Jack Baty baty.net

Friday, April 17, 2026

Blurry black and white photo of a train passing by

I was reminded today by a mention in the JTR interview at People And Blogs that I've been neglecting daily.baty.net ever since I rebuilt this one. This is not a surprise to anyone, but I feel badly about leaving things hanging like that.

Being snarky is lazy and you should avoid doing it.

Hoping the slight changes to <hr> elements within posts and the dividers between posts helps when scanning the page. They were so similar before that I didn't bother with separators within posts, but I didn't like the way different topics within a daily post look all smooshed together without them.

Matcha:

A beautiful and functional email client for your terminal, built with Go and the charming Bubble Tea TUI library. Never leave your command line to check your inbox or send an email again!

I'm a sucker for anything TUI. Matcha was easy enough to install and configure, but it doesn't feel ready quite yet. Something to keep an eye on if you're looking for a terminal-based email client. I'll stick with Mutt or Aerc for now, though.

Wednesday, April 15, 2026

Black and white film photo of seagull at the beach
Sitting in the car, eating Wendy's, watching Lake Michigan (2026). Leica MP.

There are a lot of things I should be doing today, but I don't feel like doing any of them.

Speaking of not feeling like doing something. Taxes are due today. I have a service take care of the heavy lifting, which is great. All I needed to do was write checks, put them in envelopes, and get them to the post office in time. I owed much more than expected, and the 2026 estimates are shocking. I felt blindsided, but looking through the documents I can see why. Then, while putting the paperwork away, I noticed that the copy of the check (yes, I still send them checks) was missing the dollar amount. I wrote the long form, just not the number in the box. That's going to come back and bite me. Time for some bourbon.

I just noticed that I forgot to annotate today's image. It's fine. Day's nearly over, anyway.

Inviting the Aliens, by Paul Ford (Ftrain)

I’ve been vibe-coding proofs of concepts at work to help things along. I’ve never thought harder or more densely and to less effect.

I also have been vibe-coding a bunch of little utilites and whatnot. It can be exhilerating or exhausting, depending on the day. Most days it's both.

mike: "Installing Linux on an old Thi…" - social.lol:

Installing Linux on an old Thinkpad is “middle aged dad decides to get fit by doing toe touches in his boxers” except you don’t get disgusted & give up. Instead you blog about how awesome it is until it’s not and then you stop blogging for six months in hopes everyone forgets.

That's not me. At all. Nope.

Tuesday, April 14, 2026

Index cards on bulletin board
Bulletin board status

I can't find my activation code for Davinci Resolve Studio and I'm furious with myself about it. I tried the new v21 beta with built-in RAW photo editing. It's a bit primitive now, but it will improve. If I were primarily a videographer, this would be a welcome addition. Also, it's one more option for photo editing on Linux, which is nice.

SilverBullet+: The Programmable Personal Knowledge Management Platform

SilverBullet+ is a knowledge management platform (fancy term for a “notes app on steroids”) built on markdown files. It combines a live-preview editor with wiki-style linking, a built-in database and query language, and a fully integrated Lua scripting environment — turning your notes into a programmable system that grows with you. It is private by default: your data lives on your machine as plain markdown files, always portable, always yours.

SilverBullet is cool, and turning it into an app makes it more accessible to people who don't want to self-host a web app.

Ewen Bell about Davinci Resolve as a photo editor:

This little bit of news is going to be a huge moment in digital photography, and another blow to Adobe.

Davinci is powerful and complex to learn. I think this will make it unwieldy for MOST photographers.

Pretty cool, but if I wanted to use something complex and unwieldy to edit photos, I already have Darktable. What slice of the market would use this? I can't imagine it being more than a sliver. You know I'll try it anyway.

blogging AI

Some design improvements here at baty.net

Screenshot before and after
Before and after

⚠ Content warning I talk about using AI to do stuff in this post. I know some of you want nothing to do with that. The parts actually written by AI are indicated.

I worked with Claude Code, using the amazing Impeccable skills, to clean up the layout and typography here. We spent about an hour and a half and I'm pleased with the results. Things are cleaner and more consistent.

