W- was happy with his SuperNote A5X, so I ordered one for myself on July 18. The company was still doing pre-orders because of the lockdowns in China, but it shipped out on July 20 and arrived on July 25, which was pretty fast.

I noticed that the org-epub export makes verse blocks look double-spaced on the SuperNote, probably because <br> tags are getting extra spacing. I couldn't figure out how to fix it with CSS, so I've been hacking around it by exporting it as a different class without the <br> tags and just using { white-space: pre }. I also ended up redoing the templates I made in Inkscape, since the gray I used was too light to see on the SuperNote.

It was very tempting to dive into the rabbithole of interesting layouts on /r/supernote and various journaling resources, but I still don't have much time, so there's no point in getting all fancy about to-do lists or trackers at the moment. I wanted to focus on just a couple of things: untangling my thoughts and sketching. Sketchnoting books would be a nice bonus (and I actually managed to do one on paper during a recent playdate), but that can also wait until I have more focused time.

I've had the A5X for five days and I really like it. Writing with the Lamy pen feels like less work than writing with a pencil or regular pen. It's smooth but not rubbery. I've still been drawing in landscape form because that feels a little handier for reviewing on my tablet or writing about on my blog, but I should probably experiment with portrait form at some point.

So far, I've:

sketched out my thoughts

I used to use folded-over 8x14" to sketch out two thoughts, but scanning them was a bit of a pain. Sometimes I used the backs of our writing practice sheets in order to reduce paper waste, but then scanning wasn't always as clean. I really like using the SuperNote to sketch out thoughts like this one. It's neat, and I can get the note into my archive pretty easily.

sketched stuff from life

This is easier if I take a quick reference picture on my phone. I could probably even figure out some kind of workflow for making that available as a template for tracing.

received many kiddo drawings

A- loves being able to use the eraser and lasso to modify her drawings. Novelty's probably another key attraction, too. She's made quite a few drawings for me, even experimenting with drawing faces from the side like the way she's been seeing me practice doing.

received many kiddo requests

A- likes to ask me to draw things. She enjoys tracing over them in another layer. More drawing practice for both of us!

used it to help A- practise coding, etc.

A- wanted to do some coding puzzles with her favourite characters. I enjoyed being able to quickly sketch it up, drawing large versions and then scaling down as needed.

played a game of chess

I drew chess pieces just to see if I could, and we ended up using those to play chess. I should share these and maybe add other games as well.

referred to EPUBs and PDFs

I put our favourite songs and poems on it. I've also started using org-chef to keep a cookbook.

doodled sketch elements

boxes, borders, little icons, people… Probably should organize these and share them too.

I've figured out how to publish sketches by using my phone to rotate them and sync them with my online sketches. Now I'm playing around with my writing workflow to see if I can easily post them to my blog. At some point, I think I'll experiment with using my phone to record and automatically transcribe some commentary, which I can pull into the blog post via some other Emacs Lisp code I've written. Whee!

A- wants to be with me almost all the time. This can be challenging.

A multiple-choice question is easier than a fill-in-the-blank one, especially when it comes to "What do we do now?" A- seems less grumpy throughout the day when she can go from one activity to another of her choosing. I like letting her take the lead. I also like not having to come up with stuff. During bedtime, I sketched this menu:

A- wants to learn cursive, probably because it's extra-fancy and the sort of thing Elizabeth Bennet would have done. There's some support for teaching cursive in kindergarten, so it's not totally crazy. It's a good opportunity for me to improve my lettering skills, too. She usually likes it when we do the same thing at the same time, so working on letters together is a good way to nudge her to practise fine motor skills. We did a brush lettering worksheet for "Aa" from Amy Latta Creations. This one is my worksheet.

I've got lots to learn about controlling a brush pen. Doing lots of drills will probably help me get my up-strokes to be as thin as the samples.

A- often asks me to connect my letters. I think I'll make our own worksheets so that she can connect letters too.

At bedtime, I drew in my sketchbook while she read independently. When she noticed what I was doing, she said she liked the 3D letters and encouraged me to do more. She pointed to blank spaces on the page and suggested things to add.

Not that different compared to my lettering experiments from 2013:

But hey, I'm learning stuff!

Things will probably be a little strange on my blog for the next few days, as I've decided to experiment with statically generating my blog with Eleventy. It's a little complicated because I wanted to keep as many of my posts and category/tag feeds as possible.

