more than just a quick grammar check.

With folks around me using AI for creating more sophisticated tools, especially after reviewing Doctorow’s usage of AI and his viewpoint on using such tools, I thought of using it to help me with some of the editing itself. Since I use Kagi, I could utilize its custom assistant feature, which allows me to choose an LLM from an available list and then build and save a specific prompt to use each time I want to work on a post.

There’s a lot that goes into long-form¹ blog posts. I believe I went into that in detail before, but here is my process again, especially since I started to be more “hands on” in different social media platforms:

Write the draft in Emacs org-mode
Export to markdown inside Emacs, copy-paste into the Micro.blog macOS app
Correct grammar and style in Grammarly inside the Micro.blog app
Select a category, add a summary, and decide which platforms I’m going to cross-post the post to automatically (these are usually Mastodon and Tumblr, which allow me to edit posts; Blue Sky doesn’t allow that, which means I need to create another post there manually)
Go into the different social media platforms and polish those up (character limit issue, adding hashtags, etc.)

I was blown away by how well this worked from the get-go.

Here’s what I’m asking Kimi, the AI model I chose for that task, to do

Explain who I am (the author of this blog, what pronouns to use, how to call me)
Scan this blog, and look for posts that “greatly overlap” the draft I just submitted. Kimi has been smart enough so far to figure out when I’m basically rambling about something I already did, or if it’s close but I have something new to add (or if it’s new content altogether)
If it finds an identical post, it stops and asks me if I want to proceed anyway.
If I say I want to continue, it starts looking for spelling mistakes and grammatical errors. It corrects me automatically, but in a separate section under the draft, it tells me what it corrected. This is useful because it’s not always correct, and I want to make sure it doesn’t kill my awesome grumpy style.
It goes over the links of my post to check if any of them are problematic. I was delighted to see it caught a mistake where I pointed two different links to the same URL, a simple copy-paste error, and brought it to my attention.
It recommends terms I should expand on, while offering references. I asked it to prioritize official links and Wikipedia links, and it works well. Additionally, it will scan this blog and let me know if any of my other posts already explain the terms in my current draft, summarize them, and provide links to those posts.
Finally, it gives me a list of hashtags that it thinks I should use for Mastodon, Blue Sky, and Tumblr. This part is the weakest, as these trends change frequently and don’t always align with what my post is about, but it’s a good starting point. I edit those manually as needed.

The key to using AI, in my opinion, is to always see what it finds and inspect its reasoning if something feels off. Because I’m using a reasoning model, I can see what it was “thinking” and where something went wrong; this is how I’ve been able to polish it over the last few days.

I’d love it if I could get Kimi to also scan my old blog at https://master--taonaw-blog.netlify.app, but netlify.app isn’t indexed by AI bots or Google (which Kagi is built on mostly), so it doesn’t work. I could probably work around this if I upload a text of my old blog or post it somewhere else, if I get to it.

Here’s a glimpse at how it looks like when I let it work through this very post:

Footnotes

¹: In general, I split my blog posts into quick “bursts,” sort of “tweets” or “toots” which are quick and easy, and then there are the longer posts which take more time. These tend to get edited more deeply, as I like to use different sources and include visual aids, among other things. Those longer posts are the kind of posts I’m discussing here.

A good day to have a blog

Fri, 20 Mar 2026 13:45:13 -0400

Since waking up early in the morning (sleep? What sleep?) I’ve been active around my blog and enjoyed dedicating time to this personal work that doesn’t get much attention during my day-to-day.

Here are a few things I got into:

Instead of an email, I ended up writing a post.
Speaking of writing, I tweaked my custom AI prompt for “post polish” with Kagi’s assistants (I will expand on this further down the line)
- Due to the above, I also learned that Kagi featured a picture of my blog in their update post.
  - The update post itself reminded me how cool Kagi’s small web is, now even better!
Playing around with Kagi’s small web, I found another interesting blogger to follow
Reading the Micro.blog feed, I found out miljko is building an Emacs to Micro.blog package!
- Emacs + Micro.blog + frequnt posts = another person to add to my RSS feeds
- This reminded me about adventures on Micro.blog by Scott. Yet another RSS feed to add.

