Captain’s Log, 2025.12

• My GTD/PKM/WTF/organizing system hit critical mass and required a reorg. This happens every so often: I discover some improvement I can make, the improvement allows me to scale up, the scale reaches critical mass, I get super anxious and feel like things are falling through the cracks, I find a way to improve it. Repeat on a timer. But someday it will be perfect, you’ll see! :eyeroll:

  • Last year I discovered Johnny Decimal, which is a way to assign numbers to your stuff to make them easier to organize and find. I broke my brain trying to settle on a taxonomy before realizing that it’s better to just let it develop organically. Since then it’s gotten tight, and I’ve been able to roll it out across the file system as well as Obsidian. I love it, I’ll never go back. (This particular endeavor is 21.02 Industrious One, in case you were curious.)
  • Anyway, Mr. Decimal specifically says not to use it for storing next actions but I did it anyway because that’s how my old system was set up and I thought it wouldn’t really matter
  • It does matter. I found myself creating artificial categories to contain actions that didn’t really fit anywhere, either because they were too trivial or because they were cross-cutting and shouldn’t really have an “owner”. So much of the month was me unwinding action stuff from knowledge stuff, which then allowed the whole system to become much simpler. Simple is good.

• Still with the burnout. I mean, okay fair, but also enough already. I’m starting to feel antsy and ready to get on with it. But rather than forcing it I decided to go the other way and completely unplug for the holidays. Much relaxing, much ease, nothing more intense than Disco Elysium and a few rounds of Brotato. Of course that was right thing to do, as if “try more hard” ever made any kind of sense. Here in 2026 I’m feeling better for it. Between this therapeutic chillaxing and the reorg, that’s most of the month accounted for.

• I survived the holidays. This was the first one, ever, that I spent entirely on my own. It was…weird. I thought since it was just me it would feel like any other day and I would just do my normal thing, but I was wrong. You can feel the holiday in the air, even if you’re not directly a part of it. So I put on The Seasonal Music while I made myself a fancy coffee and breakfast, then sat down to celebrate the Dah Hoo Rah Hoo.

  • It was an interesting experience to have. I did take a kind of academic enjoyment in the whole thing.

• Got up and running on Graphene OS. It was on my decorporatizing roadmap for 2026, but then I fumbled my iPhone trying to pay a SEPTA fare and kablooie. Terrible timing! Fortunately, among the many reasons why Delco is awesome is that we have a Micro Center. I was able to pick up a refurbished 13 and a new Pixel 8 Pro on clearance for way less than a new iPhone. Money I hadn’t planned on spending on that afternoon, but survivable.

  • The Graphene install was totally straightforward, and I was up and running that afternoon with Obsidian and Signal and the built-in Vanadium browser. I’m still figuring out where everything lives, and who knows how long it will take for me to be fully off the iPhone, but the process is now underway.
  • The Pixel is a nice bit of kit, but it’s heavy. No wonder you Android users all look so fit and svelte, lugging these things around all day.

• Signed up for Obsidian Sync. Speaking of Obsidian! I should have done this so much sooner. I had been using iCloud Drive for sync and it was fine? And free (or already paid for, anyway)? But it wasn’t quick, and Obsidan could take quite a long to get and index all the changes. Now updates appear everywhere near instantaneously and startups are quick enough that I can now use Obsidian as a quick-note inbox.

  • I live in Obsidian. It’s ridiculous that I hadn’t already done this.
  • Fortunately I did this before I kablooied my phone. It’s almost as if I knew.

• Helped run a mobile device security workshop for our local community action network. How you’re being targeted and what you can do about it. We helped disable problematic defaults and harden their settings, moved several people to Signal, and had some good discussions about installing Linux and self-hosting.

  • I am not a public-facing person, and wasn’t in an entirely good place that night. I almost bailed out on it. But it turned out to be a fun evening!

• Got (some of) my dotfiles under control. I’ve been doing more of my development work on Sherman lately, enjoying its larger screen and leisurely performance. But now I need a way to keep my settings in sync between the two systems so I can easily bop back and forth. I followed the setup described in Dotfiles: Best way to store in a bare git repository from Atlassian and it’s been working pretty well. I have my Neovim, Ghostty, and Git configurations in there now. Having to work from the command line is pain but I’m muddling through.

• Finished watching the 2025 F1 season

  • Landoooooo!!!

• Rebooted the Pi.

  • Installed Forgejo, without YunoHost
  • NGINX and my code forge is live!

Thoughts & Advice

• Want to feel better.
• You are right where you need to be.
• Give up.
• Learned to slow down again.
  • Reminded by practicing Assetto Corsa
  • Slow is smooth and smooth is fast
  • Won (at %82) as soon as I managed to allow myself to go at 80%

Random Links

• Soma FM Underground '80s
• “Horrendous Space Kablooie”
• The “productive vs. relax” meme