A blog about everything, by Jack Baty

It’s nice having a pocketable point-and-shoot film camera with me. Normally for me, this either means an Olympus Stylus Epic or Ricoh GR1. Both of these are having issues, so I impulse ordered a Canon Sure Shot AF-7 from eBay. It was $30 shipped, so there wasn’t much risk. Here’s a self-portrait using the self-timer from the first roll (Kentmere 400) through the new camera: Self-portrait at my desk ...

Me, on this day in 2019: For like a week now I’ve gone to bed with the ThinkPad and using Linux to actually do stuff. It’s fun. Not easy or care-free, but for the first time I’m having a little fun. It’ll stick eventually. The 3.1.0 update to Omarchy has been released. The Discord channels are awash with people having trouble with the update, but I ran it on both my machines anyway. No issues so far. ...

I should probably write more about Linux and the NAS and the little Canon AF-7 and the sorry state of the US, but I don’t have the energy to put the words together in a useful way. So I’m kind of doing it one sentence at a time here in the dailies. If I’d have stuck with one system/process for longer, I’d really have something. As it stands now, all I have is a big fat mess. ...

I don’t know where to put things. I have several dozen files in my Downloads folder and I’ve no idea what to do with them. All the second engine does is fly you to the scene of the crash. – Pilots It’s possible I’ve bitten off more than I can chew. New desktop and laptop. New OS on both. New NAS. New media streamer (Jellyfin rather than Plex). New Immich install (via Docker on the UGREEN NAS). New photo editing software (Darktable). It’s a little overwhelming. My M4 Air is taunting me from the shelf over there. ...

Thinking about including a status thingy at the bottom of my daily posts. Got the idea from Warren Ellis. Do I actually do enough to justify writing it down every day? Maybe. Gruber doesn’t get art: Matthew Inman of The Oatmeal: ‘A Cartoonist’s Review of AI Art’ STATUS: 6h 24m sleep. Weight is ⬇️. TODO: Organize computers/cables. Water change in fish tank. READING: The Tools by Phil Stutz and Barry Michels LISTENING: Painkiller, by Judas Priest

I’m still working on my photo workflow in Linux. It’s gotten to the point of being tolerable, but it’s still not enjoyable. Darktable is powerful but there are too many ways of doing everything. I feel like I’m just throwing stuff at the wall, hoping it turns out. I suppose I will eventually find a process that works consistently, but right now I’m not even close to that. I really miss Capture One. ...

I mean, if you’re going to start using new computers running a new OS, you might as well get a new, unfamiliar NAS and an updated Orbi router kit while you’re at it. That’s what I did. Chaos! I haven’t been mentioning Omarchy or the Framework laptop lately because I don’t feel like being scolded for “supporting projects that promote facism” which is of course not what they’re doing, but whatever. I’m not interested in arguing about it, and I’m not going to clear my throat before every mention. fwiw I like both products very much. Send me an actual apples-to-apples equivalent and I might switch. ...

I’m trying not to miss my Mac but I kind of miss my Mac. Not being able to develop a comfortable photography workflow might be a dealbreaker for Linux. I’m still trying, though.

I’m still finding things that I’d changed in my PaperMod fork that I kind of need now that I’ve switched to the stock version. The Reply-By-Email button, for one. My improvement to image rendering from yesterday doesn’t work in the RSS feed because it uses a relative URL for the image. I had fixed this in my fork, so I copied that over. I also tried adding the reply button there, also. ...

I finally got around to updating Hugo’s image_render.html so that I can use normal Markdown for images rather than a Hugo shortcode. I used the version from Alec’s blog and it seems to work great. Here’s an example: We'll miss beach season! Markdown-mode in Emacs can hide markup so things feel a bit more WYSIWYG, but I’ve turned that off by default. Don’t WYSIWYG Markdown editors sort of defeat one of the purposes of Markdown? Plus, I don’t get confused about what is actually in the post this way. I can see the URL for links without C-c C-l-ing all the time. ...

Aaaaand, we’re back. Sometimes I really like WordPress. It lasts a week or two. I cleaned a few things up around here. The big one is that I’m now using the stock PaperMod theme rather than the mess I made in my own fork. I’ll probably tweak, but I don’t want to maintain my own theme. I also removed /notes from the navigation. I don’t need them. I may find some other way to indicate/present shorter posts, but for now it’s all either a post or a daily note. ...

Sometimes one really needs to go out of their way to borrow trouble.

Oh dear, a new daily post here? Are we doing that again? Seems so.

My family and friends have always told me, “Oh, you definitely have ADHD.” I’m not inclined to diagnosis shopping, so I’ve just assumed that’s what it was and ignored it. Recently, though, my disinterest in mostly everything and lack of focus has been worse, and it’s affected my mood and my overall well-being. I decided to see if there was anything to be done about it. I spent four hours at an intake screening for ADHD. Two hours of interview and two hours of testing. The person running the tests said that the doctor wanted to “include a few additional tests, so it might take a little longer.” Fine with me. ...

The appeal of cynicism is that it makes you sound smart without asking for a whole lot of independent thought. It’s easier to tear down than build up, to assume the worst than to evaluate evidence, to sneer than to engage, to smirk rather than smile. Source: Joan Westenberg, Why Cynicism is Just Moral Cowardice We could use less of it.

I’m trying. I really am. I’ve spent a while getting my head around Darktable and digiKam. That’s no small feat, honestly. What weird software. It’s capable, but getting to where I was with Lightroom Classic, Photoshop, and sometimes Capture One has been elusive. There are manuals, blog posts, and Youtube videos to consume, but, given the nature of Darktable, everyone tells me to do things differently. There are a dozen ways to accomplish every task. Which one’s best? Who knows!? ...

That’s not entirely fair. Wallace’s most famous book, Infinite Jest—1,079 pages and weighing 3.15 pounds (in the hardcover first edition)—is challenging. But Wallace wrote many other things, and some of them are quite accessible. Source: Ted Gioia, Where to Start in Reading David Foster Wallace I hope that reading and talking about DFW makes a comeback. For a while there, Book Social Media was (rightfully) aligned against sound-smart lit-bros who wouldn’t shut up about Infinite Jest. I may have been one of them, because I loved (and still love) that book, so shut up. ...

TL;DR It’s a love/hate thing, with love in the lead. Here are a few thoughts on how things are going so far. I’m still using Omarchy. I really like the tiling window setup with Hyprland. I sometimes paint myself into a corner, but mostly it makes window management fast and efficient. Workspaces on Linux are so nice. Everything on Omarchy can be done via keyboard. Once I got used to the bindings, this has made getting around, launching apps, moving windows, etc. convenient. I’m not against using a mouse, but It’s nice not to have to. ...

I’ve carried one kind of paper notebook or another on my person for years. Moleskine, Field Notes, Travelers, you name it. The idea is to “capture my ideas and thoughts” while on the go. I’ll be honest with you, I don’t really have many thoughts or ideas, on the go or otherwise. I can’t remember the last time I was walking or at the store or whatever and thought, “Oooh! That’s a brilliant idea, Jack! Thank goodness I have this notebook with me!” ...

tanrax/org-social: Org Social is a decentralized social network that runs on an Org Mode file over HTTP. You can create posts, interact with groups, make replies, mention other users, create polls, or personalize your profile. All this without registration, without databases… Just you and your Org Mode file. It’s a ton of fun for us emacs nerds. Follow mine here: https://jackbaty.com/social.org