I started this blog on Bear, and I still think it’s a wonderful service. I appreciate Herman’s thoughtful, principled approach to building and evolving it. I struggled with the upvotes, though. I don’t love upvoting in general and have written about that a few times.

Herman’s new approach is to allow upvoting but hide the upvote numbers on Bear’s Discovery page. From his post:

I made this change for two reasons.

The first is that visible counts make the popular posts more popular. A post with a lot of upvotes looks like it’s worth reading, so it gets read and upvoted more, and the quiet posts with no audience stay quiet. One of the things I love about Bear, and actively curate, is that someone with no audience can still be discovered. Hiding the count means people judge a post by its title and writing, not by how many people liked it first, especially on the Newest page.

The second is that upvote numbers don’t make people feel good. Someone puts sincere effort into a post, publishes it, and then sees a little “1” next to it, sitting right below someone else’s “214”. Writing shouldn’t feel like a popularity contest, and a number next to your name makes it one, whether you like it or not.

Amen.

Check out the rest of his post for more good thoughts.

Well … that didn’t work. If you have any other ideas on becoming Dr. Manhattan, please shoot me an email.

Alas, I didn’t achieve Great Insights™ through Markdown munging. But there’s a big, fat baby in the Obsidian bathwater. Before PKM, there was PIM: Personal Information Management. According to Wikipedia, PIM is about managing information “for everyday use to complete tasks … and fulfill a person’s various roles.” How boring and reasonable!

I use Obsidian strictly for PIM these days, and it’s a great tool for the job. It can also be a simple tool for the job. You don’t need any plugins or advice from breathless YouTubers. Here’s how I use it.

Work notes

At work, I put almost everything in daily notes separated by H2 (##) subheadings. I like this approach because it’s simple: daily notes are an out-of-the-box feature in Obsidian, and I never have to wonder where to put stuff. I open the app, hit my keyboard shortcut for my daily note (Cmd-Shift-D), and paste. Plus, I get automatic timestamping because the ISO date is in the filename.

I’m also starting to play with the new Bases Kanban view now that it’s a builtin.

Personal notes

For my personal notes, I use daily notes for capturing journal entries (via my gournal), decisions I made, how I fixed an appliance, thoughts on apps I tried, and that sort of “today I did a thing” stuff. Those are all in my Daily/ subfolder.

Everything else gets a top-level file:

• Music albums.
• Recipes.
• My doctors and medications.
• The forty-three apps and web portals I need to deal with my kids’ schools, sports, camps, etc., and notes on which one does what.
• The names of neighbors, parents at school, and other folks I meet and may see again. Plus any interesting factoids about them (“worked on the Coraline movie!” etc.). My wife, who remembers basically everything she’s ever heard, increasingly comes to me to consult these notes.
• The type of furnace filter to order.
• Barbers I’ve tried.
• The coffee grinder settings for pourover vs. Chemex.
• CLI invocations for tar, ripgrep, git, jj, etc.
• Cool Neovim tricks.
• My opinions on things like software and devices after trying them.
• Other people’s opinions on things like software and devices, mainly to help me avoid impulsively trying them. (“Oh that’s right, so-and-so tried that app and hated it. Guess I won’t bother.”) I recently captured Baty’s thoughts on Mojopad, for example.
• For each blogger I subscribe to: how I found them, whether we’ve chatted via email, a post or two that I liked, etc.
• Lots, lots more.

Wrapping up

None of this leads to great insights, but it’s extremely handy information to have at the ready. I’m constantly putting my work notes to use, especially with LLMs, and I refer to my personal notes many times a day.

I like Obsidian specifically for a few reasons: I’m a fan of wiki-linking, search works very well, I can edit the vault with my favorite text editor, and everything is stored locally on my devices so I’m not dependent on an internet connection.

But you could get the basic benefits of PIM from just about any system. Heck, the Bullet Journal crowd does it with pen and paper.

PIM FTW.

My hope, though, is that this AI frenzy provokes a renewed appreciation for handcrafted things, and I want this site to be a vote for that in some small way. And so, with a heaping megadose of irony, and even though I have been handcrafting my CSS (mostly) up until now, I used an LLM to give this blog’s design a more human touch.

The choices, for now

Note: If you’re viewing this on a phone, these changes probably aren’t visible.

