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Weeknotes 6

  • Maybe I should just start calling these “Occasional Weekendnotes”.
  • We now have one or two foxes with mange who sleep on chairs or in the DIY cat shelter on our porch. Every night, Sarah puts a raw chicken wing out in a metal bowl for one of them to find and grab and eat. Our hope is they’ll get comfortable enough that we can get the wildlife rescue people to loan us a humane trap and they can retrieve and rehabilitate these little guys.
  • Last weekend I installed next to my desk a corner shelf that had been sitting around for a long time. Having a cassette deck, VHS VCR, Focusrite audio interface, and the fresh experience of seeing a sea of undifferentiated old audio and video tapes in the basement lit a fire under me to get back to logging and digitizing. I don’t know what I’m waiting for.
  • Today I used TiddlyWiki to update some notes about cataloguing audio recordings and it was immediately useful and shareable and required zero activation energy, unlike my beloved org-mode or this here blog. TiddlyWiki is probably a better place to collect and share “interesting links” because I don’t hoard them for 21 days at a time, and they’re easier to connect to other things. In fact, I just scrolled through all the random things I saved to Bear over the past three weeks and I don’t care enough about any of them now to list them here.
  • We saw the Tom Petty documentary Heartbreakers Beach Party this afternoon and it was excellent. Cameron Crowe knew what he was doing even when he was 25 or however old he was when they shot it. And it made me love Tom Petty even more. Music just flowed out of him.

Music:

Yep, this is way more than one week’s worth of music.

October 20, 2024 weeknotes music inertia archiving audio TiddlyWiki

What is it about people who write Weeknotes?

I follow the #weeknotes tag on Mastodon and find it very hard to not dive into every post tagged with that. If you write weeknotes, I feel like we’re already almost friends because of the format, the commitment, and the humility. Weeknoters are loggers, not always bloggers. I can get behind this! I collect, organize, archive (hoard?), and share for fun.

A weeknote is rarely the chance to say, “Here’s what I think about important issue X”. They’re typically more pleasantly mundane: a list of what you did this week, maybe what you did at work, things you saw and heard, and a list of interesting links you came across. Weeknotes put us all on an equal footing. Everyone just had a week. What you noticed and how you spent the time and energy is what makes yours different. If your interests are even remotely up my alley, I’m adding you to the groaning load of my RSS reader.

October 3, 2024 weeknotes

Weeknotes 5

Tiger and me

Tiger and me

  • I savor the weeknotes that other people put out there. I don’t read them in an RSS reader, but I do jump out to all of your websites from RSS. And I don’t read them on my phone. I haul out the MacBook Pro and drink them in that way, usually during lunch at work on Mondays or Fridays when no one else is in the building.
  • I’m frustrated with myself for not getting these out on a more regular schedule. The purpose of weeknotes was to just go with whatever was ready each week and not overthink things. Here I am overthinking things. But, I think the benefit of weeknotes is that it keeps water flowing through the pipes and lowers the activation energy for cranking up an “actual” post.

Did:

  • Cleared out an immense amount of pure crap from the basement. A dumpster changes the equation by exerting a gravitational force on things you know you need to let go of. The bigger the discard pile gets, the more everything else you’re keeping looks like trash that’s just not thrown out yet.

Found:

general.el is an Emacs package to make creating and managing keybindings easier.

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Learned about the Richmond Synth Collective. Hmm. Venture out of the house and meet people who are into the same weird things as me? Could work.

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Went down a bit of an Elvin Jones rabbit hole:

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Molly White: AI isn’t useless. But is it worth it?. This is an even-handed, non-alarmist essay about AI and how it’s kind of good at some things, and also how much it sucks that it wastes so much energy and steals from human endeavors.

Still, I do think acknowledging the usefulness is important, while also holding companies to account for their false or impossible promises, abusive labor practices, and myriad other issues. When critics dismiss AI outright, I think in many cases this weakens the criticism, as readers who have used and benefited from AI tools think “wait, that’s not been my experience at all”.

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Jeremy Keith: Adactio: Journal—What price?

If large language models are going to improve their ethical shortcomings (which is debatable, but let’s be generous), then that’s all the more reason to avoid using the current crop of egregiously damaging tools.

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‎Steps - Activity Tracker for iOS and Apple Watch. I got this because I wanted an Apple Watch complication that would show how many flights of stairs I’d walked in a day. It does that in the “flights climbed” mode, but only shows a chart of one day at a time, although it’s worth it for that alone. I wish it would show the last 7 or 10 days.

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Oh no. Giorgio Sancristoforo has a new-ish app called No-Fi (scroll, scroll, scroll) that is “one mixer, five cassette recorders, one handy reverb and one delay. That’s it!” There’s a YouTube demo.

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Analog Office by Anna Havron is a deep well of to-be-read pages. I love blogs that lay it down for you authoritatively, like the first section of her “How To” Directory page:

How to Find Stuff in Your Paper Notebooks

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feedle is a search engine for blogs and podcasts. Each search generates its own RSS feed.

