The Art Of Not Asking Why

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 15:38:39 -0400

We were sitting at their bar, but we also had a mocha and a cappuccino toward the end. Something about the flag and the security camera above it makes things feel relevant and eerie. 📷

Diablo IV (2023) - ★

Fri, 13 Mar 2026 23:31:20 -0400

Nope. Nah ah. I tried this game twice, and it failed twice. The first time I didn’t enjoy it. It was too much clicking with little to show for it. No strategy, no method to the madness. I looked for light entertainment, and I thought I found it in this game, just to put it aside after an hour or so of playing.

The second time, about a week ago, I decided ot dust it off and try again. It was the same disappointing lack of wits, only topped with annoying additional in-game purchase requests for all kinds of nonsense, and a complete lack of any challenge. At all. None.

As I was watching the second boss in the game getting destroyed by an army of skeletons that I’m not even sure why I was able to resurrect so easily, looking at messages on my phone, I got pissed. A game should be interactive. What I saw in front of me was a flashy animation that didn’t need me to move a finger. No challenge. No brains. No fun.

At least I can thank Diablo for getting me back into reviewing games just to express my frustration.

Fri, 13 Mar 2026 08:41:39 -0400

A couple of days ago I wrote about my morning checklist, which is a list of reminders and guide of what to do in order. There are a couple of advantages I’m learning to really appreciate about it:

It keeps me in line by showing me what else I need to do
When I finish it, I feel my job is slightly less of a chaos than it really is. This is mostly a mental perk, but it helps.
It nudges me toward writing a journal entry, which in turn allows some creative thoughts out, and those are precious.

Point three above is what got me thinking I should also have a midday list.

I try to break my day into two parts and take a break around 15:00. This break usually includes a nap and some exercise before I tackle my other bigger, more time-consuming projects. Of course, meetings drag on, urgent matters need to be attended to, and the river of emails never stops.

A checklist to help me shift gears would be helpful. In a way, it would be like saving a game before moving on to the next level; it would serve as a soft reset, letting me relax enough to take that nap and exercise, which I need to stay productive and healthy.

I wonder if anyone else uses these sorts of checklists, even if they are only in their heads.

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 16:59:32 -0400

This weather is driving me nuts. I want to go out all the time. To walk, to jog, to just go to the bakery and grab something… but work, but projects, but but but… it wasn’t that hard when it was in the single digits shakes his fist at the wonderful weather

It was annoying to write this post, and that's the point. I think.

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 09:14:20 -0400

My brain woke me up around 4 this morning and concluded that I probably neglected my social platform recently. And it was right.

You see, Micro.blog is doing a fair job at reposting my stuff over to Mastodon, BlueSky, and Tumblr — but it’s only that: a fair job. It’s OK. It’s automatic, so some of the nuances that should go into a post on each platform are lost.

For example, Micro.blog doesn’t do hashtags for its timeline. I actually like it. It makes it stand out more from the rest, and its use of emoticons is a nice touch. I could include hashtags in my posts here, but they look out of place and ugly. Besides, Mastodon and Tumblr don’t seem to pick them up anyway. This means I need to go to these platforms and edit my posts and add hashtags manually.

Meanwhile, hashtags from Micro.blog do get to BlueSky. Kind of. It seems the first hashtag gets picked up, but the rest don’t — I’m still investigating. But then BlueSky itself doesn’t allow editing posts, so I can’t make the changes I need there, like condensing a summary so it doesn’t get cut in the middle (which I can do easily on Mastodon); I have to delete my entire post there and do it all over again, which gets old fast especially with images and alt descriptions.

And if the above is not complicated enough yet, I don’t see all the interactions I get on these platforms. Micro.blog shows me replies from BlueSky and Mastodon (I get replies from Mastodon all the time), but not likes, or retoots or tetweets, or reposts or whatever the hell they’re called on BlueSky.

