An interesting piece from The Atlantic on understanding ISIS on their own clearly-stated terms.
“We have misunderstood the nature of the Islamic State in at least two ways. First, we tend to see jihadism as monolithic, and to apply the logic of al‑Qaeda to an organization that has decisively eclipsed it…Bin Laden viewed his terrorism as a prologue to a caliphate he did not expect to see in his lifetime. The Islamic State, by contrast, requires territory to remain legitimate, and a top-down structure to rule it.”
It relies on Transmit to upload the public directory of a Hexo baked blog to the S3 bucket that hosts the site. You can find it on npm and Github.
I have a hypothesis. The wider the scope of your attention to social media and the popular press the more material goods you consume.
Having had too many hobbies and pursuits in my own life, I’ve noticed that the more diverse my attention, the more I ended up consuming. Is it that one’s physical environment (how much stuff you buy and surround yourself with) reflects your mental environment? Or is it the other way around? Maybe it’s really both. The less focused you are on meaningful, low consumption pursuits, the more you buy; and the more you buy, the more distracted you are by all the stuff around you. A vicious circle.
I’ve been moving to a tag-based system for organizing content in DEVONthink. All of my content for each database goes into a single group called “reference.” If I want to find something, I search the hierarchical tag structure instead of diving into some arbitrary list of groups.
But I still have groups that I’d like to collapse into the reference group. So I wrote an AppleScript to perform this action. Notably, most of the action is in the processGroup() handler which is recursive because we do not know how deep the group hierarchy goes.
To deal with the explosion of information available to us, we’re told to avoid the filter bubble by seeking out a variety of sources. Or we’re told to pursue a low information diet. But we’re also told that to be informed is one of the duties of citizenship. What are we to do? Here are some other options:
Stop caring about what doesn’t affect you. There’s apparently a Syrian refugée crisis in Europe. It’s unfortunate; but I won’t read about it. What good does it do? Nothing. So why bother reading about it? My sphere of interest should coincide with my sphere of influence. I feel bad about their situation; but all I can do it live my own life as simply as I can.
My main organizational tool DEVONthink Pro Office, a tool I’ve used for many years. I’ve written previously about it and how I use it to find things and how I synchronize databases across machines.
I’m a relative newcomer to Hazel though. Hazel’s tagline is “automated organization for your Mac.” Hazel works as an agent to keep folders organized on the Mac. It’s an engine that applies per-folder rules to take actions on files and folders. Actions can include tagging files, moving them to other folders, running AppleScripts, deleting them, etc.
If you’ve lived in the U.S. for any length of time, you realize that we have a national obsession with home ownership. Yet I’m beginning to wonder about this bit of American orthodoxy. I’ve owned 4 homes and none of them seemed like much of an investment to me. The last home that we sold was an enormous loss. We are now in a transition, anticipating our new move; so we are house-free (and debt-free!) So it’s an ideal time to unpack the complexities of home ownership.
In the popular sci-fi movie series “The Matrix”, a handful of humans discover that the perception of reality has been artificially engineered by computer software. By taking the red pill1 a person can be released from the deception, thereby seeing things as they truly are. About material “stuff”, I’ve had the same sort of epiphany.
Three years ago, we decided we needed to build a house. We weren’t pleased with our previous neighbourhood; and we happened on a piece of land that seemed to fit our needs. We began working with a builder to design a house. Despite our intent to build a smaller house, the design ended up being considerably larger than the house we were already in. Everything was to be custom-designed and fabricated. All of the fixtures were selected. We had spent hundreds of hours thinking about the designs, going to meetings, reading books, looking at photographs. It was an enormous investment of time and a significant investment of money.
I’ve been a DEVONthink user for many years; it’s an amazing piece of software. Currently I’m using DEVONthink Pro Office because I use all of the higher level capabilities. Over the years, my database structure and workflow have gone through many changes. In this post I’ll describe my approach to finding things in DEVONthink.
At first, I dumped everything into a single database. Over time, however, I realized that finding things was difficult because of the number of false positives when searching. I roughly divide my databases between areas of responsibility. For example, I’m a director at two local music organizations; so I have separate databases for each of those groups. However, most of my material goes into a single database. It’s where all of the items of daily living go - bills, receipts, bookmarks, web clips, etc.
One of the great things about shooting with a camera like the Sony A7 that has an advanced sensor is that you can shoot astrophotographs with less noise that ever before. This comes into play with the inevitably long exposures you encounter when shooting the night sky. On a recent trip to view Kilauea volcano as we’ve done many times, I wondered if it might be possible to capture both the volcano and the star-filled sky in the same shot; so I began to research a bit on astrophotography. I’m by no means an expert; but I’ve learned a bit.
