OTB: It's Darker Here
07:30 Sunday, 30 January 2022
Current Wx: Temp: 30.18°F Pressure: 1020hPa Humidity: 63% Wind: 0mph
Words: 673
Further to my efforts to increase the amount of frustration and disappointment in my life, I've made the initial steps to launch (ha!) Notes From the Underground. Ideally, if I don't screw this up, it'll go "live" on Groundhog Day, because, of course.
I originally thought I'd maintain the Marmot and the Underground in one Tinderbox file, which is eminently doable. But it creates some opportunities for mix-ups, so I just duplicated the Marmot, renamed it and deleted most of the cruft. The Underground doesn't care about the weather, so that's out.
I can go live with a fairly simple style and structure by just doing exactly what I'm doing here, and I may do that just to get things rolling. But I want to make some changes that will call for a fair amount of trial and error experimentation.
The most interesting thing will be wiring it up to a Notes folder in Apple Notes so I can write posts on an iOS device. I need to do some internal TBX wizardry in the Underground to get those routed to the appropriate container with the requisite nonsense to maintain the structure, which may be nothing at first. The trickiest part will be later, when I create some kind of trigger to automatically "Export to HTML," and have that saved locally. Then I have to teach Forklift to watch that export folder and when it changes, upload the changes to the server.
It seems all theoretically possible, and probably the matter of a few minutes work for someone who knows what they're doing. But I'm figuring this out as I go along; and a short attention span and low frustration level do not make for quick work. So, fits and starts, as usual.
Some things will be much easier. The Underground won't feature images, just text, so there's less effort there. I'm thinking about how to maintain the archive, and I haven't quite figured that out yet. For now, it'll probably just be a dupe of what I'm doing here with different CSS.
You may be wondering why do a separate blog at all, and I ask myself the same thing sometimes.
I've long wanted to do something where I could post from my phone if I had something brief I wanted to get down. Ideally, I'll be able to dictate the post to the phone on a walk. Initial efforts in that regard have been disappointing, and further research is required. So Notes From the Underground began a long time ago as a watched folder, initially with SimpleNote. I didn't do much with it, other than see if Tinderbox would import notes from SimpleNote. It did. Later, after the ability to watch Apple Notes appeared, that became my preferred option.
From there, I've wondered about tenor and tone. This is probably a whole other post, but apparently the Marmot and its predecessor, Groundhog Day, had an overall negative sentiment analysis. I'm not sure what that means yet, except that, yes, what motivates me to write is often being unhappy about something.
That's kind of informed or interfered with what I'm choosing to do here in Nice Marmot. I'm censoring myself, often not posting because I know it'll just be another "negative" post. I don't get any complaints, but, you know. I don't get much feedback at all! (Which is fine. Please, ignorance is bliss.)
Anyway, the tagline for Notes From the Underground will be "It's darker here," and I'll feel like I've given myself permission to be as negative as I want to be. Perhaps I'll be more productive. Perhaps I won't experience the internal double-clutching I experience with the Marmot. Maybe it'll be all for naught and nothing will happen and it'll sit idle like the Marmot did for many months over the years.
Who knows? Time will tell. Anyway, stay tuned. More to follow.
P.S. the National Weather Service "official" temp is 30°F, my weather station is telling me it's 29°F, 3 degrees of frost.
✍️ Reply by emailBlack Vulture Test
09:12 Thursday, 30 January 2025
Current Wx: Temp: 54.84°F Pressure: 1023hPa Humidity: 97% Wind: 5.03mphWords: 11
Doing some modifications on the marmot. This is a test post.
✍️ Reply by emailFurther Investigation
09:20 Thursday, 30 January 2025
Current Wx: Temp: 57.13°F Pressure: 1023hPa Humidity: 90% Wind: 3.44mph
Words: 518
The preceding test was unsatisfactory.
What I've been doing is kind of tightening up the marmot's, well, "structure" for lack of a better term.
At the outset of the marmot, posting a photo was largely a manually-intensive affair, mitigated somewhat by copy-and-paste.
Much of that has since been automated, and I've learned a great deal about Tinderbox in the process.
In my earlier efforts, I'd intended to use an export template to fashion all of the html involved in displaying an image in a post. For reasons I don't recall (I didn't make notes to my "future self."), I struggled with getting the export template for a photo post to work correctly. My work-around was to include the html to display an image in the $Text attribute of a photo prototype note, which note is created by an AppleScript that asks for input from me, does some work in the Photos app and exports the image, then creates a new post (a note) in Tinderbox using a photo prototype note.
