I posted the same thing on three different blogs today, just for fun.

1. here on baty.net
2. on lmno.lol
3. 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.

It’s a lot, so I’ve decided to “simplify” things and use Gnus exclusively for email in Emacs. Gnus is weird and hard to get ones head around, but it’s built-in and it only requires a ~/.gnus.el file on each machine. Gnus works directly with my email service's IMAP back end, so everything is the same everywhere, without having to think about it.

I don’t get the fancy search features of notmuch, and I don’t get an offline copy of my email store. Honestly, having local email is one of those "but what if...?" things that never need an answer.

With Gnus, I get fewer dependencies and not nearly as many “How do I keep this all in order?” issues.

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.

Merlin Mann - It takes a worried man.

I did yardwork today instead of blogging. I'd prefer not to do that.

I started using Blot for my blog in 2017. Blot is a really nice way to publish a blog from a folder full of Markdown files. Blot's author, David, is exceptionally helpful.

This morning I made an offline backup of everything and deleted all the content from Blot's folder. Then I canceled my subscription.

Five minutes later, I restarted my subscription. I'm grandfathered in to the original $20/year pricing, so I decided it's so inexpensive that it's worth twenty bucks just to have it available. Also, it supports a great project by a nice developer.

The original content has been archived^[1] as a static version and moved to blot.baty.net for posterity.

I don't know what I'll use it for, but Blot isn't something I'm ready to give up completely, yet.

Hugo is actively developed and still gets a lot of attention. This is fine. What's not fine is that it seems like every third update introduces breaking changes.

I updated to 0.146.5 and my site failed to build. This was a theme thing, and thankfully the theme maintainer was on it. Still annoying.

I like using Hugo and I like my theme and I like having a static website. What I don't like is not knowing if things are going to still work next week.

I don't want to migrate to something else...again...but I'm thinking about it.

I hope everyone had a relaxing weekend. I did, at least up until I tried setting up a new(ish) iPhone for my mom. She got a hand-me-down iPhone 12 to replace her, surprisingly still working, iPhone 6. Between Find My/anti-theft issues and forgotten passwords, it was much more frustrating than I'd hoped. Still, she has a new phone and that's good.

I'm typing this on the ThinkPad, even though my Mac is /right there/. It's probably the novelty, but at least it's happening. This is a first for me. here's the latest.

Today, I want to be the guy who only has a paper notebook, a beat up Linux laptop, and a film camera...and is happy with it.

Sometimes I create this daily entry without having anything to write about in mind. It seems necessary, but is it? Probably not, yet I keep doing it, anyway.

I'm rarely in a hurry, so why do I spend so much time working on ways to do things faster? Working on the Linux laptop this week has made so many things slower. I don't have a text expansion utility configured yet. I don't have something like Raycast on the Mac. Still, I don't feel like I'm doing less. In fact, my mind has been calmer. Writing on the ThinkPad feels more like using a typewriter. OK, that's an exaggeration, but you see the point. There's much less going on, here. I have the usual urge to "improve" things, but I may just wait a minute on that and see if I can settle in with something simpler.

I've been busy with my Linux experiment. I'm writing about it there, if you want to follow along.

Today, I put a Framework laptop in my cart. This whole experiment only got rolling because I thought I might like Linux on my desktop, so why am I looking at laptops when I have a perfectly servicable (2015) ThinkPad X1 Carbon (that I'm typing on right now)? I can't explain it. Most likely it's because I have an Apple Studio Display and (I'm told) it's quite challenging to use it with Linux. I'm not changing monitors for this, the Studio Display is too good (and expensive).

Nostalgia is some powerful stuff, ain't it?

My old Nakamichi cassette deck stopped working a few years ago, and I never bothered to replace it. I've been into vinyl and still have a good CD transport, so I didn't see a need for cassettes.

Occasionally, though, I'll spot a cassette somewhere and think I might like to bring mine out and play them. I didn't want some ancient "vintage" cassette deck, and I didn't want to spend much.

Enter the FiiO CP13.

I impulse ordered one after watching someone review theirs on YouTube or somewhere. "I NEED THAT!" I said :).

It arrived, so I quickly went to grab my 1980s cassette case with all my cassettes. Except I couldn't find it. I looked everywhere. Nothing. All I found was a tote back with a dozen or so "rejects". Tapes I'd recorded myself, broken tapes, or just things I stopped liking.

Now, I know I wouldn't throw away my tapes, so I'm sure it'll turn up. In the meantime, I'm entertaining myself with the rejects. This meant fixing the ones I have. All of my cassettes are at least 40 years old. The problem I see most is missing pressure pads. I ordered a fix-it kit from Amazon and set to repairing what I could.

