I have spent so much time this past week futzing with my Emacs config. And then futzing with my note-taking process in Emacs. And then reading articles about how other people futz with these things. It occurred to me that I’ve not done much of anything else. So I quit.

Emacs is worse than other software because it’s too damn good at too many things. This sounds like a stupid reason to stop using Emacs, and it kind of is, but I need a break from living neck-deep in it. I need a change in venue.

What usually happens is that after a couple of weeks (sometimes days), I miss it. I miss that it does nearly everything and what it doesn’t do I can make it do, with just a few days of venturing down various rabbit holes. It’s those rabbit holes that get me. And around it goes.

So, for now, I’ll edit text in BBEdit or (gasp!) Vim (an excuse to try the new v9). I’ll keep tasks in Things. I’ll write notes in TheBrain. Everything else I’ll just stop doing, I guess.

“But did you really?” you ask. We’ve been here many times before. But yes, for the moment, I’m going to take a break from Emacs (and :sniff: Org-mode). I have to quit cold turkey or I just keep going back. Let’s see how long it lasts this time.

Shot on HP5 Plus. Developed in HC-110 (dilution B) for five minutes. Scanned on the Epson V750.

The bad guys keep winning. How are we letting this happen over and over?

[People] are far too present and familiar, their every move displayed on social media. That might make you relatable, but it also makes you seem just like everyone else.

Robert Greene

I don’t know how I feel about the idea that posting so much about myself makes me seem the same as everyone else. I always figured it showed how I was different. The very last thing I want to do is be just like everyone else.

I started writing daily notes on my wiki as an alternative to spamming social media feeds with my every passing thought. I moved them to a separate blog because I thought that it was easier for normal people to read than the wiki. Then I rolled them into baty.net and here we are.

But I sometimes worry that I share too much. I worry that there’s nothing left to the imagination. I honestly don’t know if this is a problem or not. I have days I want to burn it all down and pull a _why.

I have a strong feeling that I will die young without artifact. That I will make no lasting impression. This will be my avenue. So hold your horsess I just have a few more things to do in life and I’m sure I’ll be out of your hair.

Why The Lucky Stiff

How could I ever re-invent myself if the self everyone knows is the real one?

The answer is unclear. I share things because it’s the best way I know of to be part of society without actually being part of society. Sharing makes me feel known. It makes me feel like I exist. Writing on my blog rather than on social media feels like a different and better way to feel that way while still being different than everyone else.

I have no real intention of disappearing, but I am re-thinking what it means to be here.

I was riveted for a while, but then I wasn't.

This is what a good time at The Movies means. It's great when a film delivers on its promise and is exactly what it should be.

Vile, disgusting, incoherent, disturbing, and bleak. Also exhilarating and stunningly intricate and beautiful. There is nothing like stop motion and there is nothing like Mad God.

I write my posts in Org-mode and convert them to Hugo-compatible Markdown using ox-hugo. The path from Org-mode to HTML for this is a little convoluted, so I cheat and use a macro to generate the markup.

At the top of my blog.org file, I have defined the following macro:

#+macro: mark @@html:<mark>$1</mark>@@

And when writing posts in Org-mode, I surround the text I want to be highlighted with the macro, like this:

I would like to {{{mark(higlight this text)}}} in the rendered HTML, please

This replaces the text passed to the macro with properly-escaped markup for export. While it’s easy enough to type the macro manually, I’ve created a small elisp function to do it for me:

(defun jab/markregion ()
  "Add a 'mark' macro to the current region (for Hugo)"
  (interactive)
  (if (region-active-p)
      (progn
        (goto-char (region-end))
        (insert ")}}}")
        (goto-char (region-beginning))
        (insert "{{{mark("))))

Now, I can simply highlight some text and call the jab/markregion function and I’m done.

It’s easier and faster than it sounds, really.

Adam Sandler is great when he does a "Good Movie" This was one of them. Too bad it was NBA fan fiction. I don't know basketball.

Speaking of static websites, this site was static just three weeks ago. It’s always a relief moving from a static blog to WordPress or Ghost. Everything becomes so easy! No futzing with rendering or deployment scripts. Images are just there, and properly sized and cached. Mmmm, good. But, easy doesn’t mean fun or nice. There’s no way around the fact that WordPress is big and a bit janky to work with. It may have everything one needs for maintaining a blog, but it also has everything one might possibly ever need. Those things inevitably get in the way and make the experience less fun.

There’s also the permanence thing. For example, my 20-year blog archive just runs on a simple, static, cheap Digital Ocean droplet. I never think about hosting it. I don’t worry (as much) about security or patches or upgrades. It just sits there, idling, almost entirely on its own. And, I always have a rendered version locally, right next to the original Markdown (and Org mode) source files. Everything is managed in Git and backed up easily with a simple file copy.

WordPress, while easy to host, needs to be watched closely and constantly. Things can break. Backups are more complex. Everything is more complex, really.

What it comes down to for me, I think, is that having a static website feels better to me. It feels right.

