adam solove @asolove@quietcar.social

All these years I've preferred technical books as pdfs.

Then today I tried an epub in nov.el mode in emacs and ... wow. Good keyboard navigation and shortcuts, search, show it in a split right with the code. Just wildly better.

But I'm trying to imagine a UI that is text-only, cursor addressable, in high-bit color and 60fps.

Every window's "screenshot" is actually just an attributed string of text with its formatting info. Maybe formatting can be auto-done in response to metadata on the text, and then you can pipe it to another program that can interpret the metadata in another way?

Plan 9 went a certain distance on "replace pixel-centric UI elements with text", which is pretty cool if deeply frightening. (No idea how a networked system would be secure with ambient command-execution of any visible text.) And one cool part is you can just grab the text content of most windows at the system level. But that text was still within bitblt pixel decorations and just black&white. They didn't even do syntax highlighting in the editor!

Random thought:

For material reasons, computer UI's went from black&white text, to black&white pixels, to color pixels. And each of those steps is a clear improvement over the previous.

But: there's a fourth option: color, text-centric/cursor-addressed. It was never a dominant paradigm. But if I had to choose between pixel-centric b&w and colorful just-text, the latter is clearly preferable. Wonder what that kind of UI would be like.

Today’s the day! Wrapped under migrating off my old laptop and onto the Framework. And stickers are nearly complete.

Less "Uber for X" and more "Tarsnap for X".

Is Bandcamp evil now? Anyone using Jamendo or Open.Audio instead? Would love a way to support artists and build a catalog of music.

Switching from Mac to Linux, I was mostly worried about finding an ok browser, as I generally dislike Chrome and have enough history with Firefox to tend to dislike it.

Switching to Vivaldi has been quite nice so far. It's Chromium and has standard dev tools, works with Chrome plugins, but seems faster and more privacy-centric. And the vertical tab bar and other UI niceties are quite good.

My favorite part of all this is the fractal complexity: you have 3ish dimensions of ergonomic debates, multiplied by two dimensions of keyswitch preferences, and _then_ now that the models are generated parametrically in code, multiplied by everyone's favorite slightly-obscure language.

You've got a clojure + cherry mx project getting forked on one side into ocaml and on the other side into low-profile switches.

I thought I was into mechanical keyboards and knew how deep that particular oubliette went. I mean, hell, I had an very early ergodox for a while.

Then tonight I started looking into the current scene and things are far crazier. I suddenly have super strong constraints that are only satisfied by a single experimental reddit post: https://www.reddit.com/r/ErgoMechKeyboards/comments/tdf7ke/choctyl_4x6_with_mini_cluster_and_pimoroni/ and I need to stop looking at this stuff.

After several days of being super allergic and then sick, my brain appears to be working again.

I'm a bit behind where I wanted to be, but:
- The Framework laptop is all set up and is now my daily personal computer.
- I've got a working doom emacs setup that I'm pretty happy with.
- I'm working through the Elixir LiveView book and enjoying writing more code. The dev tooling is so good: fast, auto-refresh, live dashboard built in. Loving it.

I would like a file format for saving command line and programming screencasts semantically, rather than as video, so I can replay them in my nice theme rather than whatever garbage this person is using.

I first switched from engineer to manager right as flexbox arrived. Then went back to being an engineer, and switched back to manager right as CSS Grid arrived.

It's my first time using Grid and ... dang, we have it so good today.

I was already aware of the impact of grid on building whole-page layouts, but only today did I start using it for tiny details, too. Tons of small alignment things are now so much easier without extra markup.

I am 100% sold on the idea of Nix, but it's in the category of things where every bit of documentation is written by someone who already understands it and can't quite tell you how it works until you figure it out yourself.

Upgraded MacOS to find they auto turned on "AirPlay Receiver", which ... binds to localhost:5000, breaking my dev environments. Cool cool. (Easy to fix once you find it, but super annoying and a dumb port choice.)

10yo asked what "boner city" meant. After a long talk, I discovered he actually was trying to read "bona fides".

Meanwhile:

- PTO today because I needed some time after working through part of my last vacation (by choice, but still)

- trying to find reasonable Linux paths for searching/organizing my huge pdf, photo, and notes collections

- backing up and migrating all my personal data continues apace

- password rotate and TOTP all the accounts