It’s happening again. My love of powerful, complex software has overrun my ability to avoid tinkering. For example, I’ve spent several hours this week working on my Org-mode agenda display. Configuring org-super-agenda is tons of fun. It can make one’s Agenda absolutely sing and dance, which is not ideal for me because I’ve spent way too much time trying to teach it to sing and dance. I could have finished all of the tasks on my todo list in the time I’ve spent getting them to display just right. ...

Twitter was the place I liked to be from 2006 until 2022. Or more accurately, it was the place I liked to be from 2006 until around 2015. After that, it was the place I felt I needed to be. Still, I managed to curate my Twitter feed well enough to avoid most of the awful bits. I’m a CIS white male, which made it easier of course. Then Musk happened. I gave him the benefit of much doubt, hoping that just maybe he would “fix” things. The opposite has happened so far, so I’m out. I visit every few days to see if I’ve missed anything from my friends still there, but otherwise, it’s no longer a place I want to spend time or contribute to. It’s quite sad, honestly. ...

I replaced our flaky sprinkler system controller this weekend. All by myself. The unit I chose was the Rachio 3 Smart Sprinkler Controller. They offer 4, 8, and 16-zone versions. My system has 9 zones because of course it does. The good news was that Costco sells a version with 12 zones for the same price as the standard 8-zone model. Yay me! ...

I decided that a single-player Mastodon instance isn’t ideal. It’s overkill for one person, and it’s lonely! The #local feed is just me shouting to myself. That’s no fun. What’s the point in having a giant Rails app with all sorts of moderation tools, user management, and monthy costs if it’s just me? That’s what I thought, so I’ve moved. First, I considered heading back to fosstodon.org. The vibe there is kind of what it’s like to be in my head, but it also ends up feeling a little narrow-scoped, if that makes sense, so I decided against it. ...

You may have noticed that once again things have changed around here. This time, it’s due to switching from WordPress to Blot. We’ve been around this block before, but lemme ‘splain1. I’ve switched from Hugo to Eleventy to WordPress within just the past several months. This is not surprising to any of you who’ve been following along. Sometimes I switch blogging tools because I’m mad at whatever I’m using. Other times I switch because I’m bored. This time it’s a bit of both. ...

I’ve seen a number of thoughts similar to this from Shane Parrish: We unconsciously become what we’re near. If you work for a jerk, sooner or later, you’ll become one yourself. If your colleagues are selfish, sooner or later, you become selfish. If you hang around someone who’s unkind, you’ll slowly become unkind. Little by little, you adopt the thoughts and feelings, the attitudes and standards of the people around you. ...

At the end of each month, I convert my Org-journal entries into a nice PDF, print it, and put it into a binder. It occurred to me that my daily.baty.net website content is just a bunch of markdown files that could be treated the same as my org-journal files and perhaps printed as well. I started by concatenating March’s entries into a single Markdown file, like so: cat 2023-03*.md >> ~/Desktop/202303-MarchBlog.md The resulting file wasn’t in great shape for printing, so I had to clean it up. At minimum, I needed to do the following: ...

I’ve tried so many “read-later” services that I can’t remember half of them. They’re all basically the same: visit a website, click a button, and the article is saved to a list somewhere with all the other articles I’ve saved. Some newer services get fancy with recommendations, UI improvements, social integration, etc. but they all just gather a list of articles that I almost never end up reading. But, you know, just in case, right? ...

This is not a review, but I wanted to jot down some notes after a few days in a new app that I’m enjoying very much: Wavelength Messenger. You might like to read John Gruber’s post for details. My wife believes that I have some kind of processing disorder that causes me to quickly become overwhelmed by too much simultaneous input. She discovered this after several visits to the local Costco. After a few minutes in a busy Costco, I sort of shut down and become surly. I can only think about leaving. I’m no fun in a Costco. ...

I brought a Hasselblad 60 megapixel medium format digital camera to Africa with me. I took photos side by side with my film camera. The digital camera’s images were sharper. They had more detail in both the shadows and the highlights. The digital camera made photographing very, very easy. And I hated it. … In fact, had I photographed using a digital camera from the beginning, I’m not sure that I would have liked a single photograph that I had ever taken. ...

