I may have solved at least some of my problems caused by taking notes too many different apps. I moved all of them into ~/Documents/Notes, with subfolders per app. So...

├── Denote
├── Howm
├── Obsidian
└── SilverBullet

You'll notice SilverBullet in there, my newest infatuation. But here's the trick, I just point the default target for HoudahSpot searches at the enclosing Notes/ folder, and I can find most anything right away.

You'll note that this means I am restricted to apps that allow me to configure where notes are kept and that they're kept in some form of plain text. That covers most of my tools. I had been using DEVONthink for this, but it's been giving me trouble lately so I'm looking at simpler options. I'm digging it.

I have been thrilled to be able to use my little GR1 again, after pulling it off the shelf and finding that it does actually work. Except this morning I was reminded why I'd retired it before. The viewfinder becomes blocked by something loose in there or perhaps some sort of separation. Either way, it's not usable when this happens, so I may have to document the issue and re-retire the camera.

Today I learned about SilverBullet

SilverBullet is a note-taking application optimized for people with a hacker mindset. We all take notes. There’s a million note taking applications out there. Literally. Wouldn’t it be nice to have one where your notes are _more_than plain text files? Where your notes essentially become a database that you can query; that you can build custom knowledge applications on top of? A hackable notebook, if you will?

Well now who can't resist that? Me, that's who.

I installed SilverBullet via OrbStack, which is also new to me, and is delicious.

First impressions are (it's only been a few hours) that I think he's onto something. I can't explain it, but SilverBullet immediately felt more right to me than Obsidian. I am running it locally on my Mac Mini and accessing it from everywhere else using Tailscale.

I certainly don't need another way to take notes, but I'm going to continue giving SilverBullet a spin and see if it leads anywhere.

Whenever I change blogging platforms or domain names or simply post to several places, I feel a twinge of guilt. How will my "audience" feel about the changes? Does it confuse things?

I sometimes get comments like, "I have trouble finding things you've written because they're all over the place."

I don't get a lot of traffic, but it's also not zero traffic, so I feel some responsibility. But why? I am not writing for money or influence or popularity. I write to better understand what I'm thinking about, and sometimes share the result. I write so that I have a record of those things. I write, almost entirely, for me.

In that light, I shouldn't need to worry about whether my RSS feed is consistent or if people need to follow me in too many places. I don't want to be a dick about it, but c'mon, it's an unimportant personal blog by some nobody on the internet. Let's not overthink it.

So, if you're one of the people who actually wants to read the things I write, I apologize for the scattershot way I go about publishing them. But, honestly, I'll probably always be this way.

I brought the Hasselblad to my parents house while my daughter and grandson were visiting. I underexposed the roll a bit, but the hit rate was better than expected. I love this one of my sister and Lincoln.

As often happens, I started to waffle on where to keep my notes. I blame Obsidian for this. But also Bear and Evernote and Logseq and DEVONthink and and and.

Obsidian is insidious. Sometimes all I want is to write something down and Obsidian makes that easy. Then it shows you a nice Daily Notes page. Then it makes back/linking easy. Then it teases me with a million simple-to-install plugins.

Before you know it, I'm tweaking templates and writing Dataview queries. I realize that "This is worse than futzing with Emacs!" so I decide to "Reduce & Simplify" and start putting everything into Bear instead.

And around it goes.

Hoping to reduce temptation, I've deleted Obsidian, Logseq, Bear, Noteplan, and a couple others I don't remember.

My notes go in Emacs. Now, does that mean Denote or Howm? Both!

Doom Emacs is pretty great, especially for former Vimmers. I lived in Doom for a long time because it makes so many little things nicer, without having to dedicate one's life to customizing Emacs.

Toward the end of last year I wrote I'm Doomed again when I moved back from my vanilla config. Then, early this year, I rolled my own config again, and spent a lot of time getting things just so. I even removed Evil mode and have been using the usual Emacs bindings. It's the closest I've felt to being comfortable in Emacs in a long time.

Last week I was editing files on a server (via Vim) and I practically started the data center on fire because I had lost years of muscle memory around Vi bindings. Honestly, I miss modal editing.

My vanilla config takes around 4 seconds to launch. That's too long, but I didn't feel like figuring out how to optimize it.

