The final day of 2021 - known as Hogmanay here 🏴. I was meant to have reviewed 2021 and made high level plans for 2022. Not done the first and only lightly touched the second.
Didn’t quite get round to home developing in 2021, but I did buy most of the stuff and I’ve just loaded my 4x5 film into the holder. Thanks Cat Films for your little video.
There’s a whole load of tinderbox and I’m excited to figure it all out but…there’s a whole load! Got a few use cases that’ll start me off in it. One is replacing this blog. I was hesitant to do so, given I’ve already made this one, and it works well enough. However, the more I think about it, the more I want to move it. A lot of making this site was figuring out format, layout, CSS etc., and I can take all those learnings into the new site. The actual jekyll part wasn’t that much work. I just spent a lot of time on small parts - like search, pagination (didn’t end up using it), messing about with journal.txt, and back and forth on tagging.
Somewhere before I said I wanted to do 10-12 projects in 2022. I think 10 is the right number. One per month minus holidays.
I picked developing 4x5 first as then I can just take two shots and try it out. vs. 24/36 on 35mm. However, I have to do the whole development process in the dark (fomapan 400 is panchromatic film so it is sensitive to all wavelengths of visible light). Loading it was fine but interesting. I didn’t know what to expect inside the box and there were some paper things and plastic bags but I think I managed…something is in the holders! 😅 Not sure about moving from tray to tray though…feel like I’ll lose the sheet between trays or something. I suppose I can test it with some paper and closing my eyes.
The downstairs bathroom might not be the best place to do this as the light switch is on the outside. So unless I make a sign someone could walk up and turn on the lights without warning!
Anyway, all this is to worry about later. The next challenge is figuring out the 4x5 camera!
Didn’t get round until later than I wanted but have started watching Micheal Becker’s video series on Tinderbox. It’s funny that he started this series exactly 1 year ago! There’s a lot of them, and I keep thinking “oh that’s a good thing” but know I’ll forget by tomorrow. However, having it all wash over me as an overview gets me thinking about how I’ll do stuff.
Tinderbox makes for a great blogging tool, but I’m hesitant to change this site from a static gen, as it’s quite free and open to use it. I can also just edit it anywhere with git and a text editor or github.dev. However, I’ve been struggling with tagging or adding some meta data that makes it useful as a reference, even just for future me.
By putting it into Tinderbox I can then link it with other info, e.g., and now see the full story. For public viewers of the website, I could even add tags to each entry as an attribute. Now how I would wrangle that attribute in html I’m not sure, I suppose I’d build an archives like page per tag and link each entry underneath. Or could make a json file or something which could be searched? I have no idea how that even gets done but I’ll worry about it later. The point is, I’m sure it could be done in Tinderbox, whereas here it’s a bit messy with the current implementation or very complex with an alternative…i.e. writing a structured document (XML, JSON, OPML etc.).
I’m back on to wondering about Tinderbox again. I was reading Phil’s notes about Tinderbox and the references he posts. It is a very unique piece of software that can do all sorts. I already knew this. The trouble right now is we’ve been visiting family and I’m just with my iPad, so I wouldn’t be able to add anything to a Tinderbox file. Maybe that doesn’t matter…in fact it doesn’t. It is expensive as far as software goes but it’s like a fancy meal for 6 or something.
I did start looking at OmniOutliner, as it has an iOS companion app. I’ve got a 14 day trial but also thinking I only have about 2 days left of the Winterfest sale on Tinderbox. Perhaps the desktop version has more functionality but the ios one seems limited. The only “interesting” feature is adding columns to outlines, so it’s like a spreadsheet but with the hierarchy of the outline. It does have a few features for numbers, like averages and totals. You can’t set custom attributes to each node or do much else…at least not that I’ve found. You can script things to automate stuff.
However, I can’t see much in OmniOutliner that warrants its use over Dyanlist.
Saw a good deal on a 28” Samsung 4K monitor. The only trouble is my 2012 mac mini can only do 2650x1440.
Well I finally did it, I bought Tinderbox! Does look like my sort of application - perfect for faffing about in but never actually writing anything 😅 Paypal had given me $5 as well, so that was nice. Now to read the endless blogs, tutorials and documentation I’ve saved about it.
I’ve setup WebDAV on my server, and am using 1Writer on my iPad/iPhone to write to my new plain text journal/daybook thing. I wasn’t really sure what to call each file or even how to structure them. I guess I’ll see how it goes. 1Writer is nice though. Started looking at some of the javascript actions to see if there’s anything useful.
WebDAV with nginx was a bit of a pain. Seems nginx is strict and most clients (including Finder and Windows explorer…oh you know the two largest clients) don’t do what they’re supposed to do. Namely trailing slashes for new directories. Random blog posts yielded nginx rewrites to fix it. Probably some other issues but for now it works fine. Much cheaper than dropbox…
Still trying to ignore Jack’s fun with Tinderbox, doing all sorts of clever tricks.
I can’t buy a Ricoh GRiii as I think it’s too expensive, but then look at a Leica Q2M and think “oh a new one is only £4,995”. 🙈
Hooking up this blog to 1writer might be a nice idea. I guess that means buying Working Copy app…or cloning the repo into the webdav folder on the server then somehow commiting the new entries. I can SSH in but maybe some shortcut thing that calls a script or API to then do it…🤔 sounds overly complex…
This holiday I’ve finally deleted Outlook and teams apps from all my devices. I don’t missing checking work emails at all but if the app is there then I can\t help but open it. There is a certain expectation, because so many people do it though, that everyone can and does access their emails all the time.
My wife is thinking about stopping all social media in the new year. Think that’s facebook and instagram for her. I think it’ll be good. Her brother was telling us that he gave up his phone whilst on holiday for a week. That’s even better! My bad habits are reddit and forums, which I do read a lot of on my phone. In my head those are better than “social media” but think I’m lying to myself. Reddit especially. BUT I do think I learn things from them…learning of new cameras and lenses I need to buy 😅
Not really sure how to use the tags in these posts. I want to keep it to the main ones but that’s hard. Maybe I should just delete them again as it’s a thing to stop and think about.
Writing all these blogs and journals sure does take up a lot of time…What I need is one place to do everything…lol yeah that old chestnut. Actually one place to write everything is fine and easy. It’s the parsing and rendering that’s tricky. Family log, weblog, personal journal, … Makes me think of some text with attributes such that I can just write everything and anything and then mark that section as one of the logs, then the text goes off to wherever it needs to be. I bet Tinderbox would be great for that 🤩
Some automation might help. Or writing paragraphs with certain characters appended. I suppose if I didn’t want any automation (or it was too finicky) a weekly review process could be taking those pieces and splitting them up manually - a bit slow for a daily notes blog - but fine for everything else. I guess family and personal are split as I want to use DayOne for family log so it’s easy to print. However, is it really that hard to print text otherwise? There’s no photos but maybe I should just print those out and stick in a book (like I’ve talked about before but never done anything), and I could even print out the text I wrote to stick in - if I’m too lazy to hand write it again. I quite like that idea. I also like the idea of buying the 1-line per day 5 year journal book, just there’s not much scope for pictures.
This script is great for a single file journal. Mines only a few lines long but I’ve “headered” the year, month and day so now I can jump around. Might tweak it or my formatting for just down to month level as it could get a lot. Or add the year to months.
No excuses now. Well I’m sure I can come up with some to put off actually doing it. Probably 4x5 is going to be easier to start with? I can take two frames and then develop them vs. waiting for a whole roll of 35mm.
Might give my X-700 to my cousin who is starting a photograph course at college. Not sure if they’ll use film cameras and probably wants or already has a digital one which is a lot more convenient. I hope she’s doing it because she likes photography. Anyway, it’s that or sell on ebay and maybe I could get £50 for it. Or it sits on my shelve and never gets used. I still have the SRT-100x (or whatever number it is), in case I want to use a SLR but I can’t see why I’d just not use the M2 all the time - which is what I do. So hopefully she can get some use from it.
I think tagging every day with daily notes isn’t really necessary. I should either get rid of them or maybe add tags that are relevant to the topics contained within. Means I should go back and remove this tag from the rest of the posts.
Think I’m over my obsession with Tinderbox now. Mostly as I’ve come to realise (once again) that the system and orchestration is secondary to the actual act of writing - be it public or private. I put a lot of effort into this site and generally it’s fine. Okay, so I don’t get permalinks to each paragraph but so what. If I want more “features” I can make them with includes in Jekyll instead of post attributes, but most of the time that doesn’t matter.
I think just a couple of plain text files is all I need, then I can sync via some service or git and then use a variety of apps across any OS and platform to edit it.
I think the following would be good:
A recap summary file
Either weekly or monthly, with a few bullets beneath each section
Separate so that it forces me to distill down into notable items.
Daily log file
Probably one per year
Just write whatever in it
I’ve seen people do a daily file and then a running 1 line per day log but, think I’d rather do a bigger daily one and then weekly summaries.
I’m thinking text files vs. tiddlywiki as text files give me more options to use different apps - particularly keen to have something more native on iOS. Also if I want to do any automation then text is easier to work with. It does now mean there’s an endless number of apps and syncing configurations I’ll distract myself with, vs. just a single web app.
After reading this, I now think the one line per day might also be good.
I rearranged all the posts on this site into year/month subfolders. Makes it a lot nicer to manage. Conveniently, Jekyll doesn’t care about the subfolders. Although it was hard to find information about this out. Seems everyone wants to use the subfolders to do something (like categories). So I was confident, plus it would be one git roll back if it didn’t work.
Not sure I like classic chrome look on Fuji anymore. It’s…grungy…or perhaps I’ve just used it so much I’ve had enough of it. On the other hand, however, I really like the Acros black and white. I shall have to fiddle with the colour profiles and see what I can find.
I was very close to buying Tinderbox last night. I know buying stuff at 11:30 pm is never a good idea. Even with the discount it’s still £175. I just can’t get over that. I’ve been watching more videos on it. The interface is still weird but I get it a bit more now. I’ve also downloaded the demo version and started messing about with it, just random stuff. I ordered the Tinderbox way as that had 25% off. Although maybe shouldn’t have bothered.
Obsidian live preview. This is what I wanted from the start. Now I’m looking at Obsidian again. It does have iOS apps which is nice…hmm. Ugh this is ridiculous - as I’m writing this I’m watching emacs videos. I should just play computer games and ignore all this. I’ve wasted a quiet morning by myself on pointlessness.
Okay, well what a fun christmas eve. One of the boys has a terrible cough and woke up the other and neither went back to sleep until 11pm.
Jack kindly shared his new 2022 daybook tinderbox file to demonstrate it to me. It’s definely a great tool and I’d like to own it, however, I think that for me to use it just to make a blog and a daily journal thing seems like a waste of money and learning effort. It would be good at it but it’s still overkill. I really like the way it can do daily page blogs though, with custom attributes that generates other html. That’s something which is missing from all (at least as far as I’ve seen) static blog generators. So even though I want it, I’m not going to buy it.
Occasionally I still think “fuck it, just buy it”.
Another factor that I realise is important to me is mobile access. iPad at a minimum, because I’m not going to buy a laptop, and actually I write a lot on my phone. Most of my DayOne entries are from my phone when watching the kids in the bath or waiting for something somewhere. So I’d end up writing stuff and then moving it across, or sorting out syncing between Apple notes or whatever.
Right now I’m using github.dev to just edit this file in my repo on my ipad and it’s great. This is not great on my phone, however, blog editing doesn’t need to be on my phone.
I actually opened up dynalist and made a new doc for my journal. It’s going to be single page, and it works nicely on iOS. It’s not a permanent place but I feel like a single page is going to be a good thing.
One of my potential projects for 2022 is making my own static site generator. Specifically tailored to daily notes like this site, and customisable attributes on nodes. I’m hoping to adopt an existing editor to do the writing (maybe Concord or even Drummer, but would be nice if it was something more portable (which maybe concord could be)). Making the text entry section is quite a bit more work, but perhaps that’s the only solution. I suppose emacs and ox-hugo thing may already be what I want, but I’d rather make it web based. I suppose it depends if I’m making it for me or for others to use, and by that I mean something people could use not just “here’s the code on github”. Writing and thinking about this makes me think “fuck it, buy Tinderbox, it basically does what you want and £170 vs many many evenings…”.
Came across this blog service again. It’s pretty comprehensive.
If I want to use the mac more, then I should move it to the main computer area and then I’d use it. Daughter is on the other computer so I’m using it today. I definitely think a single monitor would be better. I just hate selling old monitors - no-one really wants to spend that much and shipping them is a real hassle. Trying to sell local means I get nothing for it. I suppose I could just keep them in case of something later and put them in the attic. The Apple Cinema ought to get a decent price as it’s Apple. Sort of makes me want to get an Apple 27” Thunberbolt display, however, they seem to cost more than a new Dell 27” and the Dell is probably better. I don’t need the magsafe charging so would be a waste.
Someone bought the broken trackpad from me. People will buy anything.
After I don’t know how long, okay I looked it up, I started this 31st October, so nearly 2 months ago, I’m opening back up Head First Javascript book. I’m sat at the mac, and it’s open! On to Chapter 2…
Trying to find that date on this site was impossible, the wiki, however, made it very easy! Okay, I’m just distracting myself with this. I should promise to stop talking about this and never do it again. I guess I’ll give myself until the end of the year then I don’t want to hear about should I write in x or y ever again. This site is just like a river. You side beside it and enjoy watching it go past but once it’s gone you don’t try and go searching through it. If you look away, so be it. The river flows and that’s that. If you’re really dedicated I suppose you can drive further downstream and pick up what you missed.
Rather than spending 20 hours learning about Tinderbox, surely I should spend that time learning emacs or vim.
I’ve been watching videos on emacs this evening. I’m currently debating between emacs and Tinderbox for my personal journal and maybe all-in integrated everything tool. Not sure why I’ve focused just down to these two tools but they seem suitable for doing everything I want. The problem is they’re both not straight forward, and warrant a good amount time to invest to learn them and use them well. So I really only want to pick one. Both are not with disadvantages, I don’t want to write all the pros and cons of each and so just going to pick out random things. It’s also my view - which is definitely going to suffer from my ignorance of both tools.
Tinderbox
Mac Only. $250. These are the main issues. It also appears weird on first opening but I suspect a few videos and I’ll be fine.
From the brief and random browsing of the forum and videos, it appears pretty powerful and I assume being a GUI app there’s a lot that can be done without resorting to coding but you can still write some code if you want. It’s like the more recent tools, roam etc., have just a subset of Tinderbox’s features.
It has so much, like emacs, but I hope it’s more accessible to use, and therefore quicker to learn.
Free, and open source, cross platform, and a legend of computer science. Just seems so hard to get going. Basically rely on Doom-Emacs otherwise I’ll be forever in the config not knowing what I don’t know. It’s technically superior but I also don’t care. I really don’t want to have to remember between buffers and frames and windows. However, if stock doom works well then why not use it? Problem is if stock doesn’t work well then I have to dive into config and lisp. I just have no interest in that. Most of the time I just use stock defaults on stuff because I’m not going to be a power user in it. I like VS Code as I can just install some extensions and go. I click a few more buttons. Occasionally I’ll remember a new shortcut but most of the time I forget the shortcuts.
