Good morning. What shall we wring our hands about, today?

After a week or two with Liquid Glass, I find that I don't really notice it. Those new Safari tabs, on the other hand...

My first blog post was written on August 10, 2000, making today the official 25-year anniversary of my blog^[1].

Most of the early posts were simple links to other sites, with brief comments. It was a link blog. Sadly, many (most?) of those links are dead. I've left the posts up, because to me it's still a form of history.

I don't get all philosophical about blogs or blogging. My blog has become a simple journal. It doesn't mean anything. I write about what I'm thinking or what I feel like sharing. That's it. I never worry about posting frequently enough or writing about the right things. There is no lane to stay in. I write whatever, whenever. Some days I love doing it. Other days I wonder why I bother.

For a brief moment, I thought about shuttering this site as an anniversary present to myself. I may not fret about the content here, but I spend a lot of time thinking about the platform and presentation. I probably consider switching platforms or themes or colors or something every day. It's a fun part of the hobby, but it can also be crazy-making.

So what's next? More of the same, I suppose. The platform may change. The style of writing may change. The topics may change. The domain may change. All I know is that I don't know how to stop, so I'll keep doing whatever it is I'm doing here for as long as I feel like doing it.

I am off social media for a bit. Whenever I feel myself doing nothing but scrolling or looking for likes or thinking of something "like-able" to say, I know it's time for a break. I'm not cross-posting to Mastodon at all anymore, either. So now, whenever there's a lull in the action of my life, I feel lost. That's the feeling I want to get rid of.

I spent time this morning working (with Claude Code) on displaying full content on the current daily post, but it ended up fighting what the theme wants, so I decided it wasn't worth it. Just for grins, I'm now theme shopping.

You know what, I don't like most themes for any platform. I'll stick with my PaperMod fork for now.

Switching between the MacBook Air keyboard and the HHKB keyboard can be off-putting. I have loved using the HHKB for years, but I've lost patience for the function layer and missing arrow keys. My pinky hurts too often.

I've been using an Apple Magic Keyboard and Logitech MX Master 3, and, while I love the mouse, the keyboard was boring, but fine, except the spacebar would intermittently fail to register. That's annoying.

On a bit of a whim I made the decision to go all in with Apple's keyboard, so I picked up a new Magic Keyboard with Touch ID, and a Logitech "MX Master 3S for Mac" to go with it. My old mouse works, but is so worn and gross that I thought it was time for a new one. You know, while I was shopping anyway.

I love having Touch ID on the keyboard, especially since I've not been wearing my Apple Watch as often.

I thought about going with some new fancy-keyboard route, but this is practical, simple, and done. It's fine, and now I can stop thinking about my keyboard so much.

Here's what Claude says about my recent posts:

I'll help you summarize your recent blog posts. Let me search for posts in the Blog/posts container that have been modified in the last 30 days.I see the Blog/posts container is organized by year, but these are just the year containers themselves. Let me look specifically at the 2025 posts since that's where your most recent content would be, and get the actual blog post content

Based on your blog posts from the last 30 days, here's a summary of what you've been writing about:

Key Themes in Your Recent Writing

Software and Tools Decision Fatigue You're clearly experiencing significant tension between different tools and platforms. This is your most prominent theme, appearing in posts about:

• Moving between Emacs, Tinderbox, and other tools for note-taking and journaling
• Email client struggles (particularly with Notmuch and various Mac email apps)
• Blogging platform decisions between Hugo/Kirby/Tinderbox/Ghost across multiple sites (baty.net, daily.baty.net, baty.photo)
• The exhaustion of having "3 or 4 ways of doing everything" and constantly second-guessing decisions

Tinderbox Appreciation Despite the tool-switching struggles, you consistently return to praising Tinderbox as:

• Your "longest-running favorite app"
• A "pointy-clicky graphical counterpart to Emacs"
• Making you "twitchy when you don't use it for too long"
• The perfect tool for this daily blog format

Blogging Philosophy and Structure You've written thoughtfully about:

• Preferring the simplicity of this Tinderbox blog's "lack of necessary decisions"
• Wanting to consolidate to "One Blog" but currently maintaining 4 active sites
• The value of curation in an era of fragmented social media
• Preference for static sites over dynamic ones to reduce server maintenance anxiety

Social Media and Digital Wellness Several posts touch on:

• Taking sabbaticals from social media due to amplification of "terrible shit"
• The health impacts of sitting at computers all day
• Finding the right amount of "friction" in digital tools
• Questioning LLM hand-wringing and asking for more nuanced discussion

Creative and Technical Observations Shorter posts about:

• Music criticism (Blood Incantation's metal)
• Photography gear obsession vs. artistic vision
• Server migrations and technical deployments
• The importance of making notes "immediately useful" rather than just having them in plain text

The overall picture is of someone deeply thoughtful about their digital tools and workflows, but perhaps caught in analysis paralysis about the "right" way to do things. Your writing suggests both technical sophistication and a desire for simplicity that sometimes conflict with each other.

