Wednesday Thoughts 17

16 Sep, 2026

People continue to do neat things with Obsidian. The latest plugin I stumbled across is Simple Journal (the author also made "Simple Streams", but I don't think I have a use-case for that one). The neat thing about Simple Journal is it creates a timeline-style journal you update using the command palette. I write my journal by hand, but I can see this as something handy to write out notes while working on a project.

¶

And on the topic of Obsidian, Carlos just recently raved about it and while I probably don't use it as extensively as he does, he's on the money.

¶

I've been doing some constant tinkering with my new-to-me 2019 Macbook Pro; we bought this one for my wife a few years ago, used, but she hasn't got much use out of it. One of the struggles is that the keyboard layout is French-Canadian, so you kind of have to type from memory (the / key is a capital E with an accent). It's a good thing I'm a touch-typist.

Anyway, I migrated my data from my previous 2012 Macbook Pro, minus all of my files¹. In retrospect, given that I was not bringing all my files to the device, I should have done a fresh install without all the apps I had installed before. I had to uninstall a few apps I don't use and haven't used in quite some time. It's probably easier to install from scratch if that's the case. I think Robb did the same thing with a new mac, recently.

¶

An interesting post from disassociated: Enshittification rules: there goes the post-platform internet era. The person refuting "enshittification" that he links to, I think, misses the point of the term (I will admit to not reading the article, just disassociated's interpretation). Enshittification is about trapping people on a useful platform/service/app and then eroding the user experience on both ends: the users themselves, giving advertisers more power, and then on the advertisers themselves. The people who profit are the platforms (Facebook, the famous example). The users of the service, whether it's advertisers or people who like to post on Facebook, are the losers.

Whether or not people leave these social media platforms is irrelevant to the term.

¶

A great post: More meaningful online interactions, please

When I first joined Mastodon, I had a lot of meaningful engagement with other people. I still do, but it has tailed off. It's still a social media platform and inherently they're designed to be a soap box for people to talk AT you instead of TO you. Joel mentions Discord and similar forums—those are conversations in real-time, so it's not a surprise those are more enjoyable than trying to get back-and-forth from Mastodon.

Reply by email   Share this post  Mastodon  Bluesky

#thoughts