Brett Terpstra: I’ve been using this keyboard for 3 days now. That’s not very long, but I’m more comfortable on it after three days than I have been with any other mechanical after a week Brett really likes his Ultimate Hacking Keyboard. I ordered one in early September and can’t wait to try it.

When carrying a fully manual film camera, it’s difficult to ask someone take my picture without first running a 10-minute training session on focusing, etc. On the other hand, most people know what to do with a modern, digital, auto-everything camera. It’s the best way for me to get a portrait of myself that’s not a selfie.

K.Q. Dreger: A Brief Explanation of How I Choose Between Buying a Physical Book or the Kindle Edition I don’t. It’s impossible. Sisyphus spends less energy pushing his boulder than I do when debating paperback or Paperwhite. The only compromise is to buy both. My budget hates me, my wife shakes her head in disapproval, but my bookshelves have never looked better nor been more portable. How did I not think of this!

Oh for crying out loud. I’ve wasted so much time working on ways to automatically edit new Hugo content immediately after typing e.g. hugo new post/my-new-post.md. I had no idea there was a built-in setting for it. 1 newContentEditor = "bbedit" # or vim or emacs or whatever Now all new posts are opened in BBEdit as soon as they’re generated. That was easy.

Editing photos on the iMac I’ve been shooting mostly digital lately and I’m learning to really enjoy the process. It could be simply that I like the novelty of changing things up, but it feels like more than that this time. Here’s what I think is helping make processing digital photos fun again. I bought a fancy new full-frame digital camera and the DNG files are such a pleasure to work with I switched back to Capture One and watched every Capture One video I could find and I feel like I’m finally getting the hang of it I’m using Affinity Photo in combination with Capture One and it’s just so much more fun than Photoshop I’m more actively posting things to Flickr and Flickr makes me happy I’ve been changing up how I manage all my files (more on this later) It’s good when things are fun.

I’ve been giving Bear another run as the place I take notes. I don’t plan to use it as a journal, but if I do, Robert Jorgenson has created a nice set of bash scripts to automate the process. Bear Journal - Robert Jorgenson There’s one for daily and one for monthly entries. They can be easily tweaked to suit particular requirements.

My ongoing effort to wean myself from my dependency on Emacs and Org-Mode has only been intermittently successful. Whenever I try moving out of Emacs I have to find replacements for all sorts of tools and processes. Things like task management, journaling, email, project notes, text editing, and general note taking are all things that I’ve been doing in Emacs for a while now and if I’m ever going to move away from it I’ll need to find replacements.

DragThing is no longer for sale: While we have not yet made a final decision, we do not feel comfortable selling an app with an uncertain future, so DragThing is no longer for sale. It should continue to function on 10.14 Mojave for now. I haven’t used DragThing for a long time, but I loved it while I did.

Ben Thompson - Stratechery How much of the affection people have for Instagram, particularly relative to Facebook, is precisely because the photo-sharing service has not been as aggressive as the “blue app”, and how much of that good will in general and good user experience in particular might disappear without Systrom’s restraint? I’d wager most of it.

Things were starting to sprawl around here, so I’ve consolidated some of the services I use. First, I moved all of my private repos into Github. I’m already paying the $7/month so there was no increase in cost. I had a bunch of repos in Gitlab and a self-hosted Gitea instance. Now I know where all of my repos are. Second, I moved the files I was syncing with Syncthing back into Dropbox.

I’m considering reversing my “no external dependencies” policy when it comes to my blog. The difficulty of dealing with images when using a static site generator (e.g. Hugo) deters me from posting. What if I used embedded Flickr photos instead? Like this… It’s super easy to copy a photo’s Flickr embed code and paste it into a blog post. Otherwise I have to export from Capture One, copy the file to Hugo’s image folder, copy or remember the filename, and then create a markdown image link in the post.

FileSafe, from Standard Notes: FileSafe is a new platform by Standard Notes that integrates directly with your day-to-day usage of Standard Notes, and serves as an encryption intermediary between you and your favorite cloud provider Standard Notes is fighting the good fight.