I also miss out on new interesting people I might want to follow. I like RSS, and I enjoy using it, but it’s not a replacement for hearing from people who spew sentences here and there that I tend to enjoy — sort of my online buddies. This is very evident in Mastodon, for example, where I have a dedicated list I call “friends” that displays posts from those folks, but I need to be on Mastodon to interact with them.

If this post conveys anything besides confusion, I hope it’s the fact that reaching out to people can easily be a full‑time job, if you consider Cory Doctorow’s routine. Actually, I wrote him an email yesterday, asking for his advice, and he surprised me by replying within a couple of hours. I don’t know why I was somewhat disappointed to find out that he has no solution for this problem — I mean, he explained what a mess his routine is in the essay that prompted me to write to him in the first place…?

There is no clear solution. If I want to engage more people on the social networks they’re on, I need to engage more people on those networks. It’s tedious and time‑consuming, and time and energy are already pretty scarce resources for me, so I need to tread carefully — not to mention that most of these places spew depressing and upsetting opinions (politics) I need to avoid. But isn’t that the song and dance we all do online to one degree or another?

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 07:52:57 -0400

I can already tell the espresso puck screens I got are going to become a regular part of my espresso-making routine. Glad someone brought it to my attention.

Display images with Org-attach and org-insert-link quickly and effectively

Sun, 08 Mar 2026 13:43:25 -0400

Suppose you have an org-mode file and want an image to appear in the buffer. The way to do that is to insert a link to the file, for example:

[[home/username/downloads/image.png]].

Then, you toggle inline images with C-c C-x C-v, and the image should display inside the org-mode buffer, provided the path in the link is correct. If you do this often in your notes as I do, you might as well just turn it on for the entire file with #+STARTUP: inlineimages at the top of your org file, with the rest of the options you have there; this way, images will always display when you load the file. This is all nice and good, and most of us org-mode users probably know that.

A common use case for a full workflow like this is attaching images to your org file. You have a file in your Downloads folder, as shown in the example above, and you want to keep the image with your org file where it belongs, rather than in Downloads, where it will be lost among other files sooner or later.

For this, as most of us know, we have org-attach (C-c C-a by default). This starts a wonderful organizational process for our files:

It creates a data folder (by default) inside the folder the org-file is in if it’s not there
It then gives the header (even if you don’t have one) a UUID (Universally Unique Identifier) and creates two more directories, one inside the other:
1. The parent directory consists of the first part of the UUID
2. The child directory consists of the rest of the UUID
Lastly, the file itself will be copied into the child directory above.

For example:

./data/acde070d/8c4c-4f0d-9d8a-162843c10333/someimage.png

If you’re not used to how org-attach works, it might take some time getting used to, but it’s worth it. Images (or any file, as we will deal with soon) are kept next to the files they are associated with. Of course, org-attach is customizable, and you can change those folders and UUIDs to make them less cryptic.

For example, my init includes this:

    (setq org-id-method 'ts)
    (setq org-attach-id-to-path-function-list 
      '(org-attach-id-ts-folder-format
        org-attach-id-uuid-folder-format))

This tells org-mode to change the UUID to IOS date stamp format, so the folders under the data folder are dates, and tells org-mode to use that system (I wrote about this in length in my old blog; it is yet another post I need to bring over here).

In my case, this creates a file reference system by date: inside the data folder, each month of the year has a folder; inside those, a folder for the day and time (down to fractions of seconds) of the attachment. The beauty of org-attach is that you’re not meant to deal with the files directly. You summon the org-attach dispatcher and tell it to go to the relevant folder (C-c C-a to bring it up, then f as the option to go to that directory).

org-attach and displaying images inline are known to many org-mode users, but here comes the part I never realized:

org-attach stores the link to the file you just attached inside a variable called org-stored-link, along with other links you might have grabbed, like URLs from the web (take a look with C-h v org-stored-links). And, even better, these links are added to your org-insert-link, ready to go when you insert a link to your file with C-c C-l.

