A blog about everything, by Jack Baty

I got up today and discovered my Mac Mini server backups (via Backblaze) haven’t been running in more than a week. Claimed that there were permissions issues, but there shouldn’t have been. Nothing has changed, but it stopped working. This is the kind of thing that makes me want to remove every dependency I can find. It makes me want to stop using things that have any reasonable chance of just not working one morning. It’s exhausting, because that list includes nearly everything. Now, all it took to fix it was reinstalling the Backblaze client, but an easy solution doesn’t make it more fun having to worry about the problem to begin with. ...

My blog turns 25 years old today

I am off social media for a bit. Whenever I feel myself doing nothing but scrolling or looking for likes or thinking of something “like-able” to say, I know it’s time for a break. I’m not cross-posting to Mastodon at all anymore, either. So now, whenever there’s a lull in the action of my life, I feel lost. That’s the feeling I want to get rid of. I spent time this morning working (with Claude Code) on displaying full content on the current daily post, but it ended up fighting what the theme wants, so I decided it wasn’t worth it. Just for grins, I’m now theme shopping. ...

Switching between the MacBook Air keyboard and the HHKB keyboard can be off-putting. I have loved using the HHKB for years, but I’ve lost patience for the function layer and missing arrow keys. My pinky hurts too often. I’ve been using an Apple Magic Keyboard and Logitech MX Master 3, and, while I love the mouse, the keyboard was boring, but fine, except the spacebar would intermittently fail to register. That’s annoying. ...

I asked Claude to summarize my recent blog posts. Claude knows me.

I take a lot of screenshots using the built-in screen capture tool on macOS. By default, these are saved as PNG files, which are unnecessarily ginormous for my purposes, so I always convert them to .jpg files. Today I learned that the default format can be changed: defaults write com.apple.screencapture type jpg killall SystemUIServer Better.

I’m realizing that my enthusiasm for Hugo reflects my current mood about Emacs. When I’m all-in with Emacs, Hugo is my favorite way to manage a blog. When I’m “off” Emacs, I find other ways to blog because my whole Hugo workflow is built using Emacs. The problem right now is that I’m oscillating rapidly between Emacs and not-Emacs, so I post in multiple places. It’s fun having options, but I dislike making decisions. 😵‍💫 ...

I continue to overthink everything related to my blog(s). I want specific things for specific posts, depending on my mood that day. It’s exhausting. The dream of course is to have One Blog. I have 4 active sites right now. That’s more than one, for those who are counting. The new baty.photo blog that I’ve set up just for posts about photography feels like the right move. That one stays. I like using Ghost for that. ...

I’m not even supposed to be here today.

I’ve been doing this for 25 years. I’m just not feelling it lately, ya know?

I’m a little tired of all of this. Blogging, I mean. I’ve been writing about the same things on repeat for 25 years. Aren’t we all sick of hearing about blogging tools and software and tech and bla bla bla? I am. Maybe I’ll open a barber shop, like my great grandfather did.

I don’t feel much like writing full-on blog posts, so I keep spouting off little bits and bobs over on Mastodon instead. It’s not ideal. I mean, I just added the /notes feature here, so why not use that? I honestly don’t know. There’s something about it I don’t like. I made the font here a bit smaller and a bit less black. It looked chunky and amateurish to me, somehow. Anyway, it’s different now, which might be all I wanted. ...

I’ve rejiggered the Ghost blog I was using for this site into a dedicated photography blog. There’s a lot of cruft scattered about, and I’m using the default theme for now, but it’s a start. The idea is that it will help me focus on photography, which is something I want to do, but haven’t been doing. Sometimes I need a nudge, so baty.photo is a nudge. See Why do I need a separate site for photography? for a bit more detail. ...

Ongoing issues with choosing to journal using fountain pens.

Why bother blogging when even I don’t feel like reading my posts? I guess I don’t understand why blurring my “content” behind semi-transparent UI controls is any better than hiding it behind easily-distinguished UI controls. The content itself is unusable either way, so why not make the controls easier to see/use? What do we think about about the whole /notes implementation here? I don’t think I like it. I don’t feel like creating a whole thing every time I want to share whatever useless thought pops into my head. OTOH, I don’t much like putting everything into these daily posts, either. Not on this blog, in this format, anyway. On the other hand, why not just do it here? Problem is already solved, right? ...

Can you imagine much easier things would be if I… Used (only one) digital camera Put my photos in one big Lightroom Classic catalog Or maybe just used my iPhone with Apple Photos I saw a post where someone complained that the timeline for some community was “…a sanitized version of reality.” My question is, must every “community” always, no matter what, include content from every possible awful corner of the universe? If I wanted “reality”, I’d go read about it, or visit just about every other timeline on the internet. I know shit is terrible, that’s why I’m hanging out in this nice space for a spell…as a respite. Is it not OK to want to be mildly entertained and amused for a little while? I mean, we don’t bitch about, say, The Disney Channel existing, do we? I don’t believe people have the right to demand that every space conform to every situation. ...

Too hot for chores, today, so I’m in my air-conditioned office, futzing with AI tools, server options, and my Emacs capture templates. For some reason, I can’t get a markdown-mode-hook to fire and call olivetti-mode when I open a Markdown file in an Emacs buffer. I’m using the exact method that works with org-mode files. It’s a small annoyance, but this is why I sometimes want to quit.

Posted: Roll 037 Ozzy died today. For a long time, I expected this to happen any minute. He didn’t exactly live a healthy lifestyle. After a certain point, though, it seemed like he might live forever. His “Blizzard of Ozz” tour in 1981 was one of the of the first concerts I saw. I remember leaning my head into a speaker cone, because LOUDER!

The other day, I converted my entire TiddlyWiki into an Obsidian vault, just to see if I could. Since I still spend most of my time in Emacs, I thought it would be nice to search the vault from there. The post, From Obsidian to Emacs, by Mike Hostetler, mentioned using the Xeft package, so I thought I’d try it. Here’s my config: (use-package xeft :ensure t :defer t :config (setq xeft-recursive t) (setq xeft-database "~/.deft.db") (setq xeft-directory "/Users/jbaty/Documents/Notes/Vault/") (setq xeft-ignore-extension '("png" "jpg" "jpeg")) (setq xeft-extensions '("md")) (setq xeft-title-function #'file-name-nondirectory)) Xeft relies on Xapian for searches, so a module needs to be downloaded or built locally. I didn’t have any luck with the downloaded version, so I deleted the package, started over, and had it compile locally. The trick there was entering the prefix “/opt/homebrew” during installation, since I’d already installed Xapian using Homebrew. ...

With any luck, I’ll spend time today far away from the computer and very close to the lake.