Mitch's Blog

While walking the dog, I saw this SUV 📷

My latest article: Ancient programming language gets new life in the cloud thanks to IBM, watsonx and AI. An IBM watsonx AI tool helps refactor COBOL mainframe code into Java, to make it easier to maintain and extend for folks who entered the workforce after the disco era.

Why Calvin and Hobbes author Bill Watterson vanished from the public eye.

My friend Marc Gorelick shares lessons from more than 40 years playing the tuba. Can confirm that Marc played the tuba as a teenager. We gave him grief for it at the time, but Marc made the tuba cool.

Watching a security awareness training video as required by a client. Holy mackerel, Doug, stop being such a baby.

I saw this sign. Poor Sadie. 😭😢😭📷

TidBITS is doing a poll on whether Apple users use Apple Weather or some other app for weather forecasts. During yesterday’s weather emergency, I checked Apple Weather several times an hour.

All is well here following the storm. Reviewing the news today I see a dozen people had to be rescued from flooding in the San Diego River. Most likely they were homeless. Many people did not get to sit in their warm, dry houses and watch Netflix yesterday. So I am a little humbled and grateful.

Meanwhile, here in San Diego and nearby Southern California

Unimpressed by Hurricane Hilary. Demoted to a tropical storm. So far, we’ve gotten some heavy rain, but very little wind. Note to Hilary: This is not a challenge.

I love all 17 guidelines in Tracy Durnell’s reading philosophy.

Two highlights jump out at me.

• “Read according to whim.” Just read whatever the heck you want to read. Classics, trash, whatever.
• Quit reading a book whenever it stops working for for you. Tracy’s rule is “Quit nearly as many books as I finish.” I finish 90-95% of the books that I start and you know what? I think I should be quitting more books. Because I think quitting more books would mean that I’m trying to read a greater diversity of books.

Gradually over time in my adulthood, I found I was reading fewer and fewer books. I got back in the habit a few months ago, and I’m happy about that.

Many adults don’t read books, and if you’re one of those and would like to start, you could do worse than follow these rules.

Small changes in daily activity levels, like doing a little more walking, stair-climbing, chores around the house, and gardening, can burn a lot of calories and have major health benefits. It’s called NEAT—non-exercise activity thermogenesis.

I was kicking myself because I only thought to stock up on water this afternoon, and was sure the stores would be sold out. But I decided to try a couple of stores anyway (being mindful that we also need to conserve gas in the car, in case we need to evacuate). First supermarket I went to had stacks and stacks of water bottles in front. I bought five gallons.

We have plenty of people and animal food, meds, flashlights, external power supplies for electronics, and we’ve moved large but blowable items into shelter or tied them down. The backyard actually looks better than it has in years. It previously looked like some kind of ghastly graveyard for lawn furniture.

A couple of the neighbors across the street have small piles of sandbags strategically placed at the corners of their driveways. That’s not a problem for us; the slope of the street directs water away from the front of the house. Julie says the slope of the backyard directs water into the crawlspace under the house in heavy rain, but it’s too late to do anything about that now.

My prediction is much of this preparation will be unnecessary. We’ll get minor damage. I expect we won’t lose power, water, cable or TV. On the other hand, moving and securing blowables was definitely necessary, because we could well get record heavy rain and wind, and stuff tends to blow around even in normal winter storms.

But it’s good to be prepared for worse than you expect.

Rain predicted to maybe start at 2 am, with winds picking up Sunday early afternoon and continuing through mid-evening.

I’m hoping to do my normal morning walk tomorrow, but may give the dog a break.

Finished reading: The Gutenberg Parenthesis by Jeff Jarvis 📚A thoughtful history of five centuries of print as dominant form of information dissemination, culture and conversation, now closing (hence the parenthesis metaphor) and the internet era now dawning.

We got the front and back of the house as clear as we could of items that might blow around. Julie did most of the work on that. We have enough food in the house to last a few days. Later today, I’ll check to be sure we have plenty of potable water and that the electronics are charged. I have been thinking for some time of getting a solar-powered battery for electronics, maybe I’ll order something today and it will arrive in time for next time. Longer term, we should put in batteries that can power the whole house.