Then, thinking about all the stuff I’ve done around my blog today, I thought about expanding my “blog check list”, adding the few items I’ve learn. It is now divided into maintenance and inspiration parts:

    * Blog Stuff to do
    
    ** Maintenance 
    
    - [ ] check taonaw email
    - [ ] tinylytics:
      - [ ] most popular posts in the last month (3 places)
      - [ ] Insights can be interesting
    - [ ] new webmentions (under *Account* on the Micro.blog site)?
    - [ ] "On this day" if exists:
      - [ ] check for typos
      - [ ] check for bad links/broken images/missing emojis
    - [ ] check plugins (updates?)
    - [ ] delete used bookmarks (Micro.blog) 
    - [ ] photo page (add 📷 to posts)
    
    ** Inspiration 
    
    - [ ] Check old blog for posts to import
    - [ ] Journal
    - [ ] Bookmarks (in Micro.blog)
    - [ ] RSS feeds!
    - [ ] Kagi small web (in browser) for sites
    - [ ] Take a random picture

I feel like a very efficient blogger today 😄

About Stable Products

Fri, 20 Mar 2026 08:28:45 -0400

Pete doesn’t think companies can make Stable products that just work. I mostly agree with him, but not fully.

The problem is that, no matter how much you and I say we would want that sort of thing, there is no incentive for companies to actually do it. Any CEO who suggested doing this sort of thing would be immediately sacked by their board and replaced with someone committed to an ever-expanding user base and perpetually growing recurring revenue, because that is what the investors want.

Very much agree here. Any company that has investors would “move fast and break things”, as Zuckerberg’s saying goes. And if they can’t come up with new “innovations,” they’d copy them. And if they can’t copy them, they’d buy them or the company¹.

I’ve been thinking about this endless cycle recently, when I read about Bluesky and their association with crypto-related investments². If we go that route, it’s pretty much how Enshittification works. Doctorow coined the term, but not the concept, which I think is as old as society and money.

But then there’s this:

I am unconvinced that most of the mass public actually would want this sort of thing and even if they did, we would have to contend with a commercial and financial economy that has figured out a way to keep profits rolling in utterly disconnected from what buyers of their goods and services actually want.

I think this is too US-centric and tech-centric. My counterargument? Bread 🥖.

People love the concept of good old-fashioned bread that comes from bakeries that have been doing the same thing for generations, along with some pastries 🥐 and good coffee ☕️ or tea.

The emojis I used above to emphasize my point? Yeah, those will keep changing, along with the tech companies that keep rolling out their own versions.

Even traditional bakeries adjust and move with what the customers want; that’s true. What was only bread then would be bread and cake tomorrow, and after that they would offer coffee too, etc. But I think the old-fashioned bread would stay.

The US economy is built against this, more or less, with big capital coming from the stock market and investors that always want more more more. Even if a business is profitable and has shown stable growth for decades, they’d still want more. This is human nature on steroids under what we know as capitalism. But travel in Europe, in small villages (or even in the US in small towns that want nothing to do with the hustle of opening a chain), and you’d find these gems.

Stable products that just work could just work, if they weren’t about money and profit - but most of the products we see around us are. You could make a living and stick to something that pays the bills, or even allows you to enjoy your money and save it, without selling out. There are plenty of examples. But then it’s about passion, not about money.

Footnotes

¹ : This brings to mind how InvokeAI is now owned by Adobe, something else I was checking on recently (for now, it seems the free product is still around and kicking, but I doubt it will remain this way). There are plenty of such examples.

² : I’m not sure what this is about. Most of what I see is the fallout in Mastodon. As far as I can tell this is part B or some funding strategy that started with part A, which was pretty much common knowledge back then too, so people being upset now is more of the “well, duh” to me.

Fri, 20 Mar 2026 08:01:31 -0400

Kagki just included a screenshot of my blog in their Kagi Small Web news! 🤯

Wed, 18 Mar 2026 23:02:32 -0400

This is a better video than I expected. The main idea is nothing new, but the video games he mentions are perfect examples: I’m also looking for my next game after Hades 2, and I think thanks for this video, I found it. It’s about cats, how can you go wrong?

Wed, 18 Mar 2026 08:28:15 -0400

Staycation. And I’m still connected to my work computer, organizing my tasks and projects, because they are out of control and having a vacation means I can finally organize them…

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 15:38:39 -0400

We were sitting at their bar, but we also had a mocha and a cappuccino toward the end. Something about the flag and the security camera above it makes things feel relevant and eerie. 📷

Diablo IV (2023) - ★

Fri, 13 Mar 2026 23:31:20 -0400

Nope. Nah ah. I tried this game twice, and it failed twice. The first time I didn’t enjoy it. It was too much clicking with little to show for it. No strategy, no method to the madness. I looked for light entertainment, and I thought I found it in this game, just to put it aside after an hour or so of playing.

