Misc

Whenever I change blogging platforms or domain names or simply post to several places, I feel a twinge of guilt. How will my “audience” feel about the changes? Does it confuse things?

The new Saxon album is really good.

⚠️ This blog is no longer running Kirby, but I left this here just in case.

As much as I love Tinderbox, I’m wondering if it will continue to make sense long-term as a blogging engine. I get along great with most of Tinderbox’s features, but export is one that has eluded me for going on 20 years. I can muddle my way through, but it’s always a challenge.

I’ve settled on WordPress for this blog. (“settled” is a fluid word for me, but let’s assume I mean it for now). However, I prefer to do most of my writing in Emacs and Org mode. To help with this, I’ve configured org2blog and I’m writing this post with it.

One valid criticism of using paper for notes is that searching through notebooks is rather difficult. With my poor handwriting, scanning for certain information in a wash of squiggly lines can be painfully slow.

I keep this blog around so that I have somewhere to post images and maybe a little background as well as the ever-popular gearhead nonsense. So why do I so rarely post anything?

My dad (right) stands in front of bar while in the Navy. (France 1963)

As an antidote for my usual spiral of sitting at a giant screen full of a dozen windows, staring, clicking, staring, clicking, etc. I thought I’d try living on my iPad for a while. I’m not an iPad person, even though I’ve used one since the day they were released. I just don’t understand how anyone thinks they can be anywhere near as productive on an iPad as on a “real” computer. Stockholm Syndrome or something, I always figured, but smarter people than I are doing it, so who’m I to judge?

Riccardo Mori has a few comments on the beta of Safari 15 showed up. Here’s one:

Yesterday I was asked something about a project I’d worked on two years ago. At that time I’d used Curio to help manage the project. I opened the Curio project and within thirty seconds of just looking at the workspace I had a handle on the project and easily found an answer to the questions I’d been asked.

Unless I’m doing some crazy non-standard layout, I’m not a fan of using WordPress’ Gutenberg editor. Mostly I just want to type some simple text and add a link or two. Last year I bought a license for Iceberg which is a lightweight Gutenberg replacement that feels more “normal”. I stopped using it because there was a kind of uncanny valley effect, but after several frustrating days wrestling Gutenberg, I’m trying Iceberg again. Here’s what this post looks like in Iceberg

I’m almost certainly using Zotero wrong.

It’s been a while since I bought a new fountain pen. This is about the Pilot Custom 823. Literally every review I’ve read says the same things: “It’s not a looker, but what a great writer!” I can only resist that kind of consensus for so long, so I bought one. I have the “smoke” color with a fine nib. I ordered it from JetPens for $270. I’d say this puts it well into significant purchase territory, so I was very excited when it arrived. I’ve been journaling quite a lot recently and was looking forward to spending time with what reviewers call one of the best every day writers.

The more simple any thing is, the less liable it is to be disordered; and the easier repaired when disordered

It’s good being able to celebrate again. I brought the Q2 Monochrom with me to the party. Shot about 20 images. This is the only one I kept.

I see office vs remote is very much on the menu (thanks media for using your platform to ruin our day ????)

Riccardo Mori: But this review was underwhelming and, as I commented on Twitter, with unusual fanboyish tones I’ve never really detected in his past product reviews.

Keith James, Macfilos:

I spent the weekend helping a friend assemble and place a lift for his speedboat. It was a job for four people, but we only had two. This meant some extra planning and heavy lifting. Eventually, we succeeded. It was a fun challenge.

Cory Doctorow The availability of a deep, digital, searchable, published and public archive of my thoughts turns habits that would otherwise be time-wasters — or even harmful — into something valuable.

Things have been stagnating around here. I haven’t felt like doing any capital-B Blogging. Rather, I’ve been pouring stuff into rudimentarylathe.wiki. It’s just easier to have the daily notes tiddler open and type as I go. No need to come up with titles or worry about whether I have enough words put together to justify a new post. Writing blog posts is a Whole Thing™.

I take all my notes in TiddlyWiki now, and publish most of them to rudimentarylathe.wiki.