The fun starts at 2 am, according to the weather forecast. Today is actually a beautiful day, cool and calm and overcast.

Notwithstanding the preparations, I’m optimistic the storm will fizzle. But best to plan for worse.

The pizza delivery guy says the weather outlook is changing rapidly and he is optimistic that when the storm hits it will be weak so that’s good.

Want to read—nonfiction: Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World by Maryanne Wolf 📚

Want to read—nonfiction: Proust and the Squid by Maryanne Wolf 📚

This weekend we’re supposed to get a hurricane and an invading army of lustful tarantulas. How does your weekend look to be shaping up?

Yesterday morning, I was typing happily on my Mac when I noticed the cursor disappeared. I was typing but no text was appearing. I determined that another app was stealing focus. The problem app was the Finder. I figured this out through the simple expedient of watching the menu bar to see which app jumped to the foreground when the problem came up.

This was going on every minute or so. Very annoying! I continued working like that all day, just Cmd-Tabbing back after the Finder stole focus. Around 4 pm I decided enough was enough.

After trying several possible solutions, I resolved the problem by rebooting in safe mode.

A couple of other things I tried before that:

• Of course I tried Googling, and got the usual mishmash of confusing forum responses and just plain wrong search results. Completely unhelpful.
• I asked ChatGPT.

Interestingly, ChatGPT’s answer was wrong but led me in the right direction.

ChatGPT’s first suggestion was a complete hallucination—it suggested disabling a feature in Finder through a menu setting that simply does not exist.

It suggested resetting Finder preferences. I followed the instructions (this time they were accurate) and that did not solve the problem.

It suggested incompatible hardware might be to blame. I gradually disconnected stuff from my MacBook until I was running it in pure MacBook mode—no external keyboard, no external storage devices, no external display, and so on. That didn’t solve the problem either.

ChatGPT mentioned third-party software twice, which led me to restart the Mac in safe mode. Safe mode accomplishes two things: Restarts the Mac without starting third-party software, and also performing some system maintenance. I suspect the system maintenance is what worked.

This is a five-year-old MacBook and I expect I’ll have to replace it soon enough. But it will survive another day!

This post is primarily for the benefit of anybody coming after me Googling “Finder stealing focus on Mac.” Good luck, my friend! I hope my advice helps you fix your problem.

A brief history of an American gift to world cuisine: the peanut butter and jelly sandwich. This article at the Saturday Evening Post by Linda Rodriguez McRobbie takes a few paragraphs to get going, but then it delivers.

Peanut butter was reportedly invented in 1894. Early recipes featured “a banana and apple salad served over lettuce with a peanut butter dressing” and “a peanut butter ‘loaf’ recipe involving two cups of chopped olives and a teaspoon of onion juice”

“Animal House” is where the 1960s finally and decisively turned into the 1980s — the 1970s being understood as a transition period highlighted by double-knit and “Kung Fu Fighting.” With “Animal House,” we crossed the line from hippies to yuppies, from “all you need is love” to “greed is good.” It seems crazy to say it, but the film’s Deltas — a fraternity of proud, self-defined losers — became role models for a generation obsessed with winning. You could argue we’re still living with the fallout.

— Ty Burr at The Washington Post: I was on campus when ‘Animal House’ debuted. It changed everything.

I love this movie and can quote from it endlessly. And Burr is right.

Donald Trump is Bluto.

“The Warriors” keeps popping up in my Internet wandering. Time to watch it again?

We’re watching “Hijack,” a miniseries about an airline hijacking, focusing on Idris Elba as Sam, a passenger working to outwit the team that’s taken over the plane. Highly recommended—very suspenseful!

The British Home Secretary is a supporting character. I’ve heard of that position but realized I had no idea what the home secretary does.

My half-assed Internet research tells me the Home Secretary is responsible for British internal security, so they are basically Britain’s top cop. They’re also responsible for immigration and emergency services, such as the fire departments.

