Took a walk with the new Rolleiflex this afternoon

This week has been a whirlwind of blogging changes. Or, more accurately, a whirlwind of me thinking about blogging changes. I’m fascinated by the new ActivityPub features being built into Ghost. This would let me be part of the “Fediverse” without needing to belong to any specific instance of anything. I could blog and post to social media from the same place. People could follow me there, and I could follow them. ...

You may have noticed that I’ve been toying with the idea of moving my main blog to Ghost at https://copingmechanism.com. This all started because the folks developing Ghost have been working on implementing ActivityPub features directly into Ghost, and I like the idea of blogging and reading/posting to social media in one place. Mastodon is cool, but “belonging” to an instance can carry more meaning than I care for. I’m not interested in self-hosting Mastodon or GoToSocial or anything like that, so having it come along for “free” with Ghost makes it a tempting option. ...

I’m not the only one who thinks it’s too much work.

Today will involve more yard work. Mulch delivery Most of the day was spent outdoors, working on stuff. I rarely choose that option, but am always glad when I have.

I wrote recently that I’m tempted to “move the entire enterprise onto paper” and I’m more than half serious. Playing with text on the computer has become a way to never actually do anything useful. It’s fun and easy and gets me nowhere. I fired up my Micro.blog subscription again yesterday. This was probably not the right move, but I’m experimenting with my social media “identity” and Micro.blog is one option. ...

Hello again. Daily notes are back here now, after a brief foray over in Kirby and Tinderbox.

Remember my “Reduce and Simplify” goal for 2024? That was a good idea, eh?

Folder Preview is a quick look extension for previewing the contents of folders on macOS. It’s $1.99 and worth every penny. (via Andrew Canion)

I recently discovered Org mode’s speed keys option and it’s pretty great. One caveat with speed keys is that they only work if the point is at the very beginning of a heading. To help with this, I (with Claude’s help) created a small lisp function and hook to move the insertion point to the beginning of the first heading whenever I open an Org mode file. I’m recording it here in case it’s useful to anyone else. ...

The luminous and shocking beauty of the everyday is something I try to remain alert to, if only as an antidote to the chronic cynicism and disenchantment that seems to surround everything, these days. It tells me that, despite how debased or corrupt we are told humanity is and how degraded the world has become, it just keeps on being beautiful. Nick Cave, “Faith, Hope, and Carnage”

An early attempt at exporting my Journelly journal to PDF

I’m still mad at Hugo, so I’m spending time in Opposite Land. Blogging with Ghost, that is. My old theme (Kyoto) was zipped up in an archive folder, so I dusted it off and will post over there until I’m bored with it: Coping Mechanism.

So I have a couple of static blogs and two kind-of-static blogs. This is fine, I suppose, because I consider both blogging and software to be hobbies. But man, what a mess I’m making. I’m sensing the urge to recoil from all of it. I’m feeling like the whole Linux thing is a rabbit hole leading nowhere. Also, trying to shoehorn everything into Emacs is not yielding the benefits I read about in the brochure. ...

I bought a new car today. Before we get to that, I’d like to tell you about my old car. Ever since I’ve been able to drive, I’ve been fascinated by BMWs. Reading Car and Driver magazine from cover to cover was a monthly routine. Car and Driver loved BMWs. BMW was marketed as “The Ultimate Driving Machine” and I believed it. In 2019 I was shopping for used car. I walked into the local CarMax intending to buy a Jeep Grand Cherokee. As we were walking around the lot, I spotted a black 5-series BMW and thought it would be fun to take a look. I asked how much they wanted for it, and it turns out that BMWs depreciate wildly in the first few years, because the price for the 2016 BMW was comparable to the Jeep I had my eye on. In other words, it was within my budget. ...

Yeah, I’ve been distracted by a couple of new static blogging tools. I think both are interesting and worth a serious look by anyone looking for simple, local-first, Markdown-based blogging. I’ll try to write a bit more detail about them, but for now, check them out yourself. BSSG is a complete static site generator written in Bash. The only dependency is a markdown processor. Cmark is recommended and simple. I use Pandoc. It’s simple, fast enough, and has a refreshingly easy to use theming system with a ton of built-in themes. Then there’s LMNO.lol, which is even easier. Create a single Markdown file with all your posts, then just drag and drop the file into lmno.lol and boom! you have a blog. This one is a hosted service. Check them out! I did: linux.baty.net and baty.blog are BSSG blogs and lmno.lol/jbaty is at lmno.lol. ...

I posted the same thing on three different blogs today, just for fun. here on baty.net on lmno.lol on baty.blog (BSSG) All three of them were fun to do, which is why I keep so many blogs going at once.

If I were to only have one computer, I’d use notmuch for email in Emacs. I might also import non-email stuff as notmuch messages so I can search everything in one place. But, I now have 3 computers; 2 running macOS and one running (Fedora) Linux. Notmuch takes too much of my energy to keep synced between machines. So what about Mu4e? Mu4e is probably the “nicest” Emacs package for managing email, but it still requires a local synced copy of all my messages. This means configuring mbsync on all machines, etc. ...

Merlin knows: The bummer is we miss so many great little things because it doesn’t conform to the implastic version of ourselves that lives in some blindingly lit menagerie where everything is just so. Where we store the notional version of ourselves that’s never existed. And who do we imagine all that certainty is impressing? Eventually, you can make up someone plausible, I suppose. But, more basic bitches like me and you are stuck trying to puzzle it all out in a world full of people who’ve decided we’re misunderstanding the world wrong. ...