I was working on a little shell script for generating GoAccess reports on the web server but I was running into a minor problem that I couldn't figure out. I asked ChatGPT for help and immediately had the solution, and a better overall script than I had written. The side effects of LLMs suck, but there's no denying their utility right now. I feel dirty, but I have a nice script, I guess?

I'm deleting a bunch of old files. There's a significant psychological difference between "zipping them up and putting them on some hard drive somewhere" and actually deleting them. Deleting, where feasible, is better.

Merry Christmas. Christmas arrives without much fanfare around here, but we do spend time with family. Maybe I'll even step away from the computer for a while.

Still true: I'm tired of organizing things

I watched the Ken Burns' "Leonardo da Vinci" documentary and now all I want to do is write in my notebooks...and dissect things.

I was going through my Braintoss messages and this one from April, 2023 jumped out at me:

there's a low-level specific pain in having to accept that putting up with you requires a certain generosity of spirit in your loved ones

Ouch 😬 (It's from ― Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility)

Also this one:

The thing I miss most about working is canceled meetings.

And this:

you know I think I want to read a book about minimalism as a concept but really I just want somebody to tell me how to organize my closet

I hate to judge, but I have trouble taking you seriously when you use a half-naked anime character as your desktop background.

I thought maybe I'd change themes here just to change things up a bit, without completely bailing on Hugo, as I'm wont to do. Changing Hugo themes is almost as much of a pain as changing blogging engines. I gave up after an hour.

jAlbum is pretty good at creating nice static web photo galleries. I made an elaborate gallery last year. It was nice, but now I can't find my copy (or settings, originals, etc.) I'm not mad because I have to start over. I'm mad because all I do is organize stuff and despite that, I still can't find things. Probably because of that, honestly. Anyway, starting over.

I need some new sources. Everything I read is related to AI or social media or some gadget I simply must buy. I'm bored with all of it.

See, the thing is, I need to somehow keep the the "Reduce & Simplify" dream alive. It's OK if my system takes a little work to maintain, but it has to be one system. I can manage one. What I can't do, is have a bunch of completely different setups that each take "a little work" to maintain. I've become overwhelmed as a result of my never-ending urge to tinker (combined with boredom). So here we are, on baty.net, doing daily notes again. One Blog, One Life or some such thing, right?

Speaking of limiting my systems, I just paid for an entire year of Adobe Photography 1TB plan (~$250). That committment requires that I don't renew my Capture One subscription, which is about the same cost, but C1 doesn't include Photoshop, LrC, Bridge, and 1TB of cloud storage. Seems like a no-brainer, but I still find it difficult to decide. Lightroom it is, I guess.

I'd rather have Reddit posts slurped up by AI than hit a bunch of [deleted] dead-ends when I'm trying to find the answer to something just because someone left in a huff.

Maybe my favorite "feature" of Flickr is...it remains Desktop-first. Mobile phones ruined proper photo sharing.

See how the way I'm doing this blog ruins the archives?...

I've been happily using Doom Emacs again, but I missed the feeling of having built things myself. I mean, if I wanted everything done for me, I could just use Obsidian, right?

There's a certain level of geek pride in building one's own config, although I don't always feel it's worth the trouble, knowing Doom exists. Other times, however, I miss feeling the satisfaction of being in complete control of my environment. I spent the day starting over.

When I say "from scratch" I don't mean without any help from anyone. There are things that have become defacto standards when making Emacs "nicer", so I went hunting for a leg up.

The first option I considered was to start with minimal-emacs.d from James Cherti. I'd used this for my previous vanilla setup. It's quite fast and the defaults are sensible. This time, though, I was hoping for a little less magic in my config. I decided to look for something else.

I ended up taking the best bits from Protesilaos' basic and capable configuration. Prot is so pragmatic and thoughtful that it's always valuable to look at how he does things.

Something Doom is very good at is fast startup. With all my crap included, Doom would start in about 1.5 seconds. It's one reason I moved back to Doom in the first place, as my config had blown up to around 8 seconds and I didn't have the energy to optimize it. My unofficial target for the new config was under 4 seconds. I don't launch Emacs that often. A few seconds once or twice a day won't kill me.

I brought over the particulars from my earlier configs (for Org-mode, LaTeX, org-journal, etc.) and, long story short, I have a leaner, newer configuration that I (sort of) built myself. Startup is around 3 seconds, so I have a bit of room if I need it. Or maybe I'll learn about garbage collection and compilation and see if I can improve things.

One thing I didn't bring along was Evil mode. I don't know if I want to run Emacs without it, but I'm going to try living with stock Emacs bindings with some tweaks. We'll see how it goes.

There's no public repo for this yet. I worry that my cobbled together stuff would do more harm than good if someone started copying things from it. Maybe later.

Thanks Frank! It's good to know I'm not alone.

I went to sleep last night having decided that, "Tomorrow, I'm going to revamp my Emacs config and go back to my home-grown config." This morning, I thought, "Life would be easier if I just used Obsidian instead." So yeah, normal day so far 👋🏻.