The equivalent position in the US seems to be the Secretary of Homeland Security. However, the Home Secretary position was created in the late 18th Century, while Homeland Security was created in the aftermath of 9/11.

We Jews are left out of progressive discussion of diversity. Jews don’t count.

A significant part of the progressive movement is outright anti-Semitic.

And conservatives have a weird variety of anti-Semitism that fetishizes Israel and supports some prominent American Jews.

But I just can’t bring myself to care about Jewface in movies and TV.

Bradley Cooper is getting criticized by Jewish activists who are accusing him of “Jewface” for wearing a prosthetic nose in an upcoming biographical movie about Leonard Bernstein.

To be fair to Cooper, early versions of the movie had him wearing a clown nose, so the current version is better.

Want to read: Emperor of Rome: Ruling the Ancient World by Mary Beard 📚A new book of Roman history by the author of “SPQR”? Yes, please.

The same lawmakers who want to rob their constituents of the right to bodily autonomy have also begun to treat democracy as an obstacle to avoid, not a process to respect. If the people stand in the way of ending abortion, then it’s the people who have to go.

— Republicans Won’t Stop at Banning Abortion, by Jamelle Bouie at the New York Times.

Me, watching @manton ’s video demo of the Epilogue app for micro.blog: “Hey, I just added that book to my want-to-read-list! And that one too! And I’m currently reading that one! OMG, Manton is looking at my blog! I’m Internet-famous now!”

When I was a kid, we rode bicycles for miles every day, unsupervised. Also unsupervised: We played in schoolyards and playgrounds, went into stores, and went to the movies. Even when we were playing in another kid’s backyard, often the adults weren’t outside with us. I can’t even remember if the adults were home.

And I was, by the standards of my childhood, a sheltered, sedentary, bookish kid. Other kids were having even MORE adventures than I was.

And of course Generation X, the generation younger than mine, were famously latchkey kids.

I don’t see any of that anymore. Kids seem to be always, always supervised by adults.

I saw this while walking with the dog this morning. I was disappointed that I did not see the pig, but it’s probably just as well because I totally would’ve put my fingers through the fence.

I never see pre-teens outdoors unsupervised by adults. Not playing in their front yard, not walking, not in a park, not at a playground, not riding bikes. Are pre-teens supervised all the time nowadays?

The Case of the Internet Archive vs. Book Publishers

David Streitfeld at the NY Times:

In the pandemic emergency, Brewster Kahle’s Internet Archive freely lent out digital scans of its library. Publishers sued. Owning a book means something different now.

“Sweet sesame chicken!” sounds like something a person would say instead of swearing.

Lunch yesterday with friends at Shakespeare’s, a British pub here in San Diego. One of the restrooms had two walls covered with dozens of “cheeky postcards.” Here’s one example. 📷

A quick look back at the first IBM PC that launched 42 years (and two days) ago My Dad had one of these. I was living at home and going to college at the time, and I spent a lot of time using it to write papers and noodle around.

I’ve been listening to the Age of Napoleon podcast for months now, which covers Napoleon’s life, career and world in exhaustive detail. I am coming away a great admirer of Napoleon, while also acknowledging that Napoleon did terrible things. (Haiti.) That is one thing I have in common with Musk.

I also love Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History podcast.

So that’s two things I have in common with Elon.

Also, like Musk, I have not and never will fight in a cage match with Mark Zuckerberg.

Trump tells Georgia witness not to testify

The Marion County Record was investigating sexual misconduct charges against police chief Gideon Cody before police raided the newspaper, according to publisher Eric Meyer. Meyer says the allegations, and the names of the people making the charges, are on computers the police seized.

Police in the small town of Marion, Kansas, raided the local newspaper office, leading to worldwide protest by free speech organizations. The newspaper publisher’s 98-year-old mother died the following day; the publisher says the raid triggered her death.

Gary Marcus:

… we are building our entire global and national policy on the premise that generative AI will be world-changing in ways that may in hindsight turn out to have been unrealistic.

I have found generative AI uses to be limited at best.

I use it to generate illustrations for articles. In the past, I used public domain and Creative Commons images, and those were just as good as AI imagery.

