Hi, I’m Jack Baty 👋

Hello again. Daily notes are back here now, after a brief foray over in Kirby and Tinderbox.

Remember my “Reduce and Simplify” goal for 2024? That was a good idea, eh?

Folder Preview is a quick look extension for previewing the contents of folders on macOS. It’s $1.99 and worth every penny. (via Andrew Canion)

I recently discovered Org mode’s speed keys option and it’s pretty great. One caveat with speed keys is that they only work if the point is at the very beginning of a heading. To help with this, I (with Claude’s help) created a small lisp function and hook to move the insertion point to the beginning of the first heading whenever I open an Org mode file. I’m recording it here in case it’s useful to anyone else. ...

The luminous and shocking beauty of the everyday is something I try to remain alert to, if only as an antidote to the chronic cynicism and disenchantment that seems to surround everything, these days. It tells me that, despite how debased or corrupt we are told humanity is and how degraded the world has become, it just keeps on being beautiful. Nick Cave, “Faith, Hope, and Carnage”

I’m still mad at Hugo, so I’m spending time in Opposite Land. Blogging with Ghost, that is. My old theme (Kyoto) was zipped up in an archive folder, so I dusted it off and will post over there until I’m bored with it: Coping Mechanism.

So I have a couple of static blogs and two kind-of-static blogs. This is fine, I suppose, because I consider both blogging and software to be hobbies. But man, what a mess I’m making. I’m sensing the urge to recoil from all of it. I’m feeling like the whole Linux thing is a rabbit hole leading nowhere. Also, trying to shoehorn everything into Emacs is not yielding the benefits I read about in the brochure. ...

I bought a new car today. Before we get to that, I’d like to tell you about my old car. Ever since I’ve been able to drive, I’ve been fascinated by BMWs. Reading Car and Driver magazine from cover to cover was a monthly routine. Car and Driver loved BMWs. BMW was marketed as “The Ultimate Driving Machine” and I believed it. In 2019 I was shopping for used car. I walked into the local CarMax intending to buy a Jeep Grand Cherokee. As we were walking around the lot, I spotted a black 5-series BMW and thought it would be fun to take a look. I asked how much they wanted for it, and it turns out that BMWs depreciate wildly in the first few years, because the price for the 2016 BMW was comparable to the Jeep I had my eye on. In other words, it was within my budget. ...

Yeah, I’ve been distracted by a couple of new static blogging tools. I think both are interesting and worth a serious look by anyone looking for simple, local-first, Markdown-based blogging. I’ll try to write a bit more detail about them, but for now, check them out yourself. BSSG is a complete static site generator written in Bash. The only dependency is a markdown processor. Cmark is recommended and simple. I use Pandoc. It’s simple, fast enough, and has a refreshingly easy to use theming system with a ton of built-in themes. Then there’s LMNO.lol, which is even easier. Create a single Markdown file with all your posts, then just drag and drop the file into lmno.lol and boom! you have a blog. This one is a hosted service. Check them out! I did: linux.baty.net and baty.blog are BSSG blogs and lmno.lol/jbaty is at lmno.lol. ...

I posted the same thing on three different blogs today, just for fun. here on baty.net on lmno.lol on baty.blog (BSSG) All three of them were fun to do, which is why I keep so many blogs going at once.

If I were to only have one computer, I’d use notmuch for email in Emacs. I might also import non-email stuff as notmuch messages so I can search everything in one place. But, I now have 3 computers; 2 running macOS and one running (Fedora) Linux. Notmuch takes too much of my energy to keep synced between machines. So what about Mu4e? Mu4e is probably the “nicest” Emacs package for managing email, but it still requires a local synced copy of all my messages. This means configuring mbsync on all machines, etc. ...

Merlin knows: The bummer is we miss so many great little things because it doesn’t conform to the implastic version of ourselves that lives in some blindingly lit menagerie where everything is just so. Where we store the notional version of ourselves that’s never existed. And who do we imagine all that certainty is impressing? Eventually, you can make up someone plausible, I suppose. But, more basic bitches like me and you are stuck trying to puzzle it all out in a world full of people who’ve decided we’re misunderstanding the world wrong. ...

I started using Blot for my blog in 2017. Blot is a really nice way to publish a blog from a folder full of Markdown files. Blot’s author, David, is exceptionally helpful. This morning I made an offline backup of everything and deleted all the content from Blot’s folder. Then I canceled my subscription. Five minutes later, I restarted my subscription. I’m grandfathered in to the original $20/year pricing, so I decided it’s so inexpensive that it’s worth twenty bucks just to have it available. Also, it supports a great project by a nice developer. ...

Hugo is actively developed and still gets a lot of attention. This is fine. What’s not fine is that it seems like every third update introduces breaking changes. I updated to 0.146.5 and my site failed to build. This was a theme thing, and thankfully the theme maintainer was on it. Still annoying. I like using Hugo and I like my theme and I like having a static website. What I don’t like is not knowing if things are going to still work next week. ...

I hope everyone had a relaxing weekend. I did, at least up until I tried setting up a new(ish) iPhone for my mom. She got a hand-me-down iPhone 12 to replace her, surprisingly still working, iPhone 6. Between Find My/anti-theft issues and forgotten passwords, it was much more frustrating than I’d hoped. Still, she has a new phone and that’s good. I’m typing this on the ThinkPad, even though my Mac is /right there/. It’s probably the novelty, but at least it’s happening. This is a first for me. here’s the latest. ...

Sometimes I create this daily entry without having anything to write about in mind. It seems necessary, but is it? Probably not, yet I keep doing it, anyway.

I’m rarely in a hurry, so why do I spend so much time working on ways to do things faster? Working on the Linux laptop this week has made so many things slower. I don’t have a text expansion utility configured yet. I don’t have something like Raycast on the Mac. Still, I don’t feel like I’m doing less. In fact, my mind has been calmer. Writing on the ThinkPad feels more like using a typewriter. OK, that’s an exaggeration, but you see the point. There’s much less going on, here. I have the usual urge to “improve” things, but I may just wait a minute on that and see if I can settle in with something simpler. ...

I’ve been busy with my Linux experiment. I’m writing about it there, if you want to follow along. Today, I put a Framework laptop in my cart. This whole experiment only got rolling because I thought I might like Linux on my desktop, so why am I looking at laptops when I have a perfectly servicable (2015) ThinkPad X1 Carbon (that I’m typing on right now)? I can’t explain it. Most likely it’s because I have an Apple Studio Display and (I’m told) it’s quite challenging to use it with Linux. I’m not changing monitors for this, the Studio Display is too good (and expensive). ...

Nostalgia is some powerful stuff, ain’t it? My old Nakamichi cassette deck stopped working a few years ago, and I never bothered to replace it. I’ve been into vinyl and still have a good CD transport, so I didn’t see a need for cassettes. Occasionally, though, I’ll spot a cassette somewhere and think I might like to bring mine out and play them. I didn’t want some ancient “vintage” cassette deck, and I didn’t want to spend much. ...