Finally, I’ve gotten my beloved Leica M4 out of storage. It’s been in a case in my basement since last year’s move and that’s a shame. Figure 1: Leica M4 with Voightlander 35mm f2.5 Color Skopar The camera was made in 1966 and I bought it in 2009. It’s seen regular, if sporadic, use since then. I think it’s beautiful, and I especially like that it has the M3-style levers.

I’m still using ox-hugo for publishing with Hugo. I like writing in org-mode. I also like that my entire site can be in a single text file. It’s clever enough to be helpful, but not so clever that it feels like magic. Here’s a current screenshot.

Bad Monkeys by Matt Ruff<My rating: 3 of 5 stars I was nearly half-way through before I realized that I’d already read this book, so I stopped. IIRC, the first 2/3rds are better than the final 3rd.

Road to Seeing by Dan Winters My rating: 5 of 5 stars I was looking for some creative inspiration. Dan Winters' description of his photographic journey provided plenty.y View all my reviews

Laura on dev.to: The designer that knows CSS can’t update some colours in GitHub without breaking half of the tests. The Product manager can’t replace a bunch of words in a page without figuring out the PropTypes of the map component. The accessibility expert can’t replace divs with buttons because the visual regression testing says that Opera mini in Windows Phone 6.5 renders a border about them and we can’t merge changes until it all goes green.

Armada by Ernest Cline My rating: 3 of 5 stars It was fine. More like “Ready Player Six”, I’d say. I enjoy the occasional pop culture reference, but good lord that was a lot of them. I knew I was in trouble when, as soon as he met a girl, I said to myself, “How much you bet he accidentally says something clever and they kiss before the day is out.

Space Opera by Catherynne M. Valente My rating: 2 of 5 stars I imagine Catherynne Valente thought to herself… “I think I’ll write something sort of like Douglas Adams, but with MORE!" If you throw a lot of words at me, all trying to be super funny, a few of them will land. But when you do it in every single sentence with no guidance at all from an actual plot or characters, it becomes exhausting.

From a post by Jared Sumner: It’s become cliche for Olds like me to pine for the days of the old, quirky, “fun” internet, but dammit I kind of miss the old, quirky, fun internet.

Here’s a snap of today’s all-analog combo in the Peak Design Everyday Sling 5L. Fuji Instax Square camera Leica M6 w/50mm Summicron Film for both I love this bag. I wish that the clever strap adjustment mechanism worked more easily, but otherwise, for carrying a small camera and accessories it’s nearly perfect.

Org-super-agenda really helps wrangle the agenda view when there are lots of tasks. My config is so far pretty simple… 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 (use-package org-super-agenda :ensure t :config (setq org-super-agenda-groups '((:name "Today" :time-grid t :scheduled today) (:name "Due today" :deadline today) (:name "Important" :priority "A") (:name "Overdue" :deadline past) (:name "Due soon" :deadline future) (:name "Waiting" :todo "WAIT")))) Here’s a sample of what it looks like…

This post at irreal laments the fact that people make such a big deal out of how their text editor looks, suggesting that it’s only the functionality that matters. He quotes Vivak Halder… “why should you ever care how your editor looks, unless you’re trying to win a screenshot competition?” In general, I agree. What my editor can do and how it does it is what’s most important.

It’s fashionable lately to “ditch” Dropbox for other sync services. The reasons stated are usually around cost or privacy. This is understandable, but for anyone with a significant number of files and/or services using Dropbox, the time and complexity of switching could easily be costlier than what it would be to just continue using Dropbox. Dropbox has only rarely caused me grief, and only with resource usage. Sometimes the client takes too many of them.