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Baty.net

A blog about everything by Jack Baty 👋

Journal Entries

Wednesday, February 05, 2025

JFC, I don’t even want to be around the Good Guys anymore.


# You Can’t Post Your Way Out of Fascism

You Can’t Post Your Way Out of Fascism:

If there’s one thing I’d hoped people had learned going into the next four years of Donald Trump as president, it’s that spending lots of time online posting about what people in power are saying and doing is not going to accomplish anything. If anything, it’s exactly what they want.

Tuesday, February 04, 2025

Writing Desk (2025). Nikon FM2n. HP5 @800.

Writing Desk (2025). Nikon FM2n. HP5 @800.

Let’s test the idea of continuing with daily journal posts as separate “things”.


I’ve subscribed to a year of Wired Magazine. For $6/year, including the print edition(!), it’s a pretty good deal.

Saturday, December 28, 2024

I don’t feel like writing full-on blog posts, lately. What I’m interested in is journaling…in public. I don’t like this Hugo template for that purpose, but I have learned that changing Hugo templates isn’t worth the trouble. Now what?


I want to be entirely self-sufficient, but I don’t want the job of maintaining anything. How’s that supposed to work?


DVD is dead. Long live DVD.

In a media landscape where the only sure thing is that there are no sure things, our best bet is still to put a disc in a drive

Friday, December 27, 2024

I was working on a little shell script for generating GoAccess reports on the web server but I was running into a minor problem that I couldn’t figure out. I asked ChatGPT for help and immediately had the solution, and a better overall script than I had written. The side effects of LLMs suck, but there’s no denying their utility right now. I feel dirty, but I have a nice script, I guess?

Thursday, December 26, 2024

I’m deleting a bunch of old files. There’s a significant psychological difference between “zipping them up and putting them on some hard drive somewhere” and actually deleting them. Deleting, where feasible, is better.


Tuesday, December 24, 2024

I was going through my Braintoss messages and this one from April, 2023 jumped out at me:

there’s a low-level specific pain in having to accept that putting up with you requires a certain generosity of spirit in your loved ones

Ouch 😬 (It’s from ― Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility)

Also this one:

The thing I miss most about working is canceled meetings.

And this:

Monday, December 23, 2024

I thought maybe I’d change themes here just to change things up a bit, without completely bailing on Hugo, as I’m wont to do. Changing Hugo themes is almost as much of a pain as changing blogging engines. I gave up after an hour.


Friday, December 20, 2024

jAlbum is pretty good at creating nice static web photo galleries. I made an elaborate gallery last year. It was nice, but now I can’t find my copy (or settings, originals, etc.) I’m not mad because I have to start over. I’m mad because all I do is organize stuff and despite that, I still can’t find things. Probably because of that, honestly. Anyway, starting over.


I need some new sources. Everything I read is related to AI or social media or some gadget I simply must buy. I’m bored with all of it.