I had a couple of drinks last night and opened my laptop and accidentally launched Obsidian and thought, "Oh, I remember. This is pretty cool! I should use this for everything." so this morning I'm staring at Obsidian wondering what now?

But why not just bail on the Obsidian app and drop back into my beloved Emacs?

I've been asking myself that question all morning. Ostensibly, I simply felt like a change of venue this morning, and Obsidian seemed as good as any. But there's something larger lurking under the surface.

Playing with my Emacs config is a fun hobby. I do it all the time. Like, all the time. Every moment using Emacs can feel like, "...but this would be better if I made this one change..." where "one change" is a keyboard binding or a different package or a new theme or some little behavioral tweak using some homemade lisp.

I've recently broken some stuff that used to work. And do I really like the way my Org Agenda looks? Emacs gives me all the rope I need, which is great. For many, it's the perfect amount of rope. On days like today, though, it feels like too much rope.

I'm not planning to switch from Emacs to Obsidian. That would be silly. But I am taking a short break. A change of pace can be fun, and I'm in the mood for something fun and different. That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.

After a couple of days, I have mixed feelings about going all-in with Ghost for my blog and fediverse identity.

This all started because I was frustrated with Hugo breaking things after nearly every update. When I get mad at Hugo, I start CMS shopping. Usually, this ends up with me moving to Eleventy or Blot or Kirby. Sometimes it means I move to Ghost. I seem to always end up back in Hugo, though.

Ghost is one of those things that looks like The Right Answer™. It's open-source, can be self-hosted, is pleasant to use, and the themes look good right out of the box. It comes with newsletter features that I don't need yet, but might one day. Ghost's editor strikes a decent balance between plain and fancy. It's not "plain text" but I don't hate it, most of the time.

At the same time I was growing frustrated with Hugo, the Ghost team was working on adding ActivityPub features directly within Ghost. What this could mean is that my blogging and my social media posting could be done in the same place. Even cooler, my social media identity could become @jack@baty.net, which I find ideal. Not being part of someone else's "instance" is a welcome change. Even better, I don't have to self-host my own Mastodon or Mastodon-like instance, which was a nightmare last time I tried it.

Yesterday, I migrated my content as best I could and flipped the switch. Baty.net is now running Ghost. I've done this several times before, but this time is different because of the corresponding migration from being @jbaty@social.lol to @jack@baty.net. If I change my mind, it won't just be a matter of making a little DNS change.

So, how do I feel about it after a couple of days? I'm nervous, to be honest. I'm twitchy about not having my "main" blog as a static website running on a simple server somewhere, nearly free. The fine folks at Magic Pages are hosting everything for me, at a cost of $15/month. This is a fair price, but there's a weight behind the "pay every month forever" feeling.

Blogging with Ghost is mostly a pleasure. The editor does some stupid things that may drive me nuts later, but I'm ignoring them for now while I enjoy simply dragging images into the post and having them resized, placed, and linked for me. That's really nice, coming from the manual process when using an SSG.

What I'm more troubled about is that living in Ghost as my social media hub isn't feeling the way I expected. It feels claustrophobic, somehow. It's lonely, even though it's very Mastodon-like. There's no way yet to migrate followers, so I've got to spam my Mastodon followers and beg them to follow my new account. This is a little gross for me. I'm watching where Ghost goes with all this and I am banking on them making it all feel more, smooth, I guess.

I know me, and that means I know that some day, probably soon, I'll feel like I should be using an SSG for my blog. Some thing or things will bug me about Ghost and it'll make me second guess everything. Happens every time. Maybe this time I'll ignore it and just keep going with Ghost. For now, I'll occupy my time fretting over themes. Otherwise, I'll keep you posted.

Update, the next day: I can't live in Ghost.

Whenever I don't feel there's anything interesting to photograph, I fall back on self portraits. I'm a willing subject, and who doesn't like looking at themselves? 😆

I set up one Westcott strobe and my backdrop in a spare room/studio. The bulb release wouldn't work, but thankfully the Rolleiflex has a self timer.

