Journal

Now that I've added a /notes section to the blog, where does that leave these daily notes? I think I'll keep them. It gives me a place to record some notes throughout the day, but without spewing everything out to social media seventeen times. Just the once :). Then again, isn't that what the wiki is for?

Greg Storey:

We've turned each consumer interaction into a moral audit. An app download requires community consensus. Every platform choice needs ethical clearance.

...

I’m exhausted. I'm tired of everything being a moral decision. Tactical retreat has turned into a life strategy, and the world won't improve based on the number of doors I close.

I think we're all exhausted.

Today will involve more yard work.

Most of the day was spent outdoors, working on stuff. I rarely choose that option, but am always glad when I have.

I wrote recently that I'm tempted to "move the entire enterprise onto paper" and I'm more than half serious. Playing with text on the computer has become a way to never actually do anything useful. It's fun and easy and gets me nowhere.

I fired up my Micro.blog subscription again yesterday. This was probably not the right move, but I'm experimenting with my social media "identity" and Micro.blog is one option.

Hello again. See this post for why I'm back to posting daily notes here.

No one with privilege is going to simply stop taking advantage of it on their own. That's why it's called "privilege". When it comes to helping them to better understand and use their privilege for good, it might be more effective if you didn't constantly scold them for even having it.

So I have a couple of static blogs and two kind-of-static blogs. This is fine, I suppose, because I consider both blogging and software to be hobbies. But man, what a mess I'm making. I'm sensing the urge to recoil from all of it.

I'm feeling like the whole Linux thing is a rabbit hole leading nowhere. Also, trying to shoehorn everything into Emacs is not yielding the benefits I read about in the brochure.

Yeah, I've been distracted by a couple of new static blogging tools. I think both are interesting and worth a serious look by anyone looking for simple, local-first, Markdown-based blogging. I'll try to write a bit more detail about them, but for now, check them out yourself. BSSG is a complete static site generator written in Bash. The only dependency is a markdown processor. Cmark is recommended and simple. I use Pandoc. It's simple, fast enough, and has a refreshingly easy to use theming system with a ton of built-in themes. Then there's LMNO.lol, which is even easier. Create a single Markdown file with all your posts, then just drag and drop the file into lmno.lol and boom! you have a blog. This one is a hosted service. Check them out! I did: linux.baty.net and baty.blog are BSSG blogs and lmno.lol/jbaty is at lmno.lol.

I posted the same thing on three different blogs today, just for fun.

1. here on baty.net
2. on lmno.lol
3. on baty.blog (BSSG)

All three of them were fun to do, which is why I keep so many blogs going at once.

Merlin knows:

The bummer is we miss so many great little things because it doesn't conform to the implastic version of ourselves that lives in some blindingly lit menagerie where everything is just so. Where we store the notional version of ourselves that's never existed.

And who do we imagine all that certainty is impressing? Eventually, you can make up someone plausible, I suppose. But, more basic bitches like me and you are stuck trying to puzzle it all out in a world full of people who've decided we're misunderstanding the world wrong.

Merlin Mann - It takes a worried man.

I did yardwork today instead of blogging. I'd prefer not to do that.

I hope everyone had a relaxing weekend. I did, at least up until I tried setting up a new(ish) iPhone for my mom. She got a hand-me-down iPhone 12 to replace her, surprisingly still working, iPhone 6. Between Find My/anti-theft issues and forgotten passwords, it was much more frustrating than I'd hoped. Still, she has a new phone and that's good.

I'm typing this on the ThinkPad, even though my Mac is /right there/. It's probably the novelty, but at least it's happening. This is a first for me. here's the latest.

Today, I want to be the guy who only has a paper notebook, a beat up Linux laptop, and a film camera...and is happy with it.

Sometimes I create this daily entry without having anything to write about in mind. It seems necessary, but is it? Probably not, yet I keep doing it, anyway.