The market has chosen Markdown over Org mode files and I hate that.

Wouldn't it be great if, instead, we just stopped wanting more stuff?

I am almost embarrassed to admit that Adobe Bridge has become my default for dealing with photos. After dismissing it for years, it might now be my favorite "new" app. Weird how that happens. It does so much more than I thought.

I don't have the energy to go around looking for things to be mad at.

The only thing Obsidian has to offer over Emacs is convenience. That's not a good enough reason to use it.

JFK Jr. is a public health emergency

Online following and Starter Packs · Luna’s Blog

I want people to follow me naturally because they enjoy my posts in particular, I don’t want a tech/demoscene/gamedev/etc audience showing up in bulk just because someone else decided to put me on a list without my prior consent.

Hold on a sec, do we want to make it easier to find interesting people to follow or not? I can't keep up.

I can understand why it's worth the conversation, but this sits wrong with me. I can't help but read it as, "Sure, we want to make it easier to find people to follow, but leave me out of it. Those people haven't earned the right to follow me. And take me off your blogroll while we're at it."

On daily.baty.net, each little whim of a post has its own page and is part of the RSS feed (and gets cross-posted to my mastodon.social bot account). Some days, that's exactly what I want. When I write daily notes here at baty.net, using the single-entry-per-day format, I feel less pressure to make anything "count". And some days, that's exactly what I want. Living in my head is frustrating.

Century-Scale Storage:

But at the century scale, even our most widely adopted file formats are completely untested. Digital history is not long enough to definitively settle on best practices.

So, WordPerfect, then? 😁. Seriously, though, it's a really interesting article.

I joined https://izzzzi.net/ for some reason (I'm jbaty).

I know y'all are sick of me waffling about where to post these little daily notes, but I can't help it. I'm honestly split right down the middle about it. I want everything to be in one place, but I can't seem to make it all fit in one place. At least not the way I want things to fit. I could leave baty.net for the longer posts and daily.baty.net for these daily notes. Or, I could try combining everything here. Or maybe combine everything there and make this a landing page. I think each of these options has equal merit, so I haven't been able to decide, and probably never will. I guess I'll continue posting wherever I'm in the mood to post on any given day.

Today, I'm in the mood to do it on daily.baty.net.

Yesterday, I had three "pods" on PikaPods: Ghost, Actual Budget, and Linkding. Today, I have none.

Deleting Ghost was easy, since I moved back to Hugo.

I wasn't using Actual Budget enough, so losing that isn't a sacrifice.

Linkding I really like, but for weeks I'd add links to it, then never go back to look at any of them. There are other, simpler ways to manage bookmarks. Same goes for a "read later" service. I still grab the markdown, create a PDF and print it. If it's not worth doing that, I'm probably not going to bother reading it later, anyway.

PikaPods is a great way to spin up inexpensive (mostly) self-hosted web apps. I just didn't need the ones I was using.

I'm in the middle of re-reading "Digital Minimalism" by Cal Newport and I must've put the book down to check my phone at least a dozen times last night. I'm doing it wrong.

The best way to avoid having to organize things is to not have things to begin with. I'm deleting so much stuff right now. I'm going to regret it, but I need this. It's self care :)

Markwhen is a markdown-like journal language for plainly writing logs, gantt charts, blogs, feeds, notes, journals, diaries, todos, timelines, calendars, or anything that happens over time .

(h/t @AnthonyBaker)

A roll of HP5 through the Olympus Stylus Epic.

I spent a good portion of yesterday offline. Well, not technically offline, but not on social media, which feels like the same thing.

Trying to remember to step away from the computer once I notice that all I'm doing is clicking things basically at random. That means I'm done for now, but I rarely heed the clues.

I'm looking at the contents of the media drive on my 2014 Mac Mini and there are dozens of seasons of TV shows in the Plex folder. I don't rewatch shows. Ok, I rewatched The Wire and West Wing but that's about it. I'm planning to decomission the Mini so I'm deciding what I need to keep. I don't need to keep the TV shows. That's a start.

I spent most of the day rejiggering my backups and other parts of my setup. It's December and I have not yet Reduced nor Simplified. I pulled everything off the Mac Mini (2014) server. Consolidated all of my "Attic" folders. Moved backups into one spot. Rebuilt the Roon Core on the original NUC server, where it belongs. Things were getting out of hand, and it felt good to reel it in just a little.

Mastodon is great when I want to listen to people scold each other. Bluesky is for listening to people being performatively clever. I am not enjoying either of them.

Most people care nothing about the things I care deeply about. I'm feeling too old to try convincing them.

Suggesting that people start a blog instead of joining a new social media platform is a category error.

Typing my little takes here on the blog is better than doing it on the socials because here no one bothers to correct me. I don't feel like arguing.

I canceled my membership at 500.social. I wasn't using it enough, so it didn't make it through my end-of-year subscription cutting exercise.

"I don't know anything about what you asked, but here's what I got from Perplexity..." is not helpful. Plus, you still don't know anything about what I asked. We've gotten nowhere and you've wasted our time.