The last post in here, my review of Luck, was 4 months ago. Since then I’ve realized micro.blog is a better place for short-form writing, hence the silence.¹

The thing is, micro.blog is also better for longer essays, and the Tufte theme which enables margin notes and sidenotes instead of footnotes is an absolute delight. So, I have moved all of my writing there, which is easy to see, the last post on here being 4 months old.

Worry not, Infinite Regress will remain frozen in time until I convert it into something more cohesive — digital garden seems to be the preferred term — about meta-science and meta-medicine, which will be a fun thing to do in retirement.

A brief experiment with Drummer reminded me how fun it was to write short, untitled, tweet-like posts throughout the day without having to be exposed to social networks. Drummer itself was too high-maintenance for the 2020s me, but Micro.blog is a (paid) service whose focus is — and the name does give it away — short, untitled, tweet-like posts with a light layer of social networking.

Which is to say, my old domain is now resurrected as a micro blog with a snazy Edward Tufte-inspired design. The RSS you get there should include updates from this blog, so subscribe to either but not both.

Drummer is an online outliner that enables quick, easy, and near real-time posting of text both long form and short — what we used to call blogs back in the good old days of two years ago. Dave Winer created it for his own purposes, but it works beautifuly with just your Twitter account as a login. Here is my page.

As things are still very much in progress, Dave recommended doing daily backups. Sadly, I didn’t, and as of today’s updates a few weeks’ worth of half-baked notes are wiped out from the Drummer server (but thankfully not from the website they helped create). That’ll teach me.

Since posting to that page is on hold until everything is back in order, expect more — dare I say daily — updates here. Managing markdown files is not nearly as intutitive or pleasant to use as Dave’s outliner, but he seemes to be working on an OPML to markdown converter. That will be well worth the wait.

I don’t like automated posts on personal Twitter accounts, so I’ve created one just for this blog: @8regress. It’s automatic and unmonitored.

As always, there is an RSS feed.

What better way to spend a Sunday morning than setting up a home server while watching Wimbledon finals?

Congratulations, Andy.

This website is:

• a public repository of articles, lectures, and other original works I authored or co-authored;
• a place to repost comments, reviews, and recommendations I wrote on other sites (like Quora, Amazon, etc);
• a place where my half-baked ideas and philosophizings go if I think them interesting enough for general consumption.

This last one is what gives me trouble. Ideally, if I think a topic is worth writing about, I should make the extra 3-day effort to gather references, edit it nicely, and have it published. But like the character in “The bridge on the Drina” who means to be the town chronicler but can never find an event worthy enough to write about, most subjects have me less excited the more I think about them. By the time I finish a blog post, then, I have no intention to revisit the matter.

This is an excellent filter against appearing foolish in print, but horrible for productivity.

Two solutions come to mind readily, with equal chances of failing—either stop posting the third category of articles altogether and start writing everything with an intention of publishing; or start writing even more with the hope that at least a small percentage of that will turn into something a journal would accept for publication.

The former is a set-up for procrastination, the latter—doing extra work in a hope to create material for even more work—oxymoronic . I will try both and see where I end up.

It looks like you can, provided you have a server running somewhere. Mine is a 2013 MacBook Pro with a dying battery.

This one I’m writing in Drafts, which will then copy the post to a Dropbox folder monitored by Hazel. This should trigger a simple bash script that processes the markdown file and pushes the newly created html files to github.

Very Rube Goldberg-y, I know. I’ll try doing it from Editorial next.

Starting tomorrow, miljko.org will no longer be on Squarespace. Instead, it will be a Pelican-generated static site hosted free of charge on GitHub Pages.

Squarespace is an excellent service, for those who don’t have the knowledge, time, or ambition to muck around with self-hosted websites, but have enough readers to justify the $8/month subscription. My long commute gives me more time to play with Python, git, vim, etc, and the $96 renewal charge was due this month. It was an easy decision to make.

Having most of my posts saved as markdown files payed off, as it is currently impossible to get a clean conversion of old Squarespace articles to Pelican. Some links will be dead, some images temporarily unavailable, and the three of you reading this via RSS will need to resubscribe.

That is all.