Macworld: The answer is simple: hold down Command and press the Return key or press Command-R. You can also hold down Command and double-click the item in the results list. Spotlight has bugged me for years because I didn’t think I could do this. I never even thought to look it up. Dummy.

Robin Sloan: There’s a rhetorical habit that is very prevalent and very bad. It involves: finding a ridiculous version of an argument you oppose, possibly by using Twitter’s search function; pointing to it; saying, “See! Look at these assholes!” This is so bad it’s actually self-indicting, by which I mean, a person who indulges in this kind of straw-man “weirdo safari” is telling you very clearly that they are not worth your time.

I just deleted 14,247 tweets going back to 20061. Why? Aren’t I supposed to archive and keep everything forever? Yes, and that’s what I did. I downloaded my entire Twitter archive before deleting anything. I still have a local copy of everything. I kept all tweets from 2019 and a bunch of my favorites going back to 2007. Eventually I’ll maintain a rolling set of maybe 90 days and delete everything older than that.

I’m trying Spaceline in Emacs. This is the package that provides Spacemacs with its famous mode-line theme. It has been extracted as an independent package for general fun and profit. I’d been using a super minimal mode line and was finding it a bit too minimal. Rather than just add things to my config, I let Spaceline do it for me. Looks like this: The relevant config looks like this…

TJCX: Most knowledge worth having comes from practice. It comes from doing. It comes from creating. Reading about the trade war with China doesn’t make you smarter—it gives you something to say at dinner parties. It gives you the illusion that you have the vaguest idea what is happening in our enormously complex world. I agree with the article in general, but disagree with the above. Perhaps reading Twitter about the trade war with China doesn’t make you smarter.

I could write a post every day titled “Why I switched to [INSERT TOOL HERE].” I don’t do that, because 90% of the time the reasons I switch from one tool to another have little to do with how I’d characterize them in a blog post. In other words, most of my “reasons” for switching, while based on facts, are still bullshit1. See, most of the time I’m just bored and want to try something new.

Bob Martin: Over the last 5 decades, I’ve used a LOT of different languages. And I’ve come to a conclusion. My favorite language of all, the language that I think will outlast all the others, the language that I believe will eventually become the standard language that all programmers use… …is Lisp. I haven’t learned a new programming language in a decade, but I’m fascinated by Clojure.

Yep, I’m posting to Tumblr again. It could just be nostalgia, but I’ve been thinking about Tumblr ever since Matt announced the purchase. I posted to Tumblr for the first time on Febuary 24th, 2007 and continued pretty regularly through 2015, right about the time Yahoo was determined to ruin it. I really liked Tumblr. I liked the content, the easy posting UI, the “community”, the weirdness, all of it.

It turns out that most of the problems I wrote about in I Failed at Using Elfeed as My RSS Reader were due to the “improvements” introduced by the elfeed-goodies package. Removing that package made Elfeed behave as I’d expect, and now I’m reading feeds in Emacs again :) This isn’t likely to replace NetNewsWire for the majority of my read-for-pleasure feeds, but it’s quite nice for cranking through more “transactional” feeds.

I’d like to have fewer of more things. Does that make sense? Right now I have five of everything and it’s driving me nuts. I know, I know, I’m the type of person who likes to try different things; to have options, but that may be changing. At least it feels like it’s changing. It could very well be just another short-lived mood, but I’m tired of making decisions. Here are some of the things I’m working on having fewer of.

Gregory Heisler: 50 Portraits: Stories and Techniques from a Photographer’s Photographer by Gregory Heisler My rating: 5 of 5 stars Wonderful, fascinating book. Reading the stories about and technical approach behind each photo was riveting. I loved every one of them.

Paul Ford, Vergecast: So it’s getting cheaper to do more, but it is not an environment that rewards the vast and ridiculous creativity that we saw in the early days. I think it would. I think that just a little more ridiculousness would be welcomed because it’s very inexpensive to be ridiculous at scale. I, for one, would welcome a little more ridiculousness.