Author: William
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Libra season
Libra season is upon us, and a couple weeks ago, I crossed over the official time of my birth across another calendar year. It is now more than safe to say that I am well past the 50% marker of my overall lifespan. Coming to grips with how finite life really is not a lesson…
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Memento Mori
So many incredible things have unfolded this year, both good and bad. I’ve learned many lessons, but the most significant one is the value of time. “Memento Mori” has been the most prominent stoic principle in my life this year. As you get older, there aren’t many “first-time” experiences that make you want to write…
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Amor Fati
Amor Fati “Those who receive the bare theories immediately want to spew them, as an upset stomach does its food. First digest your theories and you won’t throw them up. Otherwise they will be raw, spoiled, and not nourishing. After you’ve digested them, show us the changes in your reasoned choices, just like the shoulders…
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The Illusion of Connection
The second of May marked my six-months of being at my new post. This would also mark the near nine-month period of time that I have been gone from my last post at Meijer. These people I worked with at that store for eight years, these people who called me “brother” and others who gave…
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on Leaving Hipstamatic
Each fiscal quarter, I put my Yearly subscriptions under a very harsh and unforgiving lens of scrutiny. The second quarter of the year puts DayOne, Hipstamatic, Obsidian Sync, and Digital Blasphemy under this lens. We reflect and contemplate the pros and cons of keeping the service around. We debate the value it brings into our…
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The Man Wearing the Nikon Hat
So the other day at work a customer approaches the seafood counter and starts talking to Jake about shrimp. Or maybe it was flounder or squid. Who knows what it was they were talking about, my eyes were fixed on his hat: Nikon. I had little going on at the time, so I wandered over —…
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Post-Production Transition Update
Tonight was the first night I felt tangible progress in Lightroom take place. Which is a relief but also confusing. Because it seems a lot less intense compared to Darktable, but it came across as some intimidating at first. The keyboard shortcuts are setting themselves properly on the shelves in my mind, and my big…
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Dashy: The Ultimate Homepage for your Homelab
Typically I find these approaches to a solution to be wasted efforts, but there is something about Dashy that sets it apart from the others. Perhaps it’s the “search ready” approach to the app, the way you can just start typing. Check it out.
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Easy Video Rotation on Linux Using FFmpeg
ffmpeg is a versatile multimedia framework that can decode, encode, transcode, mux, demux, stream, filter, and play almost any media content. It’s widely used for various multimedia processing tasks, including video rotation. 🔧 Step 1: Install FFmpeg (if not already installed) If you don’t have ffmpeg installed on your Linux system, you can install it…
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@Mentions have landed in ChatGPT
Talk to Chat about this or that and then switch whom you’re talking to without making a new conversation.
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Untitled 24.2
All week I have been kicking around the idea of nuking all the posts on USWM and coming up with some new “format” and starting anew. But what would be the purpose of doing this? I’m not going to formulate some new format, be inspired by it, not to mention, stick to it. Arriving at…
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40 Questions to Ask Yourself Every Year 2023 Edition
What did you do this year that you’d never done before? Saw my sister get married on the shores of Lake Chatuge. Did you keep your new year’s resolutions? Yes, because again, I did not make any. Did anyone close to you give birth? Negative Did anyone close to you die? Jerry Zimmerman and Chris…
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Music for Jackson
Tracks that I hope you already know or should will live on this playlist. Any relative notes about the music will be listed below. NOTES Damien Jurado – Seattle. Someone well worth your time deep diving. YouTube search results and his official YT page. He’s also got a lot of stuff on Bandcamp. Lastly his…
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from Restaurant Regrets to a New Opportunity
The job in Oconomowoc did not work out the way I had thought it would. It ended before it started, literally. I didn’t make it thru training. It ended up being a wage discrepancy that had a lot of bureacracy attached to it’s solution, which I wasn’t interested in sticking around for. I walked around…
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Navigating the Unknown
Tomorrow is the beginning of my journey at a new company. While I am not completely at ease, I am less nervous than I thought I would be. I am really not sure what to expect from any of this, but I am going to walk in with an open mind and try to take…
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on Love for Rocket Money 💚
