From a “Relocated Items” folder (alias, actually) on my MBP desktop after upgrading…
Some of your files had been in a location that is now incompatible with macOS security settings. These files were moved to the Security folder for your review. If there are any files you want to keep, you can move them to a new location, as long as it is different from their location before the upgrade or migration.
Screw you, Catalina. I don’t feel like messing with this nonsense.
It’s amazing, and frustrating, to me when I can’t find some bit of information. It’s not as if I don’t have a place to keep things. Oh, no, it’s definitely not that. I’m well aware that it’s having too many places to keep things that makes it so hard to find stuff.
Several times this week I went looking for information about something from more than a couple years ago and couldn’t find it. This was maddening, since I like to think of myself as someone who takes copious notes about everything and has a thoughtfully-considered system for storing them.
But where did I put that one thing? How the hell should I kow? I mean, it’s probably somewhere in one of these…
Do you see what I’m dealing with here? It’s madness.
I start out with the best of intentions. I’ll say, “This cool New Thing is where I’m keeping everything from now on!” I’ll move recent stuff into New Thing and convince myself that I’ve finally solved my problem. For good!
Fast forward two weeks…
New Thing is great, but I miss [INSERT FEATURE] about Old Thing. I open up Old Thing and OMG how did I ever stop using this? It’s awesome!
Sigh. Repeat this on a regular basis over a decade or more and it’s just a confusing, messy, shit-pile and I’m fumbling around in Spotlight hoping to get lucky.
Anyway, you can probably guess what I’ve been doing this weekend. Maybe I’ll sum it up in another post if I can get over the shame of it all.
I was reminded today1 of twtxt, “a decentralised, minimalist microblogging service for hackers.”
It would be neat if more people used it regularly. My feed is at http://tilde.club/~jbaty/twtxt.txt if you’re looking for something to follow. It’s super simple and kind of fun.
Similarly, if producing ideas becomes a symbol of work (having to think about stuff all day), rather than leisure (freedom to think about stuff all day), I wonder whether basic behavior will start to become covetable. Instead of signaling how much we’re thinking, maybe we’ll start to signal how much we’re not thinking. Rather than a private coping mechanism or a way to unwind, basic behavior would become a way to display total unawareness of those who toil in the idea mines all day; a blissful unfamiliarity with the social signal factory.
”…a blissful unfamiliarity with the social signal factory”
How nice that would be.
I have a (5th Gen?) ThinkPad just itching to run Linux. I’m a decades-long Mac user also itching to try Linux. This combination meant that I’ve been experimenting with Linux for several months.
But it’s over…for now.
I’ve found running Linux to be death by 1,000 cuts. Things like…
All of these things are solvable, but solving them isn’t why I want to run Linux. I want to have a relatively inexpensive, non-Mac laptop with a decent keyboard. I want to learn some of the magical things available to me on Linux. I want to experiment with different desktop environments or distributions.
This weekend I spend half a day re-installing Manjaro i3. That’s not true, I spent about 20 minutes installing it, and then four hours swearing at everything I couldn’t get to work properly. I’ve tried a few other things like Ubuntu, Mint, Manjaro xfce, etc. but i3 is the one I’m most interested in, but oops! “There’s an error in your .i3/config”. Of course there is.
It just hasn’t been fun. Linux should be fun, right?
I’m going to shelve this experiment for a while and revisit it later. I don’t know that I’ll ever be comfortable actively running both macOS and Linux. If I were going to go all-in Linux, I’m sure it would be a better experience because I wouldn’t have a machine running macOS right over there that basically just works and has more than everything I need.
I’m not giving up on Linux yet. Just pressing pause.
On August 22nd I wrote
I took DEVONthink out of the rotation today. Too much overhead for how I use it (as a glorified file manager). HoudahSpot does a fine job of helping me find things. I’ll miss capture and inboxes, so we’ll see if it takes.
It didn’t take. I’ve been using DEVONthink since 2005 and I should have known better.
DEVONthink Pro (DTP) is a deep and powerful app that can masquerade as merely a fancy file manager. I sometimes feel that it’s unnecessary overkill for my purposes, so I move things out of it and into the Finder. (DEVONthink makes this almost too easy).
Then, I find a snippet of text that I want to save and I don’t know where to put it. Evernote works for that but I don’t want to use Evernote.
Or I scan a document and it ends up on my Desktop and not OCR’ed because I can’t remember how to configure ScanSnap to do that. It was so much easier to just let DTP handle it because it’s very good at that sort of thing.
Then I try cleaning out my Downloads folder and there are a bunch of receipts in there that now need filing. DTP’s AI features make filing documents almost automatic and I suddenly miss that.
Or I want to link to a file I just created but the file is still on my Desktop so the link will break once I move it (manually) to it’s new home. DTP makes it easy to generate permanent links to documents that don’t break no matter where I move the file.
What if I want to take notes about a document? In DTP I just add an annotation and type as much as I want. Finder comments aren’t nearly as flexible or accessible.
You see what I mean? For something as simple as a “glorified file manager”, DEVONthink sure brings a lot of power to the process of capturing, managing, and finding information.
I just bought the upgrade to version 3 and I’ll be spending time today bringing everything back in (which, of course, DTP also makes easy work of).
Whenever there’s no package.json I know it’s going to be a good day. Whenever there’s one, Pandora is coming along the way with her fucking box.
I’m happy that I get to work with some great developers so that I don’t have to be one myself. I couldn’t handle modern web development.
(via Baldur Bjarnason)
Lots of neat notebooks listed and briefly reviewed in New York Magazine.
One that sort of rubbed me the wrong way was:
I had a hard time with the “I’m a person who carries around a Field Notes notebook”–ness that carrying around a Field Notes notebook signifies, but that’s perhaps my own issue.
Yes, perhaps it is.
My iPhone 11 Pro shipped early and I love it. pic.twitter.com/rJsZVfGTbq
— Brilliant Ads (@Brilliant_Ads) September 12, 2019
😂
I find the iPhone 11’s camera conglomeration to be rather ugly. Function over form is new for Apple, no? I could get used to it, but sheesh, it’s a shock to the system.
I would prefer seeing fewer aspirational posts/tweets/etc. I’m not terribly interested that you’ve started to read a book, but please do let me know how you liked it when you’re finished. It’s great that you’re planning to work out every day, but why tell me that? Intending to regularly write morning pages before breakfast isn’t actually writing anything, but I can’t wait to hear how it’s helped you after you’ve done it for six months.
Writing aspirational posts can be self-motivating, and I’m guilty of it myself. And of course feel free to write about anything you damn well please. I’m just asking for fewer before and more after posts.