The second time, about a week ago, I decided ot dust it off and try again. It was the same disappointing lack of wits, only topped with annoying additional in-game purchase requests for all kinds of nonsense, and a complete lack of any challenge. At all. None.

As I was watching the second boss in the game getting destroyed by an army of skeletons that I’m not even sure why I was able to resurrect so easily, looking at messages on my phone, I got pissed. A game should be interactive. What I saw in front of me was a flashy animation that didn’t need me to move a finger. No challenge. No brains. No fun.

At least I can thank Diablo for getting me back into reviewing games just to express my frustration.

Fri, 13 Mar 2026 08:41:39 -0400

A couple of days ago I wrote about my morning checklist, which is a list of reminders and guide of what to do in order. There are a couple of advantages I’m learning to really appreciate about it:

It keeps me in line by showing me what else I need to do
When I finish it, I feel my job is slightly less of a chaos than it really is. This is mostly a mental perk, but it helps.
It nudges me toward writing a journal entry, which in turn allows some creative thoughts out, and those are precious.

Point three above is what got me thinking I should also have a midday list.

I try to break my day into two parts and take a break around 15:00. This break usually includes a nap and some exercise before I tackle my other bigger, more time-consuming projects. Of course, meetings drag on, urgent matters need to be attended to, and the river of emails never stops.

A checklist to help me shift gears would be helpful. In a way, it would be like saving a game before moving on to the next level; it would serve as a soft reset, letting me relax enough to take that nap and exercise, which I need to stay productive and healthy.

I wonder if anyone else uses these sorts of checklists, even if they are only in their heads.

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 16:59:32 -0400

This weather is driving me nuts. I want to go out all the time. To walk, to jog, to just go to the bakery and grab something… but work, but projects, but but but… it wasn’t that hard when it was in the single digits shakes his fist at the wonderful weather

It was annoying to write this post, and that's the point. I think.

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 09:14:20 -0400

My brain woke me up around 4 this morning and concluded that I probably neglected my social platform recently. And it was right.

You see, Micro.blog is doing a fair job at reposting my stuff over to Mastodon, BlueSky, and Tumblr — but it’s only that: a fair job. It’s OK. It’s automatic, so some of the nuances that should go into a post on each platform are lost.

For example, Micro.blog doesn’t do hashtags for its timeline. I actually like it. It makes it stand out more from the rest, and its use of emoticons is a nice touch. I could include hashtags in my posts here, but they look out of place and ugly. Besides, Mastodon and Tumblr don’t seem to pick them up anyway. This means I need to go to these platforms and edit my posts and add hashtags manually.

Meanwhile, hashtags from Micro.blog do get to BlueSky. Kind of. It seems the first hashtag gets picked up, but the rest don’t — I’m still investigating. But then BlueSky itself doesn’t allow editing posts, so I can’t make the changes I need there, like condensing a summary so it doesn’t get cut in the middle (which I can do easily on Mastodon); I have to delete my entire post there and do it all over again, which gets old fast especially with images and alt descriptions.

And if the above is not complicated enough yet, I don’t see all the interactions I get on these platforms. Micro.blog shows me replies from BlueSky and Mastodon (I get replies from Mastodon all the time), but not likes, or retoots or tetweets, or reposts or whatever the hell they’re called on BlueSky.

I also miss out on new interesting people I might want to follow. I like RSS, and I enjoy using it, but it’s not a replacement for hearing from people who spew sentences here and there that I tend to enjoy — sort of my online buddies. This is very evident in Mastodon, for example, where I have a dedicated list I call “friends” that displays posts from those folks, but I need to be on Mastodon to interact with them.

If this post conveys anything besides confusion, I hope it’s the fact that reaching out to people can easily be a full‑time job, if you consider Cory Doctorow’s routine. Actually, I wrote him an email yesterday, asking for his advice, and he surprised me by replying within a couple of hours. I don’t know why I was somewhat disappointed to find out that he has no solution for this problem — I mean, he explained what a mess his routine is in the essay that prompted me to write to him in the first place…?