It’s always surprising to me how many frames I don’t screw up when using the meterless M3.

I’m wondering if I should become more like everyone else. Should I post “5 Tips to improve your workflow right now!” articles on Medium? Should I be “super excited” to humblebrag about myself on LinkedIn? Should I fire up my Instagram account and splash gaudy “stories” all over it throughout the day? Should I buy some neon background lights and work on an unnecessary 90-second musical intro to my upstart YouTube channel? ...

Update: I think Org-roam is the right answer for most people, but I could not resist the simplicity and lack of dependencies of Denote, so I am back in Denote as of June, 2023. Using both Org-roam and Denote for my notes is not sustainable. I had to make a call one way or the other. I went with Org-roam. This is a bit disappointing because I prefer the philosophy of Denote. I like that Denote is agnostic about file types (I can mix and match Markdown and Org-mode files, for example). I like that it forces a consistent file naming scheme. I like that it doesn’t depend on Org-mode features or any other complex dependencies. I like that it doesn’t try to do too much, but is easily extensible. Plus, I’m not trying to build some sort of zettelkasten or anything, so simple is preferable. ...

When I started building a new index card note box, I followed Scott Schepard’s lead and used the Wikipedia Academic Disciplines as the overarching structure. I’ve come to dislike that system. It’s too dependent on hierarchy, and one I don’t really follow. So, this morning, when trying to install a new note about Libertarianism (topical!), I became frustrated and renumbered everything. I’m now using a simpler, more Luhmann-like card numbering system. (Some would call it “Folgezettel”, but I’ll stick with “numbering system”). ...

UPDATE: I’ve had trouble getting GoAccess to parse the logs consistently after changing the date format. I’ve been using GoAccess on the VPS running my static sites for keeping an eye on web server access logs. It works great and requires no tracking scripts. I run a cron job every five minutes to process my site logs and generate an HTML report. This is fine, but GoAccess always processes the entire log file and offers no way to filter the results. Sometimes I only want to see stats for, say, today or for the past week. ...

Ten years ago, Steven Johnson wrote The Spark File, in which he describes his process for keeping track of hunches, ideas, etc. in a single text file. I, of course, thought this was a great idea and immediately started keeping my own spark file. It began in 2012 and I was reasonably consistent with it until 2016. After that, there was a lull, but it picked up again for a short time in 2021, after which I sort of forgot about it. ...

I’ve been tracking an issue with the way backlinks are displayed that affects my use of Org-roam. Someone (hwiorn) finally discovered a workaround when using Doom Emacs: delete the compiled version of org-roam-utils. Like this: rm .config/emacs/.local/straight/build-*/org-roam/org-roam-utils.elc Now my links show up correctly. Finally! I’ll probably need to delete the file every time I sync or update but I don’t care as long as there’s a fix. It was driving me nuts. ...

I’ve been a Flickr user since 2004 and a SmugMug user for nearly as long. For some reason, I prefer looking at my photos via online galleries rather than, say, my Photos library, and both Flickr and SmugMug have helped me do that. I’ve also kept standalone static web galleries for the odd side project, such as a memorial to my dog Leeloo. Recently, I’ve been creating more of these, so I started looking for easier or better ways of generating static web galleries from a selection of photos. There are what feels like a thousand options. Everything from giant GUI apps to the nerdiest little command line utilities. ...

The Leica SL2 felt inevitable. After an almost accidental run with the Panasonic S5, which I didn’t enjoy at all, I tried going back to the Fuji system. I’ve always liked Fujifilm cameras and their classic control layout. I purchased a new X-T5 and a few nice lenses late last year, but it didn’t grow on me. The X-T5 is a great camera and I had nothing to complain about. Except it just didn’t give me The Feels. Not the way, say, a Leica does. ...

Reading notes for ‘Why People Photograph’ In a recent post, My Antinet and Barthes’ “Camera Lucida”, I wrote about having shelves filled with books that I remember nothing about. Seems like a waste, no? Writing notes (by hand) while reading new books has completely changed the way I read and I am finding many benefits: More deliberate consumption, better recall, and a physical residue of the things I’ve read. ...