Journal

I’m typing this in iA Writer because I read a blog post. See how susceptible I am to the opinions of others? 10 minutes later: Back in Emacs. Other editors are fun for a minute, but nope. I’ll be honest here: if being a supermarket janitor paid as well as being a developer at a large consultancy firm that I won’t name, I’d go back to cleaning toilets in a heartbeat. Software is never really done, especially in an “agile” shop, but least I can tell when the toilet’s clean. ...

I’m realizing that digital photography is actually not always easier than shooting film. Wrangling the new Nikon Zf to do what I want has been the opposite of easy. It’s not the Nikon’s fault, really. It’s that modern cameras want to do everything for everyone and it’s exhausting getting them to do the right things for me. Trying to use both Lightroom and Lightroom Classic and syncing between the two was a terrible, terrible idea that I’ve tried and failed at several times. The worst being this past month. Now I’m spending the morning either finding missing photos or dealing with duplicates. I never learn. ...

Me, all proud with my new camera I made a little Retrobatch script to overlay the date onto a photo. It’s meant for the OpenGraph cover image on these daily posts. I don’t normally include the photo in the posts themselves, but I did today. For some reason. ...

Still a bit sick. Slept better, though. It’s hard using a CPAP with a stuffy nose. I’m in one of those moods where I don’t feel like managing anything. It occurred to me that Emacs helps with this. Denote and Org Journal both manage the files for me. I just type. Org-attach handles my files for me. On the other hand, TiddlyWiki is Just One File, so there’s that. The thing I’m thinking about now is going back to Lightroom desktop for photos. I’ve been using Lightroom Classic because it’s got everything, but it sure is janky compared to the new Lightroom. And with Ligthtroom I don’t need to organize everything (although I probably would, anyway). Still thinking about it. ...

I’m a little under the weather, still. Today will consist of tinkering and reading, mostly.

I’ve removed these journal posts from the RSS feed for now. I like the feeling of writing without worrying about dumping all this crap into a bunch of unsuspecting RSS readers. Who knows, I may end up staying with the wiki for this. What will likely end up happening is that I’ll keep doing both, depending on my mood that day. Details Consistency is boring. I don’t feel like exercising or weighing myself today. I guess I’m not in the mood for expending any effort or being exposed to any more bad news right now. ...

I have an idea about these daily posts. I’ll be writing throughout the day over in the wiki. Then, end of day, I’ll grab anything I think is worth sharing and re-post it here. I mean, I didn’t call the wiki a “Rudimentary Lathe” for nothing. ...

I’ve redirected all requests to the briefly-revived copingmechanism.com to baty.net. Sorry for the trouble. My love for TiddlyWiki continues apace, with a bunch of updates to my wiki

This is helping me, today. Sometimes, it’s not what you thought it was, eh?

JFC, I don’t even want to be around the Good Guys anymore. You Can’t Post Your Way Out of Fascism You Can’t Post Your Way Out of Fascism: If there’s one thing I’d hoped people had learned going into the next four years of Donald Trump as president, it’s that spending lots of time online posting about what people in power are saying and doing is not going to accomplish anything. If anything, it’s exactly what they want. ...

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?