Tech

As of Sunday, June 1, 2025 at 10:00 AM, all of my sites (including this one) are being served using Caddy on a FreeBSD server from Vultr.

One of the reasons for my Ghost/ActivityPub experiment was to try to better integrate both short and long posts. Since that didn’t pan out, I started thinking about how I might manage it with Hugo.

I don't know what the over/under was on my Fedivers-via-Ghost experiment, but yeah, it’s paused.

So, how’s it going now that you’ve committed, Jack?

I’m not the only one who thinks it’s too much work.

Folder Preview is a quick look extension for previewing the contents of folders on macOS. It’s $1.99 and worth every penny.

I’ve gone back to using Espanso for text expansion. As powerful as Keyboard Maestro is, every time I reach for it I feel like I’ve already lost a battle somewhere. Text expansion macros are about all I use KM for these days, so it’s not much of a disruption.

Scrolling with the Logitech MX Master in Safari sucks out of the box. The following from this Reddit thread helped, even though it required installing 2 additional packages.

Hang on a sec… digg reboot

My use of Howm has continued to grow organically. In other words, I don’t set out to use Howm, it just happens :). One of Howm’s unique features is its TODO implementation:

I “settled” on using notmuch for my email, but now I’m reconsidering that decision.

You are all a bunch of sick freaks.:

I got big into TiddlyWiki around 2018, when I created my Rudimentary Lathe wiki. For a few years there, I put stuff into it daily. I sometimes drift away to something New/Shiny, but I always end up back in TiddlyWiki. Off the top of my head, here are a few things I like about TiddlyWiki:

Now that I’ve solved my Notmuch sync problems, I’m more inclined to move ahead with converting other content into emails and indexing them using Notmuch. I thought I’d start with my blog posts.

I hesitate to use org-goto in my Org mode files because I find the UI for it to be confusing. In a recent post, Streamlining Navigation in Org-Mode using an adapted org-goto, James Dyer makes some nifty improvements. The TL;DR is this:

You’ll notice that baty.net is back to using Hugo1. I really like Kirby, but every time I use a platform that’s not fully static, I get twitchy, and I got twitchy. I’m using a new theme, Anubis2, which I find to be easy to read and just the right amount of boring. It doesn’t have all the features of the PaperMod theme I was using, but it’s simpler, and simpler is what I was after.

Listing directories first and hiding file details by default in Dired

Improving site performance by adding Expires headers in my Caddy config.

Making tags readable in Org-mode DONE headings

I’ve updated my org-mode reading list using my fork of the org-books package

When a horrible billionaire ruins my wonder at the night sky

My SetApp subscription was scheduled to renew today, but I didn’t let it. I figured that if I buy the apps outright that I actually use, I’ll spend around the same amount as I would on a 1-year SetApp license for both Macs. The purchased apps would either come with lifetime licenses or a small annual upgrade fee. This means next year I’ll pay a much smaller amount for all the same software.

I’ve been testing a version of Johnny Decimal using folders and org-mode files. While doing this, I found myself frequently wanting to create a new .org file in the current (Dired) directory with the same name as the directory (long story).

howm is an Emacs package for taking notes. It was recommended to me recently, so I thought I’d take a look. The project page says “howm: Write fragmentarily and read collectively.” Worth a shot, right?

Canceling things brings mixed feelings

I spent some time in Obsidian again yesterday. I do this once a month or so just to see if somehow it’s changed into something I’d like to use. Obsidian is great software, in theory, but I still find it boring and unpleasant to actually use.

I tried OpenBSD. It’s nice. I don’t need it right now. (Or do I?)

A few months ago I became twitchy about my aging Synology so I replaced it with an old Mac Mini. The idea was that I understand how Macs work and if something breaks I can more easily deal with it.

The more I lean into using Org-mode files for everything, the more isolated I’m feeling. It may be irrational, because “plain text”, but having to export or otherwise translate everything when I post to my blog or other tools is becoming less fun. Org-mode Island is beautiful, but lonely.

Generating yearly and monthly calendars using Pcal on the command line

Following up after reading Jeremy Friesen’s response to my earlier post

I’m using using Denote’s silo feature for accessing my Beyond the Infinite folder

My current thinking is that our little blogging society doesn’t need secrecy, it needs visibility.

After using Arc for months, I’ve made Safari my default browser.

I mentioned that I should create a lisp function for sending my org-journal entries to Day One. Turns out I’d already done it. The only problem was that the original version assumed I was using a new org file every day. I’m now doing monthly files, so I needed to change how the text selection was made. Here’s the new function.

Let’s not overthink it, eh?

C’mon, everyone’s doin’ it. Here is my list of default apps (in alphabetical order by task):

I should stop trying to roll my own Emacs config. So I did.

Mike mentions disabling Alfred and going back to using Spotlight as an app launcher. I’ve been having similar thoughts.

A lisp function for generating either Page Bundles or normal Markdown files when creating new Hugo posts.

Links should looks like link. Let’s bring back blue and purple.

While looking for a way to enable xmlrpc in this Siteground-hosted WordPress installation, I ran into this:

I like to record the weather in my journals. For several years, I’ve used https://wttr.in via curl. Recently, wttr is often unreachable or throws errors, so I took a look at weatherapi.com

I was skeptical about this tablet’s ability to replace paper. I needn’t have been. It’s a terrific paper notebook replacement.

I’ve played on and off with twtxt a little and keep the feed out here: http://tilde.club/~jbaty/twtxt.txt. Here’s a snippet of my old twtxt.txt file…

The Pi-hole was great, but NextDNS makes more sense for me.

Trying some new things this week, app-wise.

Should I host my own stuff or not?