Journal

On daily.baty.net, each little whim of a post has its own page and is part of the RSS feed (and gets cross-posted to my mastodon.social bot account). Some days, that’s exactly what I want. When I write daily notes here at baty.net, using the single-entry-per-day format, I feel less pressure to make anything “count”. And some days, that’s exactly what I want. Living in my head is frustrating. Century-Scale Storage: But at the century scale, even our most widely adopted file formats are completely untested. Digital history is not long enough to definitively settle on best practices. ...

I know y’all are sick of me waffling about where to post these little daily notes, but I can’t help it. I’m honestly split right down the middle about it. I want everything to be in one place, but I can’t seem to make it all fit in one place. At least not the way I want things to fit. I could leave baty.net for the longer posts and daily.baty.net for these daily notes. Or, I could try combining everything here. Or maybe combine everything there and make this a landing page. I think each of these options has equal merit, so I haven’t been able to decide, and probably never will. I guess I’ll continue posting wherever I’m in the mood to post on any given day. ...

Digital Minimalism. Organizing. Markwhen.

I spent a good portion of yesterday offline. Well, not technically offline, but not on social media, which feels like the same thing. Trying to remember to step away from the computer once I notice that all I’m doing is clicking things basically at random. That means I’m done for now, but I rarely heed the clues.

Cleaning up my servers and backups

Social media, blogging, subscriptions.

“I don’t know anything about what you asked, but here’s what I got from Perplexity…” is not helpful. Plus, you still don’t know anything about what I asked. We’ve gotten nowhere and you’ve wasted our time.

I find that I kind of enjoy starting the day with a quick jab/hugo-new-daily in Emacs and here we are. The issue with publishing right away is that for people who use RSS they may think I’m finished for the day, and that’s seldom the case. Sometimes I worry about this, but most of the time I remember that the people subscribed via RSS know me, and I think they understand. :) ...

Oh dear. It’s OK, though. What happened was that I started to feel twitchy about having my posts and photos locked up in Ghost. “Locked up” is an exaggeration, of course, but you know what I mean. It’s better when everything is in a nice, tidy set of folders on my hard drive, in Org or Markdown format. So here we are, back in Hugo. I’ve noticed a drop-off in interaction on Mastodon the past week or two. Is it because people are leaving? Maybe they just don’t find me interesting anymore. ...

What have we done?

I hope you’re voting for Harris today. Other than that, I’m shutting my political brain down for the rest of the day. My heart can’t withstand this level of sustained anxiety. I have a lot of anxiety around flying, so before and during a flight, my brain and body sort of shut down and go into internal, primary-systems-only mode. That’s how I’m reacting to the election. This is mostly because of two things: ...

Do you ever feel like your life’s wake is littered with missed opportunities? I spend so much time looking backwards that I don’t pay attention to what’s ahead. I don’t understand people who post overconfident, often controversial posts on social media, and then say things like “This is NOT an invitation to debate!…”. I mean, where do you think you are? I’ll tell you where, you’re in a place where everything is an invitation to debate, whether you like it or not. ...

You should vote vote for Harris. I did.

I have a routine that I go through on the 1st of every month, during which I always tell myself that, “This one will be different.”, but in the end they’re all the same.

I’m so mad at Emacs right now. It’s so frustrating when something stops working for no reason I can fathom. I sync everything related to my Emacs config via Syncthing, and the Emacs version is identical, and yet doom-modeline fails to load on the MBP but works fine on the Mini. It’s crazy-making and I can’t figure it out. UPDATE: I had to re-install the “f” and “shrink-path” packages for no apparent reason. I still hate not knowing why things broke in the first place. Makes me want to throw in the entire Emacs towel. ...

Roam > Obsidian and Org-roam > Roam. So guess what I’m using today :).

LinkedIn, The New Internet, Worrying about a “lack of updates”

We’re back on Hugo

I’m not saying anything new, but I feel like we’ve lost the battle for having good and useful products and services. Is it just me, or does every product seem to only grudgingly accept the actual user as a necessary evil? We’re secondary to whatever is actually making the money. Call me a grumpy old man, but I hate this trend. “Enshittification” is an over-used meme word by now, but I can’t think of a better one. ...

The thing about BOGO (Buy One, Get One free) is that I end up buying something I don’t need, just so I can get a second thing I don’t need. I’m (half-heartedly) considering canceling every streaming option I have. Maybe then I’ll stop endlessly scrolling through trailers while never actually watching any movies. Haven’t felt like blogging much. Every time I think of something to “say”, I shrug and think, “Not worth it.” I hope this doesn’t trigger a platform change or anything. I was just getting comfy here :) ...