Jack Baty baty.net

Friday, August 08, 2025

Audio tape unwound on the floor
pretty much

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'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.

Thursday, August 07, 2025

Black and white film photo of toddler
Lincoln at water park. Olympus Stylus Epic.

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. 🤓

Blogging

How much more is there to say?

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.

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Tuesday, August 05, 2025

Old photo of barber shop interior
My great grandfather's barbershop, Grand Rapids, MI. (Year unknown).

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.

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.

Sunday, August 03, 2025

Black and white film self-portrait in mirror

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.

Photography

Your host, in action

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)_/¯.

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photography plogging

Baty.photo

Screenshot of baty.photo home page

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.

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Analog

Pen and Notebook frustrations

Notebook with fountain pen

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.

Tamoe River notebook

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:

What, is the new Tamoe River paper clear or something?

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.

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Sunday, July 27, 2025

Photo of people standing under a flag and speaker (1950s)
My dad, uncle, grandfather, and aunt (early 1950s)

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.

Saturday, July 26, 2025

Black and white film self-portrait with Leica MP in mirror
Self (2025).

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.

Thursday, July 24, 2025

Black and white film photo of slim tower and sky
Tower and clouds (2025). Leica MP. 50mm Summilux. HP5.

Too hot for chores, today, so I'm in my air-conditioned office, futzing with AI tools, server options, and my Emacs capture templates.

For some reason, I can't get a markdown-mode-hook to fire and call olivetti-mode when I open a Markdown file in an Emacs buffer. I'm using the exact method that works with org-mode files. It's a small annoyance, but this is why I sometimes want to quit.

Tuesday, July 22, 2025

Black and white film photo of boy and dog watching out screen door
Waiting for mom. Leica MP, 50mm Summilux, HP5.

Posted: Roll 037

Ozzy died today. For a long time, I expected this to happen any minute. He didn't exactly live a healthy lifestyle. After a certain point, though, it seemed like he might live forever. His "Blizzard of Ozz" tour in 1981 was one of the of the first concerts I saw. I remember leaning my head into a speaker cone, because LOUDER!

Emacs Obsidian

Searching my Obsidian vault in Emacs using Xeft

The other day, I converted my entire TiddlyWiki into an Obsidian vault, just to see if I could. Since I still spend most of my time in Emacs, I thought it would be nice to search the vault from there.

The post, From Obsidian to Emacs, by Mike Hostetler, mentioned using the Xeft package, so I thought I'd try it. Here's my config:

(use-package xeft
  :ensure t
  :defer t
  :config
  (setq xeft-recursive t)
  (setq xeft-database "~/.deft.db")
  (setq xeft-directory "/Users/jbaty/Documents/Notes/Vault/")
  (setq xeft-ignore-extension '("png" "jpg" "jpeg"))
  (setq xeft-extensions '("md"))
  (setq xeft-title-function #'file-name-nondirectory))

Xeft relies on Xapian for searches, so a module needs to be downloaded or built locally. I didn't have any luck with the downloaded version, so I deleted the package, started over, and had it compile locally. The trick there was entering the prefix "/opt/homebrew" during installation, since I'd already installed Xapian using Homebrew.

Here's what a search for "linhof" looks like:

Searching for
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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.