Org mode is likely the best of its kind. However, I don’t want/need todos or calendar or probably a lot of it so it’s wasted on me.
Oh well that quickly descended into a no. I’m a GUI tool user but appreciate config if I need it.
Although it did make me think of vim. I’ve learnt a few vim keybindings, mostly when editing config files on servers. Possibly sometime like vimwiki. Think it has a daily log. Although I don’t want a wiki. I have that already. I want a notes tool that integrates my life. Tiddlywiki could probably do it too but not sure it’s the same (as Tinderbox).
Oh I can get 25% off Tinderbox with code Winterfest2021…hmmm…
Finally setup the Mac Mini with its own monitors. Not sure I like the two monitors for the mini, the space is a bit tight and the black one eats into the typewriter area. I think a single 27” would be better. Also way too much stuff in here but not sure where else to keep it. I did this as my daughter wants to use the main computer, and now it’s the christmas holidays there’s a lot more time when we both want to use a computer. Makes me think about the laptop arrangement like Jack as moved to…although I like big or multiple monitors so not sure that’s a good option for me. I often wonder what my “perfect setup” would be. I can never decide.
I found this blog when browsing the Tinderbox forums. It’s made in Tinderbox and is a general daily notes site. Dave, the owner, likes photography and doesn’t like what social media has become. His site is 8 years old. I really like it. Makes me want to use Tinderbox. Although that doesn’t really make much sense. Also my mac is not my main machine, unless I change my habits, and so it’ll be hard to maintain. Least this is cross platform. Also not sure I want to spend $250 on some software. I’ll watch all the videos and then decide.
I thought about writing a summary of this year. Problem is, I can’t really remember what I did for large parts of it. I remember bits and pieces but not 365 days worth of things. Made me realise the benefit of journalling. Not that I journal for myself. I have a family one in DayOne that’s more for what we all did together, or notable things from the kids. Haven’t been the greatest at keeping it up to date but reasonable. Generally weekends or holiday periods are more populated. It’s something so I don’t mind. This and the wiki site of public journal/thoughts started August 6th. It’s a partial insight into what I did. But there’s still two issues:
I should write weekly and monthly summaries as I’m not reading 122 journal entries to see what I did. Especially not in Tiddlywiki, although I guess I could transclude them all into a single tiddler. But summaries would let me pick out what’s important when it’s closer in memory vs. the end of the year. Then I’d have 12-52 to read.
There’s a lot of private stuff that isn’t anywhere.
I like the idea of Tinderbox but I shouldn’t even waste my time watching those videos. I’m not going to buy it. I should just use a private Tiddlywiki or maybe dokuwiki or maybe just a private repo with files in it. Or even…….a real notebook! 📚😵
This evening I watched my friend play unpacked. I don’t even.
I started looking at Working Copy again. It is a very nice app for working with git repos on an iPad. However, I don’t really want to do that much development or git writing on my ipad. Github.dev is good enough for this static site, and occasional tweaks.
The new Voigtlander 90mm f/2.8 VM is so good (according to reviews), how could I ever justify a Leica lens…
Sometimes I think about learning R. In fact I wish I’d started with R instead of python. The bulk of what I use it for it data analysis at work. Python gets the job done and there’s the benefit of it being useful in web development or some areas. However, I don’t really use it for other areas - maybe some scripting here and there but nothing major. If you’re doing data work (not necessarily only data science) but the R ecosystem is so much nicer. R itself is more convenient for data stuff but also RStudio, install packages, writing and creating reports, even dashboards and websites. I could still learn it but not sure what the point is. I don’t use it enough at work to make it worthwhile and whilst I’m far from an expert, I do have some knowledge of python and know how to get things done. There’s also the fact that we do have jupyter lab setup which I could use more.
I just like the idea of writing reports in Rmarkdown with the data, code and text all together, and I can regenerate it whenever things change. I hate writing reports in Word. Guess I’ll add it to my list of possible projects.
A friend at work is undertaking a masters degree. I like the idea of doing one, but I don’t have time for that!
Think I want to gitbook like static site to write things in where I want a specific order. Such as monthly summaries or maybe even daily notes. I still like the order of a paper notebook and prefer to find things that way. Maybe sounds peculiar but I like it. Not sure if it should be private or public though. There’s quite a few options out there:
Although it’s just an excuse to build another site rather than adding content to it. Remember you have dokuwiki which can basically do all this plus with private stuff…
There’s also bookstaack, which is a web-app version. Might be nice to use plus has authentication.
I remember when I wanted to blog more and I’d set myself the target of one post per week. A month would go by, so I would change the target to one a month. A year would go by and I’d make the same New Year’s resolution to do one post a week.
Now I’m doing one a day!? It does feel like a bit of a burden though. Someone’s site I visited they wrote weekly updates. Similar in style and format to this but on a weekly level.
Debating about either adding tags to these daily posts, in the vague attempt at helping discoverability and future usefulness or switching it more into a more traditional blog with titles, categories, etc. where posts are about a topic and not a collection of parts. Just writing under a date heading is very easy to do, but not sure it’s any more productive to the world than random chatter on twitter. Another factor is having the wiki and some duplication of the daily journal on that. The problem with changing it all is then I question the very architecture of it, and that risks starting from scratch.
For example, I’m using jekyll because I started off with journal.txt and that was Ruby and Jekyll. Jekyll is also very easy with Github pages. However, Hugo and others are super easy too. Whilst Jekyll is maintained, I can’t help feel it’s 5 years out of date and if I were starting a fresh blog I’d probably pick Hugo.
The one saving grace is that this consumes so much of my brain cycles that I don’t think about buying new cameras. 😅
Ordered my very first DayOne books. I had a browse through the past entries and there were so many things I’d forgotten about. There’s a lot to read and it’ll be nice reading it in a physical book. Does encourage me to continue recording the journal. It’s probably cheaper if I kept the text elsewhere and made my own book but it’s certainly a lot easier through the app. Postage adds a bit as it comes from the US, but it’s not horrible.
I think I’m just going to leave this site as is. There’s better things I can do with my time for now. I might add tags to posts, but keep them hidden and see if they’re useful.
I’ve made a new private tiddlywiki node.js hosted version. Means I can access it anywhere. It’s for private journal both work and home. Going to use it for work stuff too, like highlights and goals and plans. I don’t need it for work content (goes better in OneNote at work as often it’s screenshots of slide decks.) or task management (I prefer that in a physical notebook). However, reflections and a log over the year work well in tiddlywiki. I’ve used it this year to keep track of weekly updates and then consolidate those into quarterly updates for stakeholders, and it’s worked well. Going to keep it pretty simple, but would like some templates or text snippets to help streamline stuff. I’ll add that over time.
Does mean I have a lot of places to write things:
This website - daily public notes, semi-organised.
The wiki - maybe daily public notes, random thoughts, plus useful wiki-like content
DayOne - Private family log
New wiki - private journal and work log and info
Notebooks - Bujo-like, work related todo, meeting notes, planning etc.
OneNote - Work meeting notes (often just screenshots of slides from Teams meetings)
Field Notes - notebook that sits on my desk for mostly personal todos or scratch pad
TickTick - Started using it for lists of stuff. Like projects or todos or plans
Possibly other minor things like Apple Notes or random apps.
Started setting up the articles section of this site. It’s not in the navigation yet as I still want to do more things. They’re going to be more traditional blog posts, which I write very infrequently. However, whilst making it I realised that I should perhaps have made these daily notes to be a separate collection and the normal blog posts the default. Just as things like tags and “out of the box stuff” are all setup towards them by default. It would also be a chance to move these daily posts into a folder structure so there’s not so many in the explorer. No doubt that’ll add more complexity though.
The multiverse is a weird blogging/community site.
I remembered I put all of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations book into a tiddlywiki. I want to make each statement a tiddler so then I could randomise them and display one from the lot.
This site is hosted on Github pages, but as a backup I’ve also configured it on vercel.app.
Almost three months later from first looking at it, I’ve still not figured out what film development chemicals I need or should buy. I keep putting it off as I’ve not got the containers and trays etc. yet. I bought some from the secondhand darkroom. Was great value but they don’t deliver to Scotland without paying a fortune. This is quite annoying and not sure entirely necessary but that’s what they do. So I ordered the bits to a family member down south and let them bring it up over Christmas. So I should get some chemicals ready for the christmas holidays and then there’s the opportunity to get some christmas large format shots.
This presentation about web accessibility is both very funny but also makes very good points about the state of the internet. Even as a completely able internet user the amount of crap websites pack in and everyone’s obsession with javascript is very annoying. There are some stores that don’t work on my home network as I block ad domains. This mostly annoys my wife when she wants to buy something and either I have to disable everything or she switches to cellular and buys it on her phone. My stance is that if the company’s website is that bad then I’m not going to buy from them. My website is not at all important but I like that it’s clean, fast and has minimal javacsript. It would have none but I like having search, and the image zoom when you click on an image. I’m also looking for an image gallery which might have to be javascript as well. I was looking at fotorama, but it needs jQuery and that put me off. I’m sure I could do something to improve accessibility and I might look into some of the tools to check the site like:
I made a list of all the non-fiction books I want to read…18 of them! Not sure I’ll get to them all in 2022. Have to think about what and prioritise them. 🤔🧠
I want to make a book fo all our old DayOne journal entries. The book making is easy, but I really want to review all the previous posts first. There’s about 600-700 😰. I just want to get rid of things that don’t fit. It’s 99% family but occasionally I thought I’d try it with work. Don’t know why I didn’t start a new journal for that. If I’m paying for it to be printed I don’t want rubbish in there, but at the same time this might take me forever and then I never print it.
It’s nice reading it all though. Even the stuff I delete afterwards.
Loqseq, git and Github could be a good solution for a work/private journal. Whilst there’s nothing much to learn about Logseq, there are some good practices/methodologies people have developed to make the most of it. I’ve just got so used to Tiddlywiki I don’t really want to learn something else. There’s also no real mobile solution - editing or even viewing. There’s convoluted systems but that’s not what I’m looking for. So back to TW. Probably for the best.
I wanted to minify and concat all my CSS into a single file, so that it was one request. I don’t have too many on this site: the main CSS, code highlighting, and then some CSS for the zoom javascript plugin. However, I occasionally tweak, add, subtract things from my main CSS and re-minifying it was a pain. Luckily I have a script from the static photo site I like to use and just copied that over. Now I can edit the main CSS, run the script and commit the updated version to the repo. I want to maintain the order of the CSS in case highlights or zoom has to overwrite something else, so I just number them all and it adds them in order.
#!/bin/bash# minify all .css-filesls-1*.css|grep -Ev"min.css$" | while read cssfile;do
newfile="${cssfile%.*}.min.css"echo"$cssfile --> $newfile"
curl -X POST -s--data-urlencode"input@$cssfile" https://www.toptal.com/developers/cssminifier/raw >$newfiledone# merge all into one single filerm-f styles.min.css
cat*.min.css > styles.min.css
I wish we used things like git, markdown, wikis and plain text at work for procedures and documentation. Would be so much easier to maintain, update, track changes, find information. But no, it’s a whole bunch of Word documents spread across (at best) SharePoint, a document management tool, and network drives.
Look at this great tool I made in Excel
😪
Friend bought me Valheim and we started a server last night. These survival/crafting games are all the same but the best part is playing with a few friends because of the chat.
I’m liking TickTick for it’s quickness to add stuff. Particularly ideas or longer term things I’d like to do. It’s much quicker than tiddlywiki, maybe similar to Apple reminders but TickTick has the advantage of being cross platform and the website is much better than icloud.com website. Also you can nest tasks and add all sorts of context. I don’t need or use much of it but I like it. Now I just need to actually do things from it!
I’m compiling a list of “projects” I want to do in 2022, in an attempt to actually do something. Thinking of maybe 10-12 items, circa one per month. It’s easy to get carried away and try and do so many things that I give up and do nothing. I was even thinking of having “read xyz” as one. I’ve quite a few non-fiction books that I’ve bought over the years but have never read. Some work, many photography. I might pick a shortlist of them and set those as projects - but read and make notes.
I’ve given up on prose.io. It doesn’t seem to quite work properly (or I’m not understanding it). I’ve found VS Code to be great for this site.
I want to put in my old drummer posts into this site. So I’ve used pandoc to convert my opml file into a single markdown file. This was very easy pandoc --from=opml --to=markdown_mmd blog.opml -o blog.md. However, that makes it one big file, not individual pages. I don’t have that many posts, but I don’t really want to make a whole load of files to copy and paste this info into. I’ve also noticed images aren’t referenced or showing up. What might be a better way to generate the markdown would be from the rendered HTML, that way images and everything exactly how it shows will be created. If I’m making pages then I may be better off making my own converter, reading the opml and making pages. However, this’ll just be a one off thing, so not super excited to put a lot of time into this. Maybe just generating the pages might be a start with published=false and then I can pick away it at over time.
Even though it’s much slower, I decided I’d make the individual posts and then move the content across. Part of the reasoning was that I wanted to edit the posts, as there’s a lot of cruft from drummer config which I don’t need anymore and given the one off nature of this exercise I didn’t want to spend my time writing the content conversion which pandoc has so nicely done for me.
Here’s my code to create individual files named yyyy-mm-dd-weekday.md with the frontmatter set to my style and published: false so I can add them to the repo now and then update over time.
importpathlibfromdatetimeimportdatetimefromxml.etreeimportElementTreedefprocess_date(date):"""
Converts opml created date into python datetime object
"""datetime_object=datetime.strptime(date,'%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S %Z')returndatetime_objectdefcreate_front_matter(date_object):"""
Creates the front matter in my notes from a date.
Format:
---
title: Monday, 6th December, 2021
date: 2021-12-06 00:00
---
"""# https://stackoverflow.com/a/66364403/2000527
n=date_object.dayordindal=f"{n:d}{'tsnrhtdd'[(n//10%10!=1)*(n%10<4)*n%10::4]}"title=date_object.strftime(f'%A, {ordindal} %B, %Y')date=date_object.strftime("%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S")return ('---\n'f'title: {title}\n'f'date: {date}\n''published: false\n''---\n')withopen('blog.opml','rt',encoding='utf-8')asf:tree=ElementTree.parse(f)fornodeintree.findall('.//outline'):type=node.attrib.get('type')name=node.attrib.get('name')date=node.attrib.get('created')ifnameandtype!="calendarMonth":datetime_object=datetime.strptime(date,'%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S %Z')# create file with name YYYY-MM-DD-day.md
filename=datetime_object.strftime("%Y-%m-%d-%A").lower()+'.md'file=pathlib.Path.cwd()/'posts'/filename# Add front matter contents
file.write_text(create_front_matter(process_date(date)))
Poking about on Phil’s wiki, I came back to the journal/thoughts journal on Derek Sivers site. I had two thoughts - one: I like tiddlywiki, and if the situation was reverse I’d never find that info on this new site👀. Two: Should I be using DayOne for personal journal? Although it’s not really a personal journal, more like a family log. So actually I think that’s fine, it’s meant to ultimately end up as a printed book, and the convenience of DayOne and all it does helps that.