AI produces mediocre writing that’s filled with errors. In the time it would take me to bring AI writing up to standard, I can just do the writing myself. And that’s what I do.

So yeah maybe generative AI will be the biggest thing since the invention of electricity or fire, but I don’t see evidence that will happen.

The most promising application for generative AI is to deliver voice-activated Star Trek like computers. That would be a big deal—but we’re not there, and may never get there.

Want to read: Sh*tshow by Richard Russo 📚

Want to read: Chances Are . . . by Richard Russo 📚

Want to read: Triage by Richard Russo 📚

Want to read: Elsewhere by Richard Russo 📚

Want to read: Somebody’s Fool by Richard Russo 📚

Want to read: My Life as a White Trash Zombie by Diana Rowland 📚

Currently reading: This Bird Has Flown by Susanna Hoffs 📚

San Diego attorneys fought to prosecute an unhoused woman for blocking a sidewalk. Now they’re backing off. The solution to homelessness is not criminalizing homelessness.

The History of Command Palettes: How Typing Commands Became The Norm Again

Cory Doctorow: Paying consumer debts is basically optional in the United States. The Fair Debt Collection Practices Act protects the people who need it least. How the debt collection industry sets the poor to prey on the poor.

A short collection of delightful and/or appalling confessions, rendered in an excruciatingly painful format. Some of these are extremely raunchy, so don’t read them to the kiddos.

Silicon Valley billionaires and millionaires support racist Richard Hanania, who advocated eugenics, forced sterilization, and opposed “miscegenation” and “race-mixing,” Bouie writes.

Hanania wrote, “These people are animals, whether they’re harassing people on subways or walking around in suits.”

Racists are the natural ally of plutocrats, Bouie says. By supporting an argument that some people are naturally inferior, the plutocrats support the argument that other people are natural elites.

I could watch a 2-1/2 hour movie of Peter Quill and his grandpa eating breakfast and gossiping about the neighbors.

We just watched Guardians of the Galaxy 3. I hope they make about ten more of those movies. So good.

Kottke: Glamor photos of vintage calculators, 1968-83.

In the 1970s, calculators weren’t just for calculating. They were luxury items. In a world before iPods and iPhones, calculators were the first aspirational personal electronics.”

My Dad was an accountant and started using calculators very early. I remember visiting his office as a boy around 1970 and seeing a desktop calculator. All it did was add, subtract, multiply and divide, and it was the size of a cash register.

Kottke: The accidental secret ingredient that made Chicago Vienna Sausages delicious.

Occasionally I like to not dress like a person who works from home and dribbles food down the front of their shirt. When I’d Google for fashion advice, I’d end often up on r/malefashionadvice. Morgan Sung reports on TechCrunch that Reddit’s menswear hub is the latest casualty of its battle with moderators.

If you follow me on Facebook, Tumblr, or Mastodon, you know that I like to share memes and vintage ads and photos, and I used to often find them on Reddit. I’m just not finding those images and videos there as much anymore, and I’m starting to check Reddit less often.

I saw this leaflet on a utility pole when walking with Minnie.

Currently reading: The Gutenberg Parenthesis by Jeff Jarvis 📚

“The long bezzle: Verizon can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.” Verizon shutters BlueJeans, three years after buying it for $400M, the latest in a long series of failures for the company.

Techdirt: Verizon Fails Again, Shutters Attempted Zoom Alternative BlueJeans After Paying $400 Million For It:

These repeated failures by Verizon would be less of an issue if the company didn’t have such a long history of skimping on essential broadband network upgrades. Whether it’s New York, New Jersey, or Pennsylvania, the telco has a long history of taking tax breaks, subsidies, or regulatory favors in exchange for promised DSL to fiber network upgrades that somehow never fully materialize.

How Will Artificial Intelligence Change Journalism?

EFF: Congress Amended KOSA, But It’s Still A Censorship Bill. Despite small changes, the Kids Online Safety Act “is a censorship bill that will harm the rights of both adult and minor users. We oppose it, and urge you to contact your congressperson about it today.”

