Hi, I’m Jack Baty 👋

AI can be useful to me, personally.

I’ve migrated daily.baty.net to Kirby CMS. It has been a static site managed by Tinderbox for a long time. I love Tinderbox, but now that baty.net is back on Hugo, I wanted a playground for learning more about Kirby, without moving the main blog back and forth between Hugo and Kirby. So, here we are. Your RSS feed is probably complaining right now. Sorry about that.

I ran across something neat while reading the Mu4e release notes A (experimental) “transient” menu has been added for mu4e. You can use it e.g., with something like: (require 'mu4e-transient) (global-set-key (kbd "C-c m") #'mu4e-transient-menu) It’s very handy!

I thought it would be neat to include the date and weather on the images I use for my journal entry covers here on the blog. It turned out to be neat, but not fun. I spent nearly 3 hours on all sorts of failed approaches. I figured it might be useful to write down where I ended up. I leveraged two of my existing bash scripts that deal with the weather, and wrote a new one that uses ImageMagick to put things together. ...

I spent hours this morning trying to find a good way of adding some metadata to the cover images on the blog. I wanted the temparature, at least. I tried shoehorning it into my Retrobatch script, but that was a dead end. Whenever I’m lost in image manipulation, I turn to ImageMagick. Boy did that take me down a rabbit hole. Long story short, I figured it out. But now I don’t like it. ¯_(ツ)_/¯. ...

I maintain a list of shell commands for updating Make/Model/Lens information in film scans. I’ve always run this via babel in a code block in an Org mode file. Something like this: #+begin_src sh cd ~/Pictures/_Scans exiftool '-m' '-Make=Leica' '-Model=Leica MP' -overwrite_original . exiftool '-m' '-LensModel=Summilux-M 1:1.4/50 ASPH' '-FocalLength=50mm' -overwrite_original . #+End_src Easy enough, I just copy and paste from a list of commands, depending on the lens and camera. However, it occurred to me that I’d prefer to simply have Emacs prompt me for the information, and then take care of the shell commands for me. Also, instead of hard-coding the path, I wanted to use marked files in a Dired buffer. ...

Yes, I changed blog platforms again. It’s been like a week, so it seemed like we’re due for a change. :)

LinkedIn is not the right place for me to find interesting work.

I was feeling envious of the Obsidian Web Clipper, which is quite fancy, so I thought I’d try leveraging it for use with Denote. My first run at this involves a couple of steps: Tweak the web clipper to save files using Denote’s format and front matter Save the file without adding it to an Obsidian vault Move the saved file into my Denote folder Here’s the Web Clipper template configuration I ended up with: ...

I upgraded PHP to v8.3 (from 8.2) today on the server running baty.net. I don’t pretend to be an Ubuntu sysadmin, so I’m writing it down, just in case. sudo apt update sudo apt install php8.3 php8.3-cli php8.3-{bz2,curl,mbstring,intl,gd,xml} sudo apt install php8.3-fpm sudo a2enconf php8.3-fpm # enable it sudo vi /etc/caddy/Caddyfile # replace socket path with 8.3 sudo systemctl reload caddy sudo sudo a2disconf php8.2-fpm # disable 8.2 sudo apt purge php8.2* # in fact, just delete 8.2 The site runs on Caddy, so I needed to change the path to the fpm socket. Here’s the Kirby section of the Caddyfile… ...

I’ve not been shooting much film recently. Yesterday, I was bored and in a mood, so I grabbed the Hasselblad and fired off a roll using Alice as my model. Only one frame was good enough to share. I really like it, so it was worth sacrificing the other 11. Alice

For a while, I tried maintaining a combined RSS feed that included posts from all my sundry blogs. I kept it at /everything.rss. It was managed as part of my WordPress blog, and since I’ve stopped using WordPress, I’ve been redirecting /everything.rss to the feed for baty.net, which is either /feed or /index.xml, depending on my blog platform of the day. I think that instead of that, I’ll piggyback off my @batybot account on Mastodon.social. I crosspost most stuff from my sites to @batybot via EchoFeed already, and Mastodon offers an rss feed for each account. Mine is https://mastodon.social/@batybot.rss. ...

A few quick thoughts after just over a month with the new Nikon Z f

Scrolling with the Logitech MX Master in Safari sucks out of the box. The following from this Reddit thread helped, even though it required installing 2 additional packages. Here’s the useful part of that thread: Install Logitech Options+ (sigh) and set: Logi Options+ (Plus): Customization App for Logitech Devices What a gross bit of software, but it’s necessary here. I’ve read that once this process is done, I can delete the app completely, but I haven’t tried that yet. ...

While tinkering with Obsidian recently, something I liked was having a daily notes template with a Dataview query showing the other files I’d added that same day. I added something similar for Denote. It’s a Yasnippet: # -*- mode: snippet -*- # name: Denote insert today's links # key: dnl # -- #+begin: denote-links :regexp "^`(format-time-string "%Y%m%d")`$0" #+end I just run that after first creating the daily note and I get a list of links to the other Denote files from that day. There’s probably a way to automate that, but this is good enough for who it’s for. ...

I’ve gone back to using Espanso for text expansion. As powerful as Keyboard Maestro is, every time I reach for it I feel like I’ve already lost a battle somewhere. Text expansion macros are about all I use KM for these days, so it’s not much of a disruption. I bookmark Espanso’s config folder in Emacs so I can jump right in any time. The expansion macros (“matches”) are contained in YAML files and can be as simple as: ...

you can “study” the data later and rearrange it. But the initial “just remember this” impulse should be as close to simply throwing the data at Emacs as possible. Remember Mode (Manual) I like that. I’ve been secretly conducting an experiment called “Use Obsidian Exclusively for 30 Days”. It started a week ago. I’m typing this in Emacs, in case you’re wondering how it’s going. Most days, I write the same things in both paper and digital journals. Then I print the digitital one. What’s wrong with me? 😄1 ...

Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative. Oscar Wilde Walking Alice this morning shortly after 3:30 AM, I thought the moon looked weird. There was only the slightest sliver lit and the rest was a deep red. Turns out there was a total lunar eclipse at 3:30 that no one told me about. That explained it. I spun up a WordPress blog this morning because I was bored and wanted to tinker with something. It’s so easy to get started, but the block and site editors still feel like a janky, confusing mess. Just make me a nice theme with a few options and access to CSS and I’m good. I deleted the site 20 minutes later. Guess I’ll need to find something else to play with today. ...

Nothing feels fun right now. Most of the things I typically enjoy have become frustrating exercises. I love paper notebooks, but can’t bring myself to write in them for more than a few minutes. I love film photography, but I don’t feel like dealing with the constraints and the costs. I’ve no patience for it. I love movies, but none of them look interesting. My typewriters collect dust. It’s probably just another allergic reaction to the terrible shit happening in the world right now, but I’m finding it hard to shake. ...

Finished a roll of HP5 today with some shots of my grandson, of course. Here’s 4 from the roll.