There is no clear solution. If I want to engage more people on the social networks they’re on, I need to engage more people on those networks. It’s tedious and time‑consuming, and time and energy are already pretty scarce resources for me, so I need to tread carefully — not to mention that most of these places spew depressing and upsetting opinions (politics) I need to avoid. But isn’t that the song and dance we all do online to one degree or another?

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 07:52:57 -0400

I can already tell the espresso puck screens I got are going to become a regular part of my espresso-making routine. Glad someone brought it to my attention.

Display images with Org-attach and org-insert-link quickly and effectively

Sun, 08 Mar 2026 13:43:25 -0400

Suppose you have an org-mode file and want an image to appear in the buffer. The way to do that is to insert a link to the file, for example:

[[home/username/downloads/image.png]].

Then, you toggle inline images with C-c C-x C-v, and the image should display inside the org-mode buffer, provided the path in the link is correct. If you do this often in your notes as I do, you might as well just turn it on for the entire file with #+STARTUP: inlineimages at the top of your org file, with the rest of the options you have there; this way, images will always display when you load the file. This is all nice and good, and most of us org-mode users probably know that.

A common use case for a full workflow like this is attaching images to your org file. You have a file in your Downloads folder, as shown in the example above, and you want to keep the image with your org file where it belongs, rather than in Downloads, where it will be lost among other files sooner or later.

For this, as most of us know, we have org-attach (C-c C-a by default). This starts a wonderful organizational process for our files:

It creates a data folder (by default) inside the folder the org-file is in if it’s not there
It then gives the header (even if you don’t have one) a UUID (Universally Unique Identifier) and creates two more directories, one inside the other:
1. The parent directory consists of the first part of the UUID
2. The child directory consists of the rest of the UUID
Lastly, the file itself will be copied into the child directory above.

For example:

./data/acde070d/8c4c-4f0d-9d8a-162843c10333/someimage.png

If you’re not used to how org-attach works, it might take some time getting used to, but it’s worth it. Images (or any file, as we will deal with soon) are kept next to the files they are associated with. Of course, org-attach is customizable, and you can change those folders and UUIDs to make them less cryptic.

For example, my init includes this:

    (setq org-id-method 'ts)
    (setq org-attach-id-to-path-function-list 
      '(org-attach-id-ts-folder-format
        org-attach-id-uuid-folder-format))

This tells org-mode to change the UUID to IOS date stamp format, so the folders under the data folder are dates, and tells org-mode to use that system (~~I wrote about this in length in my old blog; it is yet another post I need to bring over here~~ it’s here now.).

In my case, this creates a file reference system by date: inside the data folder, each month of the year has a folder; inside those, a folder for the day and time (down to fractions of seconds) of the attachment. The beauty of org-attach is that you’re not meant to deal with the files directly. You summon the org-attach dispatcher and tell it to go to the relevant folder (C-c C-a to bring it up, then f as the option to go to that directory).

org-attach and displaying images inline are known to many org-mode users, but here comes the part I never realized:

org-attach stores the link to the file you just attached inside a variable called org-stored-link, along with other links you might have grabbed, like URLs from the web (take a look with C-h v org-stored-links). And, even better, these links are added to your org-insert-link, ready to go when you insert a link to your file with C-c C-l.

So when you have an image ready to attach to an org file, say in your Downloads folder, you could first attach it with org-attach, and then you can call it back quickly with C-c C-l. The trick is, since this is an image link (and not just any file), is not to give it a description. By default, org-mode will suggest you describe the link as the file you attached, but inline images do not work like that, and with a description, the image will just display as a file name. In other words:

A link to an image you want to display in the org buffer should look like:

[[file:/Home/username/downloads/someimage.jpg]]

But any other file would look like:

[[file:/Home/username/downloads/somefile.jpg][description]]

By deleting the suggestion, you are effectively creating the first case, the one that is meant to display images. This is explained nicely here.

There’s more to it. As it turns out, the variable org-attach-store-link-p is responsible for the links to these files to automatically be stored in org-insert-link (you can toggle it to change this option). This is why, when you use it, your files or images will show as [[attachment:description]], without the need for the path as specified above.

I have years of muscle memory to undo, as I’m used to manually inserting the links with the full path for my images. I did not realize the links to the images I’ve attached are right there, ready for me to place into the buffer if I only delete the description.