Tinderbox has a great feature that indicates the size of a note using a tiny icon next to each note. This makes it easy to see which notes are long or short at a glance. I’ve tried to recreate that here, since at first glance every post is the same. I would have gone with the built-in method by showing the word count, but that takes work to read; 250 and 550 look the same at a glance . ...

As a huge fan of Denote, I still sometimes dabble with other ways of taking notes in Emacs. For example, I like the way Howm does notes. I have a growing set of Howm notes, but they feel isolated from my other notes. For a while, I tried keeping Denote and Howm together but it felt like swimming upstream. I bailed on that and broke them apart again. More recently, I learned about an Org-roam-alike called Org-node. I like org-node quite a lot. There are no enforced file name rules, as in Denote. Any Org-mode heading or file can be a node. All one needs to do is give it an ID property. It’s very fast at finding notes. I pointed org-node at my entire ~/org directory. Finding a node is still basically instant. ...

I was bored this afternoon so I just walked around the house and used up a roll of HP5 in the Rolleiflex.

Don’t ask me why I occasionally try to move away from Emacs. I can’t explain it. Under duress, I’d say it’s because Emacs swallows the world, and I like changing things up. Doing everything in Emacs makes that difficult. Org-mode is unmatched, but it’s also essentially useless outside of Emacs1. I get a little twitchy about that. Also, sometimes a package update throws a wrench into my Emacs config or I become tired of C-x C-whatever all the time and so I start shopping for a replacement. ...

Well, I finally did it. I deleted my 50,000-photo iCloud photo library and moved everything to self-hosted Immich. Here are some of my notes from the process1. It was actually much easier than expected. Shout out to a couple of tools, first. osxphotos Python app to work with pictures and associated metadata from Apple Photos on macOS. Also includes a package to provide programmatic access to the Photos library, pictures, and metadata. ...

On macOS, I prefer Capture One as my RAW editor, but C1’s cataloging features are weak. Plus, I’d prefer not having my catalog and editor so tightly tied together. I’d love to get out of the Adobe ecosystem, so I don’t want to get too deep into using Lightroom Classic for my catalog. Photo Mechanic is great, but has gotten too expensive. I thought I’d revisit NeoFinder. I’m glad I did. NeoFinder is really good at keeping track of all kinds of media on all kinds of storage. I’ve put 2025’s photos and some other projects into it as a test, and it’s impressive. Also, the app just turned 30 years old, so, Lindy Effect. ...

In November, I experimented with using only CLI tools. How did it go? I’d give it a 7 out of 10. The other two CLI-based productivity tools I used for the month were Taskwarrior and nb. Taskwarrior is very good at managing tasks, but I don’t know if it’ll stick as my main task app. There’s too much typing involved with keeping things updated (adding tags, projects, etc.). The TUI helps, but I’m not sure it’s enough. I’m currently tinkering with Super Productivity as more GUI-ified option, but I’ll probably just end up back in Emacs org-mode like I always do. ...

“Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.” Kurt Vonnegut

In Baty.net • What do I even mean by “Simple?”, I was looking for a definition of “simple”. I aspire to simplicity, but never seem to find it. For example, I switched my daily.baty.net blog between Kirby and Tinderbox three times in three days. One day, I want posting to be simple, so I use Kirby, because it’s an easy-to-use CMS. The next day, I want hosting to be simple, so I go back to using Tinderbox as an SSG because static sites are simple to host. ...

I’ve become a bit overwhelmed by text after using mostly CLI/TUI tools for the past few weeks. I need a break from looking at tedious walls of text all day, so instead of creating posts here using Markdown, I’m posting to my WordPress blog over at baty.blog for a while1. I needed a change of venue. Hope to see you there! 👉 baty.blog I don’t know what I mean by “a while”, so don’t go too far. ↩︎ ...

Some thoughts and observations around my feelings about using Linux vs macOS. For the past week or so, I’ve been switching between Linux and macOS several times a day. I’ve been working towared full-time Linux for nearly a month, and planned to relegate the Mac to photo processing only. A sort of photo appliance. While doing that, though, I opened some of my favorite Mac-only apps, and immediately doubted the entire Linux experiment. Things would be much simpler if I used macOS for everything. Right? ...

It’s been the kind of day where using (or trying to use) Emacs frustrates me. I’ve spent the past few weeks adapting my custom Emacs configuration to work on Linux. I was so confident that I would be moving to Linux that I ignored anything that might not work cross-platform. I should know better. Today I was using my Mac and fired up Emacs and of course nothing worked. I spent nearly 2 hours futzing with it and I still don’t know what’s gone wrong. Reviewing Git commits hasn’t narrowed it down, either. It’s not the fact that I broke Emacs, it’s more that I’m so capable of breaking Emacs at any time. I do it more than I care to. I’m not in the mood, ya know? ...

