The idea is that it will help me focus on photography, which is something I want to do, but haven’t been doing. Sometimes I need a nudge, so baty.photo is a nudge.

See Why do I need a separate site for photography? for a bit more detail.

Follow on the Fediverse using @jack@baty.photo if you like.

My daily notebook is the popular Leuchtturm 1917. I’m using the 120g version, because I dislike bleedthrough and that’s some big fat paper. My mistake was ordering the dotgrid version. I chose dotgrid because I tend to use it like a Bullet Journal, and often like to line things up, vertically. The problem is that the dotgrids use 5mm spacing. That’s too small. Squeezing a row of cursive handwriting into a 5mm space using my medium-nib fountain pen isn’t working. I’m learning that I prefer 7mm ruled pages, Or maybe blank pages.

Someone on YouTube mentioned that they love the Tamoe River notebooks. I’ve been a fan of Tamoe River paper for many years, so I ordered a blank one.

The idea was to use it for free-form morning writing. I grabbed a couple of my favorite pens, loaded with my favorite ink, and wrote a couple of pages. Then I looked on the reverse of one of those pages, and saw this mess:

My copy must be defective, because otherwise the “new” Tamoe River paper is no longer suitable for fountain pen use. That would be a shame. So now I’m writing in the new notebook with a pencil, which of course works fine, but seems like a waste of what should be a great fountain pen notebook.

I got so frustrated that I slammed my notebook(s) closed and put them up on a shelf, saying, “That’s it for now. My journal goes digital!” I’ll get over it and probably start all over again tomorrow, I love pen and paper, but it sure can be frustrating.

I guess I don’t understand why blurring my “content” behind semi-transparent UI controls is any better than hiding it behind easily-distinguished UI controls. The content itself is unusable either way, so why not make the controls easier to see/use?

What do we think about about the whole /notes implementation here? I don’t think I like it. I don’t feel like creating a whole thing every time I want to share whatever useless thought pops into my head. OTOH, I don’t much like putting everything into these daily posts, either. Not on this blog, in this format, anyway. On the other hand, why not just do it here? Problem is already solved, right?

Can you tell there’s something going on with me? I don’t feel like thinking about all the details and options with everything I do. Is it possible to underthink thinks? Because that’s what I’d like to do for a while.

“I’ve decided to use Emacs for my notes” doesn’t really narrow my options all that much, since Emacs is a self-contained infinity of choices all by itself.

I’m reluctantly realizing that most of my cassettes sound like shit. I’m not talking about the inherent limitations of the format. I mean that my specific copies are terrible.

I read about a Leica gathering, where someone wrote, “…you can learn a lot about someone’s journey just by the glass they’re rocking.” That’s three words (journey, glass, and rocking) in one sentence that I’ll never use that way in any sentence. Also, no you can’t.

• Used (only one) digital camera
• Put my photos in one big Lightroom Classic catalog
• Or maybe just used my iPhone with Apple Photos

I saw a post where someone complained that the timeline for some community was “…a sanitized version of reality.” My question is, must every “community” always, no matter what, include content from every possible awful corner of the universe? If I wanted “reality”, I’d go read about it, or visit just about every other timeline on the internet. I know shit is terrible, that’s why I’m hanging out in this nice space for a spell…as a respite. Is it not OK to want to be mildly entertained and amused for a little while? I mean, we don’t bitch about, say, The Disney Channel existing, do we? I don’t believe people have the right to demand that every space conform to every situation.

I turn 61 years old, today. That seems like a lot.

For some reason, I can’t get a markdown-mode-hook to fire and call olivetti-mode when I open a Markdown file in an Emacs buffer. I’m using the exact method that works with org-mode files. It’s a small annoyance, but this is why I sometimes want to quit.

Ozzy died today. For a long time, I expected this to happen any minute. He didn’t exactly live a healthy lifestyle. After a certain point, though, it seemed like he might live forever. His “Blizzard of Ozz” tour in 1981 was one of the of the first concerts I saw. I remember leaning my head into a speaker cone, because LOUDER!

The post, From Obsidian to Emacs, by Mike Hostetler, mentioned using the Xeft package, so I thought I’d try it. Here’s my config:

(use-package xeft
  :ensure t
  :defer t
  :config
  (setq xeft-recursive t)
  (setq xeft-database "~/.deft.db")
  (setq xeft-directory "/Users/jbaty/Documents/Notes/Vault/")
  (setq xeft-ignore-extension '("png" "jpg" "jpeg"))
  (setq xeft-extensions '("md"))
  (setq xeft-title-function #'file-name-nondirectory))

Xeft relies on Xapian for searches, so a module needs to be downloaded or built locally. I didn’t have any luck with the downloaded version, so I deleted the package, started over, and had it compile locally. The trick there was entering the prefix “/opt/homebrew” during installation, since I’d already installed Xapian using Homebrew.

Here’s what a search for “linhof” looks like:

Normally I use a small lisp function in Emacs for creating posts, but that doesn’t help me on days that I don’t feel like using Emacs¹.

Another option would be to use the built-in hugo commands, but for some reason I never think of that. Probably because it requires that I cd to the right place and tell it what to name the file.

Mike Hall recently published an update to the Ruby script he uses. It’s called hpost.

I used hpost to create this post. Worked fine, but made me think about how I might do it, given some private time with Claude.

• I wouldn’t use Ruby. It’s a nice language, but dependencies and version management confound me. Same with Python. I bet it could be done using bash. Or maybe Go, which would be Hugo-appropriate.
• New posts would go in dated folders (e.g. /posts/2025/07/my-new-post.md)
• I’d offer a choice to use a Hugo bundle (/my-post/index.md vs my-post.md) to make it easier to include images.
• Including a slug: entry in the front matter would be nice for maintaining URL consistency in case of title changes.
• Daily Notes would have to conform to my own conventions (/journal/2025/07-july/20250718/index.md)

What I’ll likely do in real life is to continue using Emacs for creating posts. I’ve got Dired bookmarks for getting to previous posts, dwim commands for building/deploying, etc. hpost (or equivalent) is still nice for days like today when I’m off Emacs.