To demonstrate representational bias, the London Interdiscipinary School asked the AI tool Midjourney to generate images of a typical prisoner, lawyer, nurse, drug dealer, etc. The results showed striking racial and ethnic stereotyping.

My latest: Snowflake wants to help telcos ditch silos with a blizzard of data. With its telco ambitions, is Snowflake getting over its skis? The company launched its Telco Data Cloud this year to help providers make better decisions for network planning, customer service, and growing revenue.

“This question has two parts, neither of which have anything to do with the other or the subject at hand. Also, this question has four parts.” Every Question In Every Q&A Session Ever.

Daring Fireball: “Colonel Harland Sanders, who founded Kentucky Fried Chicken, sold the company to a conglomerate in 1964, and then remained their paid spokesman for the remainder of his life, despite the fact that he despised their food and professed deep regret that he sold the chain.”

Jason Kottke writes about the joys of being a regular at your neighborhood restaurant.

Despite’s Zoom’s attempts to walk back its changed terms, the service is still a privacy mess, according to Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols' research.

I’ve been using Zoom several times per week for three years. It’s been my go-to videoconferencing service. I need to think about whether to stay with it.

Oracle expands its hybrid cloud footprint to the enterprise. My latest: Big Red introduces Compute Cloud@Customer, a microcosm of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure that runs in the customer data center.

Investigating the provenance of archive.today, useful for circumventing paywalls to read articles on sites such as Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal, the Economist, etc.

The dirty little secret that could bring down Big Tech. New research reveals that Silicon Valley uses predatory pricing to crush competitors and scam investors — evidence the government can use to bust up tech monopolies.

Cory Doctorow: “Private equity plunderers want to buy Simon & Schuster: From the same parasites that infected your hospital’s emergency room and sucked Toys R Us dry.”

Caleb Sasser writes about “Turn-On,” a legendary hyperactive sketch comedy show from “Laugh-In”’s creators, canceled in 1969 midway through its first episode, reportedly because it was too far ahead of its time. The show disappeared for 54 years but surfaced (possibly illegally) on YouTube. Via Waxy

Life before cellphones: The barely believable after-work activities of young people in 2002. “I never knew what time it was, so I was constantly buying watches and losing them.”

What it was like to travel before smartphones and the internet.

SJVN: The best Twitter alternatives of 2023: Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads, and more.

Cory Doctorow hasn’t joined Bluesky or Threads, and is sticking with Mastodon, because Bluesky and Threads aren’t federated and Mastodon is. Bluesky and Threads have captive user bases, while Mastodon users are free to leave.

Cory Doctorow:Fool Me Twice We Don’t Get Fooled Again: There’s a crucial difference between federatable and federated.

Cory is also on Tumblr, which isn’t federated either, and he doesn’t talk about why he’s there. I suspect his reasons are the same as mine for being on both Tumblr and Facebook: I’ve been on Facebook and Tumblr for years, and made connections on those platforms. I don’t want to just walk away from that.

Indeed, 80% of my social media conversations are on Facebook. If I could only stay on one social media platform, it would be the Facebook blue app. I wish that were not the case.

(Cory isn’t on Facebook. Smart man, Cory.)

And Cory leaves off my primary reason for focusing on ActivityPub-enabled platforms, specifically micro.blog and Mastodon: They have legs. They’ll be around. I invested a lot of time and energy in Google+, only to watch all of that vanish. I don’t want to repeat that mistake.

Mastodon was announced in 2016. The ActivityPub standard launched in 2018. Those technologies have legs. The Lindy Effect suggests they’ll be around for several more years at least.

Bluesky has been around only a few months, and it’s still in closed beta. Threads have been around only a few weeks, and it’s still in alpha. Maybe they’ll be around a long time. Maybe they’ll be fly-by-night. I don’t see any reason to rush onto those platforms. There is no early adopter benefit to social media. If those platforms are a big deal in a year or two or five, I can think then about whether to jump on.

Yes, Bluesky, Threads and Tumblr all say they will federate. Bluesky has its own protocol for that, and Threads and Tumblr say they’ll adopt ActivityPub. Let’s talk again if those things actually happen.

