Journal

All-in with Linux? Some blogging minutiae.

More on Linux. Film scanning.

Tired of the internet.

Mulling over what to do about these daily notes posts. Hugo RSS feeds.

If I would just put Journal entries here, I could have One True Blog™.

I spent all morning toying with a few different static blogging options that could replace Hugo.

It’s weird how I spend a few days relaxing in WordPress, then I wake up one day and think, “Maybe I’ll generate my whole website with Org-mode and Emacs!” I probably won’t do that, but I sometimes consider it.

My therapist asked me why I thought it was a problem to have so many blogs/cameras/notebooks/etc. and I couldn’t give her a good answer. It often feels like a problem, but is it? Maybe not. Maybe I’m just having fun and that’s fine.

I have so many great cameras, and I have the free time to use them. Yet I’ve barely been taking any photographs. Why is that? I’d love to figure it out.

I’m trying to spend as little time as possible on any social media. I’m finding it difficult.

Me, on this day in 2019:

I should probably write more about Linux and the NAS and the little Canon AF-7 and the sorry state of the US, but I don’t have the energy to put the words together in a useful way. So I’m kind of doing it one sentence at a time here in the dailies.

I don’t know where to put things. I have several dozen files in my Downloads folder and I’ve no idea what to do with them.

Thinking about including a status thingy at the bottom of my daily posts. Got the idea from Warren Ellis. Do I actually do enough to justify writing it down every day? Maybe.

I’m still working on my photo workflow in Linux. It’s gotten to the point of being tolerable, but it’s still not enjoyable. Darktable is powerful but there are too many ways of doing everything. I feel like I’m just throwing stuff at the wall, hoping it turns out. I suppose I will eventually find a process that works consistently, but right now I’m not even close to that. I really miss Capture One.

I mean, if you’re going to start using new computers running a new OS, you might as well get a new, unfamiliar NAS and an updated Orbi router kit while you’re at it. That’s what I did. Chaos!

I’m trying not to miss my Mac but I kind of miss my Mac. Not being able to develop a comfortable photography workflow might be a dealbreaker for Linux. I’m still trying, though.

I’m still finding things that I’d changed in my PaperMod fork that I kind of need now that I’ve switched to the stock version. The Reply-By-Email button, for one. My improvement to image rendering from yesterday doesn’t work in the RSS feed because it uses a relative URL for the image. I had fixed this in my fork, so I copied that over. I also tried adding the reply button there, also.

I finally got around to updating Hugo’s image_render.html so that I can use normal Markdown for images rather than a Hugo shortcode. I used the version from Alec’s blog and it seems to work great. Here’s an example:

Aaaaand, we’re back. Sometimes I really like WordPress. It lasts a week or two.

Oh dear, a new daily post here? Are we doing that again? Seems so.

More Framework. Ocular migraines.

The Framework 13 laptop arrived a day early, so I spent the afternoon setting it up. I’ll post more later with some details. This is so much fun I can’t stand it.

I really really want to reduce my blogging footprint to a single place. see here.

It’s been a minute since I’ve added one of these daily notes. I thought I was done with them, but here we are. The reason might not make much sense to many. Linux, or at least the one I’m using, doesn’t have Emacs bindings everywhere, the way macOS does. I’ve been slow to get used to it. I may never get used to it. In the meantime, the one place that does have Emacs bindings is Emacs, so that’s where I’m spending as much time as possible. The blog is Hugo and I’ve got a whole Emacs setup for publishing here. For now, that’s what I’m doing.

I’m considering removing the /notes section and just rolling everything into the main feed. Let’s try “Everything is just a post” for a while. Sure, it’ll be messy and too noisy for some, but it might help prevent the “is this a note or a post?” thing every time I start typing.

I don’t want to even think about anything, let alone overthink everything.

I see Zed just received $32 million from Sequoai because “this investment lets us pursue our vision for bringing a new kind of collaboration directly into the IDE.” Well, never mind, then. I want nothing to do with “collaborative editing”, nor the inevitable decline of anything touched by VC money. Thank goodness there’s BBEdit.

Suddenly, two copies of the weather were showing on journal posts here. I have no idea how that happened. I’ve cobbled together a fix, but sheesh. This is another thing with Hugo…I don’t get how most of it actually works. There’s magic going on and I just piggyback off it with a lot of copy and paste and guesses. This is no way to run a website, is it?