Interestingly my private tiddlywiki was setup around the 30th December 2020. I’ve generated a single page html of it, and I’m going to nuke it and start again! Seems like an annual occurance. However, I installed or setup too many plugins that I don’t want and want to start a fresh. I’ll import stuff into it but easier than trying to edit the existing one.
Wife bought me the Analogue Wonderland Wonderbox for my birthday. You get two boxes of films, one now and one in two months’ time. Quite the black and white selection, and possibly some IR films…I’m not sure, will have to look into each one. A nice way to try other things which I wouldn’t normally buy. Put the Delta 3200 in the M2 and will see how that goes.
Did a little prose.io configuration and it does make it nice to use. I think there’s some way of dropping in code snippets, so I can use some includes to make use of the other styling I’ve done. Would be nice if the default rendering by jekyll could be changed so I don’t need to resort to includes but I don’t think that’s possible. The create post, create draft, publish workflow is a bit funny but I’ll get used to it. Did think about looking up other jamstack CMSs, like Stasti or Forestry.io.
I’m wondering about just using prose.io to add and edit posts on here and skipping journal.txt. Although the text entry box on prose isn’t recognised by iOS as a text entry thing so spelling and autocorrect don’t work. Turns out this is more annoying that I thought.
Actually this is just for iPhone. iPad is slightly better as the suggestions appear at the bottom, so I can correct things as I go, and things like double tap space bar for full stop work. Still doesn’t autocorrect or show spelling errors though. On the iPad there’s a better menu on prose and changing things is more obvious. I guess for my phone I’d have to either visit github.com and edit posts or write somewhere else (Apple notes?) and copy it later. Not ideal, but maybe I shouldn’t bother writing on my phone in the first place.
Been digging into ticktick and it’s pretty feature packed even on the free tier. Lists with sublists (outlines anyone?) means I’m struggling to know what to do with tags. Few people suggested using them for context (like GTD, e.g. #home, #office, #phone etc.) or periods of the day, or this month, next month etc. I quite like the time ones, as I don’t want the specificness of a calendar but would like some time bounding on them. With tags I can just add endless ones and do all sorts. Ticktick even has note entries, and templates. So stuff like weekly summary of work to boss could be a to-do reminder and then a note based off template. Pretty much takes tiddlywiki’s role for that. Other than transclusion and other TW features, but I could see myself using ticktick for it. I don’t like that it’s a service but I do like having native apps on all platforms and a web interface. I’ve not checked but I could probably export the data if I was that worried.
Adding each day manually isn’t that much of a big deal, then least I can set the title properly and not have a weird arrangement to try and get it in the format I want. I just type the date and that takes seconds.
One problem I suffer from is when finding new software, I look up how other people use it and then copy their system. I then use it for a while and find it too complicated or doesn’t work and then stop using it. It is useful seeing how others use stuff, particularly how parts are constructed, like tiddlywiki, to do something but I shouldn’t try and adopt it. I’m resisting watching videos on ticktick or reading articles about it and just using it how I want or how I find I’m using it naturally. Part of the issue is I want to optmise or maximise things such that I get the most out of it. However, I should measure this by what the tool is for, not that I use 100% of it. But I’ll still watch some anyway 😅
Christmas party season. Had our work one today. People’s sense of personal space starts to disappear as the night goes on!
Github saver for tiddlywiki keeps being annoying. Not quite it’s fault, but my phone has forgotten the github secret and somehow it’s not in bitwarden. Possibly a sync issue when I moved VPS..? Seems a weird one as it was an old password, and not noticed anything else.
I have a lot of big, chore like things to do. I should just do a tiny bit each day. e.g. backfilling photo albums or drummer posts. After a month or something it’ll be all done. Whereas now, I just put it off for a month and have nothing to show for it.
Ha, my co-workers choke every time I share my screen and they see my tabs. Then they learn that they’re just seeing one window out of twelve.
reply.
This made me laugh, from hackernews.
This site seems to be a reoccuring theme of motion vs. action. I’ve gone through the motions of making a new static site but the actual action of writing in it could be quick to disappear. Hopefully the past few months of writing in the wiki will stop that. As long as it doesn’t get too hard to write then I should continue. It’s funny that I can already hear in my head “how easy it was to go to the wiki, press alt+j and then start typing. This is pretty easy though.
Quite decent snow (for here) today. We don’t normally get much before Christmas.
A friend has just got a Tesla. It’s very fancy, but also very expensive. He’s already installed teslamate, but is complaining that the docker container has it’s own version of Grafana and he wanted to integrate it with his smarthome grafana. 🙄 The available data from the car is nice, and would be nice if my car offered that, but there’re still very expensive and EV charging infrastructure is quite poor.
I don’t like twitter, or most social media places. I only visit reddit (certain subreddits) and occasionally hacker news, although usually via this summary. I say I don’t like them quickly without thought. But what is it that I don’t like? People selectively sharing the best things to show off? Am I do the same thing I dislike just on my own website? How is this any better? 🤷♂️ Too deep to think about that just now. Best get back to website construction…
Speaking of which…top things left to do:
Move to main domain
Add comments
Add Blog™ section
Really only move to domain is critical right now.
Other stuff that needs tidying up but lower priority:
Update/add About page and maybe books and setup and now etc.
Setup prose.io
Styling the search page a bit better
Make the search results show the search content, not just the first ~160 characters of that page
Backfill drummer posts from opml
Pagination?
Continue using this journal.txt?
Making this todo list (which will go nowhere other than down the page list) makes me think about todo list apps again. At work I use a notebook and written lists, this works well and I have no real need for a bigger todo management thing. At home I don’t use anything but I do wonder if it means I never actually do anything. The problem I’ve found in the past is more motion vs. action, I spend ages faffing with systems and colours and tags but never actually do anything. For a while I was using ticktick and was good at both using it and doing stuff. I think it’s simplicity was key. I also liked having it available everywhere via web app and photo app. Maybe there’s self-hosted versions but maybe I should just use it again. I think the free teir was sufficient.
My renewal notice for piwigo.org where I host my family galleries has come in. I like it (quite cheap, €39/yr) but also don’t like it (style and formats are a bit limited and dated looking). I did wonder about keeping it for photo backup but the download mechanism is painful. I started wondering about paying for Flickr Pro instead. Not sure what I’d use it for but could be a backup solution and easy hosting for random photos. Still want to rebuild my static photo site again but the backlog of albums is going. Suppose I should just start with the latest and maybe work backwards as time permits.
Now that I’ve built this site, I’m wondering if a single markdown file for for the whole site might be better (? or just different). Would be simple.
Logged back into my ticktick account, deleted the old stuff (from 18 months ago) and started adding things. It is cathartic to offload tasks from my mind. Turns out there’s a lot.
This site is coming along nicely. Only big things left are search and comments. Thought I’d try search first. Generally seems to be:
Generate a list or json of all the posts
Search over the top of this
Display the results
There’s “simple search”, someone made a small script to search over page titles, and then using lunr.js which allows more capabilities. Following along some tutorials but they don’t quite do what I want. They’re all similar but different and so far it doesn’t quite work. It’s one of those things where if I knew some javascript I could figure out what I needed to do. Not sure if it doesn’t help that I want a search bar at the top and not on a dedicated page.
Think I’m getting there…
Busy with family stuff the rest of this week so I may not get much time on it until after the weekend.
I’m amazed how I was super motivated to do this site last night. I do like it, and I much prefer having a static generated site than anything else. Now it feels like a bit of a slog to do the remaining parts. I’m now in that 20% which is going to take 80% of the time! I should make a list of the things I want to complete or figure out:
Figure out all the CSS elements and how I add them. e.g. markdown, or includes, or get jekyll to render them
That is quite a big one… 😅 Main ones:
Full width images
Aside images
Asides
Description lists
Quotes
Code and syntax highlighting
Install syntax highlighting - either jeykll or js plugins
Add comments (maybe use utterances on github?) and hide them with <details> section
Change header links on main page. Either remove underline or some fancy ::before thing.
Those are probably the essentials or the first round to sort out. Other stuff I’m thinking of:
Adding content
Do I keep using journal.txt? It's simple to enter stuff and I don't have to remember anything. I've hacked the page titles so I ignore them. If I want to do anything further then might need to go. VS Code and Prose.io are the obvious other things to investigate, with plugins/configs etc.
I’d sort of forgotten about this. Thought I’d try writing in it with prose. See how that experience is. The site needs some theming and CSS work badly but until I decide on this is the way to go then I won’t put in the effort.
I’d also wondered about running VS Code web version on my server and editing a static site via that. I suspect there’s a lot of helper plugins or even some shell scripts I could write that I could access from the web. Would make things easy on pretty much all devices. Not sure how it would look on mobile though. I should make my work wiki and get using that. I don’t have to wait for the new year before doing so. Then faff about with this or other sites later. Maybe I’ll read the hugo docs and compare what’s easier/harder and use that as my basis for blog.
I still like dokuwiki’s private vs. public settings within the app without having to have multiple areas. I’m actually thinking tiddlywiki will be better for work and dokuwiki for home? Maybe that’s just an excuse to use everything.
Also found out that prose has features for editing jekyll blogs…I should test this out…
It’s almost the 30th now…but I have managed to setup a reasonable site based on jekyll, the journal.txt generator. There’s a few things I still want to change with the style. Not sure if I want pagination or just limited number of posts. Also don’t like the link CSS for headlines. Need to figure out all my syntax stuff and how I add it into posts. Maybe setup prose as well. VS code is okay but not sure I like it that much for editing this file.
Once that’s done, I should do the static pages, and then consider if I want longer blog post section as well. Oh and a search bar.
I like editing this text file to add stuff. It’s very easy and I don’t need to remember much. Trying to test out github actions to automate building the posts from this file without me having to do it - means I can use other computers or web editors a lot easier without having to have ruby installed.
Like usual I didn’t read the manual, I just googled it and copied and pasted things and guessed what changed I have to make. When I push this when I’ll see if it really worked.
I’ve found a theme I quite like, although I could just build up this page from scratch. There’s not much I want:
All posts’ content on the main page
Paginated by maybe a week? 7 posts
A small menu somewhere with links to about, books, stuff, elsewhere, etc.
Maybe a feed, but I think that’s easy with including a setting.
An archives page of every day by month in a long list
The one thing I’m not sure about is ruby. I don’t know it. I don’t know jekyll. Jekyll doesn’t seem that hard but now that I seem to be going along the lines of making it all myself, should I really be using it? It’s nice with Github pages as I literally have to do nothing. This journal.txt gem is mostly what I want, although I’m tempted to make my own, so that I can change things slightly. I’m sure there must be similar scripts in python or something else that people have made. It would be quite a nice thing to make - although seems ridiculous to make my own blog generator…
The best sales this Black Friday are always VPS! Lowendbox and lowendtalk have the best deals. The problem is there’s so many it’s hard to know what to get. Often things are limited availability so you have to commit before seeing what else there is. Last few years I’ve bought from inception hosting, they’ve always been reliable and decent, so tempted to upgrade my current VPS to their latest €15/year VPS and be done with it. I’d get more storage and bandwidth for the same price. If I buy it now, it gives me a little bit of time to transfer my services across before the existing one shuts down.
I want to buy the Elder Scrolls: Skyrim for Nintendo Switch. It’s on sale but I don’t know why I want to. It’s a 10 year old game, I already own the game on PC, and it’s still not exactly cheap given it’s so old. If it sells, of course they’re going to try and get the most money they can for it. It does come with the DLCs and maybe it’s been improved since the original in terms of bugs and whatever. Like most gaming these days, I have fond memories of playing games but I actually find them boring to play. I know I shouldn’t buy it, yet I still keep thinking about it. I suppose once this week is over the sale will end and I’ll move on to something else.
Using macOS again
I’ve been critical of Apple and macOS in the past, and I’ve not used a Mac in years. That changed recently and now I have a Mac and am using macOS. The more I use it, the more I appreciate the details in it. Everything is unified in a much tighter and nicer way than Windows or Linux. I think GNOME or KDE on Linux does a decent job of it, or if you live entirely within emacs, but as a mainstream desktop OS, macOS is enjoyable. I do have some Windows/Linux-isms to unlearn or perhaps is macOS-isms to learn.
Finder is a bit odd - why can’t I press enter to open a directory? It actually is an outline, and pressing ⌘ Command + ↓ Down Arrow navigates to the level below. There’s probably other stuff but I’ve forgotten it or looked it up. Using ⌘+C/V for copy and paste is going to be the biggest complaint from the family if I setup the main computer to be the Mac. Yes they can learn, but they don’t use the computer enough to appreciate everything else to understand why they should learn.
Seems like it annoyed someone enough they wrote some software to fix these things!
The integration obviously goes a long way if you’re in the Apple ecosystem. So it makes so much sense to use the stock apps too. Which is something else I now appreciate. Stock apps - that are good and useful! Windows what do you offer? A few things but nowhere near as good. Of course Linux has the upper hand in terms of available software (of course much of it runs on other OSs too) but there’s not always the integration.
Anyway, I’m enjoying it and no, it’s not all open source, but whatever. 🤷🏼♂️
The new (to me) Mac mini arrived, 2012 i7 model. Also came with a 23” Apple Cinema Display. Which is cool but it gets boiling and only one input is annoying with multiple computers. Not sure what I’ll do with that. Coming back to macOS after ~7 years takes a bit of getting used to. There’s a lot to setup and I feel like a lot of tricks to learn.
I do like all these new Cosina Voigtländer vintage design lenses they’re coming out with. I feel like I should get at least one Leica lens but the quality, performance and price of the CVs it’s hard to justify Leica.
Had two rolls of Kentmere 400 developed. One at box speed, and one pushed two stops. At box speeds its quite a grainy film stock, I’ll have to dig out some HP5 photos to compare but seems similar to that. What was interesting was at ISO 1600 the grain appeared no worse! Certainly on casual viewing, probably there are some differences at 100%. So whilst I wasn’t that excited about it at 400, I’m very impressed with it at 1600. Could be a good B&W stock for the winter months when I’m even looking for 1600 whilst outside! These photos were from a few weeks ago where I was kicking myself from being poorly organised. However, even with the disorganisation the photos turned out really well. Although I’m not sure I’ve had a film photos that (as long as it was in focus) that I didn’t love.
I was plesantly surprised how well my blog.opml imported into dynalist. Node attributes don’t work, so link nodes and image nodes. Links which are inline are fine.
I’m always a sucker for new static site generators. This one,📜Scroll, I found today was interesting. Mostly the layout, of which an interesting demonstration is this trees site. A bigger site is here. Maybe it’s a little overwhelming…
What has been a more interesting discovery is Gitpod. It’s a container-based development platform, provisioning dev environments, even running code and previewing the output in the same window. Think I need to watch the screencast series to really understand what can be done. It appears you can get all the fun of VS Code (and even open the gitpod project in you local VS Code instance) and a server to run it on just from pre-pending gitpod.io/# to your Github (or Gitlab/bitbucket) URL.
This could be a nice way to manage a static site generator, or a personal plain text log system. It’s all on the same environment, you can access it anywhere with a browser - so no worrying about mobile devices, syncing between computers or any of that. Everything is backed up on github. VS Code does allow you to do all this already, however, you now get a server to run things on too. There’s so many things you can do with this.