Rocket Money sent me an email last night and said that the negotiated price for my internet bill they got for me last year had expired. Apparently I had “Auto Renegotiate” ticked on, and because of this they automatically contacted Spectrum again on my behalf. Wake up to an email this morning from Spectrum, first…
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Late Night Tales: Old Town East
I have always deeply enjoyed the Another Late Night/Late Night Tales compilation albums for the past twenty years. Like most people my age, I was part of that “digital music revolution” and used to spend large amounts of time back in the day burning my own compilation albums for people, and would spent insane amounts…
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Weeknotes – Week 38
🧘♀️ While I sincerely doubt that anybody sent out any Internet Search Parties on my behalf, but for approximately the past four-and-a-half weeks we had been taking part in our annual self-imposed social media break. Typically we aim for a month, sometimes it goes for little longer and this year it was. It is worth…
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Moby (Softer) tracklisting
2000.MobySongs – 01.First Cool Hive2000.MobySongs – 03.Into the Blue2000.MobySongs – 04.Now I Let It Go2000.MobySongs – 06.Like to Score2000.MobySongs – 08.Hymn2000.MobySongs – 10.God Moving Over the Face of the Waters2000.MobySongs – 11.Alone2000.MobySongs – 12.Novio2000.MobySongs – 13.The Rain Falls and the Sky Shudders2000.MobySongs – 14.When It’s Cold I’d Like to Die2000.MobySongs – 15.Living2000.MobySongs – 16.Grace2000.Play: The…
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Eight Years Down the Drain
Woke up to notifications from Find My Device that my AirPods were missing, glorious start to the day. When I went into work, the boys had basically everything already done. Nobody said anything to me. When I asked them work-related things, it was all one-word answers and looking at the floor. I basically stood around…
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Chillhop Essentials Spring 2023
Chillhop’s Essentials always deliver, and Spring ’23 ain’t no different! The album’s got some killer tracks, but illiterate’s The Strangest Thing had me turning to my trusty terminal just to see what magical sounds were tickling my eardrums. Here’s to a spring as groovy as this tune. Favorite track: The Strangest Thing. Originally posted here.
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Weeknotes – Week 33
🗓️ Last week we almost dropped the ball and posted our Weeknotes post a day late, and excused that by saying “better late than never” but we know that is not good enough of an excuse. Must demand better of myself. 📱 To be honest, I do not use Obsidian on my phone as much…
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Weeknotes – Week 32
This week will be a breeze due to the fact that I haven’t had any days off since our last Weeknotes post. This is due to the fact that I requested off this upcoming weekend to take my cousin’s senior pictures. 🎓 When I started my photography gig, I rejoined the major corporate silos because…
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Life is an RPG
Once upon a time, I found myself immersed in the world of Skyrim, leveling up my character and gazing at the enchanting skies, pondering which attribute to kick up a notch. It was during this gaming session that a sudden realization dawned upon me. Skyrim, just like my cherished game series Fallout and even Final…
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Weeknotes – Week 31
We’ve made it to another Weeknotes! The weather is still hot and heavy up here in Wisconsin, we lost a couple of days to the heat, but made good headway in a couple different departments. Lets go! 💂 Over this past weekend, I brought with me my camera to work with the intention of running…
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Weeknotes v2.0 – Week 30 – “Genesis”
I have been on the fence about getting onboard with the idea of doing #WeekNotes. This is due in part that the format many of the people I see doing these follow the same sort of format I used to use on my blog back in the day when I was a WordPress user on…
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Breaking Up or Making Up? My Q3 Subscription Showdown
The first of the Q3 bills start in the first days of August. In fact, all of the subscriptions due for renewal during Q3 are in August. 🤘 1Password Renewing without question. The passkey things is incredible and I hope they pioneer more major players to adopt it into their authentication protocols. Important shit like…
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on being oldtowneast
When I purchased @oldtowneast on omg.lol, I also bought my legal first name. Since the early 90s, I go thru phases online where I hid behind a username and othertimes I would use my full legal name. I’ve been hiding behind oldtowneast for almost a decade now, and I feel like I might be reaching…
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You Can Shoot RAW on iPhone
Some of the greatest things happen to me within those first thirty minutes of waking up. The coffee is at it’s peak performance, Folk Forward (and lately Sonic Universe) always delivers something perfect and things just seem to “click”. Even the keys on the keyboard are enjoyable to press. So it was during this time…
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in response to “Being an Email Subscriber Butterfly Gives Me Inbox Peace — Please Don’t Take It Personally”
[Original Post] Comment 1 I have unsubscribed to almost all PKM feeds I was subscribed too because I have come to the conclusion that my usage of Obsidian was too far removed from most of those in the PKM community. I also fear that AI is going to wipe out entirely most of what we…
