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Hi, I’m Jack Baty đź‘‹

Director of Unspecified Services.
Amateur photographer, blogger, and curious nerd.
This is my blog about everything, since 2000.
Close-up black and white film photo of an old brush in the snow

Monday, June 02, 2025

While visiting my grandson this morning, I finished a roll of expired Portra 400 in the Rolleiflex. When I got home, I didn’t feel like developing the roll. C-41 processing is a whole thing. It’s not hard, but I don’t love it. Still, I’m usually excited to at least see what’s on the roll. Today, I wasn’t. Not a great sign.

Partly cloudy 72.0 | Low 39.9, High 82.0 Â· 61 words
Black and white photo of old car

Sunday, June 01, 2025

I try to avoid writing about LLMs but sometimes fail.

Partly cloudy 64.9 | Low 38.5, High 71.6 Â· 155 words

Running on FreeBSD

As of Sunday, June 1, 2025 at 10:00 AM, all of my sites (including this one) are being served using Caddy on a FreeBSD server from Vultr. Yesterday everything was on an Ubuntu server at Hetzner. I would have prefered to stay at Hetzner, but they don’t seem to offer FreeBSD. Why have I done this? I don’t really know. Many years ago (early 2000s), I ran FreeBSD for all our client’s servers. We only moved to Linux because “that’s where everyone was headed” at the time. I’d always liked FreeBSD, so I wanted to try it again. ...

June 1, 2025 Â· 123 words
Train yard (2010). Leica M4.

Friday, May 30, 2025

I’ve been going through my Lightroom library and noticed a couple things. First, I used to just walk around with a camera and take pictures of things. Some of them are pretty good. Second, my Lightroom catalog has everything and I’m wondering if abandoning it was a good idea. My mates at lunch today are all in with AI. One works at a startup, the other for a large manufacturer. Both manage development and product teams. Both claim to be “10 times more productive since using AI.” One said, “I get things done now that I’d never even attempted before AI.” ...

Mist 48.0 | Low 49.3, High 71.4 Â· 116 words

A new Notes section

One of the reasons for my Ghost/ActivityPub experiment was to try to better integrate both short and long posts. Since that didn’t pan out, I started thinking about how I might manage it with Hugo. It turned out to be relatively easy. I added a /content/notes folder. Then I made a tweaked Hugo list template that doesn’t render a title and instead displays the entire post content rather than just a summary. And finally, I added a custom RSS feed just for notes. ...

May 29, 2025 Â· 142 words
Alice in color. (Rolleiflex 2.8D. Kodak Gold.)

Thursday, May 29, 2025

Now that I’ve added a /notes section to the blog, where does that leave these daily notes? I think I’ll keep them. It gives me a place to record some notes throughout the day, but without spewing everything out to social media seventeen times. Just the once :). Then again, isn’t that what the wiki is for? Greg Storey: We’ve turned each consumer interaction into a moral audit. An app download requires community consensus. Every platform choice needs ethical clearance. ...

Mist 54.0 | Low 49.1, High 66.7 Â· 117 words
Me, judging you for not using Flickr

Letting Flickr host my blog's images

Flickr is still the best place to host and share images, I don’t care what anyone else says. After migrating content from Hugo to Ghost (and back again) this past week, I’m reminded of the mess I’ve made over the years. I’m leaning toward letting Flickr host my blog’s images. You might be thinking, “But Jack, that’s a third-party dependency! What if Flickr goes away?” Fair question, and one that has prevented me from going with Flickr on my blogs. For more than 20 years. And you know what? If I’d have been using Flickr all this time, I’d have 20 years of working links instead of the broken mess I’ve made by changing platforms and hosts and whatnot all the time. ...

May 28, 2025 Â· 220 words

What happened to Ghost?

I don't know what the over/under was on my Fedivers-via-Ghost experiment, but yeah, it’s paused.

May 28, 2025 Â· 302 words
Older woman with toddler

Roll 217 (Leica MP)

It’s been great having the MP back from DAG. Sometimes I feel like it’s too much camera ($$$-wise), but then I use it and realize it’s the exactly right amount of camera. Papa showing Lincoln how it works Lincoln showing papa how it works

May 28, 2025 Â· 44 words

I need the internet out of my head

I’ve stopped being able to think for myself. I need you all to get out of my head for a minute.

May 26, 2025 Â· 259 words
My garage workbench

Roll 216 (Rolleiflex 2.8D)

May 25, 2025 Â· 0 words

Too much rope

I had a couple of drinks last night and opened my laptop and accidentally launched Obsidian and thought, “Oh, I remember. This is pretty cool! I should use this for everything.” so this morning I’m staring at Obsidian wondering what now? But why not just bail on the Obsidian app and drop back into my beloved Emacs? I’ve been asking myself that question all morning. Ostensibly, I simply felt like a change of venue this morning, and Obsidian seemed as good as any. But there’s something larger lurking under the surface. ...

May 24, 2025 Â· 247 words

Living in Ghost, day 2

So, how’s it going now that you’ve committed, Jack?

May 24, 2025 Â· 574 words
Self-portrait

Self-portraits with the Rolleiflex

Putting the new Rolleiflex through its paces by subjecting it to some self-portraits of me

May 23, 2025 Â· 85 words

Roll 214 (Rolleiflex 2.8D)

Took a walk with the new Rolleiflex this afternoon

May 22, 2025 Â· 104 words

What if I didn't change anything

This week has been a whirlwind of blogging changes. Or, more accurately, a whirlwind of me thinking about blogging changes. I’m fascinated by the new ActivityPub features being built into Ghost. This would let me be part of the “Fediverse” without needing to belong to any specific instance of anything. I could blog and post to social media from the same place. People could follow me there, and I could follow them. ...

May 22, 2025 Â· 249 words

Domains, Identity, and Inertia

You may have noticed that I’ve been toying with the idea of moving my main blog to Ghost at https://copingmechanism.com. This all started because the folks developing Ghost have been working on implementing ActivityPub features directly into Ghost, and I like the idea of blogging and reading/posting to social media in one place. Mastodon is cool, but “belonging” to an instance can carry more meaning than I care for. I’m not interested in self-hosting Mastodon or GoToSocial or anything like that, so having it come along for “free” with Ghost makes it a tempting option. ...

May 20, 2025 Â· 351 words

Jim Nielsen on working with multiple computers

I’m not the only one who thinks it’s too much work.

May 19, 2025 Â· 44 words
Black and white photo of boy standing by trees

Saturday, May 10, 2025

Today will involve more yard work. Mulch delivery Most of the day was spent outdoors, working on stuff. I rarely choose that option, but am always glad when I have.

Partly cloudy 48.0 | Low 41.7, High 77.5 Â· 30 words
Black and white photo of child playing piano

Friday, May 09, 2025

I wrote recently that I’m tempted to “move the entire enterprise onto paper” and I’m more than half serious. Playing with text on the computer has become a way to never actually do anything useful. It’s fun and easy and gets me nowhere. I fired up my Micro.blog subscription again yesterday. This was probably not the right move, but I’m experimenting with my social media “identity” and Micro.blog is one option. ...

Clear 36.0 | Low 34.2, High 68.2 Â· 71 words
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