What goes here in daily notes and what goes into separate /notes? No idea. Maybe I should kill the idea of /notes and just make everything a regular post. Messy for readers, but cleaner for my brain? Dunno.

All I wanted to do this morning was to add a class to an image in Hugo. At first I thought I needed to override my theme’s image-render hook, but then I learned that could use the built-in Markdown attributes. It required a new setting or two1, but worked great for adding a style to images in a single post. In lists, however, the styles are applied to the paragraph above the image, even with wrapStandAloneImageWithinParagraph set to false. I couldn’t figure it out, so I just put the paragraph after the images. Not a solution, but solved the problem in this case. This will happen again, I’m sure. Normally, I’d just use raw HTML for this, but the image pipeline in Hugo “bundles” wouldn’t work, and I need that.

It’s all just bunnies on a trampoline, now.

I would like to quit social media completely, but I’m addicted to validation. I tell myself that I actually suffer from FOMO, but the reality is that I’m looking for “likes” and comments and, well, validation. Maybe it isn’t validation so much as it is feeling like I’m being seen. I mean, how else can one know they exist in the world?

I sat down this morning, looking to journal a bit about the past few days with extended family, but Emacs threw an error on launch. I fixed that. Then, I couldn’t find a note I’d written earlier. Sometimes I would just like to write stuff, take a few notes, and find things later when I need them, but without all the fuss. I don’t know how to get there.

Good morning. What shall we wring our hands about, today?

I am off social media for a bit. Whenever I feel myself doing nothing but scrolling or looking for likes or thinking of something “like-able” to say, I know it’s time for a break. I’m not cross-posting to Mastodon at all anymore, either. So now, whenever there’s a lull in the action of my life, I feel lost. That’s the feeling I want to get rid of.

I’m realizing that my enthusiasm for Hugo reflects my current mood about Emacs. When I’m all-in with Emacs, Hugo is my favorite way to manage a blog. When I’m “off” Emacs, I find other ways to blog because my whole Hugo workflow is built using Emacs. The problem right now is that I’m oscillating rapidly between Emacs and not-Emacs, so I post in multiple places. It’s fun having options, but I dislike making decisions. 😵‍💫

I continue to overthink everything related to my blog(s). I want specific things for specific posts, depending on my mood that day. It’s exhausting. The dream of course is to have One Blog. I have 4 active sites right now. That’s more than one, for those who are counting.

I’m not even supposed to be here today.

I’m a little tired of all of this. Blogging, I mean. I’ve been writing about the same things on repeat for 25 years. Aren’t we all sick of hearing about blogging tools and software and tech and bla bla bla? I am. Maybe I’ll open a barber shop, like my great grandfather did.

I don’t feel much like writing full-on blog posts, so I keep spouting off little bits and bobs over on Mastodon instead. It’s not ideal. I mean, I just added the /notes feature here, so why not use that? I honestly don’t know. There’s something about it I don’t like.

Why bother blogging when even I don’t feel like reading my posts?

Can you imagine much easier things would be if I…

Too hot for chores, today, so I’m in my air-conditioned office, futzing with AI tools, server options, and my Emacs capture templates.

Posted: Roll 037 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!

With any luck, I’ll spend time today far away from the computer and very close to the lake.

Don’t you wish I had only one blog? I do.

I’m editing this in (Neo)Vim because I feel like living in normal Vim bindings for a minute, without the grief I cause myself trying to use evil-mode in Emacs.

Firing up a new daily note every morning used to be a regular thing for me. Lately, it just gives me blank page anxiety. It’s possible that an “I don’t feel much like blogging” phase is starting. I know this because I don’t feel much like blogging.

Reverting my blogging changes

Just seeing if this thing still works.

Daily notes. What are they for? I guess it’s like having a legal pad open on my desk, where I can write whatever I’m thinking about at any time. The problem for you, dear reader, is that you’re subjected to all of it. I feel a little guilty about that. Not guilty enough to stop doing it, of course.

If there are “Notes” listed under this post, it means the thing I’ve been working on here is…working, I guess.

Maybe I’d blog better if I was a more gooder writer.