I love tinkering with different blog engines and methods. I’ll probably always switch between them. It’s fun! But for the long haul, and for peace of mind, I find that running a static site is better for me in the long run.

So don’t be surprised if your RSS feed is pummelled with duplicates again, soon. Sorry again for the noise.

Up all night with an uncomfortable dog. Lots going on today.

An absolute over-the-top blast, start to finish.

I bought a reef tank this week. I’ve always admired salt-water aquariums and wondered what it would be like to keep one. I’m about to find out. I’m already learning that I have a shit-ton to learn. One of those things is patience.

Publicly posting every passing thought is unnecessary and uncalled for, but I can’t seem to stop. At least I’m not spamming everyone’s Twitter feed with them.

Lately, I’ve been feeling hampered by keeping my journal on paper. My handwriting is terrible unless I write very slowly and deliberately. I worry that personal journaling suffers from slow, deliberate writing. I spend too much time deciding between and playing with various writing instruments. I love my fountain pens, but I’m left-handed, and fountain pens are not ideal. The ink and paper must be just right, and that’s hard to arrange.

Eleven years ago I started using Day One, a journaling app for macOS and iOS. Day One is a fantastic app, dedicated to journaling. I’ve used it intermittently ever since.

What this has meant is that I’ve been keeping a journal in both paper and digital formats. This doesn’t make sense.

I love (I mean, love) having the artifact of a paper journal. Just seeing all those filled notebooks lining my shelves is comforting. It may be comforting, but it’s not useful. I’m starting to feel like I need more usefulness in my tools.

Journaling offers different benefits to different people. For some, the simple act of writing down one’s thoughts is enough. I love that part of it. However, I also love searching for things my past self has written. Not browsing, searching. They’re different. Browsing old paper journals is a favorite pastime of mine, but more often it would be handy to be able to look for specific things I’d written. I could keep a detailed paper index, but I’m not even close to disciplined enough to maintain that. I’ve tried. It’s awful.

Being able to paste in texts or emails from family and friends is another bonus with digital journaling. Or quotes, or tweets. Sure, there’s a certain romance to transcribing quotes by hand, but in reality, I rarely do it.

And then there are images. I have a big Moleskine notebook that serves as both a journal and a photo album/scrapbook. It’s beautiful and, again, a wonderful physical artifact. But, I need to be in the right mood or it doesn’t get updated. Day One pulls photos in from my photo library and fits them nicely into the day’s entry. Hard to beat that kind of convenience.

As for artifacts, I print my digital Day One journal every month and put the pages into a binder. It’s not quite as lovely an artifact as a hand-written paper notebook, but it’s pretty good. And Day One lets me print a real book from entries, which I’ve started doing annually. The books might be even nicer than paper notebooks.

I don’t think I’ll ever be able to stop writing in paper notebooks completely, but for the moment, most of my writing will be digital. I’ll pick up the notebook now and then and write a little. One thing I’ve learned is that no matter how infrequent the entries, the result is still valuable. This way, I’ll have most of my writing in a convenient digital format, backed up on paper. I’ll also have beautiful, timeless paper notebooks so that future generations can throw them away, unread.

I love “Ted Lasso” and I love Roy Kent. I also feel the same way about watching horrible things happening to people in my “entertainment”. I approve of the trend of “Nice TV” that Brett is contributing to.

“I do think there is so much stuff put out into the world on the internet and in art that tells you the world is bad. And the world might be bad — but the majority of people are not. Also, the older I get, the less horrible shit I want to see. I hate seeing people get hurt”

Brett Goldstein (aka Roy Kent), The Sunday Times

I don’t know what to do about this, or if something even needs doing. I’m just making a note of it. I still dream of having One True Website but we all know that will probably remain nothing more than a dream.

The usual suspects, namely, photos of my dog and self-portraits.

Update, 1 day later: I've gone back to the “Blog” format. Still not sure which I prefer. Discuss...

My sister got another new dog yesterday. A pug rescue named Pepper.

The Q2M is a nearly perfect walk-around, everyday camera for someone who wants to focus purely on making black and white images. That describes me perfectly, for a while. I love B&W photographs and the Q2M makes them as good or better than anything available. I love how using a B&W-only sensor forces me to think in tones, shades, and lighting.

But, and there’s always a “but”, my use of the camera is mostly while hanging around with family or out at dinner, etc. As an everyday carry camera, I am often asked by family members if they could “see the color version” and they are disappointed when I tell them there is no such thing. After a while, I start to feel like I want the option to shoot black and white, but not always.

I also have a beautiful M10-R which is always just begging to be used. The decision about which camera to bring is crazy-making for me, so I now have fewer choices, which I am telling myself is a good thing.

My “kit” now consists of the Leica M10-R and Leica MP. It’s great being able to use the same lenses on both film and digital bodies. And there really is nothing that compares with an M.