First, I went for the paper-on-desk look. I deployed it a week or two ago. If you noticed … how nice of you!

But it felt a little stuffy, or boring, or something. So I explored some different colors and textures. I tried a dot-grid texture on the background and liked it, but I realized it was almost exactly what Kev currently has, so I moved on. I tried a “wool felt desk” look, but it was too cold, and the texture was a bit too fine, almost unnoticeable. I tried some higher-contrast options, but the background was too dark for light mode.

I landed on a “linen weave” texture with a warm-toned background, vaguely similar in color to what I was already using, which itself was vaguely based on Gruvbox’s light mode but less aggressively yellow.

It doesn’t spark joy quite yet, but it’s good enough for the moment. If you see any bugs or gaffes as I flop around, please email me!

Edit: That weave pattern looks wonky when the device’s zoom level isn’t a clean 100% or 200%. Apparently this is due to the Moiré effect. I got rid of that and am trying some other options.

Why an LLM?

In short: I suck at design, I’m short on time, and I need help.

I consider myself a creative person in some respects, but not at all when it comes to visual design. That’s why I chose a flat design in the first place: fewer decisions to make, less spinning of wheels. When I try to get fancy, I tend to burn lots of time and get mediocre results.

With an LLM, however, I can go from a general concept, like humanness or skeuomorphism, to specific ideas in seconds. It implements those ideas so rapidly that I can literally type “next” until I see one I like. And then it can tweak them based on my vague nudges like “warmer background color” or “more subtle texture” until it feels close enough to good. Meanwhile, I can direct all of this activity while maintaining a conversation with my wife. That’s wild.

This doesn’t mean I’m pro-LLM. I still wish I could magic-wand them into oblivion. But since they’re here to stay, I can admit that they’re really good at stuff like this.

Back to the title of this post: does this make me a hypocrite? Maybe, but I don’t think so. If this were a flashier, more design-forward blog, or I were somehow implying that I’m a “design guy” when in fact the LLM did all the creative work, then yes, that’d feel hypocritical. Maybe that’s what bugs about the Claude aesthetic — it’s trying to look hip. But hip is a human thing, so it feels phony.

In contrast, I hope it’s obvious that I’m not going for any design awards here. I just want something that’s easy to read and unique enough to distinguish it from off-the-shelf designs or AI defaults. I think I can use an LLM to facilitate that effort without treading into hypocrisy.

I’d say I’m more like Don Draper, sending the underlings off to generate ideas, and applying my cunning wit to select and refine the best one.

Yes, that’s exactly it. I’ll go tell my wife.

If a post takes me longer than an hour end to end, it’s going to land in the drafts pile. And while I might have the purest intentions to finish it later, that rarely happens. A couple reasons jump to mind.

First, drafts are messy, and I have enough messes in my life. I’ve got 28 files in draft status right now. Just looking at the list makes me tired. A clean slate is more energizing and fun.

Second, my motivations shift. I might have been thrilled about that coffee post a week ago, but today, when I finally have time to write again, I want to write about a split keyboard. Since this blog is purely for funsies, following my nose seems a better choice than grinding it out on a stale idea.

So, dear readers, in case you were worried about having to read something of substance here one day, let me assuage you. These posts will stay short and shallow, or my name’s not Sal!¹

I tried some new color schemes recently. Everforest, Catppuccin. My standard scheme, Gruvbox, is great.

Why bother changing things that work? Baty’s recent words stuck with me:

I simply grow tired of staring at the same thing every day.

Word.

I did some reading about why so many of us feel the need to switch things up, and why some people aren’t this way and can be happy with “just good enough” year after year.

In theory, neither type of person is better. Those of us who endlessly experiment and optimize risk wasting time on side quests. The just-good-enough folks risk missing out on the fruits of progress.

Balance in all things, I suppose. How’s that for a safe take?

Anyway, digging Iosevka this time.

It turns out that it’s easy to add a similar feature to tmux. Here’s my relevant config:

bind-key Space if-shell -F '#{==:#{session_name},scratch}' {
    detach-client
} {
    display-popup -d '#{pane_current_path}' -w 90% -h 90% -E "tmux new-session -A -s scratch"
}

With this config, <prefix> + Space will toggle a floating popup with the “scratch” session. The logic, in short: if I’m already in the scratch session, hide it with detach-client. Otherwise, display a popup with that session.

