Journal

I honestly don't know whether the past few days of tinkering with Emacs evil-mode, Doom, etc. was fun or a complete, confusing waste of time. Right now I'm thinking the latter.

I should apologize for my mood this morning...Sorry about my mood this morning.

Yesterday, I decided to bring back my Doom Emacs config. I've been missing evil-mode and using Space as leader key. Sometimes hitting Control-this Control-that constantly becomes tedious, ya know? After a couple of hours, I bailed on the idea. Doom offers a ton of quality-of-life features, but it also contains a lot of magic. As much as I appreciate the magic, I too often feel like it's working against me. Back to my own config, which works against me too, but at least it's my fault this way.

I need to find a way for my brain to relax. I spend entire days with a dozen apps open, each with a dozen tabs open. I click rapidly between them looking for something to focus on. I never find anything.

Part of my problem might be that I've surrounded myself with too much infrastructure. There are dependencies everywhere. daily.baty.net for example. The idea is that I have a separate blog that works well for short, daily writing. Except that now I have two blogs. And I'm (for the moment) using Kirby for that one. This means an entirely different workflow and setup. This is great for when I'm feeling bored with Hugo. It keeps me from moving this blog back and forth. However, it's also more stuff in my brain. Do I need more stuff in my brain? Right now, I don't think so. Hence, I'm writing today's journal post here.

I was feeling nostalgic for Evil mode today, so, instead of doing the smart thing and installing and configuring Evil-mode, I brought back my Doom Emacs config and got it up to date. Doom is pretty great. It usually takes a couple weeks before I get twitchy about Emacs not feeling like "it's mine" but we'll see.

One of the things I'm finding useful about LLMs is having them summarize my own writing. For example, I threw this month's Org journal at ChatGPT and asked for a summary:

Jack Baty's journal entries from early March 2025 reflect his daily life, thoughts on photography, and personal observations. He struggles with sleep due to being woken early, enjoys organizing his journals and photos, and contemplates selling his cameras, particularly the Leica SL2 or Nikon Zf. He describes his experiences shopping with friends and family, expresses concerns about aging, and shares his mixed feelings about current events, especially regarding political figures. His reflections reveal a sense of nostalgia, motivation issues, and a desire for connection, particularly with his partner, Gail. He also documents mundane tasks, like grocery shopping and website building, while dealing with the ups and downs of daily life, including caring for his dog, Alice.

It's as if my journaling is raw material for a new set of documents summarizing my life. It's readable, accurate^[1], and like seeing it this way.

🎶 "Absolute Elsewhere" by Blood Incantation.

When are we going to get past this period of Metal sounding like call-and-respond between Backstreet Boys and Cookie Monster with the flu? It's been self-parody for a decade.

I spent hours this morning trying to find a good way of adding some metadata to the cover images on the blog. I wanted the temparature, at least. I tried shoehorning it into my Retrobatch script, but that was a dead end. Whenever I'm lost in image manipulation, I turn to ImageMagick. Boy did that take me down a rabbit hole. Long story short, I figured it out. But now I don't like it. ¯_(ツ)_/¯.

So, the so-called DOGE is planning to rewrite the SSA codebase in months. This sounds to me like a way to stop paying people, but being able to blame it on software.

I knew it would happen, didn't you? I really don't want to talk about changing blog platforms, though. It's embarrassing. I'll just say that, while I don't love Hugo, it's the thing I'm least uncomfortable with overall. Let's move on, shall we?

Going slowly, making lots of little mistakes, and figuring out how things work is how you learn to solve tons of problems. AI platforms are creating a world where the solution to any problem is “more AI” and prompting.

Paul Ford, "Bad Vibes Coding"

LinkedIn is not the right place for me to find interesting work.

you can “study” the data later and rearrange it. But the initial “just remember this” impulse should be as close to simply throwing the data at Emacs as possible.

Remember Mode (Manual)

I like that.

I've been secretly conducting an experiment called "Use Obsidian Exclusively for 30 Days". It started a week ago. I'm typing this in Emacs, in case you're wondering how it's going.

Most days, I write the same things in both paper and digital journals. Then I print the digitital one. What's wrong with me? 😄^[1]

Dante Stella on over-thinking travel photography:

It is difficult for amateur photographers to accept that, on any given trip, they will not likely take unique photos of staggering social significance or prize-winning landscapitude. The reality is that the photos most likely to survive generationally will be the ones with family members in them. The rest stand a good chance of being binned.

Dante Stella, Mutiny! Travels with a camera | The Machine Planet

Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.

