Tuesday, February 04, 2025

Writing Desk (2025). Nikon FM2n. HP5 @800. Let’s test the idea of continuing with daily journal posts as separate ā€œthingsā€. I’ve subscribed to a year of Wired Magazine. For $6/year, including the print edition(!), it’s a pretty good deal. ...

February 4, 2025 Ā· Jack Baty

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 ...

December 28, 2024 Ā· Jack Baty

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? ...

December 27, 2024 Ā· Jack Baty

Thursday, December 26, 2024

I’m deleting a bunch of old files. There’s a significant psychological difference between ā€œzipping them up and putting them on some hard drive somewhereā€ and actually deleting them. Deleting, where feasible, is better.

December 26, 2024 Ā· Jack Baty
You woke me for this?

Wednesday, December 25, 2024

It’s Christmas šŸŽ„. Organizing things. da Vinci.

December 25, 2024 Ā· Jack Baty
My beloved Focomat IIc Enlarger

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: you know I think I want to read a book about minimalism as a concept but really I just want somebody to tell me how to organize my closet ...

December 24, 2024 Ā· Jack Baty

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.

December 23, 2024 Ā· Jack Baty

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. ...

December 20, 2024 Ā· Jack Baty

Thursday, December 19, 2024

See, the thing is, I need to somehow keep the the ā€œReduce & Simplifyā€ 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 ā€œa little workā€ 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? ...

December 19, 2024 Ā· Jack Baty

Sunday, December 15, 2024

See how the way I’m doing this blog ruins the archives?… Part of my Archives page. Useful, huh?

December 15, 2024 Ā· Jack Baty

Saturday, December 14, 2024

Thanks Frank! It’s good to know I’m not alone. I went to sleep last night having decided that, ā€œTomorrow, I’m going to revamp my Emacs config and go back to my home-grown config.ā€ This morning, I thought, ā€œLife would be easier if I just used Obsidian instead.ā€ So yeah, normal day so far šŸ‘‹šŸ». The market has chosen Markdown over Org mode files and I hate that.

December 14, 2024 Ā· Jack Baty
Plant on my desk that I haven't killed yet.

Friday, December 13, 2024

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

December 13, 2024 Ā· Jack Baty

Thursday, December 12, 2024

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 ā€œcountā€. And some days, that’s exactly what I want. Living in my head is frustrating. Century-Scale Storage: But at the century scale, even our most widely adopted file formats are completely untested. Digital history is not long enough to definitively settle on best practices. ...

December 12, 2024 Ā· Jack Baty

Monday, December 09, 2024

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. ...

December 9, 2024 Ā· Jack Baty
Powerlines on my walk. Olympus Stylus Epic. HP5.

Sunday, December 08, 2024

Digital Minimalism. Organizing. Markwhen.

December 8, 2024 Ā· Jack Baty

Friday, December 06, 2024

I spent a good portion of yesterday offline. Well, not technically offline, but not on social media, which feels like the same thing. Trying to remember to step away from the computer once I notice that all I’m doing is clicking things basically at random. That means I’m done for now, but I rarely heed the clues.

December 6, 2024 Ā· Jack Baty

Thursday, December 05, 2024

Cleaning up my servers and backups

December 5, 2024 Ā· Jack Baty

Wednesday, December 04, 2024

Social media, blogging, subscriptions.

December 4, 2024 Ā· Jack Baty

Tuesday, December 03, 2024

ā€œI don’t know anything about what you asked, but here’s what I got from Perplexityā€¦ā€ is not helpful. Plus, you still don’t know anything about what I asked. We’ve gotten nowhere and you’ve wasted our time.

December 3, 2024 Ā· Jack Baty
Playing with the old X100

Monday, December 02, 2024

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. :) ...

December 2, 2024 Ā· Jack Baty