I’ve kept a journal (though infrequently) since my early 20s. A thick notebook with a table of contents on its first two pages made of a long list of dates. At the time, life was too chaotic to keep the habit uninterrupted. I’m not sure at what point I converted to digital form, but I flirted with digital journaling for years before it became my primary method of keeping a journal…
Macs are evil. Macs are expensive pieces of toy hardware, which is often not up to par with what’s offered on the market (my personal biggest annoyances are the keyboards and the touchpad). Everything you do on a Mac you can do on Linux better… and so on. If that’s true, why are so many professionals in IT environments (which are otherwise Windows-based) use Macs? I want to see if my perspective changed.
They say a picture is worth a thousand words:
This is my SSH server’s log, and this looks like a good time to talk about basic ssh server security.
In my last post, I discussed how I (finally) found out that I can use entire org files as capture templates. This is a basic feature that works out of the box, but the org-mode manual doesn’t give it enough exposure in my opinion. Turns out it wasn’t just me either.
As I was expanding my checklists and learning more “trivial” org-capture features, I discovered more useful things, but ran out of time to write about them. It’s now time to get back to more “basics” of org-capture again for some helpful tips.
I’ve been pretty busy org-mode-ly speaking. There is a lot to say, and as I was writing my post, more ideas occurred to me that behooved me to stop writing and experiment more, which lead to more interesting results, which meant I ran out of time to write about the results. When I finally returned to my post this morning, I realized there’s so much to explain, I can’t include it all in one go. Here you go, part one of my latest adventure in org-mode: org-capture from org files.
Even though I don’t have any means of tracking how many readers I have on this blog, I can’t help but feel a little bit responsible for my audience. This is an attempt to see how a quick “here’s what’s up” post while the blog is otherwise idle.
So, a few quick updates about what’s coming up:
Says Jamie T. Rubin: “As a writer, I naturally want to spend my time writing. More and more I see tools getting in the way of writing. If that wasn’t the case, why do so many tools now add a “focus” or “distraction-free” mode? What choices can I make to simplify my writing ecosystem?”
My answer to that, considering the theme of this blog and how I’m writing it, is obvious. But the question is going deeper than that, and so should be the answer.
I’ve talked about Orgzly several times on this blog, but I haven’t dedicated a full post to it yet until now. Instead of describing my workflow again or just praising Orgzly’s usefulness in a repeated manner, I thought it would be interesting to reach out to its creator and ask a couple of questions instead. To my delight, he was happy to reply! I’m happy to present my first interview on this blog.
Every now and then I discover (or re-discover) a tool in Linux that does exactly what I need it to do. Some examples include ffmpeg, to shrink down my self-recorded webcam journal session while increasing the volume; abcde, to rip a classical music CD to flac and find its exact title and name; youtube-dl, which downloads any video online I need along with aria to speed these downloads, and more.
Today I want to praise a new excellent tool, this time for screenshots: Flameshot.
I’ve been using Linux as my daily driver for the last three years. I work with Windows on a daily basis and I support Mac issues all the time, but I don’t think I will ever go back to using either one for my personal data. As a matter of fact, it’s Linux which made an appearance at work: without my VM and Org-mode, I would probably be drowning under hips of emails, meeting invites, support tickets, and the constant in-person walk-ins into our work environment.