So when you have an image ready to attach to an org file, say in your Downloads folder, you could first attach it with org-attach, and then you can call it back quickly with C-c C-l. The trick is, since this is an image link (and not just any file), is not to give it a description. By default, org-mode will suggest you describe the link as the file you attached, but inline images do not work like that, and with a description, the image will just display as a file name. In other words:

A link to an image you want to display in the org buffer should look like:

[[file:/Home/username/downloads/someimage.jpg]]

But any other file would look like:

[[file:/Home/username/downloads/somefile.jpg][description]]

By deleting the suggestion, you are effectively creating the first case, the one that is meant to display images. This is explained nicely here.

There’s more to it. As it turns out, the variable org-attach-store-link-p is responsible for the links to these files to automatically be stored in org-insert-link (you can toggle it to change this option). This is why, when you use it, your files or images will show as [[attachment:description]], without the need for the path as specified above.

I have years of muscle memory to undo, as I’m used to manually inserting the links with the full path for my images. I did not realize the links to the images I’ve attached are right there, ready for me to place into the buffer if I only delete the description.

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 12:50:03 -0400

shutout to TinyLytics and Vincent who helped me figure out why my kudos button didn’t work - I needed to get the right plugin for my theme 😅

TinyLytics is an ethical, down-to-earth version of Google Analytics, managed by a small human team. Love it!

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 10:31:31 -0400

On my way to get some fresh vegetables for my usual soup. It’s a good day for that. 📷

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 19:54:12 -0400

It’s time to do some updating/house cleaning.

The theme I use, TinyTheme, is a couple of versions behind. I also wanted to add a kudos button, which seem to need me to re-build my blog (which usually causes issues, especially with my Movies page). There are a few weird CSS things I need to fix. So, if things seem a bit broken soon - you’ve been warned…

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 15:36:36 -0400

So emacs plus (through homebrew on macOS) keeps giving me this error: Invalid function: org-element-with-disabled-cache.

Does anyone know what this is about, and why it’s happening? No issue with Emacs on Linux (same config) or when I had emacsformacos (same config)

I believe I fixed it this morning (3/11) by removing Emacs-plus completely and reinstalling.

brew uninstall emacs-plus@30
brew cleanup (this removes dependencies, where I think the issue was)
Delete emacs.app and emacs-client.app from /Applications (I keep forgetting to do this)
brew install emacs-app (which is now emacs plus, from what I got through Homebrew)

I also ran Brew Doctor between steps 2 and 3 and found a couple of issues I resolved, which shouldn’t be related, but you never know.

What started this whole thing, I think, was that I wanted to try the new org-mode on top of the old org-mode. I am not too sure, but it seems like that was the problem.

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 20:59:41 -0500

I hope it doesn’t surprise anyone that I love a good checklist. After all, checklists are what got me started down the path of Emacs about 7 years ago. I love a good checklist. It tells me what I need to do, in what order, and allows me to get back on track after I get distracted. A good checklist can really make a day go right, and it’s a good idea to start the work day with one.

My new morning checklist is still a work in progress, but here is what it looks like:

    [ ] VPN > RMD work computer
    [ ] Outlook:
      [ ] Meetings > org-mode "MEETING"
      [ ] Pins > org-mode "Email"
      [ ] Emails > pin or add to org-mode "Email:" (don't reply, we want to finish this checklist)
    [ ] org-mode Agenda
      [ ] MEETING (todos) > projects
      [ ] choose personal projects (choose one personal project first!)
      [ ] choose an afternoon work project
    [ ] Journelly

It is still a work in progress: a good checklist is a result of trial and error over many repetitions, but the core is there.

First, if I work from home, I want to remind myself to VPN in and use my work PC rather than my Mac (RMD is remote desktop, which is my preferred method for connecting to my work PC). This has a couple of benefits, but a few of the main ones: URLs open natively in Edge, my default browser on the PC, leaving my personal side of things on my Mac with Safari. Outlook and Teams also work as expected on Windows better than on the Mac. Then, of course, there are various admin tools I need to run from inside our network.

