Jibaro vibes.

Currently on a 41 day streak for daily box breathing. Longest streak thus far, but there’s a part of my mind that distrusts this whole streak thing. What happens if (when?) I drop a day? I want to say I’ll suck it up and just start over, but dropping the streak would feel like falling back to the foot of the mountain, looking up and knowing how far you have to climb to surpass yourself. I can probably question why the idea of surpassing past achievements I’d important to me, but also… what other options to stream mechanics are there? Visualising completions within a given time horizon seems healthier: if I miss a day, all I have to do is stay invested for length of that time horizon to get back to good, and then focus on maintaining that as best as I can…

Spent the past couple of days getting to grips with my... I don't know what to call it... life system? In Drafts. Could call it a PKM system (personal knowledge management), but a) PKM is a bit of an overused trope in the corners of the internet I frequent, and b) it feels bigger than that, more inclusive. I use Drafts for everything: journals, logs, workout templates, inventory of possessions, reading list, notes, project/task management, relationships, brain dumps, everything.

Been iterating on my keymap A LOT in recent weeks. Most impactful recent update has been two two-finger tap-hold combos. Tapping J+K moves the cursor left by one word. Holding J+K moves the cursor to the beginning of the current line (aka the far left). K+L does the same in the other direction. As a writer… this has been gold.

Starting my days with the acknowledgement: “I can only do what I can do.” Worrying about anything beyond that means nothing.

Status: learning how to operate at human scale.

Been putting off transferring all my iThoughts files over to MindNode. iThoughts really was a fantastic app, and there are things it can do that are’t replicated anywhere else (e.g. node sums/totals!). Now that it’s gone, MindNode is the best way forward, I think…

Still hanging on to be able to flash firmware on my keyboard from my iPad. 🤔 Pretty sure I’m probably one of five people who have a real interest in this, and by all accounts, Apple has far bigger fish to fry (Siri, much?) but hey, a guy can dream…

Very much appreciate the idea of building your own tools. That said, I have some lightweight coding chops, but I'm no developer. Drafts.app, (my goto app for notes and tasks) is probably the closest I'll get to building something for myself, thanks to the way it lends itself to being extended by Javascript actions/plugins. Beyond that, I'm fond of smaller tools that match my sensibilities and don't try to be everything for everyone. Also, from Linus’s post, the relationship between notes and tasks that he posits makes so much sense, the fact that a system like his needs to be able to flag a note as an actionable item. Same vibe here.

Yep. Finally did it. Added a rotary encoder to my board. Spent a lot of time thinking about doing it, then some more time prepping for doing it, then decided “I’m doing it” and 20 minutes later, it was done. A little hackish, but done. Updating the firmware was not as complicated as I thought it might be. The biggest roadblock was my own ignorance. And let’s be clear— I still don’t know all the underlying foundations of ZMK or C or GitHub and any of the other things that might have made this easier, but now I know I can build a keyboard and add an encoder to it. #learning #keebs

#show: started Berlin ER. Only partway through the first episode, but I’m into it so far.

Prioritise. Match priorities to available time. Resist the “I am super capable” gambit of cramming a list of big ticket tasks into a small window. Do the most important next action as well as it needs to be done (no more, no less).

#highStress: general underlying sense of malaise. Comes from an acute awareness of having lots to do and not enough time to do it. Feels like I’m letting things fall through the cracks. Mind racing, but I know I need to slow down and breathe. Literally just breathe.

#show: Silo (season 2). Finished last night. Binged the last few episodes. Drew me in as it progressed. The mystery:reveal ratio kept me engaged and satisfied. Solid cast, solid performances. I raised an eyebrow here and there, but mostly at minor details and nothing that turned me away. Looking forward to next season.

I’m growing more and more comfortable with the idea of using tools, platforms and services that operate at a grokkable scale.

Getting my head around replies and threading… threading may not seem so necessary when you have no limit on post length, but if you want to connect present thoughts to things you’ve written in the past… @anton (sorry to ping you so much today as I learn my way around here!): can we specify link titles e.g. [title](url)? It’s cool that I can link to my own posts, but would be good to be able to give a bit more context than “Jacob’s post” for the link title…

First, Public.me feels very phone-centric. Sure, you can load it up on a larger screen but it remains within phone-sized proportions. That’s a constraint that I think is likely to keep my activity here phone-focused, which is to say: not ubiquitous. Second: the lo-fi aesthetic. In Messages, I can’t summon up a user name with an @ sign if I want to mention someone, I have to know who I’m talking to. Likewise, I can’t summon a list of tags by tapping the # symbol. There are ways around this, of course— there are plenty of tag/snippet keyboards for iOS. But there’s something about the friction that I find appealing. I have to stay active in order to do things here. I have to think a bit harder. And that’s not a bad thing.

Nice. Tags work.