Journal

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 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 ...

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: 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 ...

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. 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. ...

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?… Part of my Archives page. Useful, huh?

Thanks Frank! It’s good to know I’m not alone. I went to sleep last night having decided that, “Tomorrow, I’m going to revamp my Emacs config and go back to my home-grown config.” This morning, I thought, “Life would be easier if I just used Obsidian instead.” So yeah, normal day so far 👋🏻. The market has chosen Markdown over Org mode files and I hate that.

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. 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. ...

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. 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.

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. :) ...