Journal

I changed the body font here to Instrument Sans. For some reason, I find that serif fonts in blog posts feel pretentious. It's not me.

I asked Claude Code to convert my entire denote directory to use Org-roam style links. I wanted to try Org-roam again, but without losing work. Took Claude 20 minutes.

This morning started off as another "Emacs tripped me up again so I should use something else." mood. It passed, because everything else is worse in more ways.

I don't mind tinkering with Emacs, but I can't stand fixing Emacs when something goes pear-shaped. It seems like something is always going pear-shaped.

My corner of the internet this morning is nothing but navel gazing and hand wringing. I may need to go do something else for a while.

What a day for networks. My UGREEN NAS suddenly dropped off the network. Reboots didn't help, so I moved ethernet cables around. It works now, but I wish I understood why. Mostly I either jiggled or restarted everything and it started working. You just know this is going to blow up again some day.

Then, while at my parents' celebrating Mother's Day, we noticed his internet was down. Turns out his WiFi had stopped working, so Xfinity sent a new router. It seemed like the network was insisting that he set it up. So I did. Different network name/password, which meant updating every wifi-dependent device in the house. I'm just glad my dad isn't a nerd. It was mostly iPhones, the TV, and a camera. Still took an hour and a half.

I get a lot of newsletters, the traditional way, via email. Those newsletters often contain links to interesting things. Unfortunately, people love metrics, causing many of those newsletters to obfuscate the URLs with tracking links. I don't usually bother clicking those, because I can't hover over a link and see where it's really going. The ones I do click are usually blocked by my network filters. I'm not paranoid as much as just annoyed. Parannoyed?

I gotta start bugging Claude Code to help me make adding images here easier, before I'm sucked backed into Ghost.

I have many ways to listen to music. Vinyl, cassette, streaming, etc. Lately I haven't been listening to much music. I don't know why.

I cut myself on both edges of the Emacs sword. Even so, I've been having so much fun with Emacs I can hardly stand it.

I'm on my own this weekend, which isn't good for being productive in real life. I am on such a roll cleaning things up, digitally. My Emacs config, my Read Later process. Next up, backups. Or maybe more Emacs! I did make time for laundry, a water change in the fish tank, and cleaning the interior of my wife's car. Not a lot, but enough for me to finish the day doing some guilt-free farting around.

Could I just scroll your web page without shit moving all over the place, please?

The last couple days have been a whirlwind of changes to my Emacs config. I have to admit that Claude Code made quick work of things I've been avoiding for too long. My config is now cleanly cross-platform. I've removed hundreds of lines of unnecessary lisp. I removed the complexities around using the minimal-emacs starter kit. My fonts work correctly. I cut startup time in half. Tons more. I'm pretty happy with it.

I was going to post something cool I did with Claude Code's help on Mastodon but the Never LLM! hoards would scold me and I don't want to deal with it.

Someone mentioned org-roam and it reminded me how cool it is. I moved away from org-roam a couple years ago, shortly after denote was released. Denote felt lighter and less dependent on Emacs-ey stuff. Denote is great and I'm happy with it, but that didn't stop me from digging up my old org-roam config today, just to play around with it. That was 3 hours ago and I've not slowed down. I may need to revisit Using both Denote and Org-roam.

The dog's surgery went well yesterday. She had several large masses removed from her skin. This is the third time we've had to do this. The vet convinced me to send a sample out for a biopsy, even though the aspiration looked benign and cyst-like. The fact that they regrew on the same scar line as last time is concerning. Alice is recovering, but is in a lot of pain. It's killing me to hear her whine. She never whines. It'll get better, slowly.

I am (mostly) down to two blogs. I've spent a lot of time recently dialing things in with both of them. I'm enjoying both of them equally, which means it's hard to decide which one to use at any given moment. Been here before, many times. After De-ghosting my Ghost theme, I quite like that one. This one is static and has a fresh redesign. Now what?

There won't be much time for farting around today and I'm already feeling twitchy about it.

People who can do stuff like this are not the same species of human as me. Redbull downhill urban biking POV

It's not that I'm unhappy with what I'm using or doing with it. It's that I want to try something new, like, every day.

