A blog about everything, by Jack Baty

How about this for a resolution… Don’t change blogging platforms more than once a quarter. Ha! I sometimes wish playing with tools wasn’t so much fun. It would be better, I think, to write more, tinker less. Except that I mostly write about tinkering, so that’s sort of self-defeating, no? Let’s recap. 2025 was comprised of Kirby, Ghost, WordPress, Hugo, Zola, Eleventy, Blot, Tinderbox, Emacs, and TiddlyWiki. That seems like a lot, even for me. ...

Sooo, I thought I wanted a new theme but that didn’t work out, so I changed my mind and decided to go back to my old PaperMod theme. Trouble is, that theme was made for Hugo1, so I also had to move things back to Hugo. Had to! 😀 I like PaperMod well enough. It’s not the full-post-on-home-page I was looking for, but its excerpt handling is good enough for who it’s for. ...

Update: I went with something else :) Then again, maybe I want the previous theme instead ...

My daughter has been sending me adorable AI-generated images of her and my grandson in various Christmas get-ups. They’re so fun and cute and she’s having a blast. It makes me wonder, though, what happens 20 years from now when she’s scrolling back through her photos and sees these. Will she remember that they’re faked? How will she know what’s real and what’s not? How will my grandson? I worry that it won’t matter to her or anyone else that their pasts are imaginary. Well, it matters to me and it makes me sad.

My first serious foray into Linux was driven by how deeply I fell immediately in love with Omarchy. Omarchy made me realize that I could totally live in Linux. If I wanted to. The big draw of Omarchy for me was Hyprland and window tiling. I’ve tried a few other tiling window managers (e.g. i3) but they were either too hard to configure or felt janky. Omarchy’s version worked great, with great keybinding support. It felt good to no longer spend half my time in the OS moving and resizing windows. Omarchy’s rendition of Hyprland made it easy and fun. ...

I’m over 60 now, so I often react differently to certain things than younger people do. Badly, most of the time. Take, for example, the rise of “Video Podcasts”. To me, that’s always seemed a contradiction in terms. “Podcasts are audio!,” I’d grumble. I don’t know why I cared, because I never listen to podcasts, anyway. I do, however, watch a lot of YouTube. Like, a lot. Too much, but I’ll deal with that later. Recently, I was watching a lengthy video about some topic or another, when I realized that the entire thing was just two people talking into microphones while a camera was running. Then it happened. One of the guys said something like, “You can follow this podcast here or on…”. Dammit! They called it a podcast. Was I really watching a podcast? Damn kids! ...

Tinderbox has a great feature that indicates the size of a note using a tiny icon next to each note. This makes it easy to see which notes are long or short at a glance. I’ve tried to recreate that here, since at first glance every post is the same. I would have gone with the built-in method by showing the word count, but that takes work to read; 250 and 550 look the same at a glance . ...

As a huge fan of Denote, I still sometimes dabble with other ways of taking notes in Emacs. For example, I like the way Howm does notes. I have a growing set of Howm notes, but they feel isolated from my other notes. For a while, I tried keeping Denote and Howm together but it felt like swimming upstream. I bailed on that and broke them apart again. More recently, I learned about an Org-roam-alike called Org-node. I like org-node quite a lot. There are no enforced file name rules, as in Denote. Any Org-mode heading or file can be a node. All one needs to do is give it an ID property. It’s very fast at finding notes. I pointed org-node at my entire ~/org directory. Finding a node is still basically instant. ...

I was bored this afternoon so I just walked around the house and used up a roll of HP5 in the Rolleiflex.

Don’t ask me why I occasionally try to move away from Emacs. I can’t explain it. Under duress, I’d say it’s because Emacs swallows the world, and I like changing things up. Doing everything in Emacs makes that difficult. Org-mode is unmatched, but it’s also essentially useless outside of Emacs1. I get a little twitchy about that. Also, sometimes a package update throws a wrench into my Emacs config or I become tired of C-x C-whatever all the time and so I start shopping for a replacement. ...

Well, I finally did it. I deleted my 50,000-photo iCloud photo library and moved everything to self-hosted Immich. Here are some of my notes from the process1. It was actually much easier than expected. Shout out to a couple of tools, first. osxphotos Python app to work with pictures and associated metadata from Apple Photos on macOS. Also includes a package to provide programmatic access to the Photos library, pictures, and metadata. ...

