Sunday
I closed February and planned the first two weeks of March today. It’s quite overwhelming. A few projects that needed to end in February did not, and they crawl into March menacing the projects that have mid-month deadlines. Still, I think I managed to identify two big rocks and several smaller ones for this week, so as long as nothing new shows up (which will prove to be a futile dream my Monday noon) everything should be OK.
Since I’ve activated my micro.blog ActivityPub user, replies sent from Mastodon to my posts show up both in the micro.blog timeline and like comments in my blogs' posts. I can reply to them from the timeline and they show back in Mastodon. This is exactly what I wanted. I can stay in my blog and in micro.blog and know that I can interact with people in Mastodon, and these interactions are not lost because they are recorded in my blogs, where they belong. #geekery #thoughts
One more step
Into a simpler digital life. More focused on blogging and slower, more meaningful interactions.
I redirected my three different Mastodon accounts to my ActivityPub user in micro.blog. So the people that followed me in Mastodon are now following my micro.blog persona. I did not import the follows I had over there. I only want to keep my micro.blog follows and every new acquaintance will come organically from there. I deactivated my Twitter/X account. It’s not the first time, in the past I have always reactivated it because I didn’t want to loose the user handle, but that’s not very important any more, so we’ll see if Twitter/X is gone for good. After 16 years, 14 of them very intense. The friends I made there, I hope, will know how to reach me.
I’m keeping LinkedIn for now. It’s not very demanding and I always find value in the professional stuff that people share over there.
So the plan is to stick to my blogs for writing and NetNewsWire for reading. Interactions will come, hopefully, more and more via email. And if anybody reaches out to me in the micro.blog timeline, that’s a peaceful place, too. So all is good.
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Jokes aside, tech is a blessing and a curse. Especially when it becomes unmanageable. And sometimes I think the only solution to tech problems is more tech. Which is silly but it’s a silly world the one we live in.
That is paradoxical, but quite true. Actually, that’s the route I’ve taken: instead of going analog, I built a this digital garden to make it a place of my own and find a bit of peace of mind. Tech to cure tech madness.
Anyhow, you should read the whole Carnival Roundup, it’s full of interesting insights into the experiences of a lot of different people. #thoughts
Old question from @crossingthethreshold to @vincode
🚀 Maurice Parker - Shortcuts for Micro.blog:
David Johnson Thank you, and a question. If I have two blogs under the same Micro.blog username, can I chose which blog to post to?2021-11-01 8:42 pm
I’m discovering Humboldt by Maurice @vincode and really having fun with the Shortcuts I’m building for iOS and iPadOS. One for publishing text posts, one for pictures, one for quotes…
I just saw this old question from David @crossingthethreshold and I’m sure he’s already got the answer, but this is how I do it. I have two blogs and I want one single Shortcut that lets me select the one I want to publish to each time.
Humboldt has a Select ID action. You set it to Always Ask and it gives you the list of your micro.blog blogs. You can define a variable with the input coming from that list. Then you put the variable in Humboldt’s Post action. When you run the Shortcut, you first choose which blog you want to publish to and Humboldt does the rest.
Machair by Angie Lewin
We have this at home and we love it.
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Machair
Screen print
Image size: 335mm x 460mm
Edition size: 95
#art
The Deposition by Lovis Corinth
It’s impressive how real the portraits look.
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Lovis Corinth (1858–1925), The Deposition (1895), oil on canvas, 95 × 102 cm, Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, Cologne. Wikipedia Commons.
The Deposition (Descent from the Cross) (1895) was one of Lovis Corinth’s major paintings from his early days in Munich, and won a gold medal when exhibited in the Glaspalast in Munich that year. It shows the traditional station of the cross commemorating the lowering of the dead body of Christ from the cross, attended by Joseph of Arimathea and Mary Magdalene.
This work is another thoroughly modern approach to a classical theme, in its framing, composition, and the faces. Its close-in cropped view suggests the influence of photography, and the faces shown appear contemporary and not in the least historic. These combine to give it the immediacy of a current event, rather than something that happened almost two millennia ago.
#art
MegaShortcut
I built one single shortcut for all my text-blogging options. I first choose the blog in which I wish to publish. Then I write a title for the post or leave it blank. Then I write the content. Depending on the blog I chose, the shortcut will present me a list of tags to choose from. If I’m on the Mac, the tags will be picked from a list. If it’s the iPhone or the iPad, the list will be drawn from Data Jar. The publishing is handled by Humboldt, a great tool by Maurice Parker. #geekery
#thoughts
#thoughtsSaturday night
I spent the afternoon playing with this blog’s concept and with iOS Shortcuts, improving, or at least trying too, my workflows to publish in this new project.
For the blog, I created a home page that is meant to be a representation of a garden made of different topics, themes, categories… It’s just an index page, and not a very fancy one at that, but that’s all I can build and I’m sure it will improve. I need to learn HTML and CSS and all that stuff. For now, I can tweak some simple code snippets I find in the internet or that I obtain from ChatGPT.
Hi @manton I need your help. I’m building a Shortcut to publish posts to my blogs. The one publishing to my default blog (estebantxo.micro.blog) works OK, but I want another one to publish to umerez.eu (the uid I got for that is https://umerez.micro.blog/). I saw in the documentation that I need a mp-destination and I’m trying to put it in the shortcut like this (see screenshot). What am I doing wrong? Can you help me?
Digital garden
2024-03-17 UPDATE: I changed my home page to a more conventional one. The one I designed was quite gimmicky. If I ever learn a bit more about web design, I may come back to visually depicting my garden metaphor. For now, the patches in my garden, meaning the different sections of my website, will be featured in the conventional navigation bar.
Following a “digital garden” concept, I built a home page with buttons that in my mind symbolize patches in a garden.
Each patch will have its contents, be it a static page, a blog, a collection or category of posts, whatever this personal site of mine develops into.
For now, there’s four patches ready to be visited and four more are empty, waiting for my future gardening. The ones you can visit gather my Thoughts, my posts about my Geek hobbies, some Art I want to share (mostly music) and the Photos I take.
So if you like my garden, you are more than welcome.
Saturday morning
I feel like I’m in front of a raw piece of wood, a big one, my task is to carve a sculpture out of that wood, and I’m just too tired to start the process. My mind tells me it will be worth it and the result will satisfy me and my client. But there’s a lot of work to do to start peeling off and shaping the wood before the figure starts to show. And I’m tired.
Bullshit, says another voice in my head. You’re just lazy.
I guess that the YouTube app draining the battery and shutting down the iPad is a clear sign that I need to stop procrastinating and start working on that damn report.
T.S. Eliot’s real words on copying and stealing
One of the surest tests [of the superiority or inferiority of a poet] is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different than that from which it is torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest.
Eliot, T.S., “Philip Massinger,” The Sacred Wood, New York: Bartleby.com, 2000.
The source of this quote is Nancy Prager’s research as shown in this 2007 article, so kudos to her.
I found it thanks to this 2011 post by David Barnard that was quoted by John Gruber here. Thanks to all of them.
And as a bonus, I found this source for authoritative quotations, that’s going straight to my bookmarks.
You have to wait till the end of this beautiful cover of Ne Me Quitte Pas. Wyclef Jean is awesome.
