it's pudding time!

At the carnival

I made a first cut at automating gallery pages on Jekyll today using a frontmatter-driven technique I found. Not what I wish Smugmug would just do, but now it’s “dump images into dir, autogen the index, add alt & done.” https://mike.puddingtime.org/photos/spring-break-2022/

“How Do Anti-Theft Wheel Locks on Shopping Carts Know to Trip at the Edge of the Parking Lot?"

I prefer the elegance of the old-school magnet-and-pin implementation. The onboard processor business has no grace. 🛒

Early Fastmail impressions:

I secured a new domain today that’s quite similar to but more easily pronouncable/understandable than puddingbowl.org. I’m rearranging ‘net presence stuff in a small hurry so I can turn my attention to actually using it.

All the shuffling offered a chance to ditch the hosted provider I’ve had for almost 20 years – the one I got after the server I had in the soon-to-be nursery threw a fan bearing and caught on fire in the closet. (Really nothing gets you out of the self-hosting business faster than nearly setting your soon-to-be-born child’s nursery on fire.)

Fastmail came so recommended by enough non-overlapping-social-circles people that I decided to just go for it after a few hours of poking around.

Stuff that impressed me:

• I thought I’d have to live out of a few inboxes, and wasn’t looking forward to the rigamarole of multi-identity life. Fastmail seems to understand that’s just reality and makes it easy. I set up a sending identity for my old domain without realizing I’d done it.

That matters because my old provider became sort of horsey about forwarding addresses, refusing to leave SMTP open if you’ve got a forward only address and leaving you to trust an opaque forwarding filter system that guarantees you’d miss an edge case otherwise. Not really “hostile,” because it’s just sysadmins trying to provide a commodity to abusive cheapskates, and I am professionally obligated to side with the sysadmins over abusive cheapskates (even when they’re me), but neither is it friendly policy.

Anyhow, I label the mail from the old address and will be able to slowly migrate to the new identity over time and do it all from a single inbox.

• Legacy mail import from vanilla IMAP and Gmail IMAP just worked and was sort of considerate: Just toss it all in the pot or segregate it.

• Documentation was on hand specifically for Cloudflare DNS. Generic instructions would be fine for this kind of thing, but it’s nice to get something specific.

• Choice of folders or labels for organization. (Chose labels. Google won.)

• 1Password integration to generate single-use addresses. I’ve never bothered but now I might.

• Account provisioning for iPhone and Mac: Really nicely done using a profile generator. You just run a little configurator, click on a profile file and load it from Settings, and your calendar, IMAP, and contacts are provisioned. No pecking in server names and ports, etc.

• Super friendly failure when I tried to migrate my Sanemail account using my account credentials. A very polite automated mail landed in my inbox telling me what I’d done wrong and providing documentation to do it correctly with an app-specific password.

All in all, just a thoughtfully executed service with nice polish and pleasant affordances.

How to find a collection of photos in LR Classic using a CSV file. That you generated by finding through 2000+ Jekyll posts. Because something Cloudflare images something something tidy and clean. https://pic-time.kb.help/how-do-i-modify-a-csv-list-and-use-it-in-lightroom/

Last night I learned that if you’re getting the “pages in Safari tab groups open blank tabs instead of the expected content” problem (e.g. after a middle-click, or links within Google Drive) the workaround is to set your new tab preference to “Empty Page.”

I just set up a custom domain for email on iCloud and it was shockingly non-dramatic. I got a dialog box asking if I wanted Cloudflare to add the MX records and clicked “Sure, yeah.” Don’t think it’s a permanent thing. Just curious. Pretty smooth. Taking recos for mail providers.

… and flagged this as “military.” I’ll allow it.

Wow. I was downsampling an image in GraphicConverter, clicked the little lightbulb icon, and it told me what’s in the picture.

I’ve never use the Finder for “work,” but faced with triaging 800 markdown files, the gallery view came in handy, especially with the QuickLook Markdown extension installed. Cursor arrows to flip through, ctrl 1-9 to tag.

Obsidian Things Link turns Obsidian pages into Things projects and Obsidian tasks into Things todos, with links back and forth between the two. Peanut butter and chocolate.

Every 7-8 years I have to retrain myself to not over-filter email. Sanebox has been worth the license, but reinforcing it with a habit of only checking my email three times a day and letting it be a little fuzzy has let it shine. Need to re-look my initial review & reshare.

I tried out Secure ShellFish on my iPad to see how it compared to Blink. Wow. Logging in to a remote instance and using textastic foo.md to edit on the iPad, or quicklook bar.jpg to preview on the iPad. Plus baked in tmux support. Thanks @maique and @odd for the tip!

The Moonlander didn’t stick with me – too many devices to tolerate the difference in keyboard style. But ZSA doing a macro pad seems promising. An analog knob for Lightroom sliders would be pretty welcome, but looks like there are enough keys to just assign +/-.

Forty is nice but doesn’t observe a few blog conventions, so last night’s fussing around involved a first whack at a bloggish posts page and adding a related posts feature (example at the bottom of this post. I’m going less for “blog” than “magazine,” I guess.

Something good that came out of 2 months of refusing to do much on a topic until writing about it: Things lost their glamour. I’m left, for instance, wanting to use Obsidian because it’s a useful tool right now, not because someday I could use a Zettelkasten to write 63 books.

Three other learnings/reminders from the tool whirlwind over the weekend:

1. GitHub pages doesn’t support LFS, so don’t bother.
2. If you’ve been having problems with git pushes hanging at the end, it might be time to update your Mac’s git client (I just used the one in Homebrew and my problem was solved)
3. There are cheaper ways, but GraphicConverter helped me solve the LFS thing by just chewing through the task of resizing and reducing the resolution of ~2000 images. From 2GB to ~350-good-enough-for-inline-display-on-a-microblog-MB in under a minute (Go, M1 Max, go!)

This morning’s “putter around before the first meeting” project was to automate a calendar-to-Obsidian note workflow using iOS Shortcuts.

Part of my daily routine involves a review of the day’s meetings and events. I ask myself two prompting questions about each:

• What is the most important thing about this meeting? That answer can vary. Sometimes it’s about a deliverable or a business outcomes. Sometimes it’s about something some attendees human need.
• How do you want to show up in this meeting? I have found it very helpful to sit with this question for a minute first thing in the morning.

I keep the meeting notes on the same page where I answer those questions so that I have a reminder in front of me of what I want to accomplish and how I want to show up.

I was doing that on a reMarkable, but I’ve found that handwritten meeting notes don’t really aid retention much, and that it’s better to have searchable text, so I rewrote the automation for Obsidian.

You can grab the workflow and review it.

• You need to at least have your calendar set up in Apple Calendar.
• It will ask for the name of the vault you want to store the note in during setup. Don’t worry about spaces: It will URL-encode that.
• You will need to set which calendar it collects events from (or unset that value in the Find All Calendar Events step of the workflow)
• It was cheaper and easier to replace colons and slashes in event names than figure out how to encode them to avoid problems with problematic filenames.
• If you don’t like the prompts I used, the text that drives the content of the page is just plain old Markdown … pretty easy to change them.

TODO: Add a specific folder to put the notes in. For now it drops them in the top level of the vault, which suits my purposes.