Journal

I can't figure out how to coax Hugo into generating full URLs to images when I'm using Page Bundles. The whole point of bundles is that I can use links to images like [](yet-another-self-portrait.jpg) and it just works. But it doesn't work in RSS feeds. Not all RSS readers automatically figure out the full URLs. The figure short codes should at least work, but don't. Frustrating.

With all of the free time and curiosity I have, you'd think I'd be good at something by now.

I'm starting to figure out that if I don't know where to put something, I probably shouldn't be keeping it to begin with.

I was partially successful at avoiding social media yesterday. Whenever there was a lull in my thoughts, I'd "Just check for mentions real quick." This would be fine, but then I'd jump over to the feed and do a quick scroll through. That's the part I'm supposed to be off. Trying again today, but it's hard to resist.

Org-mode may be the Betamax of text formats, but if you recall, Beta was the better format. VHS won, but not because it was better. Why would I use a lesser format for my notes than Org-mode? "Everyone uses Markdown" is not an answer.

We walked the channel in Grand Haven, today. A large boat cruised by sporting a giant Trump flag. That itself wasn't unusual, but the boat's name was "Insurrection". It made me want to do violence.

I need to step away from social media for a minute. Adam of social.lol is, far as I can tell, a terrific person. He has an inclusive, friendly, and welcoming attitude and I've been a happy user of his services for a long time.

However, this thread from last night criticizing 500.lol has been bothering me more than I can account for. The entire thing just pisses me off, and I need to back away while I try to understand why.

I suspect part of it is that I'm wrong about something and I don't want to admit it to myself. That pisses me off even more :). Anyway, a break will do me good.

I love that Dave seems to be enjoying his Apple IIc

I've been sitting here staring at the screen and clicking things mostly at random and finding nothing that sparks my interest. Am I reaching the end of something? Feels like I'm reaching the end of something. I just hope it's the beginning of something else.

I don't have any real plans today other than one appointment at lunch. How shall I waste spend the day?

I deleted the Ghost instance that was meant to be a photo blog. I'm fine with putting things here. I prefer that my posts are just a folder with a markdown file and a few jpegs.

My daughter and I built a fire pit at her house today. I think we did a fine job.

Maybe these daily notes are more like an internal monolog, published. The microblog will be for things I want to deliberately share. This would be what I'm using Mastodon for, currently, but I'll crosspost to Mastodon instead.

It seems that everywhere I turn, someone is giddy about Oasis getting back together. I'm not embarrassed to go on record stating that I absolutely cannot stand their music, so consider me nonplussed.

Thankfully, I've got things to do in real life today. Otherwise, I'd be wasting the day by fretting over the long-term use of Emacs. I need to get past that, but not today.

I can't think of anything more useless and boring than trying to craft the perfect AI prompt so that it will generate something useless and boring for me.

I talk about gear and process a lot because it helps fill the gaps left by a dearth of ideas.

All of the handwringing around AI or Apple or [trending topic here] has become boring. So has the naval gazing around blogging and social media and everything. I need a new thread to pull.

Abandoning the hours I spent making little scripts and shortcuts to do the things I normally do in Emacs, but in Bear, etc. instead, I spent time yesterday doing the same thing with the Emacs versions. I feel better about that, because I'm better at Emacs to begin with, so this feels like adding on to something I have rather than starting over with something new.

Speaking of Emacs, I've added evil-mode back into my Emacs config. Now I'm really confused. I have two conflicting sets of muscle memory, both of which I quite like, but they can't really coexist peacefully. I tried Demon-mode and other kinda-evil-but-not-really modes and none are what a want. I'm going to need to decide.

The thing I tried yesterday (Bear, iA Writer, and Day One) fell apart immediately this morning after I created this daily file in Emacs and started typing without even thinking about it. How am I ever going to extract myself from the clutches of Emacs if I keep using it by default? The Gravitational Pull of Emacs strikes again. Besides, every time I try leaving Emacs I can't get past the guilt of abandoning more than ten years of experience, just so I can try something different or easier.

I went to post something just now, but stopped to make a teeny tweak the Hugo frontmatter. Now I don't remember what I was coming here to write. Good morning, I guess ¯_(ツ)_/¯. On the plus side, I woke up feeling actually relieved that the blog is on Hugo. Can't explain it, but it seems like a good thing.

Neither my wife nor I have been to Europe, so I'm planning a trip there for later this fall. I don't even know which country we should start at. I'm thinking Italy.

There are a lot of things to do in this world that don't involve making sure my dotfiles are syncing correctly or figuring out why some emacs package suddenly starts tossing errors after an update.

Here's something I'm trying: I've moved my daily log (Daybook) entries into a new, separate Day One journal. This replaces my Org-mode Daybook.org and my Tinderbox Daybook.tbx. I want access on every device. Even though I rarely use iOS for anything, I want the option. I want proper, working sync. I don't want to worry if I have the same (e.g. Tinderbox) document open on two Macs. Day One is made for date-based writing, so why not take advantage of it? I export to PDF, JSON, and Markdown at the end of every month, which alleviates my fear of long-term lock in. Let's try it.

