Om on the Leica Q3. Unsubscribing from finger-pointers.

The other day I wrote this: Knowledge should reside in the notes, not in the software used to manage the notes. I’m feeling like software has been hindering me more than helping me. I spend too much of my time building overly complex workflows in Emacs or Tinderbox or Obsidian or whatever. These crazy workflows often introduce dependencies and push the actual knowledge up into the process/software. This seems like a bad idea. ...

I recently found my original Fujifilm X100 in a box in our storage unit. I have such fond memories of the camera, so I knew I would enjoy using it, even today. I was surprised to learn that I didn’t enjoy it as much as I thought I would. It still feels great to carry, but it’s not quite as nice to actually use as I expected. It’s kind of slow. Slow to power on. Slow to focus. Slow to navigate. This shouldn’t bother me, as I often use old, manual-focus cameras and I’m used to working slowly. I guess the difference is that if I’m going ask the camera to do things, it should be faster than I am. The X100 isn’t. It’s not unusable, but it takes a bit of the joy out of using the camera. ...

I’ve been head over heels in love with Arc for a long time now. So far, the only thing I don’t like about it is that there is no support for bookmarklets. Convert bookmarklet to Chrome extension to the rescue. I’ve tested it with two bookmarklets so far, and it seems to work fine.

I restarted my Micro.blog this morning. I was feeling lonely all by myself here at baty.net, so I thought I’d revisit some old friends. I expect this will affect the types of things I post here in my daily notes, but I don’t know in what way, yet. Micro.blog is a great blogging service, and I’ve been using it almost continually since the original Kickstarter campaign. I sometimes put the account on pause when I’m feeling Subscription Fatigue or when I’m suddenly all into some new platform or if I just don’t feel like sharing quite so much on social networks. It’s usually some combination of those three. ...

Mike Hall wrote about friends, a personal CRM for the command line. It’s a ruby gem that does most of the things I was trying to do using Emacs. It seems worth a try, so I installed the gem and created a few shell aliases to make things faster: alias faa 'friends add activity ' alias faf 'friends add friend ' alias fla 'friends list activities'

I go through periods during which I don’t feel much like making “art” with my cameras. This is normal, but lately I haven’t felt like taking photographs at all. For example, I met my parents yesterday to celebrate Mother’s Day. This, being an Event™, prompted me to bring my two good cameras, one film and one digital. I wanted to be sure to make a nice record of the day in both formats. In the end, I took a single photo as we left. I took it with my iPhone. ...

While doing some spring cleaning this week, I ran into a box of old cameras that I had marked “To Sell” but forgot about. The box had an old Olympus digital and a bunch of beat-up OM-2n film cameras and accessories. This was neat, but what I was most exited about were two cameras in particular: An original Fujifilm X100 and an Olympus Stylus Epic. Here’s the Epic: ...

“I’m like, are we in a fucking movie right now, or what? The fuck, man?… Shit, what the fuck? I’m lost. I don’t know.” Snoop Dogg, Ars Technica Me too, Snoop. Me too. This might be the first honest take I’ve read.

I usually prefer reading my email using Mu4e in Emacs, but the Vim (“Evil”) keybindings have been broken since upgrading to 1.10.x. (See this PR for background). This added so much friction that I went back to Mail.app and Notmuch. Recent changes in evil-collection have fixed the issue but weren’t available yet when updating Doom. The fix for now was to (unpin! evil-collection) in packages.el. Much better! Another snag I’ve run into while using Mu4e was that sometimes I also use Apple’s Mail on macOS and iOS and any messages I delete there would only be flagged as “trashed” in Mu4e, so they would show up in the inbox, cluttering things considerably. The fix for this was to set Expunge Both in my .mbsyncrc file. Also much better! That one has been bugging me for a long time. ...

I try to name all of my files using the file’s creation date as a prefix. For example: 20230504-MyNewFile.txt If I forget, it’s a pain to rename them, so I created a short AppleScript to do it for me. -- Prepend Creation Date to selected files -- Install Location: ~/Library/Scripts/Applications/Finder -- Last Modified: 2023-05-04 tell application "Finder" set selectedItems to selection as list -- Loop through each selected item repeat with selectedItem in selectedItems set creationDate to creation date of selectedItem set fileName to name of selectedItem -- Prepend the creation date to the file name set newName to my stringFromDate(creationDate) & "-" & fileName -- Rename the file with the new name set name of selectedItem to newName end repeat end tell on stringFromDate(_date) -- yyyymmddhhmmss set _string to "" set _string to _string & my stringFromNumber(_date's year, 4) set _string to _string & my stringFromNumber(_date's month as integer, 2) set _string to _string & my stringFromNumber(_date's day, 2) return _string end stringFromDate on stringFromNumber(_number, _digitsToPad) return text -_digitsToPad through -1 of ("0000" & _number) end stringFromNumber I put the script into a Finder-specific folder, so it’s made easily available when Finder is the frontmost app: ~/Library/Scripts/Applications/Finder. (I use FastScripts to make things, er, faster). ...

