Hi, I’m Jack Baty đź‘‹

Director of Unspecified Services.
Welcome to my blog about Everything.

Roll-189 (Olympus Stylus Epic)

A roll of HP5 through the Olympus Stylus Epic.

December 7, 2024 Â· 9 words

Friday, December 06, 2024

I spent a good portion of yesterday offline. Well, not technically offline, but not on social media, which feels like the same thing. Trying to remember to step away from the computer once I notice that all I’m doing is clicking things basically at random. That means I’m done for now, but I rarely heed the clues.

Overcast 25.0 | Low 23.2, High 29.5 Â· 57 words

Thursday, December 05, 2024

Cleaning up my servers and backups

Partly cloudy 17.1 | Low 21.0, High 31.6 Â· 142 words

Wednesday, December 04, 2024

Social media, blogging, subscriptions.

Overcast 24.1 | Low 26.4, High 32.9 Â· 117 words

Tuesday, December 03, 2024

“I don’t know anything about what you asked, but here’s what I got from Perplexity…” is not helpful. Plus, you still don’t know anything about what I asked. We’ve gotten nowhere and you’ve wasted our time.

Overcast 26.1 | Low 28.2, High 34.2 Â· 36 words

From Hugo to Ghost and back again

It’s been nearly a month using Ghost, so it was time to switch back to Hugo.

December 2, 2024 Â· 294 words
Playing with the old X100

Monday, December 02, 2024

I find that I kind of enjoy starting the day with a quick jab/hugo-new-daily in Emacs and here we are. The issue with publishing right away is that for people who use RSS they may think I’m finished for the day, and that’s seldom the case. Sometimes I worry about this, but most of the time I remember that the people subscribed via RSS know me, and I think they understand. :) ...

Overcast 25.0 | Low 24.6, High 35.4 Â· 177 words
Alice chilling (2021)

Sunday, December 01, 2024

Oh dear. It’s OK, though. What happened was that I started to feel twitchy about having my posts and photos locked up in Ghost. “Locked up” is an exaggeration, of course, but you know what I mean. It’s better when everything is in a nice, tidy set of folders on my hard drive, in Org or Markdown format. So here we are, back in Hugo. I’ve noticed a drop-off in interaction on Mastodon the past week or two. Is it because people are leaving? Maybe they just don’t find me interesting anymore. ...

Partly cloudy 28.0 | Low 21.0, High 29.7 Â· 92 words
Photo: Bildhuus website

Testing Aspect for photo management

Some former Nik Software people are building a new tool for managing photo libraries. It’s called Aspect. I’m a sucker for any photo-related software, so I installed the beta and spent yesterday testing it. I took some notes after using it for a day. First impressions were good. I like the ideas behind Aspect. It relies on the underlying file system, so it’s reasonably transparent. It organizes things for me based on dates and events. I can control the structure. I can even change it later, and Aspect will move things around to match. ...

November 28, 2024 Â· 726 words

Forging org-attach features into Tinderbox

Every note-taking app handles file attachments differently. Most of them do it poorly. What I’ve found surprising is that I actually like what Org mode does with attachments. I might be the only one who does. The way I have Emacs configured, dragging a file into an open buffer window will prompt me with a few options, the one I use being “Attach file”. This then copies the file into a subfolder of whatever directory is configured as the org-attach-directory. This subfolder is named based on any ID property set in the Org file. This means I end up with a directory tree that looks like this: ...

November 25, 2024 Â· 607 words

Hardcover

All I want is Letterboxd for books. LibraryThing is the Craigslist of book trackers. Goodreads is icky. TheStoryGraph has a layout I don’t get along with. Bookwrym is decent, but doesn’t feel that great. Plus, I don’t care if my reading list is “federated”. I asked about this on Mastodon, and @johnke responded, suggesting Hardcover, which I’d never heard of. It was a good suggestion. I imported all of my books from TheStoryGraph, which I’d previously imported from Goodreads, and I was off and running. Here’s what it looks like: ...

November 25, 2024 Â· 237 words

Creating self-contained HTML exports from Tinderbox

How to export a note with images from Tinderbox and end up with a fully self-contained HTML archive.

November 21, 2024 Â· 370 words
Mirror self-portrait using the Nikon FE2

Returning the Nikon FE2

I bought a nice Nikon FE2, but I don’t love it enough to keep it.

November 18, 2024 Â· 265 words
It's not as if I haven't been reminded of this every time I look up.

I have neither reduced, nor simplified

At the beginning of 2024, I had grand plans to Reduce & Simplify. I was also determined to use what I have. I’ve done neither of those things. It’s November. I tried for a while. Or rather, I tried a bunch of different times, which had the effect of making everything less simple. Instead of limiting the number of tools I use, I switched from one to another (in an honest but misguided effort to make things simpler). The result has not been the nice, clean, simple set of tools I had hoped for. Instead of having few dependencies and requiring little maintenance, my stuff is spread everywhere and littered with neediness. ...

November 13, 2024 Â· 232 words

Fun with software today

I had fun today exploring my options for a browser-based workflow.

November 10, 2024 Â· 435 words

Adding an ID property to Org-mode files in directory

I wanted to add an :ID: property to several hundred files, but only if one didn’t already exist. I cheated and asked ChatGPT for help. It helped.

November 10, 2024 Â· 530 words

Adding an Edit link to Ghost posts

How I added a subtle link to edit the current page or post in Ghost.

November 8, 2024 Â· 186 words

Floating images in Ghost

There is no built-in method in Ghost for floating an image and having text flow around it. It’s a significant omission, and one which they say is “too hard” and have no plans to change. OK fine, I’ll do it myself. I found a reasonable solution in this post on the forums. Here’s how I’m using it. Add the following to the header in the code injection area: /* small images to float but not look stupid on mobile */ @media (min-width: 40rem) { .float-left-half figure, .float-left-two-thirds figure { float: left; margin: 8px 20px 6px 0; } .float-right-half figure, .float-right-two-thirds figure { float: right; margin: 8px 0 6px 20px; } .float-left-half figure, .float-right-half figure { max-width: 50%; } @media (min-width: 64em) { .float-left-two-thirds figure, .float-right-two-thirds figure { max-width: 67%; } } } Then, in a post or page, I add an HTML block before the image card I want to float (e.g to the right). ...

November 8, 2024 Â· 165 words
Alice enjoying herself at the park.

Roll-185 (Canon AE-1 Program HP5)

The Canon AE-1 Program was my first real camera. Unfortunately, I no longer own that original from 1982, so I bought another one in 2013. It’s not a great camera, but it works. I like to put a roll through it now and then.

November 8, 2024 Â· 44 words
All he wants to do is walk around. (Photo: Jessica S.)

Roll-184 (Leica MP/HP5)

I spent the morning of the election with my daughter and grandson. It was a nice way to spend part of an otherwise anxiety-filled day.

November 7, 2024 Â· 25 words