Notes

Bose is open-sourcing its old smart speakers instead of bricking them | The Verge:

A friend of mine in middle school used to enjoy assembling model cars. I remember that he would often paint the engine in great detail, then later glue the hood shut over it. I think about this a lot.

I still hate vertical videos.

To those of you who whine about receiving phone calls: Maybe get over yourself and answer the damn phone.

One of my resolutions for 2026 is to never even launch Obsidian. It’s a red herring and a distraction.

In a newsletter I just read, the author wrote:

If you want to feel like a failure when it comes to keeping a journal, check out this 700+ page chunk of Michael Palin’s diary entries from between 1969 and 1979. It’s Volume One! Not only is there a /lot/ of it, but it’s fun to read.

I wanted to see if my my/hugo-new-note function still worked. It does. 👋

I’ve been posting over on baty.blog instead, so these notes have sort of stopped happening. How long until I’m back, do you suppose? (This one not included).

I’m not clear what I’m supposed to put in these Notes vs what I might just drop into a daily post. At one point I was syndicating them to Mastodon, but once I stopped doing that, these notes have become less useful. Still noodlin'.

Stop expecting the bare minimum:

Color is a coating applied _later on_ to the original truth of the black-and-white photograph. For me, color is an artifice, a cosmetic (like the kind used to paint corpses). Roland Barthes, Camera Obscura

You know what’s weird? I’ve installed dozens of apps on this laptop and not once have I had to go to a website and do the download->.dmg->extract->drag->delete dance or anything. And no App Store. I guess I didn’t expect that but I’m quite happy about it.

I have a shell script that creates a new Hugo post in the right place, with the right name, and all the right front matter. I thought I’d try it on this linux machine, since Omarchy really pushes NeoVim, and I need to get used to NeoVim. Except after running the script, it opened the file in Typora. I’m still learning, I guess. 😊

A fast, good-looking and well-configured tiling window manager is a wonderful thing. It’s how I want to use a computer. In my case right now that’s Arch Linux and Hyprland via Omarchy.

The Arch forums after Omarchy feel a lot like Mastodon did after a Twitter exodus: YOU’RE NOT USING IT RIGHT!

photographing in black and white is not an afterthought.

I don’t know where anything is in Linux. Omarchy does a decent job of abstracting things, but once I move outside of that, I’m lost. This is going to be a long road, isn’t it?

To publish this note, I had to:

...the dream became reality when she finally completed her perfect note-taking system comprised of Zettelkasten-styled interlinked markdown files stored in Org-mode format with two-way conversion on the fly with syncronization across devices through a p2p network with E2E-encryption and backups stored in IPFS, with both native and PWA apps for all major platforms as well as command-line interface with a rich set of zsh autocompletions and keyboard shortcuts. Matthew Solenya, The Olognion

The reason we give for "Why I switched from System A to System B" is usually a derivative of "I was bored and wanted something new to play with.", but this doesn't stop us from writing 5,000-word explainer posts in which we invent all sorts of other reasons. Jack Baty, Rudimentary Lathe, Aug. 19, 2021

’Cause the technology is just gonna get better and better and it’s gonna get easier and easier and more and more convenient and more and more pleasurable to sit alone with images on a screen given to us by people who do not love us but want our money and that’s fine in low doses but if it’s the basic main staple of your diet you’re gonna die. David Foster Wallace

People seem to compare the hype around AI/LLM use to that of Blockchain/NFT from a couple of years ago. The difference for me is that I don’t personally know anyone who cared at all about blockchain, whereas everyone I know is using and is amazed by AI tools. Including me. Sure it’s still over-hyped, but at least it deserves some of it.

This kind of thing drives me bonkers. Is it really not possible to make packaging both secure and openable?

If you’re reading this, my new shell script for creating notes here in Hugo is working. (See post).

The difference between what I imagine that people think of me and what people actually think of me is a terrifying and humbling gap.

I’m beginning to feel like automated cross-posting is a mistake. For example, I might want to write this on the blog, but not have it propagated everywhere, automatically. Sometimes these notes are just for me, ya know? Still noodling on it.

Can you imagine what things would be like for me if I’d have just stuck with one or two approaches to everything. Given any task, I probably have 3 or 4 ways of doing it, each of them wildly different, but fully formed. This means I have a decision to make for everything all the time. It also means that I second guess every decision. Every time. It’s kind of exhausting.

“The dogs bark, but the caravan moves on”

I sometimes tire of hitting C-x C-c C-this C-that all day in Emacs. When that happens, I think about Evil mode. When that happens, I think about Doom Emacs. I installed Doom this morning and started merging it with my config. It lasted a few minutes. Doom is fancy and refreshing and ultimately frustrating. Back to vanilla.

A nice little thing: The light in my toaster oven comes on automatically when there’s 30 seconds left on the timer. It makes me smile every time, for some reason. It’s as “smart” as an appliance needs to be.

Yesterday, I exported all of the content from the wiki and converted it into an Obsidian vault. Why? I’m not sure. Just to see if I could, I guess. I kind of wanted to see how it “felt” having all 4000 of my wiki notes in Obsidian. It’s different.

