The Art Of Not Asking Why

I’m trying Arc browser (thanks to @jack) and I’m hooked. So far it passed the test of “there’s an emergency at work, I don’t have time to learn how to use a new browser” by being 150% intuitive and working with everything I threw at it. Nice.

Here’s one example (of many):

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.

Is there some sort of a way to get into Bluesky that I’m missing? There seems to be a waiting list, but that’s it, yet I see a few folks here who seem to have access…?

It’s nothing major for me, I’m curious and after Threads I’m thinking, nothing can be that bad xD

Today is my Emacs day - the day I created my first “for real now” journal entry in Emacs org-mode in 2018. Wow, 5 years I’ve been using this tool. It did - no exaggeration - change my life. I need to talk about it more. Talk about it… I can do podcasts now… hmmm 🤔

Apple came out with a Classical music solution not too long ago, and most reviews amounted to “meh.”

I wanted to throw in my solution: IDAGIO. For one dollar less than Apple Music, you get a dedicated lossless (FLAC) Classical music solution.

I’m enjoying Vivaldi’s Flute this morning. ♬ ♪

Those of you who have cats 😺: have you found a way to get rid of the litter box smell?

I’d consider one, but this is the main issue. This is a small NYC apartment and the litter box will be in the kitchen / living room / dining room area (it’s all the same room basically).

I decided to give Micro.blog premium a go. I’ve been on the regular tier for a while, enjoying what the platform and community has to offer. After playing around with a FOSS read-it-later app for Android and not getting what I wanted out of it, I figured (with the help of my partner, who saves me from my own complications on a daily basis) that it just makes sense.

Not only the premium version comes with a place to store and read articles, I can also integrate them into the post I’m going to write about these articles anyway. Meanwhile, I get the option to create newsletters and have a place for podcasts if I ever go that route (why not, I already tried my hand at recording videos). With the premium version, I can even upload short video clips, which will be perfect with the pictures I already take.

But the best indication that I’m doing the right thing is the positive feeling I get when I blog on MB. It always feels good to write here; it’s always nice to interact with the people in the community, and the “leadership” is making decisions I stand behind and support myself. A good product from good people.

Heading back home. This wasn’t the magical vacation it was last time, but you can’t make magic, it happens on its own when you don’t have the expectations. Thoughts and (more) pics coming soon.

As a result of a conversation with Pete yesterday, I did some of my own digging into accessibility and contrast.

The first interesting thing I learned: folks with myopia (which is the medical term for shortsightedness), especially those with Astigmatism, are likely to also have halation, which is a “glow” or a “halo” of bright lights. As a person with Myopia and Astigmatism for most of my life, I didn’t know that the third phenomenon has a name. White text on black background increases this halation to the point of making it hard for me to read the text. For years, I thought it was just my own poor eyesight that does that; turns out it’s much more common.

I’ve never liked harsh contrast for this reason. As a matter of fact, a more “gentle” contrasting theme is one of the reasons I like working in Emacs. My website and my wiki are a result of these preferences. The black text on the beige background is comfortable on my eyes. Enough contrast to read, but not enough to burn text into my vision, as many dark modes out there do.

The second interesting thing I learned: Google has a team looking into accessibility, and Chrome has a built-in tool to can check accessibility issues on websites. Here’s an example from my website (my letters-to-background ratio is good enough, as turns out). I’m not sure if Safari and/or Fhaveirefox have these tools.