To speed things up, I usually work with a subset of my posts. Generating a partial copy of my site results in 557 files and takes 3.73 seconds. When I generate the full copy of my site, it writes 13358 files in 96.73 seconds.

With any luck, I'll be able to get most of the things working before the next Emacs News post. Let's see!

Depending on what time A- finally goes to bed, I might have around 1-2 hours of discretionary time that I can use to focus on a small task and complete it. If I pick something that's too big, I get tempted to stay up late, which often makes me grumpy the next day. So a good approach might be to have a number of reasonably small tasks that give me as quick a payoff as possible, especially if those tasks can result in compounding improvements.

Now that I can post Org Mode headings to my journal from Emacs, it's easier to log finished tasks as journal entries that will get picked up during my weekly and monthly review. The next step might be to figure out how to flesh out those lines into more useful posts. That way, I can find things again by searching my blog. Also, if other people can pick up ideas from my posts, I might be able to benefit from their improvements.

There's a lot of room for growth in terms of my workflow for doing stuff, learning stuff, and sharing stuff. Here's what a possible learning path might be like:

• Planning: I've just started excavating the Org files that I've been tossing ideas into over the last 5+ years of limited discretionary time. Now things are mostly refiled, and I've got quite a few projects on my priority list. I might spend a bit of non-computer time mulling over 1-3 possibilities throughout the day, and then work on the most interesting one after processing my inbox. I find that in the course of a week, I tend to focus on one or two projects in order to take advantage of momentum. It's also good to set aside planning/improvement/review time instead of getting tempted to prioritize coding all the time, as fun as it is to write stuff.

  I don't have to optimize this. Most tasks are good to work on and move me forward, so I don't have to spend a lot of time trying to analyze the best effort/reward ratio. I can usually just go with whatever I feel like working on.

• Coding: I usually work with Emacs Lisp or Javascript, with a little bit of Python. I have some technical debt in Ruby that I don't have the brainspace to dig into at the moment. It may have to wait until A- goes to in-person school. For Emacs Lisp, my next workflow improvement might be to get the hang of Lispy. For my personal projects, infrastructure is the main thing tripping me up. I need to spend some time setting up a proper development environment and learning more about workflows so that I can reduce risk when I'm working on stop-and-go things.
• Writing: Dictation is out for now, since I don't feel much like talking at night. It's nice to be quiet after a whole day of talking with a kiddo. When I get the Georgi keyboard I ordered, stenography might be an interesting long-term skill investment. The bottleneck is probably still my thinking speed, though. That means I could probably:
  • embrace lists and outlines as a way of getting fragmented thoughts down (possibly over several sessions) and then shuffling them around into some form of coherence (yay Org Mode)
  • lower my threshold for posting; it's better to think out loud
• Screenshots: I recently tweaked my shortcuts for inserting screenshots. Now I just need to make them part of muscle memory.
• Drawings: I can sketch things out on my Lenovo X220 tablet PC, although flipping the screen is a little annoying. One option might be to leave my screen rotated and then use a Bluetooth keyboard to type and use shortcuts. The keyboard isn't as comfortable to type on as my laptop is, though. Hmm… org-krita doesn't quite fit my workflow, so I need to write my own. I want to be able to quickly sketch something. If I like it, I want to convert it, rename it with a caption, and add it to my sketches.

(defun my/org-insert-drawing-as-link ()
  (interactive)
  (let ((file (make-temp-file "/tmp/image" nil ".psd")))
    (copy-file my/index-card-template-file file t)
    (insert (org-link-make-string (format "file:%s" file)))
    (my/open-images-in-krita (list file))))

(defun my/preview-in-other-buffer (file)
  (with-current-buffer (find-file-noselect file)
    (display-buffer (current-buffer))))

(defun my/org-convert-sketch-at-point (&optional two-col)
  (interactive "p")
  (let* ((link (org-element-context))
         (file (org-element-property :path link))
         date
         (intermediate (concat (file-name-sans-extension file) ".png"))
         new-file new-link)
    (unless (eq (org-element-type link) 'link)
      (error "Not at a link"))
    ;; (call-process "krita" nil nil nil file "--export" "--export-filename" intermediate)
    (call-process "convert" nil nil nil (concat file "[0]") intermediate)
    (my/preview-in-other-buffer intermediate)
    (setq
     date (org-read-date)
     caption (read-string "Caption: ")
     new-file (expand-file-name (format "%s %s.png" date caption) my/sketches-directory)
     new-link (concat "#+CAPTION: " date " " caption "\n"
                      (org-link-make-string (concat "sketch:" (file-name-base new-file)))))
    (rename-file intermediate new-file t)
    (delete-region (org-element-property :begin link)
                   (org-element-property :end link))
    (if two-col
        (progn (insert
                (format  "#+begin_columns
#+begin_column50
%s
#+end_column50
#+begin_column50
"
                         new-link))
               (save-excursion (insert "
#+end_column50
#+end_columns
")))
      (insert new-link "\n"))))

(defun my/reload-sketches ()
  (interactive)
  (url-retrieve "https://sketches.sachachua.com/reload" (lambda (&rest args) (message "Updated sketches."))))