Must be some limit to the free service…the pricing page gives you 50 hours/month.
If I’m honest, this is the office setup I aspire to.
Turns out using Apple’s dictation button on the keyboard, which is present in every app you type in, is a pretty nice way to add voice dictation to anything whatsoever! I like how it goes back and adjusts its transcript (to make it better/correct) when you speak more. It’s also interesting that sometimes I don’t correct it as it’s written what I’ve said slightly better
Oracle’s free VM tiers are nice, but I worry they are too good to be true and will disappear…like how google cloud’s free vms (well free ipv4) disappeared. You can still get a free VM from Google Cloud but no ipv4. Which isn’t *thatmuch of a big deal as you can use cloudflare’s proxy to get around it but it’s just another thing and that might not be useful for everything.
I remembered a really good article about something today that I know I’d “saved” for later. Now that I want to find it I don’t remember where I saved it. Or if I did in fact save it directly or save the route I took to find it. I think I found it via a comment on reddit, or maybe it was a comment on a blog…hmm…
A deal for a mATX motherboard almost sucked me into buying a new computer. Mine is old, 3rd gen Ivy Bridge CPU, but it still functions just fine. I still sort of want a Mac, but I also like Linux and value for money. For a while I was very pro-open source software, particularly Operating Systems. I still am but I still use Windows on my main machine. I have decided that when (if) we redo the kitchen, I’ll get an iMac as a family computer. It’s the ideal device for a family area.
Enjoyed some good fireworks this bonfire weekend. I think this year’s was our most efficient ever. Literally as we found ourselves a good spot to stand, the fireworks started.
I tried taking some photos in the dark with the X-T2, and pushed the ISO to 12,800. On the camera’s LCD they looked okay, less so on the monitor. I should print one out and see how it looks. Thought about the monochrom cameras being ideal for this situation. Then remembered the prices.
Kids don’t know how easy they have it these days with SSL from Let’s encrypt. One line sudo certbot --nginx -d your_domain and it does everything for you. Even edits your nginx config where it finds the domain to add all the SSL certs and recommended settings to secure a strong rating. I remember when startssl (I think) began offering one free SSL cert per year. You’d have to go through various hoops to prove yourself and then download the certification, upload it to your server and then figure out all the settings. There was a gist somewhere that had recommended settings and generating your own dhparam key and everything. Now just install nginx and certbot and away you go. Scores an A on SSL Labs.
If you’re after a new VPS this month then wait until black friday/cyber monday and have a look on lowendtalk, always lots of great deals (in fact too many). I’ve picked up great VPSs over the years for ~$15/year that have all run perfectly for my self-hosted sites. Inception hosting is one of my favourites, Virmach have been good too. I’m looking for a new photo gallery hosting site to upgrade my $4/yr OpenVZ VPS special 😅
Playing around with PhotoFloat again, and I do like static gen websites. It’s python2 but still makes a nice site. I currently use Piwigo for gallery website, which is a great piece of software, but has lots of features I don’t really care about. However, their hosted service with unlimited storage is nice for big photo collections.
I sold my Fujifilm X100F after not using it for a long time. Now I want to use it.
Surely the solution to this ”tools for thought” problem is emacs? It’s been looking for a good editor for ages. I’m not sure importing opml files into other tools really helps any more than just adding a search function to the rendered html. These other tools have a benefit due to the additional meta data the user adds - e.g. linking, tags, filters, queries, macros, etc. I suppose these unlinked references might be of use, but dumping a whole heap of data into the tool, then looking at all those unlinked references would be a bit overwhelming. If you want to replace its editor, then drummer needs to support the extra stuff. I love blogging with drummer but logseq’s editor has a lot of nice features I wish drummer had…Now I want to try logseq again and see where it’s got to…
I think that I shall never envision An op unlovely as division. An op whose answer must be guessed And then, through multiply, assessed; An op for which we dearly pay, In cycles wasted every day. Division code is often hairy; Long division’s downright scary. The proofs can overtax your brain, The ceiling and floor may drive you insane. Good code to divide takes a Knuthian hero, But even God can’t divide by zero!
Been watching some videos on Rocketbook, this seems like it could be what I’m after to help with my challenge. If nothing else it’s a cheap experiment. In fact, they offer printable templates to try out first - so free!
I (re)remembered the Advent of Code. That’ll be another good intention that I’ll never furfill.
The longevity of physical notebooks, and their content
The other day I was tidying my office. The clutter had slowly grown and it had become too annoying. I also had a bunch of things to do that I was putting off, like scanning some letters, storing boxes of (yet more) stuff I’d bought as well as just the tidy up itself. I had a stack of notebooks, a mix of Leuchturms, moleskins, random brands, but all about A5 size. I use these every day at work to track my weekly and daily to-dos, notes from meetings and general paper scratchpad for calcs or ideas. This stack probably went back to about 2018. What was I going to do with them?
I probably spent a good 20 minutes just flicking through the pages - this is something I love about physical notebooks. The ease of rediscovery of previous entries. I’ve not found a digital equivalent that’s quite so enjoyable. The “on this day” feature that many photo and journal apps have is nice but it’s just that day. There’s sometimes open a random entry or but the flicking through large time ranges and just having things jump out is much better.
* Although if I’m honest, whilst it’s nice to do, it tends not to yield anything other than a brief moment reminiscing about that particularly entry. It’s definitely not a good way to manage work or organise important information.
At work, I always have my notebook with me. It’s very quick to capture anything, I also think it’s perceived as less rude than taking out a laptop. Pretty much as everyone thinks you’re not paying attention whilst writing notes on it. Now of course I shouldn’t care what other people think, but sometimes it isn’t appropriate to take out a laptop. I also have a nice routine of weekly planning, and daily planning in my notebook. That’s worked well for me for several years now and I shouldn’t really change that.
The bulk of entries are transient, stuff that needed to be done that week, meetings about it, updates, which whilst important at the time, the information tends to become meaningless over time. However, within it are useful items - what did I accomplish, updates and records of long running projects, and good reference information that I’ve captured. It is this information that I’m wondering about.
I’ve managed to get into a good habit of summarising my weekly achievements and capturing that in a private Tiddlywiki file. The habit is not entirely mine as my boss asks for the updates each week so that makes me do it, I suppose the putting it into TW is mine. I think there’s more improvements I can do in TW to make the information more convenient but generally it’s good enough. I have to do this summary as part of my work, so it gets done.
The obvious solution to saving this other important information is to extract it from the notebooks and into something more permanent, and probably something digital for longer term storage and searching. Maybe Tiddlywiki as it’s a pretty nice application, very customisible and has a good long term viability. The problem is getting the data into it. It’s going to take more time to do it, and time is always limited. There’s probably a whole host of systems and methods and I’m sure I can spend many hours figuring out systems and tools and maybe even buying stuff. In fact, I’m sure I’ll convince myself that buying stuff is the right solution - ranging from eye-watering eink notebooks like reMarkable or Supernotes, to more reasonable rocketbooks. I’m just not sure if they really solve the problem or just give me the feeling that I’m solving it. I don’t really need to buy anything, but I suppose the arguement would be that if it saves me time then that’s the value it brings.
* Anyway I suppose thoughts and review of those products are beyond what I started off typing about.
Whilst I think about the future, I looked at all the notebooks and decided just to recycle them. They probably have useful information in them but it’s too late now.
Doesn’t this just make you want to run tmux and vim. what url?
You can also make projects (think Kanban board) on your Github profile, for sharing stuff you’re up to, or anything you want! It’s also integrated with Github workflows
Here’s a fun podcast episode from JS Party where they talk about the hardware and software they use. A lot of macs and vim! One Omnifocus user. Website has links to everything if you don’t want to listen. Brian (who works at Github) has amazing examples of Github automation and making the most of actions, Github’s GraphQL, and special repos. Interesting stuff to dig into. If you have a dotfiles repo, then codespaces (a VM with VS Code) will automatically pull it in!
46 years ago, HM The Queen officially inaugurates the massive Forties field in the North Sea.
I feel like iOS 15’s display of the number of Safari tabs I have open on my phone is a constant judgement of me.
Jailbreaking a kindle
Spent last night jailbreaking my older Kindle Paperwhite. This was kicked off by my desire to be able to pull out my highlights in a more automated manner on books that aren’t purchased from Amazon - which is quite a lot more me. I’d found KOReader online and this appeared to have some automation potential with Joplin syncing, Calibre syncing or even just a SSH server on it.
The jailbreaking is very easy, and you just follow a series of steps from the forums. It installs KUAL (Kindle Unified App Launcher), this adds a button/book that you can launch from the normal Amazon system. You keep all the same Amazon library, store, options as well which is nice. Seems like you have to be wary of OTA upgrades from Amazon which can break your jailbreak. There’s some workarounds but looks like newer firmware is making it harder and harder. My kindle is quite old and I don’t think it’ll get any more firmware updates. They recommend putting it into Airplane mode when you don’t need the internet.
* Airplane mode defeats my purpose of remotely pulling the highlights…
I played about with KO Reader last night, instead of reading, and it has lots of features and customisations which are nice. I probably won’t use many of them so not sure for me if it’s worth it.
* Being able to rotating to landscape is a nice feature though. Again, probably won’t use it.
I think I’m just going to use my Tiddlywiki to capture my notes, so the Joplin sync is probably too complex. Calibre might be a good way to go. I don’t currently have it on my server, but probably not hard. I’ve never invested much time into Calibre, other than to covert epubs to mobi for kindle. However, it would be a nice way to organise my books. If I took my kindle with me, then the news feature would be good too. I think I read somewhere I can sync highlights with Calibre and then look at them there. Not sure if that’s helpful or not. I can open it and copy and paste but it adds formatting I don’t want even when copied as plain text. I wonder if the server version gives access to the highlights.
* It does mean they’re all in one place. I’m sure someone else on the internet has solved this problem.
Then there’s SSH. Basically could script my server to download the highlights from the kindle automatically. Not sure if SSH is only running when the kindle is on or when asleep too. This is probably the best way if I’m going to automate syncing of highlights. However, I don’t just want a copy, process and file away system as I’ll never use it. Some interaction for reviewing the highlights, editing, picking, adding other notes etc. is important. It also risks spending more time automating a tiny part of it versus reviewing. I think it’s between this and Calibre.
I did end up quitting KO Reader and going back to normal kindle to keep reading my book (as the place is saved). KO Reader was just the first thing I tried and maybe it’s not what I want. I should have a look at the other plugins and see what else can be done.
The jailbreaking is a bit of a faff, and makes me think a Kobo might be better from the start. I used to jailbreak my iPhone back in the day and installed lots of things and always did the dance during iOS updates. When I had Android phones I’d install custom ROMs and root them. In the end it was too much hassle and I have better things to do.
I don’t want to lose sight of actually reading books.
I shouldn’t read non-fiction in bed before going to sleep. I read things and think this is amazing and I should do something about this. Maybe I highlight it on the kindle. Then I go to sleep and wake up and completely forget about it all. I don’t actually even get the benefits of kindle highlights as I don’t often buy books from Amazon. I buy them elsewhere (or they’re free) and I load them onto the kindle. So the highlights just sit in the text file on the device. Of course I could connect it to the computer, download the file and parse it (there’s probably many scripts online to do this for me already). THEN I could benefit from it. This is never going to happen. If I could ssh or remotely connect to the kindle then I could sync stuff. Perhaps that’s worth some research. Or maybe a different ebook reader is for me. OR maybe I should read non-fiction at another time, but then that conflicts with other stuff I do (like what? What do you do? Watch YouTube videos and browse used cameras+lenses that I don’t need).
The end of daylight savings. Where people with young kids get up at 5am. It’s still the “same time” as yesterday but when the clock says 5 it feels a lot earlier.
The Voigtlander Heliar Classic 50mm f/3.5 VM looks like a nice lens…
But in all seriousness, I’m not buying a new computer for Windows 11. Although I do *wantto buy a new computer. In fact I find it quite curious that I, as a computer aficionado, does actually only have pretty old computers. There’s a few of them about but the youngest is probably the T450s ThinkPad with 5th gen intel. Windows 11 might run on it, but it’s happily running GNU+Linux and my daughter uses it for her school work and so I don’t have to worry about it. The others are 3rd and 4th gen intel cpus. For the past 5-6 years I’ve been “buying a new computer”. The problem is nothing seems right, and I don’t want to buy something that I’ll be annoyed with. It is a little bit of *don’t let perfect is the enemy of goodbut my current computer isn’t actually that slow - they are probably “slow” (benchmarks puts the new Ryzens about 3x the multithreaded performance) but nothing that has become annoying. I suspect if I used a newer computer I’d notice the difference but right now I’m ignorant to it. I used to upgrade my computer frequently, I feel like back (~2000s) then it made a noticeable difference. I also used to play a lot of computer games and so a newer graphics card was always on the menu. I still play a few games but it’s getting less and less often. I’m to the point that I should just not bother with a “gaming” computer as all that happens is I buy a game and then never play it. I like the idea of computer games but I just have no interest anymore. Every so often a few friends will get something and we’ll play it together. That is a lot of fun but mostly as it’s us all chatting together. Sometimes I think about going Apple, although the SSD tax is eye watering, and then I think about all Linux (and very occasionally some maddness over OpenBSD), or just get a laptop and be done with all desktops and computers and make the office a reading and writing room. I can’t quite go without any computer or just iPad but sometimes I feel like the computer takes over too much of my life. But then I’m conflicted as I want to learn programming stuff…so yeah. I’ll just continue window shopping.
What’s a meta? Nothing, why what’s the meta with you?
The compute module 4 has opened up so many options for tiny NASs. The RPi 4 is decent, and think it would be fine for media transcoding - which is my most demanding task. I’d like to replace my current server with a small, SSD only one. Maybe the PI is the answer. Although probably a refurb Lenovo or Dell with a SATA riser and a bunch of SSDs just kicking about inside would be a lot faster, less ARM hassle and maybe even cheaper.
Get your REALMS in the latest auction! Website seems very buggy at the moment, so maybe worth waiting a day or two…I do like the art style and maybe now the “game” will actually have something to do.
Running GNU+Linux on a Chromebook looks a lot easier these days than it used to be. Given all I use are web apps, maybe a Chromebook would be a nice tool.
Ugh, I’m so behind on things…it’s been about 6 weeks since I updated my hledger journal, and 3 months since I added any photos to my family photo website. One is certainly a lot more interesting than the other.
I have 31 pages left in my Leuchtturm1917 notebook. Last week I used 9 pages, this week so far I’m on page 4. At best I can scrape my way to the start of December but not sure I’ll make it to Christmas. Would be nice to end the year in this notebook. Not that I ever go back and look in them, they sit on my desk but I start to forget what was in it and so don’t look. I always start off trying to use the index but often there are 30 page gaps or I just stop. I suppose I’m not making useful entries? I always want to be more organised but find I just get away with remembering things, googling, searching old emails, or flicking back though my current notebook. I have a very small tiddlywiki for work which does work well…when I remember to update it. Yesterday I was all about drummer for work but I’m not sure the tool is the issue. Thinking about an e-ink notebook is an (other vain?) attempt at trying to be more organised. The supernote one has options for tags and table of contents or something, but that’ll still rely on me using them when I write stuff down.
