Journal

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 wake up every day wondering who I'm going to be that day.

Both WordPress and Hugo have things to like about them, so I keep using both because I don't want to miss out on the good things about one when I decide to use the other. It's silly, but there we are.

• STATUS: Weight: down. Sleep: Dunno, the Pebble said 1.5 hours which is a bit off
• TODO: Therapy, groceries, maybe clean the closet
• WATCHING: Bingeing the 3rd season of “The Diplomat”

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

I started posting over at baty.blog again for some reason.

Me, on this day in 2019:

For like a week now I've gone to bed with the ThinkPad and using Linux to actually do stuff. It's fun. Not easy or care-free, but for the first time I'm having a little fun.

It'll stick eventually.

The 3.1.0 update to Omarchy has been released. The Discord channels are awash with people having trouble with the update, but I ran it on both my machines anyway. No issues so far.

Some days I want to live entirely within Emacs. Some days I want to live in a browser. Some days I want to live in terminal and TUI apps. These things, while not mutually exclusive, don't get along well.

I am surprisingly content with using Zen browser.

I'm typing this in neovim/lazyvim for some reason. Sometimes a change in venue is refreshing, right?

I've optimized myself into a completely broken system.

• STATUS: Sleep: 6h 50m
• TODO: Figure out Linux backups, I guess.
• WATCHING: Started "The Chair Company". Funny, but cringy, as expected.
• LISTENING:

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.

If I'd have stuck with one system/process for longer, I'd really have something. As it stands now, all I have is a big fat mess.

• STATUS: Sleep: 5h 50m. Weight: I don't weigh myself on the weekend.
• TODO: Water change in fish tank
• WATCHING: Finished "Task". ★★★★
• LISTENING: J. Geils Band "Bloodshot"

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.

All the second engine does is fly you to the scene of the crash.

-- Pilots

It's possible I've bitten off more than I can chew. New desktop and laptop. New OS on both. New NAS. New media streamer (Jellyfin rather than Plex). New Immich install (via Docker on the UGREEN NAS). New photo editing software (Darktable). It's a little overwhelming. My M4 Air is taunting me from the shelf over there.

• STATUS: Sleep: 7h 30m yay! Weight: ⬇️
• TODO: Visit grandson
• LISTENING: Ratt, "Out of the Cellar" on cassette

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.

Gruber doesn't get art: Matthew Inman of The Oatmeal: 'A Cartoonist's Review of AI Art'

• STATUS: 6h 24m sleep. Weight is ⬇️.
• TODO: Organize computers/cables. Water change in fish tank.
• READING: The Tools by Phil Stutz and Barry Michels
• LISTENING: Painkiller, by Judas Priest

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've spent a ton of time and money moving my film scanning workflow from a flatbed to using a digital camera. My results using Darktable's Negadoctor module have been lackluster, so I re-scanned my last roll using the Epson flatbed. I still feel like it's faster and less fussy doing it that way. I loaded the TIFF scans in Capture One, selected all of them, and hit "Auto" and that was it. They look better than the ones I futzed with forever in Darktable. I haven't timed it, but I'd bet that the total time from dried film to shareable images is significantly faster using the flatbed. Sigh.

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 haven't been mentioning Omarchy or the Framework laptop lately because I don't feel like being scolded for "supporting projects that promote facism" which is of course not what they're doing, but whatever. I'm not interested in arguing about it, and I'm not going to clear my throat before every mention. fwiw I like both products very much. Send me an actual apples-to-apples equivalent and I might switch.

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.

Here's an image to test the RSS version of the link:

Now to figure out the reply button. It's in the XML but I don't see it in Innoreader but do in elfeed.

The UGREEN NAS arrives today. I've pulled everything off the old Synology that I need and will move those drives into the UGREEN and format everything. I hope this doesn't turn out to be a maintenance nightmare. It's going to replace the little Mac Mini server and the drives hanging off it, which has been working fine.

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:

Markdown-mode in Emacs can hide markup so things feel a bit more WYSIWYG, but I've turned that off by default. Don't WYSIWYG Markdown editors sort of defeat one of the purposes of Markdown? Plus, I don't get confused about what is actually in the post this way. I can see the URL for links without C-c C-l-ing all the time.

Aaaaand, we're back.

Sometimes I really like WordPress. It lasts a week or two.

I cleaned a few things up around here. The big one is that I'm now using the stock PaperMod theme rather than the mess I made in my own fork. I'll probably tweak, but I don't want to maintain my own theme.

I also removed /notes from the navigation. I don't need them. I may find some other way to indicate/present shorter posts, but for now it's all either a post or a daily note.

Who knows if I'll end up back there. Some of the cool upcoming ActivityPub stuff might draw me. For now, though, it's Hugo at Baty.net.

The idea that "...endorsing ANYTHING is 100% endorsing that anything's beliefs." is horseshit, btw.

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

The new Framework 13 is pretty much ready for action. I'm still dealing with how and what to sync between machines. I've rejiggered my emacs config so that it's all done via Git. More work than expected. The rest of the system is even more confusing. I'm not going to sync all of .config/ but seems like most of it could be. And what parts of Omarchy make sense to sync? I'm new here.

Once or twice a week lately I have an ocular migraine that wipes out parts of my vision for 20-30 minutes. I use that time to go for a walk.

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 don't want to think about how much of my life I've spent moving windows around a computer screen. Those days are over, I think.

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

My new Framework laptop shipped sooner than expected. It's estimated to arrive Tuesday, but I see that it's already in Grand Rapids. BRING IT TO ME!

"He was a father and a husband." People keep repeating this as if any of those things requires you to be a decent human being. Lots of vile people are fathers and husbands.

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'll be happy to talk to machines once I no longer need to learn their language in order to do so.

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.

I'm running immich on the Mac Mini via Docker and it's been working great. It's fast and simple to use. Hosting has (knock on wood) been a breeze so far, too. I like it.