Every note created with a prototype, inherits the characteristics of that prototype. You can include html code in the $Text attribute of a note, and it will render as html at time of export. But having html code in the body of your post's text is an unattractive sort of kludge, given all the other facilities Tinderbox affords in templates.
So this morning, in lieu of blaming the Orange One for the tragic aircraft collision over the Potomac (Of course he's not to blame, but since he blamed Biden for essentially everything, I think we all owe him the same treatment.) I looked for something else to occupy my time and attention, and this is what it landed on.
I'm delighted to say that I was able to sort out the export template rather quickly, for blog posts in general. The result is visible in the preceding post. Where I seem to be struggling somewhat...
Oh! Light bulb goes off...
Figured it out. Tinderbox is case-sensitive, and I was testing against a lower-case spelling of a prototype name, when it included an upper-case letter in the name. Oldest mistake in the book.
So I guess I'll do another photo post and see if I've fixed it.
But I guess I should tell you what wasn't working...
If you're reading this in an RSS feed reader (And why aren't you?), you might recognize the problem. The photo of the buzzard didn't appear in the RSS feed, whereas before, they always would.
I had to add an export condition in the newsitem_rss template, to include the image URL if the post descended from a p_Photo prototype. (Note the uppercase "P".) The previous version of the newsitem_rss template only included the $Text of the post, which wasn't a problem before since the image html was embedded in the text. I needed to tell the template to create that html from the relevant attributes if it was a photo post, i.e. had the prototype p_Photo.
Anyway, now to test it.
✍️ Reply by emailTest Drive
09:51 Thursday, 30 January 2025
Current Wx: Temp: 61.63°F Pressure: 1024hPa Humidity: 75% Wind: 3.44mphWords: 31
Took this yesterday morning since I was a few minutes early for my blood donation and they wouldn't let me on the bus until precisely 0800.
Let's see if this works.
✍️ Reply by emailTest Sat
09:55 Thursday, 30 January 2025
Current Wx: Temp: 61.63°F Pressure: 1024hPa Humidity: 75% Wind: 3.44mph
Words: 42
Okay, that all worked. I see at least one other thing I need to clean up. It's not affecting production, but it's a vestigial attribute I created when I was trying another approach and it may lead to confusion in my dotage.
✍️ Reply by emailLike Panasonic, "Just slightly ahead of my time"
18:15 Thursday, 30 January 2025
Current Wx: Temp: 62.29°F Pressure: 1022hPa Humidity: 77% Wind: 4.61mph
Words: 180
(Panasonic's 70s slogan used the plural possessive pronoun, "our.")
Giving too much attention to my iPhone, I happened upon this interview with Nick Carr in The Atlantic. (Apple News+ link. Apologies.)
Imagine my delight when I read this:
When you speed up the exchange of messages and information beyond a certain point, you actually overwhelm the mind’s ability to make sense of it all in a deep way. To keep up with the flow, people have to sacrifice emotional and intellectual depth. We become reactive and impulsive, and that ends up triggering misunderstanding and animosity and, in general, misanthropy.
Spot on, I'd say.
That said, I recognize that much, if not all, of my online consumption is problematic. I haven't figured out how to solve that yet, but "the first step" and all that...
(I'd write a longer post, but dinner is ready. I'd already outlined much of it in my head. But dinner, dishes and then TV. Maybe tomorrow. Plus, I want to post a pic I just took because the sunset, well, the sky anyway, demanded my attention.)
✍️ Reply by emailTonight's Sky
18:24 Thursday, 30 January 2025
Current Wx: Temp: 61.63°F Pressure: 1022hPa Humidity: 77% Wind: 4.61mphWords: 45
Grabbed my other black XZ-1 to step outside and capture this. Probably doesn't do it justice. My white XZ-1 gave up the ghost last week. I have one more spare, a "Titanium" version, still boxed. My original black XZ-1 is at Winterfell.
✍️ Reply by emailDelete Amazon
05:59 Friday, 30 January 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 1.17°F Pressure: 1026hPa Humidity: 80% Wind: 10.33mph
Words: 232
Slept better last night than the one before, though my Apple Watch still bitched at me that I wasn't doing it right.
Anyway, while I was awake I wondered what I could do as part of the "general strike," to convey some sort of signal that I'm not ok with what's going on.
When I canceled Prime, I don't know how much that conveys to Amazon corporate. They probably track those metrics, but they probably don't obsess over them since it's a yearly subscription fee, and most people probably "get over it," and re-up. So, what could I do that might be more of a signal that I was done with Amazon.
