I plan to avoid most news and all social media for a week. It's to the point where, between the daily barrage of horrible, incompetent people doing stupid, horrible things and the incessant misinformed chatter about all of it on social media, I'm going to lose my shit. I need a brief respite in order to reset.

Since I'm mostly only using macOS right now, I've punted on the NetNewsWire <--> Miniflux connection. There has been something off about it for a while. I've moved all my NNW feeds into the iCloud synced collection and it's working better.

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I'm no Jane Bown! As much as I love the viewfinder in the OM-1n, I could not seem to get a handle on focusing that lens. Nearly every frame was out of focus. To be fair, 85mm at f/2.0 or 2.8 doesn't leave much room for error, but still.

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6. Those who have read and understood the post, whether they agree with it or not, will email you if they have something to say.

All of the rules sound right, but that last one nails it. It's one reason why I have a "Reply by email" link instead of comments.

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"README-driven development" is a phrase Simon Willison used and it's kind of perfect.

I'll never understand why people get such a boner over ridiculing someone else's code. It's not a good look.

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The advantage of using macOS is that all of the comfort food software I love is there. I get my photo processing workflow the way I like it. I get all my little utilities like PopClip and Keyboard Maestro and Alfred. I get Tinderbox and DEVONthink. I get dead-simple sync via iCloud and backups using Time Machine. Trying to replicate this is an unrealized dream for me when using Linux.

There's a lot of friction introduced by managing two OSes on two or three computers. I don't enjoy it and I'm not sure it's worth the trouble.

The benefits I get from Linux are real, but they are more about philosophical alignment than about practical day-to-day computing. I'm convinced that one day I'll switch fully to Linux, but I'm not quite ready yet.

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I'm spinning today. I want to do everything at once.

One of the things I did was completely revamp my Obsidian vault, with Claude Cowork's help. I wouldn't have done it without the help. Made the whole thing consistent, easy, and complete. Don't ask yet why I'm even looking at obsidian.

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Last week I impulse-ordered a FiiO Echo Mini because it's cute and isn't expensive.

I've been listening to it daily. It's a fun and rather good audio player for the price, but as a device it is nowhere near in the same league as the iPod Classic. Maybe I'll pair it to the car and use it on the road. For around-the-house listening, the iPod wins.

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If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.

E.B. White

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Good lord, just look at all the 3D-printed cameras! I had no idea.

(via 82MHz)

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Much of yesterday was swallowed by converting this blog from Hugo to Eleventy (Like Twitter, I'll probably never call it Build Awesome 🙄). I wondered if I'd wake up today feeling like I'd made a mistake. So far, I don't miss Hugo. It's only been a day, though. Whether I continue to like the design is another story. I meant for it to be basic and simple, then decided to put everything on the home page. I like the individual pages, but home is pretty messy. That's probably OK, since most people read this via RSS anyway.

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It has been 0 days since I changed blogging platforms on baty.net.

Hugo and I go way back, and our relationship has been tumultuous at times. Sometimes I get mad at it for introducing yet another breaking change. Sometimes I'm bored with it. Sometimes I get frustrated with the way things work (or don't). All three of those came up for me this week, so I did something about it.

Rather than fix what was broken, I completely revamped site using Eleventy. I've made passes at it like this before, but this time I started from scratch and, with a bit of robot help, made it about as simple as I could.

All the content has been migrated. I've tried to keep URLs the same as before. Post and Journal URLs should be good. Notes might break, though, sorry.

I'm missing a few things yet, but I'm started to lose momentum today. I did all this in half a day, but I need a break. I'm going to deploy it, since that will motivate me to finish.

It's deliberately simple, theme-wise. I may have gone too far by include all content types on the home page, but we'll see how it settles in.

Let me know if you hate it or if anything is broken.

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That said, for $200 a month (or $20), you have a team of cybercriminals on tap that you can call at any time. You are now an absolute elite hacker, if you take time to learn some basics. Congratulations! Seeing state-level cyberweapons become a commodity is kind of a new thing, and I thought you should know about it.

