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.

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.

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.

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.