These are from a roll of HP5, processed in HC-100(b) and scanned on the Epson.

I'm not sure that they give me the "Wow!" like the Hasselblad does, but they're not bad.

The Rolleiflex is new to me, so I have some learning and practice ahead of me. I took it on my usual route today and finished my second roll. I have to admit that I'm not thrilled with the results. Things look flat and a bit soft. It's like the lens is ghosting or flaring. Low contrast and not-quite-tack-sharp is not the look I'm going for.

The camera was easy and fun to carry and a pleasure to use, so it's got that going for it, at least. I'll give it a few rolls before I decide if I like what it gives me.

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.

But I'm stuck. I had planned to leverage the copingmechanism.com domain for this, but I don't want to "live" at that domain. My domain is baty.net. My fediverse handle should be @jack@baty.net because that's the ideal option, right?

So, I started the process of moving baty.net to Ghost, but stopped when I remembered what a pain it is to migrate Hugo content to Ghost.

As I see it, I have three options:

1. Move baty.net to Ghost and import everything from Hugo
2. Move baty.net to Ghost and don’t bother importing anything
3. Don’t do anything. Keep Ghost at copingmechanism.com. This would be so easy.

The best option is #1. It's cleanest for everyone and doesn't break anything. Except it will break things. It always does.

I only have energy for #2. I hate to break all those links, though. I'd move the original blog to some other domain, but the links are still broken.

The conflict between 1 and 2 means I could end up choosing #3.

I’m catatonic over what to do here, so I haven’t done anything.

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.

Except I don't love the new domain name. It's fine, I guess, but I've got so many years wrapped up as baty.net that it seems a shame to move away from it. Wouldn't it be cool if my "Fediverse" identity could be @jack@baty.net? Remove one character and it's my email address. Remove five more characters and it's my website. I like this idea.

I promised myself that I wouldn't move baty.net again. If I want to play with a new blog, I'm supposed to create a new one, somewhere else. We all know what happens when I try moving a blog to a new platform...I move it back in a month.

This time, though, if I want the benefits of blogging, posting to social media, and reading the feed all in one place, that place needs to be baty.net. At least if I want @jack@baty.net, it does.

Importing years of Hugo posts to Ghosts isn't fun. I've done it before, and it was a pain. Inevitably, some images or links end up breaking. I hate that.

If I move my identity and blog management to Ghost, it means I'm all in. There's no going back. Not without breaking even more than the usual stuff.

Still noodling on this. I'm impulsive when it comes to new stuff. I should spend time thinking this through. Or at least I should wait until everything actually works. Hanging my hat on a beta release is stupid. And yet, I'm this close.

Maybe I could get used to being @jack@copingmechanism.com instead.

Multiple Computers - Jim Nielsen’s Blog:

I’ve spent so much time, had so many headaches, and encountered so much complexity from what, in my estimation, boils down to this: trying to get something to work on multiple computers.

Hooboy, can I relate to that!

Today will involve more yard work.

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. See this post for why I'm back to posting daily notes here.

No one with privilege is going to simply stop taking advantage of it on their own. That's why it's called "privilege". When it comes to helping them to better understand and use their privilege for good, it might be more effective if you didn't constantly scold them for even having it.

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

Here's the thing, even after committing again a year later, in Reduce & Simplify - Redux 2025, I've done neither of those things. In fact, nearly six months after the Redux post, I continue to do the opposite.

The biggest failure was my stumbling attempt to use Linux^[1]. Doing that meant rejiggering anything that was previously macOS-only. I had to redesign my Emacs config to take into account differing paths and tools. I had to use different shared calendars. I had to use different sync tools. I had to use a different text expansion utility. Things that I'd had working and taken for granted for years were upended. It has been fun, and I continue to tinker with it, but I'm no longer seriously considering a full-on move to Linux, so now I have two systems to deal with and maintain. That's the opposite of "simplify".