I already spend too much time staring at screens. I’m reluctant to invest much time in Bluesky and Threads.

Douglas Rushkoff: Embracing the Impossible. What if magic is our most probable path to a sustainable future?. We’re not going to be able to engineer our way out of the numerous global crises we face.

Paul Reubens Never Got the Critical Reappraisal He Deserved. Reubens brought joy to millions. Many friends came forward after his death to testify as to his generosity and kindness. This article makes a compelling case that even in his sex crimes, he didn’t hurt anyone or do anything wrong.

Felix Salmon at Axios: Even before the pandemic, young people mistrusted capitalism. “Now, with a strong labor market at their backs, they are increasingly proud of, and being lauded for, turning the tables on their employers – the exploited have become the exploiters.” The behavior now called “quiet quitting” is nothing new: the phrase “phoning it in” dates back to 1938 “and the novelty then was the phone, not the conduct.”

According to Axios, what’s new is that people used to be ashamed of slacking off and now they’re proud of it.

The 1999 movie “Office Space” came this close to making slacking off heroic – but then, in the final scene, it turns out that the protagonist, Peter Gibbons, is perfectly happy to put in an honest day’s work after all. It wasn’t the all-American paragon of hard work he was rebelling against, just soulless corporate drudgery.

…

Hard work used to be part and parcel of the American Dream. For millions of younger workers, that’s no longer the case.

I wonder whether young people are really lazier today, or have they returned to a more healthy view of work being a part of a balanced life? Most people shouldn’t live to work; they should work to live.

Jo Walton at Tor.com: The Dystopic Earths of Heinlein’s Juveniles. Thanks, Cory!

Actor Bruce Horak, who played Hemmer, returns as the Klingon general. In real life, the actor performs in a musical group, the Railbirds, which explains his superior singing chops.

And Christina Chong, who plays La’an, and Celia Rose Gooding, who plays Uhura, both have musical theater backgrounds. Gooding got a Tony nomination for her performance on Broadway in “Jagged Little Pill.”

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 2 Just Pulled Off a Secret Cameo | Den of Geek

Lin-Manuel Miranda is reportedly turning The Warriors into a stage musical. I’ll watch whatever Lin-Manuel Miranda does next but this seems like maybe not the best idea?

I saw this while walking with the dog today. 📷

“Fighting junk fees is ‘woke’: Visa and Mastercard want you to pay credit card swipe fees to own the libs.”

A dark money campaign is claiming that legislation to rein in credit card junk fees is bad because it’s “woke," and compares reining in credit card fees to Communism.

The campaign is “literally that stupid,” says Cory Doctorow, who notes that Mastercard and Visa skim 3-5% of every of “every single retail transaction in the entire fucking economy.”

Not quite true but close—according to statista.com, cash accounted for just 12% of retail transactions in the US in 2022. Nearly other transaction is either a straight-up credit card or some variation like a debit card, ewallet, or a prepaid card.

Nowadays, the only thing I pay for with cash is my monthly haircut. Until this year, I also paid cash for pizza, but the pizza place we order from finally went to app delivery. Every other retail transaction I do goes through Visa.

The youngs today are burned out on dating apps so they’re posting long personal profiles to the Internet, often using Google Docs or Notion. These are essentially resumes, but for romance instead of jobs.

Connie Li, 33, a software engineer, “described herself as monogamous, short and prone to wearing colorful outfits. She added that she was undoubtedly a cat in a previous life, ‘just one of those weirdo bodega ones that like people.’”

Cooking With Gas: The decades-long marketing campaign by big business to get us to love our gas stoves. On the 99% Invisible podcast.

Casey Newton at Platformer: How the Kids Online Safety Act puts us all at risk. KOSA gives the Republican Party power to censor the Internet and eliminate LGBTQ content and anything else Republicans don’t like. And yet Democrats are on board with it, because if you wave the flag of child protection in front of a politician their brain switches off.