“We must not admire those who own great possessions, but those who have the strength to do without them. For it is not he who has little, but he who desires more, that is poor. The man who is not in need is not the one who has much, but the one who can go without much.”

I keep seeing comments like, “I don’t use community plugins in Obsidian because I don’t want to be dependent on something one guy works on in his spare time.” Then they go about the rest of their day using a dozen other things made by one guy in his spare time.

After years using various “Read Later” apps and services, I recently decided to go simple and just use Safari’s Reading List feature. It works as well as the others…in that I never read anything later there either.

I’m in a weird mood today, so Wet Leg is appropriate.

Before I went out of town yesterday, I mentioned that I might be moving back to Hugo from Ghost (again). I wasn’t sure I’d actually do it, come the light of day, but I did it.

I swore off Evil-mode in Emacs a while ago. It often feels like a kludge and some packages I use, namely Howm, don’t work with it at all. But I still spend time in a terminal, terminal apps, and Vim, and bouncing between Vim and Emacs bindings is crazy-making and I’m not enjoying it.

So my little essay about the computer, why I’m not going to buy a computer, was just a part of my strategy to try to keep myself whole as a human being. I don’t want my life to be lived for me by a machine."

I just want to choose a service without feeling like I’m also committing to an ideology.

I can’t seem to read fiction anymore. Every time I pick up one of the novels I’ve started recently, I find myself saying, “Don’t care.” and I put it back down. Non-fiction is faring much better.

Ghost is nice, but it still makes me feel like I’m living in someone else’s space. There’s a sort of background hum of “this isn’t really yours”, and it bothers me. I haven’t decided yet if it bothers me enough to do anything about, though.

I find that I’d much rather look at these janky Polaroids than any super-sharp-and-clean hi-megapixel digital image.

It’s funny how when I move something for like the fifth time, I think to myself, “There, now I never have to move that again!”

I’ve noticed that I’ve started posting things with an eye toward getting more attention online, and I hate myself for it. Might be time to pull back for a bit.

Why can’t they make players with big, obvious, differentiated Play/Pause/Stop buttons. My CD and Blu-ray players require a magnifying glass and a flashlight to find the right buttons.

Here’s a stupid idea I’m thinking about trying. What if I were to write all my posts in Emacs and render them locally using Hugo. Then, copy and paste the rendered HTML into the Ghost editor for publishing? A bonus with that approach would be that when I inevitably end up back to using Hugo for the blog, all the content will already be there 😁.

I’ve been using my new MacBook Air for a few days. I just now did a search (using Google, by default) and noticed that I’d not yet installed the Kagi extension. If I didn’t notice, I must not have missed it, so I canceled my subscription.

Tim Bray’s post about Qobuz got me thinking. I have a lifetime subscription to Roon, and Roon integrates smoothly with Qobuz. The problem has been that I already subscribe to Apple Music, so Qobuz felt redundant. However, after recently freeing up $10/month by

I hate not knowing how many times I’ll need to press the button in order to turn a light off. Power on/off switches should be separate from brightness controls.

When including these “Notes” on my daily journal pages, I forgot to deal with cover images. This here is a test of this morning’s fix for that.

I’ve changed my Hugo template so that any “Notes” I create on the same day as a daily journal are included inline in the journal post. No titles, just text. They’re still on the /notes page, too, so I can see them all at once. I’m also still cross-posting them to Mastodon, for now.

I think about this a lot. Whenever I read it I usually make a few prints.

It happened again and it was so satisfying.

I want to just walk around the seaside village all day, making small watercolor paintings of things I observe. I would do that, but I rarely leave the house in my boring midwestern suburb and I can’t paint for shit.

It’s gotten out of hand.

I took a roll’s worth of frames today, but on four different film cameras, so I still don’t have anything new to process.

Kazuyuki Hiraoka, author of the Howm Emacs package:

I know people throughout history have successfully used Rolleiflexes for all kinds of documentary photography and photojournalism, but have they ever tried following a toddler around?

I’ve not quite gotten the hang of the Rolleiflex, apparently.

Looks like I accidentally took a photo of a hole in the universe.

I can’t explain why I like listening to my old cassettes so much. All I can say is that I’m having a blast.

In 2010 I would walk around with the Hasselblad and a roll of Tri-X and take photos of just about anything. This is a spring from a train car. I like how it turned out.

I spent hours yesterday watching YouTube videos about photographers. Ernst Haas, Winogrand, Helen Levitt, Irving Penn, Tish Murtha, etc. I loved it, but so help me if I don’t get out and make some of my own pictures soon what am I even doing?

What happens if a YouTube thumbnail doesn’t include someone making a stupid face and pointing? I assume there’s a fine involved.

In Junior High, I asked a girl I had a crush on to sign my yearbook. She wrote, “You’re weird, but sweet!” I was a teeny bit offended at the time, but I like to think I’ve stayed true to her summary ever since. It now feels like a compliment.

I’ve set up EchoFeed to “echo” the content from the new /notes area on Baty.net to Mastodon. No link, just the content. If you can read this, it worked.

This note was added via my new jab/hugo-new-note function in Emacs.

Hello, this is the first “Note” post I’ve added to my Hugo blog. The idea is for these to be short, title-less posts, syndicated to social media.