There is certain quiet in snow that is hard to describe. Even in the city, sounds are more muffled. They too prefer to stay warm under a heavy blanket
Ann misses the time when appliances were durable over smart:
Ann Aguirre (@annaguirre.bsky.social) bsky.app
I know this is an “angry man yells at cloud” kind of thing, but the idea that “kids today” find the notion that washing machines can last over a decade and that fixing them is something you can do yourself with tools, time and knowledge completely alien is crazy to me.
…I spoke to soon. It’s 3:00 in the morning now. Probably halfway the food, halfway family-related worries. Hope to get some more sleep before a busy Monday.
My sleep has gotten better recently. I still have 5-hours nights where I’m tired all day, but it happens less. With more sleep, my routine of waking up at 5:30-6:30 every morning returned, and I enjoy it plenty. Is this an age thing or a morning/night person thing?
Someone on my Micro.blog feed watched Perfect Days a couple of weeks ago, and I don’t remember who. It seemed like a movie I’d enjoy, and I did - so thank you, whoever watched it, it was a good recommendation. Review’s coming up.
Perfect Days, 2023 - ★★★½
Perfect Days is a "slice of life" light drama movie. It's relaxing to watch for the most part, though I can imagine some would find it boring to watch.
Hirayama (Koji Yakusho) just follows the motions, a strict daily routine of cleaning public toilets in Tokyo, which starts every morning with the sun and ends in the afternoon. We follow him as he wakes up from his dreams (flashes in black and white), brushes his teeth, gets in his van, and chooses what music to listen to every morning from his cassette (if you remember those, you'd also appreciate the music he listens too) collection.
It's like unwrapping a package carefully without damaging the paper, taking your time with it, finding a plain description-less box inside, then putting it on the kitchen table and staring at it, trying to think what's inside. What's next? What's going to happen today? Is it going to be bad? Good?
But nothing really happens, at least not the way you'd expect in most films. Everyone else besides Hirayama has a lot going on in their life, and they collide with him. And when they do, they get a piece of his peace, a chance to relax and play around a bit. I love this about this movie. This movie is about appreciating life, not celebrating it, just sitting down and smelling the flowers - or the tree leaves playing with the sunlight, in the case of Hirayama.
The toilets in the movie are actually "an urban renewal project through which 17 public toilets in the Japanese capital are being turned into veritable works of art by architects from around the world" (see more here
and here). Cool.
Now, if you excuse me, I'm going to create a list of this movie's songs.
Finally I get to try this Christmas gift. Mmm.
Happy new year!
2024 brought two good things into my life toward its end: a new role/promotion at work, and a new amazing person. I don’t like contributing things to luck, though this is a convenient way to explain happenstance. Some things come to you as if the “universe” was listening in one day in the shower (where all deep thoughts happen, as we all know) and gave you a head nod.
I hope you all had a good year and looking forward to a new one!
My writing/blogging Environment
On my Mac, I’ve been slowly making improvements to my writing environment, both physical and software. It was not intended initially, but this is sort of “part 2” of the post I wrote about my Mac’s menu bar. There are five overall components, and I’ll try to summarize each below.
Emacs
I’ve been using Emacs since 2018, with a journal entry titled “does this work?” which is very appropriate when you finish installing Emacs for the first time.
In terms of writing for my blog, as I do with this post you’re reading now, I rely on Emacs to convert my post to Markdown (and HTML where Markdown falls short, like in the case of footnotes I sometimes use) and basic spell checking among many other writing “hacks” that are usually achieved by other independent Mac apps. A few quick examples: typing out shortcuts like “mb” will automatically expand to “Micro.blog” or Ctrl t, which in Emacs runs the command transpose-chars, to fix one of the most common typos (from “tyop” to “typo”), among other full automations and scripts I won’t get into here. Emacs has won me over time and time again when I compare it to other writing applications; in my mind, It’s the best writing and note-keeping tool ever created.
Micro.blog (app)
Last Friday I said I was finally satisfied with Micro.blog macOS app. Since my blog is hosted on Micro.blog, it only makes sense to use the official app, but I tried to use it several times in the past and ended up uninstalling it because it did not work as smoothly for me as the Micro.blog’s web interface. Now it seems it’s finally better.
The app handles Grammarly (coming up below) better than the web interface. “Scheduling” a post from the past runs better than it does on the web interface too. And while drafts are still not saved automatically (something I’ve asked for many times), I can at least save them quickly with ⌘ s, and the app is safer than a browser tab you’re likely to close by mistake and lose your work. The macOS app also asks you if you want to save your post when you’re about to close it.
