Hi, I’m Jack Baty 👋

With apologies to Groucho Marx… I don’t want to work for anyone who would hire me via LinkedIn. The New Internet I read a post recently where someone bragged about using kubernetes to scale all the way up to 500,000 page views per month. But that’s 0.2 requests per second. I could serve that from my phone, on battery power, and it would spend most of its time asleep. I can always tell when someone is unserious about software by how much they complain about a “lack of updates”. They’re just bored and want something new to play with. ...

I sure wish Hugo would stop deprecating things. This time it’s site.Social. My theme uses that in a couple of files, and the theme’s author is busy and doesn’t always have time to fix things right away. They now want site.Params.Social so I’ve temporarily fixed the problem myself by editing two files. In twitter_cards.html: {{ with site.Social.twitter -}} # becomes {{ with .Site.Params.Social.twitter -}} And in opengraph.html: {{- with site.Social.facebook_admin }} # becomes {{- with .Site.Params.Social.facebook_admin }} At least now the error is gone and the site builds. I’ll need to keep an eye on the PaperMod repo for a real fix. ...

We’re back on Hugo

I’m not saying anything new, but I feel like we’ve lost the battle for having good and useful products and services. Is it just me, or does every product seem to only grudgingly accept the actual user as a necessary evil? We’re secondary to whatever is actually making the money. Call me a grumpy old man, but I hate this trend. “Enshittification” is an over-used meme word by now, but I can’t think of a better one. ...

The thing about BOGO (Buy One, Get One free) is that I end up buying something I don’t need, just so I can get a second thing I don’t need. I’m (half-heartedly) considering canceling every streaming option I have. Maybe then I’ll stop endlessly scrolling through trailers while never actually watching any movies. Haven’t felt like blogging much. Every time I think of something to “say”, I shrug and think, “Not worth it.” I hope this doesn’t trigger a platform change or anything. I was just getting comfy here :) ...

I wish I would find something better to do.

Certain software tools click with me. TiddlyWiki, Emacs, BBEdit, and OmniFocus are the ones that I am thinking of right now. I love them all. I write here nearly every day, but what’s it for? Speaking of clicking with software, I do not click with Obsidian. After seeing another new error when using Emacs this morning, I thought I’d move some stuff into Obsidian, hoping that maybe this time it would stick. It didn’t. The whole experiment lasted about 3 hours. Sometimes I just want things to be easier for a minute, which things like Obsidian, Bear, etc. are good for, but I don’t know if I’ll every leave Emacs. ...

I noticed that the “cover” images for my posts aren’t showing up when reading my feed in Elfeed. It’s because I use absolute URLs without a hostname. Other readers, like NetNewsWire, prepend the hostname automatically. I don’t think I’ll fix it yet, because using full URLs makes me twitchy, because I’m me and I move things. I’ve been re-discovering TiddlyWiki. My wiki (wiki.baty.net) contains nearly 4,000 “tiddlers”, beginning in 2018. There is so much stuff in there that I search it almost daily. I’ve drifted away from using it for new stuff, probably because I’m all-in Emacs for notes (howm, specifically) and I’ve been publishing my daily notes at either baty.net or daily.baty.net. Now, though, I’m remembering how great TiddlyWiki is for exactly the sort of things I want to record and share. So, I’ll be spending more time there for a bit. ...

It’s unanimous, people prefer the one post/day journal format here on baty.net. “All in one place is best” seems to be the consensus. I’ll try. BSAG » Exploring desktop linux: Part 3 I’m watching this closely. She seems to be getting on well so far. The only way I could use Linux would be to only use Linux. Switching between Linux and macOS is crazy-making. I did, though set up Neovim and LazyVim yesterday, just for kicks. I might be experiencing a mild case of Emacs Fatigue. ...

I removed the “Open to Work” label from my LinkedIn profile. Not because I’m not open to work, but because I truly can’t stand being anywhere near LinkedIn. The type of people who would hire me are just as likely to find me elsewhere. Do people prefer these once/day combined posts, or would they rather see them individually (as seen on daily.baty.net)? I feel like most of the individual notes aren’t useful enough to justify their own slot in someone’s RSS reader. On the other hand, it’s nice being able to link directly to any of them. ...