I'm listening to a bunch of Aerosmith tracks I recorded off something in 1980.

I can't tell you how the player sounds, because my tapes are in such poor shape that it's impossible to know if it's the player or the tape. What I will say that I'm having a blast with it.

Linux is fun, but frustrating. I'm trying to stick with it long enough to blame Linux rather than my inexperience for my troubles. As a way to help remember the process, I've started a new blog at linux.baty.net^[1]. The new blog is a journal of things I'm learning or struggling with. I'd normally be taking these notes locally but I thought it would be worthwhile to publish them.

So, yeah, I seem to have four blogs at the moment. It's fun, but not sustainable. Anyway, good morning!

I mean, maybe I'm meant to be the guy who has a bunch of different blogs and nobody wants to follow because he's inconsistent and spread so thin. Is that so bad?

Today I learned about BSSG, a static site generator written using Bash.

I've been chugging along with Hugo for a minute, but you just know I have to try every new thing I discover, so...

bssg.baty.net

How fun is that!?

Written by Stefano Marinelli, BSSG is so simple and easy to use that I had a blog started in, I swear, two minutes. The only thing I had to do was change MARKDOWN_PROCESSOR to use pandoc, and I was off and running. Nice.

But there a lot of SSGs out there. Why BSSG? It's the themes! Every blogging platform for the past 10 years has featured themes that feel like a personal branding exercise. Like something you'd want to feature on your LinkedIn profile. Gross.

BSSD has like 50 themes ready to go. Many of them are so weird and retro that I fell in love. I mean, look at the "BBS" theme...

I don't need a new blog, and I promised myself I'd keep baty.net on Hugo, but damn, I feel like finding a use for this, just for the fun of it.

Dammit, now I'm posting journal posts in two places. I get bored doing things the same way every day, so I change things. I don't know if this makes me interesting or if it's a symptom of some deep-rooted mental issue.

Read Mike's Deft, Markdown, Marksman/Emacs LSP, iA Writer and then spent an hour playing with Marksman and I ended up getting nowhere and now I'm upset that I can't get wikilink completion in random Markdown files. This is why I shouldn't be using Emacs.

You know how I say that I'd rather not think about my blogging software and just concentrate on writing instead? And you know how sometimes I try to do that by changing my platform and workflow? Yeah, I sometimes miss the irony of doing that. There's almost nothing in my existing workflow that needs changing, if I'm honest. If I wanted to, I could "not think about blogging software and just write." So why don't I, then?

I had fun yesterday working with the Coping Mechanism blog and Ghost. If you ignore the upsell and "please subscribe!" noise, Ghost is rather pleasant to work with. The problem is that I don't want to migrate this blog to it, and I don't want multiple blogs. This means that, while I still may tinker with Ghost, I shouldn't use it for anything "real". So, what am I doing? ¯_(ツ)_/¯.

I'm typing this in iA Writer for reasons I can't explain.

I'm supposed to be working on a new website for a family member. I'm 80% finished, but the final 80% is the uninteresting part and I don't feel like doing it right now. Instead, I spent an hour this morning feeling like I should go back to using Lightroom Classic instead of Capture One, but I still prefer Capture One, so I'll have to deal with the things I don't like about it.

I skipped my last 6-month dentist appointment, so when I finally went in for a cleaning today, I was apprehensive. Turns out I had nothing to worry about. Doc said that he saw "nothing of interest at all" on my X-rays. That's always a good thing. No cavities, only minor plaque. Yay flossing!

It's my dad's 84th birthday. I had the M3 with a roll of HP5.

...feeling that strange mix of liberation and disobedience that comes with rejecting the default.

Joan Westenberg, I’m Entering My Curmudgeon Era

I am in one of my moods today. I know this because I changed Denote's default file format to Markdown. Then changed it back to using .org 10 minutes later.

I don't know what to write about today. I'm sitting here at my usual desk typing into a full-screen Emacs frame with a few of my usual buffers open. I did end up giving up on Doom again. It's just more than I want, even though it does a lot of nice things without my help. And I miss having SPC as leader key. I'm not doing that general.el thing again, either. Oh well, I guess it's back to C-c or C-x for everything.

Maybe I should start a manufacturing company. AI is unlikely to take my job from me and all those dickheaded teriffs might work in my favor. Except that's now how it works, is it? No one here knows how to make the things we use to make the things.

"There is a computer disease. Anybody who works with computers knows about it. It's a very serious disease and it interferes completely with the work. The trouble with computers is that you 'play' with them!"

Richard Feynman, "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman"