Taking a complete break from any social media and news through New Years Day. My mental health really needs it right now.

Enjoy the holidays, whichever you celebrate!

Hot mess. I can’t decide what I want to do. Where I want to be. So I keep wasting money flitting around. Right now I’m back on WordPress.com, which I paid for previously for a year, until I can figure out what I’m going to do (I’ve got until March).

Here is the way it works: I start up a blog with all of these ideas. Then I hardly write anything. Then I wonder what I’m doing and who the hell would read it all anyhow, kill the blog, and start wanting to write again a day later. The cycle continues. Told you I’m a hot mess.

I’ll figure it out one of these days…

I’m getting tired of the scare tactics by Proton over the “risks” of using competing services. I totally understand the company has to market their tools but many times they do so in a way that is more about scaring people than the pros of their own products. The latest is a warning about lack of end-to-end encryption in services competing with Proton’s new Proton Drive cloud storage option.

Called out in the posting are Dropbox and Google. Dropbox is mentioned because of a data breach in 2016 in which logins and passwords were leaked. This had nothing to do with anyone gaining access to encryption keys and is a red herring at best. Google is noted because, while they actually haven’t had a data breach (as noted by the article), someone might get the keys and get to your data.

The article calls out many other factors such as privacy policies, server location, legal jurisdictions, etc. These are important things to consider but one thing the article doesn’t mention at all is productivity and convenience features such as document indexing, integration with other systems, etc.

Proton, while talking about their end-to-end encryption in Proton Drive, neglects to mention that there isn’t a computer sync client yet for Proton Drive. Neither do they discuss the implications of end-to-end encryption in a cloud storage system, such as giving up server-based file indexing to allow you to search your documents on the web. There is no way to search documents in Proton Drive and that won’t be an option until there is a sync client.

It is very important for users to realize that there are many factors to consider when choosing a cloud storage provider. I think that for a normal user Proton Drive forces you to give up far more in convenience than you’re getting from the security of end-to-end encryption. Again, I get that they have to market their own product, especially in a market where there are superior options such as Tresorit. But I find them being irresponsible in how they’re doing their marketing. Stick to the facts, not the fear mongering.

I’m exhausted. Truly exhausted. The stuff (stupidity. absolute stupidity) going on with Twitter is putting me over the edge. It’s like witnessing some terrible, unending, car pile-up and not being able to look away. One of the great flame-outs of all time but one I simply have to stop watching before I do damage to myself.

I just made a pact with myself for no more Twitter. No more account. No more reading stories about the goings-on there. I am literally wasting precious minutes of my life on this and sending my mental health spiraling. And for what? Anything I was following there I can follow elsewhere without the drama.

It’s time to say enough is enough and make one step to helping myself feel well again.

Investigations will dominate the new Congress, from the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic and allegations of politicization at the Justice Department to America’s botched withdrawal from Afghanistan. But none will attract as much attention as the GOP’s planned investigation into the business dealings of the president’s son Hunter two years before a potential Biden re-election bid.

Are you kidding me? This is what these clowns are going to waste time and taxpayer dollars on?

It’s the annual Red Cup Day at Starbucks, that day that “everyone” gets excited to get their free-with-purchase red, reusable, plastic holiday-themed cup. As I have done the last 5 years I was up early and at Starbucks to get mine. Sounds like this year the shop was prepared, they had 800(!) on hand…

Here I am brewing Thanksgiving Blend because it’s still not being brewed in the stores yet.

I tried ignoring this software, sure that it couldn’t be anywhere near as good as sampled pianos like Walker D from Embertone. Then I tried the trial version and bam, love at first…hear? Because it’s modeled it’s really like on resources and it sounds wonderful.

Even better: the upgrade was free because I bought version 7 less than a year ago. Of course they got more money out of me because upgrades are 25% off so I bought the upgrade from Stage to Studio and along with that a new piano model, the Petrof models they offer.

Sunday Vibe: I don’t want to do shit today other than sit around and drink coffee and read and write on my iPad.

Sunday Reality: I won’t be sitting around all day drinking coffee reading and writing on my iPad. Too many things to do and my stomach couldn’t handle the coffee anyhow.

On this Sunday, where the United States has emerged out of the always-argued-about Daylight Saving Time I find myself thinking about time, and more specifically calendaring.

I have to admit a bit of confusion over how to refer to Sunday and how to approach it in my own life. Is it a day of reflection and planning for the upcoming week? Or do I start working on things on Sunday because it is the start of the week? What happened to the weekend?

By tradition it’s part of the two days known as the weekend, or literally, the “week end”. But then things get confusing when we start talking about calendars. In the United States the standard is that the calendar week starts on Sunday. As with units of measurement and weight this is different from the rest of the world (well, most of it anyhow) where the calendar week starts on a Monday, as per the international standard ¹.

