dcreemer rants

tl;dr: https://github.com/dcreemer/hammerspoon-bear https://github.com/dcreemer/dotfiles/tree/main/dot_hammerspoon Bear Notes and Hammerspoon Bear and Hammerspoon are two very useful but very different applications for macOS. Bear Bear is a super-polished, Markdown-based note-taking and management application. It’s an exemplary macOS (and iOS) application. The user experienced is fast and neat. Everything generally works as expected, and it implements most expected Apple-ecosystem. Features like iCloud synchronization, consistent key handling, and Shortcuts integration are built in. I love taking notes in Bear, and as you might expect this post was written using it.

The late writer Michael Crichton (of Jurassic Park fame) gave a speech in 2002, excerpted here: Media carries with it a credibility that is totally undeserved. You have all experienced this, in what I call the Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. (I refer to it by this name because I once discussed it with Murray Gell-Mann, and by dropping a famous name I imply greater importance to myself, and to the effect, than it would otherwise have.

Editor’s Note: After Flipboard’s CEO Mike McCue was featured in Gear Patrol sharing his essential items, his employee D Creemer was asked to do the same. Ultimately his submission was not published due to a strike by the thesaurus staff. That article is presented here.1 Flipboard employee D Creemer is a lazy man. His day runs from 8 AM to 9 PM, and in that time he barely manages to get his one high-school kid out the door, ride a motorcycle 8 minutes to work, work, make it home after dinner which he often skips anyway, and then barely keeps up on email before falling asleep on the couch until his kindle hits him in the face.

I work in an industry supported by advertisements. We give you something for “free,” and in exchange, you agree to view ads from companies and organizations that want something from you. Connecting you to an advertiser is called “targeting.” The better we do at matching you to an advertiser, the more money we make. If I know you are in the market for a car, I can make a lot of money putting GM ads in front of you.

Civilization Modern human civilization is about six thousand years old – the first real cities arose in Mesopotamia about 4000 BC, give or take a few hundreds of years. Settled civilization (e.g. farming) is maybe six to eight thousand years older than that. One human generation is generally regarded to be about 20-25 years or so. That means that from you and me, back to the dawn of human civilization is only about 450 generations.

In this article I share bit of what I’ve learned in putting together a backup and data synchronization system for myself and my family. My goal is simple enough to state generally: I want to make sure all of my notes, documents, photos and videos are backed up and available from anywhere. Diving into the details of this goal is where things get complex. Happily, I think the end result is simple enough for others to emulate.

Simple, Secure, Repeatable Most of us live a connected life by default. I have six computers and three mobile devices that hold bits and pieces of my work and personal lives. As a software engineer that may be on the high end, but surely it’s not uncommon to have a computer or two, a shell account or VPS, a phone, and perhaps a tablet too. On each device, I need different parts of my digital life: