Welcome to 2024 everyone, and especially to this traditional yearly year transition post!

Religion is a culture of faith; science is a culture of doubt. – Richard Feynman

• Went to the beach at just after 11:00. Brilliant weather which for Betty’s is quite special, so the place was absolutely packed.
• Finally created org-capture-template to do the Daily Head Voices post setup more easily and more consistently, see below for the relevant element.
• Thought a bit about writing and then self-hosting the tool that scans the cpbotha.net RSS feed and then performs actions, e.g. sending to Telegram, when new posts appear
  • Initial thought was Go, because small and self-contained (like my discord scihub bot and my eureka-alert RSS feed generator), but Python means much higher development velocity. Because it’s a script that will run every few minutes and then stop, RAM is less of an issue, and the official docker images https://hub.docker.com/_/python/ mean I don’t yet have to upgrade the ancient Ubuntu 18.04 on my VPS.
  • Next thought was rather to spend this time writing. Zapier free tier is working fine for now, will get back to self-hosting it later.
• org-roam-node-find calls org-roam-node-read calls org-roam-node-read--completions calls org-roam-node-list, which always reads the full list of nodes from the sqlite database. Whyyyyy? When I do a semantic search using org-roam-similarity, I already have the small list of IDs. I only want to offer the user this small list, I don’t want to read the full list every time, and then remove everything except the list I already have – so much wasted effort. I’m really hoping d12frosted’s vulpea has something better…

org-capture-template to create DHV after prompting for date

;; select region around your private day notes, then C-c c l
("l" "Lifelog" entry (file+olp+datetree lifelog-org)
 "* TODO Daily Head Voices on %<%A> %<%Y-%m-%d>
:PROPERTIES:
:EXPORT_FILE_NAME: index.md
:EXPORT_HUGO_BUNDLE: lifelog-%<%Y%m%d>
:EXPORT_HUGO_TAGS: lifelog
:END:
:LOGBOOK:
- Created \"TODO\" %U
:END:

%i
"
 ;; - with org 9.6.6 :time-prompt is only honoured when target is
 ;;   "file+olp+datetree"
 ;; - I would have preferred just target "file" for this, but need
 ;;   time-prompt as I often only create post after the day
 :empty-lines 1 :jump-to-captured 't :time-prompt 't :tree-type 'month)

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• Typing this note in the fresh new 2024-01-Jan.org file, in the completely fresh new journals/2024/ directory.
• Had to fetch GOU#1 from her NYE party in Hermanus, where they had been focusing more on the party parts and less on the sleeping parts.
• On the way back, stopped at my aunt and uncle in Onrust to give best wishes for the new year in person. Slipped and talked about AI a bit. Oops.
• Back home, read to GOU#3 (now 7) what I wrote about her in this blog when she was born, and at various points since then. Seeing her reaction makes this activity even more worth it. (pro-tip: Tag post with the GOU in question!)
• Read about the evolution of aging, the mutation accumulation (MA) and the antagonistic pleiotropy (AP) hypotheses in https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/the-evolution-of-aging-23651151/ during the preparation of my traditional year transition blog post. Not depressing at all!
• Reclining on sofa, back almost horizontal, with laptop on lap, is an underrated ergonomic lifehack.

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• If you’re reading this, you’ve successfully made it to the last day of 2023. Congratulations!
  • My jokes about successfully not dying for another period of time are unfortunately starting to hit closer and closer to home. The bad jokes will continue until morale improves! (more about this later)
• The tail-end of yesterday’s navel gazing about these daily posts involved looking into this blog’s Hugo configuration.
  • I really do like Hugo, but there is a substantial amount of implicitness and magic going on. See for example the logic behind sections: https://gohugo.io/content-management/sections/
  • My plan was to evaluate whether it would be worth it creating a whole new subsection of the site just for the lifelogs (nope), and also just to see in general what would be involved in addng more structure, with something like https://gwern.net/ being the ultimate form of personal website (a lot of work, and I’m not yet at the stage of life where I am able to invest that much time into this, although as I mentioned yesterday, I definitely want to get back to writing more substantial posts again soon).
• Lovely family hike up to Leopard’s Kloof in the Harold Porter botanical gardens
• Took it easy into 2024 with a family braai and an undisclosed number of craft beers.