While visiting my grandson this morning, I finished a roll of expired Portra 400 in the Rolleiflex. When I got home, I didn’t feel like developing the roll. C-41 processing is a whole thing. It’s not hard, but I don’t love it. Still, I’m usually excited to at least see what’s on the roll. Today, I wasn’t. Not a great sign.

I try to avoid writing about LLMs but sometimes fail.

I’ve been going through my Lightroom library and noticed a couple things. First, I used to just walk around with a camera and take pictures of things. Some of them are pretty good. Second, my Lightroom catalog has everything and I’m wondering if abandoning it was a good idea.

Now that I’ve added a /notes section to the blog, where does that leave these daily notes? I think I’ll keep them. It gives me a place to record some notes throughout the day, but without spewing everything out to social media seventeen times. Just the once :). Then again, isn’t that what the wiki is for?

Today will involve more yard work.

I wrote recently that I’m tempted to “move the entire enterprise onto paper” and I’m more than half serious. Playing with text on the computer has become a way to never actually do anything useful. It’s fun and easy and gets me nowhere.

Hello again. Daily notes are back here now, after a brief foray over in Kirby and Tinderbox.

So I have a couple of static blogs and two kind-of-static blogs. This is fine, I suppose, because I consider both blogging and software to be hobbies. But man, what a mess I’m making. I’m sensing the urge to recoil from all of it.

Yeah, I’ve been distracted by a couple of new static blogging tools. I think both are interesting and worth a serious look by anyone looking for simple, local-first, Markdown-based blogging. I’ll try to write a bit more detail about them, but for now, check them out yourself. BSSG is a complete static site generator written in Bash. The only dependency is a markdown processor. Cmark is recommended and simple. I use Pandoc. It’s simple, fast enough, and has a refreshingly easy to use theming system with a ton of built-in themes. Then there’s LMNO.lol, which is even easier. Create a single Markdown file with all your posts, then just drag and drop the file into lmno.lol and boom! you have a blog. This one is a hosted service. Check them out! I did: linux.baty.net and baty.blog are BSSG blogs and lmno.lol/jbaty is at lmno.lol.

I posted the same thing on three different blogs today, just for fun.

Merlin knows: The bummer is we miss so many great little things because it doesn’t conform to the implastic version of ourselves that lives in some blindingly lit menagerie where everything is just so. Where we store the notional version of ourselves that’s never existed.

I hope everyone had a relaxing weekend. I did, at least up until I tried setting up a new(ish) iPhone for my mom. She got a hand-me-down iPhone 12 to replace her, surprisingly still working, iPhone 6. Between Find My/anti-theft issues and forgotten passwords, it was much more frustrating than I’d hoped. Still, she has a new phone and that’s good.

Sometimes I create this daily entry without having anything to write about in mind. It seems necessary, but is it? Probably not, yet I keep doing it, anyway.

I’m rarely in a hurry, so why do I spend so much time working on ways to do things faster? Working on the Linux laptop this week has made so many things slower. I don’t have a text expansion utility configured yet. I don’t have something like Raycast on the Mac. Still, I don’t feel like I’m doing less. In fact, my mind has been calmer. Writing on the ThinkPad feels more like using a typewriter. OK, that’s an exaggeration, but you see the point. There’s much less going on, here. I have the usual urge to “improve” things, but I may just wait a minute on that and see if I can settle in with something simpler.

I’ve been busy with my Linux experiment. I’m writing about it there, if you want to follow along.

Linux is fun, but frustrating. I’m trying to stick with it long enough to blame Linux rather than my inexperience for my troubles. As a way to help remember the process, I’ve started a new blog at linux.baty.net1. The new blog is a journal of things I’m learning or struggling with. I’d normally be taking these notes locally but I thought it would be worthwhile to publish them.

So, yeah, I seem to have four blogs at the moment. It’s fun, but not sustainable. Anyway, good morning!

Dammit, now I’m posting journal posts in two places. I get bored doing things the same way every day, so I change things. I don’t know if this makes me interesting or if it’s a symptom of some deep-rooted mental issue.

I had fun yesterday working with the Coping Mechanism blog and Ghost. If you ignore the upsell and “please subscribe!” noise, Ghost is rather pleasant to work with. The problem is that I don’t want to migrate this blog to it, and I don’t want multiple blogs. This means that, while I still may tinker with Ghost, I shouldn’t use it for anything “real”. So, what am I doing? ¯_(ツ)_/¯.