I wonder what I would choose to do with my time if I didn’t share every detail of my life?

Software-wise, this incredibly powerful iPad is as capable as a 2014 iPad Air 2 (the oldest iPad model that can run iPadOS 14). There is still, in my opinion, a substantial software design gap preventing iPads from being as flexible as they are powerful. Software-wise, iPadOS still lacks flow. Don’t wave Shortcuts in my face as a way of objecting. Shortcuts are a crutch. A good one, no doubt, but a crutch nonetheless. Software automation can do great things for an operating system, but if an operating system comes to depend on it to become usable, then maybe you have to rethink a thing or two.

It’s 2021; structured data and ~transclusion~ are still the sidewalk around the quad, while screenshots are the diagonal desire path, worn to bare dirt

I’m exhausted. I think it’s because I haven’t been working in more than a month and my brain has had too much free time to “figure stuff out.” (Yes, I know how it sounds to complain about exhaustion while not having a job!) As an experiment, I’m going to live the month of May in “Easy Mode”. This means I’m going to solve problems with quick, obvious, easy solutions. I’m going to use the easy-to-use tools. And I’m going to make various processes as easy as possible.

I’ve been using the reMarkable 2 tablet for almost three months now. I’m often asked what I think of it. The short answer is this:

Here’s my star rating system for everything: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Loved it! ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ It was good ⭐️⭐️⭐️ It was OK ⭐️⭐️ I didn’t like it ⭐️ Hated it

…skip any definitive conclusions, as we know you might change those at any time. ????

TL;DR: I’m sticking with HEY for my email, but there’s a surprise twist: I’m also sticking with Fastmail. Hear me out.

(Updated with notes about the custom domain discount) Other than having a couple of nits to pick, I really like using HEY! for my email.

A New Guild System | THR Blog | Blogs | The Hedgehog Review:

Dante Stella, The Machine Planet:

I got my first Kindle in 2007. I had given up on Amazon letting me do the Most Obvious Thing, which is to use the current book’s cover on the lock screen.

Writers spend way too much time and money seeking out their “grail” pen and paper combo — the tools that will make their work so much “smoother.” It’s a pattern we’ve seen repeated in all creative pursuits.

Everything in my life has become overwrought, overthought, overdone, and needs to be unwound. Today, I’m dealing with this blog at copingmechanism.com. A few weeks ago I decided to go back to using WordPress (again), and dammit I’m going to try sticking with it this time. But, I don’t like any WordPress themes. There are thousands of them, and I can never find one that works for me. Oh, I find a lot of them that make me say, “Ooh, cool!” and install immediately and say, “There, that’s nice!”

It feels like the entire world (or at least my corner of) is consumed by the “how” of note-taking. Tools, workflows, processes, backlinks, and on and on. Obsidian? Roam? Paper? I read it all. It’s fun and interesting and there’s no end of things to distract myself with. A distraction is all it is. None if it really matters, though, and yet we endlessly split hairs and wring our hands and gaze at our navels over irrelevant minutiae. It’s exhausting. I’m not one of those people who wear “I never change my system” as a badge of honor. I can’t seem to stop. I’m too curious for that. FOMO and all.

Dante Stella pokes accurate fun at videos about still photography.

When I started using Roam, I found the way it handled backlinks to be a revelation. Other software does backlinks, but Roam’s implementation made it feel new. Suddenly, backlinks felt necessary.

My first annual subscription to Basecamp’s HEY email service is about to expire, meaning it’s time to decide whether I will be renewing.

Using a single 32-inch monitor with my M1 Mac Mini has caused me to re-think how I manage apps and windows. After a few iterations, I’ve settled on the following layout. This layout includes Finder, iTerm2, Safari, and Emacs. Safari takes up the majority of the center. Finder and iTerm are split equally on the left, and Emacs is on the right, divided into two windows (or “panes” as most other software calls them). All my most-used apps are visible at the same time and I’m not constantly moving windows around.

None of the old books on my Kindle mean anything to me. They’re just there. I never see them, I never re-read them. I never use them for anything. Seems like a waste.

