Week of 2023-01-08

📷 Photography

  • It was a quiet week for pictures. We skipped longer morning coffee walks a few days.
  • I have lost something I had about getting pictures posted to micro.blog to look right. Something in the pipeline is compressing them in unattractive ways.
  • After Pixelfed sort of let me down I started sketching out a way for creating a sort of headless photo feed I can use to push images into syndication. I think that's the next thing to hack on.

✏️ Writing

  • I wrote a thing about some photography squabbles on Mastodon. It is the most restrained, empathetic thing I could think to write after years of studiously avoiding a lot of photography forums and blogs. One thing I like about photography is that it's a particular intersection of technical acumen, artistry, and machinery operation. That combination just means you have a population constantly drawing in people who are hyper-indexed on one or another of those dimensions, and people who simply are not. It gets crabby in there.
  • I wrote a thing about Feedly and why it is underrated.

📚 Reading

  • I've been reading Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson this week. I'm enjoying it as much as I did Red Mars (plenty), and maybe even more.
  • I've been testing out Readwise Reader, a possible Pocket replacement. I tried it when I first got access to the beta but made the mistake of dumping all my feeds into it. That was a mistake: Its feed-reading capabilities are not really aimed at the kind of perusing you do with a traditional RSS reader. It's meant to capture a bunch of streams and aid you in curation. So the right answer with RSS and Reader is to feed it things that are the kind of stuff you'd want to read later, scan and add to the list, then delete the rest. It's proving to be a pretty capable tool. Right now I have it consuming my Pocket saves so that if I end up backing out and not using it, I won't have lost anything.

⚙️ Organization

  • I've been using Obsidian's kanban stuff a lot. I like the way I can just start a note off a card and everything's all linked together. It is replacing Things for a lot of stuff.
  • I invested some time in getting Drafts set up for how I want to use it, and it is pretty great. I have actions for Mastodon, micro.blog, a few flavors of Reminders, and getting stuff into Obsidian.
  • I am going to set aside my daily pages on the Remarkable and go back to doing them in Obsidian. There's a certain charm to handwriting that kind of thing, but there's a lot of utility in having a daily page that is more interactive, dynamic, and automatable during the day. I may look to sell the Remarkable. I don't hate it -- it's pretty nice -- but I don't get the utility out of it I should to justify the space it takes up.
  • A few useful Obsidian plugins:
    • Text Transporter: The only way I seem to be able to move kanban cards around between boards.
    • Custom File Explorer Sorting so my Obsidian sidebar can be arranged usefully.
    • AnuPpucin theme, which implements the catppuccin palette and adds some other stuff (like a rainbow color scheme for the file explorer, which I saw no sense to until I tried it.)

🫥 How are you feeling?

You know, on balance, pretty good. I'm coming off my two-month break feeling rested and a little more centered. It had a recalibrating effect.

January is meant to be "okay, you're rested, time to step things up." So I've been working on a daily/weekly routine to make sure I hit the things that need to be hit, and that includes some job search stuff.

I've had some sleep stuff going on that I think is down to not paying attention to my caffeine cutoff time and being a little bit of a night owl.

I'm looking forward to next week, when intend to build focused writing time into the schedule. I've got a backlog of topics I want to do and haven't allowed myself steady sit-down time to work on.