The app also has a built-in preview option that shows you what your markdown post looks like. It gets updated as you type, which is a nice touch. Another thing worth mentioning: the app can also be used to reply to comments, I now use it whenever I get notifications on my iPhone (which are mirrored on my Mac’s screen) to reply quickly by clicking on “Mentions.”
A few things are still missing, and I hope these will be corrected in the future. The upload page only copies the AI description for images when you click on a particular image on the website and click on “Copy HTML” from there, which is cumbersome; I believe copying the HTML code with the AI-created caption should be the default1. As if @Manton read my mind, the latest update of the Micro.blog has a dedicated “copy HTML” from images in the app, with the AI description included.
Grammarly
Grammarly doesn’t need an introduction among writers and proofreaders. I mentioned it on this blog several times, most recently when discussing my Mac’s menu items, but not in depth. I’ve tested several AI grammar tools, and Grammarly is hard to beat.
Grammarly’s markings on texts with its newly integrated AI summaries options augment my writing in a way that “all or nothing” tools like Apple Intelligence or Chat GPT can’t do. It’s a premium tool that isn’t cheap, though.
PopClip
I talked about PopClip, so I won’t expand much here. It is more of a reading tool than a writing one, but in terms of the latter, PopClip has Urban Dictionary available with a click if I’m not sure about a slang term. There’s also the macOS dictionary (Emacs has a built-in dictionary). PopClip is an amazing tool that doesn’t cost too much and is worth every cent if you ask me.
Standing Desk
I got my Standing Desk in 2020. It’s more of a writing enhancement than a tool, and in my case, it’s what allows me to be productive and keep writing instead of getting too antsy. I enjoy typing standing in the early morning with my coffee; this is usually when the best writing takes place.
At first glance, a manual elevated desk like mine doesn’t seem like much, but if you read the post linked above, you’ll see I’ve put quite a bit of research into it. The fact that it doesn’t raise on a hinge, the way it supports my ultra-wide screen, and the size of the keyboard tray that fits exactly at the top of my desk without blocking my drawers—all of these things took patience and time.
Footnotes
1 : I understand, though disagree, with folks who want nothing to do with AI on their blog. It’s good that Micro.blog offers one central place to turn all AI features off. I believe that some functions, however, like having alt descriptions for images created for photos by default, is one of the good use cases for AI. You can always change the description if you’d like, after all.
I picked up The Walls Have Eyes by Petra Molnar 📚 and gave it up after two days. I was curious about the tech, but she barely touched it; this is mostly political. On the other hand, I finished reading Artificial Condition by Martha Wells 📚. Do I want to pick up the third one..? Probably.
test post
I’ve been experimenting for about a week, and I think I will finally use the micro.blog macOS App. It’s still missing a few things, but the overall writing and posting experience is better than the web for me, finally.
How I handled projects in Emacs org-mode in 2024
I mentioned my projects file, now.org, is getting a little bit out of control. I’ve been playing around with a few ways to organize it since.
This is firstly a conceptional problem, one that has to do with how I organize things mentally before I can go into the technical level of how to tell Emacs to do it: a “what do I want to see?” question before a “how do I do it?” one.
Let me start by showing you what my project file looks like now:
As you can see, a lot is going on.
One of the issues that are already fixed in this image is having the “DONE” or “CANCELLED” projects at the end of the file. This looks more organized than having them mixed with the “ACTIVE” projects all over, and it also allows me to focus on the things I’m currently working on as soon as I open the file.
By default, org-mode adds newly created headers at the bottom of the file. This means that every time I add another project or a meeting (an “ACTIVE” or “MEETING” in the image), it goes to the bottom of the list, right under the last header. I have to fix this manually by standing on the header I just created and moving it up with (M+↑) all the way to the top. However, I recently looked for a solution and found it: adding prepend: t to my capture templates. This reverses the order, so this problem will automatically sort itself out.
In my image, you can also see that some headers start as “Project:” and then the project’s name. This is redundant, and I hope to get rid of this soon because anything that is marked as “ACTIVE” is a project - which is defined by having sub-tasks (marked as “TODO”) under it; the idea is that a project is a large undertaking that has to be broken first to manageable parts:
I write notes under each one of those sub-task headers (as you can see under the first one). I also find it helpful to attach relevant files (in this example, the Reserved IPs header has an Excel sheet containing details). I find that it’s easier to find files through Dired on Emacs than it is looking for them in my work’s OneDrive because they are tied to the project in the right place and arranged by date at the same time by my header’s ID (I changed that from random slugs to date-formatted IDs in the past). I can also jump directly to the directory with those files with C-c C-a F, and then use the open command on macOS (M-x !open) to open it with the default application.