The biggest gap this leaves is that I still need something for casual carry. Something with auto-focus and macro capabilities that I can shoot one-handed. The M cameras leave me without any of that and I often miss it. For now, I’m filling that gap with the little Ricoh GRIII. It’s a great, tiny, easily-pocketable camera that should do just fine.

I’ll miss the Q2M, but for now, I’m going to work with what I have, and what I have is pretty great. But don’t be surprised if my next post discusses something entirely different.

How is it possible I had that much fun?

It pretty much is what it is, which is fine. Good to see some cameos from a few favorite bands, too.

Discuss...

After a week or more of non-stop tinkering with nearly every bit of software on my Mac, I had a fit and decided to switch things up. I now have an iPad Pro (11-inch) with Smart Keyboard. The idea is that the software I use on iOS is less prone to tweaking. Plus, I’m not always futzing with shell aliases and other CLI tools just for fun. I’m not tempted by a 32-inch screen peppered with windows just begging me to play with them. I’m still thinking Reset to Defaults.

I just want to read and write. Maybe doodle a little. And I want to do it digitally and on paper. Hence, the “hybrid” idea.

So I have a limited-capacity device alongside my paper notebooks and index cards. I took over the unused upstairs bedroom (which used to by my office anyway) and cleaned out everything I don’t need. This is the first iteration. I’d like to keep it minimal so I’m not adding things until I feel I need them.

I smiled the entire time. What more can I ask for?

I’m calling it an experiment, and I’m naming it “Reset to Defaults”.

The idea is to revert to stock macOS apps where feasible, or simple and established apps otherwise, and avoid tools that lend themselves to constant tweaking. This hurts because tweaking is what I spend much of my time doing. I enjoy it! But, it’s a distraction and I should do less of it. To this end, I’ve restructured task management, blogging, journaling, note-taking, photo editing, file management, etc.

Yesterday I wrote that I no longer wanted to talk about my process. Yet, here I am talking about my process. I’m doing it because this is what helps me sort things out and remember how they were sorted. So, what the hell, let’s make it a blog post.

Here’s what I’m trying.

Apple Reminders for task management. Reminders has gotten much better recently. There’s smart lists, tags, the works. It’s a very capable app and integrates with everything, so I’m trying it. This change has the highest chance of failure, because I don’t like Reminders. I don’t like how it feels or how it handles notes or how I need to click in a certain area to select things or that it adds a new reminder every time I simply click in an empty space below the list. Anyway, we’ll see. There’s a 50% chance I’ll be back in Things and a 25% chance I’ll be back in Org mode for my tasks.

Apple Notes for notes. What?! That’s right, I’m writing all my “evergreen” notes in Apple’s venerable Notes app. I have to say, Notes is really nice, once one lets go of “IT MUST BE MARKDOWN” or whatever. It doesn’t have to be Markdown, btw, if you’re not converting your writing to HTML or some other format. I have zero fear of lock-in and there are various methods of saving notes as text or other formats. I’m trying to get over wringing my hands about all that.

Day One for personal journaling. I have 3,671 entries in Day One going back to 2011. Each of them has location and weather info, along with date and time. Many have photos or other images. I can filter and export them any way I see fit, to text, Markdown, PDF, or HTML. I can order a nice printed book from any selection of entries. I can journal on my iPhone or iPad. I can hook it into other tools using the CLI if I want. And I spend almost no time tweaking it. I just type and save. Day One was my default journaling app for years and I’m going to try it again for a while.

WordPress for blogging. I know, I know, we’ve all been around this block before. But using a CMS that does everything, pretty easily, and without much fuss is what I’m looking for right now, so WordPress it is.

Of course there are always a bunch of supporting players, and I’m evaluating how I use those too. For now, this feels like I’m using the tools that I would use if I didn’t think too hard about tooling. Let’s see what happens this time.

There’s no honest justification for moving back to WordPress other than “I wanted to.” Over the past couple of weeks I have been running an experiment I’m calling Reset to Defaults. Basically, I’m trying to stop the ever-expanding complexity of my “system” by reverting to default apps and processes. I’m avoiding tools that lend themselves to endless tweaking.

How does WordPress fit into this? I’m not sure it does. My rationalization is that WordPress is easy, free (I already have a server), and does everything I need right out of the box. 1 click. But mostly it’s because the “default” way for me to blog is to hit a “Create Post” button…type some stuff…and hit “Publish”. WordPress lets me do that. I need not worry about deployment scripts or format conversions or image resizing or local dependencies or any of that. Click…type…click. It’s not cool, but it’s good at what it does.

The following self-portrat was the best of the bunch, but I didn’t realize that my head was in direct sunlight. I’m still clumsy with the Linhof but it’s fun trying.

For a previous failure, see The Grafmatic back (and yet another 4×5 failure)

Pretty great, but maybe there is such a thing as too much of a good thing.

Well, that was impressive. Weird and brutal. Beautiful.

