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Baty.net

A blog about everything by Jack Baty đź‘‹
It Really Whips the Llama's Ass

Saturday, February 22, 2025

I still don’t know what belongs here. It’s mostly just a place to write things I’m thinking about. Things that have even the remotest chance of being useful or entertaining to someone else. There are at least three places I write things: Here, the wiki, and my Emacs daybook. And this doesn’t include the paper options. I don’t enjoy having to decide where to put things, but I have been unsuccessful in limiting myself to only one option.

Morning pages with the AlphaSmart Neo 2

AlphaSmart Neo 2

AlphaSmart Neo 2

I started free writing again a couple weeks ago, but this time I’m doing it digitally, using the AlphaSmart Neo 2.

I dove hard into “Morning Pages” after reading Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, but it didn’t last long. I mean, c’mon, there’s no way I can consistently write 3 lined pages, longhand, every morning.

Thursday, February 20, 2025

I’d love to have this for my M3. The Leica Summilux-M 50 f/1.4 is the fifth lens in the Classic Line


I dreamt last night that my blog had a really fun, whacky design and everyone talked about it. Then, I woke up and remembered that my blog has a plain, boring, perfectly fine design and I’m keeping it.


I’m considering adding a /notes section of the blog, with tweettoot-sized posts. No titles. Probably no RSS feed. And they’d be syndicated via EchoFeed to Mastodon. It would take the place of these Journal posts. Maybe? Not sure it’s something I want, but it’s being considered.

I think I have to go back to Mu4e

I “settled” on using notmuch for my email, but now I’m reconsidering that decision.

Notmuch is great, but using it forces me to have two email stores. One is IMAP (via Fastmail). The other is my local notmuch database. Mbsync keeps things kind of synced, but it’s really only a few flags. Notmuch doesn’t delete or move email on the server. This means I’m managing, for example, my Inbox, in two places. It’s not hard, but is it necessary?

Tuesday, February 18, 2025

I’m typing this in iA Writer because I read a blog post. See how susceptible I am to the opinions of others?

10 minutes later: Back in Emacs. Other editors are fun for a minute, but nope.


I’ll be honest here: if being a supermarket janitor paid as well as being a developer at a large consultancy firm that I won’t name, I’d go back to cleaning toilets in a heartbeat. Software is never really done, especially in an “agile” shop, but least I can tell when the toilet’s clean.

Monday, February 17, 2025

I’m realizing that digital photography is actually not always easier than shooting film. Wrangling the new Nikon Zf to do what I want has been the opposite of easy. It’s not the Nikon’s fault, really. It’s that modern cameras want to do everything for everyone and it’s exhausting getting them to do the right things for me.


Trying to use both Lightroom and Lightroom Classic and syncing between the two was a terrible, terrible idea that I’ve tried and failed at several times. The worst being this past month. Now I’m spending the morning either finding missing photos or dealing with duplicates. I never learn.

Mundane film vs digital photos

The other day, while bored, I shuffled around the house and burned through a roll of film, just for something to do. I took photos of random stuff that I use or see every day. The photos were boring af but, for some reason, because they’re film I think they’re kind of cool.

But are they? No, they’re not. Film photography is fun, and the paraphernalia is awesome, but a boring photo is still a boring photo. Here’s an egregious example. HP5 from the Nikon F100 on the left. Nikon Zf with an HP5 film recipe on the right.