Rethinking & Organizing my life with org-mode (part 4)
Welcome to part four of my rethinking and organizing with org-mode.
In the last part, I rediscovered org-achieve and the option to archive past events. Turns out this works well. Since the archive is an org-mode file, I can add options (like making it present pictures) and give it a user-friendly name. Here’s an example from an event I just blogged about. Looks pretty good, no?
The map is by the OSM package, and the screen capture with annotation is with Snaggit, which I use for work. You see it because I included #+STARTUP: inlineimages at the top of the file. The date breakdown is an automatic org-mode archive option I discussed last time. I use the tags to include people in events and at this point, also to note that I took photos (I don’t want to attach those because this will quickly eat up space - though I could just link somewhere else where I store them… 🤔)
Not bad. I like.
Mouse introduced me to their friend and a guard at a local pet store last night. 📷 I’ve walked these streets a hundred times, but I don’t see the things they do. It’s like discovering a hidden world in the world I know each time.
How not to quit Google
One does not simply quit Google - If you’re not a techie. Sure, you can use Firefox and switch to Duck Duck Go like 90% of the folks who “quit” Google and call it a day, but that’s not doing much.
Lifehacker has the right idea here, interviewing Janet Vertesi. The first big problem is, as she says, “You don’t jump out of the frying pan into someone else’s frying pan,” yet that’s the only option most folks have: switching from Android to iPhone. It’s just another company that owns all your data.
Installing a custom ROM on an Android device is not something most people can do (or keep living with), and even that is only the beginning. Your cell phone number belongs to your carrier, which has you on file along with your address and credit card. It’s just another pan. Even if you get over that, say by paying cash for a cheaper phone every month, you still need to figure out how to get Android apps working on a device without Google’s framework underneath. For the non-techies, it quickly gets overly complicated and non-functional.
As this article points out, sometimes you can’t quit Google services even if you want to. For example, if your work is tied to Google products, you don’t have much choice.
The point is, it’s not easy. There aren’t good alternatives. And I don’t think articles titled “How to Quit Google” help much.
Why we fall for fake news
7 Reasons Why We Fall for Fake News
This has been in my bookmarks for a bit. I wanted to dig more into the research, and the post got lost somewhere after I tried to get a psychology textbook.
The article is layered out well and provides some interesting sources (hence the book I still want to get):
- Confirmation bias: information that confirms our existing beliefs. Breaking out of the circle is hard.
- Lack of credibility evaluation: we believe our news without checking it (ties to 4).
- Attention and impatience: We read information fast and fall for “hooks” without understanding the whole.
- We are cognitively lazy: Our brains have evolved to conserve energy (ties to 2).
- Our emotions are targeted: emotions make thinking irrational.
- Reiteration: the illusory truth effect: the more we are exposed to certain information, the more we are likely to believe that information.
- Social pressure: need I explain this one?
This is the same author who wrote 10 Ways to Spot Fake News, which is another good read.
So not only do you get tricked and opt into paying every month, you also can’t get out without paying for a penalty:
The government says Adobe pushed consumers toward the “annual paid monthly” subscription without informing them that canceling the plan in the first year would cost hundreds of dollars.
I’ve been using GIMP on and off, but it’s just not there.
Stop or I shoot!
When I was 19, I went back to Israel to serve in the IDF. I was required by law in Israel, but I also wanted to go back and get away from what I felt was too much of a constraining life in the US with my mom, my sister, and my stepdad.
I don’t remember much of my time in the army. There are days I don’t even remember my personal number. Other days, like yesterday, I wake up from a nap and that number is on my lips as if I just used it to identify myself at the base’s gate.
in the IDF, My medical profile as Israelis call it meant that I wasn’t allowed to be in the infantry. I wanted to change that, so I went to see a doctor to get a permit to serve in a combat unit, even if it meant being a part of a tank crew or operating artillery (these places require somewhat of a less-than-pristine medical profile), but the doctor found that my situation (it was my eyes) was even worse than I knew, and my medical profile went down even lower.