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Salesforce’s New AI Strategy Acknowledges That AI Will Take Jobs

The new iteration of Salesforce’s AI products is meant to run without supervision “in contrast to now-outdated copilots and chatbots that rely on human requests and struggle with complex or multistep tasks,” the company said in a statement.

Go to hell.

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I’d like to try Mike Hall’s twist on Making a plaintext personal CRM with org-contacts.

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Special Fish

special.fish is a community word processor for writing poetry, journals, and logs, supported by users like you.

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If I ever get around to trying desktop/laptop Linux, I’ll install Harmonoid for managing a music library, as BSAG mentioned in Exploring desktop Linux: Part 2.

Music:

Looking forward to:

  • Ordered a RealForce R3 White TKL Dye Sub PBT Topre 45g keyboard. I felt like my recent extra work hours deserved a non-annoying keyboard. I’m living on the edge and going non-silent Topre. If it’s too loud, I’ll keep the Leopold FC660C 45g silent at work and use the R3 at home. You can go nuts watching YouTube reviews, listening to videos of switches, and imagining whether some r/MechanicalKeyboards commenter’s definition of “tactile” matches your own. Even worse if you start searching for “Topre-like MX switches”. Once you’re in that deep, you will likely spend more than you should for something worse. And that’s when you go for a stock Topre keyboard.
  • Getting more sleep this week.

September 29, 2024 GenAI Emacs music paper Linux keyboards weeknotes

Weeknotes 4

We just rented a dumpster for a week to help/force us to clean out 14 years of detritus in the basement. This appears to be the only way.

Did:

  • Dumped a bunch of mp3s on a thumb drive to play on shuffle in the Honda Fit. It works, but the shuffle in the car is not smart enough to not repeat the same song too soon.

We’re An AmeriKihn Band at Nutstock 2024
We’re An AmeriKihn Band — photo by Dave C.

  • Played drums on two Greg Kihn Band songs with my buds at Nutstock this past weekend. We called ourselves We’re An AmeriKihn Band and it was fun as hell! After that, I played in a rock improv duo called Jazz Brunch that I had forgotten I was supposed to be in. Both of those bands made me wonder why I don’t play drums more often.
  • And then we were treated to Martin Roach, who hadn’t played together since they were a band in Blacksburg 35 years ago. The memories!

Music:

Found:

LLMs are like your weird, over-confident intern | Simon Willison (Datasette) - Software Misadventures

  • Great stuff in here about having a personal blog, using your blog for accountability and to document what you learn, and taking detailed notes in GitHub issues on a large number of projects to document what you were thinking, tried, and decided. I need to watch his Django talk.
  • Also, the idea of saying “what are my options” in a prompt does work great when I try it, which also sucks. Like this: “In Emacs orgmode, what are my options for showing search results from all orgmode files in their respective headings context?”

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mclear-tools/consult-notes: Use consult to search notes

consult-notes can be used with any directory (or directories) of note files. It easily integrates with note systems like zk, denote, or org-roam. Additionally, it may also search org headings in a set of specified files.

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Music industry’s 1990s hard drives, like all HDDs, are dying | Ars Technica

One of the things enterprise storage and destruction company Iron Mountain does is handle the archiving of the media industry’s vaults. What it has been seeing lately should be a wake-up call: roughly one-fifth of the hard disk drives dating to the 1990s it was sent are entirely unreadable.

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Re: Overwhelmed and Need Help with Organizing | Protesilaos Stavrou

My recommendation to you then is to forget about the advanced features of logging, plotting, linking, drawing, stamping, clipping, extracting, summarising, analysing, et cetera, and focus on the one and only basic thing that matters: you set a goal and you do it. If you cannot do this with consistency, then all that other stuff is just a glorified mini-game to make you feel better about the fact you are not actually doing what you are supposed to.

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archive.today/

Archive.today is a time capsule for web pages! It takes a ‘snapshot’ of a webpage that will always be online even if the original page disappears. It saves a text and a graphical copy of the page for better accuracy and provides a short and reliable link to an unalterable record of any web page including those from Web 2.0 sites:

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Why I prefer rST to markdown | Hillel Wayne

The most important difference between rst and markdown is that markdown is a lightweight representation of html, while rst is a midweight representation of an abstract documentation tree.

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Challenging The Myths of Generative AI | TechPolicy.Press

The productivity myth suggests that anything we spend time on is up for automation — that any time we spend can and should be freed up for the sake of having even more time for other activities or pursuits — which can also be automated. The importance and value of thinking about our work and why we do it is waved away as a distraction. The goal of writing, this myth suggests, is filling a page rather than the process of thought that a completed page represents.

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BEM — Block Element Modifier

BEM — is a methodology that helps you to create reusable components and code sharing in front‑end development

Looking forward to:

Someday installing Linux on the 2014 MacBook Pro after seeing bashbunni demo how to turn a MacBook Pro into a Linux server | YouTube. And her homepage has the coolest loading animation.