The problem is that having to access the Function layer (for arrow keys, etc.) using my pinky is causing discomfort in my hand. On the one hand (pun!), I’m good at using the function key to access the arrow keys. They are close by so it’s actually faster and easier than on keyboards with dedicated arrow keys. This took me a long time to realize, but now that I’m used to it, other keyboards feel less efficient. But, on the other hand (again!), I don’t enjoy the pain in my hand.

I’m going to reset for a bit and give the pinky a break. I’m taking the lazy way out and just using the Apple Magic Keyboard. The Apple keyboards are fine, and as a bonus, the layout matches the MacBook Pro keyboard so switching is less jarring. Still, it’s a shame.

Here’s my setup today. (Notice my poor HHKB cowering in the shadows.)

There’s no Off button. I hate this. I don’t use them every day, and if I don’t remember to either plug them in or put them in the case (for “low power mode” or whatever it is), the batteries are often dead when I go to use them.

They feel unstable on my head. I can’t figure out what it is about the way the AirPods Max fit, but I find that I’m always aware of them on my head and am constantly adjusting them. Maybe it’s because of my giant head, but they aren’t as comfortable as they should be.

They steal audio from the AppleTV. Occasionally, when my wife is doing a workout using the AppleTV in the next room, I’ll put on the AirPods, and they steal audio from the TV instead of connecting to my Mac, which is right in front of me. I haven’t been able to figure out why this happens, but it bugs both of us.

I can’t stand the clicking sound they make when moving them around. If the AirPods are folded flat, they bang together when I pick them up and move them around. The sound is like fingernails on a chalkboard to me. Why is nobody talking about this?

The “case” is stupid. Who approved that thing?

I wish I enjoyed them more. Spatial audio is nice, and the noise canceling works great. They sound really good, too. However, and as much as I hate wires, I find myself plugging in the Sennheiser HD 650s most of the time instead. The 650s fit perfectly, sound even better, don’t need charging, and never do anything wrong.

While farting around with Curio exports, I tried exporting a few entries as HTML and was surprised how much fidelity is maintained when exporting. For giggles, I uploaded a few days’ exports to a web server. I had a crazy idea that this could be a daily blog. Here is my test site.

It’s neat, right? I slap images, notes, cards, mindmaps, lists, anything on the day’s entry, and it ends up as a web page.

While a fun experiment, I don’t think it makes sense long-term, since the resulting web pages are a mess on mobile, offer no accessibility, and managing navigation, etc. is a pain. Still, it’s a neat trick and I may throw pages out there every once in a while, just for fun.

This one is special.

As solid as it gets. Tight, fun, no gimmicks, and features the absolutely fantastic Mark Rylance.

Well, that was brutal and disturbing. What a terrific debut.

Alice got me up at 3:00 am WHY ALICE!? :)

Please stop using Discord.

New Note: Saving a Maildir email as .eml using Mu4e

Why am I even here?

Can't wait for Mr. Robot season 15 to start

New note: Org mode custom link types

Canceled my MailBrew subscription. Don't need it. I happened to check on it the day before it was scheduled to renew for $99. Love when that happens, but they should always send a notice of renewal in advance.

Every email I send using Mu4e goes to spam. I have no idea why but I'm back to Mail.app because who needs that kind of grief.

I learned today that an app I built back in the early 2000s is still being used and the company still loves it. IIRC it was written in 4th Dimension. Wow.

People sure overthink the shit out of Batman. I was an hour and a half in before I realized it was only half over. Decided I didn't need another 90 minutes of dark, wet, and broody so I shut it off

So, kinda nunsploitation, but really well-done nunsploitation and I loved it.

Some of the slowest bits were dreamlike and mesmerizing. Others bored me to tears. It was worth finding out which were which.

This reminded me how much I miss my shepherd. His name was Zim and he was a good boy.

That was amazing

Watched on Friday April 15, 2022.

Dark and Twisted Amélie.

That was a blast.

Wildly unfunny while trying way to hard to be wildly funny.

I'm sure it deserved all its awards, but it didn't move the needle a lot with me.

📌 I’m testing the idea of rolling these daily posts into my main blog at baty.net.

I'm so high on nostalgia right now.

Severence is the best thing on TV.

I should take a closer look at sourcehut

Trying jimeh/emacs-builds: Self-contained Emacs.app builds for macOS, with native-compilation support in nightly builds. Rather than the emacs-mac package. UPDATE Nope, doesn’t work yet on M1 Macs.

I deleted PhotoPrism from the Synology. It was chewing up all my (4GB) of RAM and generally causing things to misbehave. I suppose Synology Photos will have to do for now.

I still don’t know the difference between my “Daybook” and “Journal”. I know what I think the difference is, but I get lost in the grey area in the middle. I suppose the Daybook is for things I want to show up in the Agenda on that day. Things for which the date is important.

I made some prints this morning. I am trying to make at least one or two 5x7" prints from each roll (in addition to a contact sheet). I’m not fussy about it. I guess at exposure time and print. I only re-print if my guess was horribly wrong. Otherwise, they’re good enough. Anything “special” gets the real treatment by printing an 8x10" print on fiber paper.

