Journal

My personality is a rolling amalgam of the recent movies, blog posts, and YouTube videos I’ve taken in.

I’d love to have this for my M3. The Leica Summilux-M 50 f/1.4 is the fifth lens in the Classic Line

I’m typing this in iA Writer because I read a blog post. See how susceptible I am to the opinions of others?

I’m realizing that digital photography is actually not always easier than shooting film. Wrangling the new Nikon Zf to do what I want has been the opposite of easy. It’s not the Nikon’s fault, really. It’s that modern cameras want to do everything for everyone and it’s exhausting getting them to do the right things for me.

Me, all proud with my new camera I made a little Retrobatch script to overlay the date onto a photo. It’s meant for the OpenGraph cover image on these daily posts. I don’t normally include the photo in the posts themselves, but I did today. For some reason.

Still a bit sick. Slept better, though. It’s hard using a CPAP with a stuffy nose.

I’m a little under the weather, still. Today will consist of tinkering and reading, mostly.

I’ve removed these journal posts from the RSS feed for now. I like the feeling of writing without worrying about dumping all this crap into a bunch of unsuspecting RSS readers. Who knows, I may end up staying with the wiki for this. What will likely end up happening is that I’ll keep doing both, depending on my mood that day. Details

I have an idea about these daily posts. I’ll be writing throughout the day over in the wiki. Then, end of day, I’ll grab anything I think is worth sharing and re-post it here. I mean, I didn’t call the wiki a “Rudimentary Lathe” for nothing.

I’ve redirected all requests to the briefly-revived copingmechanism.com to baty.net. Sorry for the trouble.

This is helping me, today.

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

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.

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 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?

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.

It’s Christmas 🎄. Organizing things. da Vinci.

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

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.

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.

See, the thing is, I need to somehow keep the the “Reduce & Simplify” dream alive. It’s OK if my system takes a little work to maintain, but it has to be one system. I can manage one. What I can’t do, is have a bunch of completely different setups that each take “a little work” to maintain. I’ve become overwhelmed as a result of my never-ending urge to tinker (combined with boredom). So here we are, on baty.net, doing daily notes again. One Blog, One Life or some such thing, right?

See how the way I’m doing this blog ruins the archives?…

Thanks Frank! It’s good to know I’m not alone.

Nothing specific today. Tiny thoughts about energy, Obsidian, Adobe Bridge, JFK Jr, and Starter Packs.

On daily.baty.net, each little whim of a post has its own page and is part of the RSS feed (and gets cross-posted to my mastodon.social bot account). Some days, that’s exactly what I want. When I write daily notes here at baty.net, using the single-entry-per-day format, I feel less pressure to make anything “count”. And some days, that’s exactly what I want. Living in my head is frustrating.

I know y’all are sick of me waffling about where to post these little daily notes, but I can’t help it. I’m honestly split right down the middle about it. I want everything to be in one place, but I can’t seem to make it all fit in one place. At least not the way I want things to fit. I could leave baty.net for the longer posts and daily.baty.net for these daily notes. Or, I could try combining everything here. Or maybe combine everything there and make this a landing page. I think each of these options has equal merit, so I haven’t been able to decide, and probably never will. I guess I’ll continue posting wherever I’m in the mood to post on any given day.

Digital Minimalism. Organizing. Markwhen.

I spent a good portion of yesterday offline. Well, not technically offline, but not on social media, which feels like the same thing.

Cleaning up my servers and backups

Social media, blogging, subscriptions.

“I don’t know anything about what you asked, but here’s what I got from Perplexity…” is not helpful. Plus, you still don’t know anything about what I asked. We’ve gotten nowhere and you’ve wasted our time.

I find that I kind of enjoy starting the day with a quick jab/hugo-new-daily in Emacs and here we are. The issue with publishing right away is that for people who use RSS they may think I’m finished for the day, and that’s seldom the case. Sometimes I worry about this, but most of the time I remember that the people subscribed via RSS know me, and I think they understand. :)

Oh dear. It’s OK, though. What happened was that I started to feel twitchy about having my posts and photos locked up in Ghost. “Locked up” is an exaggeration, of course, but you know what I mean. It’s better when everything is in a nice, tidy set of folders on my hard drive, in Org or Markdown format. So here we are, back in Hugo.

What have we done?

I hope you’re voting for Harris today. Other than that, I’m shutting my political brain down for the rest of the day. My heart can’t withstand this level of sustained anxiety.

Do you ever feel like your life’s wake is littered with missed opportunities?

You should vote vote for Harris. I did.

I have a routine that I go through on the 1st of every month, during which I always tell myself that, “This one will be different.”, but in the end they’re all the same.

I’m so mad at Emacs right now. It’s so frustrating when something stops working for no reason I can fathom. I sync everything related to my Emacs config via Syncthing, and the Emacs version is identical, and yet doom-modeline fails to load on the MBP but works fine on the Mini. It’s crazy-making and I can’t figure it out.

Roam > Obsidian and Org-roam > Roam. So guess what I’m using today :).

LinkedIn, The New Internet, Worrying about a “lack of updates”

We’re back on Hugo

I’m not saying anything new, but I feel like we’ve lost the battle for having good and useful products and services. Is it just me, or does every product seem to only grudgingly accept the actual user as a necessary evil? We’re secondary to whatever is actually making the money. Call me a grumpy old man, but I hate this trend. “Enshittification” is an over-used meme word by now, but I can’t think of a better one.

The thing about BOGO (Buy One, Get One free) is that I end up buying something I don’t need, just so I can get a second thing I don’t need.

I wish I would find something better to do.

Certain software tools click with me. TiddlyWiki, Emacs, BBEdit, and OmniFocus are the ones that I am thinking of right now. I love them all.

