So Many Hills …

Uugh. I have to use wetransfer for work. Its website is … not for me. Great opportunity to use Safari’s “Hide Distracting Items” to blow away all the javascript & animations that only distract. So far, so good! Well, other than a momentary flicker when the site spins up a new image. 95% better!

I forgot how devastating being called “immature” is when you’re an elder teen or twentysomething

Puzzling out how to modify #emacs #writegood mode to ignore #orgmode source code blocks using org-babel-src-block-regexp. Mildly surprised this hasn’t been done, or isn’t easy to find. Anyone got tips on where to start or how to proceed? I think ispell/flyspell might provide inspiration

I use ispell/hunspell/flyspell in #Emacs for spell checking. Still rely heavily on Malabarba’s Ispell and Abbrev, the Perfect Auto-Correct. Found one missing piece for me – silently saving the personal dictionary when I insert a new word: (setq ispell-silently-savep t)

My RSS and social news workflow is changing again. The new Reeder dovetails with Reeder Classic on my Mac. My Emacs-related feeds are in Elfeed. However, I forgot that Classic on iOS/iPadOS isn’t for me. There I’ll probably stick with Fiery Feeds.

I ❤️ Bandcamp Fridays! Great way to directly support artists, esp. as they’re squeezed for profit sharing at live shows by some venues

It’s Bandcamp Friday, a great day to send revenue directly to artists. It’s also a great day to help the unionized workers Bandcamp laid off last year who are still struggling financially. www.paypal.com/pools/c/9…

— via @MinervaArcher@indieweb.social

❤️the new Reeder from Silvio Rizzi but I can’t get it to auth with micro.blog on MacOS. It keeps looping asking me to log in, get email, paste code, rinse & repeat. I got it to work on iPad tho 😄

WTF?!?!?! Where did this “Shake to Undo” option come from on iOS/iPadOS? And why is it enabled by default? I almost lost a bunch of work moving from one class to another.

Are we not supposed to pick up and move, thereby shaking the device, resuming where we left off?

Also, who picks up an iPad to shake it like an Etch-a-Sketch™ to undo something? Just checked to make sure it’s not a MacOS option as well (It’s not; Phew!).

I’d seen the pop-up dialog recently but did not know to what it referred. Its text is vague AF if you’re not in the know.

@ please fix this, at least by providing more information in the pop-up dialog!

Q: Why did the FDA recently reject MDMA-assisted therapy? A: They believe it could be a gateway to harder therapies.

— The Onion, What To Know About MDMA Therapy

Chatted with a friend yesterday about my Substack post. She’s ramping up to a possible newsletter (nothing to be shared publicly yet, so no link). The evaluation of Patreon, Substack, Medium, Ghost, self-hosting/Wordpress, and other things are, in her estimation:

1. Overwhelming
2. Time consuming
3. She just wants to start writing
4. and worry about the business & technical stuff later

For №3 & 4 her concern, and a legit one, is having to move later due to a bad decision. Substack and Ghost are the current hotness, but it wasn’t that long ago that Medium was the place to be.

Before anyone asks, she is on-line savvy & has staked out her social media persona including a personal domain name. She had a blog for many years on Blogger and Wordpress.

Substack will likely be her choice because:

1. The social elements are built in [sort of – pj] so less time needs to be devoted to Twitter, Bluesky, &c.
2. Mailing list management is robust
3. Good tech support
4. Good money handling

She noted that she doesn’t like actually writing in Substack, or in fact any of the options. The best was Wordpress with the Classic Editor [naturally – pj]. She’ll keep using her own tools up until she publishes.

She disagreed with me that Substack isn’t that good for readers. It provides navigation on the side for longer pieces, for example. And there’s the note taking capabilities which she uses a lot. When I asked about getting one’s notes and data back out again she confessed to not having spent any time on that.

Food for thought.

When your speaker, TV, car, printer or digital books are connected to the internet, you’re never truly in control. The manufacturer can botch your product with one bad software update.

— Shira Ovide in WaPo’s Your Tech Friend

Messed around on Substack again. Still don’t get why it’s attractive to writers or readers. It feels like a mishmash of twitter, reddit, and work. The best way for me to read Substack is to follow a newsletter’s RSS feed by appending ‘/feed’ the end of the URL & forgo the rest

Listening to Falling Water play at Cherry Street Tavern in Chattanooga. They’re playing a free family friendly happy hour show.

Struggling getting the org-capture-template property :refile-targets working in Emacs orgmode. I’ve tried various options to make this function as I want, which is to be able to have targets for a capture template generated based on the file naming scheme. I use Denote filetags for my current term class’s files, in this instance fa24.

(setq org-capture-templates
        (seq-uniq
         (append
          '(
            ("c" "Class notes" entry (file+headline org-default-notes-file "Class")
            "* %U\n\n** Lecture Notes\n\n** Assignments\n\n** Required Reading\n\n"
            :prepend t
            :jump-to-captured t
            :empty-lines 1
            :refile-targets ((directory-files "~/org/" t "fa24") :maxlevel . 1))
            )
          )
         )
        )

※ The following is also in my config and works fine:

(setq org-refile-targets '((org-agenda-files :maxlevel . 1)))
(setq org-agenda-files (append
                       (list
                        "~/org/calendar-beorg.org"
                        "~/org/refile.org"
                        "~/org/orgzly.org"
                        "~/org/inbox.org"
                        "~/org/20240512T145547--habits.org"
                        )
                       (directory-files "~/org/" t "fa24" t)
                       )

Dear Social web, any suggestions?

Uni is fully engaged, a new job is immanent & my ailing tech stack is refreshed, so I’ll work on my opportunistic writing & homework stuff. That mostly means my iPhone and thinking iPhone 1st in many contexts. That means working on phone, noting the pain points & addressing them

Ben writes: My girlfriend and I were talking about the Beatles. I said the album covers for “Abbey Road” and “Let It Be” are the most recognizable images of the band. She said that’s ludicrous, and the White Album cover is easily more recognizable. I find that logic to be wild: It’s just a white cover!

— Judge John Hodgman, The Most Iconic Beatles Album Cover 🔗 NYT gift link

Read the tastefully brief piece. It’s funny. He’s right. And I burned a gift article link for y’all.

Meanwhile, if anyone was worried I might not be a white guy over 50, this column should set all doubts to rest.

fediverse symbol ⁂

No. Just no.

Steven Knight from SellCell: iPhone 16 Pre-Launch Survey: 62% of iPhone Users to Upgrade to iPhone 16

The second rumored feature the 2000 iPhone users want to see with the 16-series is the thermal control to avoid overheating, with 26.8% of those surveyed stating that this will positively affect their purchase intent.

It’s definitely an interesting data point. For my part, I can say without question that the iPhone 15 Pro has had the most “oh wow, my phone is hot!” moments of any iPhone I think I’ve ever owned (and no, I’m not talking about running any beta OS versions). I guess throw me in with the crowd that hopes future iPhones feel consistently cooler to the touch.

— via Birchtree

Good note. My iPhone SE is dying in weird unpredictable ways. Was going to throw caution to the wind and upgrade over the weekend. Guess I’ll wait

The school announced Tuesday that the Cowboys will sport QR codes on their helmets linking to a donation page for the school’s NIL fund, believed to be a first in college football.

The QR codes on the back of each helmet will be 1.5 square inches. The school said that while the codes won’t be visible from the stands on game day, fans watching during television broadcasts will be able to capture them on their phones. Oklahoma State believes this will help raise the team’s NIL value throughout the year.

— via ESPN

※ I’ve seen no mention of how the $ will be handled. I suspect OSU, Gundy & his mullet will somehow get a nice cut of the “donations”. I’m embarrassed to be an OSU alum. I hope the school & coaches choke on their take

I think what lasts is almost always what has a dedicated following among one or more of the following: artists, geeks, academics, critics, and editors. “Gatekeepers” of various types, if you like. Artists play the most important role in what art endures because artists are the ones making new art. Indirectly, they popularize styles and genres and make new fans seek out older influences. Directly, artists tend to tout their influences and encourage their fans to explore them. In literature that takes the form of essays, introductions to reissues, and so forth. In music, it might be something like cover albums as in the way Nirvana’s Unplugged introduced a new generation to older bands and musicians. Academics is pretty obvious. The older books with the best sales are mostly ones that appear on syllabi. And geeks and critics are the ones who extensively explore a genre or category’s history and proselytize their favorites. Editors are the ones who actually chose the older books to republish and can champion obscure books back into the public eye.

Lincoln Michel on Counter Craft Newsletter “What Lasts and Mostly Doesn’t Last”

I’ve got a working theory for my edu workflow on devices: Emacs & org-mode on MacOS, beorg on iOS/iPadOS/WatchOS, DevonTHINK/-To-Go on MacOS/iOS&iPadOS, and Nextcloud sync+webdav in all the places. Org files on Nextcloud. Attachments & reference materials in DT with backlinks in org 🤔

Follow-up to my Hum for Wordpress post. I also had to put a redirect in Cloudflare to get it working. I followed these instructions to get it working properly.