Oscar Wilde

Walking Alice this morning shortly after 3:30 AM, I thought the moon looked weird. There was only the slightest sliver lit and the rest was a deep red. Turns out there was a total lunar eclipse at 3:30 that no one told me about. That explained it.

I spun up a WordPress blog this morning because I was bored and wanted to tinker with something. It's so easy to get started, but the block and site editors still feel like a janky, confusing mess. Just make me a nice theme with a few options and access to CSS and I'm good. I deleted the site 20 minutes later. Guess I'll need to find something else to play with today.

Something weird is that my Emacs setup feels like it's both complete and just started at the same time.

Good lord, look at all this free stuff! FreeMediaHeckYeah.

Nothing feels fun right now. Most of the things I typically enjoy have become frustrating exercises. I love paper notebooks, but can't bring myself to write in them for more than a few minutes. I love film photography, but I don't feel like dealing with the constraints and the costs. I've no patience for it. I love movies, but none of them look interesting. My typewriters collect dust. It's probably just another allergic reaction to the terrible shit happening in the world right now, but I'm finding it hard to shake.

I just exported 2700 tiddlers from my TiddlyWiki as one big markdown file, split it into individual files, and renamed them using Denote's format. ¯_(ツ)_/¯. I guess I tired of searching my Denote notes, coming up empty, then having to go to the wiki and search again. I'll write some notes about it at some point.

Using ChatGPT reminds me of when they started letting us use calculators in class. Sure, I forgot how to do long division by hand, but who cares? Everything else was so much easier it was worth the trade.

It seems like this is turning into an Emacs blog.
Not that there's anything wrong with that :).

It's getting harder and harder to discover useful videos on YouTube. Every thumbnail is created using the same "Make a crazy face and point at something!" format. Every title is a despirate grab for attention. The recommendation algorithm is all over the map and usually not helpful. I rely on subscriptions to known quantities and recommendations from other people. I wish it was better.

Dave's still doing fun stuff with Tinderbox.

I decided to try something new and I created a "quote"-type post.

Dave Rogers

I've been meaning to do something similar, but haven't gotten around to it. I'd probably not be so fancy. I also like the <cite> block in quotes, as seen above. That would be even more involved. Right now I have a bookmarklet that copies a Markdown-formatted version and I tweak it by hand as needed.

I'm thinking about migrating all of the content from the wiki into individual text (.md or .org) files and freezing the wiki. I love the thing, but I would like to focus my attention on Emacs/Org/etc. right now.

My eyes were bored so I changed themes again. Back to PaperMod for now.

I'd like to not create these daily journal posts, and instead create several individial posts. The problem is that so much of what I write here in journal posts is not Postworthy. So, I'll keep doing this, I guess.

Avatarium is new to me. I love her soulful (clean) vocals and the doom/sludgy sound. It's like Joni Mitchell and Black Sabbath teamed up.

{{< youtube VFKfPIV_aZc >}}

Too many journals. Not enough to say.

I would love to be a person who goes out to photograph because I have something to say, rather than someone looking for an excuse to play with cameras and because I'm bored.

I find YouTube to be 95% useless, but the other 5% is helpful and can be absolutely amazing and wonderful.

If I cancel my subscriptions to every newspaper that publishes something stupid, I'll have nowhere left to get any news. Mastodon, you say? Hardly.

I bet you a million dollars that the Mozilla terms-of-use kerfluffle ends up being a tempest in a teapot. Again. We're so quick to jump on things that have even the slightest whiff of "wrongdoing". That's fine, but know what you're pouncing on, first.

Hey everyone, a little more empathy, please. Thanks.

I've been shopping for desktop computers to run Linux. Something easy and nice, like a low-mid range Thelios, maybe. This is a terrible idea and I should stop doing it at once.

When do you think I'll finally find something that I'm good at?

There are too many people in my head.

I like Matt Birchler's Quick Reviews app, but I wish it would look up the year/director for me. The new iOS app might do something like that, but I won't use the app on iOS.

Some days I find myself in a foul mood because "Emacs is being stupid and annoying and I don't feel like dealing with it!"

Today, though, Emacs has been making me absolutely giddy. It can be wonderful, and I wish more people could put in the time to get to know (and love) it. 😍.

Well, I'm in that place again. You know the one. The one where I write the same thing in more than one, and sometimes more than two, places because I can't decide where stuff goes.

I've backed up and made all of my Kindle books readable on any device. I also just borrowed a book from the library, directly from my Kobo. This feels very good.

I'd like to get kaorahi (Howm) and Prot (Denote) together and maybe lock them in a room for a few hours. At the end, there would either be plans for building the greatest Emacs package ever...or fisticuffs.