Most of the projects in both images have a percent to completion next to them. Since I usually don’t know what a certain project requires to complete when I start it (what subtasks are required or how many), this is more of a general guide, if anything. Still, I like knowing how much of a project is already done. The percent cookie is an feature built into org-mode1.
Not in the images yet are emojis. I’m playing with the idea of including a small person emoji (🙋♂️) in “MEETING” headers to make them stand out a bit more. Meetings, as it turns out, are a special kind of project. It’s a place where a lot is going on at once, and I mark a “MEETING” as “DONE” only after all the actionable notes are distributed to tasks. Meetings can include tasks that start a whole new project or fit into existing ones. It’s also possible to meet about a certain project, so the “MEETING” header needs to be refiled under an existing project later as one of the subtasks. Meetings can take a long time to break down and follow up on, making them a project in themselves: this is why I found that giving them a dedicated keyword is a good way to handle them2.
Another thing I added to the projects' capture template is clocking in as soon they’re created with :clock-in t. I often forget to clock out later, but I want to keep trying and build this as a habit. If I create a clock with a project, Emacs creates a :LOGBOOK: line for me with the time I started working, and I can correct the hours later. This is another area where it’s more of a guide than critical information: it’s often inaccurate (because I forget to clock out and then in again), and also, it doesn’t matter to me if I work half an hour more or half an hour less on something. It’s more of an indication of how much time a certain project took and how often I worked on it during the week.
Projects are also tagged with people I regularly work with. I know some folks (and I get to know many more) personally. When this happens, it’s helpful to see recognizable projects and tasks tagged with names I know. Since tags are hereditary in Emacs, an entire project can be tagged with a person if it’s required, but usually, I need different people for different subtasks of a certain project, depending on what I do. This is helpful to see how much I am working with a certain person, what on, and what that person does. I also have another file for people I work with, along with their names, their ID, their department, and what they do; it’s my useful “I know a guy” file I can tap into when I need someone to do something or when someone else asks me if I know how to handle a certain thing. I then can say, “I don’t, but I can find someone who can for you.” Helpful.
I can add a couple more things here, but this is probably a good place to stop. If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to comment! I’d love to hear from you.
Footnotes
1: It’s also worth noting that half of the time, I need to “re-ACTIVE” a project marked as “DONE” because of a new development or because it would happen again and might become more of a routine. This means new “TODO” tasks are added below, and the percentage goes back down from 100%, so, yes, this is more a visual guide than anything concrete.
2: I use at least two (but sometimes more) datestamps in a “MEETING” project. The first time stamp is usually before the meeting takes place: this is where I write down a list of bullet points I want to bring up and discuss. The second timestamp takes place during the meeting (I type while people talk, and I ask them to slow down or wait if I need to (by the way, this is something that worked horribly for me with a notebook: my attempts and my attempts at something that looks like handwriting in meetings while rushing were laughable at best. I missed critical points that way). The second timestamp then becomes an indication to look for actionable items later. Since I write these notes in bullet points, it’s also easy to copy them back into Outlook with minor editing to leave a summary or meeting minutes later.
I don’t celebrate Christmas and I’m too grumpy for all this nonsense, but I’ll make an exception and wish you all who celebrate a Merry Christmas, now that it’s here and it’s not November anymore.
You welcome.
Huuumbug.
Nat knows me well 😂 An early holiday gift. 📷
If you’re interested, it was made by a local collective of metal artists: www.metalpark.org
Phone mirroring is kind of growing on me. It has a few hiccups here and there, but otherwise worth it for something quick, like syncing an app or checking notifications.
Good thing I use YouTube music. Google is probably much better 🤦♂️ </sarcasm>
Currently reading: Artificial Condition by Martha Wells 📚
Part two connects well to part one, and offers additional depth. I’m enjoying exploring what it means to be human through the eyes of murderbot.
Mac folks, I have a question:
When you have more than one virtual desktop (they are called Desktop 1 and Desktop 2 when you press ctrl ↑), is there a way to select and move several windows at once into the other desktop? Right now I have to drag each one individually.
I missed This Week in Tech. What a good discussion on drones and TikTok/First Amendment! Good stuff.