For nearly two years I’ve been telling myself to Reduce & Simplify. For short periods, I’ve almost done that, but entropy takes over and I once again overcomplicate everything. Could the problem be that I’m not sure what I mean by “Simple”? One day, it feels simple to use only Emacs and a browser on Linux installed on boring hardware. The next day, simple means using the default Notes, Mail, and Reminders app on macOS. Then on another day, a notebook and pen are my definition of “simple”. What happens is that I end up alternating between all of these so-called simple workflows, and I’m back to chaos. ...

When I started running the macOS 26 (Tahoe) betas, I didn’t have strong feelings about Liquid Glass one way or the other. I’ve been running Linux for a while now as daily driver, but since I was thinking that I may have to use macOS on the desktop, I’ve spent a lot of time using both Linux and macOS. Now I kind of hate Tahoe and Liquid Glass. While getting my Mac Mini (M2 Pro) updated and configured, I was reminded how many times macOS pops up a dialog telling me something needs permissions for something. It feels like I’m constantly clicking “Allow”. It happens so often that I no longer bother even reading the messages. I just click “Allow” and move on. Kind of defeats the purpose of the warnings, no? ...

I’m trying to get everything running smoothly on the Linux machines. I really am. And I’m close, but I’m not there yet, and I’m not sure if I’ll ever get there. Many of the apps I use on macOS are also available on Linux. This is awesome. It’s the ones I love, but need to leave behind that are causing all the trouble. Most of the problems are around photo processing. I’ve spent many (many!) hours learning and testing Darktable for RAW processing. It’s a powerful tool with a lot of clever ideas, some of which I actually prefer to its Mac counterparts. However, Darktable is not at all pleasant to use. Once the cleverness and new-shiny factors are past, I’m forced to live in a clumsy, awkward, unpleasant, unattractive environment. I miss Capture One dearly. Capture One gets me results I like quickly and easily. It’s better. ...

I started my CLI app only experiment at the end of October, meaning that it’s been just over a week of nothing but CLI and TUI apps for nearly everything. How’s it going? Well, it’s been fun. I suspected it would be, because I’ve been living in a terminal on and off for decades now. It’s not as if terminal apps are new to me. Diving back into them has been a blast. ...

Speaking of jrnl, did I mention that I’m testing jrnl as my daily logging tool? Since I’m sticking to CLI-based tools for the month, I needed a replacement for my Emacs “Daybook”. My Daybook relies on all sorts of capture templates and snippets in Emacs. Since that’s out, I figured I might try the One Big Text File (OBTF) approach. By default, jrnl writes entries to one big text file, so it seemed suitable for this purpose. ...

I’m slowly learning how to customize Hyprland. I’ve been playing with jrnl as a way to do a daily log. It’s been successful enough that I wanted to streamline it a bit. What I wanted was to bind a key to opening my jrnl prompt in a floating terminal in whichever workspace I happen to be in. Here’s how I did it: # Keybinding for floating centered terminal bind = SUPER SHIFT, J, exec, alacritty --class floating-term -e jrnl --config-override editor "" windowrulev2 = float, class:(floating-term) windowrulev2 = center, class:(floating-term) windowrulev2 = size 800 60%, class:(floating-term) This gets me a conveniently sized and placed terminal window with jrnl waiting for me to type whatever I want. A simple CTRL-d and it creates the jrnl entry and the window goes away. ...

Since I’m using only CLI and TUI apps in November, I needed to find a replacement for Mu4e in Emacs. As a long-time Mutt user, I assumed that’s what I’d use. A couple people recommended that I try aerc instead. I’ve run into aerc before, but assumed it was some super geeky thing meant for emailing software patches around. While it does do that, it handles “regular” email pretty well, too. ...

I think I’ll try something. I think I’ll try using only CLI and TUI apps during the month of November. So this means: NeoVim / LazyVim instead of Emacs and Org-mode for notes Mutt instead of Mu4e for email Taskwarrior instead of Org-mode for tasks LazyGit instead of Magit for Git. Newsboat instead of Elfeed I might even give nb a fair shake, just for kicks. Why would I bother with this? No reason other than that it’s fun. Omarchy comes with a pretty complete LazyVim setup and I’ve been surprised by how nice it is. ...