Inspired by Sacha Chua, I decided to move my Emacs configuration into an Org Mode file. This lets me organize things nicely and keep notes about my progress, as I’m still learning a lot. I use Spacemacs and keep all of my customizations in ~/.spacemacs.d/ so that ~/.emacs.d/ can belong entirely to the Spacemacs installation. My init.el file had grown a bit unwieldy, so I was looking forward to the opportunity to tidy things up.

I’m still learning to paint with watercolors, so I decided to paint gift tags for Christmas. I made a handful of them, and found it to be pretty easy. Making small paintings takes the pressure off having to deal with detail. I have a long way to go, but I’m happy with how they turned out.

Matt Gemmell Today, things have changed considerably, and I’m getting rid of my Apple Watch. It’s nice to see I’m not the only one who overthinks the shit out of changing my mind all the time. I’ve gone through the same cycle and back again about my Apple Watch. I’m currently back in the “I dig it” phase.

Cecil (2016). Nikon F3. 105mm f/2.5. Tri-X in Diafine. I get to watch Cecil for the next couple of days. He’s such a cute dog. I’m trying Diafine again, because I like the idea of shooting Tri-X at 1250 and not worrying about temperature, accurate timing, etc. This roll ended up with some spotty areas, so I’m not sure what happened yet. I’ll try again.

I’ve been tinkering with Vimwiki again. It happens. While editing Markdown files, I often want to see a preview of the file as HTML. This is where Brett Terpstra’s Marked comes in handy. I didn’t know the best way to start previewing a file directly from Vim to Marked. A quick search turned up this post by Rob Allen showing how to use Vim’s make command to open the current file in Marked.

David Cain: Every minute spent watching news is a minute you are unavailable for learning about the world in other ways. Americans probably watch a hundred million hours of news coverage every day. That’s a lot of unread books, for one thing. Read three books on a topic and you know more about it than 99% of the world. Watch news all day for years and you have a distant, water-cooler-level awareness of thousands of stories, at least for the few weeks each is popular.

Whenever I get a new device I set it up “from scratch”. In doing so, I figure I’ll be avoiding all of the cruft and nonsense that accumulates over time. I imagine installing a half-dozen or so non-Apple apps and THAT’S IT! It never works out that way. Here are the apps I installed within the first hour of owning the smaller iPad Pro, and the list has grown since then.

When the original iPad Pro was released I bought one right away and I loved it. It was so big and fast that I thought it might replace my laptop for meetings and quick outings. That didn’t happen. In fact, it fell out of regular use because it was so big. I recently started using the new 13” MacBook Pro, and here they are side-by-side. It felt like I was using two laptops.

Recent versions of Apple’s Notes app have been pretty good. Still, I frequently wish for more. Enter, Bear. Bear has many features that I found useful immediately. The big ones are… Markdown support Linking directly to individual notes Inter-note links Decent export options It’s only been a few days, but so far I don’t see any reason Bear shouldn’t replace Apple Notes for me.

Leonard Cohen - “The Future”: Things are going to slide (slide) in all directions Won’t be nothing (won’t be) Nothing you can measure anymore The blizzard, the blizzard of the world Has crossed the threshold And it has overturned The order of the soul When they said (they said) repent (repent), repent (repent) I wonder what they meant “The blizzard of the world has crossed the threshold,” indeed.

Diceware: I’m Mira Modi. I’m a seventh grader in New York City, and I sell strong, secure passwords. It sounds a little crazy to buy a password. But using a terrible password, such as 12345 or password, is even crazier. Genius. Of course I ordered one

I’ve been experimenting with watercolor painting. It’s not going well, but I refuse to give up quite yet. Yesterday I painted a tree, for practice. It’s not a good tree, but I’m happy that I can tell it’s a tree.