Hi, I’m Jack Baty š
Welcome to my blog about Everything.
I was going through my Braintoss messages and this one from April, 2023 jumped out at me: thereās a low-level specific pain in having to accept that putting up with you requires a certain generosity of spirit in your loved ones Ouch š¬ (Itās from ā Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility) Also this one: The thing I miss most about working is canceled meetings. And this: you know I think I want to read a book about minimalism as a concept but really I just want somebody to tell me how to organize my closet ...
I thought maybe Iād change themes here just to change things up a bit, without completely bailing on Hugo, as Iām wont to do. Changing Hugo themes is almost as much of a pain as changing blogging engines. I gave up after an hour.
jAlbum is pretty good at creating nice static web photo galleries. I made an elaborate gallery last year. It was nice, but now I canāt find my copy (or settings, originals, etc.) Iām not mad because I have to start over. Iām mad because all I do is organize stuff and despite that, I still canāt find things. Probably because of that, honestly. Anyway, starting over. I need some new sources. Everything I read is related to AI or social media or some gadget I simply must buy. Iām bored with all of it. ...
See, the thing is, I need to somehow keep the the āReduce & Simplifyā dream alive. Itās OK if my system takes a little work to maintain, but it has to be one system. I can manage one. What I canāt do, is have a bunch of completely different setups that each take āa little workā to maintain. Iāve become overwhelmed as a result of my never-ending urge to tinker (combined with boredom). So here we are, on baty.net, doing daily notes again. One Blog, One Life or some such thing, right? ...
See how the way Iām doing this blog ruins the archives?ā¦ Part of my Archives page. Useful, huh?
I like the idea of building my own Emacs config, so I set Doom aside and (re)built my own configuration (mostly) from scratch.
Thanks Frank! Itās good to know Iām not alone. I went to sleep last night having decided that, āTomorrow, Iām going to revamp my Emacs config and go back to my home-grown config.ā This morning, I thought, āLife would be easier if I just used Obsidian instead.ā So yeah, normal day so far šš». The market has chosen Markdown over Org mode files and I hate that.
Nothing specific today. Tiny thoughts about energy, Obsidian, Adobe Bridge, JFK Jr, and Starter Packs.
On daily.baty.net, each little whim of a post has its own page and is part of the RSS feed (and gets cross-posted to my mastodon.social bot account). Some days, thatās exactly what I want. When I write daily notes here at baty.net, using the single-entry-per-day format, I feel less pressure to make anything ācountā. And some days, thatās exactly what I want. Living in my head is frustrating. Century-Scale Storage: But at the century scale, even our most widely adopted file formats are completely untested. Digital history is not long enough to definitively settle on best practices. ...
I know yāall are sick of me waffling about where to post these little daily notes, but I canāt help it. Iām honestly split right down the middle about it. I want everything to be in one place, but I canāt seem to make it all fit in one place. At least not the way I want things to fit. I could leave baty.net for the longer posts and daily.baty.net for these daily notes. Or, I could try combining everything here. Or maybe combine everything there and make this a landing page. I think each of these options has equal merit, so I havenāt been able to decide, and probably never will. I guess Iāll continue posting wherever Iām in the mood to post on any given day. ...
Deleting things I donāt really need is liberating.
Digital Minimalism. Organizing. Markwhen.
A roll of HP5 through the Olympus Stylus Epic.
I spent a good portion of yesterday offline. Well, not technically offline, but not on social media, which feels like the same thing. Trying to remember to step away from the computer once I notice that all Iām doing is clicking things basically at random. That means Iām done for now, but I rarely heed the clues.
Cleaning up my servers and backups
Social media, blogging, subscriptions.
āI donāt know anything about what you asked, but hereās what I got from Perplexityā¦ā is not helpful. Plus, you still donāt know anything about what I asked. Weāve gotten nowhere and youāve wasted our time.
Itās been nearly a month using Ghost, so it was time to switch back to Hugo.
I find that I kind of enjoy starting the day with a quick jab/hugo-new-daily in Emacs and here we are. The issue with publishing right away is that for people who use RSS they may think Iām finished for the day, and thatās seldom the case. Sometimes I worry about this, but most of the time I remember that the people subscribed via RSS know me, and I think they understand. :) ...
Oh dear. Itās OK, though. What happened was that I started to feel twitchy about having my posts and photos locked up in Ghost. āLocked upā is an exaggeration, of course, but you know what I mean. Itās better when everything is in a nice, tidy set of folders on my hard drive, in Org or Markdown format. So here we are, back in Hugo. Iāve noticed a drop-off in interaction on Mastodon the past week or two. Is it because people are leaving? Maybe they just donāt find me interesting anymore. ...