Journal

I spent all morning toying with a few different static blogging options that could replace Hugo. Kev had generously sent me a head start on a Jekyll theme that mimics my WordPress theme at baty.blog. I installed Jekyll and (to my surprise) I didn’t hit any Ruby walls. While it was a great head start, I realized how much work remained, and I’m still not sure I want to use Jekyll. ...

It’s weird how I spend a few days relaxing in WordPress, then I wake up one day and think, “Maybe I’ll generate my whole website with Org-mode and Emacs!” I probably won’t do that, but I sometimes consider it. I don’t want photography be just another way to generate files to play with on the computer. The temperature dipped to freezing for the first time this year. This usually means it’s truly the end of summer. Blech. ...

My therapist asked me why I thought it was a problem to have so many blogs/cameras/notebooks/etc. and I couldn’t give her a good answer. It often feels like a problem, but is it? Maybe not. Maybe I’m just having fun and that’s fine. I’m using WordPress lately because it’s easy and I don’t have to think about anything but the typing. Images are easy to add and it can do fancy things when it needs to. Sure, it’s a bit bloated and janky, but if what I do most of the time is hit “New post” and write, who cares? ...

I have so many great cameras, and I have the free time to use them. Yet I’ve barely been taking any photographs. Why is that? I’d love to figure it out. I wake up every day wondering who I’m going to be that day. Both WordPress and Hugo have things to like about them, so I keep using both because I don’t want to miss out on the good things about one when I decide to use the other. It’s silly, but there we are. ...

I’m trying to spend as little time as possible on any social media. I’m finding it difficult. I started posting over at baty.blog again for some reason.

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. ...

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

More Framework. Ocular migraines.

The Framework 13 laptop arrived a day early, so I spent the afternoon setting it up. I’ll post more later with some details. This is so much fun I can’t stand it. I don’t want to think about how much of my life I’ve spent moving windows around a computer screen. Those days are over, I think.

I really really want to reduce my blogging footprint to a single place. see here. My new Framework laptop shipped sooner than expected. It’s estimated to arrive Tuesday, but I see that it’s already in Grand Rapids. BRING IT TO ME! “He was a father and a husband.” People keep repeating this as if any of those things requires you to be a decent human being. Lots of vile people are fathers and husbands. ...

It’s been a minute since I’ve added one of these daily notes. I thought I was done with them, but here we are. The reason might not make much sense to many. Linux, or at least the one I’m using, doesn’t have Emacs bindings everywhere, the way macOS does. I’ve been slow to get used to it. I may never get used to it. In the meantime, the one place that does have Emacs bindings is Emacs, so that’s where I’m spending as much time as possible. The blog is Hugo and I’ve got a whole Emacs setup for publishing here. For now, that’s what I’m doing.