It's a wild world out there. I'm a little nervous about it.

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Today has been a whirlwind of indecision. It started with wanting to write a daily post (you're soaking in it), but I couldn't decide which blog to post it on. There are three good candidates. I'm choosing this one.

And then there's Emacs. I've spent a lot of time tidying up my config and it's still kind of a mess. It's starting to wear on me. Sometimes I want things to be clever and cool, but sometimes I just want it to be easier. I launched Obsidian yesterday, if that tells you how bad it is. Thankfully, I've come to my senses and I am typing this in Emacs. Phew!

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See copingmechanism.com.

Sorry not sorry.

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After posting about having four blogs and a wiki, I felt guilty that things were scattered all over the place. There are a handful of people who actually want to follow all of my posts, and I've been making it difficult for them.

For a while, I kept a WordPress instance with a couple of plugins that would consolidate various RSS feeds into a single "Everything Feed". I lost interest in maintaining it, and grew tired of the plugins nagging me to "Upgrade to Premium!" all the time. It was overkill and a pain, so I pulled the plug. Besides, I shouldn't have so many blogs, anyway, right?

The dream of having One True Blog remains ellusive. It occurred to me that if I'm going to continue posting to several blogs, I should bring back the Everything Feed, but only if it's easy to maintain.

My feeds don't update that often, so I wanted a basic static site that let me trigger updates manually when needed. I sat down with Claude yesterday and we came up with a simple (Node.js) app that parses all of my feeds and generates one master feed. There's a companion web page containing a link to the feed, and cards for each individual site as well.

You can see it at feeds.baty.net.

It took an hour to build, test, and deploy. "Vibe coding" has derogatory connotations, and is a bad idea in many places, but there's no denying its utility for small projects like this. I would never have bothered trying to build this on my own. It was fun, fast, and easy. And hopefully useful.

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Given my proclivity for tinkering with publishing tools, it should come as no surprise that I now have four active blogs and a wiki.

• baty.net - The "main blog". Hugo. (You're soaking in it.)
• daily.baty.net - Daily notes and short posts. Statically published using Tinderbox.
• baty.blog - Possible replacement for baty.net. Pure Blog is so simple! (PHP with plain-text content files)
• copingmechanism.com - New. Not sure what it's for. I can't seem to let go of Ghost with its ActivityPub stuff and ease of posting.
• Rudimentary Lathe - The Wiki. I love TiddlyWiki and it's a great place to dump stuff and deal with it later. I've started over from scratch.

I understand that this is probably unsustainable, but I can't seem to help myself. It's chaos, especially for readers, but it's a fun chaos!

It'll be fine, once I'm able to admit to myself that I'm not so much a writer as I am a blog collector. I post to whichever one I feel like posting to at the moment. I know it makes things difficult to follow. I may feel differently about all this tomorrow.

Like the Dread Pirate Roberts, each night I tell my blogs:

“Good night. Good work. Sleep well. I'll most likely kill you in the morning.”

Dread Pirate Roberts

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He highlights the priorities of his tenure as:

• Expansion of digital and connected imaging solutions
• Further development of the premium product portfolio
• Strengthening global sales and retail structures
• Intensifying partnerships in the fields of mobile imaging and optics
• Sustainable corporate governance and responsible manufacturing.

I don't know the guy, so he's probably great, but what do these even mean? Of course you want to sell more stuff, who doesn't? Anyway, I hope he does all of the above, I guess.

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What if the exhaustion everybody feels isn't a moral failure but the completely rational response to being made responsible for an ecosystem of objects that never stop asking?

(via Gruber)

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Early AI photography tools like automatic masking and object removal were a miracle. Then came "Replace Sky" and it's been downhill ever since. The better generative AI gets and the easier it becomes to use, the more inclined I am to do the opposite and never touch the stuff.

What if I started posting from scratch at a completely different blog, but didn't tell anyone about it?

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