I've spent time this week trying to wrangle Johnny Decimal into something I can use. It's a great system, but I don't know if I'll be able to stick with it. It's me, not J.D. Yesterday, I was doing some AI-assisted searches in my Apple Photos library and started thinking that at some point, won't AI be able to organize my files for me? Then I found Sparkle, which claims to do exactly that. It sounds great, but no way I'm paying $20/month for the privilege. Someone will eventually create a free, local-only version of this and then I'll be interested. In the meantime, maybe I won't bother spending so much time organizing my files.

Adam pointed out some missing links due to my recent move back to Hugo. These have been fixed. Thanks Adam!

I started a blog post about my recent futzing with Johhny Decimal and Obsidian and Bear and so on, but I'm so tired of all that that I quit. Merging my J.D index (now called a "JDex") with a folder full of notes is what I want to do, but the best option for that is Obsidian, and I just can't make myself use Obsidian. I know this, but keep trying anyway for some reason. Then, I tried rebuilding the thing in Emacs with Org-mode documents and that felt better but was actually worse in practice. Finally, I tried importing the "Life Admin" starter into Bear. That felt better, but now I'm back to maintainin an index and a folder hierarchy. It's all too much. I've started just making new notes in Bear wherever and whenever the hell I feel like it. Then I move on to something else instead of over-thinking where shit goes. It's exhausting and I need a break.

Wouldn't it be great if all I needed was Emacs, a browser, a terminal, and Finder? Why then do I end up with this? And it's only 6:00 a.m.

I'm not really getting anywhere. I mostly just move around in loops of varying sizes. Photography, note-taking, journaling, and all my other hobbies move in circles. I change something, then change it again, and again, and suddenly I'm back where I started.

Is there such a thing as declaring computing bankruptcy? I started a blog post this morning, but I don't feel like finishing it. I think maybe I've gone and skipped the declaration part.

Me, January 3, 2024...

The care and feeding of my system | Baty.net

Thing is, I’m weary of mystery. I want things to work all the time and require as little fuss as possible. My current situation requires a lot of care and feeding and I need to find a way out of it. ... Sure, much of this is self-imposed because I tweak. But I’m beginning to tire of having to babysit the things that should just be basic infrastructure.

Managed to get my stepdaughter moved into her new apartment yesterday, and without further damage to my back, which is nice. It went well, and the new place looks great.

I finally tossed my t-shirt from Roger Waters' 2012 tour of "The Wall". The Wall was released while I was in high school and I listened to nothing else for like an entire year, so seeing it performed in full was such a great experience. It was a hell of a show.

My wife just went through and froze her credit report on all 3 services. It was a piece of cake. I froze mine in 2015 and at that time it was still a nightmare. It also used to cost money. Some things do get better.

Busy day today. We're moving Ella into her new apartment. I've been taking it easy since hurting my back last week, so I feel like I'm good enough to be useful.

The best thing about being busy is that it prevents me from second guessing my move to Hugo for the blog. I love that I'm here in Emacs typing this post, but the threat of some update breaking things, or that I break things, looms. And It's mostly stock PaperMod theme, so this is just another boring blog that looks like a lot of other boring blogs. It's fine for now.

How does the divider look? I'm trying it as a way to separate the "ideas" here in these daily posts, when there's not enough to justify a heading. I thought about using something more ornate, but maybe a simple line will do. Should I devise some sort of CSS mechanism

The challenge now is deciding whether to keep posting to daily.baty.net. The ellusive "I have one blog" dream could be one step closer if I could only contain myself to posting these daily notes here on Baty.net. Fewer moving parts and all that. The problem is that here I don't get individual entries for each note. It's a wall of daily text. Not sure how I feel about that. Won't these just get lost in the flow? Probably, but does it matter? I mean, c'mon, it ain't Shakespeare.

Just when I thought the move back to Hugo was finished and had gone smoothly, I discovered the search (using Fuse.js) wasn't working on the server. It worked fine locally. I thought it must be that the server is using Caddy, so I ran it locally via Caddy and search still worked fine. It took me forever to notice that the Caddy config on the server included a redirect from index.json to index.xml. This was from an earlier time when index.json was an Atom/RSS file. Technically it still is, but the search page needs to load the file and the server was throwing it off. I removed the redirect from my Caddyfile and now search works again.

Fortunately, my old lisp functions still worked, so creating this daily post for Hugo was just a matter of M-x jab/hugo-new-daily and here I am.

You'll have noticed (if you're not viewing via RSS at least) that I moved the blog back to Hugo. This was unexpected, since I swore off Hugo months ago :). Anyway, I have started migrating the last six months of content over from Kirby. It's slow going, so there'll be some 404s for a bit.