I added Plausible analytics to jack.micro.blog, baty.net, and daily.baty.net. I’m already generating reports using GoAccess for my self-hosted sites, but it’s hard to parse what’s a real “visit” through all that noise. Plausible is great, cheap, and doesn’t track anything other than hits, so it’s pretty privacy-safe.

Upgraded Emacs to 28.1. Here’s a nice summary of changes.

Today, I shall improve something. It doesn’t matter what that something is.

I am considering some form of internet hiatus. Social media, mainly. We all suspect it’s not healthy, but I’m still addicted and feel like a break would do me good. Can I manage to only post on the blogs and only read my (fairly limited) set of RSS feeds? Is that enough?

How many of the super-cool things I can do with Org mode are actually useful and not just super-cool things that I think are super-cool?

I wonder if this is related to the USB ports not working on my LG display? Users Report External Monitor Issues After Updating to macOS Monterey 12.3 - MacRumors. I don’t think so. I unplugged the monitor and plugged it back in and it all works again :).

Mowglii - Itsycal for Mac - Tiny menu bar calendar. Similar to Dato

Great, I thought I’d try PhotoPrism on the Synology so I installed it, pointed it at a few thousand photos, and now it took down the whole synology by chewing through all its memory. Nice.

Good morning. It’s 4:25 am and I should probably be doing something useful today, but so far it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen.

So, I replaced baty.net with a Hugo-based version of the blog. All the content from the WordPress site has been migrated. Well, most of it. Some formatting got all blowed up. This is why I swore I’d never do it again, but here we are. I just got tired of pushing up against all the stuff that is WordPress. (18 hours later) . I just switched DNS back and forth twice today. I honestly don’t know which site I want to use.

Ordered: The Real Deal: The Good, The Bad and the Beautiful of a Life Behind the Camera « Joe McNally Photography

Tried LaunchBar 6 for a minute, just to see what was up, as it’s been years. Nah, back to Raycast.

Sleeve — Now playing on your Desktop

Fixed the issue with ox-hugo failing to export subtrees if the file has org-roam links in it.

I don’t need a “better” terminal but Introducing Warp: The Terminal for the 21st Century | Warp

I’m feeling the weight of WordPress pushing against the inconvenience of maintaining a static blog. The past couple of days, I have found myself happier dealing with the inconvenience. So, I’ve rebuilt all of baty.net using Hugo. Content has been imported and it’s ready to go. All I need to do is sync it up to a virtual host on my VPS and update the DNS. But, I’m going to sit on this a bit to see how I feel. I’d hate for it to just have been my mood this morning.

I read the headlines from the Grammys and didn’t recognize any of the performers mentioned. I’m old and I guess I can officially stop caring about the Grammys.

the days of usenet, irc, the web…even email (w PGP)…were amazing. centralizing discovery and identity into corporations really damaged the internet.

I realize I’m partially to blame, and regret it.

Jack Dorsey

I’m feeling the need for convenience today. Also feeling very pointy-clicky. This doesn’t bode well for my current setup. It’ll pass.

If I were to be described as a “Man of letters” after I’m gone, I would consider my life to have been a success. I wonder why I’ve not done anything in support of that.

“…takes the biscuit” is a phrase I’m definitely going to be using more.

I just need to remind anyone using Org mode and Hugo that ox-hugo - Org to Hugo exporter is the absolute bee’s knees.

There’s something I’m eating that doesn’t agree with me. Probably ice cream. My stomach is a mess this morning.

I want to make one of these Penkesu Computer - A Homebrew Retro-style Handheld PC | penkesu

I just happened to already be in Emacs so I thought I’d write here for a spell. It’s no joke 😉. Which reminds me that today is the best day to stay off the internet.

I’ve been publishing a few of the notes from my Org-roam database over at notes.baty.net just in case they might be useful to someone somewhere. I also like to browse them as decent-looking (read-only) HTML files instead of from within Emacs all the time. I’m using a version of the same “CodeIt” theme I used to use for baty.net. Ideally I’d list the categories on the home page rather than a list of recent posts, but Hugo’s templating system is completely unfathomable to me so I’m leaving it alone for now. Another thing I’m doing “wrong” is putting the theme’s git repo right in the themes folder. No submodules, no hugo modules. I’m just editing in place. Hell, I might just stop keeping it as a separate repo :).

After I don’t even know how many years, I’ve canceled my Dropbox account

I thought I’d lost my entire archive of posts from the original baty.net but accidentally ran into it on Github yesterday. Whew!

Don’t tell anyone, but I’m thinking about selling the M10-R again. That would put me at a 4-month period of buying and selling two of them. I just can’t get over feeling guilty about having so much money tied up in a camera that I’m hardly using. It worries me that something could go wrong with it or it would get broken or stolen and I’d be out all that money. I don’t like feeling this way. Still noodling on it.

You’re you, and your pictures are yours, and what you bring to a photograph is not separate from it.