I also like octothorpes ###
Saw this nice looking recipe markup language, and remembered how I want to put all of Granny’s index card recipes onto the computer. Not sure this is what I want though, as I’d rather have a website that everyone can access. Think I have a few projects starred on Github, even Tiddlywiki would work for it, but the bulk of the work is transcribing the index cards into text. Would be nice to have them as plain text files that software can use to generate a site vs. a database.
Been thinking about how I can get data into Drummer, particularly data I write on my phone as Drummer on my phone is..unpleasant. However there are other good apps, like dynalist and Zavala, for writing on phone. I don’t think there’s a way to push data into Drummer, unless the token in the download files button works to upload, but I could use the schedule to load a file from somewhere. The only caveat is that it has to be publicly available. OR I just import it manually when I have something to add. But I’d still like the ability to push data in for future ideas.
Why will none of our iPads update to iPadOS 15…
I keep a private tiddlywiki for work, but I’m considering a private outline in Drummer. I think having everything viewable in a single page would be more useful than a wiki. Something like Notion or Airtable might be good for work but they’re strict about posting information outside work network and I also can’t be bothered with all the faff of those tools. One big list is my preferred option, as it usually just ends up being weekly summaries or results. The big ‘+’ button makes it nice to add a day.
Jack has wanted an improvement to downloading his drummer outlines, and I would like it too if I started using private outlines more. I’d noticed the download link had a unique URL which meant I could likely access it directly outside of Drummer. I decided this lunchtime to have a little look and it does work. Here’s my small python example but it’ll work with other languages too. Update: everyone else in the thread have posted great alternatives too. There’s one for everybody from Apple’s Siri, to serverless Zapier to unix server cron 🤩
So Obsidian has released mobile apps now. For free. You can use iCloud sync or pay for their sync or maybe git via Working Copy. A quick test of it (on iPad) and the mobile app is very impressive, looks to have most, if not all, the features of the desktop app. Has a nice toolbar that you can customise, gestures to open command palette. I think I like it more than the desktop app! If you just use Apple products, it’s a pretty decent setup. If you paid for Publish it would make for a great experience. I just don’t like the desktop app nor want to pay $192 / year for it. Probably if I looked someone has made a static html generator using your Obsidian notes. e.g. 1, 2
I’ve come back to thinking I want a reMarkable (or similar) tablet again. I love paper notebooks to flick back through for some information but once I move to a new book this is impossible. Also like the idea of annotating/note taking from a book at the same time. Have to actually research how good it really is first. Seems Supernote might be better. Will take this research line over to the wiki.
Ordered a copy (digital and physical) of Derek Siver’s new book “How to Live”. It sounded very interesting and thought provoking. Going to give the physical copy to my sister.
When I’m away, I’m always so good at updating our family journal in DayOne. It’s because I’m not going on my (non-Apple) computer and instead using my iPad or phone so the app is right there. I want to print out our journal from America I kept in it. Only did about 2 years but would be nice to have. Something happened to some of the photos - probably the transition between old and new DayOne apps - but I did take a backup ages ago so they’re on my computer. I just need to go through each one and find the right day…I do have the json or whatever from the export so hopefully the photos are referenced in that and then I can at least skip straight to the right day. Not sure how to do this on my iPad…perhaps a combo of looking up the day on the computer from the journal text and then just adding the picture in the app on iPad. It’s a bit of a chore but would make a good christmas present for my wife. I told myself it would be a good anniversary present but too late for that now. I think DayOne books are from USA, so really need to order it in next couple of weeks. Unless I export pdf and have it printed locally…anyway need to do the photos. I’m also wondering if I should (or need to) edit the text, this will then take a lot longer.
* The fun of film is fixing what you get for the next 24/36 shots. I suppose midway rewinds are possible but that’s just asking for trouble. The big choice is colour or black and white and then what ISO. There are other choices too but these are the main ones for me. ISO 400 is generally a good one for me as it let’s me just get away with f/1.4-f/2 with 1/60s indoors and outdoors it’s fine on overcast days. If it’s sunny then it would be nice to make use of (generally) finer grained ISO 200 or ISO 100 films. Gives the photos a smooth, crisp look. The problem is you don’t always know what you’re going to be shooting, how many frames you’ll use and how reliable the weather forecast is. A professional will mitigate these issues with multiple bodies or backs and probably take more photos than I would. This weekend was a particularly bad *series of unfortunate events*, and I was all over the place.
* I’ve been wanting to try some different black and white stocks, and had some cheap Kentmere 400. I’d also brought some Kodak ColorPlus (again cheap!) which is ISO 200. The B&W was loaded first before we left and it was a beautifully sunny day. I used a whole roll without resorting to pointless shots, which is always nice, and didn’t bother loading another as we were about to leave. To be organised, I decided to load the ISO 200 colour film that night ready for the next day. Oh, how grey and dull and dark is was, even outside! Trying to take pictures at 1/50s f/1.4, or trying 1/30s knowing that there’s going to be movement. Clearly a flash or other light source would be helpful but I don’t have one that works with my film camera. Down at f/1.4 is also pushing my focusing when everyone is running around. Oh how I wished I’d waited until the morning to load the film…there’s a lesson for me…I could’ve pushed the film but I’m not confident cheap ColorPlus would handle that very well. I managed to use up the roll, maybe something can be salvaged from it.
* So back to another roll of Kentmere for the next day. It was more mixed in weather, plus I knew I’d be taking some photos inside. I’d also brought my digital camera and it’s easy to forget that it can easily push ISO 6,400 before it looks bad and in B&W ISO 12,800 even looks nice. Around the house it was 2500-3000 ish. So when I switch back to ISO 400, I realise this is still going to be tricky. So I decided I’ll meter it for ISO **1600**! +2 stops. Am I mad? The cheap stock pushed two stops?! Only one way to find out…We shall see how that goes. However, at 1600 I now have plenty of latitude and can start closing that aperature down a bit. So everything’s great…
* We then decide to go out to Loch Lomond and the clouds part and the sun comes streaming out. Which is lovely for the kids and everyone to enjoy it, but for me I’m now at f/16 and topping out on shutter speed on my camera! The scenery is of course beautiful and the autumn colours aren’t quite the same in black and white! Oh well!
* On my digital camera, I was trying out some new fujifilm simulation settings - trying to get to just one colour and one black and white that I use 99% of the time to make it easier to decide - and the B&W one is way too bright on the highlights. Maybe I could’ve turned the exposure compensation down but it was only +1/3 or +2/3 at most. So now I either accept or delete a lot of those photos, or go and reprocess the raws.
Every year I think about doing NaNoWrite but always do nothing. This year I’m “too late to start thinking about it”…What I should do is just write crap for month because it’s better than doing nothing. I get too bogged down in process and not action.
All this messing about with Fuji film simulations is another reason why I appreciate film. There’s no menu or settings, just lens, film, aperture and shutter.
I think ColorPlus has a nicer case than Gold.
@Phil, we were one step away from finding your house and standing over you until you made a Drummer blog :) Welcome! It took me a few days to figure it out, and I still use my Tiddlywiki, and it’s somewhat random what goes where, but the wiki tends to be more chatty, least at the moment. I’m intrigued you find Drummer easier to use than Tiddlywiki on the phone. I can’t see anything when I open drummer on my phone, I turn it landscape but it’s all overflowing, but TW fits to the screen.
Took the boys for the their haircuts. The barber was a very strict Italian man who kept them sitting up straight the whole time. I enjoyed it.
Getting in the Hallowe’en mood with pumpkins, biscuits and decorations.
Had to cut the lawn, although it’s been raining for weeks and it’s still wet, but I did it anyway. I usually listen to talkpython.fm podcast but the most recent ones looked boring from my perspective. So I thought I’d search for Dave Winer. I’d not really heard of him until I somehow got to know about Drummer (most likely via Jack). I found this one from Nov 2020. It’s fascinating to listen to the early days of the internet, and generally any of Dave’s stories from the early days of tech and silicon valley (including meeting with Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and others back in the early days). It was also during peak COVID lockdown.
I think it’s time I worked out my own ones. It’s only been 4 years of using Fuji and I’m yet to do it. Mostly just taken ones from online, such as Fujix weekly’s, or other random places. Right now I have two that I use a lot, and two others that I occasionally use but then like them when I remember. The other 3 are just entries I have to jog over to get to what I want. I should also order them in how I want to use them. E.g. top is favourite colour, then favourite B&W, and last another favourite (as my custom button means I can press it then up or down to get to another custom settings).
The tethered FujiFilm X raw studio should be useful for this but requiring tethering is a bit of a pain. Last time I tried it got upset and stopped working or something equally frustrating. It does help me get the image on the big screen so I can see if Shadows needs another -1 or whatever.
Classic chrome is generally my favourite colour simulation, although sometimes it’s a little grungy for family photos. The classic neg in the newer camera models looks a bit nicer but I’m not buying a newer model for a film simulation. The newer models do offer more customisation though…I’ll wait for the X-T5/6 to be released then maybe it’ll be time to get the X-T3 (assuming it has what I’m looking for). Acros is by far my favourite black and white.
Trying out 27mm (eq.)
The lens focuses fast enough for me and my kids. Yes, it’s not the fastest lens but I’m not getting annoyed with it. It is my first day with it but enjoying it inside and outside.
Wondering if I should subscribe to smugmug or flickr or none…I wish Apple did more with Photostream web albums.
Film data imprinting
Several cameras offer the ability to imprint data on the film, such as time, date, but more interestingly is shutter speed and aperture. Most do it via a special back. I don’t want it on the photo (and I don’t want date/time) but between them.
The tricky part is finding available backs.
Minolta Dynax/Maxxum 7 has a data recorder on the camera. So no imprinting but saved for later retrieval via the menus. I guess that’s something, but I’d have to remember to write it out. Fortunately it saves 7 films so in my typical batch of 3-4 for development should be fine.
I never use twitter (I did back in 2010 or something but then deleted my account after a few years). Sometimes I think I’m missing out but I don’t care.
* I ordered 2x B&W film development and scanning from [Analogue Wonderland](https://analoguewonderland.co.uk/collections/film-developing). They had a 20% off promo that ended last night. Even with the promo filmdev is cheaper for C-41.
* If I had my own scanner then it might be worthwhile as you can do £6 development then scan myself, and that includes postage.
* Eventually I’ll develop my own black and white. Not sure about colour.
* Also started browsing black and white film stocks….there’s quite a lot which could be fun.
Sometimes I think about going all in with Apple: Macs, iPads, iCloud, Watch, Apple One subscription, AppleTV. Replace everything in the house with Apple. Think it would all work well but a lot of eggs in one very expensive basket.
Still not sure where this site fits. It definitely doesn’t take over Tiddlywiki. It might take over my blog, but it’s a different type of blogging. It’s more like the short posts I do on the blog vs. the long ones. However, this blog would most likely be much more active that my current one. I could also capture the long posts that I want categorised in the wiki. OR I could keep both TW and the blog and add this as another blogging site. I’m thinking as my home domain, alexjj.com. That way I can still link to the blog for longer stuff I want to add (which I should also just make copies of in the wiki - or in fact draft them in the wiki) and then have the wiki for random gibbering, plus wiki stuff and then this as a slightly more refined blog/home page. I might tweak the index.html to have “an about” at the top. It’s quite the all-in mode but this is a much better static gen site than I used to have and whilst I do like my novelty css alexjj.com landing page, it’s a little pointless. hmm have to think about it some more.
No new mac mini. Possibly good for me as, if I do buy one, I’ll find a decent deal on the existing….unless I want 16GB RAM…
Decided (for now) instead of a GRiii(x), I should get a 18mm lens for Fuji. The f/1.4 is nice but pricey and big, so sprung for the older 18mm f/2. It’s tiny, light and has a cool square metal lens hood (that makes your photos look better). It gets a lot of hate online but most likely (a) it’s fine, (b) I won’t be able to tell. It’ll be my Q2 😅
Fuji Portrait Lens
* I’m interested in also getting the 60mm f/2.4 macro lens too. Another (according to the internet) a runt of the Fuji litter. I don’t have anything fast in the range 50-90mm on APS-C. The macro feature tempts me for film scanning. The alternatives are the 50mm f/2, nice little lens, 56mm f/1.2, the classic portrait lens and that f/1.2 but big, the 90mm f/2, appears to be the “best” lens ever but even bigger, then 80mm macro, supposedly the best macro but also massive.
* Oh and the 50mm f/1.0 🤑
* Whilst I want the 56mm, I’m not sure I’d really use it that much, and probably better getting the 50mm f/2 for speed, weight and WR. Of course the 56mm is supposed to have *character*. The 60mm is virtually same weight as 50mm f/2 and will have more compression with a bit longer plus, again, the macro function.
It was funny reading Dave describe his perfect app that he wants. I feel like I’m pretty much there with Tiddlywiki hosted on github pages (or a self hosted nodejs would work). It’s not a native app, it’s a web app but it works perfectly on phone and tablet.
The Ricoh GR iii is £750 new. GRiiix is £900 new. £150 for 40mm vs 28mm.
Drummer Pros
This site is much more convenient for entering text throughout the day, and also just for general rearrangement of text. Images are a little more time consuming to setup, bit like how TW was before that uploader plugin, so not a huge deal. Plus most of the time I don’t bother with images. Although I do like the little right aligned ones people drop in.
It’s nice having other outliner files just here for private or draft stuff too. Or even just commenting out sections for later if I don’t finish them in time.
There’s probably a lot more to the “environment” that I’ve not realised yet.
When I was looking for a static generator and a web based editor system, this is what I was looking for.
I like the linklog, doesn’t need explanation.
Tiddlywiki Pros
Seamless transition between journal entries and a wiki.
There’s more scope to join things together over time
Search built in on the website
Drummer’s search is on the editor not the website.
Entirely self-hosted and git managed
Mature, and big community with lots of support/plugins etc.
Not that I use many but things like uploader plugin are community developed
The text editing is more straightforward, but maybe I’ve just not got used to drummer yet.
I quite like a tiddler a day, although outliner mode of drummer means I can close off days/months easily.
I can use it quite easily on my phone. Drummer is not great on my phone.
Conclusion
I’m not sure today. It can’t replace the wiki but how should I use them together. Duplicate info? TW is just for me and drummer is for the world (so more polished?) Drummer could take the place of my blog, and maybe that’s the best thing.
So then where should it sit in my the domain structure?
Decisions on web logging
* [Jack](https://rudimentarylathe.org/2021/10/17.html#a101131) - I think the ordering during a day only matters if you update yourself. e.g. trying to fix x at 10am. 6 hours later “I found the solution”. Then in time order makes more sense. Of course with an outliner style (vs. TW) you can always just do a new level underneath. Personally speaking, I like the idea of it being in the order of the day for when I go back and look at it and remember that day. I suppose it’s easy to do with just reordering levels.
* Writing this makes me wonder if a “conversation” section of the day makes sense - bit like how you started tagging things with conversation.
I wanted to sit outside this evening and write in the wiki but it’s too cold. It’s nice to get away from the computer. I probably have some bad habits that are triggered by sitting down at the computer - YouTube videos, general time wasting. Sitting somewhere else helps break them.