Hard Fork: “Researchers in Korea claim they’ve identified a material that could unlock a technological revolution: the room temperature superconductor.” Kevin Roose and Casey Newton at the Hard Fork podcast explain why that’s a big deal.

Twitter is doing its own research on the subject, including @iris_IGB, who claims to be Russian, uses a manga character for an avatar, and says they’ve reproduced the experiment in their kitchen.

On the Search Engine podcast with PJ Vogt: Why can’t we turn all the empty offices into apartment buildings? The answer: We already have, for many. Most of the remainder are unsuitable for residences. And also, a century of zoning law and NIMBYism stands in the way.

Things I saw while walking with the dog this morning. 📷

I’m happy to support the Kickstarter for the audiobook for Cory Doctorow’s next book, “The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation,” a guide to breaking up tech monopolies and incidentally saving the planet. Backing the project supports the great work Cory does on his blog and podcast.

Maybe you’re saying I should watch where I’m walking more carefully. And maybe you’re right. But I’ve lived with cats nearly forty years and the dog for ten and it hasn’t been a problem before. I have suddenly acquired dog poop and cat throw-up bad karma.

In recent weeks I have cleaned my shoe soles of great masses of dog poop twice and an extraordinary quantity of cat throw-up once.

I have become a reluctant expert on this subject. Warm water and dish soap. Easy peasy.

Minnie says good night.

This is what it’s like to spend your life in prison.

Listening to the men in the short Opinion Video above is like encountering visitors from another planet. They are serving life sentences at Angola prison, in rural Louisiana, with little to no hope for release. Many are elderly; they have not seen the outside world, or their families, for decades. They do not face execution, but they have been sentenced to death all the same, their lives spooling out endlessly on the cellblock and in the cotton fields, then ending in a prison hospice bed.

A friend is getting started with Obsidian, making the switch from Evernote, and he asked me for recommendations on plugins—which ones I, personally, find most useful. Here’s my list:

Essential

Command Palette This is the main way I invoke commands in Obsidian. You type a keyboard shortcut (Command-P on my Mac) and a little text popup comes up. You start typing and Obsidian auto-suggests possible commands, until you quickly narrow down to what you’re looking for.

Command Palette is a core plugin. It comes with Obsidian. If you want to use it, just switch it on from the Preference settings in Obsidian. The same is true for all core plugins.

Slash Commands does the same thing as the Command Palette plugin, but you start by typing a slash into the text of your note. I often use this as an alternative to the Command Palette. (Core)

Quick Switcher. A palette for quickly finding files and documents. It’s similar to the Command Palette. The Quick Switcher is my primary way of navigating between Obsidian documents. The keyboard shortcut on Mac for that is Cmd-O. (Core.)

I’m in Obsidian all day when I’m working. Most of the time, I’m writing, but when I’m in Obsidian and not writing, most of the time I’m hitting Cmd-P or / to invoke a command, or Cmd-O to switch between documents.

Daily Note. For writing daily notes. (Core.)

Files. See the files and folders in your vault. (Core.)

Better Word Count. Obsidian comes with its own word counter plugin, but this one can count the words and characters in a text selection.

I see now that Better Word Count has a couple of useful settings I have not explored, like excluding comments from word counts, and counting pages in addition to words.

My work as a writer requires me to write to length, and Better Word Count is how I keep track of that.

Better Word Count is a community plugin. Community plug-ins are made by people in the Obsidian user community. To get Better Word Count, or any Community plugin, go open Obsidian preferences, go to the Community plugins section, and search for the plugin by name.

Pandoc Plugin. Export Markdown documents in a variety of formats. I use it to export documents to the DocX format, for sending to clients. (Community.)

Useful

Backlinks. Shows other documents that link to the current document. (Core)

Search. Searches the vault. (Core.)

Outline. Displays an outline of the document you’re working on. (Core.)

Page Preview. Hover over an internal link to view its content. (Core.)

Templates. For creating note templates. (Core.)

Auto Link Title. When you paste in a Web URL, this plugin automatically fetches the title of the page. Works almost all the time. (Community.)

Calendar. Displays a calendar. Useful for navigating between daily notes. (Community.)