Let's talk about taking notes. I use the Denote package in Emacs for notes^[2]. I have a decent workflow dialed in. And yet, I keep Obsidian installed, just in case. Even wilder, yesterday I created a new Tinderbox document meant to take over Denote's duties for my "lab notes". Good grief. I love Tinderbox, but Emacs does everything I could want and I'm already "good at it". Why introduce another option? Because I'm bored?

And blogs. So many blogs. I honestly don't know if tinkering with blogging tools and platforms is a harmless hobby or a life-freezing procrastination device. Ghost, Tinderbox, BSSG, LMNO.lol, Kirby, 11ty, Hugo, and so on. Sometimes all at once. It's unsustainable.

I bought a Nikon Z f as a modern, faster replacement for my Leica SL2. Yet I still have both, because I like them both and can't decide which one I should keep. Oh goody, yet another decision I need to make every time I want to make digital photos.

And what should I use to process those digital photos? I keep a full workflow at the ready in both Lightroom Classic and Capture One. Oh, and sometimes I use the new Lightroom, just for fun. Worse, when I feel overwhelmed, I back it down to just using Adobe Bridge and editing via Camera Raw. It's no wonder that sometimes I can't find one of my photos.

Doing specific things in a variety of ways can be fun, but it's also crazy-making and I think it's time to reel it all in. Again.

I'm not good at reeling things in, obviously, but I'll start with the following:

1. Focus on one blog (this one, even though I'm still kind of mad at Hugo).
2. Pause the Linux experiment for now.
3. Only use Denote in Emacs for taking notes. Stop pretending something else might be "better".

I'll deal with the camera and photography workflow conundrums later.

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.

(defun my/org-goto-first-heading ()
  "Move point to the beginning of the first heading in an org file."
  (when (eq major-mode 'org-mode)
    (goto-char (point-min))
    (if (re-search-forward "^\\*+ " nil t)
        (goto-char (match-beginning 0)))))

(add-hook 'org-mode-hook 'my/org-goto-first-heading)

I had to disable the saveplace package but I don't mind. This is better, since I don't often want to return to where I was last editing a document.

I wouldn't be shocked to learn that there's a simpler way to do this, but this works for now.

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"

I have a well-established monthly routine for getting my org-journal exported to a nice PDF for printing. Converting this process to my Journelly journal needed to happen in order for me to seriously consider switching.

It needs a lot more work, but here's how I did it this time.

Create monthly file

First, copy and paste the month's entries from my Journelly.org file to a new file, e.g. 2025-04.org.

Add my usual export front matter to the file...

#+title: Journal - April 2025 #+date: #+setupfile: ~/Documents/Notes/org/_SETUP/EXPORT #+setupfile: ~/Documents/Notes/org/_SETUP/jack-latex-journal-twocolumn.setup #+latex_class_options: [10pt,twocolumn]

The EXPORT file has a bunch of settings for handling the Org export...

#+AUTHOR: Jack Baty #+OPTIONS: toc:nil num:nil <:nil ':t #+OPTIONS: *:t -:t ::t <:nil H:4 \n:nil ^:{} arch:headline #+OPTIONS: broken-links:t c:nil creator:nil #+OPTIONS: author:t title:t date:t #+OPTIONS: d:t e:t email:nil f:t inline:t num:nil #+OPTIONS: p:nil pri:nil prop:nil stat:nil tags:nil tasks:nil tex:t #+OPTIONS: timestamp:nil toc:nil todo:nil |:t #+SELECT_TAGS: export #+EXCLUDE_TAGS: noexport nolatex

The .setup file is my variation on the default Pandoc template. I haven't touched it in years, so I don't remember how all of it works. Still...

Sort entries

Journelly creates entries in reverse-chronological order, so the order needs to be reversed. This is easily done by selecting all the entries and running M-x org-sort and choosing "time".

Reformat headings and dates during exports

Another issue is that each Journelly entry begins as a top-level Org heading containing an org-formatted timestamp and location, like so...