Also, graphviz is pretty handy for quick diagrams, and it will probably be even more useful as I dig into it and other text-based diagram tools. The diagram at the beginning of this post was generated with:

#+begin_src dot :file "sharing-path.png" :cmdline -Kdot -Tpng -Nfontname=sachacHand -Nfontsize=30
digraph {
  rankdir=LR;
  node [shape=box];
  "Planning" -> "Coding" -> "Writing" -> "Screenshots" -> "Drawings" -> "GIFs?" -> "Video" -> "Streaming";
  "Planning" -> "Reading" -> "Writing";
  "Planning" -> "Writing";
}
#+end_src

Animated GIFs, videos, and streaming may have to wait until I have more brainspace. Plenty to tweak even now!

I’ve been getting deeper into Python so that I can model our personal finances. I really like using the pandas library to manipulate data. All those years I spent trying to juggle increasing complex spreadsheets… Working with Python code in Org Babel blocks is just so much more fun. I like being able to keep my assumptions in tables without having to fuss around with naming cells for easy-to-read formulas, slice and summarize parts of my data frames, organize my notes in outlines and add commentary, and define more complicated functions that I don’t have to squeeze into a single line.

I haven’t quite been able to tempt W- into the world of Org Babel Python blocks. Still, I don’t want to give up the awesomeness of having pretty tables that I can easily edit and use. So I have a bunch of named tables (using #+NAME:), and some code that exports my tables to CSVs:

#+NAME: tables
| Table         | Key                 |
|---------------+---------------------|
| assets_w      | Description         |
| assets_s      | Description         |
| tax_rates     |                     |
| disposition   | Asset               |
| probate_rates | Asset               |
| basic         | Client information  |
| base_expenses | Category            |
| general       | General assumptions |

#+begin_src emacs-lisp :results silent :var tables=tables :tangle no
  (defun my-tbl-export (row)
    "Search for table named `NAME` and export."
    (interactive "s")
    (save-excursion
      (goto-char (point-min))
      (let ((case-fold-search t))
        (when (search-forward-regexp (concat "#\\+NAME: +" (car row)) nil t)
          (next-line)
          (org-table-export (format "%s.csv" (car row)) "orgtbl-to-csv")))))
  (mapc 'my-tbl-export tables)
#+end_src

and some code that imports them back in, and formats tables nicely if I’m displaying them in Org. The in_org block doesn’t get tangled into index.py, so I don’t clutter command-line use with Org table markup.

#+begin_src python :results silent :tangle no
  in_org=1
#+end_src

#+begin_src python :results silent :exports code
  import pandas as pd
  import numpy as np
  import orgbabelhelper as ob
  def out(df, **kwargs):
    if 'in_org' in globals():
      print(ob.dataframe_to_orgtable(df, **kwargs))
    else:
      print(df)
    return df
#+end_src

#+begin_src python :results silent :var tables=tables :colnames yes
  for row in tables:
    table = row[0]
    index = row[1] 
    if row[1] == '':
      index = None
    globals()[table] = pd.read_csv(table + '.csv', index_col=index).apply(pd.to_numeric, errors='ignore')
    # print(globals()[table])
#+end_src

Then I can use C-c C-v C-b (org-babel-execute-buffer) to update everything if I change the table in my Org file, and I can use C-c C-v C-t (org-babel-tangle) to create an index.py that W- can read through or run without needing Org.

Here's another technique that makes a simple photo book. I wanted to
make an 8-page book that could be printed 4 pages to a 8.5″x14″ sheet
(duplex, flip along the short edge), with a final page size of
7″x4.25″.

Sample with my own photos:

#+begin_src emacs-lisp :var pages=story :results value latex :exports results
(mapconcat (lambda (row) (format "\\graphicframe{%s}{%s}" (cadr row) (org-export-string-as (car row) 'latex t))) pages "\n")
#+end_src