Well, I've got the urge again — I've not really changed the design for a couple of years.
I know it's boredom setting in, and I haven't been using it much lately which annoys the hell out of me.
May a redesign could emphasise my music more, make it more prominent. Perhaps I need to return to a home page but completely change it from what I was using for so long.
I asked ChatGPT to take the current blog page and CSS and simplify it; it didn't really get what I was after and its "solutions" just made a mess of things.
I need to have a long think about this, work out exactly what I want. The trouble is, I'm not sure.
Yesterday and today, I was busy with some “bug fixing.” Not on computer code, but on my beloved bike – the one from that incident last month that sent me to the hospital for an X-ray.
Since the brake lever for my rear hydraulic disc brake broke, I took the bike to a repair shop. After almost two weeks, I finally got it back. The brake lever was replaced and the rear brake was fixed, but unfortunately, a new problem popped up: the front brake squeaked terribly loud every time I tried to use it. A very unpleasant sound!
As soon as I noticed it, I went straight back to the shop, but they told me I had to book a new appointment for next week. They weren’t willing to take a quick look right then to see what the issue was.
But that gave me an idea: maybe I could fix it myself and finally learn something new. I often feel pretty incompetent when it comes to manual work, so this was a chance.
Many YouTube tutorials, a lot of trying, sweating, swearing, and feeling desperate later, I finally managed to fix it! I had to dismount the lowrider luggage rack, the front wheel, the brake caliper, and the brake pads. The brake pads and the brake disc needed a thorough cleaning with some brake cleaner I had to buy from a hardware store first.
After doing all that and putting everything back together, I wanted to see if the squeaking was gone. It wasn’t. Not as bad as before, but still there. Feeling a bit desperate, I did more research and found out it was probably because I hadn’t “braked in” the front brake yet after lightly sanding the brake pads. For that, I had to ride a bit and gently press the brake repeatedly.
After I did that, the sound finally vanished! I had such a great feeling of competence. I didn’t give up; I kept trying to find the cause and a solution. It was just like fixing code, but with hardware instead of software.
Now, I can cancel my repair shop appointment and try a different place for my next bike inspection or repair.
Long-time users of Micro.blog won’t believe this… We are rolling out 24-hour time and more localized date formats today, many years after it was first requested. Visit the Micro.blog timeline on the web and it should detect your settings, then start applying them everywhere.
A framework’s marketing usually pretends it is unnecessary for you to understand how its core transformation works — but without that knowledge, you can’t achieve the beautiful range of results you see in the framework’s sample site gallery.
This is a great callout. Tools will say, “You don’t have to worry about the details.” But the reality is, you end up worrying about the details — at least to some degree.
Why? Because what you want to build is full of personalization. That’s how you differentiate yourself, which means you’re going to need a tool that’s expressive enough to help you.
So the question becomes: how hard is it to understand the details that are being intentionally hidden away?
A lot of the time those details are not exposed directly. Instead they’re exposed through configuration. But configuration doesn’t really help you learn how something works. I mean, how many of you have learned how typescript works under the hood by using tsconfig.json? As Jan says:
Configuration can lead to as many problems as it solves
Nailed it. He continues:
Configuring software is itself a form of programming, in fact a rather difficult and often baroque form. It can take more data files or code to configure a framework’s transformation than to write a program that directly implements that transformation itself.
I’m not a Devops person, but that sounds like Devops in a nutshell right there. (It also perfectly encapsulates my feelings on trying to setup configuration in GitHub Actions.)
Jan moves beyond site creation to also discuss site hosting. He gives good reasons for keeping your website’s architecture simple and decoupled from your hosting provider (something I’ve been a long time proponent of):
These site hosting platforms typically charge an ongoing subscription fee. (Some offer a free tier that may meet your needs.) The monthly fee may not be large, but it’s forever. Ten years from now you’ll probably still want your content to be publicly available, but will you still be happy paying that monthly fee? If you stop paying, your site disappears.
In subscription pricing, any price (however small) is recurring. Stated differently: pricing is forever.
Anyhow, it’s a good read from Jan and lays out his vision for why he’s building Web Origami: a tool for that encourages you to understand (and customize) how you transform content to a website. He just launched version 0.4.0 which has some exciting stuff I’m excited to try out further (I’ll have to write about all that later).
I received a tonne of responses to my question about notes systems. I've also had a couple people email me asking for an update, as they're interested too. This is that update.
OK, so one thing became clear as a result of the many responses I received to my previous post - there's no one method to rule them all when it comes to taking notes.
Obsidian is very popular, but apart from that, everyone seems to be doing their own thing. So I decided to pluck the best bits of the various note taking systems people have emailed me with, and used those tidbits to improve my own system.