* [2025-04-10 Thu 05:54] @ Computer * [2025-04-09 Wed 06:31] @ Computer * [2025-04-08 Tue 12:52] @ Mom and Dad's

That wouldn't look great as headings in a PDF, so I needed to reformat the dates during export. It turned out to be trickier than expected. Org has hooks that do most anything during exports, but I struggled with it. The lisp I eventually found in this post helped me get the exported dates to render as e.g. "Saturday, May 3, 2025"

(with-eval-after-load 'ox (add-to-list 'org-export-filter-timestamp-functions #'env-filter-timestamp))

(defun env-filter-timestamp (string _backend _comm) "Remove [<>] around time-stamps from STRING. The filter receives the entire output timestamp as STRING and then processes it before saving." (if (string-match-p ":" string) (format-time-string "%A, %B %-e, %Y" (org-time-string-to-time string)) (format-time-string "%A, %B %-e, %Y" (org-time-string-to-time string))))

I use a quick M-x regexp-replace to remove the location: @.* part of the headings.

Export!

Then it's a matter of running the export via the export dispatch in Emacs. For me, that means C-c C-e l o and boom, there's a nice PDF of my month's Journelly entries. Here's a less-than-ideal sample page from April that doesn't include too much personal info:

The odd thing with this is that when I exported, all the images were rendered upside-down. I had to go into Photo Mechanic and run "Apply JPEG Rotation" on the images. This is probably due to adding photos on the iPhone, but I'd like to figure out how to avoid this step in the future. This all worked fine for my first export. It's close enough, but I'll want to automate as much as possible. I have a month to figure it out 😄.

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.

I looked at the car and thought, "Wow, that's gorgeous." I sat in the car and thought, "Man, this is nice!" I drove the car and said, "Ok, I want it."

So for the past six years I've been a BMW driver. The car is everything I'd hoped for. It's beautiful, perfectly proportioned, and aggressive-yet-restrained. Fit and finish is outstanding and it's the most fun I've ever had while driving.

It's also been surprisingly reliable. At nearly 90,000 miles, it remains solid and problem-free. I've only had one minor non-routine repair. There are no squeeks, rattles, or other faults with the car. It's still a blast to drive. It's just tight, you know?

But there was a problem. I know I shouldn't worry about it, but there's a stigma associated with BMW drivers. Especially drivers of black BMW sedans. Many people assume that all BMW drivers are assholes. It's a Douche-mobile.

Try as I might, I could never shake the feeling that I was being judged. I go out of my way to drive politely, correctly, and defensively. I conduct myself on the road as if it's my personal duty to rid the world of a misconception. Except I don't know that it's a complete misconception. A lot of BMW drivers are assholes. It's a group I grew tired of being associated with, whether the stigma was justified or not.

Given that the car is going on 10 years old, I decided to start shopping for a replacement. BMW repairs are notoriously expensive, and I wanted out of the feeling that at any moment I could be in for thousands of dollars of repairs. I wanted the opposite of a BMW. I wanted reasonably-priced, reliable, and boring. I wanted to be invisible.

I wanted a Honda.

The first car I ever bought was a 1976 Honda Civic.

I've owned a number of other Hondas.

• 1976 Honda Civic
• 1990 Honda Civic
• 1994 Honda Accord
• 2006 Honda Civic
• 2009 Honda Accord Coupe

All but the first one were great, reliable, solid cars.

So I bought a new CR-V.

I've only ever bought one brand new car, and told myself I'd never do that again because it's financially unsound. Except the used auto market has changed since last I checked. Used cars, Hondas at least, aren't significantly less expensive than new ones. I found a couple of 2023 CR-Vs, but they had at least 25,000 miles on them and were only a few thousand dollars less than new. I opted for the peice of mind of a full warranty and backing of a reputable dealer.

I'm scheduled to pick the car up today. I'm a little excited about it!

The idea is that I don't want to think about my car for the next 5 or 10 years. Hondas are kind of boring to begin with, and the CR-V is so popular that every 3rd car on the road will look just like mine. It's a few steps down from the fun, over-engineered driving excellence of the BMW, but it's a notable improvement for my mental well-being on the road. The Honda is like an invisibility cloak and that's exactly what I wanted.

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.