Holding Dear: The Value of the Real by Steve Leveen
“Holding Dear” begins with Steve Leveen telling the story of how he and his wife Lori started Levenger back in 1987. I’ve been buying stuff from Levenger for many years and Leveen strikes me as sincerely interested in providing “Tools for Serious Readers”
The remainder of the book consists of short pieces by various people writing about “real” objects and what they mean to them.
Examples:
- Kevin Kelly - a digital camera
- David McCullough - his typewriter
- David Allen - whiteboards
- Patty Smith - Levenger’s Jefferson Writing Desk
The book was a quick, enjoyable read and made me feel a little better about being attached to some of my things.
How about dinner?
My ex-wife passed away recently. We’d been divorced for many years and haven’t kept in touch, but we share a daughter, so we never completely lost touch.
While going through her mom’s things, my daughter found the sign that started our whole relationship. I was working construction in her neighborhood at the time. She would drive by a few times a day and we’d make eye contact. Eventually, I gathered all the courage I could muster, wrote “HOW ABOUT DINNER” on the back of a blueprint, and held it up as she drove by. She stopped, and the rest is history.
Sign drawn on blueprint. (June 23, 1987)
Start stopping down
I’ve always been a fan of fast lenses. I enjoy a photo with a narrow depth of field in which the subject “pops” out of the background.
I say “bokeh” a lot.
But, I think maybe we’ve taken things too far. I’ve come to realize that while a narrow depth of field can make a good photo better, it can’t make a bad photo into a good photo.
So many photos (including mine) are nothing more than a demonstration of what a fast lens looks like wide open. Or increasingly, how good my phone’s computer can fake it.
For me, a portrait with a busy background benefits from throwing the background out of focus. Other than that, I’m starting to feel like we should start stopping down a little.
Remind gets an update after 3 years
I’ve never found a better reminder utility for the command line than Dianne Skoll’s Remind.
I used Remind for years. I was reminded (ha!) of Remind today when Dianne announced a new version (I still subscribe to the mailing list). It’s the first update in three years.
My favorite way to use remind was with a curses front end called Wyrd. It’s a powerful combination, but I haven’t been able to find a way to download Wyrd recently so I’ve not been using either.
UPDATE: While writing this I found a fork on Github that I may try building.
Dianne is not a fan of Apple or Microsoft, and goes so far as to hobble the app when it’s built on a Mac. I understand her point, but it’s a little heavy handed, so I remove that bit from the code before building it myself.
A few resources:
- Author’s introduction to Remind (Linux Journal, 2000)
- Mike Harris wrote an article at 43 Folders (43folders.com, 2005)
- Remind FAQ
Blot and/or Hugo and Micro.blog
I’ve noticed recently that WordPress is becoming more like Squarespace and that [Micro.blog][micro] has become a darn nice tool for blogging. For this reason, I’ve stopped posting short posts to my WordPress blog at jack.baty.net and instead post to my Micro.blog at micro.baty.net.
I should just go all-in Micro.blog, since it easily handles both short and long posts, but I want to keep short Tweet-like posts separate from my “main” blog, so for now I’ll need two blogs.
Micro.blog is perfect for, well, “micro” posts. [Hugo][gohugo], which I use for baty.net, is also great, but recently it just quit working one day and I couldn’t publish my site. That got me thinking about [Blot.im][blot] again.
Blot is the easiest thing I’ve found for publishing a static site using Markdown files. Edit a local Markdown file in my favorite text editor, hit “Save”, and it’s published. There’s no pushing or rsyncing or anything fancy.
I’m going to dip my toes back into Blot using my existing Blot site at [baty.blog][baty 2] and see how it goes.
[baty 2]: [blot]: https://blot.im [gohugo]: https://gohugo.io [micro]: https://micro.blog
Getting the iPad to Pro — by Craig Mod
The iPads of today are a far cry from that oddly rounded, difficult to hold, heavy, low-ish resolution first version of the iPad released in 2010. These new iPad Pros are, from a hardware perspective (whispering with hedged hyperbole), quite possibly the most impressive, certainly most beautiful, consumer computers ever made. And so expectations should be high for what we can do with them. We should expect to do more, more easily.
Computers are nothing if not a constellation of design and engineering details that either work for or against you. They either push you forward, smoothly, an encouraging tailwind allowing you to get done the work you want to get done, or they push back, become abrasive, breaking you from flow states, causing you to have to Google even the simplest task. I lost an hour the other day trying to open an Open Office Document.10 This is bananas. iPads should be better. They’re so close. And they’re certainly powerful enough.
Posting to Blot using Blotpub
This is a test of Amit Gawande’s Blotpub, a Micropub service for Blot.im blogs. If this works, thanks Amit!
Happy 21st Century! - antipope
Forget barbed wire, concentration camps, gas chambers and gallows, and Hugo Boss uniforms. That’s the 20th century pattern of centralized, industrialized genocide. In the 21st century deep-learning mediated AI era, we have the tools to inflict agile, decentralized genocide as a cloud service on our victims.
Good grief, how depressing. Not necessarily because of what he says, but because of how true it rings.
Things 3 on the latest Mojave beta
Looks like it won’t be long before Things 3 works again on the latest Mojave beta. Whew!
The Penna Bluetooth Keyboard
I was creating an eBay listing to sell my Penna Bluetooth keyboard and I thought I should probably make sure it worked first, since I hadn’t used it in months.
Penna keyboard
The batteries were still good and it paired immediately. I started typing on its Cherry MX Blue switches and realized it was so fun and weird and cool-looking that I decided to keep it.