Daily Notes Viewer. View your most recent daily notes in a single page. (Community.)

File Tree Alternative. Displays files and folders separately. (Community.)

Minimal Theme Settings. Customizing the look of the minimal theme. Also, Styles. (Community.)

Natural Language Dates. For example, typing @today enters the current date, @yesterday enters yesterday’s date, and so on. (Community.)

Typography. Automatically replace dumb quotes with smart quotes, three hyphens with an em dash, and so on. (Community.)

AidenLx’s Folder Note. Creates a note with the same name as a folder. You can use the folder note as an index to the folder, with notes about what’s in the folder. The folder note can either be inside the folder, or in the parent folder. (Community.)

That’s seven plugins in my “Essential” category, and 13 more in the “Useful” category. This level of complication might be holding Obsidian back from mainstream adoption.

On the other hand, this level of customizability is precisely what appeals to Obsidian’s core user base.

And there’s more:

Trying these out to see if they are useful

Properties. Manages custom metadata you can add to your file: Dates, descriptions, links, whatever you want. Uses YAML formatting, which is just plain text at the top of the file. Obsidian has supported YAML for a while, but previously you had to work with the plain text; Properties puts an easier to use and prettier face on it. (Core, currently available only to people in the Obsidian Catalyst early-access program.)

Tags. I’m experimenting with switching to a very tag-heavy organizational structure for my vault. Previously I used folders. (Core.)

Tag Wranger. Rename, merge, and search tags from the tag pane. You can also create tag pages—pages with the same name as your tag. (Community.)

DevonThink. Helps to pair Obsidian with the very sophisticated Apple-only DevonThink document and information management tool. (Community.)

Very useful to many people, but I’ve never found a need for them

Bookmarks. Saves files and searches as favorites. (Core.)

Workspaces. Save and restore workspaces layouts. Frequently used for displaying multiple notes on one screen. (Core.)

Dataview. Turns your vault of text documents into a database you can query. I lack the technical chops to use this plugin. (Community.)

Templater. A powerful alternative to the Templates core plugin. As with Dataview, this seems to require more technical chops than I have. (Community.)

Canvas and Graph View are core plugins you use to visualize relationships between notes. Graph View generates maps automatically, using the links between notes. Canvases are built manually, by dragging notes and cards on a two-dimensional surface. I am an extremely non-visual thinker, so I do not find these two plugins useful. At least not yet. Maybe one day.

I’m working on an article about Snowflake Inc. and trying to get in just the right amount of puns about snow and winter.

Yesterday afternoon, I went into the sunroom to lie down for a few minutes, and found that Minnie had peed all over the daybed in there. She had been extremely difficult to potty train when we first got her 10 years ago—many, many accidents for about the first 18 months we had her—but she hasn’t had an accident in years. She has been rock solid. But she broke that record yesterday. And boy this was a big one.

We keep a canvas cover on the daybed for just such accidents as these, and also because Minnie can be a high-energy dog at times and she goes in and out of the backyard all day and we want to keep the daybed clean and unshredded. The canvas cover was allegedly waterproof. It is not—not the least little bit. Minnie’s urine soaked through the canvas cover, and into the blankets and sheets.

So, no nap for me, and Julie cheerfully pitched in and took the lead on the clean-up for which I was and am grateful.

I brought the canvas cover out back and hung it on the fence and sprayed it down with Urine Destroyer (great product name) and hosed it down and went back inside. Around nine at night, I went out back to check to see if the canvas cover was dry, and on the way back to the house, I stepped in a big pile of dog poop. I was wearing the only shoes I have that I like to wear with shorts and no socks.

This morning, I went to let the dog out and looked for the key to the backdoor. A few days ago, I decided I didn’t like the place I usually keep the key, and put it somewhere else. I didn’t like that place either, so I put it in a different place. I didn’t like that place either, so I found a third place for it. And now I can’t find the key anymore.

And how is your week going so far?

Fortunately, we have had no repeats of indoor doggy accidents. And I found another pair of no-socks-shorts shoes that turn out to be quite comfortable and look better than the ones I had been wearing.