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• Woke up to overcast, rainy and windy day in Betty’s Bay
• 11.4km run with hip niggle brought me to exactly X.0 kilometres for the year, where X was my modest kilometre goal. I was not sure about that .4 until after I had recorded the run. Whoohooo! 🥳
  • Hip niggle is currently not happy with me. Will deal.
• Helped the electrician debug a non-functioning lights circuit, which turned out to be due to two disconnected load wires hiding behind the rail plate in the DB.
• My current thoughts about this daily lifelog experiment here on this blog are:
  • it’s great having a daily logging habit; anything that encourages that is positive
  • posting on mastodon felt like the right mix of low (tech) friction and semi-ephemerality and obscurity (= low stakes) which really helped decrease the barrier to daily publication there
  • Although I worry a bit about the impact of these smaller, slightly more chaotic outputs on existing readers who are waiting for more substantial posts, which I do hope to start producing again soon, cpbotha.net is fortunately probably more than obscure enough to host these daily logs.
    • In other words: For now I’m just going to keep on keeping on.

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• First time back on the Clarence Drive coastal route after the floods. As beautiful as ever.
• Derek Sivers’s walk and talk: 100km through Northern Thailand over 7 days with interesting folks. See https://sive.rs/wt
• According to my notes, it was 2023-09-23 when I had started giving evil-mode a solid bash again. Last time was… <checks notes>… 2017-09-18. Strange that it was also in September! (My previous vim-proper era probably around 2007, but I’m guessing). Anyways, it now feels like it was the right choice to try again now. My emacs agility is almost back to what it was before the switch, and with some of the vim interactions now trained into muscle-memory, there are many more places where that’s turning out to be useful, which was a large part of the motivation for this experiment.

My evil-mode config

As per special request by Keegan below, here is my mostly by-the-book evil-mode config, part of my vanilla-Emacs ball-of-config:

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• Longer run brought my year target back in reach, at the cost of some hip niggle. 4km in, I decided that this was not the time and place for a fasted run and bought me a powerade. I bought another on the way back from the Vergelegen-to-Reservoir Road section of my route. I have no regrets.
• Before the run, thought about Values vs Vision vs Sinek’s Why. This was brought on by a twitter thread (which I did not bookmark argh) by a person who identified the root cause of a previously resolved mental health challenge to be the fact that at that point they had ill-defined personal values, and that addressing that was a large part of the resolution. I think my previously-mentioned “life systems” are indeed closely related, but it can’t do harm to spend some more mental cycles on listing my values, and then maybe to see how exactly these related to my life systems.
• Before and during the run, half-designed in my head a software tool for narrating books using OpenAI’s text-to-speech API.
• After the run, took care of some errands:
  • Had car battery replaced
  • Installed new diaphragm for the Zodiac pool cleaner, the current one has a hole in it and did not work at all
  • New brush for the pool pole
• After errands, built and then published the afore-thought-about prototype https://github.com/cpbotha/audio-my-book – warning, it’s still super rough, but it works nicely chopping up your book text into semantic chunks and then text-to-speeching each chunk into mp3 (the openai tts API has a 4096 character limit, hence the chunking)
• In the evening, worked on https://github.com/cpbotha/org-roam-similarity fixing bugs, and also showing similarity scores in the *org-roam* buffer.

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• Pack up and drive back home
• Lovely lovely family lunch at The Drydock restaurant in Knysna
• During the last part of the drive my partner took over, and I could spend some time updating https://github.com/cpbotha/org-roam-similarity to support multi-qa-MiniLM-L6-cos-v1, a much smaller and faster transformer-based similarity model. See https://www.sbert.net/docs/pretrained_models.html for more details.
• It seems I do always need to be building something. It is one of the building blocks of my well-being.
• That thought led to me spending some more time thinking about more clearly defining my personal values. You could take a look at the personal life systems I wrote up at the start of 2021. They are the backbone of everything, while my personal values are a list of more concrete priorities that cover different subsets of my life systems.

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• I thought I was done, but no, I had to spend more time chasing corner cases and learning more tricks for https://github.com/cpbotha/org-roam-to-apple-notes
  • If you need to escape a single quote ' within a single-quoted string for bash, zsh and some friends, remember $'-quoting. See https://stackoverflow.com/a/16605140/532513 for more
  • Apple iCloud and Notes have great difficulty with folders suddenly containing 1800 notes. Not yet sure where exactly the comfort threshold is. Had to nuke the org-roam folder in Apple Notes and start over with a smaller subset of my notes. Due to this, implemented optional “export only org-roam notes modified within the last N days” feature.
• Lovely day conclusion braaiing with friends.

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• Merry Christmas everyone!
• In spite of my hip niggle but because of great weather, decided to do a normal weekday run. Due to family’s beach plans, I ended up for the most part on a coastal hiking trail which was amazing!
• Family Christmas (buffet) lunch at Joe Fish. The food was so amazing that I might have eaten a a tad or three too much. I think this is what folks in the US feels like after Thanksgiving.
• Drove (relaly slowly) back home to recover…
• … and to continue with https://github.com/cpbotha/org-roam-to-apple-notes
  • After switching back to built-in HTML export with some hacks, results are looking much better. Rest of my 1800 notes are being exported as we speak.

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