A week ago I decided to cancel Doom Emacs and go back to building Emacs from Scratch, and once again I was reminded what a terrible idea that is.

Is this something I can do? Sometimes I want a better environment for writing and posting to my blog. Ghost’s post editor is fine, but not “nice”. For writing with Markdown, iA Writer‘s editor is hard to beat. I thought I’d see if there’s a way to post from iA Writer to Ghost.

Of all the ways I’ve logged books, I’m thinking that plain text remains the best. I’ve been adding books to a text (Markdown) file for while now and it’s not pretty, but it works. And it will always work. I publish a copy at www.baty.net/books books.baty.net

I recently bought a used,

When I bought a used Leica SL(601) recently instead of the newer SL2 , it was mostly because I didn’t want to spend $6,000 on a camera that I wasn’t sure I’d love. But it was also partly because I really don’t need a 47-megapixel sensor. Who’s got the time and space to manage 80MB per image photos?

mi·​nu·​tia (noun) – a minute or minor detail—usually used in plural

I fell in love with TiddlyWiki almost exactly 2 years ago. I wrote in it almost daily until late August, 2020, when I moved full-time into a public Roam database.

I joined Flickr in 2004 and have been posting photos there, on and off, ever since. For years, Flickr was the place to share photos and discuss photography. Then Yahoo neglected and thus helped ruin it. And of course Instagram eventually finished the job.

To make this simple self-portrait, I didn’t spend an hour setting up the Wista, loading sheets of film, processing with half-expired C-41 chemistry, crossing my fingers, drying, scanning, spotting, inverting, storing, and on and on. Instead, I set a digital camera on a tripod and triggered the shutter with my iPhone. The whole thing from idea to upload took less than 10 minutes.

Film photography is a lot of work. Not so much the actual shooting part, that’s work no matter what the medium, but lately I find the rest of the process (developing, scanning, storing) to be more trouble than it’s worth. Thing is, I enjoy spending time in the darkroom, processing film. It’s meditative; the perfect hobby for an introvert. I have various wonderful old cameras, which are often reason enough to shoot film. But is it worth the trouble?

I’ve prided myself on my ability to shoot a Leica M3 or Hasselblad 500C/M with no meter, no auto-focus, and no auto-exposure. Who needs it? Real photographers certainly don’t! Plus, being fully mechanical means that the cameras require no batteries and should be repairable forever. It’s a badge of honor. Except, and maybe I’m getting lazy in my old age, I’ve grown to like letting the camera do at least some of the work. In fact, I prefer it. They’ve gotten pretty good at it and if I’m honest they do things better than me most of the time.

Here are my remaining 35mm SLR film cameras. Clockwise from front-left, they are. Canon AE-1 Program. An AE-Program was my first real camera. I received one from my parents as a graduation gift. Today, though, it’s my least favorite. It just doesn’t feel good to use.

Gutenberg is powerful and useful for enabling those of us who don’t feel like working too hard to create decent-looking, complex, media-rich layouts. But, most of my posts are just an image with a paragraph or three of text. I don’t need a fancy, complex, block-based editor for creating those.

I have lots of film stored in my fridge. Some of it is very old. I’m determined to shoot it rather than throw it out, so I ran a roll of Ektar 25 through my Nikon F100.

I threw a singe strobe off to one side. It’s a little hot. It’s no picnic learning how to light things while using large format film cameras. The feedback loop is slooooow. Shot with: Wista 45DX | Rodenstock Sironar-N 150mm | Ilford HP5+ 400 @ 320

I hate scanning film negatives. Especially color film negatives.

Where should I keep my notes, TheBrain or Roam? I decided earlier this year to use Roam, and was confident in that decision until TheBrain version 12 added backlinks.

GQ told me that Now Is a Great Time to Go Back to an Old iPod and I believed them, so I bought one.

Sometimes I get bored with the way I’m running things around here and look to mix things up a bit. It’s happened again. This time, it meant bringing back the Coping Mechanism blog. You’re soaking in it.