Journal

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.

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.