Again with another evening (yesterday) of faffing with Hugo but not actually getting anywhere. I also had a detour into ikiwiki, wondering if I should just use that. I have an instance of it setup mostly for when I think about using it I can switch to it and just mess about with it. I get hung up on tiny details, imagining scenarios (that’ll probably never happen) which xyz theme or config can’t solve. When I went to bed I thought about binning everything except this wiki.
Well I finally made a decision….My “normal” blog is now officially on ikiwiki.
Spent way too long looking at Hugo Themes yesterday evening. Still haven’t picked. Should just go for a regular one then can always come back later for the funny ones. Got distracted by the fact our flights during the holidays got cancelled by the airline and finding nothing else comparable in price or convenience ☹️
The Lime one light meter that showed up in NI got special delivered to me today…except no one was in and now that it’s special del (compensation from Royal Mail) it needs signing. Rescheduled, so we’ll try again.
In my attempt to be quick (lazy) I tried to just make use of the forestry.io starter packs. i.e. one click clone and setup on forestry. I wanted to stick with Hugo just in case I want to tweak later, and whilst a couple of themes looked fine (nothing exciting but good enough) they ended up having weird features that were annoying and would take too much effort to deal with. So rather than spending time fixing a theme I’m not that excited about, I might as well setup one with a theme I do like and then configure forestry.io myself. I’m hoping I can copy the config across and it’ll be good enough. In fact I’m going to test just changing the theme git repo and seeing if it all magically works…
However, now I have to find a theme…🤔 ugh I get sucked into themes with a million features…
I’ve gone full circle and am back on static gen Hugo blog. I’m using forestry.io though to interact with it. I just used one of their templates to start as I was always too lazy to configure it with my own blog. I’m not loving the theme but it’s fine for now. One thing I found, which is overcoming one of the biggest blockers I had to a static gen site, is that if I upload media via iOS I can choose a size and iOS will compress it! So now I can upload more sensibly sized images without having to mess about compressing it. As I can access Files app and therefore server, I can access all my photos and then have iOS compress them. This is pretty nice.
Need to finish off configuring the site then will just get on and write stuff vs. Endless motion and zero action.
I was wondering where my [Hedeco Lime One] was, particularly as the tracking hadn’t updated all week. I even emailed the seller to ask if other UK orders showed similar minimal tracking info. Typically the tracking updated after I emailed him, which was good to see….except it had gone to Northern Ireland…oh well glad it’s not lost.
Phil describes his perfect camera.. Well I presume so, it could just be the camera he wants //next//. Not sure you can get a viewfinder and the size of a Ricoh? I think, and sort of from experience, that if you just have one camera, then a X100T/F/V is the way to go. If it’s a camera to compliment others you have, then I think it’s good to find cameras that have advantages for situations. E.g. Ricoh for compactness, X-T2/3/4 for ICL, D500 and 200-500mm for birding, Hasselblad Data Camera for visits to the moon.
My dad visited today to see us and play with the kids. The 23mm f/1.4 is perfect for indoors. I like the 23mm length and it was cloudy/rainy so poor light inside the house, so the 1.4 keeps the ISO down. Plus 1.4 on a 23mm still often gets enough in focus. However, then playing outside in the garden the 35mm f/2 or the 16-80 f/4 are my favourite picks. I was also playing football etc. So kept to the prime for compactness and weight. I have wondered about the 50mm f/2, just to get a bit tighter shots, although then more likely to be individual shots vs. group - which is often when the 16-80 is nice. Having said that, I sometimes find the 16-80 photos to be a bit lack lustre. Maybe the shots are boring and I suffer from the infinite digital photos capacity. I’m not sure exactly what it is, but I find after trips out with the 16-80, very few photos are appealing. Compared to the 23mm, which I pretty much love every photo from it. I suppose with the 23mm, I get closer to everyone, so they make up more of the frame. Plus I always use it indoors, so it tends to be f/1.4-f/2.8 so I get more isolation. I should go through my photos with the 16-80 and take a look at them and at the focal length I used and see what I think then.
Posted the X100F off for repairs. I’m now back wondering about the GRIII (non x) or GRII. A little from price standpoint but also as the 18mm lens might actually be more interesting to use.
Been reading/watching various reviews of the Ricoh GR3x. The thing about the 18mm lens version is that you don’t really need to look to frame things. Whilst you do have the LCD, you can shoot from the hip and get away with it. I think that becomes tricky at longer focal lengths. 28mm isn’t that much longer so probably be fine. I think I’ve become a viewfinder snob. Thinking “I don’t want to look like an idiot using the screen / people won’t take me seriously / etc.”.
Let me remind myself:
'’no one cares’’
I spend a lot of time stressing about blogs and websites etc. Maybe I should just not bother. Other than this wiki, which is easy going and simple to look after.
I started on the export script for node.js version to build a blog and a public wiki. I think the blog might take longer to get the formatting suitable. I would also like having the backups of this as individual tiddlers, makes git history more useful.
Trying hard not to buy the Ricoh GR //before// I get the X100F repaired and sold. Also have a nagging feeling that I should keep the X100F as well, rather than exchanging. It has nice features over the GR, like flash (vs. GR 3), and ND filter and a viewfinder…Maybe confirmation bias….but maybe I should get the GR before I sell the X100F, to check that it’s what I want. 😂 I’ll at least wait until the shipping material arrives to send the Fuji back for repairs.
Weather has been lovely these past few days. Sat out in the garden in the evening with the iPad and writing this or reading stuff online and a cup of tea. I debated about an ipad for so long but it’s been a good tool to use. The Smart Keyboard thing is nice and makes it more effective for me. Was ideal for going on holiday, home working, and being outside. I’ve always been a heavy desktop user, then a light laptop user so the idea of an ipad seemed stupid to me. However, the mobile OS, battery life and decent apps are what sets it apart from a laptop. There’s still a few things I miss from a regular OS but everything else makes up for it.
One thing that has been annoying recently, is Files app refusal to write to a samba share. Perhaps I’ve not got something configured correctly but I’m sure it used to work fine and I’ve not changed my samba config in over 10 years. It might be it doesn’t like guest users but it’s a pain when trying to do any photo management/editing/printing workflow. I like downloading and opening the scans of film on the ipad, look through, maybe print one or two and then back up to the server. As a workaround I end up using a web based files application I have running on the server for accessing files remotely. Seems dumb, but it’s less time than trying to find out why Files app doesn’t work. Probably if I paid for some cloud service it would be easier but I already have my own…ZFS RAIDZ1 and my mate’s computer at his house (also ZFS RAIDZ1).
I was thinking about getting a photo box (a fancy shoe box I suppose) and printing out a decent number of photos to stash in that. Mostly to then put in a cupboard and look forward to when the kids find it and go through old pictures of us.
My nanna used to use Tripleprint to develop and print her photos. They’d print off 6x4s but also two 2x1(?) and she’d cut off one of the little ones and give them to me. I’d have a big box of them from my time at my grandparents house and occasionally come across it and look through it. As a kid I liked that they were small. They weren’t very convenient for keeping though. Think I tried to put 4 in a photo album sleeve but was awkward and they kept moving about.
Jack Baty shared this, and I’m really glad he did as I never knew that before. tl;dr comic sans is one of the best fonts for dyslexia as it has very few repeated shapes between letters so they are more distinct. Explains why schools always use it.
The sofa that was about 3 miles from our house in a van last Sunday has now been lost. They’re going to build a new one and it’ll be 3 months wait. 🤦 I guess they’ll refund the money until then, which is fine as the car had lots of things that needed repairing.
When I had the Nikon DSLR I was attracted to mirrorless for its small size. Now I want the Ricoh GR for its small size…as the mirrorless is “too big”. I do find the mirrorless size advantage a bit squiffy as whilst the bodies are generally smaller the lenses are still honking great tubes. Yes, there are pancake and small lenses but if you need some speed then you pay in size. (Fuji f/2s are pretty small I guess…) Now I do like the EVFs of mirrorless, if you’re going to use digital, why not take //full// advantage of it. I’ve used the OVF on my X100F so few times, generally when the battery is really low and I don’t have any other charge. I don’t want to do processing on the computer (or even on the camera) so I’d rather WYSIWYG it: EVF, film sim, and exposure comp dial.
I enjoyed my Nikon DSLRs, the D40 was my first and I learnt so much with it. I made a lot of great (to me) shots with it, and I couldn’t afford too much back then. I sold my Magic: The Gathering collection to buy it (probably that’s worth more now but whatever) and picked it up used from eBay. I got the 35 mm f/1.8 used from a computer forum and that was my kit for a couple of years. I did get a 55-200mm but didn’t take to it that much. I really wanted the 18-200mm super zoom but it was too expensive and the D40 was a bit small for it really. I think the D40 only had 3 focus points, but I always used the centre one and recomposed. When I upgraded to the D7000 and eventually the D7200, I found all the focus points confusing the use and for a long time just set it with the single point. I read up on it some more and eventually made use of the other AF systems. I sold the D40 on and got a D7000, and also picked up the a 3rd party ultrawide, 11-16mm I think it was, and then the 18-200mm. It was perfect on the D7000, balanced well and took some lovely shots with it. Portrait of my daughter is on the wall in front of me now. The D7200 was probably the perfect model in the 7000 series but its larger density sensor meant all the flaws of the 18-200 were much too visible and the lens was ruined. I, eventually, picked up the X100F when it came out and sold my Nikon cameras. A few months later I regretted it and bought a D7200 back again, but after using the Fuji I struggled to go back to the enormous DSLR and eventually just sold it again.
At the time of looking for the X100F, I’d debated about the X-Pro 2 and the X-T2, but they were expensive! Plus lenses. Plus I wanted something small and light to take when we travelled back home with everyone, and the X100F won the decision. Last year I bought the X-T2, was a bargain, and has been great to use. Got the 35mm f/2, the 23mm f/1.4 (the indoor favourite) and the cheapo 50-230mm.
Maybe I should stop complaining about blogging and use micro.blog (that I’ve paid for) and let it be the convenience I’m looking for. Plus it should be auto backing up to Github, and any “precious” images I can just download from it and put in the wiki pre-compressed. I’ll leave the forums as they’re sort of fun but likely no-one else will join, or say anything. I should put a bit of effort into customising micro.blog. Then when the annual sub is due I’ll go through the whole mental anguish stuff about my non-existent blog’s home. Plus maybe buy then I’ll have bought a mac and the desktop app will make it even more convenient just to stick with µblog.
Paid £155 for Fujifilm to fix my X100F. Tried seeing if I could fix the SD slot myself but I think some pins or springs in it have somehow got bent and it won’t lock. Didn’t really want to spend that but the camera is useless otherwise. Just means I’ve now spent £310 on repairs on it…
For DSLR scanning this is an alternative to the Essential film holder. It includes 35mm, 120 and 4x5, which is appealing, and a light box. The EFH is just 35mm and 120 and no light source, but also cheaper at £90 vs $300 (£220).
Still waiting for a notification that the cheap copy stand I saw is back in stock.
I’ve started wondering if I should pay for Flickr Pro. I’m not entirely sure why, it’s not for backing up photos, but it seems like the only photosharing website that I can stand. Although I’m not that bothered about sharing my photos.
Spent a while last night tweaking the forums. I do like discourse as a piece of software. Just still not quite sure it’s what I want in general. Although I sometimes think I invent scenarios in my head that I’m trying to address…probably many of them aren’t real or are ever going to be. I guess I’ll just keep it as if I do revert to a more traditional blog, ie get Ghost setup, I can use it as a comments backend. Although maybe people don’t like that as there’s no quick comment option.
I looked at Wordpress and decided I didn’t like it….maybe I was too premature…I now don’t like Ghost, so removing it and might as well try out Wordpress first…this theme looks nice. Well, I installed Wordpress.
Interestingly, Wordpress and Ghost both suffer handling image uploads on this free Oracle VPS. Perhaps a setting somewhere but wordpress is php and ghost nodejs It was nginx. What is even more interesting is that Discourses seems to handle it just fine as I think they compress it client side before uploading.
All this blogging] stuff is starting to clog up the dailies.
I should setup SSO for google and ~GitHub etc tonight for Discourse site. Saves some hassle if people do want to comment 😉. //Update// I’ve added Github and Twitter. Github was by far the easiest, Twitter was okay. Google seems incredibly complicated just for OAuth, so I’m skipping that. I don’t use Facebook and I didn’t think Discord was that popular although I might add it if it’s easy.
I’m not 100% convinced it’s the right thing to do. It does open up the interesting dimension of have blog post threads, some story over time but linked much more visibly and immediately than just hyperlinks or tags etc.
I have gone to a lot of lengths to find a blogging platform, as I’ve decided static gens have too much potential to overcome before I write anything, yet I’ve not tried the most obvious one of all…Wordpress.
I do wonder if by dividing my time between this site and the forums/blog will I write less than if I just consolidate everything into one site. THIS site is clearly a wiki, so all wiki type stuff should go here. However, I’m wondering if the chat box (I don’t know what I’m calling that site) might be better for daily waffling. Just of course linking to wiki content within a daily journal note is more hassle as moving between sites.
Oh no…I think I’m creating my equivalent of Jack Baty/Phil Nunnally’s Roam vs. Org vs. xyz … (also Jack’s page has disappeared…perhaps the github saver borked at some point)
I have just realised that having auth and groups etc. on the forum means I can add Private stuff on it and not worry.
My makeshift blogging platform built on Discourse is up! Basics are sorted out but I think still some more tweaking to do but for now I’ll leave it and see how I get on.
Discourse is installed. Email setup was a bit of a pain as seems the first email to setup has a hardcoded address and that’s not the one you put in the settings… It’s a bit of a memory hog, my poor 1 GB VPS is sat at 707 MB, and after a fresh boot it ends up using ~50MB of swap. Perhaps with usage it doesn’t go up much. They say 1GB is fine for a small community so we’ll see. Have to wade through all the settings and have a look at some themes and plugins next. No doubt to go through all this then throw it away and just use another tiddlywiki as a blog 😅
The sofa that never showed on Sunday has now gone missing and “can’t be found” so won’t be being delivered tomorrow. Perhaps it fell down the back of another sofa. Obviously the database and the real location don’t match so no-one has any idea where it is. The beanbag arrangement continues.
I enjoy having small conversations via micro.blog, such as this:
@alexjj It is indeed weird to earnestly shop for an old digital camera. For me, the lower cost is a driver, and I’ve also found that 16 MP is my favorite sensor resolution. Going higher can result in images that are to me sometimes too clean.
But I don’t enjoy scrolling through the feed. It’s just parts of conversations that I then have to open up to see the context of. Perhaps I’m doing it wrong but it’s too time consuming. I bought a year of it so time to consider.
Still keep eyeing used 90mm Tele-Elmarit-M (that’s f/2.8). It’s basically the same price as a Fuji 56mm. They’re virtually equivalent lengths but I feel like I should probably get the Fuji first as being digital I’d use it more. However, there aren’t many of these 90s and I like the lightness of it. I could get a M to fuji mount adapter, but I usually want autofocus if I’m taking the digital camera.
The Lime One has shipped…hope I don’t get stung on import charges or whatever due to Brexit. Thanks Boris.
