Tech

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. I never unplugged the Synology, though. You know, just in case. A week ago I started getting emails from the Synology that Drive 1 was failing. What I should have done is to unplug the thing and move on. But what I did was to order a new 8TB Seagate Ironwolf drive. ...

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. Later: Jeremy Friesen reacts to the above with his take on the isolation of using Org-mode. Here’s some follow up.

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. (defun jab/dayone-add-note () "Sends current subtree as Day One entry" (interactive) (org-mark-subtree) (shell-command-on-region (point) (mark) "/usr/local/bin/dayone2 -j=Journal new" nil)) It’s not perfect, since it includes any PROPERTY drawers and leading stars, but it works and was easy to make. ...

Let’s not overthink it, eh?

C’mon, everyone’s doin’ it. Here is my list of default apps (in alphabetical order by task): Backups: Backblaze, Arq Blogging: What day is it? I mean Kirby. Calendar: BusyCal, Apple Calendar Chat: Apple Messages, Signal Clipboard Manager: Raycast Code Editor: Emacs File Manager: Forklift, Dired (Emacs) Journaling: Org-journal (Emacs), Day One Launcher: Raycast Mail Client: Apple Mail, notmuch Mail Server: Fastmail Music: Roon, Qobuz, Apple Music Notes: Org-mode (Emacs), TiddlyWiki, Tinderbox Password Management: 1Password Photo Editor: Capture One Photo Management: Capture One, Apple Photos Podcasts: I don’t listen to podcasts RSS: NetNewsWire Read It Later: Omnivore Screenshots: Cleanshot X Search Engine: Kagi Shopping List: Apple Reminders shared with wife Social Networking: Mastodon (web UI) Terminal: iTerm, Kitty Text Editor: Emacs, BBEdit Task Manager: Things, Org-mode (Emacs) Weather: Hello Weather Web Browser: Arc Word Processing: Emacs Org-mode -> LaTeX

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. I use Raycast, and its latest release notes are mostly around features of the $8/month subscription version. I thought, there’s no way I’m paying monthly for what’s basically a glorified app launcher, which brought me back to thinking about Spotlight. My first app launcher was Quicksilver and it immediately became an intregal part of using a Mac. From there I moved to LaunchBar and then to Alfred before settling on Raycast. I still sometimes fire up LaunchBar because it’s great for navigating the filesystem. And it’s faster. ...

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: RSS continues to struggle with maintaining traction, and this doesn’t help.

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 Designed for developers by developers, Weather API is the ultimate weather and geolocation API The free account limits are generous, so I created an account. The default JSON results are very thorough. I created a little shell script that uses jq to parse the JSON and returns only the high/low temps and a text summary of the forecast: ...

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

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

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… 2017-10-15T08:45:06-04:00 Hello, this is a test from twtxt 2017-10-15T08:54:53-04:00 Testing the post_tweet_hook to see that it copies the file to my server 2017-10-15T09:11:16-04:00 Moving my public twtxt.txt to tilde.club/~jbaty/twtxt.txt because it seems fitting there 2017-10-15T16:24:10-04:00 Fun with text tools today https://www.baty.net/2017/some-text-based-things-today/ 2017-10-16T07:17:40-04:00 Good morning, several people! It’s a fun, simple idea; just a text file as social media feed. I’m already spread pretty thin online so it’s only been an occasional toy, but of course someone (James Mills, aka @prologic) is trying to make using the format easier and more approachable by wrapping it in a web UI. Here’s his description from the about page ...