One side effect of an app developer’s decision to move to a subscription model is that the monthly charge is a regular reminder for me to re-evaluate that app’s value. Sometimes I decide the value is no longer worth the monthly overhead in both money and friction. Such is the case with TextExpander. I’ve relied on it for years and use it many times every day, but darn if that monthly fee hasn’t been nagging at me.

I love software. Even though I long to be one of those “I’ve only used X for 10 years and nothing else matters” people, there’s just no way. I use, and love, many things. Here I list a few of my long-time favorites. These are wonderful apps that have held up for years and continue to be useful and valuable. Tinderbox Where to begin with Tinderbox? I’ve been keeping notes in Tinderbox for at least a decade.

I thought it odd that Quicklook doesn’t work on Markdown files. I found the quicklook plugin, QLMarkdown, which not only makes Quicklook work with Markdown (.md) files, but it actually renders the markdown. Installed using Homebrew as directed and it just worked. 1 2 $ brew update $ brew cask install qlmarkdown

Blot has been popping up in my feed at micro.blog. Blot turns a Dropbox folder into a blog. Use your favourite app to write. Just drag-and-drop files into Blot’s folder to publish them. Images, text files, Markdown and more become blog posts automatically. There’s no interface. Just files and folders. I’ve tried a number of these blogging-via-dropbox things and they’ve all disappeared. Still, I paid the $20/year fee for blot.

My ongoing efforts to stop using Emacs continue to fail. Moving away from Emacs becomes more difficult every time I adopt a new Emacs module, replacing yet another tool or process. This time, I’ve started using Emacs for reading RSS feeds. I’m trying Elfeed as my feed reader. It looks like this… The list of feeds is maintained as an Org Mode file using elfeed-org. I have the feed list and elfeed’s database in Dropbox so everything syncs nicely.

A month ago, in Pausing my experiment with WithKnown, I wrote that Known was “accidentally a decent IndieWeb-enabled blogging platform”. After a few weeks trying to wrangle Wordpress into a useful IndieWeb platform, I feel differently about Known. Known is a darn fine, simple, and IndieWeb-complete blogging platform. It works so well that there can be nothing accidental about it. So, as I tend to do, I set up a new site using Known at stream.

I’m trying to use up a bunch of expired film in my freezer, so I put a roll of Delta 3200 (exp 2011) through the Hasselblad. Just a few quick shots of Josie around the house. This one isn’t helped by the dirty window glass I shot through, but she still looks cute and the film worked fine. Josie. Hasselblad 500C/M. 80mm Planar. Delta 3200 @1600. HC-110.

I’m trying to use up a bunch of expired film in my freezer, so I put a roll of Delta 3200 (exp 2011) through the Hasselblad. Just a few quick shots of Josie around the house. This one isn’t helped by the dirty window glass I shot through, but she still looks cute and the film worked fine. Josie. Hasselblad 500C/M. 80mm Planar. Delta 3200 @1600. HC-110.

After spending several months out for repair with David Odess, my Hasselblad 500C/M kit is back! Isn’t it beautiful! Hasselblad 500C/M, Zeiss Planar 80mm, and A12 back I had begun to notice that my exposures were all over the place. At first I thought it was just inconsistent metering on my part but it turns out the shutter mechanism in the lens was badly broken. Considering the camera was made in the 1980s, I thought it was time for a CLA of the whole kit.

I did a little template cleanup today, and Hugo’s rendering times got even faster. It’s pretty great being able to manage a static site with thousands of pages and not worry at all about rendering speed.

Keeping up with a journal every day is hard. I’ve tried to make it easier by using capture templates in Org Mode. My usual approach is to have the capture template create a “datetree” entry in my Daybook.org file. This works well for short, individual entries like the following: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 ** Received the Hasselblad back from David Odess <2017-06-24 Sat> Total cost: $1,244 He fixed and CLA'd the 500C/M, 80mm, and the older A12 back I’ve been trying to write longer posts every day, so the capture template approach wasn’t ideal.

Colin Walker: “Part of the problem with people based following models on social networks is that you follow the whole person so see everything they post whether it is relevant to you or not. There is no filtering system.” I don’t consider this to be a problem. I prefer to follow people rather than topics. People are more interesting. It’s the same for me with musicians or artists or directors.