That didn’t mean I didn’t go through boot camp, get a rifle, learn how to shoot, and realize that I developed the ability to fall asleep standing. Another part of every soldier’s job in the IDF (at least the last time I checked) is guard duty. You can’t get out of it, no matter what. Every couple of weekends, I had to pass a weekend at my home base and guard it.
One time, toward the end of my service, I was sent to guard in a remote base near the “shtahim” (שטחים) - the Palestinian territories. This base was on a higher alert than my home base, accessible only by military vehicles. It was known as a place that was usually reserved for long guard duties for disciplinary punishments, and it was not a place I should have been to, given my training. The army being the army however, things like this happen. I learned early on when I could argue my way out of something and when I couldn’t, and this was one of the couldn’ts.
They were as surprised to have me as I was surprised to be there. I was a “jobnick” - an IDF slang term meant that I was doing the army as a day job, meaning, 9 to 5, and going home every night, which was more or less true. A jobnick is not someone you’d send to guard a bunker with ammunition alone, but well, there I was, and it was too late for them to ask for someone else and for me to try and argue anyway.
There was this isolated watch tower standing on a hill. The hill was artificial: it was the top of the bunker. The watch tower was made of reinforced metal of sorts (not sure it was steel though), bulletproof glass, and graffiti. Lots and lots of graffiti. There’s a lot that goes in your head when you guard alone and watch the silent hills around you for three hours, and much of that was described in the graffiti, as well as phone numbers, a frequency for “quick relief” to tune into, horrible poetry, and even worse drawings of human anatomy. Among the graffiti and the many tick marks that decorated the walls, there was also the IDF’s rules of engagement (sorry, no English translation available - the English page leads to something else), which I was refreshed on quickly before it was my turn to guard.
I was to guard until sunset, an overall period of three hours. I was alone and I needed to be alert and awake which wasn’t easy, but I somehow managed.
Toward the evening, as the shadows started to get longer, I heard a noise that pierced the silence around me because it was too close. It was the gravel below me on top of the bunker hill. I looked down and saw a figure sneaking about. I remember trying to convince myself that someone was playing pranks on me, but a prank is a prank, and this was not the place or the time.
You don’t get scared when something like this happens. There’s no time for that to happen. Andrelanine is rushing through you and all you hear is your heart pumping through your chest and into your ears.
“Who’s there,” I barely mumbled in Hebrew and then louder: “Stop!” - But they didn’t.
There were a few more steps I was supposed to go through: I should have called that person to stop again and ask for a passphrase, but I was never given one. There was no time either because that person was coming right toward me, not exactly sneaking anymore. I reached for my magazine and hoped to god that the rifles I was given, unlike my own rifle which was doubtfully functional, would work. Shooting was not something I’ve done for a while in the service, and when I did it was only in a firing range.
“Wakaf en la Btoohak!” I yelled, which roughly should translate to “stop or I shoot!” in Arabic (not that I remember - now or then) - part of the procedure. I had my gun in hand, aimed at the sky outside of the tower. I was supposed to shoot a warning shot first, but I wasn’t sure I had the time. Rules are important, but also, fuck the rules.
Fortunately for me (and for him, though he didn’t believe I was serious) it was my commanding officer. “Relax, it’s just me,” he said, and I was able to breathe. I didn’t care about anything at that moment besides that everything was OK again. He was happy to see that I wasn’t asleep, and I was happy to, well, not be dead, or kidnapped, which would have been worse1. Many things could have happened instead, mostly pretty grim. This officer, needless to say, shouldn’t have done what he did, but he did. I shouldn’t have been there, and definitely not alone, but well, I was. Luckily for both of us, he identified himself when he did. I don’t want to think what would have happened if he waited 10 more seconds or so.
I don’t know why I felt I had to write about this experience. I feel like my reasons will reveal themselves slowly in the next couple of days. What I can say for now is that sometimes what you’re supposed to do and what you actually do are two very different things. You can’t think because thinking is switched off, as if someone just cut the wire to your brain and your muscles respond on their own. I want to emphasize something here: This is not about bravery or cowardliness. There’s no honor, discipline, or any other thing associated with good or evil in a situation like that. It’s just on or off. 1 or 0.