I'm rarely in a hurry, so why do I spend so much time working on ways to do things faster? Working on the Linux laptop this week has made so many things slower. I don't have a text expansion utility configured yet. I don't have something like Raycast on the Mac. Still, I don't feel like I'm doing less. In fact, my mind has been calmer. Writing on the ThinkPad feels more like using a typewriter. OK, that's an exaggeration, but you see the point. There's much less going on, here. I have the usual urge to "improve" things, but I may just wait a minute on that and see if I can settle in with something simpler.

I've been busy with my Linux experiment. I'm writing about it there, if you want to follow along.

Today, I put a Framework laptop in my cart. This whole experiment only got rolling because I thought I might like Linux on my desktop, so why am I looking at laptops when I have a perfectly servicable (2015) ThinkPad X1 Carbon (that I'm typing on right now)? I can't explain it. Most likely it's because I have an Apple Studio Display and (I'm told) it's quite challenging to use it with Linux. I'm not changing monitors for this, the Studio Display is too good (and expensive).

Linux is fun, but frustrating. I'm trying to stick with it long enough to blame Linux rather than my inexperience for my troubles. As a way to help remember the process, I've started a new blog at linux.baty.net^[1]. The new blog is a journal of things I'm learning or struggling with. I'd normally be taking these notes locally but I thought it would be worthwhile to publish them.

So, yeah, I seem to have four blogs at the moment. It's fun, but not sustainable. Anyway, good morning!

I mean, maybe I'm meant to be the guy who has a bunch of different blogs and nobody wants to follow because he's inconsistent and spread so thin. Is that so bad?

Dammit, now I'm posting journal posts in two places. I get bored doing things the same way every day, so I change things. I don't know if this makes me interesting or if it's a symptom of some deep-rooted mental issue.

Read Mike's Deft, Markdown, Marksman/Emacs LSP, iA Writer and then spent an hour playing with Marksman and I ended up getting nowhere and now I'm upset that I can't get wikilink completion in random Markdown files. This is why I shouldn't be using Emacs.

You know how I say that I'd rather not think about my blogging software and just concentrate on writing instead? And you know how sometimes I try to do that by changing my platform and workflow? Yeah, I sometimes miss the irony of doing that. There's almost nothing in my existing workflow that needs changing, if I'm honest. If I wanted to, I could "not think about blogging software and just write." So why don't I, then?

I had fun yesterday working with the Coping Mechanism blog and Ghost. If you ignore the upsell and "please subscribe!" noise, Ghost is rather pleasant to work with. The problem is that I don't want to migrate this blog to it, and I don't want multiple blogs. This means that, while I still may tinker with Ghost, I shouldn't use it for anything "real". So, what am I doing? ¯_(ツ)_/¯.

I'm typing this in iA Writer for reasons I can't explain.

I'm supposed to be working on a new website for a family member. I'm 80% finished, but the final 80% is the uninteresting part and I don't feel like doing it right now. Instead, I spent an hour this morning feeling like I should go back to using Lightroom Classic instead of Capture One, but I still prefer Capture One, so I'll have to deal with the things I don't like about it.

I skipped my last 6-month dentist appointment, so when I finally went in for a cleaning today, I was apprehensive. Turns out I had nothing to worry about. Doc said that he saw "nothing of interest at all" on my X-rays. That's always a good thing. No cavities, only minor plaque. Yay flossing!

...feeling that strange mix of liberation and disobedience that comes with rejecting the default.

Joan Westenberg, I’m Entering My Curmudgeon Era

I am in one of my moods today. I know this because I changed Denote's default file format to Markdown. Then changed it back to using .org 10 minutes later.

I don't know what to write about today. I'm sitting here at my usual desk typing into a full-screen Emacs frame with a few of my usual buffers open. I did end up giving up on Doom again. It's just more than I want, even though it does a lot of nice things without my help. And I miss having SPC as leader key. I'm not doing that general.el thing again, either. Oh well, I guess it's back to C-c or C-x for everything.

Maybe I should start a manufacturing company. AI is unlikely to take my job from me and all those dickheaded teriffs might work in my favor. Except that's now how it works, is it? No one here knows how to make the things we use to make the things.