The Art Of Not Asking Why

I have a question for those of you who use Automator on their Mac . I have a folder action that renders PDFs to JPG, with two problems so far:

1. It doesn’t “know” how to deal with more than one file
2. It can’t render more than one page in PDF as separate images.

Looking for advice or a guide.

Now I’m playing around with ImageMagick and Automator. I’m almost there, though I’m having a hard time telling Automator to grab the resulting files from ImageMagick.

On the techie side 💾, I can’t resolve my issues with VMware (it’s slow to the point it’s unusable, and all the troubleshooting around hypervisor/power throttling didn’t help). My Windows machine seems like a mess as is. I’m thinking of wiping it clean and starting fresh. This will be fun (not).

Playing around with my new ability to upload video files, here are some motivational thoughts about running from earlier this week.

A quick recording from my phone, nothing special, just playing around.

I miss having a functional smartphone with me.

You may recall that I have GrapheneOS installed on my Google Pixel 6. The phone is stripped from anything Google besides the App Store (many of the apps I need are not available in other places) and the Camera (the camera that comes with GrapheneOS is basic at best). My smartphone hasn’t felt that “smart” for months.

My work iPhone seems magical, especially now. It scans my notebook pages to PDFs in one tap. It measures distances with the camera. It can take photos and edit them and post them to the blog and add descriptive text in one go. It has a functioning map that shows me the locations of nearby coffee shops, the hours they are open, and how to get there. It knows the weather and warns me when it’s going to rain. It even fits in my pants pocket.

I keep wrestling with my privacy shtick daily. Why am I doing this? What am I gaining out of it? How is it good for me? I’m not sure I know anymore. Yes, Apple has my data, and Google, and Amazon, and 20 other places. So what. As long as I don’t trust them to keep my data and I have my own backups… so what. Meanwhile, I have a blog with my thoughts, a YouTube channel with my face, and I’m considering a podcast with my voice.

The more I think about it, the more I wonder how long I can keep up with this.

Prot’s Denote is an interesting package to explore. It has limited use for me because most of my notes are attached to tasks and projects, which I already save in weekly org-mode files. There are two cases denote can be useful:

First, My blog posts on Microblog. So far, I created posts inside the weekly org file I scheduled a task to write a post. This means blog posts do not have a dedicated folder; they’re scattered in my tasks inside the weekly files. Ideally, posts should be in one place, and one post per file makes sense.

Second, the “personal wiki” articles. I can post technical explanations on my public wiki, but some information is personal and does not belong there. Furthermore: it’s a good idea to write information down in a draft, which in turn can be polished and edited for the wiki. Since these notes are not time-sensitive, they should be separated from my scheduled tasks.

I used to maintain a wiki org file, but it turned too big and messy. Some of the topics in this old wiki org file fit in the new public wiki, while others are too specific to my setup. A folder containing individual articles in files with keywords and dates is an excellent use case here.

Denote needs adjustments to fit my preferences, and I’m currently exploring it. I need a specific template for blog posts and wiki articles. I also need to define different locations to save the notes for each case. Being able to call these templates with a keyboard shortcut or directly from org-capture is another thing to look to.

I am now on Bluesky. Feels like old-school Twitter back when everything was cool and without ads. Just my stream and cat pics. Lots of cat pics.