If I don’t want the popup to have its own persistent session, it can be even simpler:

bind-key t display-popup -E -w 90% -h 90% -d '#{pane_current_path}'

That will show a popup of a new terminal in the current path. I can’t use it for long-running things where I need to toggle it on and off, but it’s good for one-off commands.

I’ve been using both of these quite a lot. If you can spot any room for improvement or have your own tmux tips to share, please email me!

In contrast, opening my corporate MacBook — my nicest laptop by most measures — triggers a stress response. Even if I open it to do something fun, like shell into my homelab to write a blog post, I feel the weight of corporate pressure on my shoulders. My baseline anxiety level is elevated. This is especially true after some recent, acute stresses on the job.

I’m writing this particular post on my iPad Pro using Secure ShellFish to access my homelab, where I’m writing in Neovim. This iPad is also a fun device.

I feel that I should conclude this post with some takeaway or piece of advice. Like: “Remember keep work and personal life separate, peeps!” But advice is so often obvious, or patronizing, or perhaps impossible to follow given the reader’s constraints, or all of the above.

Therefore, my grand conclusion is that fun devices are fun.

Bye bye now.

One thing I dislike about deploying with Cloudflare Pages, Netlify, and the like is having to spin up an entire deployment pipeline for what might be a one-word edit. This is where a CMS wins by a mile. (And maybe I just shouldn’t care because in the scheme of things this sort of activity is miniscule, but I can’t help it. Efficiency is where I spend my neurosis points.)

Pico deployments use rsync, which is a great way to ship a static site. I build the site locally on my home server, which takes a fraction of a second, and then rsync sends only the files that have meaningfully changed over to the live site. This is simple and efficient, not to mention transparent, as the rsync logs tell me exactly what’s changing.

The cherry on top: Pico’s cache busting has been flawless. Within a few seconds of rsync completing, the changes are live.

I’m very happy to pay two bucks a month for such a great service. Cheers to the Pico team!

In the Linux vs. Mac conundrum, I’ve read endless commentary from Linux folks justifying Linux and Mac folks justifying Mac. Just as with text editors, people like what they’re familiar with. And that’s to be expected.

Jack’s post was particularly interesting to me because, like me, he’s a Mac-familiar guy who feels a strong pull toward Linux, so much so that he spent an entire year going mostly-in on it. And it was validating because his conclusions are similar to the ones I’ve reached in my prior attempts at this sort of move.

There are a couple things that are really hard for me to give up when going from Mac to Linux, and Jack addressed both of them. First, there are the macOS-only apps. The two that I’m most attached to are Alfred, because it’s the bomb, and Passwords, because I’ve migrated all of my family’s passwords into it. I assume I could eventually replicate my core Alfred stuff in something like Albert, and I’m working on various experiments to easily share a password from my phone to a Linux machine. I could get over these losses, but it’d cost.

Messages is also a bummer to lose. Boy do I love typing texts on a real keyboard instead of my phone. But I could make do.

Edit: Oh, and Preview! Preview is fabulous. Again, I assume a could cobble together Linux equivalents.

Second, it’s hard for me to give up macOS’s Emacs-inspired shortcuts. I use these constantly. They’re so baked into muscle memory that I don’t even realize I’m using them until they’re not there. And it’s so flippin’ great that they also work in the terminal thanks to Readline. This sort of platform-wide consistency is really nice. I assume I’d eventually get fluent enough at the Linux equivalents, but again, it’d cost.

Losing both my core apps and the Emacs shortcuts is a bitter pill to swallow, so I keep coming back to the question: Why Linux? Is it just for novelty and my petty grievances with macOS, or is there some larger, longer-term value to be gained from switching?

Linux has yet to win this analysis, in part because it’s not a level playing field: I’m already highly fluent and efficient on a Mac, my family is all on Apple devices (iPhones, MacBooks, my Mac mini, iPads, AirTags), Apple still has the best hardware out there, and these days that hardware is even cost-competitive.

So, again, why Linux, Sal? Jack says:

The things I like about Linux are abstract. The “I’m in complete control of my computing environment” kind of things. I miss that feeling on the Mac, especially when I can’t launch an app that I downloaded or when I’ve had to dismiss the two thousandth permissions dialog that day. Also, I love the “This twelve-year-old ThinkPad still works great running Linux!”