Between slow startup times and nostalgia for Vi bindings, I moved my config aside and re-installed Doom. That was so much fun! It lasted for maybe 10 minutes. I remembered how nice Doom was, but I also remembered that I dislike using Doom's built-in wrappers for things like use-package. I also don't like having to wrap my customizations in (after! ...) blocks so Doom doesn't steal them back.

I spent the time with it so that my stuff worked and Doom's stuff did its magic. Startup time just over one-half a second. Nice! But things were broken. I kept seeing little errors about Org-mode this or that. This could have been a load order thing and maybe I missed and (after! somewhere, but I didn't feel like dealing with it.

The novelty of using Doom wore off quickly and I'm now back to my custom config. I get mad at having to C-c x or C-c c all the time, but at least it all works my way again.

Now, the question is am I even going to continue using Emacs? I'm fun.

I posted the above photo to Flickr 20 years ago today. It was my first. Flickr remains the best place to upload photos. I just wish it was still the best option for sharing them.

Photo Mechanic is the fastest, most powerful tool for ingesting/browsing/exporting photos. It's always been a little expensive, but I've had a license for many years.

Before 2024, I could buy a license and use it until the next version came out. I paid $90 to upgrade Photo Mechanic Plus (the fancy version with catalogs) from version 5 to version 6 in 2020. That was four years ago. It's not cost me a nickel since then.

There's "a little expensive" and then there's "expensive". This year, Photo Mechanic has introduced subscription pricing, and it's now firmly in the latter category.

Photo Mechanic Plus is now a paid subscription of $249/year. Ouch. The "perpetual" license (good for one year of updates) is $399. That prices it well out of "hobbyist" territory.

A subscription to the standard version is $149/year. Still too expensive for non-professionals.

I've been trying to get by using cheaper alternatives. First, I tried FastRawViewer. It is fast and cheap, but it's also comparatively janky and I simply didn't enjoy it. Next, I tried (link: https://www.apollooneapp.com/ text: ApolloOne). ApolloOne is a nice app. It comes close to being good enough as an image viewer. But it's not good enough to be a full-on Photo Mechanic replacement.

Thing is, I like the way Photo Mechanic works. It fits my brain. It's fast, complete, can be customized nicely, and has been solid for a couple of decades.

After failing to find a suitable replacement, I took the money returned from the Ghost theme I'd purchased, and used it for a one-year subscription to Photo Mechanic standard. It's expensive, but better, so it's worth it.

Most of the information I've written down about my cameras is either on my wiki or in random blog posts. I've decided to try and consolidate things in a new, separate wiki (using TiddlyWiki). It was trivial to drag and drop my original camera notes from the main wiki into this new wiki. I then copied the wiki file to my server, and it now lives here:

👉 jackbaty.com/cameras

It's very much a work-in-progress. My intention is to flesh out the individual entries and catch up on the TODO list. If that goes well, I may include some of my photos or notes on process. After that, maybe I'll add information about photographers who've inspired me. Or not, who knows? TiddlyWiki makes all this easy, but it is also kind of weird. I'll try to keep it easy as I can to navigate.

Tinderbox is an unusual, powerful, quirky, and amazing piece of software. I don't understand why more people don't use it for everything. Maybe because it costs $298 and that's expensive by today's app store race-to-the-bottom pricing situation. It's worth every penny, though.

Before Emacs came along, I put everything into Tinderbox. These days, I use Tinderbox for specific projects that benefit from its unique features. I also maintain my blog at daily.baty.net with it.

The blog's Tinderbox document is an outline organized by year/month/day/note. It contains all the HTML/CSS for rendering the site. It contains scripts for grabbing the daily weather forecast and for publishing and deploying the site. It's kind of crazy when you think about it.

It looks like this.

Lightroom it is. After a long period using Capture One, then a shorter period using Lightroom Classic (LrC), I'm once again trying the new Lightroom.

I left Capture One for LrC partly because Capture One's catalog features feel weak compared to LrC. LrC has everything and does it all pretty well. Its ecosystem is unmatched. Capture One is powerful and awesome, but the company is leaning hard into its Professional Photographer In a Studio market. I'm not one of those. C1 is also rather expensive. Instead, I've been using LrC with a single catalog containing every image I have. It works fine, and for $10/month I get both versions of Lightroom on the desktop, the mobile app, and Photoshop. Yes, it's a subscription, but one that is hard to beat.

