There was a period of time when reading one’s junk email was randomly entertaining. Sure, there were the people who just wanted to sell dubious substances with exaggerated claims of medical impact, or fiscal schemes designed to make something out of nothing with few details other than parting with all your money is sure to make some more.

But now and again there was a gem. As I go through all my old posts from previous sites and consider which should live again and which should be forgotten (most) I came across one where I commented on a particular piece of email that seemed wildly out of place.

It took a little work, but I managed to get iA Writer, Working Copy, and Shortcuts to play nice and create a new Hugo post on mobile. I’d toyed with the idea of adopting dynamic APIs that mutated a checkout of the site and such but there was always some extra difficulty and the whole point of going static was to avoid that nonsense.

The short of it is:

1. Ask for Text with “Post Title”
2. Current Date
3. Format Date (Current Date, ISO)
4. Text (your stub post goes here, frontmatter and all)
5. Replace “[^\w\s]+” with “-” in “[step 1]”
6. Change “[step 5]” to “lowercase”
7. Format “Current Date” as “yyyy-MM-dd”
8. Set name of “[step 4]” to “[step 7]-[step 6].md”
9. Save “[step 8]” to “[Working Copy path to content dir]”
10. Open “Saved File” in “iA Writer”

A fun trick I’ve used lately is to have Claude Code and Gemini critique each other through a Markdown document conversation. It’s surprisingly effective.

In Claude Code, I’ll have it do some work without checking it in just yet. Then I’ll start up gemini in the same working directory and say:

You’re a code reviewer. You will not edit code. Review the current changes. They were intended to [bug/feature description]. Evaluate the solution and write your review to reviews/Review-1.md and I will inform the other coder.

Finally pushed through to the end of Absolution Gap by Alastair Reynolds after putting it down twice over the past decade. As a conclusion to the original Revelation Space trilogy, it’s an … ending. Worth going through because the first 95% is standard RS-level fun (at least on Akarat). A solid 4/5 for the first 47/50 chapters.

If you want the ending to be satisfying—or the Epilogue to make sense—have Inhibitor Phase on the ready to start right after (so I’m told). Also, the Galactic North collection of short stories apparently has a lot of the missing bits/context that build out the world before this. Perhaps the proper reading order is: Revelation Space, Redemption Ark, Galactic North, Absolution Gap, Inhibitor Phase. With Chasm City appropriate anywhere after Revelation Space for the world-building of Yellowstone.

Quick tip for Time Machine backups: Mac OS X Server (“Server.app” these days) can setup a quota for Time Machine backups that is specific per-machine (rather than per-user). This trick works on any share, actually, since it’s a root-owned property list in the share directory. You’ll want Mavericks or later as a client for this to work, but to set it up cd into the root of the Time Machine share and create the plist with (for a 500GB example):