Your Camera Roll Contains a Masterpiece | The New Yorker

Maccy - macOS clipboard manager

I made some prints from 4x5 negatives this morning using the big Beseler in a spare bedroom. It was cool that I could do it, but there's something wrong with the enlarger. The filter mechanism is janky and the "white light" indicator doesn't come on unless I do things in a certain order, and when the indicator is on, the lamp doesn't work.

I hate capitalism but I need money and I want things, so ¯_(ツ)_/¯

I changed the default journal tiddler title again. Just because.

I wish I was someone else, but I can't decide who, so I try being everyone.

Could not care less about the drama at the Oscars.

Another thing I don't need more of is articles about quitting. Quitting social media. Quitting your phone. Quitting some service. It's almost a certainty that you or I won't be adding anything new to the conversation. Maybe just quit without telling everyone.

Heh. I spent 2 hours today in TheBrain and thinking about OmniFocus. I considered moving project stuff out of Emacs and into TheBrain. While looking for information about a project, I found it easily in Emacs and org-roam made it easy to spot related information so I quit. Emacs is great and fine and I should just stop thinking about anything else.

How many times do I have to say "I don't care about X" before I realize that lately I don't care much about anything? Snap out of it, dude!

Earlier this week I wrote this:

I don't want to have to decide where to publish things. I want to publish things everywhere and let my mood guide me.

I don't think that's right. What I think I meant was this:

I don't want to have to decide where to publish things. I want to only have one place to publish them so I don't have to decide.

I spent too much time yesterday messing with the ThinkPad X1 Carbon trying to get it upgraded. The Regolith updates caused the thing to hang on boot so I figured I'd give Pop!_OS another go but that wouldn't boot if I opted for encryption during the install. Ok fine, let's go simple with Linux Mint. That installed fine, so I started down the path of getting all my shit installed but realized I'd shedded all of my syncing and shared configuration worries when I got down to a single Mac. So I started moving my dotfiles, fish config, etc. to shared folders that I could sync with Syncthing (which I had to re-install). Then of course the Emacs config had Mac-specific paths and such. I shut the ThinkPad and think I'll put it back in storage. It's not time for Linux yet. When and if it is, it's going to have to be all Linux. I'm not interested in doing the multi-OS thing anymore.

I don't understand these. They look nice, but they're still just nice fake Speedmasters. Joint Mission: Launch of the BIOCERAMIC MoonSwatch

Beautiful. Melancholy. Rewards patience.

I've been writing online for more than 20 years. Mostly about writing online.

I feel like playing with Linux today.

After a couple of weeks with Espanso, I'm quite happy with it. I wish that the configuration files were somewhere more convenient. And that espanso edit used my $EDITOR like it's supposed to, but the actual expansion features have quite easily replaced those in Keyboard Maestro.

Ok, I think I got the Daily-Notes-with-Emacs out of my system for now. 👋.

I don't want to have to decide where to publish things. I want to publish things everywhere and let my mood guide me.

Content doesn't need to be portable if you never move it.

I wish people would blog more than they tweet.

This wiki has search built in. My Hugo-based site does not. I'd rather just UWYH and not figure out search over there.

Blog Post: Aligning comments in Emacs – Jack Baty

Still amazing. Almost anything else you could spend an hour on would be worse.

I've spent hours configuring my Org-roam setup so I can publish certain notes as a website. It's so cool, but in the end I'm not sure it offers clear advantages over this wiki other than that I can make some of my roam notes public without needing to rewrite them in TiddlyWiki. WIP is here: notes.baty.net

I'm so into Emacs right now. I may be posting at daily.baty.net for a bit until I get it out of my system.

So far this morning I’ve written notes in Emacs, Roam, TiddlyWiki, and Logseq. JFC what’s wrong with me? This is after spending a good part of the last few days dialing in my Emacs config for capturing, writing, publishing, etc. UWYH (Use What You Have), remember? I do, but I have everything.

All of our smoke detectors started chirping at the same time last night. No smoke or fire. After an hour of walking around with that ear-piercing shrill, we noticed water coming out of one of the detectors in the basement. The one directly below the kitchen sink. Leaky garbage disposal. I removed the detector, which had shorted out (causing the ruckus). Turned off the water supply to the sink, and went to bed. Today is garbage disposal replacement day.

The conflict for me happens when I can’t decide if it matters to me how things are done. For example, film photographs mean more to me than digital photographs, so I tend to prefer using film because of how the photos are made. Otherwise, digital gets the job done and is 1,000% easier. Similarly, using Emacs for notes and tasks and blogging is, for me, the correct way to handle things. Plain text, consistent environment, free and open source. On the other hand, using Things and DEVONthink and WordPress sure is pretty and easy.

I updated this site’s RSS feed to only include type “post”. By default everything is included and this meant things like the About page were in the RSS feed.

I used to love programming and computers because I could make them do things. I still probably could, but I no longer know what I want them to do.

