A blog about everything, by Jack Baty

I’ve tried to make Mylio work a few times. Maybe this time it will.

In case you’re wondering, I’ve been posting over on the wiki and daily.baty.net this week. I was in the mood for a change of venue. Also, I kind of got spooked by a small surge in traffic here. For someone who posts in public every day, I still don’t like being watched. So, I write in places that fewer people know or care about. It’s weird, I know.

YouTube video about how hobbies aren’t fun anymore

I’m considering removing the /notes section and just rolling everything into the main feed. Let’s try “Everything is just a post” for a while. Sure, it’ll be messy and too noisy for some, but it might help prevent the “is this a note or a post?” thing every time I start typing. I’ll be happy to talk to machines once I no longer need to learn their language in order to do so. ...

Rambling about a little loop I find myself going through with Emacs vs Not Emacs

I don’t want to even think about anything, let alone overthink everything.

Every year I renew my subscription to Curio, even though I haven’t used it much recently. I renew mostly to support development of one of the nicest, most thoughtful apps on macOS, but another reason is that George continues to add truly useful and interesting features year after year. I don’t know how he does it. Check out the Curio 32 Release Notes for details. Standouts for me are multiple project windows and improvements to Journal sections. I don’t need another journaling tool, of course, but I often consider it. ...

I see Zed just received $32 million from Sequoai because “this investment lets us pursue our vision for bringing a new kind of collaboration directly into the IDE.” Well, never mind, then. I want nothing to do with “collaborative editing”, nor the inevitable decline of anything touched by VC money. Thank goodness there’s BBEdit. I’m running immich on the Mac Mini via Docker and it’s been working great. It’s fast and simple to use. Hosting has (knock on wood) been a breeze so far, too. I like it. ...

The Ricoh GR1 looked sad in the “broken camera” drawer, so I loaded it up with a roll of HP5 and gave it a shot. It worked just fine. This time. Sometimes the LCD stops working. Sometimes the viewfinder gets blocked by something loose inside the camera. Usually it’s both those things, but this time I got through the roll without issue. It’s a great camera when it works. ...

I enjoy using the Rolleiflex so much that I am able to ignore how difficult it can be to focus and how sometimes it flares badly.

Suddenly, two copies of the weather were showing on journal posts here. I have no idea how that happened. I’ve cobbled together a fix, but sheesh. This is another thing with Hugo…I don’t get how most of it actually works. There’s magic going on and I just piggyback off it with a lot of copy and paste and guesses. This is no way to run a website, is it? Cool, there’s now a Lightroom Classic plugin for Glass.photo ...

What goes here in daily notes and what goes into separate /notes? No idea. Maybe I should kill the idea of /notes and just make everything a regular post. Messy for readers, but cleaner for my brain? Dunno. I spent hours today making sense of my wiki content using Claude Code and it was a frustrating blast. Sorry, I brought up AI, again. I’m not supposed to do that.

All I wanted to do this morning was to add a class to an image in Hugo. At first I thought I needed to override my theme’s image-render hook, but then I learned that could use the built-in Markdown attributes. It required a new setting or two1, but worked great for adding a style to images in a single post. In lists, however, the styles are applied to the paragraph above the image, even with wrapStandAloneImageWithinParagraph set to false. I couldn’t figure it out, so I just put the paragraph after the images. Not a solution, but solved the problem in this case. This will happen again, I’m sure. Normally, I’d just use raw HTML for this, but the image pipeline in Hugo “bundles” wouldn’t work, and I need that. ...

The Stylus Epic, HP5, and light leaks at the beach

I wanted a more generic version of my emacs lisp function for creating new posts. Claude helped me write it.

It’s all just bunnies on a trampoline, now.

I would like to quit social media completely, but I’m addicted to validation. I tell myself that I actually suffer from FOMO, but the reality is that I’m looking for “likes” and comments and, well, validation. Maybe it isn’t validation so much as it is feeling like I’m being seen. I mean, how else can one know they exist in the world? So many people that I like are starting to share opinions that I don’t like. ...

I sat down this morning, looking to journal a bit about the past few days with extended family, but Emacs threw an error on launch. I fixed that. Then, I couldn’t find a note I’d written earlier. Sometimes I would just like to write stuff, take a few notes, and find things later when I need them, but without all the fuss. I don’t know how to get there.

Good morning. What shall we wring our hands about, today?

My blog turns 25 years old today