A blog about everything, by Jack Baty

STATUS: Driving people around to appointments. Thinking about operating systems. TODO: I intend to do nothing on my list, today. Harumph! READING: Still working through “Dungeon Crawler Carl” Am I back? Not sure yet, but I think I’m a static-blog kind of fella. Pure Blog is awesome, and Kev’s done a great job with it. I like it a lot. And yet, there’s this nagging feeling about it running “out there” and needing PHP, etc. Pure Blog is super simple to host, but not as simple or portable as a static site. A CMS with a nice, simple UI is pretty great, but I’ve spent years honing my combination of Hugo and Emacs. Blogging is a “solved” problem, right? :) Anyway, I’m going to try this again for a minute. I’ve migrated the “regular” posts from there to here. I don’t think I’ll bother with the journal entries.t ...

The guy sure works hard at blogging. Using AI to help do that seems like a fine use case. He addresses the usual anti-AI backlash with a few choice quotes. Doctorow, Six Years of Pluralistic Purity culture is such an obvious trap, an artifact of the neoliberal ideology that insists that the solution to all our problems is to shop very carefully, thus reducing all politics to personal consumption choices ...

I seem to have completely lost the thread when it comes to managing my photos. I blame Linux, but it’s totally my fault, and has been happening in some form for years. When living on macOS, I moved between Lightroom, Lightroom Classic, Capture One, and Bridge/Photoshop for editing and managing photos. That was bad enough, but now I’ve thrown Linux into the mix and all hell has broken loose. None of my usual tooling is available for Linux, so I dove into Darktable, which seems to be the top contender for dealing with RAW files. (RawTheraPee doesn’t attract me for some reason). Darktable is the oddest thing. It’s super powerful and flexible, but the UI and workflow are inscrutable. I could learn to live with it if I had to. ...

There’s been talk lately about why RSS readers are designed like email clients and whether they should use unread count indicators This goes back to at least 2014. The latest discussion is around Phantom Obligations. I love seeing new approaches to things, so I bought Terry Godier’s new RSS app, Current, which is designed in a way meant to avoid the sense of obligation around unread articles. Current does some clever semi-algorithmic manipulation of feeds based on frequency, importance, type, etc. It’s quite clever and it looks nice. I have a few early thoughts about it. ...

I’ve been experimenting with Pure Blog and liked it so much that I made a new blog with it. I’ll be posting there for a spell, if you’re interested. ☛ baty.blog or subscribe to the RSS feed.

In order to use Linux full-time, I’ll need to find a feasible workflow for my photography hobby. Weeks working with Darktable hasn’t converted me. I still prefer both Lightroom (Classic) and Capture One for editing photos. I see people mentioning WinBoat as a possible option, so I installed it, along with Windows and Capture One. It works! Well, technically it works, but is it usable? See that app in the upper right? That’s Capture One, running in KDE via WinBoat ...

Well, I did it. After days of tinkering with Pure Blog, I’ve used it for this site at baty.blog. I didn’t have the guts to replace my main blog at baty.net yet. Too much work. Baty.blog has been powered by Blot for a while now, but I had to put this one somewhere, so Blot had to go. Most of the Blot content has been archived at blot.baty.net. It feels nice to start fresh. Now, what should I use it for?

D’ya ever grow weary of thinking about blogging and blogging software and blogging workflows and blogging culture? No? Me neither. Not normally, anyway, but it’s happening now. I’ve been having a blast testing Kev Quirk’s new blogging platform, Pure Blog. He’s done a great job of nailing the basics. It’s easy and fun to use. So fun, in fact, that I’ve been teetering on using it for this blog at baty.net. Sometimes I just want a CMS. ...

“TILES is an Emacs package for taking quick, title-less notes.” Well color me intrigued! Screenshot from the TILES Github page: I love trying different methods for taking notes. TILES is sort of a cross between Howm, Deft, and Denote. I think I’ll give it a go. (via Sacha Chua Emacs News)

Remember when I said I wouldn’t change blogging platforms? It’s still (mostly) true. So far.

Just to be clear, I don’t have serious plans to migrate my main Baty.net (Hugo) blog to Pure Blog. That doesn’t mean I won’t explore the “But what if I converted baty.net to Pure Blog?” scenario. Things will be wonky while I tinker. Probably don’t link to anything here, since I’m almost certain the links will break. Some things I’ve noticed: Date formats in YAML are inconsistent with different SSGs. For example, Hugo wants date: 2026-02-05 05:29:52 -0500 and Pure Blog uses date: 2026-02-07 16:25 which throws an error in Hugo. Adding seconds to the date fixes it. Quoted strings in YAML front matter are optional. Many of my Hugo posts do quote the title: attribute using either single or double quotes. Would need to be removed, because in Pure Blog, those quotes are included as part of the title, etc. Same goes for tags: [“Tag1”,“Tag2”] vs [Tag1,Tag2].

This has been mostly superceded by the built-in upgrade mechanism introduced in version 1.5.0. Since everything in Pure Blog is all in one folder, I needed some way to back things up and deploy updates to the code, independent of the content. I use just with a few basic recipies. Available recipes: default - Lists recipies (e.g. just –list) backup-to-local - Pulls content, code, and custom config to a dated folder on my local machine serve - Run local PHP version of the site upgrade - Runs git pull locally deploy - Send just the source php to the server Here’s my justfile so far: ...

A day with family

I’m giving the Feishin music player a go on Linux. It’s full-featured and very Roon-like, but streams from my Navidrome instance. It’s an Electron app, which some people can’t stomach, but it doesn’t bother me much. It’s a minor ick to suffer for a music player I might actually enjoy using. If it turns out to be too much, then there are dozens of other options. I learned about Feishin from the post, The state of Linux music players in 2026, which was linked to here which was linked to by Andreas’ always interesting Link Dump.

Posting to the photo blog.

Why am I not making photos?

I like being able to create new Org mode tasks from anywhere, via a simple keyboard shortcut. This probably doesn’t justify a whole post, but here’s how I did it. Create a script at ~/.local/bin/orgcapture.sh Here’s the script: #!/bin/bash emacsclient -c -F '((name . "capture") (width . 80) (height . 34))' -e '(progn (org-capture) (delete-other-windows))' In my Emacs config, I have a hook that tidies up the new frame: (defun my/org-capture-finalize-hook () "Close frame after org-capture if it was opened for capture." (when (and (> (length (frame-list)) 1) ; More than one frame (frame-parameter nil 'client)) ; Frame created by emacsclient (delete-frame))) (add-hook 'org-capture-after-finalize-hook 'my/org-capture-finalize-hook) In KDE’s Settings, I added a new command in the Shortcuts settings that point to that script. I assigned it to F3. ...

Linux is nice so I’m using that today.

I finally started to become comfortable in KDE, so I decided to try Gnome again.

One True Blog?