When I grow weary of dealing with plain text files and Hugo-based publishing, I fire up a WordPress blog. I’ve done it again: I’ll be posting at copingmechanism.com for now. This site will remain available as-is for a while, but may go away. I’m leaving the RSS feed alone and won’t be redirecting to the other blog. The new feed is at https://copingmechanism.com/feed I hope to see you there.

These days, proper backlinks are becoming table stakes for any respectable note-taking tool. Roam Research didn’t invent backlinks, but their implementation was so well-done and useful that it made other tools seem lacking in comparison. Many of them are now scrambling to catch up. TheBrain is an application that has seriously implemented inter-note linking for many years. The “Plex” is like an infinite mindmap with various types of links and it’s amazingly powerful when put to use.

When I recently deleted all my Adobe apps I forgot to consider how much I rely Negative Lab Pro for processing film scans. I’m slowly developing a film scanning workflow using a digital camera rather than a flatbed scanner, and a key component of the process is NLP. NLP is especially useful for color film. Even though I don’t shoot much color, NLP has proven to be by far my favorite tool for getting reasonable color from C-41 film.

I sit at my home office desk an awful lot these days. This affords me the opportunity to listen to music for long stretches, and I’ve been taking advantage of that. One of the best audio purchases I’ve made recently was a lifetime subscription to Roon. Roon does wonderful things with my offline collection of FLAC and MP3 files and at the same time integrates flawlessly with the Hi-Res Qobuz streaming service.

Digital Ocean released their new App Platform so I thought I’d test it with this blog’s Hugo build since I’m a big fan of Digital Ocean. I’ve learned a couple things. First, any submodules must use the https: protocol. Using git: doesn’t work. This was confirmed by DO support (which was fast, by the way). My site won’t build because it times out after 20 minutes. In contrast Netlify takes 3 minutes and Render.

I was just let into the Codespaces beta in Github. I’m interested in this for ad-hoc development in a browser or in my iPad. As a test, I created this post in Codespaces via Safari. Typed this and committed it all right in Safari in a VS Code-like environment. It was all easy and could definitely come in handy for my workflow.

I like keeping my eye on the hosting/SaaS space, so I was interested to see what Render was like. To that end, I signed up and will be testing the process of hosting a static site (baty.net probably) using Render. Static site hosting is free (with some limits). I connected my Github account and repo, created a new “Web Service” in Render and the whole thing was pulled, built, and deployed within minutes.

Andy Matuschak nails it in a series of entries on his site. A couple of good examples: The most effective readers and thinkers I know don’t take notes when reading | People who write extensively about note-writing rarely have a serious context of use: In fact, the negation almost seems true: most note-taking fanatics seem to actually be quite ineffective thinkers. and… Many bloggers and “life-hackers” have made a full-time job of suggesting how you should organize your journal, or how you should most effectively “Write about what you read.

Kelly and Jess (2009). Hasselblad 501C/M Acros 100" Kelly and Jess (2009). Hasselblad 501C/M Acros 100 I ran into the above photo from 2010 and it jumped right out at me. I am a huge fan of the way the Zeiss lenses on the Hasselblad render, but this one had a little extra something. I dug out the original negative and of course it was Acros 100. I didn’t realize I was missing Acros after they stopped making it but now I wish I had more of it.

Editors. I try them all, so now I’m trying Nova, from the artists at Panic. The idea of a freshly-built, all-native macOS text/code editor is exciting. I think people overreact to the oddities of Electron apps, but a fast, lean, “real” Mac app is still refreshing. I have only used Nova for about an hour, including to write this post, but my first impression is that it’s fast, clean, pretty, and a pleasant, more Mac-like alternative to VS Code.

Today, I deleted the Adobe apps from my devices. This was not due to some sort of protest or reaction to policy or subscriptions fatigue or anything like that. I did it because I needed to make a decision about how I manage and process my photos. I wrote just a week ago about how I’m going to be using only Lightroom because I couldn’t deal with the combination of Lightroom and Lightroom Classic.

In January, 2018 I wrote this: Yet, I continue to learn, discover, laugh, share, and interact with interesting and generally wonderful people on Twitter every day. At that time, I decided to continue using Twitter, but I’d significantly pruned back my feed. Disabling retweets, unfollowing negative people, unfollowing brands, all made Twitter more useful than not. However, I’m not so sure I can continue spending time on Twitter.