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Clouds of Disconnection
There are those days when I’m just not feeling it, which sadly happen more often than they should, and then are days like today, where, I’m not feeling it so much that something inside of me snaps and I’m severed from my physical body somehow and suspended in air and just watching myself walk around…
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on Culling
According to ActivityWatch, I’ve got 13h 41m 24s clocked in with Darktable. It is very much safe to say a majority of this time wasn’t necessarily spent with development experimentation (although there was quite a bit of that), after having taken a bit of time to figure out the sort-of standard workflow approaches people took…
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Appalachian Dreams
In seven days from this moment I’ll be sipping coffee in the foothills of the Appalachian mountains, and enjoying a much deserved break from the Chaos of the North. In 14 days from this moment we will be putting the finishing touches on my dear Sister’s wedding, and organic family-made efforts one year in the…
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on Learning Darktable, part 1
March 8th, 2023 I first dipped my toes in the water that is Darktable, the RAW image editor. It pretty much scared the living daylights out of me and it wasn’t shortly thereafter that I was tinkering around with RAW Therapee. That was much more accessible for someone who knows absolutely nothing about editing RAW…
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on TikTok
When I look at the Sims 4 cover, I sometimes wonder if it shouldn’t really be called “The United States” and China is playing us. These kids at my work are legitimately brainwashed by the TikTok platform. It is their search engine. It is their Google. No logic. No debate. I remember back in the…
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Love Letter to Espanso
Many moons ago, I first heard of Text Expander and although it seemed pretty neat, I had most of the things I typically paste often enough baked into my alfred installation under the “snippets” extensions. In there I have almost every SomaFM station and a command for mpv listed there so all I have to…
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on Maintaining streaks
You know what our Grandparents never did? Beat their chest telling their friends and coworkers how long their streak is in DayOne or Habitify. They did things and did so routinely with no expected praise, like, comment or heart. I’ve often wondered if the act of adding an app somewhere in your workflow instead of…
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Why Everything Sucks
Reflecting on the passions that excited me as a child, it’s intriguing to consider why what we once cherished seems to be merely a shadow of its former self today. Is it possible that the decline in quality stems from an attempt to cater to a broader audience rather than niche communities? Consider video games,…
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Breaking Up or Making Up? My Q2 Subscription Showdown
Embarrassing amount of subscriptions in my world, I’m sad to say. I break them up into fiscal quarters and review them ahead of time to decide whether or not to send them to the block. Currently the only monthly subscription that is proved unworthy at the moment is Audible due to my backlog of credits.…
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“the” kitchen
This was originally posted on official page for “the” kitchen on Facebook. Had my first experience in “the” Kitchen last Tuesday morning. Your fine establishment is a welcome addition to our lovely, rapidly evolving community. Mostly coming on here to praise the efforts you guys have put in and to offset some of the negativity…
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Rotini Mozzarella Medley Salad from the Meijer Deli (Copycat Recipe)
This was temporarily posted to the Meijer subreddit. Good evening! I do my Grandmother’s grocery shopping for her, but almost every time I’m in the store they are out of the Rotini Mozzarella Salad that the deli sells out of their endcaps. It seemed straightforward enough to make myself, but I did a quick web…
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on Taking Photographs
I’m taking pictures with a camera again. 📸 Back When Five Hundred Dollars Got You a 5MP camera About fifteen years ago I walked away from digital photography for a couple of different reasons. First, and the most pressing issue at the time, was the world events going on in the world around me. The United States…
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The Future of Gaming
The future of gaming is looking bleak, my friends. As we move towards a service-based model, the days of single-player-story-driven games are numbered. Instead of quality games that can be cherished a generation later, we’re being sold on the idea of games as a service, much like the old syndicated network programming on television. One…
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Select All, Delete.
All my life, my biggest enemy on this entire planet is an easy to execute keyboard sequence that can eliminate hours, months or even years of work. This truly has been an enormous source of complication for a vast majority of my life. It has prohibited me from any sort of real tangible progress regarding publishing…
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Hello, Tiny Internet!