Yep, same here, plus the novelty factor. And for me, that’s just not enough to outweigh all the pros of sticking with a Mac.

All of that said, my Thinkpad & Linux experiment is still on! My plan from the start was to have the Thinkpad as a plaything and to stick to my Macs when I just need to get stuff done. The Thinkpad can supply novelty when I’m feeling the need for it, but I can retreat back into the velvet cage of macOS when the edges feel too rough. I still like that plan.

And maybe, over time, bit by bit, I’ll get comfortable enough in Linux to reach a different conclusion. But for now, Macs are still my main squeeze.

Wow, that was way overdue. When I got the blower out and could see it clearly, it looked like it was growing fur. Apparently that’s a combination of aerosolized grease, household lint, and heat polymerization, layered up over the years.

The blower blades have a distinct shape, presumably engineered for efficient movement of air. That shape was mostly filled in by this grime, which I can only assume was impacting its performance quite a lot. Even my lovely wife, who has zero interest in the various household-optimization projects that I get excited about, commented that it seems to be working much better now after I cleaned it.

Clean those blowers, peeps!

Turns out this is super easy to add to Neovim (and probably Vim too, but haven’t gotten there yet). The config looks like this:

-- Define the syntax match for text between ==
vim.cmd([[
  syntax match markdownHighlight /==.\{-}==/
]])

-- Define the styling
vim.api.nvim_set_hl(0, "markdownHighlight", {
  bg = "#3c3836",
  fg = "#fabd2f",
  bold = true,
})

And here’s the result:

The hardest part was picking the colors! Which I want to keep playing with.

This config goes in ~/.config/nvim/after/ftplugin/markdown.lua. That might look weird if you’re new to Vim, but it’s the standard path for config that applies only to Markdown files. It’s named that way because it’s applied after the global Markdown plugin, which is called a “filetype plugin” (ftplugin). See :h ftplugin and :h ftplugin-overrule.

Cool beans.

Meanwhile, I’ve been wanting a nicer way to browse those old journal entries. Something better than just scrolling through a massive list of files. That was part of jrnl’s appeal.

I realized this is a great use case for vibe coding, so now I have my gournal.¹

To start a new entry, which will create a new Obsidian daily note and open it in $EDITOR:

gournal new Here's the title of my entry

To peruse my entries:

# list everything
gournal

# filter by tag (with fish-shell autocompletion!)
gournal -t career

# randomize
gournal -random

# on this day
gournal -ott

Each of those commands pipes the resulting list of entries through my beloved fzf, using its preview feature to show the selected entry on the side, and using glow to render the markdown.

Here’s an example of gournal -t emacs (please excuse the inanity):

Fun stuff.

My wife doesn’t know I bought this Thinkpad. It hides in the visual noise of my office closet until I deploy it furtively when she’s not around.

Someday she’ll discover it and inquire as to its presence in our home. The inquiry will take the rough shape of, “You bought another computer?” Depending on the circumstances of the moment, the inquiry could be lighthearted in nature. Or not.

It’s not about the money, as this is a relatively insignificant expense for us at the moment, and it came out of my own “fun budget” anyway. Rather, my wife has a philosophical stance on stuff — specifically, that we should have less of it. And, of course, she’s right.

I share that philosophy. I’m just terrible at living by it. Even though I’m 46 with graying hair, and even though I’ve learned over and over again that the next toy is not the key to true happiness, I still love buying toys.

Fortunately they tend to be smaller things like a used laptop or fancy bike pannier. The mid-size stuff like an actual bike or a treadmill does go through an above-the-board marital negotiation before purchase. She’ll make me squirm on these but ultimately acquiesce if I’m sufficiently gung-ho.

Luckily, 14 years into our relationship, she still loves me and has accepted that there’s going to be some level of unnecessary purchasing in our lives. On my end, I will keep striving for a less-is-more mindset, and I will continue to not suggest any contradiction when she buys that next throw pillow or set of expensive, ugly wine glasses when we already have perfectly fine, good-looking wine glasses.¹ No siree.

Anyway, secret Thinkpad is fun.

Me: No shit.

I was amused to see Kev’s post because I had the same experience and realization recently. It dawned on me as I was perusing some big list of links that it really is helpful to have a visual indicator of which ones I’ve already clicked.