A quick search of the Internet suggests this is for religious reasons, which while it makes sense in some ways, still doesn’t make much sense to me for a country that professes “separation of church and state”. It seems to me the standard start day of the week would be something that falls under state, not church.

Even more confusing is how do we figure out what week number in the year it is? In the title of this particular post I wanted to include the week number for the week that starts today. But what exactly is that number? By many apps I have on my computer or phone week 46 starts today. The reality is that number is malleable depending (again) on where in the world you are and what rules you are following.

ISO 8601 says that week 1 is “the week with the starting year’s first Thursday in it”. If you’re not following ISO 8601? Wikipedia, in the same ISO 8601 article linked above, states different rules:

• the week with the first business day in the starting year (considering that Saturdays, Sundays and 1st January are non-working days)
• the week with 4 January in it
• the first week with the majority (four or more) of its days in the starting year
• the week starting with the Monday in the period 29 December - 4 January

My head is spinning. Would you like to be more confused? Again per Wikipedia:

As a consequence, if 1 January is on a Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday, it is in week 01. If 1 January is on a Friday, Saturday or Sunday, it is in week 52 or 53 of the previous year (there is no week 00). 28 December is always in the last week of its year.

Depending on the rules there can be a week 53 for the previous year!

I’ve decided to forego adding a week number on my posts for now so as to avoid confusion with a potentially international audience. Have a good rest of your weekend everyone! 😀

Just came across this quote from my daily Readwise email from “Full Catastrophe Living” from Jon Kabat-Zinn:

As a consequence of this common play of our minds, don’t we all tend to fill up our days with things that just have to be done and then run around desperately trying to do them all, while in the process not really enjoying much of the doing because we are too pressed for time, too rushed, too busy, too anxious?

Boy isn’t this the truth. I’d take it even further saying that we tend to fill up our days with stuff we don’t enjoy. So much needs to get done that we forget self-care. Something I definitely need to work on.

Just re-read a post I made in July on my WordPress.com site. After I nuked my site on micro.blog I had noted I’d be back, but had until Feb. on my current WP sub and I wanted to tighten up my spending. So much for that.

I want to like WordPress, I really do. It still has the best admin interface of any of the blogging platforms (Why does nobody else allow bulk editing of posts?) but it’s just too hard to get words into. So even with a sub that doesn’t end until Feb. here I am back on micro.blog.

• Melitta Brewer
• Melitta #2 Cone Filters
• OXO Gooseneck Kettle

They say the best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The next best time is right now. There’s never been a better time to become smarter in how you read.

That quote courtesy of Robert Breen who has some wonderful posts about writing.

He is correct of course, the next best time to start anything is right now so here I am. It’s good to be back.

To celebrate the first full day of the coming cool weather I ran out to the Starbucks Reserve in Lake Forest to grab a Reserve coffee on the Clover machine. Stepped out of the house and saw the moon just above the trees and the clouds with that painted look. I was surprised how well the iPhone 14 Pro captured that shot with night mode given how shaky my hands were. Finished with a selfie (edited courtesy of Hipstamatic Classic) outside of the store.

(An old draft post that I discovered. This was originally written back in the Fall of 2011).

I had just picked up one of my kids at gymnastics. There is a farm across the road. It was right at the beginning of the Golden Hour and golden light was spilling out of the clouds and over the farm field. The field was already changing color due to the start of Fall and the effect of the fading sunlight and the color of the field was simply stunning. Unfortunately I didn’t have the opportunity to stop and take a picture…there simply wasn’t a good place to stop. Hoping I get the opportunity again some day. It was a beautiful view.

I use DEVONthink as my “knowledge management system” and one of the things I do with it is to archive my email. The great thing about the archiving feature is that you know that you always have a copy of everything as it never deletes email (it’s not a sync solution, it’s an archiver).

The challenge is using it when you have a Gmail account (or in my case, a Fastmail account with labels) and you apply multiple labels to an email. In an IMAP client like Apple Mail you will get multiple copies of the email based on how many labels you’ve applied to it. DEVONthink by default however won’t put multiple copies of the email in folders.

When DEVONthink’s mail archiver is working its way through your email folders during the archive process it won’t reimport mails it already imported because each email is assigned a unique identifier called a UUID. A database in DEVONthink can’t have the same UUID more than once. So if you have an email labeled “foo” and a second label “bar” after archiving you would only find the copy in “bar”. For some this might not be a problem but when I apply multiple labels to an email I want to be able to find it in those places whether I’m using the Gmail/Fastmail website, Apple Mail, or looking at my archive in DEVONthink. There is a solution - replicants!

DEVONthink has a feature called replicants which are essentially aliases to existing files. They let you have a file live in multiple places but there is only really one copy of the file. For mail archive there is an option to allow reimporting of emails using replicants.

To turn on this option open the DEVONthink menu and select Preferences. Select the Files icon then click the Emails tab. Finally, click Previously imported will become replicants.

Now you can see emails the way you do in Gmail/Fastmail!