I name most of my files with an ISO formatted date and then some descriptive text. For example… 2018-05-06 This is a File.txt A couple years ago I ran into Karl Voit’s article about Managing Digital Files. I originally wrote it off as a bit over the top and I didn’t give it another thought. Then today I decided to go all in with it. You can read his entire article if you like, but the gist of it is that he names files using a pattern like this:

Ann-Derrick Gaillot, The Outline: No matter what happens, I urge everyone to come away with a greater lesson: We shouldn’t need any excuse to wear a big, fancy hat. Could we make this happen, please? I want to wear fun hats so badly and I wish everyone else did too.

Every so often I reconfigure the way I manage my dotfiles. There are all sorts of tools out there for this. Dotbot Dotdrop Mackup yadm RCM You get the idea. I never got along with any of them for one reason or another. I’m now trying GNU Stow. Stow isn’t made specifically for managing dotfiles but it does the job pretty easily. I like it because I can easily organize things and install/update them as needed.

Dave Winer: Little-known fact: I designed and developed a programming language Gruber comments: If you never used Frontier, it’s hard to explain what made it so special. Man, I loved Frontier. I used it to build Fusionary.com 20 years ago. It was like magic. There’s still a page on Thea’s Gallery of Great Frontier Web Sites showcasing our use of Frontier. Cool. Nice work, Dave.

IBM Watson analyzed my Twitter account and came up with this: You are skeptical, inner-directed and unconventional. You are reserved: you are a private person and don’t let many people in. You are independent: you have a strong desire to have time to yourself. And you are self-conscious: you are sensitive about what others might be thinking about you. You are motivated to seek out experiences that provide a strong feeling of discovery.

Me, writing about Flickr in 2004: So far, Flickr rocks. It’s still officially in beta, and things change/improve almost daily. The site is a great combination of easy to use and geek-friendly. The developers are focused on all the right things. There seems to be a core set of ideals that touch on things like standards-compliance, ease of use, extensibility, accessibility and other goodies. And again, a few months later:

Barton Swaim, WSJ: The newspaper brings a kind of epistemological definition to the everyday work of being literate. You can hold the day’s knowledge with two ink-stained hands, and when you’re done with it, you can throw it away. It won’t update and demand to be read in a few hours, and it won’t follow you around on your smartphone. I’m convinced that reading the news “in the paper” is the best way to stay informed without losing one’s mind or dying of anxiety in the process.

My local music library as shown by Roon After a recent two-day internet outage I started looking for something better than iTunes for managing and playing my local music library. Streaming music doesn’t work very well without internet access, and iTunes doesn’t work very well for anything. First, I tried Audirvana. Audirvana is “The Audiophile Music Player for Mac” and is aptly named. I don’t have an audiophile’s ears, but even I could tell the difference in sound between it and iTunes.

This will come as no surprise to anyone who knows me, but I’m stepping away from my text-only, Org-mode/Emacs/Filesystem based setup. Sigh. Why did I do this? Honestly, it might be that I just get bored. Changing up my systems is my version of playing video games…it wastes a lot of time but it’s just so much fun. The same thing happend last year. It happens most years. I’m used to it.

I don’t want to write a review of the Happy Hacking Keyboard Professional 2 but I do want to mention that I love it. I’ve been using it for a week, which means I’ve gotten past most of the getting-used-to-it process. Before getting the HHKB I had no idea what Topre switches were, but they’re awesome. I’m not a keyboard expert, but I am fussy about how a keyboard feels. I prefer mechanical keyboards1.

Oliver Burkeman, The Guardian: Of the 45 troubling things you saw on Twitter this morning, two or three may prove to be signs of the rise of fascism/the destruction of the environment/the collapse of Brexit Britain. Yet the rest won’t. Once, it was the media’s job to sift stories of lasting significance from the rest; today, any publication that sat on a story for a week, to see if it had legs, would get screamed at for suppressing the truth.

Baron Schwartz: Why go to all this trouble myself, instead of letting Twitter’s algorithms do it for me? Isn’t that what Big Data and Machine Learning is for? Ostensibly, yes, but as we’ve seen, absolutely no. There’s a deeper point here: I either take responsibility for my own consumption and learning, or I abdicate it to machines. And I believe that abdication to machines is amongst the most pressing dangers facing our society today.