I’ve spent hours configuring my Org-roam setup so I can publish certain notes as a website. It’s so cool, but in the end I’m not sure it offers clear advantages over the wiki other than that I can make some of my roam notes public without needing to rewrite them in TiddlyWiki. WIP is here: notes.baty.net. Later: now I’ve realized that I can simply add some ox-hugo metadata to any of my Org files and have them publish to this daily notes blog. Like so…

1
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#+hugo_base_dir: ~/sites/daily.baty.net/
#+hugo_section: ./notes/

Now what!?

Apparently I have too much time on my hands.

I went into the darkroom to test a new safelight bulb and made a handful of 5x7 prints while I was in there. I love real photos. The decision to print a photo automatically makes that photo special.

Ordered a book: No One Is Talking about This - a book by Patricia Lockwood

“Computational Photography” can fuck right off.

I see no evidence that anyone involved with making Amélie was responsible for this.

Well that was the last night of managing all the dogs on my own. Dealing with the little dogs is not my favorite thing.

I'm trying (again) to get my head around using Docker but it's a non-stop festival of dead ends and frustration.

Reynolds doing the only thing Reynolds knows how to do is fine, but man I hated that kid.

Well that was beautiful.

Writing in Emacs is great. Static websites are great. Using Emacs to manage and deal with content for a static website exhausts me eventually. Doesn’t bode well for this site, although it’s probably just my mood today.

I follow Matt Osbourne (aka Mr. Leica) on Flickr because he plays with just about every combination of lens and camera you could think of. Also, the lovely models don’t hurt. Thing is, with all the fuss about camera/lens combinations, all the images look basically the same. The biggest difference is film vs digital but otherwise I’d be hard-pressed to tell one from the other.

You can see below that I’m experimenting with subheadings within daily posts. This is for things that are more than one paragraph of text or text and images. There’s a way to copy a link to the heading, but it only makes sense on an individual day’s page. Not sure if I’ll find it useful, but let’s try it.

You’re not suffering from ‘vicarious trauma’, you’re tweeting in your living room

Silver gelatin fiber prints

I’m not sure darkroom printing on fiber paper is worth the trouble. I love the way fiber prints look and feel, but they take twice as long to develop and an hour to wash, then this happens when they dry.

I don't have a better ass joke, sorry.

WordPress is fine. Medium is fine. Facebook is fine. Twitter is fine. Mastodon is fine. Your self-hosted static-HTML website is fine. Instagram is fine. A typewriter in your basement is fine. Write wherever you feel like writing. Me? I like writing everywhere. Today, I’m here. Or perhaps more precisely, this morning, I’m here.

There’s nothing like an open Emacs frame narrowed to today’s post here. I write, save, export, and done. Repeat as needed throughout the day.

One day, if I’m lucky, I’ll be busy actually doing something and won’t have time to write here all day.

Dazzling and terrifically well-made. Visually stunning and occasionally breathtaking. Spielberg is a genius. And yet, and I'm not sure how this is possible, I was kind of bored.

I fire up a new post every morning, either here or on the wiki (often in both places) and add to it (them) throughout the day. I don’t really know why. It’s as if I’m worried that I’ll no longer exist if I stop publishing every passing thought.

I spent the morning reassembling the turret on the Focomat IIc, then attempting to print from 6x6 negatives. It’s possible, but far from ideal. The head needs to be too close to the base, making for very short exposures. I’m also struggling with the autofocus mechanism, but that’s probably just me. I think I’ll hold off on 6x6 printing until I have the 100mm lens issue solved for real.

This makes me want to take another swing at Standard Notes: Why so many editors? | Crafting Privacy

The fact that I often cannot tell the difference between someone being smart and someone trying to sound smart gives you an idea of how smart I am.

I’m now running both Alfred and Raycast at the same time. I’m using Raycast for launching, clipboards, etc. and keeping Alfred running for a couple of workflows and “Universal Actions”. Why not? Although I may decide to reverse their roles at some point.

Monday: Ima use TiddlyWiki for everything!
Tuesday: Logseq! I need to put everything into Logseq!
Wednesday: What was I thinking? Emacs is life!
Thursday: ???

One nice feature of using Hugo for this site is that I haven’t felt a need to futz with it in a while. I just write, save, and type “make deploy”.

I love having a big screen, but hate managing windows. I can’t help but be distracted by background windows so I either fart around moving things to spaces or I hide them. As a test, I’m trying Hazeover (HazeOver: Distraction Dimmer™ for Productivity on Mac) to see if just auto-dimming the unfocused windows will help. Otherwise, I unplug the laptop and use the smaller screen and it’s often a relief.

I find myself withdrawing at a time when I should be participating.

Painting with John is a dumb, silly little miracle of a show and it’s still my favorite thing.

I love this blog and wiki.baty.net equally.

Looking at my baty.net stats. Is this what they mean by “trending”?

You can’t make fun of me if I’m not trying.

Fountain pens > Pencils. But not by as much as I thought.

I think we should all go back to Tumblr and Flickr. Who’s with me!?