Then, in Outlook, the checklist prevents me from replying to emails. This is important (you’d see I have a reminder for myself there not to reply) because I can’t get dragged into replying in the morning. There are too many emails in my inbox, and I need to prioritize what I do when. I tend to pin emails I want to get back to later in the day. In the morning, I add those pins to org-mode using my email template, and I pin new emails I need to get back to (which, in turn, will also end up in org-mode).

Then it’s time for my agenda in org-mode. The agenda is the meat of my day, where the projects I’m supposed to work on are laid out. Before I get to the projects themselves though, I go through my meetings that I copied into org-mode and look for TODO items, which need to be turned into projects or assigned to someone else.

The next step is particularly important to me these days, amid the endless work: find and prioritize a personal project. This can be anything, from calling back a doctor to working on a new checklist, like the one above. The afternoon work project is usually a bigger undertaking. I get back to it after my midday nap and exercise, which I try to do every day if I can. This hour to an hour and a half of “me time” is what keeps me healthy physically and mentally; I should probably expand on that soon.

Finally, a favorite of mine nowadays is to go into Journelly, where I keep my journal in an org file, and reflect on the choices I’ve made for the personal project and the work project. It allows me to mentally prepare for work.

With the checklist done, I start working on my agenda in org-mode. I usually go through the TODOs I’ve listed for myself in order, clock in, and get them done. Most of my work these days involves contacting others and following up, so I add notes on what was said and by whom in the task, clock out, and move on (unless something gets done of course).

I’ve been doing this for about a week, and it’s been working quite nicely. I hope to keep going and see what more changes need to be implemented.

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 08:06:59 -0500

I thought it would be fun to buy a small pack of stress balls for Nat and me. I like to keep my hands busy in meetings and when I talk to someone. Man what a crappy quality. And they smell. And I don’t like the glitter and the stuff inside. Where are the good ones? Can’t find any.

Tue, 03 Mar 2026 23:03:48 -0500

Managed to get Diablo 4 to install and run on my Linux Desktop running Kubuntu. It was actually quite easy with Bottles, using a Proton launcher made especially for that game. I’m not sure exactly what goes into creating those launchers, but glad it works.

Thelma, 2024 - ★★★

Tue, 03 Mar 2026 17:14:51 -0500

June Squibb and Richard Roundtree made this movie nice. They had a certain chemistry between them that worked out nice, and both actors played the roles well (especially Squibb, in my opinion). The rest... ehh...

The parents were too much (maybe on purpose, but it just felt artificail) and the grandson (Fred Hechinger) just didn't feel right in that role.

It's an overall "feel good" kind of movie with some solemn sadness sprinkled on top. It's good, not amazing, a bit over the top to make it more interesting, and overall OK.

Mon, 02 Mar 2026 08:00:20 -0500

A new Emacs annoyance: org-capture: Capture abort: Invalid function: org-element-with-disabled-cache when I try to use org-capture. Fails the first time, works the second. Where did it come from and how do I get rid of it…?

Harp is org-mode medical app for Android

Sun, 01 Mar 2026 13:02:26 -0500

There’s the app for health-related records Irreal mentioned the other day, Harp. It’s an org-mode-centered app for Android (soon to be iOS though), which looks pretty basic at this point. You can create several profiles (for different people), and each one has a medical journal and documentation attached, along with some graphs as you accumulate data.

It’s a good idea to have an org-mode-based health app, with all the information you need available to you quickly, protected behind encryption. The issue specific to me is that even though I have a personal Android phone, it’s my iPhone that has my medical apps (part of the Epic suite), as this is the phone I usually carry around with me. These apps already have all my health records, doctors, appointment etc.

I’ve been playing with it a bit, and I think it’s mostly the idea of having my health records saved in org mode that makes sense, especially with the denote file convention system. My Android is also where I have signal, which I can use to share medical records with people close to me, so there’s that. It’s not ideal to carry around two phones, but I think I want to experiment for a bit.

A proper weekend & birthday plans

Sat, 28 Feb 2026 08:44:04 -0500

Happy to have a proper weekend.

