Tech - Coping Mechanism

Trying to live on the iPad for a while

As an antidote for my usual spiral of sitting at a giant screen full of a dozen windows, staring, clicking, staring, clicking, etc. I thought I’d try living on my iPad for a while. I’m not an iPad person, even though I’ve used one

Apple

Comments on the Safari 15 beta

Riccardo Mori has a few comments on the beta of Safari 15 showed up. Here’s one: In other words, what a browser needs is horizontal breathing room, instead we have Apple doing things backwards, sacrificing horizontal space to give us what, 28 more vertical pixels? @morrick http://morrick.

Plaintext

A visual thinker using text-based tools

Yesterday I was asked something about a project I’d worked on two years ago. At that time I’d used Curio to help manage the project. I opened the Curio project and within thirty seconds of just looking at the workspace I had a handle on the

Tech

Using Zotero as a bookmarking and read-later service

I’m almost certainly using Zotero wrong. Instead of for citations and research, I’m using Zotero as a bookmarking tool and read-later service, and it’s working really well. Is no one else doing this? I’ve used many tools meant for saving links for

Apple

The M1 iMacs: Unnecessarily thin - Riccardo Mori

Riccardo Mori: But this review was underwhelming and, as I commented on Twitter, with unusual fanboyish tones I’ve never really detected in his past product reviews. I notice that when someone agrees with a review, it’s “thoughtful and detailed.” When one disagrees, however, it’

Notetaking

Writing everything in TiddlyWiki and publishing just the public parts

I take all my notes in TiddlyWiki now, and publish most of them to rudimentarylathe.wiki. For the past few years, I’ve published my wiki using TiddlyWiki. I write daily, publicly sharable notes there. Private stuff goes elsewhere…or did, until yesterday. It’s the “

Apple

A headroom so high you’ll never see it again - Riccardo Mori

Software-wise, this incredibly powerful iPad is as capable as a 2014 iPad Air 2 (the oldest iPad model that can run iPadOS 14). There is still, in my opinion, a substantial software design gap preventing iPads from being as flexible as they are powerful. Software-wise, iPadOS still lacks flow. Don’

Tech

Structure and Transclusion are the sidewalk around the quad - Robin Sloan

It’s 2021; structured data and ~transclusion~ are still the sidewalk around the quad, while screenshots are the diagonal desire path, worn to bare dirt https://twitter.com/robinsloan/status/1388325221514432514 It’s embarrassing how true this is. His tweet was part of a short thread about Multiverse,

Tech

May is "Easy Mode" month

I’m exhausted. I think it’s because I haven’t been working in more than a month and my brain has had too much free time to “figure stuff out.” (Yes, I know how it sounds to complain about exhaustion while not having a

Analog

reMarkable is sleeping

I’ve been using the reMarkable 2 tablet for almost three months now. I’m often asked what I think of it. The short answer is this: I use the reMarkable tablet every day. I love writing on it, but it won’t be replacing my paper notebooks. If you

Notetaking

Tools and Toys

…skip any definitive conclusions, as we know you might change those at any time. 😏 @ron on micro.blog Ron was referring to my still-forming opinions about the reMarkable tablet, but he could be referring to any number of things. I have a reputation for frequently changing up my process/tools/

Email

HEY or Fastmail? The Answer.

TL;DR: I’m sticking with HEY for my email, but there’s a surprise twist: I’m also sticking with Fastmail. Hear me out. I was initially disappointed with the implementation of custom domains in HEY. You can read the whole almost-rant here, but the

Email

Hey for Domains? Maybe.

(Updated with notes about the custom domain discount) Other than having a couple of nits to pick, I really like using HEY! for my email. After considering the pros and cons and waffling between dropping the service and going all-in, I’ve been leaning toward all-in. HEY offers an

Notetaking

Are automatic backlinks useful?

When I started using Roam, I found the way it handled backlinks to be a revelation. Other software does backlinks, but Roam’s implementation made it feel new. Suddenly, backlinks felt necessary. I started writing everything in Roam’s Daily Notes, and I’d link things by

Email

Back to Fastmail?

My first annual subscription to Basecamp’s HEY email service is about to expire, meaning it’s time to decide whether I will be renewing. I don’t think I will. This makes me sad, because I really like using HEY for email. They’ve done

Tech

Moom, Minus, and Keyboard Maestro

Using a single 32-inch monitor with my M1 Mac Mini has caused me to re-think how I manage apps and windows. After a few iterations, I’ve settled on the following layout. This layout includes Finder, iTerm2, Safari, and Emacs. Safari takes up the majority of the center. Finder

Doom

Doom Emacs from scratch

A week ago I decided to cancel Doom Emacs and go back to building Emacs from Scratch, and once again I was reminded what a terrible idea that is. Seriously, stock Emacs, even with a leg up from Nano Emacs, gets so many things “wrong” that I could

Blogging

Posting from iA Writer

Is this something I can do? Sometimes I want a better environment for writing and posting to my blog. Ghost’s post editor is fine, but not “nice”. For writing with Markdown, iA Writer‘s editor is hard to beat. I thought I’d see

Plaintext

Book logging in plain text

Of all the ways I’ve logged books, I’m thinking that plain text remains the best. I’ve been adding books to a text (Markdown) file for while now and it’s not pretty, but it works. And it will always work. I publish a copy at https://www.

Notetaking

Daily minutiae and record keeping

mi·nu·tia (noun) – a minute or minor detail—usually used in plural I like the word “minutia”. I’ve been thinking about the various little things that happen throughout a typical day as daily minutiae. Things like “Paid the gas bill” or “Had a minor headache”

Roam

TiddlyWiki is more fun than Roam

I fell in love with TiddlyWiki almost exactly 2 years ago. I wrote in it almost daily until late August, 2020, when I moved full-time into a public Roam database. Roam is great and I love it. I’ve tried everything else, and nothing beats Roam for easily taking, linking,

Blogging

Gettin' with Gutenberg

Gutenberg is powerful and useful for enabling those of us who don’t feel like working too hard to create decent-looking, complex, media-rich layouts. But, most of my posts are just an image with a paragraph or three of text. I don’t need a fancy, complex, block-based

Roam

Roam and TheBrain, together

Where should I keep my notes, TheBrain or Roam? I decided earlier this year to use Roam, and was confident in that decision until TheBrain version 12 added backlinks. Now all bets are off. With proper backlink handling, I’m considering bringing private notes back into TheBrain. I love the