If you like this content, become a member or purchase my book Analogue Productivity. This helps the content continue.

For the love of plain text

Over the last two years I’ve taken ownership of much of my media. I own movies on discs that are placed on my server that are streamed via Jellyfin to various devices in my house. I own music purchased on CDs, again streamed to various devices via Roon. I purchase physical copies of books, and the digital ones I get are purchased DRM free so I can send them to the few Kindle’s we have around the house or my Kobo.

When I look at my notes I wouldn’t even think of a system like Notion, where they have all my notes somewhere on a server in a proprietary format. I use Obsidian with plaintext markdown files at it’s core so I can do what I want in the future with my notes without needing to get permission from the owner of my app.

But something I haven’t taken control of was my task list. Until recently I used Todoist, which while excellent, means my tasks are locked up in their app synced via their server. I have no reason to suspect Todoist of nefarious things, but at one point you could have said the same thing about Matt the “benevolent” dictator of WordPress.

In the past I’ve tried nvim orgmode not just once but twice and bounced off it for reasons I can’t remember right now. Though after 2 weeks with Doom Emacs and orgmode I wonder if it was just that I was dealing with little errors in a Vim based system trying to emulate orgmode.

For two weeks now I’ve used orgmode synced via Syncthing which I leave running on my media server so that I always have sync and I haven’t had any issues. My most used feature currently is M x (that’s Alt x) which lets me search the different commands available in Doom and shows me the keyboard commands that go with the command I need.

Doom also comes with evil mode by default, which means it uses vim keybindings as good as vim that I don’t notice the difference at all.

When I’m not sitting at my desk I have beorg on my iPhone and iPad to add things to my lists or to check things off. While it’s not as nice as just using Emacs, it’s good enough for things when I’m out and about.

Will orgmode stick? I honestly don’t know, but it’s working well for the last few weeks so I’ll check back in later to let you know.

Two articles inspired me to make the jump to plain text tasks in Emacs.

• Writing Experience
• Plain Text tasks iOS

Unhappiness with my hardware

Specifically my Apple AirPod Max headphones which I’ve owned since the first few months they came out. In short, they’re damn uncomfortable now. The mesh sagged and the metal sits right on my head.

This usually isn’t a problem as no one is sleeping in my house most days by the time I sit down to work, but in the summer that’s not the case. Despite owning the house and such, it feels like a asshat move to play my stereo at 8am when my teenager is sleeping directly behind my monitors.

This leaves my wearing the AirPod Max’s for a few hours most days and while they sound good, they suck in the comfort department. After some research the Sony WH line of headphones gets good reviews and the older 1000XM4 is very decently priced though it does have Alexa integration which is a point against the headphones.

I’d love a suggestion for a decent set of headphones that are wireless, sound decent, can be worn for hours a day without discomfort, and don’t have “smart” or “AI” features built in.

I do also have a pair of Steelseries Artic Pro Wireless headphones and while they are far more comfortable, the sound quality is noticeably inferior to Apple’s headphones.

All my other hardware is excellent. Still loving my 13″ Framework. Typing on my Moonlander is wonderful. The Logitech MX 3s mouse will be used till it dies.

It’s just those headphones that are making part of my workday a literal pain.

Book Reviews for Learning

I have to strongly agree here. Thinking about a book you’re reading is going to help ensure that you get the most out of it. If that is you want to dive deep into what you’re reading.

If you want to read for fun, go for it. Read as you want.

But if you’re trying to learn from your reading and you’re not writing a review you are missing out on one of the biggest things that will help you maximize what you take away from your reading life.