Meant to have a new sofa arrive yesterday, we watched the truck drive all round the city on their website until 4pm, when we get a text message saying the driver is too tired now. AND then they make us call to reschedule because they couldn’t possibly come the next day… Unsurprisingly they didn’t care. I don’t much either but we moved the old sofa out already.
I don’t like the stock Ghost themes. They’re all so “cards” and compartments of text, big banner pictures and scrolly junk. There’s no awesome ghost repo…how am I meant to find anything…I just like the Ghost admin. Looks like I can use it with its API to staticgens like gatsby…bleh. I wanted ease. Maybe I just haven’t found the right settings page or something to turn off all the crap on my site. Maybe I should just bin it altogether.
Had a random though of using Discourses as a blog. Least the comments are built in. Wow this site is Discourse!
Finished The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson last night. An epic 1200~ page book that’s part of the Stormlight archive.
Does anyone still use a tea cozy?
Eyeing a Leica 90mm f/2.8 tele-elmarit-m. It’s not //too// expensive…there’s not many about and finding historical prices is tricky. That would be a good website, historical prices of used stuff. I can look at eBay sold listings, but they always seem to be “just last week this thing sold for 50% of price the current ones are listed for”. usedlens.co.uk is a good site to find currently for sale items but there’s no historical prices.
I should probably just keep them but thinking about selling the Minolta film SLRs and lenses. They didn’t cost me much so maybe just keep them. Have a hard time keeping things I don’t use as I’ve always sold on things to pay for new items. Mainly digital cameras and lenses and computer parts. Also want to sell some things as I’ve spent a lot recently! Perhaps I can sell some old switch games or something…
Just ordered a Hedeco Lime One lightmeter. My extent of sunny 16 ends with “it’s not full sunlight, now what?”, and “surely f/11 is too much”, and I bring out my phone for the lightmeter app. This is annoying and distracting. I could spend £1000 and buy a M6 or spend £2-3k on a MP or swap the M2 for M5, or save money and buy something else 😅. Instead, I’m going to buy a hot-shoe light meter. It does distract from the look of the camera but this one seems not to obtrusive and functionally excellent. The shop only opened Friday and was hidden for early subscribers only. However, you can just look at past emails on the newsletter to see the password! The shop reported stock so I don’t think anyone has missed out by me “jumping” the queue.
The Ghost CLI tool makes it incredibly simple to install. Just need to figure out themes and config items. Probably just pick one of the free ones from ghost’s website as otherwise too much faffing will ensue. Unless they’re too “bloaty” and too many sections and social media sharing etc. The magazine ones might be good, less typical styles.
I like the photography themes. They probably don’t fit with my blog content but tempting to make another site.
The lawn desperately needs cut, so maybe not much time to fiddle about with Ghost.
Thinking about my X100F (which needs repairs…again), once I get it fixed I’ll sell it. Wondering if I need to replace it with something or just live with only the X-T2. Feels a little vulnerable just having one digital camera, and even if not because of reliability, then fresh motivation by having a little change. I could get the 27 or 18mm pancake lenses if I need a small setup. Which I actually do when we travel to France for 3 weeks with one checked bag for a family of 6 😅. When the kids get older it’ll be easier to travel with more camera stuff. I was also thinking about having a B&W digital camera. I like a lot of my digital B&W but rarely switch to it, and too lazy to process raws later to see B&W. (As before there’s also film simulation bracketing but then I’d have even more photos to process and decide). The X100F’s replacement could function in both these roles, and revert to colour when its the only camera I have for a trip away. There only really seems like two options though: The X100V or the [[Ricoh GR
Ricoh GR]]. I’m tempted by the Ricoh just for something completely different and it is even smaller! The Fuji is 73% heavier and 61% thicker! That is a lot. If I were doing a primarily film photography trip away, adding the Ricoh would be minimal but handy. Not sure about the 18mm though. I like 23mm on crop sensors, enough to get things in frame inside but not too wide when outdoors that you have to be really close else the subject gets lost in the surroundings. OR maybe I just use my phone like everyone else does.
I’ve been thinking about my blog (in a state of half not finished), how I’ve been using this site and then words of wisdom from 4 years ago. I used to sneer at Wordpress. Its php language, its reliance on a database, and my view of its bloat. I was missing the point though. Maybe VS Code in github with a preview extension and split screen could achieve everything (although images still need messing about it with) but the reduced friction to get writing…that’s what my focus should be.
Time for a late night install of Ghost, on another free Oracle VM. 😅
Any time you’re ill every says it must be COVID. I guess probabilistically, that’s true but it’s still annoying. Least I get to work at home again for a good reason. My work desk has 2x24” monitors. They are nice monitors, Dell with USB-C hub and daisy chaining and virtually no bezels, but they seem oh so small compared to my home 32” 2560x1440 monitor!
I most likely have strong confirmation bias about how my film photos are much better than digital. I wish it wasn’t quite so expensive though. Ordered 3x gold, 2x colorplus (it’ll be first time with that) and 2x Kentmere 400 (also first time with that). Basically, the cheapest you can possible get. Fomo is about 50p a roll cheaper, but you always buy the second cheapest wine. So 252 shots, £39.50 (inc. postage) means 15.7p a shot. C41 developing is £6/roll plus postage (but can group them), B&W £10. So assuming I post them all together, it’s another 19.8p/shot in developing. 35.5p/shot total. If all the photos I took this year were on film, I’d have spent £980. This is all a bit silly given my last camera. I keep talking about home developing but have done nothing about it so far. The two kentmeres were meant to encourage me to start. Seeing developing (and scanning) makes up almost 56% of the cost is also another encouragement. It’s not about the money, I just like working it out.
Realistically, I’m going to get through about a roll per week MAX. Typically more like 2-3 for some event/visit/trip which is probably once a month over the year. So maybe £460 a year. Not sure what home developing costs look like on a consumables basis. Online suggests about £1.50-£2 a roll for B&W, so 36 B&W rolls of Kentmere a year, plus darkroom basics and a scanner (think used flatbed or used 35mm film scanner is cheaper than DLSR) then that’s maybe £500 in year 1 but then only £240 in year 2.
All the fun of home developing…priceless…and this is before all the pushing and pulling.
Then I’ll want to do large format and drop £50 on two frames or whatever.
Realised I hadn’t uploaded several weeks worth of photos to my website, so started to do so. But I’m still questioning it’s value. Partially as I upload quite a lot of photos, and who’s going to look at them all. I was trying to minimise the number of albums but perhaps I should have many small albums vs few larger ones. Maybe I need to revisit my Photo Management thoughts. One thing that struck me was that my wife said she hadn’t seen any from the summer. I used to point Plex at the old static photo site folders and so when she’d turn on the TV they’d pop up there and have a look through them. I do like them on the TV. Maybe I just need to sort that out again, although it duplicates photos, unless I cull an album to the best ones and discard the fine but boring ones. I do delete terrible ones, out of focus or the kids firing off one hundred photos of their shoes, but there are lots I keep (especially digital) which never go on a website or in a photo book. Why do I keep them? Perhaps someone else will like them…although they only get looked at twice - once when I add them and once when my wife makes the photo books. Now I need to look at the old photo site and see what I used to do.
We I take so many photos, maybe I do need to be more ruthless.
huh…Literally whilst I was using this today’s journal note has disappeared…I dug it out of github, although single page in git is painful. Count 3 of github saver woes.
Part way through my decompessing Meditations into individual tiddlers - via python not hand. I have a json of with tiddlers per book but I want per paragraph. That way I can transclude one per journal and take time to consider it, maybe reflect on it and favourite any good ones. I’m sure all that can be automated in TW but I might just do the manual transclusion. [[Stoicism]] resonates with my natural disposition so I enjoy reading about it. I also like ancient Rome and Greece so it’s a good combo.
Should have a look through the TW dynalist to see if there are any good navigation ideas. I want to keep it simple. Added [favourites(http://favorites.tiddlyspot.com/) for now. I like this but not sure if I want to use it. Also the [Ghostwriter theme
https://ibnishak.github.io/ghostwriter/]] looks interesting as a blog theme… Best make a Tiddlywiki Hacks page else I’ll lose this.
Digging through my oldest wiki/notes backups and keeping the best parts.
[Get ready for HAUNT 2!(https://aavegotchi.medium.com/the-ultimate-guide-to-aavegotchi-haunt-2-8bd086f9026c) Best I can hope for is to make 10% on my GHST then win a portal with raffle tickets. Just not sure how many to use if Realms are coming along. These portals are going to be 800 GHST minimum - that’s ‘‘$1700’’, which is retarded. Although in the scale of NFTs it’s a penny in the street. There are so many items going to be listed…25,944..transactions are going to timeout and all sorts of nonsense. Best tactic is to go all in on a godlike the instant it opens…but so will 1000s of others…
Might try Photonix or librephotos next. From this list. Also this, from the comments. It’s interesting they claim Photoprism has the most accurate object recognition, because in my library it’s quite poor. It does get a lot right but there’s also a lot wrong.
hmm…I’m sure there were other pages on here that I wrote last night but seems they didn’t save…Also my phone browser forgot my github key so it wouldn’t save…Github saver being annoying again…
I could do with some organisation on this site. I was using recents but now I’m uploading a lot of things it gets messy.
Took the M2 out with me this afternoon. Don’t have much 35mm film left, so it was some random B&W. If I had some home developing equipment and chemicals I would’ve finished off the roll and developed and scanned it tonight to see the pictures. Perhaps ironic that I want to see my photos immediately yet I took the film camera with me… Filmdev is cheap to develop and scan C41. Not sure I can beat that in terms of time, effort and reliability. However, B&W maybe more worthwhile, at least for fun and to stop me just picking XP2.
I do like B&W photos, but rarely take them with digital. Although have come across some nice ones from the Fuji X-T2 and Acros. Wondered about a B&W only digital camera, e.g. an old X-T20. But I could just do film simulation bracketing, but that seems to defeat the intent to shoot just B&W. Film makes a lot of choices for me.
I want to buy film from AW but it’s always cheaper somewhere else…I do have £10 in vouchers for them. I’m hoping their new development business will offer good value for developing and new film. At least that’s what I’d do.
My effort to reestablish the blog has slowed to nothing. Must be record of mine, to lose interest in it before it’s even setup! Perhaps I need something more engaging to write in. I think I want something more “normal” than this site, but not sure what. Buying a service hasn’t worked. Maybe self-hosting something dynamic and not static is what’s needed…hmm to awesome self-hosted again…
Photoprism continues to scan…up to 40,000 photos now. I didn’t think the Home Server is //that// slow.
I think Kodak Gold is my favourite colour negative film stock. ISO 200 is good for Scottish summers (probably too slow for winters) and it has a warm, soothing look, like remembering a happy moment. I thought all the films I had developed were Gold but now I just remembered one was Portra 160. So I need to go and look at them in more detail and compare to Gold to see if it’s worth the premium.
I want to keep tags to a minimum on this site, but not sure when to add and when not to. I also don’t think I can add tiddlers that have no tags 🤔
https://photoprism.app/]] on my server. I tried it before but it wouldn’t work, anyway it was simple to get going using docker compose. Only the preview version does face detection but it’s coming to the main one soon enough. Not sure if I’d want this public facing or just leave it at home, locally. The labelling seems a little poor accuracy wise - e.g. calling a cow a bird or a person a kite and other random things - but maybe it gets better? It’s not google photos smart but they also don’t have the resources of google. I do like how there’s a mobile app that can sync with it via ~WebDAV, that might be good if I get it up and running, because then photoprism will automatically organise those files.
Was funny finding out someone is actually reading this site! Hello Phil Nunnally! I had a brief panic of “//what did I write on there that he might’ve seen//” but I know he understands, and I admit I read his wiki too 😅 Phil’s and Jack’s are my favourites. So HP Tango is for you Phil!
Slowly setting up my “proper” blog. Moved micro.blog to micro.alexjj.com as well. Here’s a list of all the blog posts I’ve thought about writing but never did:
A real one about the HP Tango
One for every camera I’ve owned and what I’ve thought about it. Particularly the random film ones I’ve bought, fixed (well cleaned so they work again) and sold on eBay.
Reflecting on 10 years on Github. Most stars and interactions I’ve had, notable moments etc.
Reflecting on 10 years of having a domain and website - thinking screenshots of old versions of the site etc.
Going back even further to my very first websites I made as a teenager
A post about all the mechanical keyboards I’ve owned, built and sold.
** I did start this on the old blog, think there was about 15 posts I started drafting for it
Plain text accounting
** Someone emailed me about my 2016 blog post on beancount the other week! Guess I should put it back online
Monte Carlo simulations with python for work 🤓
Scanning, making a book and website for my grandad’s 1960s slide film from Africa and places.
Many more I’ve since forgotten.
Excited for Amazon’s Wheel of Time TV show. Took me about 5 years to read all those books, and I kept telling people they should make it a TV show. Although if you thought Game of Thrones was long…
Diablo II: Resurrected open beta starts today! Preparing us all to pay £40 for a 21 year old game that has been brushed down and tarted up a bit. I’ll give it a shot but if I remember correctly, D2 makes D3 seem like a once through story completion game when it comes to grinding gear.
Coming up 2 weeks with this wiki, and I must say I quite enjoy it. I like the design, the administration aspect, and the (Basic) setup I have for it. I keep thinking about a blog but I’m still tempted just to keep this. I’m writing all this for myself, and sometimes imagine others reading it but don’t really care if they do or not. Whereas I find a blog seems to be more focused on having others read it. I’ll continue to ruminate about that. Would also be nice not to have to support so many domains…I actually like this one more than alexjj.com but I can’t give that up as so short, and my pictures one is short, and the other for my dad’s email…ugh guess not.
Got my latest films back from developing. First set with the Leica M2. They all look great - which is good as it means no issues with the camera. I also got two films back from my Minolta SRT100X SLR. They look great as well. The film look is really enjoyable, and even though I’m sure it can be replicated in Lightroom I much prefer the original. Plus I know what’s gone in to make them - manual everything and timing and no second chances etc. - so that makes it even more rewarding when I see them.
The problem is that do the photos from the M2 look 30x better than the Minolta ones? In fact more than that including lenses. The answer is of course ‘‘No’’. The SRT even has a built in light meter, which for the most part seems reasonable accurate. The only thing that M2 has over the SRT is the rangefinder style focusing. I think all but 1 was completely out of focus and maybe 2 weren’t quite spot on with the M2, whereas I’ve had 10+ on a roll come back out of focus on the SRT. I’m sure I’ve focused it though. Either the mirror is maybe out or something but then the next roll is 90% in focus. I have noticed that sometimes there seems to be a lot of play with the lens for focus and I can’t tell that it’s changing at all. Whereas the rangefinder, line up the patches and we’re good. Sometimes it’s tricky if there’s little contrast but I do like it. I guess I’ll only be able to tell if it improves with more shots/rolls and see how they come out overall. It is an expensive camera. However, there’s very few options for rangefinders with interchangeable lenses. I also like there are still professionals who will repair the Leica, so it should last forever. Even if I do decide to get rid of it, I’ll get my money back - maybe lose a bit on the lens as ended up buying that new as I wanted the mark 2 of the Voigtlander 35mm nokton. The real alternative would be a Canon P or 7. I did own a 7 for a while but sold that as “ahem” thought it was too expensive. I think it had some light leaks though too. Now I think I should’ve kept the lens as it was the 50mm f/1.4 and they seem to go for a lot and aren’t very common.
