While walking Alice this morning, I saw a strange row of lights in the sky. It was stationary, so I knew it wasn't a meteorite. It didn't look like a comet. When I got home I did a quick search and it turns out it was a chain of Starlink satellites. There was a time I would have been amazed and optimistic about the technology. Instead, I just thought, "Fuckin' Musk."

I need to step away from social media for a minute. Adam of social.lol is, far as I can tell, a terrific person. He has an inclusive, friendly, and welcoming attitude and I've been a happy user of his services for a long time.

However, this thread from last night criticizing 500.lol has been bothering me more than I can account for. The entire thing just pisses me off, and I need to back away while I try to understand why.

I suspect part of it is that I'm wrong about something and I don't want to admit it to myself. That pisses me off even more :). Anyway, a break will do me good.

I love that Dave seems to be enjoying his Apple IIc

My SetApp subscription was scheduled to renew today, but I didn't let it. I figured that if I buy the apps outright that I actually use, I'll spend around the same amount as I would on a 1-year SetApp license for both Macs. The purchased apps would either come with lifetime licenses or a small annual upgrade fee. This means next year I'll pay a much smaller amount for all the same software.

Here are the apps I currently have installed:

On the other hand, I'll no longer have access to 250+ fun apps to try. Normally I would consider this a bad thing, but I'm still working toward my Reduce & Simplify goals, and that means striving for less software, not more. It's fun tinkering with various apps, but honestly, it's an unnecessary distraction.

And then....

It turns out that the answer to the question, "How long can I go without SetApp?" is "about 30 minutes"

I took a closer look at the apps I have installed and use frequently, and also the ones that I use occasionally and then uninstall. The math got a bit more complicated.

So, I just paid $135 to renew my SetApp subscription for two Macs. As for the urge to tinker, I guess I'll just have to learn some restraint :).

I've been sitting here staring at the screen and clicking things mostly at random and finding nothing that sparks my interest. Am I reaching the end of something? Feels like I'm reaching the end of something. I just hope it's the beginning of something else.

I've been testing a version of Johnny Decimal using folders and org-mode files. While doing this, I found myself frequently wanting to create a new .org file in the current (Dired) directory with the same name as the directory (long story).

In a past life, this would have been a fairly straightforward challenge. I'm not remotely fluent in (emacs) lisp, but I've always enjoyed learning, so I would have dug in and figured out how to write the function myself.

I don't feel like that person any more. I just wanted to use the function and move on.

So, I asked ChatGPT to write one for me^[1]

Write an emacs lisp function to create a new org-mode buffer having the same name as its enclosing folder

It worked. First try. However, I wanted to also automatically save the buffer as an org-mode file with the new name, so I amended my prompt with...

Add to the function so that it saves the new buffer using the buffer name into the current directory

And that also worked on the first try.

(defun jab/create-and-save-org-buffer-same-as-current-folder ()
  "Create a new Org-mode buffer with the same name as the current folder and save it in the current directory."
  (interactive)
  (let* ((current-directory (file-name-directory (or buffer-file-name default-directory)))
         (folder-name (file-name-nondirectory (directory-file-name current-directory)))
         (file-path (expand-file-name (concat folder-name ".org") current-directory))
         (new-buffer (generate-new-buffer folder-name)))
    ;; Switch to the new buffer and set it to Org-mode
    (switch-to-buffer new-buffer)
    (org-mode)
    ;; Save the new buffer to the specified file path
    (set-visited-file-name file-path)
    (save-buffer)
    (message "Created and saved new Org buffer: %s" file-path)))

I ran this, and it did exactly what I wanted, so I added to my permanent configuration and moved on.

I kind of hate how well this works. It feels like I'm a lazy cheater and that I'm using a bunch of magic code to do stuff. Then again, I can now do things in a few minutes what might have taken hours before. I'm not learning, but at least I'm doing. I guess.

I don't have any real plans today other than one appointment at lunch. How shall I waste spend the day?

I deleted the Ghost instance that was meant to be a photo blog. I'm fine with putting things here. I prefer that my posts are just a folder with a markdown file and a few jpegs.

My daughter and I built a fire pit at her house today. I think we did a fine job.

It's been a couple weeks since moving my blog back to Hugo and, surprisingly, I'm perfectly happy with it. However, I'm not as sure about these daily notes posts.

I often manually crosspost from here to Mastodon, and wonder if maybe I'd prefer having that happen automatically. That won't work if I continue using the current format, so I've been thinking about splitting short posts off again to a separate (micro) blog.

daily.baty.net would be fine for this, but this time around I'm in a less-software mood, so I'd prefer not having to fire up Tinderbox right now. Plus, I want posting to be dead simple.

I considered using Scribbles since I already have a blog there. It could easily be used for the daily posts, and I've already paid for a lifetime subscription. As good as Scribbles is, it just doesn't fit my sensibilities, somehow, so I'm going to let that one idle for now.

Enter Micro.blog. I canceled my Micro.blog subscription a while ago, after using it since the original Kickstarter. No reason, I just wanted to try something else, probably.

While reviewing what I wanted from a daily microblog, I realized that Micro.blog hits just about every point. So, I renewed my subscription, switched to the Tiny theme with a couple of tweaks, set up crossposting, and I'm off and running again at jack.micro.blog.

This is an experiment. Specifics may change without notice 😁.

Maybe these daily notes are more like an internal monolog, published. The microblog will be for things I want to deliberately share. This would be what I'm using Mastodon for, currently, but I'll crosspost to Mastodon instead.