I was able to prove my ownership of a copy of DaVinci Resolve Studio so they finally sent my activation code. That was A Whole Thing, but B&H and Black Magic came through. Now to properly test the new RAW editing features in v21.

I thought I would get along fine with Ubuntu, but I've found it unreliable on my Framework 13. Same with Mint. Anyway, I'm back to Fedora/KDE, which I've come to prefer anyway.

I should probably write a long, excuse-riddled blog post about it, but I have been committed to using Obsidian on macOS for nearly a month. Thing is, I have not been able to let go of either Emacs or Linux. I can't quit them. Using macOS again has been nice. It has the software I love and, Tahoe aside, the macOS is great. What's weird is that I prefer using the Framework 13 instead of the M4 MacBook Air, so I tend to grab that when away from my desk. The final straw has been that Linux doesn't (by default) use Emacs key bindings system-wide, like macOS does. I can't live like that, so I dragged Emacs along and here I am, writing this post using Emacs on Linux.

I am rebuilding the old jackbaty.com. I've been hand-editing the HTML but I think I'll go back to using Markdown and building using Pandoc. I'm updating the Leica timeline to make it easier to update. I'll cleanup up old attempts and abandoned ideas.

I was reminded today by a mention in the JTR interview at People And Blogs that I've been neglecting daily.baty.net ever since I rebuilt this one. This is not a surprise to anyone, but I feel badly about leaving things hanging like that.

Being snarky is lazy and you should avoid doing it.

Hoping the slight changes to <hr> elements within posts and the dividers between posts helps when scanning the page. They were so similar before that I didn't bother with separators within posts, but I didn't like the way different topics within a daily post look all smooshed together without them.

eBook readers should not have touch screens.

I've been alternating between 1Password and Apple Passwords and you can probably guess what the problem with that is.

There are a lot of things I should be doing today, but I don't feel like doing any of them.

Speaking of not feeling like doing something. Taxes are due today. I have a service take care of the heavy lifting, which is great. All I needed to do was write checks, put them in envelopes, and get them to the post office in time. I owed much more than expected, and the 2026 estimates are shocking. I felt blindsided, but looking through the documents I can see why. Then, while putting the paperwork away, I noticed that the copy of the check (yes, I still send them checks) was missing the dollar amount. I wrote the long form, just not the number in the box. That's going to come back and bite me. Time for some bourbon.

I just noticed that I forgot to annotate today's image. It's fine. Day's nearly over, anyway.

I can't find my activation code for Davinci Resolve Studio and I'm furious with myself about it. I tried the new v21 beta with built-in RAW photo editing. It's a bit primitive now, but it will improve. If I were primarily a videographer, this would be a welcome addition. Also, it's one more option for photo editing on Linux, which is nice.

I used Kevin's Boring Weather app instead of my janky shell script for annotating today's image. It's 90% of what I need. I might beg for the remaing 10%.

I'm a little ashamed to admit that I may have finally done it. I've been using Obsidian for notes/planning for a couple of weeks and it's working really well. I don't love the UI or editing a lot of text there, but the tooling around it makes it quicker and easier to get to useful than Emacs and Org mode. For me, anyway. Although I'm writing this in Emacs, so I'm obviously still working through the details :).

I'm testing MacWhisper for dictation and translations. Sometimes I don't feel like typing. You're soaking in it.

I really need to clean up some of the typography and layout around here. It feels off in a bunch of small ways. Remember that time like a week ago when I completely rebuilt this blog and then stopped posting here? That was pretty much the definition of me. Update

I don't like the way I feel when Claude is down.

I guess I'm posting this here, today. The past few days have been all about Ghost over at Coping Mechanism so that's enough of that, right?

I don't suffer from burnout, but I might die from fizzle-out, though.

Now that I have the various post types sorted here, I'm pretty sure I can live without the daily blog. The wildcard now is Coping Mechanism. I like using Ghost. I like the ActivityPub integration, built-in comments, emails, and analytics. I even like the editor, most of the time. And I really like just dragging images into it. I'm not sure I want to give it up, but I'm even less sure that I want two blogs that do essentially the same things.

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.

"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.