As often happens, I started to waffle on where to keep my notes. I blame Obsidian for this. But also Bear and Evernote and Logseq and DEVONthink and and and. Obsidian is insidious. Sometimes all I want is to write something down and Obsidian makes that easy. Then it shows you a nice Daily Notes page. Then it makes back/linking easy. Then it teases me with a million simple-to-install plugins. ...

Doom Emacs is pretty great, especially for former Vimmers. I lived in Doom for a long time because it makes so many little things nicer, without having to dedicate one’s life to customizing Emacs. Toward the end of last year I wrote I’m Doomed again when I moved back from my vanilla config. Then, early this year, I rolled my own config again, and spent a lot of time getting things just so. I even removed Evil mode and have been using the usual Emacs bindings. It’s the closest I’ve felt to being comfortable in Emacs in a long time. ...

Jess on Trampoline I posted the above photo to Flickr 20 years ago today. It was my first. Flickr remains the best place to upload photos. I just wish it was still the best option for sharing them.

Photo Mechanic is the fastest, most powerful tool for ingesting/browsing/exporting photos. It’s always been a little expensive, but I’ve had a license for many years. Before 2024, I could buy a license and use it until the next version came out. I paid $90 to upgrade Photo Mechanic Plus (the fancy version with catalogs) from version 5 to version 6 in 2020. That was four years ago. It’s not cost me a nickel since then. ...

Most of the information I’ve written down about my cameras is either on my wiki or in random blog posts. I’ve decided to try and consolidate things in a new, separate wiki (using TiddlyWiki). It was trivial to drag and drop my original camera notes from the main wiki into this new wiki. I then copied the wiki file to my server, and it now lives here: 👉 jackbaty.com/cameras It’s very much a work-in-progress. My intention is to flesh out the individual entries and catch up on the TODO list. If that goes well, I may include some of my photos or notes on process. After that, maybe I’ll add information about photographers who’ve inspired me. Or not, who knows? TiddlyWiki makes all this easy, but it is also kind of weird. I’ll try to keep it easy as I can to navigate.

Tinderbox is an unusual, powerful, quirky, and amazing piece of software. I don’t understand why more people don’t use it for everything. Maybe because it costs $298 and that’s expensive by today’s app store race-to-the-bottom pricing situation. It’s worth every penny, though. Before Emacs came along, I put everything into Tinderbox. These days, I use Tinderbox for specific projects that benefit from its unique features. I also maintain my blog at daily.baty.net with it. ...

Recent versions of the new Lightroom (Desktop, not “Classic”) have added features making it feasible for me to use.

I’m tired of moving things around on my computers

My brain isn’t necessarily fast, but it’s always in a hurry.

I want things to be simple and without distraction. I want to avoid futzing all the time. To this end, I often try to move away from using Emacs for everything. Emacs is not simple, no matter how hard I try to force it to be simple. So I pull out the usual inventory of simple writing and note-taking apps, trying to make them fit. Telling myself that this is better for me. ...

I like the way Bear limits my options<

There are times I don’t feel like blogging the hard way1. When that happens, I look to simple, hosted, CMS-based blogging tools. Recently, I’ve been experimenting with Pika and Scribbles. I like both of them. They are both simple, clean, easy, and inexpensive. Choosing either of them for a blog would be fine. There is one thing that concerns me a little, and that is the hobby nature of these tools. I don’t mean to be dismissive by calling them “hobbies”, but I can’t help but feel that these kinds of tools are always at risk of being abandoned when their authors’ attention shifts to something new. ...

How about I stick QR codes on index cards as a way to quickly find the original reference?

My on-again-off-again relationship with Hey email is off again

So far today, (as of 9:57 am) I have installed three apps that I had deliberately avoided installing on the new Mac Mini. MailMate because I just quit Hey but still wanted something different to play with. I’ve used MailMate on and off since sometime in 2013 I think. It’s a powerful, flexible, text/Markdown-first email app. TheBrain because I’m still looking for the “Everything” app, and in my experience, TheBrain has been the best at that. If I’d never stopped using it, I’d be able to find every single thing and everything associated with that thing. ...

Howm and TiddlyWiki share some features that I like

In the spirit of /Now and /Uses and /Hello pages, I’ve created a /Nope page. It’s for keeping track of things I don’t like or want to do. It’s a work in progress, but it’ll probably see more updates than my now page 😄

Software doomsday scenarios take the fun out of everything

Reducing complexity is never accomplished by adding complexity.

I like this calculator better than the one it replaces