My life here in the US is very different than it ever was there, in the IDF. I’m sure this is also true for those who served in the military here. I am happy to be here, in the US, and I’m very grateful for the life I have today. I want to say I worked for what I have, which is true, but I am also a lucky SOB, whether I admit it or not, and this is just one of the stories to prove it.
1 - The worst fear of any soldier in the IDF is to get kidnapped by a Palestinian militant group. For these groups, kidnapping soldiers is the best bargaining chip they have with Israel. The soldiers can be unheard of for years - decades even - and are negotiated for many prisoners. One of the most famous cases (besides obviously the current situation in Gaza) is probably that of Gilad Shalit, who was still in captivity when I was in the army.
Finished reading: The SIGMA Surrogate by Jt Lawrence 📚
I enjoyed this book, though it failed to keep me invested enough to read the next one in the series. I might later. Jt Lawrence introduced me to a new style that I’d like to explore more: light-erotica cyberpunk from a woman’s perspective
Civil War, 2024 - ★★★★
Joel (Wagner Moura) is screaming his lungs out, arms at his side, a cigarette he didn't finish stuck in his right fist. Behind him, an American flag with two stars is blowing in the wind. A tank rolls in with a group of soldiers in the background, 2 feet away from him, blocking it from view. They ignore him. His primal screams of pain and suffering are silent. The soldiers don't feel it, and you don't hear it.
I mostly tuned out of anything political because I don't want to know and what I already know is too much. But if you think there's only so much you can take, watch this movie.
On its surface, this is a decent movie with a satisfactory plot: youth and innocence lost, war, and some good scenes. But to me this movie was personal. I tried to figure out why.
It's easier to start with the cinematography. Grainy, gritty, often overly contrasted with colorful graffiti or pink sunglasses. It's good. Very good. I itched for my camera several times, mumbling to the TV "damn, this is a good shot." This is important because the story is told through the eyes of two war photojournalists with a talent for the art.
The pictures they take are far from happy family photos. Lee (Kristen Dunst), a photojournalist veteran, has seen enough horrors for them to flash in her mind whenever she closes her eyes while Jessie (Cailee Spaeny), a novice who is just started her photojournalism journey, faces new horrors that suck the innocence out of her until there's nothing left. It takes talent to describe a story through the eyes of two talented photographers, and this movie has it to the point that I want to track down Rob Hardy (the cinematography director) for more of his work.
It's these photos they take that make the war real. A war is never about the war itself, it's about the people who experience it. A series of human moments in a hellscape that defy the reasoning of everyday life. A war is a war only when it's personal: until then it's just politics and heated debates on social media.
There's a plot to this movie, a reason this great American war broke out, but we only get glimpses of it. There's an authoritarian president who took his executive power too far (ordering the usage of military force on US citizens among other things), and two states, California and Texas, called the "Western Forces" are fighting back and surrounding Washington DC. There are other factions and states involved, a hint of a more complex structure in the background, but not much more.
The rest is built from carefully selected moments. There's a scene in the movie where Joel is asking a sniper and his spotter who's shooting at them and who's giving them orders. The spotter replies: "No one's giving us orders, man. Someone's trying to kill us, we're trying to kill them." That's it. It's enough. These moments worked beautifully throughout the movie, each scene freezes and is taken apart by the pictures Lee and Jessie snap away.
I'm not a huge patriot, but it gets to me when Americans dislike the flag because it represents injustice to them. True, the flag has been used by extremists as a symbol. But this is because these extremists hijacked the flag and what it represents. Meanwhile, this kind of hate toward what the flag represents is the same stuff that one day could cause events like in this movie.
Maybe it's because I was not born into what most around me have as a right. It was given to me. I never understood why the president of the United States still has to be born here. It doesn't make sense. If you ask me, it's a nation built by immigrants who seem to understand the American Dream well, probably much better than the extremist militias who use it as an excuse for their propaganda.
I don't think Alex Garland thought about all of this when he wrote the film, but I thank him for making me think about all this stuff.
Rethinking and organizing my life with org-mode (part 3?)
I spent some time reading through the manual for part 3 of organizing my life in org-mode. org-mode has an archiving function I haven’t bothered with in the past because dumping old files into a folder was easier to do.