This was originally posted on USWM as a sort of “Hello, World!” post. You know, it’s funny all these years ago when I first installed the GeneratePress theme on my WordPress blog I really thought I was something else using a theme that was less than 40kb in size (or at least it was at…
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Weeknotes – Week 6
As detailed in an earlier post today, the wind had been sucked out of our sails a bit regarding publishing things online. In that way, this Week 6 Link Drop will make up for a bit of lost time. The Beautiful Web Music Digital Blasphemy Releases The Obsidianverse YouTube Videos In the Beginning There Was Man…
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No Artificially Influenced Intelligence
Artificial intelligence really has sucked the wind out of my sails regarding publishing text online. These technologies are being improved at such a rapid pace that it gives the authentic author the desire to turn this computer off and go back to pen and paper and give up on all the rest. Take those above 295…
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The Best Pasta Salad in the Midwest
Most people don’t give a shit about the backstory, so it is at the bottom. Ingredients Fresh Assume everything is organic. Grocery/Pantry Seasonings Method Cook your pasta as per the directions for the type of pasta you are using. In most recipes we found online, they suggested using “cold pasta” for the recipe or left-over…
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Weeknotes – Week 2
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Arthur C. Clarke Seems like everywhere the mouse and keyboard took me this week somewhere on the page artificial intelligence was mentioned. Seeing video titles on YouTube: “Top 10 Business Ideas to Start with ChatGPT”. Seeing as many AI-assisted Obsidian plugins come down the line as I…
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Weeknotes – Week 1
The holidays have come and gone. Was all that time and money you scurried eagerly to get accomplished before the morning of December 25th worth all the effort, or did it fall short of your expectations? There is only one thing to do now, keep moving forward. Time during the holidays, moments spent with those…
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40 questions to ask yourself every year – 2022 edition
40 questions to ask yourself every year – 2022 edition What did you do this year that you’d never done before? Did you keep your new year’s resolutions? Did anyone close to you give birth? Did anyone close to you die? What cities/states/countries did you visit? What would you like to have next year that…
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Weeknotes – Week 52
Obsidian 💜 We spend a lot of time talking about the newest plugins and whatever OpenAI is doing while so many of the established plugins and their changes need more light. Searching for a theme My writing vault has it’s own Style Settings, Minimal Theme Settings and Appearance settings set in such a way that…
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Weeknotes – Week 51
Abbreviated length and depth as lots of time has been dedicated to getting ready for the holiday this past week. The same can be expected for next as this year winds down to a close. Top of the list, how you doing on your 40 Questions? Digital Blasphemy released Class M. Napkin did a Public…
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Weeknotes – Week 50
What a crazy week! Obsidian canvas, Reader by Readwise and more Tana, oh my! Let’s get after it. Got an invite to Reader by Readwise. Not sure exactly how they want to be addressed. Reader, Reader by Readwise, Readwise Reader. During the onboarding process they mention apps you may have used and if you have…
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Ode to Soma FM
Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and that which cannot remain silent.— Victor Hugo There are certain things in the world we can take great comfort in knowing they will happen without any input on our part. Things like the sun rising tomorrow, a new app that is going to shake up…
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Thoughts on Tana, Part 1
Been with Tana now for just shy of a week and it was until last night when my brain could finally grasp the concept of not having files. Nodes, nodes, nodes. It worried me so much that I had a hard time inputting anything into it in fear I would lose it or something goofy…
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Weeknotes – Week 49
Not sure what happened last week. Still getting used to abiding by a routine. Lets get after it. Finally broke down and bought a LOT of Hue bulbs. If you don’t fuck around with Mint, or if you fuck around with advanced spreadsheets that are way too complicated as you get older, consider giving Rocket…
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Weeknotes – Week 47
The biggest and probably most important thing this week is pkm.social launching. A space setup after so many fled Twitter. This bad boys focused on all the personal knowledge management stuff a person could ask for and most of the important people of that space are on there. We have added backing up Raindrop and…
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Weeknotes – Week 42
Obsidian 💜 Examples using Templater More neat mentions: YouTube Links Obsidian October talks week 3: Use Plugin Settings + Creating theme for Obsidian 1.0 Metadata Menu 0.2.9 – better select and file fields Is Tana The Right App For You? | Tana VS… (Notion – Roam/Logseq – Obsidian – Todoist) Looks like Santi has been…
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Thoughts on Twitter & Medium
I fell into the Twitter trap once again, innocently trying to explore the Obsidian world, but then I got sucked in. It happened almost instantly. I followed a couple of people to spice up my feed, and before I knew it, Twitter algorithms thought they had me all figured out. They started showing me things…
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Listening to the ‘Radio’ on YouTube
Now I’ve heard there was a secret chordThat David played, and it pleased the LordBut you don’t really care for music, do ya? — Leonard Cohen Here is a list of great musical resources on YouTube (not YouTube Music) for your extended listening sessions. The following links are all livestreams but the links themselves are…
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Weeknotes – Week 38
This week, we will take a closer look at a couple of the “New in Community Plugins” mentioned in the latest edition of the Obsidian Roundup. We will focus on those that have already passed through code review and are available under the Community Plugins tab, as some users are a bit leary of using…
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Seven Applications I Actively Use Every day, (And 8 That Don’t Get Enough Love)
While this is geared toward Linux, you will find that almost all of these applications are available on all platforms. Admittedly, I have a very hard time keeping focus. Twenty years ago I thought it was going to be something I would one day just snap out of, the reality is quite different. I have…
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Quick Searches — the unsung hero of the modern-day web browser
It is easy to never mind how much time we spend online searching for things. One moment you need a color to match Dracula’s purple. Then you want to learn more about Dataview in Obsidian. Then you want to know when Carl Jung was born. Going to a website to search for the information you…
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The Wave
I’ve been trying to figure out when exactly it was that Meaningwave first splashed into my life, and I’m sure a throughout enough digging on my Last.FM profile would be enough to help me pinpoint how exactly it all came to fruition. Every once in a while I fall into a musical lull, whereas all…