September 19, 2024 Nutstock GenAI org-mode archiving Linux weeknotes

Caleb Southern

I just found out today that Caleb Southern died in July 2023. I never met him, but in the early 90s it seemed like every other album that came through our college radio station had his name on the production or engineering credits. Just to name a few bands he recorded (and these are only some of the ones from North Carolina): Polvo, Picasso Trigger, Bicycle Face, Southern Culture on the Skids, Superchunk, June, Flat Duo Jets, and Geezer Lake. (Caleb Southern | Discogs)

After that, he had a whole other career as a computer science professor at Georgia Tech:

Beloved Computing Lecturer Caleb Southern Dies  | College of Computing

“To say that Professor Southern shaped my experience at Tech would be an understatement. He always insisted that students call him Caleb, but I couldn’t bring myself to do so given how professional, brilliant, and truly prolific he was as an educator. The loss of Professor Southern means the loss of a truly great mind, full of computing hacks and secrets many of us will never know. But the greater loss is that of a friend, and a genuinely kind soul. He is already missed by those of us lucky enough to have called him a mentor,” said teaching assistant and student Nikkolas Glover.  

“Professor Southern loved what he taught and that was a passion he shared with his students. In every class, no matter the topic, whether it was data path circuits or the functionality of a doorknob design, he taught with joy. It was in his smile, the excitement in his voice, and his wild hand gestures,” said student Samantha Burger.

Southern completed his degree in mathematics and computer science with honors at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and was a recipient of the prestigious Brooks scholarship.

His Ph.D. research focused on mobile-human-computer interaction, and he created the app Braille Touch, which allows visually impaired users to text.

September 15, 2024 music recording Georgia Tech computer science

Weeknotes 3

Did:

Wasted hours and lots of gas visiting Staples, OfficeMax, and Wal-Mart to try out desk chairs. I’ve spent too much time looking at r/OfficeChairs, so most of the ones in those stores feel terrible and the ones that don’t are fantastically overpriced. In the end, I came back home and brought up my 1967 Army-made steel tanker chair from the basement and it’s fine other than needing to be reupholstered.

Found:

Creativity is made, not generated — Procreate®

AI is not our future.

Creativity is made, not generated.

Generative AI is ripping the humanity out of things. Built on a foundation of theft, the technology is steering us toward a barren future. We think machine learning is a compelling technology with a lot of merit, but the path generative AI is on is wrong for us.

We’re here for the humans. We’re not chasing a technology that is a moral threat to our greatest jewel: human creativity. In this technological rush, this might make us an exception or seem at risk of being left behind. But we see this road less travelled as the more exciting and fruitful one for our community.

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Importing all of your orgmode notes into Apple Notes for mobile access. - vxlabs. This is crazy enough to work.

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Part Four of My Battles with Emacs - Bicycle For Your Mind. I never get tired of reading about how people struggle with and prevail over Emacs.

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Bill Callahan: ‘My fans are not desiring me to put a picture of my face up every three days’ | RNZ News

“Also, what goes along with me putting those roots deep for 20 years without social media is I have a following and fans who are not desiring me to put a picture of my face up every three days on Instagram. I have an audience that has been there with me for all this time.”

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GitHub - awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted: A list of Free Software network services and web applications which can be hosted on your own servers

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Git - Book

The entire Pro Git book, written by Scott Chacon and Ben Straub and published by Apress, is available here.

Music:

  • Saw Guided By Voices play at the Broadberry. The band was fine as usual, but it sounded like Pollard’s mic was broken for the first five or six songs, the lighting was so dim it was as if they were afraid we’d be able to see the faces of the band members, and the layout of the club is more narrow than it is wide. It has never made sense. I hate the Broadberry.
  • The Jesus And Mary Chain — Pop Seeds. (from Doug)
  • Death — Freakin Out. (from Tina)
  • First two Atomic Rooster albums. (from Will)
  • George Antheil’s Ballet Mécanique. (from Richard)
  • Blondshell — What’s Fair. (from Matt)
  • Dean Roberts — Sugar Got a Cocaine Heart (from Strength Through Failure 2024-08-20)
  • White Winged Moth — Kayo (from Strength Through Failure 2024-08-20)
  • Nick Cave: Wild God

Looking forward to:

Broadcast - Distant Call - Collected Demos 2000 - 2006

Distant Call is a collection of early demos of songs that would subsequently appear as finished productions on the albums Haha Sound, Tender Buttons and The Future Crayon. The album also includes two songs discovered by James after Trish’s passing: “Come Back To Me” and “Please Call To Book”. These were her response to Broadcast’s 2006 ‘Let’s Write A Song’ project, where fans were asked to submit lyrics on a postcard which would then be worked into a finished song. Distant Call is a closing of the door on Broadcast and will be the last release from the band. Distant Call - Collected Demos 2000-2006 will be released via Warp Records on September 28th and available on standard black 1LP and CD.

Although I’m sad that it’s “a closing of the door on Broadcast”. Trish Keenan will be regarded as one of the towering songwriters of our time. Gone way too soon.

September 8, 2024 weeknotes music Emacs