Journal

Merlin knows: The bummer is we miss so many great little things because it doesn’t conform to the implastic version of ourselves that lives in some blindingly lit menagerie where everything is just so. Where we store the notional version of ourselves that’s never existed. And who do we imagine all that certainty is impressing? Eventually, you can make up someone plausible, I suppose. But, more basic bitches like me and you are stuck trying to puzzle it all out in a world full of people who’ve decided we’re misunderstanding the world wrong. ...

I hope everyone had a relaxing weekend. I did, at least up until I tried setting up a new(ish) iPhone for my mom. She got a hand-me-down iPhone 12 to replace her, surprisingly still working, iPhone 6. Between Find My/anti-theft issues and forgotten passwords, it was much more frustrating than I’d hoped. Still, she has a new phone and that’s good. I’m typing this on the ThinkPad, even though my Mac is /right there/. It’s probably the novelty, but at least it’s happening. This is a first for me. here’s the latest. ...

Sometimes I create this daily entry without having anything to write about in mind. It seems necessary, but is it? Probably not, yet I keep doing it, anyway.

I’m rarely in a hurry, so why do I spend so much time working on ways to do things faster? Working on the Linux laptop this week has made so many things slower. I don’t have a text expansion utility configured yet. I don’t have something like Raycast on the Mac. Still, I don’t feel like I’m doing less. In fact, my mind has been calmer. Writing on the ThinkPad feels more like using a typewriter. OK, that’s an exaggeration, but you see the point. There’s much less going on, here. I have the usual urge to “improve” things, but I may just wait a minute on that and see if I can settle in with something simpler.

I’ve been busy with my Linux experiment. I’m writing about it there, if you want to follow along. Today, I put a Framework laptop in my cart. This whole experiment only got rolling because I thought I might like Linux on my desktop, so why am I looking at laptops when I have a perfectly servicable (2015) ThinkPad X1 Carbon (that I’m typing on right now)? I can’t explain it. Most likely it’s because I have an Apple Studio Display and (I’m told) it’s quite challenging to use it with Linux. I’m not changing monitors for this, the Studio Display is too good (and expensive).

Linux is fun, but frustrating. I’m trying to stick with it long enough to blame Linux rather than my inexperience for my troubles. As a way to help remember the process, I’ve started a new blog at linux.baty.net1. The new blog is a journal of things I’m learning or struggling with. I’d normally be taking these notes locally but I thought it would be worthwhile to publish them. I must admit that this was also a fun excuse to play with BSSG. ↩︎ ...

So, yeah, I seem to have four blogs at the moment. It’s fun, but not sustainable. Anyway, good morning! I mean, maybe I’m meant to be the guy who has a bunch of different blogs and nobody wants to follow because he’s inconsistent and spread so thin. Is that so bad?

Dammit, now I’m posting journal posts in two places. I get bored doing things the same way every day, so I change things. I don’t know if this makes me interesting or if it’s a symptom of some deep-rooted mental issue. Read Mike’s Deft, Markdown, Marksman/Emacs LSP, iA Writer and then spent an hour playing with Marksman and I ended up getting nowhere and now I’m upset that I can’t get wikilink completion in random Markdown files. This is why I shouldn’t be using Emacs. ...

I had fun yesterday working with the Coping Mechanism blog and Ghost. If you ignore the upsell and “please subscribe!” noise, Ghost is rather pleasant to work with. The problem is that I don’t want to migrate this blog to it, and I don’t want multiple blogs. This means that, while I still may tinker with Ghost, I shouldn’t use it for anything “real”. So, what am I doing? ¯_(ツ)_/¯. I’m typing this in iA Writer for reasons I can’t explain. ...

I’m supposed to be working on a new website for a family member. I’m 80% finished, but the final 80% is the uninteresting part and I don’t feel like doing it right now. Instead, I spent an hour this morning feeling like I should go back to using Lightroom Classic instead of Capture One, but I still prefer Capture One, so I’ll have to deal with the things I don’t like about it. ...

In a mood, evidenced by changing Denote’s default file format twice in ten minutes.

I don’t know what to write about today. I’m sitting here at my usual desk typing into a full-screen Emacs frame with a few of my usual buffers open. I did end up giving up on Doom again. It’s just more than I want, even though it does a lot of nice things without my help. And I miss having SPC as leader key. I’m not doing that general.el thing again, either. Oh well, I guess it’s back to C-c or C-x for everything. ...

I honestly don’t know whether the past few days of tinkering with Emacs evil-mode, Doom, etc. was fun or a complete, confusing waste of time. Right now I’m thinking the latter.

I should apologize for my mood this morning…Sorry about my mood this morning. Yesterday, I decided to bring back my Doom Emacs config. I’ve been missing evil-mode and using Space as leader key. Sometimes hitting Control-this Control-that constantly becomes tedious, ya know? After a couple of hours, I bailed on the idea. Doom offers a ton of quality-of-life features, but it also contains a lot of magic. As much as I appreciate the magic, I too often feel like it’s working against me. Back to my own config, which works against me too, but at least it’s my fault this way. ...

I need to find a way for my brain to relax. I spend entire days with a dozen apps open, each with a dozen tabs open. I click rapidly between them looking for something to focus on. I never find anything. Part of my problem might be that I’ve surrounded myself with too much infrastructure. There are dependencies everywhere. daily.baty.net for example. The idea is that I have a separate blog that works well for short, daily writing. Except that now I have two blogs. And I’m (for the moment) using Kirby for that one. This means an entirely different workflow and setup. This is great for when I’m feeling bored with Hugo. It keeps me from moving this blog back and forth. However, it’s also more stuff in my brain. Do I need more stuff in my brain? Right now, I don’t think so. Hence, I’m writing today’s journal post here. ...

AI can be useful to me, personally.

I spent hours this morning trying to find a good way of adding some metadata to the cover images on the blog. I wanted the temparature, at least. I tried shoehorning it into my Retrobatch script, but that was a dead end. Whenever I’m lost in image manipulation, I turn to ImageMagick. Boy did that take me down a rabbit hole. Long story short, I figured it out. But now I don’t like it. ¯_(ツ)_/¯. ...

Yes, I changed blog platforms again. It’s been like a week, so it seemed like we’re due for a change. :)

LinkedIn is not the right place for me to find interesting work.

you can “study” the data later and rearrange it. But the initial “just remember this” impulse should be as close to simply throwing the data at Emacs as possible. Remember Mode (Manual) I like that. I’ve been secretly conducting an experiment called “Use Obsidian Exclusively for 30 Days”. It started a week ago. I’m typing this in Emacs, in case you’re wondering how it’s going. Most days, I write the same things in both paper and digital journals. Then I print the digitital one. What’s wrong with me? 😄1 ...