While scrolling through the Books I’ve Read, I realized that I don’t remember the first thing about most of them. There are a few standouts, of course, but for the most part reading feels like temporary entertainment. I hope some of it is absorbed and becomes a useful part of my brain, but it doesn’t seem like that’s happening. I’d almost forgotten that I re-subscribed to Medium a few months ago. After visiting the home page this morning and reading one vapid headline after another, I canceled my membership. I’m sure there’s valuable content there, but it’s hiding behind clickbait and I don’t feel like wading through it. ...

If they had fed the language machines a diet of cupcake recipes, history might have gone another way. “Moonbound”, Robin Sloan. My Applications folder is a toybox, but it should be a toolbox. I posted a little over on daily.baty.net today. I shouldn’t do that, because it undermines my dream of having One True Blog™. Some days, though, I find it impossible to resist. Links for October 16, 2024 Pluralistic: You should be using an RSS reader

Dan Milnor: Adobe Max Day One The tools remind me that story is king. I see a lot of criticism of Tesla’s new taxi design. Specifically, everyone seems confused that it’s a 2-seater. Ridiculous! Now, while I’m critical of everything Tesla, I haven’t seen anyone asking how many passengers the typical cab ride accommodates. Is it 2, maybe? It could be that Tesla did the research. Anyway If I need more room on a specific trip, I can alway call an UberX. ...

I often analyze tools before I actually need them. That’s silly, and a waste of energy. It leads to a pile of software that I don’t need, but also a bunch of opinions about them that aren’t really valid. It would be nice if I could hold a thought for more than 30 seconds. My brain is so scattered and unpredictable that it makes it difficult to get anything done. So far this morning I must’ve opened every app, note, and website that I know of. I don’t know what I’m hoping to find, but so far I’ve failed and wasted way too much time. ...

I’ve added a search page here. Some notes: Searching baty.net We celebrated my grandson’s 1st birthday yesterday. He’s so great. There were 75 people there to help celebrate. Everyone had fun. We ate, played games, and watched Lincoln open gifts (with mom’s help). The weather was beautiful, but then it started to thunder, so we took down the tent and put everything away. Shortly after that, it began to pour, so that was a wrap. Perfect timing, actually. ...

I’ve added a search page. It uses Pagefind. It turns out I’d already begun work on this with the original site. The clue was a commented-out line in my Makefile: index: npx -y pagefind --site ${SITE_DIR} All I needed to do was create a search page and add a snippet: --- layout: layouts/base.njk title: Search slug: /search --- <link href="/pagefind/pagefind-ui.css" rel="stylesheet"> <script src="/pagefind/pagefind-ui.js"></script> <div id="search"></div> <script> window.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', (event) => { new PagefindUI({ element: "#search", showSubResults: true, pageSize: 10, autofocus: true }); }); </script> To manually build the index, I render the site and then index it. using npx -y pagefind --site _site. I do this as part of the deploy recipe in the Makefile. ...

I just realized that there’s no way to search this blog. I wonder if I can use the same tooling as the Hugo blog. This doesn’t seem like fun. An admission: I’ve been using TheBrain again/still, Like I did late last year. Its value increases over time. Whenever I put something in it, I can always find it later, and quickly. It may be weird and expensive and proprietary and have limited export options, but it’s still the app I’ve found most effective for things that benefit from context and long-term linking. ...

My problem is that I love different software for different reasons. I love Tinderbox, Emacs, and TiddlyWiki equally for taking notes. Today I’ve been testing The Archive again, because it does certain things really well. Sometimes I use all of them in a single day. It’s not an effective or efficient way of working, but my love of wonderful software makes it difficult for me to avoid the behavior. “Megalopolis” and “Joker: Folie à Deux”; or, The Virtue of Burning Money ...

I thought that as soon as I sat my butt down at this computer after four days away that I would have all sorts of things lined up to talk about, but nothing much comes to mind. It’s 11:30 AM, so maybe later? The whole WordPress thing is boring as f*ck.

The best way I’ve found of preventing photos from looking too digital is to make them with film. Sometimes I defend people from pile-ons, even when they deserve the pile-on. I feel like too many people wake up and think, “Who can I decide is bad, today?” and that’s just no way to be. So, if you point out that someone did something horrible (and by “horrible”, you usually mean “something I don’t agree with”) and I say “But maybe they just…”, it’s not always because I agree with what they’ve supposedly done, but rather to point out that there might be more to it. We’re complicated. Situations are complicated. You don’t know everything about it, so maybe back off a smidge and consider that. ...