On macOS, I prefer Capture One as my RAW editor, but C1’s cataloging features are weak. Plus, I’d prefer not having my catalog and editor so tightly tied together. I’d love to get out of the Adobe ecosystem, so I don’t want to get too deep into using Lightroom Classic for my catalog. Photo Mechanic is great, but has gotten too expensive. I thought I’d revisit NeoFinder. I’m glad I did. NeoFinder is really good at keeping track of all kinds of media on all kinds of storage. I’ve put 2025’s photos and some other projects into it as a test, and it’s impressive. Also, the app just turned 30 years old, so, Lindy Effect. ...

In November, I experimented with using only CLI tools. How did it go? I’d give it a 7 out of 10. The other two CLI-based productivity tools I used for the month were Taskwarrior and nb. Taskwarrior is very good at managing tasks, but I don’t know if it’ll stick as my main task app. There’s too much typing involved with keeping things updated (adding tags, projects, etc.). The TUI helps, but I’m not sure it’s enough. I’m currently tinkering with Super Productivity as more GUI-ified option, but I’ll probably just end up back in Emacs org-mode like I always do. ...

“Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.” Kurt Vonnegut

In Baty.net • What do I even mean by “Simple?”, I was looking for a definition of “simple”. I aspire to simplicity, but never seem to find it. For example, I switched my daily.baty.net blog between Kirby and Tinderbox three times in three days. One day, I want posting to be simple, so I use Kirby, because it’s an easy-to-use CMS. The next day, I want hosting to be simple, so I go back to using Tinderbox as an SSG because static sites are simple to host. ...

I’ve become a bit overwhelmed by text after using mostly CLI/TUI tools for the past few weeks. I need a break from looking at tedious walls of text all day, so instead of creating posts here using Markdown, I’m posting to my WordPress blog over at baty.blog for a while1. I needed a change of venue. Hope to see you there! 👉 baty.blog I don’t know what I mean by “a while”, so don’t go too far. ↩︎ ...

Some thoughts and observations around my feelings about using Linux vs macOS. For the past week or so, I’ve been switching between Linux and macOS several times a day. I’ve been working towared full-time Linux for nearly a month, and planned to relegate the Mac to photo processing only. A sort of photo appliance. While doing that, though, I opened some of my favorite Mac-only apps, and immediately doubted the entire Linux experiment. Things would be much simpler if I used macOS for everything. Right? ...

It’s been the kind of day where using (or trying to use) Emacs frustrates me. I’ve spent the past few weeks adapting my custom Emacs configuration to work on Linux. I was so confident that I would be moving to Linux that I ignored anything that might not work cross-platform. I should know better. Today I was using my Mac and fired up Emacs and of course nothing worked. I spent nearly 2 hours futzing with it and I still don’t know what’s gone wrong. Reviewing Git commits hasn’t narrowed it down, either. It’s not the fact that I broke Emacs, it’s more that I’m so capable of breaking Emacs at any time. I do it more than I care to. I’m not in the mood, ya know? ...

For nearly two years I’ve been telling myself to Reduce & Simplify. For short periods, I’ve almost done that, but entropy takes over and I once again overcomplicate everything. Could the problem be that I’m not sure what I mean by “Simple”? One day, it feels simple to use only Emacs and a browser on Linux installed on boring hardware. The next day, simple means using the default Notes, Mail, and Reminders app on macOS. Then on another day, a notebook and pen are my definition of “simple”. What happens is that I end up alternating between all of these so-called simple workflows, and I’m back to chaos. ...

When I started running the macOS 26 (Tahoe) betas, I didn’t have strong feelings about Liquid Glass one way or the other. I’ve been running Linux for a while now as daily driver, but since I was thinking that I may have to use macOS on the desktop, I’ve spent a lot of time using both Linux and macOS. Now I kind of hate Tahoe and Liquid Glass. While getting my Mac Mini (M2 Pro) updated and configured, I was reminded how many times macOS pops up a dialog telling me something needs permissions for something. It feels like I’m constantly clicking “Allow”. It happens so often that I no longer bother even reading the messages. I just click “Allow” and move on. Kind of defeats the purpose of the warnings, no? ...