It seems that everywhere I turn, someone is giddy about Oasis getting back together. I'm not embarrassed to go on record stating that I absolutely cannot stand their music, so consider me nonplussed.

Thankfully, I've got things to do in real life today. Otherwise, I'd be wasting the day by fretting over the long-term use of Emacs. I need to get past that, but not today.

I can't think of anything more useless and boring than trying to craft the perfect AI prompt so that it will generate something useless and boring for me.

This roll is mostly uneventful. It's meaningful to me only in that there's a few photos from my mom and dad's 62nd anniversary this week. The rest are mostly just me plinking around the house. I mean, there's a photo of a cheeseburger on my desk, which is telling.

Shot with the Leica MP on HP5 using the 35mm Summilux.

I spent the afternoon with my parents to celebrate their 62nd wedding anniversary. This roll of Tri-X was taken with the Hasselblad 500C/M and the 80mm Planar.

I talk about gear and process a lot because it helps fill the gaps left by a dearth of ideas.

All of the handwringing around AI or Apple or [trending topic here] has become boring. So has the naval gazing around blogging and social media and everything. I need a new thread to pull.

Abandoning the hours I spent making little scripts and shortcuts to do the things I normally do in Emacs, but in Bear, etc. instead, I spent time yesterday doing the same thing with the Emacs versions. I feel better about that, because I'm better at Emacs to begin with, so this feels like adding on to something I have rather than starting over with something new.

Speaking of Emacs, I've added evil-mode back into my Emacs config. Now I'm really confused. I have two conflicting sets of muscle memory, both of which I quite like, but they can't really coexist peacefully. I tried Demon-mode and other kinda-evil-but-not-really modes and none are what a want. I'm going to need to decide.

The thing I tried yesterday (Bear, iA Writer, and Day One) fell apart immediately this morning after I created this daily file in Emacs and started typing without even thinking about it. How am I ever going to extract myself from the clutches of Emacs if I keep using it by default? The Gravitational Pull of Emacs strikes again. Besides, every time I try leaving Emacs I can't get past the guilt of abandoning more than ten years of experience, just so I can try something different or easier.

I went to post something just now, but stopped to make a teeny tweak the Hugo frontmatter. Now I don't remember what I was coming here to write. Good morning, I guess ¯_(ツ)_/¯. On the plus side, I woke up feeling actually relieved that the blog is on Hugo. Can't explain it, but it seems like a good thing.

Neither my wife nor I have been to Europe, so I'm planning a trip there for later this fall. I don't even know which country we should start at. I'm thinking Italy.

There are a lot of things to do in this world that don't involve making sure my dotfiles are syncing correctly or figuring out why some emacs package suddenly starts tossing errors after an update.

Here's something I'm trying: I've moved my daily log (Daybook) entries into a new, separate Day One journal. This replaces my Org-mode Daybook.org and my Tinderbox Daybook.tbx. I want access on every device. Even though I rarely use iOS for anything, I want the option. I want proper, working sync. I don't want to worry if I have the same (e.g. Tinderbox) document open on two Macs. Day One is made for date-based writing, so why not take advantage of it? I export to PDF, JSON, and Markdown at the end of every month, which alleviates my fear of long-term lock in. Let's try it.

I've spent time this week trying to wrangle Johnny Decimal into something I can use. It's a great system, but I don't know if I'll be able to stick with it. It's me, not J.D. Yesterday, I was doing some AI-assisted searches in my Apple Photos library and started thinking that at some point, won't AI be able to organize my files for me? Then I found Sparkle, which claims to do exactly that. It sounds great, but no way I'm paying $20/month for the privilege. Someone will eventually create a free, local-only version of this and then I'll be interested. In the meantime, maybe I won't bother spending so much time organizing my files.

Adam pointed out some missing links due to my recent move back to Hugo. These have been fixed. Thanks Adam!

I started a blog post about my recent futzing with Johhny Decimal and Obsidian and Bear and so on, but I'm so tired of all that that I quit. Merging my J.D index (now called a "JDex") with a folder full of notes is what I want to do, but the best option for that is Obsidian, and I just can't make myself use Obsidian. I know this, but keep trying anyway for some reason. Then, I tried rebuilding the thing in Emacs with Org-mode documents and that felt better but was actually worse in practice. Finally, I tried importing the "Life Admin" starter into Bear. That felt better, but now I'm back to maintainin an index and a folder hierarchy. It's all too much. I've started just making new notes in Bear wherever and whenever the hell I feel like it. Then I move on to something else instead of over-thinking where shit goes. It's exhausting and I need a break.

A roll of Kodak Gold 200 was languishing in the Nikon F100, so I used it up taking photos of Alice on our deck. Turns out that's what I did with the first half of the roll, too :)

Processed C-41 in the JOBO and scanned on the V850 using SilverFast.

Wouldn't it be great if all I needed was Emacs, a browser, a terminal, and Finder? Why then do I end up with this? And it's only 6:00 a.m.

I'm not really getting anywhere. I mostly just move around in loops of varying sizes. Photography, note-taking, journaling, and all my other hobbies move in circles. I change something, then change it again, and again, and suddenly I'm back where I started.

Is there such a thing as declaring computing bankruptcy? I started a blog post this morning, but I don't feel like finishing it. I think maybe I've gone and skipped the declaration part.

Me, January 3, 2024...

The care and feeding of my system | Baty.net

Thing is, I’m weary of mystery. I want things to work all the time and require as little fuss as possible. My current situation requires a lot of care and feeding and I need to find a way out of it. ... Sure, much of this is self-imposed because I tweak. But I’m beginning to tire of having to babysit the things that should just be basic infrastructure.