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Is this really it?

The number of occasions I've heard masses of people say they're going to walk away from Twitter now numbers in the dozens over the years. The company has demonstrated contempt for the users that can be rivaled only by Meta, having pivoted many years ago from adding features based on usage (Retweets) to generally delivering weird non-features that even the advertisers don't really want (Blue).

But now it's being bought by a guy who has latched onto the "free speech brigade" not because he's particularly pro-free-speech (he's not), or because his politics align with those kinds of people (they do), but because he seems dumb enough to believe their spiel (he might be). A union-buster, an apartheid-profiter, and a guy who has used the platform that will soon be his to:

  • Get yelled at by a Wachowski
  • Libel the guy who saved that Thai sports team after nobody liked his coffin submarine idea
  • Predict the end of COVID-19 with the accuracy of Nate Silver picking numbers out of a hat
  • Generally sound like a dumbass who'd be cringey and goofy if he wasn't so simultaneously powerful

Anyway. Doesn't bode all that well. Maybe it's time.

What is Cohost? I dunno. Probably another thing that'll come and go quickly. I still get spam emails from Ello, the supposed Facebook-killer that was all in black-and-white Courier font and whose name I had to look up.

I don't know how to Mastodon despite being acquainted with its founder and signing up for many servers over the years. Somehow the email model of "different servers but everyone can talk" fails to make sense to me in a social media context.

But I use Twitter less and less every year, and these days even the months show decline. And maybe it's time for us all to stop trying to post through it anyway.

DiscussOct 27, 2022
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One year with Obsidian

It occurs to me that I wrote this post about trying Obsidian about a year ago. In that time, I have not really strayed from it, which is pretty unusual for me. I get really restless with tools. Thanks to a very active plugin community, theme ecosystem, and subreddit, it's become a great tool that is super customizable. I adapted a few times and that was no biggie at all thanks to the fact that Obsidian is based entirely around discrete files, stored in your file system, with their own regular ol' file names.

My current way of operating is shamefully trendy; I'm using Tiago Forte's Building a Second Brain as the methodology. One reason is that it works reasonably well with other tools including paper journaling and Raindrop bookmarks. Though he apparently uses Evernote and swears by its search (which is still quite good despite Evernote's many problems), I think the linking features in Obsidian are really what makes it good for this system. Knowledge doesn't just go in a filing cabinet and get dusty. You can always see it thanks to links and unlinked mentions.

I'm still not interested in changing, and as long as I am still locked into the old $5 rate for syncing, I will keep that as well.

DiscussAug 9, 2022
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Whoops

When moving site hosts to save a buck I seem to have screwed some things up. I'm not interested in paying for a new Kirby license so I'm trying a static site generator (Eleventy). Unfortunately, as much as I was able to do some bulk text conversion, I'm just not an expert at that stuff. For everything I love about Kirby, it unfortunately does not store all the page data in frontmatter like almost every other CMS or site generator. So it's been a bit of a pain.

The upshot: even compared to Kirby or Grav or whatever, this thing should be fast.

DiscussAug 8, 2022
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"Disappointing"

At least once a year we try to get out to Cape Disappointment on Washington's Long Beach Peninsula. It's a beautiful state park where the Columbia meets the ocean. Good to get that sea air.

DiscussJul 26, 2022
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RIP Dave Smith

Less than 3 weeks after making an appearance at Superbooth and looking healthy and enthusiastic, Dave Smith is dead at 72.

If you don't know who he is, Smith is a synth pioneer who founded Sequential Circuits in the 70s. They made a lot of iconic synths but were most famous for the Prophet 5, pretty much the first programmable polyphonic synth. It really has yet to be topped, which is probably why the re-built company is still making a Prophet 5.

Then, in the early 80s he conceived of and developed a universal interface for synthesizers from different manufacturers to talk to each other. Whether the fact that it's still in use today is evidence of its effectiveness or of how out-of-date it is now, you can't argue that MIDI is one of the most important things to happen in the world of music since the development of the synthesizer itself. He and Roland founder Ikutaro Kakehashi (also sadly no longer with us) even received a Grammy for the development of MIDI.

For those of us who might never afford a Prophet, MIDI is the great unifier. Since its inception, it has allowed the fanciest Oberheim, the lowliest Volca, your SP-404 loaded with samples of farts, whatever it is, to talk to each other. The standard even continues into the computer, where I can download MIDI files of Clyde Stubblefield playing drums and replace all the hits with sounds of dogs barking or car crashes. I'm sure that's exactly what Smith had in mind.

And speaking of that, one of Smith's other ventures was the first real software synth, Reality. Though he didn't ultimately care for making music inside a computer, it's another project he spearheaded that pretty much changed music forever.

So the only thing left to say is thanks. You'll be missed.

DiscussJun 2, 2022
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Yes, Virginia, there is a Microsoft version of that

It can be tough when you're stuck in Windows world, with security lockdowns on your computer and a ban on most cloud services. With the notable exceptions of UserZoom, Figma, and Overflow, I'm in MS world and that's been an adjustment after the world of Google Apps and other lightweight, web-based tools.

There's a benefit to being entirely in Microsoftland, or at least in theory there is. Kinda looks like with the advent of Loop they are trying to make good on that theory and put it into real practice.

So to say that Loop is a Notion ripoff seems partially true. But for those of us stuck here in Office 365 with no hope of using the real thing, that's totally fine. Just like Planner is not Trello and Todo isn't quite what Wunderlist was, and Power Automate is far from being as easy to work as IFTTT or Zapier — but they exist. I can imagine a lightweight database table like what Notion employs would be so much easier for many of the small tasks where I'm using SharePoint Lists. But the "components" feature of Loop seems to be where MS are really trying to take it a bit further.

The idea behind components seems to be that the pieces of functionality (like Notion blocks?) are available elsewhere in the Office ecosystem: Teams chats, Word docs, email messages. And that's the kind of interoperability that we really don't enjoy today, even though that should be a prime selling point of Microsoftland. Mail Merge isn't exactly the future. But maybe Loop will be?

DiscussMay 8, 2022
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Lite XL

Love the contradictory name. I don't necessarily want to get on the Electron hate train, but when you see the speed at which this thing fires up (much faster than VSCode, faster than GEdit, even) you might consider ditching Atom. It strikes a nice balance of features and performance.

DiscussApr 23, 2022
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Yes, this, etc.

My quest for simplicity has led to some people doing some pretty interesting stuff. Even more appealing to me than Utopia is Every Layout, which frankly seems hard to sum up in an elevator pitch, but like Utopia it aims to get CSS back to declaration and away from prescription. In this case, it seems largely because declarative just works better. My only beef with this thing is the price. It's no doubt that a lot of work went into it but 70 bucks is steep.

The further I read into the sample content, the more I'm standing up, punching the air, screaming. It's that invigorating and it makes that much sense.

Incidentally, one of the authors is responsible for CUBE CSS, which I'm been looking at with interest too. I'm a BEM-head from way back, but this looks like an interesting philosophical take on CSS that embraces a recent trend among true HTML/CSS folks: Stop fighting the cascade. You're speaking my language.

DiscussApr 22, 2022