There was this interesting example under org-archive-subtree help text:
“
/org/datetree.org::datetree/* Finished Tasks” The “datetree/” string is special, signifying to archive items to the datetree. Items are placed in either the CLOSED date of the item, or the current date if there is no CLOSED date. The heading will be a subentry to the current date. There doesn’t need to be a heading, but there always needs to be a slash after datetree. For example, to store archived items directly in the datetree, use “/org/datetree.org::datetree/”.
Ah ha! So you refile a task and put it away in a different file (this is what archiving does by default in Emacs) and store it in its appropriate month. Not only that, the function will look for when you finished working on a project and automatically store it on that date in a header of your choosing. Good stuff.
For example, let’s say I started to write a technical document at work about pink rabbits (I’m in a good mood, OK? Bare with me, I’ll get grumpy soon enough) and this project includes a couple of subheaders: a meeting we had about the project, a task to backup the existing version of the document, and a couple of more TODOs regarding images and sending it for approval by subject matter experts. So far so good, this starts in Now.org where I keep working on the project and add to my notes.
Let’s continue with the example. Two months later, I’m done with the pink rabbits projects. I go to the parent header in my Now.org file, “update Pink Rabbits document,” and change its keyword from ACTIVE (my keyword for projects) to DONE. Since I have the keyword “ACTIVE” defined with ! in the file’s options (this is defined by the line #+TODO: TODO(t) ACTIVE(a!) MEETING(m!) | DONE(d!) CANCELED(c) at the top of the file - you can see ACTIVE is triggered by a! while its neighbor, TODO, is only t which means a timestamp will not be added), org-mode adds a timestamp for when I marked it DONE.
There are three basic scopes of defining where to put the archived headers. I can define one file in my init file for org-archive-subtree, which will create a global definition and thus a file for everything (not very useful), or I can define the destination for the archive at the top of the org file (so Now.org will have a line: #+ARCHIVE: my/path/is/here), or, I can go into the individual headers and define it there as a property with Archive: my/path/here. This last one is best for me, as I can quickly define headers for, say, article updates, announcements, and misc, each one of these parent headers pointing to a different file, if I want to do that. Nice indeed.
With the datetree option above, these archived tasks will be filed in these files and under the date and time I finished the project. The archive function will include properties in each telling me exactly where these projects came from.
I was about to start using this, but there’s only one problem… I haven’t found out how to restore something back from the archive.
Back to the example. Say I thought we were done with our pink rabbits document so I archived it away. Then, next month, someone says “Hey, JTR, we need to mention the catapults we’re implementing with the pink rabbits. Can you add it?” I say “Sure, no problem!” After all, I have the power of Emacs and it takes me less than a minute to find this project in my archive (consult-grep is amazing for this sort of thing).
So go to the archive file, I find it, and… I want to pull it out of the archive and put it back into my Now.org as one of my active projects… but… how do I do that?
I can be barbaric and go around killing and yanking, but there must be a better way, right? I think? Grrrr… (see, back to my grumpy self).
www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/gaza-chiefs-brutal-calculation-civilian-bloodshed-will-help-hamas-626720e7?mod=djem10point wsj.com
An investigation from the WSJ brings more proof of Hamas’ real goals in the Gaza Strip:
It is an outcome that Sinwar foreshadowed six years ago when he first became leader in the Gaza Strip. Hamas might lose a war with Israel, but it would cause an Israeli occupation of more than two million Palestinians.
“For Netanyahu, a victory would be even worse than a defeat,” Sinwar told an Italian journalist writing in 2018
Hamas, with Sinwar as its head in Gaza, needs Palestinians to die for his war. It is the only way his organization (and him as a leader) can survive. Hamas is doing whatever it can to ensure more Palestinians die in the conflict.
Sinwar cited civilian losses in national-liberation conflicts in places such as Algeria, where hundreds of thousands of people died fighting for independence from France, saying, “These are necessary sacrifices."
There are many ways Palestinians have been clashing over their Independence; some in armed conflicts, others through diplomacy and attempts at (lasting) peace. So far, this conflict - Sinwar’s idea - has been the bloodiest.