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.

Later, after posting, I saw this:

Just wait until you notice that it’s inexplicably slower on 120hz monitors and that your input devices remain focused on the previous space until the animation fully completes!

Aha, that’s why! Back at my desk, I’m running at 240Hz with my new monitor, and the animation is significantly slower than it is with a standard refresh rate.

Fury: justified.

Workspaces are an easy way to group a set of windows. By default, you are on the first workspace, as the bar on the bottom left indicates. To switch to another workspace, press $mod+num where num is the number of the workspace you want to use. If the workspace does not exist yet, it will be created.

The beautiful thing about these window managers, or at least the ones I’ve tried, is that they switch workspaces instantly. In i3, if you blink, you’ll miss the change. It’s such a great reminder of how rippin’ fast a UI can feel when the designers so intend.

The macOS equivalent of workspaces is called Spaces. I’ve measured how long it takes to change Spaces with the Control-<left/right arrow> shortcut, and it’s exactly the amount of time necessary to piss me off.¹

So instead of Spaces, I use a bunch of Alfred hotkeys to switch between maximized apps. It works well enough. Every seven months or so, I try Spaces again but quickly get annoyed and bail.

Come on, Apple. It’s been 15 years² of dozens of us whining about this. Give us a setting, will ya?

I decided to go with Fedora i3 spin for my distro and desktop environment. I was trying to balance nerdiness and usability. Arch was calling me, and I may go there next. But I don’t know how much hacking time I’ll end up having on this thing, so I leaned toward a just-works approach, scoring my nerd points with i3 rather than Arch and rolling updates.

And boy do I love reuniting with i3. I love its speed and power. I also appreciate how different it is from macOS. I was eager for that sort of change of scene.

Speaking of changes of scene, I’m digging the Thinkpad so far. The FHD+ screen seems plenty sharp even though I’ve been spoiled by Apple’s high-DPI displays for so many years. The keyboard is great. It’s nice that I can change the role of the function keys on the fly with FnLock. And I like having physical pointer buttons above the trackpad.

It seems to handle power management with the sleep/wake cycle nicely. It wakes immediately upon opening the lid, just like a MacBook. I’m still at 85% battery now at 10:30 PM having used it on and off throughout the day. And this is a used machine off Ebay, mind you, so I assume the battery’s been around the block a few times.

I want to think more about why I find Linux so appealing. Maybe I feel coddled by macOS, or maybe it’s just itchy feet. Dunno. Too tired to figure it out.

See ya. 👋

I’ve been doing more writing in Org Mode lately, partially just as an experiment, and partially because—as I’ve noted more than once—the strength of Org Mode isn’t the markup part, it’s the mode part: properties and tags and dates and other bits and bobs entirely outside Markdown’s purview.

It’s so true. Org mode should be called God mode because that’s what it is for plain text inside Emacs. But that’s the catch: inside Emacs. As Watts says:

If you want to work with anything outside of Emacs, things get hairy real fast.

Yep. I’d love to go all-in on Org mode, but I just can’t make that kind of commitment to Emacs, in part because the mobile situation with Obsidian is light-years ahead of what I was able to string together with Org last time I tried. Sigh.

Be sure to check out the linked post for thoughtful treatment of Org, Markdown, Marked, and some text-processing tricks.

Search hit: Herdr: One terminal to rule them all (herdr.dev) on Hacker News.

I wanted to mention that zmx is a beautiful piece of minimal software that basically has gotten rid of my tmux and zellij use.

🤨

Now searching zmx.

Search hit: Zmx: Session Persistence for Terminal Processes (github.com/neurosnap) on Hacker News.

If you like this tool, you might also be interested in reptyr, which lets you reparent a process to a different tty.

…

and some other tools similar to reptyr:

https://github.com/jerome-pouiller/reredirect/

https://github.com/pasky/retty

https://github.com/trishume/telefork

😕

Gah never mind.

It turned out that writing and learning are a lot of fun, and I was constantly looking for ways to practice my new found writing skills. I think that’s part of why I still love typing - I just find creating words on a screen a lot of fun. Yeah, I’m weird. I know.

I once applied for a data-entry temp job because typing numbers in cells for hours on end sounded fun to me. So if you’re weird, I’m worse.

Kev’s post also reminded me of some other, actually important things. First, that I keep expecting my 12-year-old son to have the same attitude toward learning that I now have at 46. How quickly I forget that I too was your typical, irreverent, know-it-all teenager until … well past my teens. I need to be more accepting with him and be mostly content celebrating the stuff he is doing and learning quite well on his own.

Parenthood is so easy.

I also love Kev’s takeaway (in part): that a seemingly innocuous decision like taking a night course in English can open doors to totally unforeseeable, invaluable experiences in life. I’ve learned that lesson myself in various ways over the years. As someone who’s perpetually hungry for solitude and most comfortable holed up alone with a computer somewhere, I have to remind myself: get out and do things. Go live. Good things will happen.

Fortunately, I married a wonderful and extroverted woman who doesn’t give me much of a choice.¹ 😉

Thanks for the great post, Kev!

Second: reader mode. And one of the cool things about reader mode, which I only just realized, is that it lets me impose dark mode on a website that doesn’t have it. Usually I don’t care much, but occasionally (like right now) I’m computing in the dark, and sites with white backgrounds are blinding.

That said, I should get around to trying Firefox. Maybe I’ll do that now.