I’m supposed to be working on a new website for a family member. I’m 80% finished, but the final 80% is the uninteresting part and I don’t feel like doing it right now. Instead, I spent an hour this morning feeling like I should go back to using Lightroom Classic instead of Capture One, but I still prefer Capture One, so I’ll have to deal with the things I don’t like about it.

In a mood, evidenced by changing Denote’s default file format twice in ten minutes.

I don’t know what to write about today. I’m sitting here at my usual desk typing into a full-screen Emacs frame with a few of my usual buffers open. I did end up giving up on Doom again. It’s just more than I want, even though it does a lot of nice things without my help. And I miss having SPC as leader key. I’m not doing that general.el thing again, either. Oh well, I guess it’s back to C-c or C-x for everything.

I honestly don’t know whether the past few days of tinkering with Emacs evil-mode, Doom, etc. was fun or a complete, confusing waste of time. Right now I’m thinking the latter.

I should apologize for my mood this morning…Sorry about my mood this morning.

I need to find a way for my brain to relax. I spend entire days with a dozen apps open, each with a dozen tabs open. I click rapidly between them looking for something to focus on. I never find anything.

AI can be useful to me, personally.

I spent hours this morning trying to find a good way of adding some metadata to the cover images on the blog. I wanted the temparature, at least. I tried shoehorning it into my Retrobatch script, but that was a dead end. Whenever I’m lost in image manipulation, I turn to ImageMagick. Boy did that take me down a rabbit hole. Long story short, I figured it out. But now I don’t like it. ¯_(ツ)_/¯.

Yes, I changed blog platforms again. It’s been like a week, so it seemed like we’re due for a change. :)

LinkedIn is not the right place for me to find interesting work.

you can “study” the data later and rearrange it. But the initial “just remember this” impulse should be as close to simply throwing the data at Emacs as possible.

Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.

Nothing feels fun right now. Most of the things I typically enjoy have become frustrating exercises. I love paper notebooks, but can’t bring myself to write in them for more than a few minutes. I love film photography, but I don’t feel like dealing with the constraints and the costs. I’ve no patience for it. I love movies, but none of them look interesting. My typewriters collect dust. It’s probably just another allergic reaction to the terrible shit happening in the world right now, but I’m finding it hard to shake.

I just exported 2700 tiddlers from my TiddlyWiki as one big markdown file, split it into individual files, and renamed them using Denote’s format. ¯_(ツ)_/¯. I guess I tired of searching my Denote notes, coming up empty, then having to go to the wiki and search again. I’ll write some notes about it at some point.

It seems like this is turning into an Emacs blog. Not that there’s anything wrong with that :).

My eyes were bored so I changed themes again. Back to PaperMod for now.

I’d like to not create these daily journal posts, and instead create several individial posts. The problem is that so much of what I write here in journal posts is not Postworthy. So, I’ll keep doing this, I guess.

Avatarium is new to me. I love her soulful (clean) vocals and the doom/sludgy sound. It’s like Joni Mitchell and Black Sabbath teamed up.

I would love to be a person who goes out to photograph because I have something to say, rather than someone looking for an excuse to play with cameras and because I’m bored.

Hey everyone, a little more empathy, please. Thanks.

New t-shirt is funny. I’ve been shopping for desktop computers to run Linux. Something easy and nice, like a low-mid range Thelios, maybe. This is a terrible idea and I should stop doing it at once.

Well, I’m in that place again. You know the one. The one where I write the same thing in more than one, and sometimes more than two, places because I can’t decide where stuff goes.

I’d like to get kaorahi (Howm) and Prot (Denote) together and maybe lock them in a room for a few hours. At the end, there would either be plans for building the greatest Emacs package ever…or fisticuffs.

What’s New in Emacs 30.1? - Mastering Emacs

I’m starting to worry that Severance is just being weird for the sake of being weird. Some of this stuff had better resolve itself or I’m going to be very disappointed.

I still don’t know what belongs here. It’s mostly just a place to write things I’m thinking about. Things that have even the remotest chance of being useful or entertaining to someone else. There are at least three places I write things: Here, the wiki, and my Emacs daybook. And this doesn’t include the paper options. I don’t enjoy having to decide where to put things, but I have been unsuccessful in limiting myself to only one option.