Then it dawned on me.
Delete the app.
It's not that strong a signal, because you could always still use the browser. But I suspect the Amazon app is just infested with as much spyware as they can get past Apple, which is probably more than we know.
If a lot of people deleted the Amazon app on their phones, that might be a signal they might receive.
So, I deleted the app and I'm putting this out into the ether.
Maybe you can't stay home from your job. Maybe you have to buy gas or milk or whatever. But how much inconvenience is it to delete the Amazon app?
I say go for it.
And fuck Jeff Bezos.
✍️ Reply by emailChain of Events
06:29 Friday, 30 January 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 0.41°F Pressure: 1026hPa Humidity: 80% Wind: 10.33mph
Words: 283
I was thinking about how I was going to be buying books going forward. I buy a lot of used books from eBay, which is just a front-end for a lot of online used book sellers anyway. But sometimes I can't find what I'm looking for as a used book. I looked around and Barnes and Noble is online, as is BAM (Books-a-Million). Made a mental note of that and stopped thinking about where I was going to buy new books.
Then I read this piece in Kottke (who is observing the general strike today), which led to this piece in Vox, which led to this article in The Atlantic (link may or may not "work" as I'm copying the "free" link from Vox). But also in the Vox piece was a link to the book it's about, The Dual State, which you will note is a link to bookshop.org.
Now I know where I'm going to buy my new books.
I've set up a bookshop.org account, and named a bookstore in Ithaca as the one I wish to support. I've also ordered The Dual State (yesterday). The last book I ordered from Amazon, last week, is supposed to arrive today. It was Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics Sixth Edition, by Alfred Korzybski, which is the book that gave us, "The map is not the territory," and which influenced Dr. Douglas E. Kelley, which I learned about from The Nazi and the Psychiatrist, which was the basis of the movie Nuremberg.
Everything is connected.
And I'm beginning to develop a genuine problem with where I'm going to put all these books.
✍️ Reply by emailBetteridge's Law of Headlines
07:11 Friday, 30 January 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 0.16°F Pressure: 1026hPa Humidity: 80% Wind: 10.25mph
Words: 25
Does Tim Cook even care about Apple’s image anymore?
History will not be kind to Tim Cook.
Capitalism destroys your soul. Consumes it. Annihilates it.
✍️ Reply by emailthe marmot is not on strike
07:15 Friday, 30 January 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 0.16°F Pressure: 1026hPa Humidity: 80% Wind: 10.25mph
Words: 95
Because the marmot is not an economic activity.
So I'm here scratching personal itches, and maybe providing a moment of distraction for those who may have some free time disengaged from the economic activity of the state.
If you're looking for some tips on becoming a better member of the resistance, look no further than Beardy Guy Musings. Guy's pretty hardcore. Maybe not as hardcore as Stephen Miller, (strong Goebbels' "total war" speech energy there), but pretty hardcore.
If you're shopping for gas masks tomorrow, Kottke posted a link to this guide from The Verge.
✍️ Reply by emailSnow Cone
Current Wx: Temp: 0.01°F Pressure: 1026hPa Humidity: 80% Wind: 10.25mphWords: 2
Palate cleanser.
✍️ Reply by emailFurther to the Foregoing
08:49 Friday, 30 January 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 1.33°F Pressure: 1027hPa Humidity: 78% Wind: 11.72mph
Words: 223
Two weeks ago, I posted The Fourth Reich.
Today it occurred to me that Tom Homan is a good fit for Ernst Rohm, leader of the SA, the Brownshits, er, I mean Brownshirts. It seems CBP is little more than a militia loyal to Donald Trump, and, like Rohm, Homan doesn't have an "official" position within the administration. The SA was a party organization.
The video is a bit tedious to listen to, but it is informative and you'd do well to watch the whole thing. I started it at Rohm's introduction.
It's not a perfect fit, nothing ever is. But again, history doesn't repeat, but it sure does rhyme.
A day after The Fourth Reich piece, I posted All Nazis All the Time, where I mentioned:
ICE detention centers are concentration camps people!
So I was pleased to hear Heather Cox Richardson say the same thing in last night's Politic's Chat. She makes her concerns very clear, and says far more than my claim, which I view as merely a blinding glimpse of the obvious.
There are still people who stop listening or reading if you make any reference to Nazi Germany or Hitler in comments about the Trump administration. Not all of them are MAGA, some of them are just unwilling to believe the evidence before their very eyes. They're fools.
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