Last Saturday, around this time, I was working with my team on an important upgrade at work that included server and client upgrades, which in turn meant logging into individual workstations and performing a bunch of repetitive steps. It didn’t turn out as planned, and the process was (and still is) riddled with problems that are still affecting us.

A little later that same morning, I decided to take a break and walk over to the local Saturday farmer’s market. It’s about 40 minutes to 1.5 hours of walking, depending on how fast I want to go (there’s a park in the way, and I enjoy going through its paths).

I’m glad I ended up making myself take that walk. Work was pressing, but we got to a certain standstill, and I grabbed the chance and used the incoming blizzard as an excuse to get groceries. That walk, which was the shortest one I ever took to the market, made all the difference. I need my walks.

One of the things I determined to do after the weekend ended and our upgrade project started to derail into the following Monday morning was to pay more attention to my personal projects. It sounds so easy, written here in Emacs on a new Saturday morning, while ~~water is boiling~~ (duh!) coffee is brewing, but it’s not. I think that for some of us, work is just a different kind of drug.

What also came out of that decision was to plan my birthday as an event for the first time, I believe, in my entire life.

As a kid, my birthdays were taken care of by my parents or teachers to some extent. Growing up, this was always a headnod kind of event, maybe an excuse to take a day off for myself. This year, however, the number of friends and partners around me, combined with my family (who apparently enjoyed my grumpy company on our recent trip to Disneyland), who also wanted some JTR time, made me realize I need to organize the birthday as a thing. There were simply too many people.

To some of you, this is no big deal - but I assure you, this antisocial hermit who writes in front of you knows nothing of such things. At best, he goes to some small gathering at a friend’s event.

So I did what the cool kids do these days and downloaded Partyful (don’t worry, I planned the whole thing on Emacs as well). Finding a place to eat and a place to drink was easy, and my birthday this year falls on a weekend, which helped. A little bit of calling to these venues reminded me that, in a very normal New York manner, no one takes your reservations seriously so far in advance, and that I’m expected to call a week beforehand, if not just a day prior. What was left was to poke and ask, and I was surprised to see that so far everyone wants to show up, even those who need to travel a bit extra or even take a day off.

I’m humbled by this. I don’t understand how I got to this point of having such a number of caring people in my life, both friends and more intimate partners¹. It’s not shocking in the sense of “what the hell happened,” because of course, I know these people and spent time with them, and we keep in touch, so the outcome is that they’d like to show up, logically speaking. But logically speaking is one thing, and emotionally understanding (is there such a thing?) is another.

More than just a birthday or a social event though, to me it’s yet another hallmark of my personal life. I’ve built myself up and improved to the point where I can do this: invite people to an event I’m planning and have enough people to do it with. Some are born with this ability, others gather it naturally in their teen years, but for me, this wasn’t even a struggle in the past: it was just nothing before. An empty space without a definition.

A bit of this has to do with accepting who I am and what people I want to have around me as a result. Again, this sounds simple, but it’s not. A recent self-recording of myself venting and then analyzing just that took about a week of self-reflection, and apparently I still am largely clueless. It’s a work in progress that never stops.

Well then. Here’s to some fun to be had? Hmm.

Footnotes

¹ : I don’t really separate those. On a spectrum of friendship, when someone becomes close, they can also become intimate. There’s no line in the sand drawn to define where the “friendship zone” ends and that of a more intimate partnership begins; each relationship is different because each person is different.

Fri, 27 Feb 2026 14:00:42 -0500

Non-helpful UI by Microsoft strikes again.

I know everyone likes to hate the new design of an app when it first launches. My problem here: this is a Windows logo, not RDP. It’s confusing. People are searching for a remote desktop, not to install Windows on their Macs.

I think I found what crashed my Emacs on macOS

Wed, 25 Feb 2026 08:46:04 -0500

For those of you following along, Emacs has been crashing on my Mac (but not on my Linux desktop) for a while, but it seemed too random to pinpoint. This led me into looking for the Darwin version in the Emacs build in Emacs for Mac OS (which was what I was using on my Mac), which was a couple of versions behind that of macOS itself.