Yeah that's no hallucination.

I take a lot of screenshots using the built-in screen capture tool on macOS. By default, these are saved as PNG files, which are unnecessarily ginormous for my purposes, so I always convert them to .jpg files.

Today I learned that the default format can be changed:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture type jpg
killall SystemUIServer

Better.

I'm realizing that my enthusiasm for Hugo reflects my current mood about Emacs. When I'm all-in with Emacs, Hugo is my favorite way to manage a blog. When I'm "off" Emacs, I find other ways to blog because my whole Hugo workflow is built using Emacs. The problem right now is that I'm oscillating rapidly between Emacs and not-Emacs, so I post in multiple places. It's fun having options, but I dislike making decisions. 😵‍💫

Here's the part in your review where I stop reading, "It's no masterpiece, but..."

I continue to overthink everything related to my blog(s). I want specific things for specific posts, depending on my mood that day. It's exhausting. The dream of course is to have One Blog. I have 4 active sites right now. That's more than one, for those who are counting.

The new baty.photo blog that I've set up just for posts about photography feels like the right move. That one stays. I like using Ghost for that.

It's the daily.baty.net thing that has me conflicted. I like how both the Tinderbox and (currently) Kirby versions work. They're good for showing a rolling set of random stuff, separated by day. This blog, running Hugo, is less suited for it. It's a combination of long posts, short posts, and these daily notes. Each of which must be clicked through to read. The daily notes don't feel like they belong here, which is why I keep trying to move them elsewhere. Except I don't much feel like maintaining both places. Both the Kirby and Tinderbox versions are custom and fairly complex to use and maintain. Do I really need more of that?

Thing is, none of this matters. Most folks visit via RSS anyway. And those who do actually come here, well, they don't really care how it works. They just want to read the latest stuff (for some reason).

OK, it just happened again. I'm reading this and realizing it doesn't belong in a daily note. It should be a separate post. Here in Hugo that means moving a file on disk and renaming it and modifying the front matter. Ugh, right? If this were in Kirby I'd just toggle "Show title" and it would do the right thing. Now what? Kirby isn't static. It's not difficult to host, but it's not simple, either.

I just also posted this over on daily.baty.net, to see how it felt. See how I am? Like I said, it's exhausting.

(Later): Guess what, tag searches stopped working on the Kirby site. I don't feel like debugging it, so the mood shifts back to Hugo. 🤓

I'm not even supposed to be here today.

I've been blogging since 2000. I've written thousands of posts, mostly about only a handful of things. Honestly, I'm a little bored with all of it. The thought of writing even more of the same things about the same things is exhausting.

The world seems to become more awful every day. I am increasingly uninterested in the incessant and unavoidable discourse and meta-discourse around AI. What does it say about me that I don't feel like writing about one of the most disruptive and contentious technologies to come along in decades?

Should I write about Apple? JFC don't we have more than enough of that, already? (Answer: We do).

How about I talk about my latest blogging platform change. Yeah, that's fun. Do more of that. 🙄

One thing feels certain, my mood is changing. I have decreasing motivation for writing full-on Blog Posts about anything lately. I don't have the energy.

I may still have the energy to continue to narrate my day as I go, but I don't know the best way to do that. Daily posts here on the blog feel weird for some reason. I think this is why I dusted off the daily.baty.net blog yesterday. It's better suited to a more stream-of-conciousness approach.

I'm a little tired of all of this. Blogging, I mean. I've been writing about the same things on repeat for 25 years. Aren't we all sick of hearing about blogging tools and software and tech and bla bla bla? I am. Maybe I'll open a barber shop, like my great grandfather did.

I don't feel much like writing full-on blog posts, so I keep spouting off little bits and bobs over on Mastodon instead. It's not ideal. I mean, I just added the /notes feature here, so why not use that? I honestly don't know. There's something about it I don't like.