Counter to that, I think about the MP! I like the M2 but the lack of light meter is a little tricky at times. Getting my phone out all the time is annoying and maybe even a handheld might be just as bad. I could get a hot shoe mounted one like the keks or voigtlander ones, but then that adds bulk to the camera and makes it janky? In bright sun I can manage just fine with it on f/11 and 250 or whatever but otherwise I can’t really tell. Maybe I should try and find a second hand one, or just buy the keks for $120. To spend £3-4k on the MP to get a light meter built in is retarded. Could mean I could get a black version…again retarded. I’m nervous about the M2, how would I be with a MP! Best get some more lenses and then maybe think about the MP. There’s always the M6 or M7. Or just go digital with a M! That’s also retarded. I did wonder if I should’ve got a Leica CL //film// camera. In fact I was looking at getting one ages about but decided they were too expensive 😅. It would be a bit lighter and smaller than the M2, and I doubt I’d notice the differences. Has a light meter too, although prone to breaking and no-one will fix it. The no-one fixing it does put me off. It’s “cheap” at £200-350 (if you’re lucky and wait) but quite a lot for the potential failure. Might still get one to compare. Shame there’s no decent camera shop locally. There’s one but it’s 3 hours away, not practical to pop in to handle a camera.
I quickly got over the Leica CL that I was admiring the other day. The native lenses for it are all huge. The 18mm is small and the 23mm is okay but the 35mm and the 60mm are big. Makes it look weird. It would be nice to have but meh. I should get the 70-300mm and maybe the 56mm for my X-T2.
I should also get some film developing going - although need a scanner and can’t decide if I’m just going to stick to 35mm or whether I should prepare for 120 as well. I think just 35 mm as it’s going to be a while before I have time / hands for 120, and just send it away. A 35 mm scanner is a much more contained expense - maybe £160 for a used plustek - should’ve kept the one I had for scanning all those slides.
Made a little script to generate hledger web page with report in it. Can get it cron-jobbed to run each night for me. I might also get it pushed to my private TW. Although I suppose I should write it to google sheets for me so I can just look there. Hledger-ui is a nice way to interrogate it. Still want to do a monthly write up but not sure where to do that. Be nice if I could do it on here. Maybe I can write it without the specifics. Maybe I could also just have it pushed to a github private repo README…in fact the very repo I keep the data in is private, so I can just visit that to look at it anywhere.
Shouldn’t have bothered with micro.blog. I just don’t care about a social website thing. I can’t be bothered looking at other people’s posts and articles. Not because they’re boring but just as it’s just another time sink I don’t need. It’s better than twitter and facebook but it’s still the same thing.
Phew it’s been a lot of writing tonight. Time for some more Lost in Space!
Finally finished getting all of 2021’s transactions into hledger for tracking expenses. Was one that I hadn’t put two spaces (not used to that from beancount days) that I couldn’t figure out why the balance assertions were failing. Once I found it then everything balanced perfectly. Just testing out the reporting now. Although I think is -M -depth 2 might be pretty much what I need month to month. Just a summary of spending. I’ll mess about with saving as html or csv and importing into something for charts or maybe this (or another) wiki to annotate.
Been thinking about setting up my static blog again. I liked the idea of microblog but not sure I want to keep everything on it and have to pay for it. It’s not much but’I don’t know’I like having my own thing. Although this goes against why I signed up to micro.blog just last month’ugh I don’t know. I keep thinking of things that I want to blog about but then never do.
Anyway started setting up another Hugo static blog. It’s quite the faff to get it up and going and then writing stuff and adding comments etc. This is my motion vs. Action again. Why don’t I just write on micro.blog? Actually makes me think about ikiwiki again, or just use this!
Found out that season 2 of Lost in Space on Netflix is out (and has been for ages!) so stopped all this blog fiddling and watching that instead.
The MakingKodak book arrived today. It was pricey, particularly the postage to the UK, but it’s an amazing book. It’s like the perfect mix of chemical engineering and film photography. —
date: 2021-08-17
title: Tuesday, 17th August, 2021
—
Been thinking about setting up my static blog again. I liked the idea of microblog but not sure I want to keep everything on it and have to pay for it. It’s not much but…I don’t know…I like having my own thing. Although this goes against why I signed up to micro.blog just last month…ugh I don’t know. I keep thinking of things that I want to blog about but then never do.
Anyway started setting up another Hugo static blog. It’s quite the faff to get it up and going and then writing stuff and adding comments etc. This is my motion vs. Action again. Why don’t I just write on micro.blog? Actually makes me think about ikiwiki again, or just use this!
Found out that season 2 of Lost in Space on Netflix is out (and has been for ages!) so stopped all this blog fiddling and watching that instead.
The MakingKodak book arrived today. It was pricey, particularly the postage to the UK, but it’s an amazing book. It’s like the perfect mix of chemical engineering and film photography.
Now I want a Leica CL (digital version). Sigh. So many reasons suddenly appear in my head that makes it seem like the best idea I have. It’s not much different from my X-T2, aside from a big price difference. It is a nice size but the lenses get big quickly. The 23 mm f/2, 35 mm f/1.4 and 60 mm f/2.8 macro. Can mount M lenses on it but then can also do that on the Fuji. Maybe I’ll get the X100F fixed, sell it and then consider my options.
Had some university friends stay with us and last night we got into a conversation about cryptocurrencies. My wife was curious as to if any of them were into them or had any (they didn’t). Normally I avoid talking about it as people have very different views and generally people don’t seem to like them - possibly as they regret not buying them before this bull run. Or they dislike the energy consumption of proof of work coins. Feels like talking about politics, usually not the best topic of conversation.
However, it did make me realise that I don’t know how proof of stake actually works and I think my proof of work explanation was poor. They said it made sense but it wasn’t quite right. Up till now, I’ve satisfied myself that I know the gist of how it works and that’s good enough, but perhaps I should learn more. However, equally there’s a whole host of fiat workings that I don’t understand and aren’t going to learn it. Would be good to have a brief, layman’s explanation of PoW and PoS though. I regret saying how much our bag went up by, and knew I shouldn’t but it was hard to escape the conversation.
One person works at a renewables power company and supposedly they spoke about it at work and should the renewable energy be used for crypto and they decided it shouldn’t be. Seemed like an odd thing to do. So should they not sell power to people or companies who break the law or have different views from them? Why is it for them to decide who can and can’t use renewable energy.
Also noticed my credit card company is going to block all transactions for crypto to “protect its customers”. Buying with credit cards is stupid anyway, but still they’ll let me buy more terrible things with it. However, it’s only to protect themselves, so they don’t have to pay out money when people get scammed or lose their keys etc.
Been thinking about photos and picture management.
Another little bit of large format
LargeFormat from youtube…I suppose it knows I’m interested. The Intrepid seems like a good way to get into it…but I would need multiple things plus when am I going to use it?
The other day my boss at work asked what I wanted to do with my career and what other jobs am I interested in at work. I jokingly (at least to make the appearance of joking) that I’d like to retire. She said I was too young. It’s interesting people’s perspective on retirement. I replied with ‘I’m not too young, I just don’t have enough money’. I feel this is an important distinction that is often overlooked. Whether or not I would actually do that is a different question but to have the choice to do it would be nice.
Finally started with my expenses tracking. Quite liking hledger and still only getting going. I think the hledger add is going to be a good thing for me. It uses the journal to guess the rest of the transaction from the description. So once I get a few months of historical data in then 90% of the time it’s enter, enter, enter, enter. Maybe changing the amount here and there but quick yet still meaning I engage my brain with each transaction and register it. Done the short accounts, moving onto the longer ones and then will start playing with the reporting and saving that as a script. Probably just get my server to generate it each night so I can look at it whenever. I should do some more now, but I’m playing a silly Aavegotchiminigame]] so that my gotchi gets some XP. I’m doing well but there’s still nearly a week left. I bet someone makes a opencv script to auto click it or something. Maybe I should…nah…better things to do.
Maybe I should add all my books here. Some table system with using fields and so on….or I keep my static single page instead…reminds me I wanted to switch over my blog to some hugo build. Ugh why bother, I’ll never use it.
Yesterday the github saver didn’t work. This was disconcerting, particularly as I’d written quite a bit in the expenses tiddler. I waited a while then tried it again and it did work. I thought I could copy all the text, refresh the page and try again if it hadn’t worked. However, it’s made me wonder if I should setup the node.js plus build job versions. Have to look into how I take an existing TW and then migrate to node.js. It would have the advantage of sorting out Private stuff and the source is all individual tiddlers that I can source control more easily.
Well maybe next week, as I want to start my [[Tracking expenses]] efforts off this week.
Trying to tidy up my Github account of old and random repos. Not sure if it matters but I don’t like having clutter in it that I no longer need. Particularly forks of stuff. Restored a few notes from older wikis into here. Still yet to bring in my original dokuwiki site that I had running for several years. Maybe I should just restore it into my dokuwiki setup - I’ve forgotten the domain to it already…oh how could I! It’s the same as it’s always been.
I’ve only had this a short time but I’m beginning to think that it should replace all my websites. I like the domain name too, maybe I’ll get bored of it all (like always) but so far I’m hopeful. Maybe I’ll keep a more ‘formal’ blog for ‘good’ posts that I want to put up and share, rather than pointing people to this rats nest of stuff.
Setup my Gemini blog, gemlog?, last night gemini://gem.alexjj.com. Probably will never put anything on it but there we go.
Finding some photos to print and send to people. I was going to write a review/post on the [[HP Tango]] at some point’ but like all my blog posts, it never gets written.
I should look for a ‘find all stubs’ thing so I can fill in the gaps when I’m looking for something to do, instead of mindlessly browsing reddit.
My plan to print and send photos to family with a letter has the downfall that I forget what I’ve printed. So now I’m worried I’ll send the same things again. It was meant to be the past 2 weeks, here’s a couple of photos, but now I feel like I need to be super organised to do this. It doesn’t help the first set were random ones across about 6 weeks. I could save them to a folder on the computer I suppose. This is getting in the way of actually doing anything.
I want to print a couple of grandad’s slides to send to my mum too. That’s easier to do, I just need to find them.
All this also points me to the fact that my photo organisation is poor. It’s not terrible - I have folders by year and a date with a name e.g.:
2021
|
--- 2021-01-01 New Years
--- 2021-04-01 April Fools
However, people and tags and ratings…there’s none of that. I have my website where I pick out good ones but that doesn’t go back very far. I think I need to look into photoprism or something, digikam?
I have Lightroom classic but I don’t know how to use the library stuff and collections etc. I also store all my photos on the NAS and keep telling myself (for the past 10 years it seems) that when I get a new computer with more storage I’ll keep them on that…but I’ve also not really upgraded my computer in 10 years. That’s not quite true, it got upgraded from sandy bridge to ivy bridge when I bought a Dell Optiplex for a machine learning project that never really happened and then I realised this “junk” computer was better than my main one. I really want a Mac Mini, the new ones with M1, but can’t quite justify it. I think Apple macOS is a good compromise between Windows and Linux. Windows for the family and Linux for me, plus as all our other devices are Apple maybe it’ll be useful with iPhotos and iCloud stuff. So now I tell myself once I get a new mac I’ll sort out my photos properly…this time…
Spent a lot of time thinking about Tracking expenses the past few days, umming and ahhing between nothing, Beancount, hledger, and spreadsheets. Still not sure but writing it out might help me…think I’m coming to the conclusion although it’ll probably be short lived.
Someone emailed me asking about my 2016 blog post on Beancount, which is quite amazing that anyone looks at it or even still wants it after 5 years! Reminds me I need to sort out my blog. The micro.blog stuff didn’t last long. I just don’t care about the “community”, I just want to write things for me and maybe for others to see. It is nice having dialogue on it for posts but equally I posted some pictures that I thought were interesting and no-one said anything which isn’t surprising as no-one follows me and I only just joined but why did I bother. This wiki is much more engaging for me. Maybe I should just skip the blog altogether? I feel like the blog is for “perfect posts” that I want to share on a “normal” website. If I do any code blogs or things like beancount. Perhaps this is my notebook and then I’ll take content from here and make it more official. Or this will teach me that blog posts don’t need to be perfect. They just need to be something.
First outing for the Leica M2. Not having a light meter is interesting. My other film cameras do all have light meters but I don’t entirely trust them ‘ being decades old. However they still function to some extent and I realise offer a sounding board or approximation that helps confirm my settings.
I use my phone and the Lightme app and found that I’d check and recheck the lighting. It was a variable day and would go from overcast to sunny very quickly. So the same shot could change before I’d even take it. I like that I’m noticing this more and thinking about it more actively. I still have no idea though. Using f/11 and f/16 is very alien to me from digital camera world. With digital I typically shoot aperture priority or program/auto mode, maybe occasionally shutter priority if I want to freeze something. The camera ‘‘never’’ picks anything over f/8, in fact often just f/5.6. So whilst it is mostly auto, you get used to seeing the settings.
From my limited film experience i have underexposed many frames and think I now try to compensate for that but at the risk of over exposing too much. So today when the light meter is 500 at f/16 I stop it down to 250 or f/11. Well I’ll see what they look like. Perhaps light leaks and uncalibrated rangefinders will be more of the problems than exposure. I should do some test shots and record the settings’when I’m not with the kids!
I do enjoy the rangefinder focusing. I’m still slow but I feel much faster than SLR focusing. I have more confidence in the shots when the patches align versus SLR where I’d go in and out to test it. I’ve not got the film processed yet so perhaps I need to wait before judging. But the taking of shots is more enjoyable.
On my last few rolls of 35mm. Have lots of 120, not sure if I bought more of it or just haven’t used as much. Will need to get some more, can’t decide if I’m going to setup my own darkroom and this buy some B&W or stick to C41 and send away. I like the idea of self developing b&w and predominantly shooting it on film and save colour for digital. I should give it a shot anyway.
Not the very beginning of my tiddlywiki nor my online wiki, rambles, dumping group but the beginning of this one. This is going to be better, and not die after 2 weeks (like most other things I do). It would probably be interesting to write up my InternetWorld at some point. I should define ThisWiki as well.
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What’s with the tea?
— //No-one//
«<
I really like tea.
LargeFormat cameras have been popping up and nagging at me. I’m trying to resist and focus on “affordable” 35 mm only.
This lady’s video was harmless fun:
TalkPhotograph forums had someone listing their huge setup of everything large format. and JackBaty has been messing with his expensive looking [[Linhof Master Technika
Kids don’t know how easy they have it these days with SSL from Let’s encrypt. One line 
Saw 
* We then decide to go out to 
I’ve been very into the Stormlight archives by Brandon Sanderson. So much so that I’ve been up to 1am every night reading it!
I think ColorPlus has a nicer case than Gold.
The lens focuses fast enough for me and my kids. Yes, it’s not the fastest lens but I’m not getting annoyed with it. It is my first day with it but enjoying it inside and outside.
The Ricoh GR iii is £750 new. GRiiix is £900 new. £150 for 40mm vs 28mm.