I noticed that the “cover” images for my posts aren’t showing up when reading my feed in Elfeed. It’s because I use absolute URLs without a hostname. Other readers, like NetNewsWire, prepend the hostname automatically. I don’t think I’ll fix it yet, because using full URLs makes me twitchy, because I’m me and I move things.

It’s unanimous, people prefer the one post/day journal format here on baty.net. “All in one place is best” seems to be the consensus. I’ll try.

I removed the “Open to Work” label from my LinkedIn profile. Not because I’m not open to work, but because I truly can’t stand being anywhere near LinkedIn. The type of people who would hire me are just as likely to find me elsewhere.

While scrolling through the Books I’ve Read, I realized that I don’t remember the first thing about most of them. There are a few standouts, of course, but for the most part reading feels like temporary entertainment. I hope some of it is absorbed and becomes a useful part of my brain, but it doesn’t seem like that’s happening.

If they had fed the language machines a diet of cupcake recipes, history might have gone another way.

Dan Milnor: Adobe Max Day One

I often analyze tools before I actually need them. That’s silly, and a waste of energy. It leads to a pile of software that I don’t need, but also a bunch of opinions about them that aren’t really valid.

I’ve added a search page here. Some notes: Searching baty.net

I just realized that there’s no way to search this blog. I wonder if I can use the same tooling as the Hugo blog. This doesn’t seem like fun.

My problem is that I love different software for different reasons. I love Tinderbox, Emacs, and TiddlyWiki equally for taking notes. Today I’ve been testing The Archive again, because it does certain things really well. Sometimes I use all of them in a single day. It’s not an effective or efficient way of working, but my love of wonderful software makes it difficult for me to avoid the behavior.

I thought that as soon as I sat my butt down at this computer after four days away that I would have all sorts of things lined up to talk about, but nothing much comes to mind. It’s 11:30 AM, so maybe later?

The best way I’ve found of preventing photos from looking too digital is to make them with film.

How about we collectively stop apologizing for how often we write on our blogs or what we write about on our blogs. Newsletters, too, while we’re at it.

Trying some things with Eleventy

New Orleans without a camera. Hugo and Kirby options.

Yesterday I did that thing where I wanted to use something other than Emacs and Org Mode, so I re-installed Obsidian and launched both Tinderbox and SilverBullet. Then, I wrote some notes in all of them. It was so darn nice having somewhere new to work. It lasted a few hours, after which I copied all of those notes into the appropriate .org documents and properly scolded myself for straying again. Everything else is inferior to Emacs, but sometimes I just need a break.

There’s nothing on my schedule today and that is totally fine with me. It’s not just fine, it’s preferred.

Is it too early to begin speculation about the iPhone 17?1

I just dropped in and scrolled through the feed on LinkedIn. If LinkedIn is the game I’m forced to play, then I forfeit.

My Org mode capture templates are acting funky. Things aren’t going where they’re supposed to. e.g. my Daybook entries are going into the wrong part of the datetree. I’ve changed nothing relevant that I know of. I hate this.

I think I’ll (reluctantly) stop using Capture One and go back to Lightroom. I was using Lightroom for a while because it’s good and keeps getting better, but I get the best results from and prefer using C1. However, it has become so slow as to be unusable. It can take 3 or 4 seconds to update the preview after moving a slider, which is maddening. I’ve done all the recommended things to improve performance, but nothing helps. Lightroom updates immediately. Plus Lightroom syncs, has modern features that non-professionals use, and is relatively inexpensive.

When I post regularly and to only one blog, my traffic numbers go up. This is pretty consistent. It’s an interesting data point, but I’m not doing this for visitor numbers, so I’ll continue to be inconsistent and scattered about.

The smartest thing for me to do would be to double down on using Org Mode for all of my notes and be done with it. I re-installed Logseq last week but haven’t launched it. Today, I downloaded Standard Notes but didn’t even install it. See? I’m getting better!

Editing in something other than Emacs. Social media and syndication.

Noodling on short posts

Melting Face (1982) In high school, I mowed lawns for extra cash. I remember vividly the time I was mowing our neighbor’s back yard and I had the idea for a painting (see above). I actually stopped the mower and went inside to start painting immediately. I miss feeling so creative that I’d stop whatever I was doing because I had an idea.

Websites I want. Newsletter observation. Things I don’t want to think about.

I’m having a lot of trouble staying away from social media. The idea was to limit myself to checking once or twice a day, but I still find myself reaching for it every time there’s a lull in my thoughts or as soon as I finish something. It’s insidious. I’m convinced that social media is bad for my brain and it’s definitely bad for my attitude. I’ll keep trying. I don’t think I should even allow the once-a-day checking. Perhaps I’ll bookmark just the notifications tab and check that, since I don’t want to be rude and not respond to people.

Notes from today # Have you ever looked into your completely disheveled pantry and said, “That does it! I’m fixing this right now!”? I did that today. After two hours of, “What the hell is this doing here?”, everything that doesn’t belong in the pantry is not in the pantry, and everything that remains in the pantry is where it belongs in the pantry. This feels really good.

News article nested negatives. Freddie deBoer on the Copernican Principle

Don’t worry about inconsistent posts and what about daily.baty.net?

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.

Social media. Org-mode. Idiots with boats.

I am very poorly today and hate everybody and everything

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?

No more Ghost instance and a new fire pit.

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.

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

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.

Backing away from my move away from Emacs again. I just can’t quit it.

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.

Fighting my Johnny Decimal plans.

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.

A bit of navel-gazing around workflows

Mostly just personal journaling today. Roger Waters t-shirt. Credit reporting. Ella’s move

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.

A bit about moving back to Hugo

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.

I’m on assignment I swear some days I want to single-handedly bring back single-use devices.

I’m fine. Server logs are interesting.

Losing interest in everything. And some blog notes.