Posts

Remember my “Reduce and Simplify” goal for 2024? That was a good idea, eh?

Folder Preview is a quick look extension for previewing the contents of folders on macOS. It’s $1.99 and worth every penny. (via Andrew Canion)

I recently discovered Org mode’s speed keys option and it’s pretty great. One caveat with speed keys is that they only work if the point is at the very beginning of a heading. To help with this, I (with Claude’s help) created a small lisp function and hook to move the insertion point to the beginning of the first heading whenever I open an Org mode file. I’m recording it here in case it’s useful to anyone else. ...

The luminous and shocking beauty of the everyday is something I try to remain alert to, if only as an antidote to the chronic cynicism and disenchantment that seems to surround everything, these days. It tells me that, despite how debased or corrupt we are told humanity is and how degraded the world has become, it just keeps on being beautiful. Nick Cave, “Faith, Hope, and Carnage”

I’m still mad at Hugo, so I’m spending time in Opposite Land. Blogging with Ghost, that is. My old theme (Kyoto) was zipped up in an archive folder, so I dusted it off and will post over there until I’m bored with it: Coping Mechanism.

I bought a new car today. Before we get to that, I’d like to tell you about my old car. Ever since I’ve been able to drive, I’ve been fascinated by BMWs. Reading Car and Driver magazine from cover to cover was a monthly routine. Car and Driver loved BMWs. BMW was marketed as “The Ultimate Driving Machine” and I believed it. In 2019 I was shopping for used car. I walked into the local CarMax intending to buy a Jeep Grand Cherokee. As we were walking around the lot, I spotted a black 5-series BMW and thought it would be fun to take a look. I asked how much they wanted for it, and it turns out that BMWs depreciate wildly in the first few years, because the price for the 2016 BMW was comparable to the Jeep I had my eye on. In other words, it was within my budget. ...

If I were to only have one computer, I’d use notmuch for email in Emacs. I might also import non-email stuff as notmuch messages so I can search everything in one place. But, I now have 3 computers; 2 running macOS and one running (Fedora) Linux. Notmuch takes too much of my energy to keep synced between machines. So what about Mu4e? Mu4e is probably the “nicest” Emacs package for managing email, but it still requires a local synced copy of all my messages. This means configuring mbsync on all machines, etc. ...

I started using Blot for my blog in 2017. Blot is a really nice way to publish a blog from a folder full of Markdown files. Blot’s author, David, is exceptionally helpful. This morning I made an offline backup of everything and deleted all the content from Blot’s folder. Then I canceled my subscription. Five minutes later, I restarted my subscription. I’m grandfathered in to the original $20/year pricing, so I decided it’s so inexpensive that it’s worth twenty bucks just to have it available. Also, it supports a great project by a nice developer. ...

Hugo is actively developed and still gets a lot of attention. This is fine. What’s not fine is that it seems like every third update introduces breaking changes. I updated to 0.146.5 and my site failed to build. This was a theme thing, and thankfully the theme maintainer was on it. Still annoying. I like using Hugo and I like my theme and I like having a static website. What I don’t like is not knowing if things are going to still work next week. ...

Nostalgia is some powerful stuff, ain’t it? My old Nakamichi cassette deck stopped working a few years ago, and I never bothered to replace it. I’ve been into vinyl and still have a good CD transport, so I didn’t see a need for cassettes. Occasionally, though, I’ll spot a cassette somewhere and think I might like to bring mine out and play them. I didn’t want some ancient “vintage” cassette deck, and I didn’t want to spend much. ...

Today I learned about BSSG, a static site generator written using Bash. I’ve been chugging along with Hugo for a minute, but you just know I have to try every new thing I discover, so… bssg.baty.net How fun is that!? Written by Stefano Marinelli, BSSG is so simple and easy to use that I had a blog started in, I swear, two minutes. The only thing I had to do was change MARKDOWN_PROCESSOR to use pandoc, and I was off and running. Nice. ...

It’s my dad’s 84th birthday. I had the M3 with a roll of HP5.

“There is a computer disease. Anybody who works with computers knows about it. It’s a very serious disease and it interferes completely with the work. The trouble with computers is that you ‘play’ with them!” Richard Feynman, “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman”

I don’t mean to be rude, but I don’t care much what you think. OK, that’s not exactly true, I care deeply what you think. Maybe it’s more accurate to say that I don’t worry about what you think. Are you mad that I keep switching platforms? Sorry, not sorry. Are you annoyed that I use words like “just” and “maybe” and “really” too often? Yeah, me too. We’ll get over it. Does it bother you that I don’t do enough throat-clearing before mentioning something that has become problematic? You’ll be fine. Would you prefer that I only write about Emacs? Not happening. ...

Kirby CMS uses plain .txt files for content. Since the bare .txt files should not be accessible with a browser, one normally uses a path matcher in Caddy and then denies requests based on a path, like so… path *.txt /content/* /site/* /kirby/* /.* But what if I want a /robots.txt file? Turned out to be a simple answer, but it took me a while to find it. I’m writing it down here in case anyone else might need it. Here’s the whole block from my site’s Caddyfile: ...

I saw the Irreal post about Journelly, but mostly ignored it because I wasn’t looking for a new iOS journaling app. He did mention that Journelly is by Álvaro Ramírez, author of Plain Org, lmno.lol, and others, so that made things more interesting. What intrigued me most, though, was learning that Journelly is backed by plain-text Org Mode files. Bonus! Now it had my attention. Álvaro was kind enough to let me into the TestFlight, and I’m putting it through its paces this morning. ...

I’ve migrated daily.baty.net to Kirby CMS. It has been a static site managed by Tinderbox for a long time. I love Tinderbox, but now that baty.net is back on Hugo, I wanted a playground for learning more about Kirby, without moving the main blog back and forth between Hugo and Kirby. So, here we are. Your RSS feed is probably complaining right now. Sorry about that.

I ran across something neat while reading the Mu4e release notes A (experimental) “transient” menu has been added for mu4e. You can use it e.g., with something like: (require 'mu4e-transient) (global-set-key (kbd "C-c m") #'mu4e-transient-menu) It’s very handy!

I thought it would be neat to include the date and weather on the images I use for my journal entry covers here on the blog. It turned out to be neat, but not fun. I spent nearly 3 hours on all sorts of failed approaches. I figured it might be useful to write down where I ended up. I leveraged two of my existing bash scripts that deal with the weather, and wrote a new one that uses ImageMagick to put things together. ...

I maintain a list of shell commands for updating Make/Model/Lens information in film scans. I’ve always run this via babel in a code block in an Org mode file. Something like this: #+begin_src sh cd ~/Pictures/_Scans exiftool '-m' '-Make=Leica' '-Model=Leica MP' -overwrite_original . exiftool '-m' '-LensModel=Summilux-M 1:1.4/50 ASPH' '-FocalLength=50mm' -overwrite_original . #+End_src Easy enough, I just copy and paste from a list of commands, depending on the lens and camera. However, it occurred to me that I’d prefer to simply have Emacs prompt me for the information, and then take care of the shell commands for me. Also, instead of hard-coding the path, I wanted to use marked files in a Dired buffer. ...