I went ahead and attempted to use Emacs Plus from Homebrew, as most people commented. I haven’t noticed much of a difference, though personally I do prefer to use Emacs from Homebrew as I do with my other packages, so I stuck with it a bit longer.

Yesterday I encountered a stubborn crash in my journelly.org file. Journelly, which is basically a large org-file with pictures displayed in-line under some headers (you can get an idea of what Journelly is and how I use it here).

I took a picture of the snow outside with my iPhone using Journelly, which saved it to journelly.org with the image attached. On the Mac, every time I went to open the header, Emacs crashed, time after time. I just couldn’t edit that image. In a collapsed state for the header, where the image didn’t show, it was fine. On Linux, when I tried - fine. Oh, and before you ask - I tried this with emacs -Q, and yes, it crashed every single time as well.

The JPG image on my iPhone was a 7MB file with dimensions of 4284 x 5712. I knew from past experience that such large images slow down Emacs (on Linux too), so I shrunk it down to a 700kb file with dimensions of 604 x 640, and launched Emacs again. No problem. Everything was stable. I tried to load Emacs a few more times and it worked each time.

This was my hunch from the beginning - that something is up with images at least on the Mac, and this is proof enough for me. I don’t know exactly at what point Emacs crashes: is it a matter of how many images the org file has? How big are they? A combination of both? But I can tell you it seems to be more about the dimensions of the image in pixels than the file size. This is fine for me, for my journal, I don’t need large high-resolution images anyway; those are uploaded and displayed on my blog and elsewhere. It seems that some folks have encountered similar issues as well, from Reddit and elsewhere.

If you have similar issues and you’re fine with scaling down your images, a good solution is dwim-shell-commands-resize-image-in-pixels, part of the excellent dwim-shell-command package, which can quickly shrink down a large number of images from inside Emacs. I’m using it constantly.

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 22:47:23 -0500

I’ve been reading The Cunning Man by William Robertson Davies. Interesting it doesn’t show on Micro.blog so I added it…

I Saw the TV Glow, 2024 - ★★★★

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 14:18:46 -0500

I can already tell it's one of those movies I need to watch more than once. I don't think I can give it an honest review, not just yet, because there's still so much I'm digesting - and I love it when movies do that to me, when they make me think about identity and question reality as I know it.

The movie should be called The Pink Opaque (not really a spoiler) as the common thread that connects the main characters and identities. What is the Pink Opaque? I'd say you need to watch to understand, but it's more likely you'd finish watching the movie asking this question. I feel this question is part of the point, at least for me.

What I've learned is that for transpeople, gender identity is gender and identity. It's not just about gender, but also about their identity as a person. As a being. And questioning it can happen when you're a kid, when you reach puberty, or when you're a 40 year old working for some local arcade and have a family, or... it can never happen. Maybe everything will always just fit out of sync or a bit odd. For some, the disturbance in their identity might mean their life as they know it is unbearable, while to others, it's "fine, everything is fine," at least for while, and yet, for others, it's just a minor annoyance. From that perspective, in a sense, we are all trans beings - somewhere on the spectrum between two absolutes that were never meant to be absolutes. The binary of gender is illusion. And while I'm personally comfortable with my gender (or I think I do? Hmm), it doesn't mean I don't question my identity, and part of my identity is my gender, which means I'm not comfortable with my gender...?

That's the sort of whirlpool of though I'm in right now, and that's just one layer of this movie, which is why I should watch it again at some point. Good stuff.

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 09:24:03 -0500

Yeah… I don’t think I’m going anywhere.

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 12:41:38 -0500

Not much to say today, so I went to my old blog to grab an old post and bring it here. The merge I’m talking about is still, in many ways, incomplete, and that desire to write documents has not diminished.

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 09:41:08 -0500

Going out quickly before the snow buries us here in NYC. How much does a shoe cobbler charge to fix a heel of a flat shoe where you live?