Read more →

The thing that scares me about how good LLMs are getting is that before long, everything is going to look good, and sound good. Everything will be well-written. The world is gonna be boring as hell.

Monday, April 13, 2026

Contact sheets hanging to dry in my shower
Contact sheets (2026).
  • STATUS: Improving design elements here at baty.net
  • TODO: Yard work. It's nice outside.
  • READING: Vigil, by George Saunders

I used Kevin's Boring Weather app instead of my janky shell script for annotating today's image. It's 90% of what I need. I might beg for the remaing 10%.

I'm a little ashamed to admit that I may have finally done it. I've been using Obsidian for notes/planning for a couple of weeks and it's working really well. I don't love the UI or editing a lot of text there, but the tooling around it makes it quicker and easier to get to useful than Emacs and Org mode. For me, anyway. Although I'm writing this in Emacs, so I'm obviously still working through the details :).

I'm testing MacWhisper for dictation and translations. Sometimes I don't feel like typing. You're soaking in it.

I really need to clean up some of the typography and layout around here. It feels off in a bunch of small ways. Remember that time like a week ago when I completely rebuilt this blog and then stopped posting here? That was pretty much the definition of me. Update

I don't like the way I feel when Claude is down.

Sunday, April 12, 2026

Black and White film photo of bamboo sculpture
Bamboo Sculpture (2026). Yashica-Mat LM / HP5

I guess I'm posting this here, today. The past few days have been all about Ghost over at Coping Mechanism so that's enough of that, right?

I don't suffer from burnout, but I might die from fizzle-out, though.

synapsmedia/ghost-theme-editor:

Edit theme files directly inside Ghost Admin with a completely client-side editor.

This solves a real problem with running a Ghost blog and just wanting to make a few little tweaks to the theme.

Tuesday, April 7, 2026

Black and white film photo of toddler sticking is tongue out
Tongue (2026). Olympus OM-1n / Zuiko 85mm f/2

Now that I have the various post types sorted here, I'm pretty sure I can live without the daily blog. The wildcard now is Coping Mechanism. I like using Ghost. I like the ActivityPub integration, built-in comments, emails, and analytics. I even like the editor, most of the time. And I really like just dragging images into it. I'm not sure I want to give it up, but I'm even less sure that I want two blogs that do essentially the same things.

Monday, April 6, 2026

Black and white film photo of abstract sculpture
Sculpture in waiting room (2026). Olympus OM-1n. Zuiko 85mm f/2

I plan to avoid most news and all social media for a week. It's to the point where, between the daily barrage of horrible, incompetent people doing stupid, horrible things and the incessant misinformed chatter about all of it on social media, I'm going to lose my shit. I need a brief respite in order to reset.

Since I'm mostly only using macOS right now, I've punted on the NetNewsWire <--> Miniflux connection. There has been something off about it for a while. I've moved all my NNW feeds into the iCloud synced collection and it's working better.

Sunday, April 5, 2026

Color film photo of the front of restaurant painted in a skull pattern
Stella's Lounge (2015). Olympus Stylus Epic / Fuji Superia

"README-driven development" is a phrase Simon Willison used and it's kind of perfect.

I'll never understand why people get such a boner over ridiculing someone else's code. It's not a good look.

Linux macOS

macOS for now

I've been using macOS exclusively for about a week and I'm a little embarrassed to admit how smooth things have felt. Not because of macOS specifically, but because I don't need to worry about keeping things set up and synced on Linux, too. I've been worrying about it a lot lately. More than that, I've spent a dizzying amount of time on it and taking a break from all that has been a relief.

The advantage of using macOS is that all of the comfort food software I love is there. I get my photo processing workflow the way I like it. I get all my little utilities like PopClip and Keyboard Maestro and Alfred. I get Tinderbox and DEVONthink. I get dead-simple sync via iCloud and backups using Time Machine. Trying to replicate this is an unrealized dream for me when using Linux.

There's a lot of friction introduced by managing two OSes on two or three computers. I don't enjoy it and I'm not sure it's worth the trouble.

The benefits I get from Linux are real, but they are more about philosophical alignment than about practical day-to-day computing. I'm convinced that one day I'll switch fully to Linux, but I'm not quite ready yet.

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