I write things down as they occur to me and I sometimes want to share them because that’s what we do now. For the past couple of years I’ve maintained a static site containing these notes at notes.baty.net. I used Dave Winer’s excellent outliner Fargo as both the authoring and publishing tool. Fargo works great, but I changed it all yesterday to use Org Mode instead. Emacs (via Org Mode) has become my default editor and document publisher.

I’m angry with my iPad Pro and it hasn’t even arrived. I’ve spent a great deal of time over the years refining, tearing down, and rebuilding my process for storing files, taking notes, and managing information. Most of the time I feel like everything is in flux and I have no idea how I want to do things. But once in a while, the past few months especially, I feel like I’m finally settling into a groove.

I’ve been receiving movies from Netflix since the envelopes were yellow. The DVD pictured above is going back today. It is likely the last I’ll ever see, since I’ve finally canceled my DVD subscription. The DVD is Hitchcock’s “North by Northwest”, in case you were wondering

I’ve been cooking Blue Apron meals for while now and I love it. If you’re like me, you enjoy cooking, but hate the planning and shopping parts. Blue Apron solves both problems by sending me the ingredients for 3 meals (for two) every week. Each box contains all of the ingredients, clearly labeled, in the exact quantities required. The meals are usually interesting, colorful, and delicious. The recipes are written and presented well enough that even I can follow them without too much trouble.

I’ve carried an old-school microcassette recorder in my car for years. There is no better way to quickly record a note to myself while driving. The little Sony BM-575 is perfect for the task. I just grab it, slide the button, talk, and release the button when finished. I can do it without taking my eyes off the road. It’s simple and quick, and the batteries last forever. Once a week I rewind the tape to 000 on the counter, transcribe whatever notes are relevant from the recordings, and reset the counter.

I sometimes imagine living in a world where I sit alone at a big old wooden desk and do my work using only a telephone, address book, adding machine, paper calendar, notebook, and a nice pen. That would be my ideal workstation. In this distraction-free world of simple tools, I lean back in my leather chair and think for a while before typing a letter that will reach its recipient in a day or two.

For the past three years I’ve used the highly-regarded Hobonichi Techo planner. It’s a great little planner, but perhaps too little. My notebook binder of choice in recent months has been a Roterfaden and it’s quickly become a favorite. It’s the perfect (A5) size, built wonderfully, and the clip mechanism is clever and useful. In it I’ve kept an Apica Premium C.D. notebook and the combination is great. I’d been carrying my little Techo separately, which worked but wasn’t ideal.

Wall with painted stones I manage my image files manually and like them named in a particular way. Each image is named using its capture date and description. I write a description for every photo I keep so I can easily see and find things using just my Mac’s Finder. The above image is captioned “Wall with painted stones” and was taken on August 29th, 2015 so its filename should be “20150829_Wall with painted stones.

Jason Fried: And then there’s the machine on my wrist. It’s powered entirely by human movement. No batteries, no cables, no daily dependency on the outside world. As long as I’m running, it’s running. And as long as one person checks it out once a decade, it’ll be working as well in 100 years as it works today. It’s better than modern. It’s timeless – yet it keeps time.

Manton Reece recently shared the following Sneak peek screenshot of his upcoming microblogging app.  I can’t wait to see what he’s is working on. What I want it to be is a microblogging app that I run at my own domain and that can optionally syndicate to Twitter/Tumblr, etc. I’d like it to be less invasive than the WordPress version of a microblog I’m using today. It’s good to see activity around this stuff.

Please Don’t Buy a Digital SLR — The Brooks Review You see, for the normal person, owning a dSLR will not yield a better picture. It is far more likely that you will get worse picture with a dSLR than with your iPhone. I know that many of you who didn’t heed my advice to not read this, are now thinking I am nuts. Yep, I think he’s nuts.

I’ve had an on-again-off-again relationship with Dave Winer’s Fargo outliner/publisher. I love outliners, and Fargo is a nice outliner, but I don’t really need a new one. My old one works just fine for general note-taking. On the other hand, publishing with Fargo is pretty slick, so I fired up an outline and made it available at notes.baty.net. Why? Good question. Mostly, I wanted a place to write things that may or may not be tweet-worthy, but that I feel like sharing.