
Sunday, April 06, 2025
I honestly donāt know whether the past few days of tinkering with Emacs evil-mode, Doom, etc. was fun or a complete, confusing waste of time. Right now Iām thinking the latter.
I honestly donāt know whether the past few days of tinkering with Emacs evil-mode, Doom, etc. was fun or a complete, confusing waste of time. Right now Iām thinking the latter.
I donāt mean to be rude, but I donāt care much what you think. OK, thatās not exactly true, I care deeply what you think. Maybe itās more accurate to say that I donāt worry about what you think. Are you mad that I keep switching platforms? Sorry, not sorry. Are you annoyed that I use words like ājustā and āmaybeā and āreallyā too often? Yeah, me too. Weāll get over it. Does it bother you that I donāt do enough throat-clearing before mentioning something that has become problematic? Youāll be fine. Would you prefer that I only write about Emacs? Not happening. ...
I should apologize for my mood this morningā¦Sorry about my mood this morning. Yesterday, I decided to bring back my Doom Emacs config. Iāve been missing evil-mode and using Space as leader key. Sometimes hitting Control-this Control-that constantly becomes tedious, ya know? After a couple of hours, I bailed on the idea. Doom offers a ton of quality-of-life features, but it also contains a lot of magic. As much as I appreciate the magic, I too often feel like itās working against me. Back to my own config, which works against me too, but at least itās my fault this way. ...
I need to find a way for my brain to relax. I spend entire days with a dozen apps open, each with a dozen tabs open. I click rapidly between them looking for something to focus on. I never find anything. Part of my problem might be that Iāve surrounded myself with too much infrastructure. There are dependencies everywhere. daily.baty.net for example. The idea is that I have a separate blog that works well for short, daily writing. Except that now I have two blogs. And Iām (for the moment) using Kirby for that one. This means an entirely different workflow and setup. This is great for when Iām feeling bored with Hugo. It keeps me from moving this blog back and forth. However, itās also more stuff in my brain. Do I need more stuff in my brain? Right now, I donāt think so. Hence, Iām writing todayās journal post here. ...
Kirby CMS uses plain .txt files for content. Since the bare .txt files should not be accessible with a browser, one normally uses a path matcher in Caddy and then denies requests based on a path, like so⦠path *.txt /content/* /site/* /kirby/* /.* But what if I want a /robots.txt file? Turned out to be a simple answer, but it took me a while to find it. Iām writing it down here in case anyone else might need it. Hereās the whole block from my siteās Caddyfile: ...
I saw the Irreal post about Journelly, but mostly ignored it because I wasnāt looking for a new iOS journaling app. He did mention that Journelly is by Ćlvaro RamĆrez, author of Plain Org, lmno.lol, and others, so that made things more interesting. What intrigued me most, though, was learning that Journelly is backed by plain-text Org Mode files. Bonus! Now it had my attention. Ćlvaro was kind enough to let me into the TestFlight, and Iām putting it through its paces this morning. ...
Iāve migrated daily.baty.net to Kirby CMS. It has been a static site managed byĀ TinderboxĀ for a long time. I love Tinderbox, but now that baty.net is back on Hugo, I wanted a playground for learning more about Kirby, without moving the main blog back and forth between Hugo and Kirby. So, here we are. Your RSS feed is probably complaining right now. Sorry about that.
I ran across something neat while reading the Mu4e release notes A (experimental) ātransientā menu has been added for mu4e. You can use it e.g., with something like: (require 'mu4e-transient) (global-set-key (kbd "C-c m") #'mu4e-transient-menu) Itās very handy!
AI can be useful to me, personally.
I thought it would be neat to include the date and weather on the images I use for my journal entry covers here on the blog. It turned out to be neat, but not fun. I spent nearly 3 hours on all sorts of failed approaches. I figured it might be useful to write down where I ended up. I leveraged two of my existing bash scripts that deal with the weather, and wrote a new one that uses ImageMagick to put things together. ...
I spent hours this morning trying to find a good way of adding some metadata to the cover images on the blog. I wanted the temparature, at least. I tried shoehorning it into my Retrobatch script, but that was a dead end. Whenever Iām lost in image manipulation, I turn to ImageMagick. Boy did that take me down a rabbit hole. Long story short, I figured it out. But now I donāt like it. ĀÆ_(ć)_/ĀÆ. ...
I maintain a list of shell commands for updating Make/Model/Lens information in film scans. Iāve always run this via babel in a code block in an Org mode file. Something like this: #+begin_src sh cd ~/Pictures/_Scans exiftool '-m' '-Make=Leica' '-Model=Leica MP' -overwrite_original . exiftool '-m' '-LensModel=Summilux-M 1:1.4/50 ASPH' '-FocalLength=50mm' -overwrite_original . #+End_src Easy enough, I just copy and paste from a list of commands, depending on the lens and camera. However, it occurred to me that Iād prefer to simply have Emacs prompt me for the information, and then take care of the shell commands for me. Also, instead of hard-coding the path, I wanted to use marked files in a Dired buffer. ...
Yes, I changed blog platforms again. Itās been like a week, so it seemed like weāre due for a change. :)
LinkedIn is not the right place for me to find interesting work.
I was feeling envious of theĀ Obsidian Web Clipper, which is quite fancy, so I thought Iād try leveraging it for use withĀ Denote. My first run at this involves a couple of steps: Tweak the web clipper to save files using Denoteās format and front matter Save the file without adding it to an Obsidian vault Move the saved file into my Denote folder Hereās the Web Clipper template configuration I ended up with: ...
I upgraded PHP to v8.3 (from 8.2) today on the server running baty.net. I donāt pretend to be an Ubuntu sysadmin, so Iām writing it down, just in case. sudo apt update sudo apt install php8.3 php8.3-cli php8.3-{bz2,curl,mbstring,intl,gd,xml} sudo apt install php8.3-fpm sudo a2enconf php8.3-fpm # enable it sudo vi /etc/caddy/Caddyfile # replace socket path with 8.3 sudo systemctl reload caddy sudo sudo a2disconf php8.2-fpm # disable 8.2 sudo apt purge php8.2* # in fact, just delete 8.2 The site runs on Caddy, so I needed to change the path to the fpm socket. Hereās the Kirby section of the Caddyfile⦠...
Iāve not been shooting much film recently. Yesterday, I was bored and in a mood, so I grabbed the Hasselblad and fired off a roll using Alice as my model. Only one frame was good enough to share. I really like it, so it was worth sacrificing the other 11. Alice
For a while, I tried maintaining a combined RSS feed that included posts from all my sundry blogs. I kept it at /everything.rss. It was managed as part of my WordPress blog, and since Iāve stopped using WordPress, Iāve been redirecting /everything.rss to the feed for baty.net, which is either /feed or /index.xml, depending on my blog platform of the day. I think that instead of that, Iāll piggyback off myĀ @batybotĀ account on Mastodon.social. I crosspost most stuff from my sites to @batybot viaĀ EchoFeedĀ already, and Mastodon offers an rss feed for each account. Mine isĀ https://mastodon.social/@batybot.rss.Ā ...
A few quick thoughts after just over a month with the new Nikon Z f
Scrolling with theĀ Logitech MX MasterĀ in Safari sucks out of the box. The following fromĀ this Reddit threadĀ helped, even though it required installing 2 additional packages. Hereās the useful part of that thread: Install Logitech Options+ (sigh) and set: Logi Options+ (Plus): Customization App for Logitech Devices What a gross bit of software, but itās necessary here. Iāve read that once this process is done, I can delete the app completely, but I havenāt tried that yet. ...