Quick bits:

• May the 4th be with you.

• Nanoc 1.0 was released 18 years ago. What a milestone!

  I’m still using this piece of software on a regular basis. Last time was just a few seconds ago — I am publishing these week­notes with it!

• I’ve set up Blocky as a second level of protection against ads and malware.¹¹1 The first level of protection is uBlock Origin.  It’s better than managing the /etc/hosts file myself.

• I’ve archived my Now page. I don’t think it’s worth keeping it; I’ve got my week­notes anyway.

• On the night of Tuesday to Wednesday, there was a loud boom in my area that shook me awake. I did not imagine it but unfortunately there also is no indication of where that explosion noise came from. It couldn’t have been from the burst water pipe²²2 I don’t live in the area of the burst water pipe. Besides, if a water pipe bursting can yield that loud of a noise even kilometers further, it would’ve been literally deafening to anyone in the immediate vicinity — if not lethal.  and it wasn’t my exploding head syndrome either. Mysterious!

• I have received my first physical AI-generated spam mail. Gross.

---

Shower thoughts:

• Start your next book with a Table of Malcontents.

• Productivity is the opposite of conductivity.

---

I gave Obsidian another try for note-taking. It didn’t stick.

There is an official importer from Bear, but that one failed to import anything with no helpful hints as to why — just a generic error message and nothing else to help me debug the problem.

On top of that, Obsidian disallows colons in note titles, and that is a dealbreaker for me. I use colons a great deal.³³3 Like in this week­notes entry! 

Asking for help and workarounds for this particular colons-in-titles problem surfaced some toxic aspects of the Obsidian community whose members will tell you that you’re wrong and you should not be doing this.

It certainly is a “bad abstraction” problem if the limitations of the filesystem shine through in the UX. Imagine not being able to create a Google Doc with colons in the title, or being unable to send emails with a subject that contains a slash. That would not be an acceptable limitation.

In any case, I certainly am a happy (and paying) Bear user.

---

I started using macOS’s Stickies app once again. This app has been part of macOS since the ’90s⁴⁴4 The ability to collapse stickies, along with the window buttons, are distinctly 90s-era macOS — or should I say “Mac OS”? “System 7,” maybe?  but is often overlooked. It still works well.

It’s possible to pin stickies so that they float on top of other windows, which is great for reminding you what exactly you’re working on and not getting distr… oh, look, there’s a new Steam sale going on!

Anyway.

---

You might also be wondering what that screenplay is — well, I’ve got this idea of creating YouTube videos for my projects, 1–2 minutes each, briefly explaining the core idea behind the project.

Here is my first experiment:

Voice reveal, am I right?!

The video is unfinished, incomplete and unpolished, and that’s intentional: the purpose of this experiment is to get a better idea of what it would take to produce the final video.

Even for a video that is only 1–2 minutes, there is a ton of work involved:

• Write the dialogue.
• Figure out what to show on the screen.
• Record the audio.
• Record the screen.
• Edit it.

None of these steps are trivial. There is also a lot of refining and reworking. So much refining and reworking.

These are the tools I’m using:

• For writing the screenplay, I am using (beat). I’ve used it before,⁵⁵5 It’s gotten me an IMDb credit!  though never for writing a screencast.

• For editing, I am using DaVinci Resolve, which is excellent too. It is a powerhouse, offering far more than I need, but I’m impressed that there is a free version available at all. I’m still climbing the learning curve.

• For recording the screen, I’m… well, not actually not recording the screen. I am using vhs for scripting and recording CLI interactions. Having a script as the source for the visuals makes it straightforward to go back and tune things up without having to re-record.

I’ve got videos planned for ddenv and adsf, and maybe I’ll do a few more once I get into the groove. I have no timeline for when to get them done by, though.

---

I’ve not been doing a lot of fiction writing lately, but I have created an interactive fiction template that allows me to write… erm, interactive screenplays:

Nobody needs this. Nobody wants this. But it was fun to make.

By the way: the example dialogue here was taken from Jon Ingold’s masterclass on sparkling dialogue which is fantastic. If you’re a writer of interactive fiction — or perhaps a fiction writer in general — you ought to check it out.

Okay, what about… something more terminal-like?

Now, if only I could get back to writing fiction instead of just fucking around with the aesthetics.

---

Entertainment:

• I finished season 2 of Foundation⁶⁶6 Foundation, written by Josh Friedman and David S. Goyer (Skydance Television, Milk & Honey Pictures, Skydance Television, 2021).  right before my Apple TV+ subscription expired. It only took me about 1.5 years to watch the entire season.⁷⁷7 The suspense was killing me! haha jk 

• Perfect Days⁸⁸8 Perfect Days, directed by Wim Wenders, written by Wim Wenders and Takuma Takasaki (Master Mind, Spoon, Wenders Images, 2023).  is wonderful. I had no idea a story about a Japanese toilet cleaner could be this good.

---

Toots and skeets and YouTube shorts and stuff:

• Paul Rickards’s photos of the DEC PDP: It’s so pretty!!!

Entertainment links:

• Grammarian vs Errorist II (Elle Cordova)

• Fuck Me, Ray Bradbury (Rachel Bloom): It has come to my attention that some of you have not seen this yet.

Links:

• Klingon Music Theory is Weird (Levi McClain)

• Who Pays the Price When Cochlear Implants Go Obsolete? (Michele Friedner for SAPIENS)

• The 12-bit rainbow palette (Kate Morley): Pretty!

• The TOP SECRET story of why you say this word the way you do! (Dr. Geoff Lindsey): Clickbaity title, but how do you pronounce “covert?”

• Germany: Intelligence agency says entire AfD ‘extremist’ (DW): Good! Now, can the AfD please be banned outright?

• Finale - How Music Software Dies (Tantacrul)

• The Ethics of Fake Guitar (Adam Neely)

Tech links:

• Giving software away for free (Simon Willison): Agreed — HTML+JavaScript is (despite its flaws) an amazing delivery mechanism.

• People can change (Annie Mueller)

• Apple to Comply With New Court Ordered App Store Rules, But Will Appeal (Juli Clover for MacRumors): Great!

• Easier layout with margin-trim (Jen Simmons for the WebKit blog): Ooh, margin-trim would help me out a lot. Hope it makes it to the other browsers, too.