I see they’ve kicked DHH off the Railsconf keynote this year. Part of me thinks they should have, because he’s being not just being normally dickish, he’s been loudly and repeatedly wrong about so many things recently. On the other hand, let him talk about Rails. Good grief, he still basically is Rails. I think he’s wrong, not dangerous, sheesh. There’s a difference.

“Book of Boba Fett” is terrible. He should’ve been left as a cool, mysterious background character.

It seems I’ve settled on wiki.baty.net as the wiki domain. “rl.baty.net” still works, but is discouraged.

Derek Sivers says Write plain text files and I mostly agree with him. Except if the plain text format makes what you’re actually doing more difficult, then don’t. I’d rather have a useful document now even if there’s a chance that one day, maybe, possibly, it could become unreadable. Future-proof-but-shitty is not my first choice.

I’ve modified things so that the home page shows the past 30 days rather than 7. Since there’s no search here yet, I figure CMD-f will let you search the past month. If it’s older than that, it’s probably no longer valid anyway 😆.

I’ve removed Disqus comments from this site. No reason other than it’s overhead I don’t need and I rarely see any comments anyway. Whatzamatta with you people?! Send me an email or something, sheesh.

I don’t usually panic when some random company I use is acquired but goddammit! Bandcamp is Joining Epic Games – Bandcamp Updates. How can that be good? Tell me it can be good. Please?!

It occurs to me that we didn’t name web1 and web2 ahead of time. We just labeled them that later. Now we’re inventing web3 and trying to make everything into that. It’s a bad idea from the start.

Speaking of Web3, there’s now Blogchain.app. I read How Blogchain is different by capsule on Blogchain and I don’t see how it’s meaningfully better or solves actual problems in any unique way. It’s what, WordPress with backups and a social element? Big whoop.

I don’t want to waste time watching a movie that I don’t like but I have no problem just browsing the trailers for an hour and never watching anything

Simon is right: Don’t default to building an SPA

Astonishing, complicated, and I don't even know what.

Looking at the server analytics (I use GoAccess - Visual Web Log Analyzer) for this site shows that a large majority of “hits” are to the RSS feed. This makes me feel a little bad about posting so much over on the wiki. I know I keep saying that my daily notes are “for me” but that guilt I feel makes me think otherwise.

Oh cool, I posted on my Tumblr this morning.

I put a roll through the IIIC. It was fun. It’s a nice lens.

My subscription to Reid Reviews has expired. I’m off subscriptions right now so I’m not going to renew yet. It’s a great resource, but focuses so much on the micro-differences between lenses and sensors and I’m not really interested in that lately.

Am I thinking about Ukraine? Of course I’m thinking about Ukraine. I’m terrified.

I am, slowly but surely, becoming bored. Not having a job is great, but I’ll need to feel useful eventually.

Good morning. Today should be “finish taxes day” but I hate doing taxes so it may be another “find a new place to blog” and “read about cameras” day.

Thoroughly enjoyed this. It was cute, and that's enough.

This was just really fun to watch. I was disappointed with the ending...a little.

Well, that was weird. I spent the entire film grinning and being amazed by everything about it. Then, 30 minutes after it ended, I wondered what it was for and felt that it was empty, somehow. Now, I can't wait to see it again.

I like him. It started with the Beatles but certainly didn't stop there. The guy got the shot. A well-mannered bulldog.

I wish I cared more about NYC. Powell took advantage of some early serendipity and always had a camera with him. He ran with it. Good for him.

Watched on Tuesday February 15, 2022.

This review may contain spoilers.

This movie did not contain even a whiff of what made the original so great. I added a star for the glorious few minutes I got to spend with Dr. Venkman and friends again. But I was so pissed at the rest of the film by then it took the fun out of seeing Egon and it was too late for me to be emotional about reconciliation.

I'm not sure I know any more about Frank than I did before, but it was interestingly made and fun to watch.

It's perfect

This movie made me feel good.

Watched on Friday December 31, 2021.

Mildly entertaining.

I thought it was fun.

It was fine.

Better than I remember.

It was interesting and I had fun. And moon hair.

An extra half star for being about saving a dog. Otherwise, there was nothing here for me.

I hear complaints that this movie is less about the Williams sisters and more about their father. These are not unfounded, but the film is, after all, titled "King Richard" so I feel like expectations were set going in.

Technically wonderful. Visually stunning. Stylistically exhilarating. Audibly enjoyable. Actors? Fantastic.

Script? Ho-hum. I mean like really ho-hum.

Could have been titled, "Hey look! I'm friends with Kurt Vonnegut!" but I'm a Vonnegut fan so that's OK.

An inspiring reminder of what's important to me.

Watched on Sunday November 21, 2021.

Riveting.

• Drowning by Numbers
• Big Night
• Raising Arizona
• Paddington 2
• Magnolia
• After Hours
• Holy Motors
• 2001: A Space Odyssey
• Winter's Bone
• The Lure

...plus 43 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.