Jack Baty

Book logging in Emacs

Logging books I read using Emacs and Org mode

I need a new film scanner

My Epson V750 Pro, purchased in 2009, has scanned thousands of rolls of film, slides, and prints. After making strange grinding noises recently, it has finally ground to a halt. Here are the last images it was able to scan from the most recent roll (2022-Roll-066)… So now what? I

Searching Org-roam files

Org-roam is “A plain-text personal knowledge management system” using Emacs and Org-mode and I put nearly all my notes in there. While it’s easy to find notes in org-roam based on filename, there’s no obvious way to search the contents of notes. Weird, right? I could use the

The West Wing Productivity System

The last time I rewatched “The West Wing” I was once again impressed by how good people were at their jobs. How productive everyone was. I wondered how I could be that productive. I noticed that the entire process used by the staff seemed to be carrying around folders full

The kinds of portraits I prefer…Judith Joy Ross, for example

I recently read Joe McNally’s book, The Real Deal: Field Notes from the Life of a Working Photographer . While I found his anecdotes occasionally interesting, I didn’t really enjoy the book. I think this was because I don’t much care for McNally’s photographs. Here’s one

Comparing film and digital: Mom

I had lunch with my parents recently and took a few photos with both my film and digital cameras. I shot about the same number of photos with each camera, with close to the same number of “keepers”. Which do I prefer? Here I’m showing one of each, digital

Some unremarkable pens the Internet made me buy

I’m an impressionable young man, and when I notice someone on The Internet raving about something, I want to feel that way, too. I often order whatever that thing is, only to be disappointed. For example, here are a few of the pens I bought after being told how

Publishing portions of my Org-roam database

I’m trying something new. I’ve become a pretty heavy user of Org-roam for personal notes. I put nearly everything there now; technical notes, contact information, project notes, vendor info, etc. These notes are all nicely linked and backlinked and live in my main ~/org directory so I can

Aligning comments in Emacs

I want my per-line code comments to line up nicely, so I’ll often add a bunch of spaces by hand to make things just so. I realized that, being Emacs, there must be an easier way to handle this. Of course there is. Two minutes of searching revealed a

Configuring the org-download save directory

When I drag and drop an image into Emacs, I want the attached file to end up in ./img/YYYY/. This is how I tried configuring org-download in my setup (I use Doom Emacs): 1 2 3 4 (setq org-download-method 'directory org-download-image-dir (concat "img/" (format-time-string "%Y&