I made the font here a bit smaller and a bit less black. It looked chunky and amateurish to me, somehow. Anyway, it's different now, which might be all I wanted.

Our annual family reunion was held this weekend. I brought the SL2 and the Rolleiflex. My wife snapped this photo with the SL2 of me shooting the Rolleiflex. I guess this is what I look like ¯_(ツ)_/¯.

I've rejiggered the Ghost blog I was using for this site into a dedicated photography blog. There's a lot of cruft scattered about, and I'm using the default theme for now, but it's a start.

The idea is that it will help me focus on photography, which is something I want to do, but haven't been doing. Sometimes I need a nudge, so baty.photo is a nudge.

See Why do I need a separate site for photography? for a bit more detail.

Follow on the Fediverse using @jack@baty.photo if you like.

As a lefty, I've always been at a disadvantage when it comes to writing with nice pens in paper notebooks. Writing on paper means dealing with the overhand hook, smeared ink, ring binders getting in the way, scratchy fountain pens, etc. I'm used to it.

My daily notebook is the popular Leuchtturm 1917. I'm using the 120g version, because I dislike bleedthrough and that's some big fat paper. My mistake was ordering the dotgrid version. I chose dotgrid because I tend to use it like a Bullet Journal, and often like to line things up, vertically. The problem is that the dotgrids use 5mm spacing. That's too small. Squeezing a row of cursive handwriting into a 5mm space using my medium-nib fountain pen isn't working. I'm learning that I prefer 7mm ruled pages, Or maybe blank pages.

Someone on YouTube mentioned that they love the Tamoe River notebooks. I've been a fan of Tamoe River paper for many years, so I ordered a blank one.

The idea was to use it for free-form morning writing. I grabbed a couple of my favorite pens, loaded with my favorite ink, and wrote a couple of pages. Then I looked on the reverse of one of those pages, and saw this mess:

My copy must be defective, because otherwise the "new" Tamoe River paper is no longer suitable for fountain pen use. That would be a shame. So now I'm writing in the new notebook with a pencil, which of course works fine, but seems like a waste of what should be a great fountain pen notebook.

I got so frustrated that I slammed my notebook(s) closed and put them up on a shelf, saying, "That's it for now. My journal goes digital!" I'll get over it and probably start all over again tomorrow, I love pen and paper, but it sure can be frustrating.

Why bother blogging when even I don't feel like reading my posts?

I guess I don't understand why blurring my "content" behind semi-transparent UI controls is any better than hiding it behind easily-distinguished UI controls. The content itself is unusable either way, so why not make the controls easier to see/use?

What do we think about about the whole /notes implementation here? I don't think I like it. I don't feel like creating a whole thing every time I want to share whatever useless thought pops into my head. OTOH, I don't much like putting everything into these daily posts, either. Not on this blog, in this format, anyway. On the other hand, why not just do it here? Problem is already solved, right?

Can you tell there's something going on with me? I don't feel like thinking about all the details and options with everything I do. Is it possible to underthink thinks? Because that's what I'd like to do for a while.

"I've decided to use Emacs for my notes" doesn't really narrow my options all that much, since Emacs is a self-contained infinity of choices all by itself.

I'm reluctantly realizing that most of my cassettes sound like shit. I'm not talking about the inherent limitations of the format. I mean that my specific copies are terrible.

I read about a Leica gathering, where someone wrote, "...you can learn a lot about someone’s journey just by the glass they’re rocking." That's three words (journey, glass, and rocking) in one sentence that I'll never use that way in any sentence. Also, no you can't.

Can you imagine much easier things would be if I...

• Used (only one) digital camera
• Put my photos in one big Lightroom Classic catalog
• Or maybe just used my iPhone with Apple Photos

I saw a post where someone complained that the timeline for some community was "...a sanitized version of reality." My question is, must every "community" always, no matter what, include content from every possible awful corner of the universe? If I wanted "reality", I'd go read about it, or visit just about every other timeline on the internet. I know shit is terrible, that's why I'm hanging out in this nice space for a spell...as a respite. Is it not OK to want to be mildly entertained and amused for a little while? I mean, we don't bitch about, say, The Disney Channel existing, do we? I don't believe people have the right to demand that every space conform to every situation.

I turn 61 years old, today. That seems like a lot.