Welcome to my blog about everything.
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.
I used to look forward to "advances" in the technology I use. Those days are gone. Sometimes I think this is because I'm older now. I don't think that's it, though. The changes that happen now are not meant to make my life better. They're meant to make someone else's life better. Maybe they always were, but I doubt it.
When I started this blog in 2000, I mostly posted links to articles I enjoyed. In recent years I've stopped linking to things and I don't know why. Maybe I should include a section in these daily posts with links to things I found interesting that day. Noodlin' on it.
How about we collectively stop apologizing for how often we write on our blogs or what we write about on our blogs. Newsletters, too, while we're at it.
I like the new message/alert summaries on my Apple devices. I just used ChatGPT to help me write some emacs lisp for my blogging workflow. DEVONthink can now use AI to intelligently rename files. I use that all the time. Complaints about social and environmental impact of AI use are justified, but it's probably time to stop suggesting that LLMs aren't useful.
Never apologize or make excuses for not commenting on a topic or event or anything. You don't owe "the world" your opinion.
Let's see if this works. I've added some basic opengraph tags.
I've gone from not caring as much about the things I used to care about, to not caring about much of anything at all. Moving 100 or so blog posts from Hugo to Eleventy is a brain-dead way to pass time while feeling like I'm Doing Something™.
You may have noticed that I've changed blogging tools again. After being mad at Hugo for a few days, I dusted off the old version I'd built using Eleventy.
As fast, flexible, and powerful Hugo is, I cannot seem to get along with its templating system. Even after years of use, it seems obtuse to me.
So let's give Eleventy a shot. I don't love JavaScript either, but at least it makes sense.
There's lots to do here, still. I moved over all of the blog posts, but so far have only moved a handful of the "daily" posts. It's tedious, and after many hours, I'm taking a break. It would have been so much faster if I'd not used Hugo's "bundles" features or custom short codes. Oh well. I'll get to the rest eventually.
I don't have the OpenGraph stuff in place yet. And the markup is old and janky, but it works for now.
Eleventy is still a bit of a mystery to me, so I hope nothing goes drastically wrong with it, as I'm unlikely to be able to fix things. For now, though, it's a relief from the even more mysterious Hugo.
Why not Kirby again? Good question. I started down that road, but realized that Kirby's quirks are confusing to me as well. More importantly, I wanted a fully statically-rendered blog. No PHP or server-side anything this time.
Yesterday I did that thing where I wanted to use something other than Emacs and Org Mode, so I re-installed Obsidian and launched both Tinderbox and SilverBullet. Then, I wrote some notes in all of them. It was so darn nice having somewhere new to work. It lasted a few hours, after which I copied all of those notes into the appropriate .org documents and properly scolded myself for straying again. Everything else is inferior to Emacs, but sometimes I just need a break.
"Oscillation creates Isolation" is a new phrase I just made up.
I dusted off my old Kirby blog after reading Kev's post this morning. I'm not falling for it, Kev! Kirby is really nice, and tempting, but I've forgotten how it works and I don't love the idea of learning it over again right now.
A phrase that bugs me is, "You have to wonder..." when what they really mean is "I wonder..." or more likely, "I think this but am too chickenshit to come right out and say it." It's a bit like "I'm just asking questions!"
Latest roll (HP5) from the Leica MP. Nothing much here to speak of, although I did use a manual flash on some of the indoor shots. I kind of like flash photos. They look like photos, you know?
At some point during my latest round of build-emacs-config-from-scratch, I must have missed part of my Dired settings.
I want Dired to only show the file name rather than all the file attributes, and I want folders displayed first. Instead, now I see all file details and folders are sorted alphabetically right along with files. Like this:
The first thing was to sort so that folders show first. I figured it would be as simple as adding the --group-directories-first switch to dired-listing-switches but nope. The default ls binary in macOS doesn't handle that option. To get it, I needed to install the "coreutils" package via Homebrew (brew install coreutils).
coreutils prefixes binaries that have the same name as a macOS counterpart with "g", so their version of ls is actually gls. Rather than depend on shell aliases that sometimes don't seem to get picked up correctly in Emacs, I found a handy snippet of lisp and modified it like so:
Baty.net
(when (eq system-type 'darwin)
(let ((gls (executable-find "gls")))
(when gls
(setq dired-use-ls-dired t
insert-directory-program gls
dired-listing-switches "-aBhl --group-directories-first"))))I added that to the package configuration for Dired and it worked like a charm.
Next was to get rid of all the extra information shown by default in directory listings. 99% of the time I don't care about permissions, ownership, or file sizes. I just want the file names. Dired has a built-in function for this: dired-hide-details-mode. To make sure this gets run for every new Dired buffer, I added a hook:
:hook
(dired-mode . dired-hide-details-mode)Now it looks the way I like it:
I can always toggle the file details back on by pressing (.
FWIW, here's my entire dired configuration:
;; Dired
(use-package dired
:ensure nil ;; built-in
:defer t
:hook
(dired-mode . dired-hide-details-mode)
:config
(setq dired-dwim-target t) ;; do what I mean
(setq dired-recursive-copies 'always) ;; don't ask when copying directories
(setq dired-create-destination-dirs 'ask)
(setq dired-clean-confirm-killing-deleted-buffers nil)
(setq dired-make-directory-clickable t)
(setq dired-mouse-drag-files t)
(setq dired-kill-when-opening-new-dired-buffer t) ;; Tidy up open buffers by default
(when (eq system-type 'darwin)
(let ((gls (executable-find "gls")))
(when gls
(setq dired-use-ls-dired t
insert-directory-program gls
dired-listing-switches "-aBhl --group-directories-first")))))I made some quality-of-life improvements to the bathroom darkroom this morning. I finally have a real "wet side". Previously, I was using the sink and counter, but there was barely room for 3 (8x10) trays. Now, I've got room for 6 or more. Or larger trays if I want to print bigger.
It's just two cut-to-size closet shelving sections and some PVC for support. It's a little rickety, but I can set it up or tear it down and store everything in about 30 seconds.
I'm still taking sewing lessons. The first week we made pillowcases and it was actually fun, other than having to rip a whole seam and start over :).
Monday's project was this drawstring bag.
This was my first time cutting fabric, and I found it harder than expected. There's nothing to work against for the first cut, if you know what I mean. After taking forever figuring out the cuts, I was having trouble with my sewing machine. I still haven't figured out what the problem was, but it seems OK now. The class is 3 hours long and I was there for 3.5 hours and still didn't get to the drawstring. I finished the drawstring this morning. It was tricky because I don't have an edgestitch presser foot for my machine, so I was a bit all over the place. I missed a small section, but I'm choosing to ignore it.
Sewing is hard, but it's really cool to walk in with a random pile of fabric and walk out with an actual thing I made with it. Can't wait until next week.
339 more posts can be found in the archive.