Since I use DEVONthink Pro (DTP) to index and store my notes and documents, I sometimes revisit the idea of using it to create notes. DTP includes a variety of built-in scripts for creating new content. These are mostly written in AppleScript. I was interested in the “Daily Journal” template. By default, running the Daily Journal template would create a new Markdown document containing a random quote and a list of the 4 latest headlines from the New York Times website. I was OK with the headlines, but I didn’t feel the quote was necessary, so I replaced it with the current weather. ...

It’s happening again. My love of powerful, complex software has overrun my ability to avoid tinkering. For example, I’ve spent several hours this week working on my Org-mode agenda display. Configuring org-super-agenda is tons of fun. It can make one’s Agenda absolutely sing and dance, which is not ideal for me because I’ve spent way too much time trying to teach it to sing and dance. I could have finished all of the tasks on my todo list in the time I’ve spent getting them to display just right. ...

Twitter was the place I liked to be from 2006 until 2022. Or more accurately, it was the place I liked to be from 2006 until around 2015. After that, it was the place I felt I needed to be. Still, I managed to curate my Twitter feed well enough to avoid most of the awful bits. I’m a CIS white male, which made it easier of course. Then Musk happened. I gave him the benefit of much doubt, hoping that just maybe he would “fix” things. The opposite has happened so far, so I’m out. I visit every few days to see if I’ve missed anything from my friends still there, but otherwise, it’s no longer a place I want to spend time or contribute to. It’s quite sad, honestly. ...

I replaced our flaky sprinkler system controller this weekend. All by myself. The unit I chose was the Rachio 3 Smart Sprinkler Controller. They offer 4, 8, and 16-zone versions. My system has 9 zones because of course it does. The good news was that Costco sells a version with 12 zones for the same price as the standard 8-zone model. Yay me! ...

I decided that a single-player Mastodon instance isn’t ideal. It’s overkill for one person, and it’s lonely! The #local feed is just me shouting to myself. That’s no fun. What’s the point in having a giant Rails app with all sorts of moderation tools, user management, and monthy costs if it’s just me? That’s what I thought, so I’ve moved. First, I considered heading back to fosstodon.org. The vibe there is kind of what it’s like to be in my head, but it also ends up feeling a little narrow-scoped, if that makes sense, so I decided against it. ...

You may have noticed that once again things have changed around here. This time, it’s due to switching from WordPress to Blot. We’ve been around this block before, but lemme ‘splain1. I’ve switched from Hugo to Eleventy to WordPress within just the past several months. This is not surprising to any of you who’ve been following along. Sometimes I switch blogging tools because I’m mad at whatever I’m using. Other times I switch because I’m bored. This time it’s a bit of both. ...

I’ve seen a number of thoughts similar to this from Shane Parrish: We unconsciously become what we’re near. If you work for a jerk, sooner or later, you’ll become one yourself. If your colleagues are selfish, sooner or later, you become selfish. If you hang around someone who’s unkind, you’ll slowly become unkind. Little by little, you adopt the thoughts and feelings, the attitudes and standards of the people around you. ...

At the end of each month, I convert my Org-journal entries into a nice PDF, print it, and put it into a binder. It occurred to me that my daily.baty.net website content is just a bunch of markdown files that could be treated the same as my org-journal files and perhaps printed as well. I started by concatenating March’s entries into a single Markdown file, like so: cat 2023-03*.md >> ~/Desktop/202303-MarchBlog.md The resulting file wasn’t in great shape for printing, so I had to clean it up. At minimum, I needed to do the following: ...

I’ve tried so many “read-later” services that I can’t remember half of them. They’re all basically the same: visit a website, click a button, and the article is saved to a list somewhere with all the other articles I’ve saved. Some newer services get fancy with recommendations, UI improvements, social integration, etc. but they all just gather a list of articles that I almost never end up reading. But, you know, just in case, right? ...