I already had a SuperNote Nomad, and wanted to keep using it. Problem was, there were no templates on the Nomad that worked exactly how I wanted them to. Turns out that creating custom templates is super easy. So I ended with a couple of templates; one for managing my to-do list, and another for bullet notes.
So here's how I put them to use in a kinda bullet journal, but not really kinda way...
With my to-do template, I maintain a monthly to-do list, which I append to as my list of things to do inevitably grows.
I then use my "bullet template" to write notes for every meeting I attend. The useful thing, for me, is that each page is labelled with the date of the meeting(s). If I have a lot of meetings that day, I just add another page and append the page number to the date. For example 11 Aug (3), would be the 3rd page for 11th August.
My hope is that this will allow me to quickly go back and find notes retrospectively. For example, if there's a meeting I attended on the 10th of last month, I know the notes for that day are likely to be somewhere around pages 10-15. So I pick one, and I will immediately know how close I am because of my date ( page #) system.
Anyway, back to my system...
I've now carved out 30 minutes first thing every working morning to review my monthly to-do list, as well as my notes for the previous day. I then do a couple things, as needed:
Add any to-do items from the previous day's notes to my main to-do list (these are usually marked with a star).
List any to-do items I want to focus on for that day into my daily note.
This is where the magic is for me. Firstly it allows me to plan my day somewhat, but secondly (and more importantly) I come away from my desk at the end of the day with a sense of achievement, as I've usually managed to cross at least a couple things off my to-list. Even if it's something really small like "email Dave about [thing]" I still get that sense of achievement.
I'm almost gamifying work, and it's working!
When it comes to the monthly to-do list, the thinking here is that by reviewing these items daily, and having to manually copy any outstanding items to a new to-do list every month, I'm able to see what's just noise and therefore not worth my time. So they will be ditched form the to-do.
Natural selection, baby. Darwin would be proud.
Here's an example of what my to-do list and bullet note templates look like. They're very simple, but that's exactly what I wanted. All the default templates have too much cruft that I'll never use. These are exactly what I need and nothing more.
Bullet notes exampleTo-do list example
These are fake notes and to-do items that I've written just as an example. I hope you can read my handwriting. 🙃
Final thoughts
So that's it. That's my new note taking system. I've only been using it for a week or so at this point, so it's likely to evolve over time. I like that all my notes and to-do's are now in one place, and are organised in such a way as to make them easy for me to find as well.
Plus, if I really wanted to, I could easily switch to a physical notebook with this system. So it's pretty flexible.
If you're using a SuperNote Nomad like me, and want to use these templates, here's the source files. Once you have them, just connect your SuperNote to your computer via USB and unzip them to the MyStyle folder. You should then be able to use them as a template when creating a new note (the templates will be in the Customization tab).
Finally I wanted to thank the many people who emailed me with tips, thoughts and feedback on how you all do notes. These conversations have been really helpful for me setting up this new system. ♥️
Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is great, and you're great for using it. ❤️
I’ve learned a ton about gardening in the past decade plus of owning a house. Gardens are so slow-moving that they’re anchored in our past choices, and don’t represent our current knowledge or skills — but we also can’t develop those skills without trying things, and making some mistakes. Ripping the whole yard out doesn’t make sense because plants grow slowly; I need to work with what exists. Figuring out how to adapt the imperfect is just another element of gardening.
I’ve learned a lot about investing in the past fifteen years. My portfolio reflects some of the things I didn’t know fifteen years ago, ten years ago, five years ago. I put money in the wrong spots, and even when I put it in the right spots I goofed up there sometimes too (I was very proud of myself for putting money into a retirement account early… it took several years to realize I needed to make investments inside the account — that it was just sitting there as cash, depreciating 🤦♀️). Sure, it’d be nice if I’d “gotten it right” from the start, but realistically I have to figure out what makes sense based on what I have. Our tax system and retirement rules are convoluted and complex, and I’m doing the best I can given the time I’m willing to spend on it. Money invested imperfectly is better than never having started investing at all.
Sometimes I see leftists yearning to start the US over from scratch, claiming that everything is too fucked to reform, but I don’t know how we could do that without causing massive harm in the transition for precisely the people we most mean to support. I think the sunk cost fallacy doesn’t apply to life quite the same way it does to economics. A country, like a garden, like an investment portfolio, is a perpetual work in progress. We can’t wipe our own slate clean; we are who we are because of our history, imperfect as it is, and getting rid of everything we’ve built so far won’t erase our cultural memory. Some of our laws are stupid, some are cruel, some are outdated… and some are there to protect people. Every time I see a warning label on a product, I think, there’s a story there. Regulations are written in blood.