So why bother switching to the new Lightroom? Fair question. It's mostly because I want to use Lightroom. It's just nicer in most ways. It looks good, it's clean, it's faster, and (regardless of claims otherwise by Adobe), it's the future.

Earlier attempts to switch failed. This is because Lightroom has always depended 100% on cloud storage. That bothers me just enough that I get turned off by it and go back to something that's local-first. Well, recent versions of Lightroom let me edit files directly from folders on disk, just the way I like it. This is even nicer than LrC because there's no need to import anything first. Just browse to the folder and start editing.

Once I'm done culling and editing, I select the "keepers" and press "Upload NN photos to cloud". This does just what it says. From that point on, I abandon the local file and continue any edits using the cloud version. It's nice being able to import photos from a card at my desk, do some basic culling, then move to the couch with an iPad or laptop and take it from there. My original files are where I left them, untouched, in nice, tidy, organized folders.

I still export any photos with significant edits to my "Digital Print Archive", just in case. This is a nice way of working.

Putting everything where it belongs has always been a pleasure for me. "Mise en place" and all that. I find comfort in knowing that a thing is where it should be and that I know where that is.

Recently, though, I've noticed that I dread deciding where that place should be. I've started to avoid my Monday morning routine of reviewing various inboxes and moving their contents into proper folders. The whole process has lost its luster.

I spent a few days recently reorganizing everything using the Johnny Decimal system. This was fun and helpful, but now I don't feel like dealing with it. The JD numbers only seem to get in the way. I'm not using it properly, probably, but any new file without an obvious place to go ends up sitting on my Desktop or wherever while I avoid dealing with it.

It came to a head this morning when I was cleaning out my DEVONthink inboxes. There were maybe 30 files that had nowhere to go. I couldn't decide where to put them. After staring at them for too long, I gave up and came here to whine about it.

I blame Howm, TiddlyWiki, and Bear.

To add a note in any of the above apps, I just type the note. Tagging and linking are available, but optional. Bear and TiddlyWiki don't create a new file at all. Howm creates one but I don't have to care where it is or what it's called. I've grown to like this way of working. Bear has taught me to that using tags might be good enough.

With local LLMs getting faster and easier, I suspect that manually organizing files will be come less important. Let technology do it! 😁

I'm tired of organizing things. As someone who has always espoused the meticulous use of folders and consistent file names, I'm starting to feel like dumping everything together with a handful of tags and calling it good.

previously, previously

My handwriting isn't pretty. It's not even always legible. I've realized that this is because, when writing by hand in a paper notebook, I start writing one of the letters from later in the word, before finishing the one I'm on. This means I spend half my time compensating for mistakes.

Another problem with speed is that it makes me clumsy. I knock things over and spill things. I believe this is because my brain has already moved on to the next thing before completing what it's currently doing. It's quite frustrating.

When I deliberately try to think and move more slowly, things happen faster. That sounds like a contradiction, but not having to rewrite words or clean up spills makes everything move along at a more consistent pace. And I don't swear as much.

I struggle to slow down, though. If I stop paying attention, the clumsiness returns. Meditation helps. A pattern I've noticed is that the more consistently I meditate, the more my brain is able to align itself with what my body is doing. Sounds weird, but ever since I started paying attention to the way speed affects my abilities, things have improved.

I want things to be simple and without distraction. I want to avoid futzing all the time. To this end, I often try to move away from using Emacs for everything. Emacs is not simple, no matter how hard I try to force it to be simple.

So I pull out the usual inventory of simple writing and note-taking apps, trying to make them fit. Telling myself that this is better for me.

I spend time actually using all those beautiful and simple apps. I love them, and the whole thing starts out with feelings of excitement and relief from the urge to tweak things in Emacs. Everything seems easier. My pinky is relieved. Futzing is reduced to nearly zero.

However, it's not long before I begin to miss the things I'd spent years building for myself in Emacs. I miss Org-mode. I miss Dired and Magit and Howm and Denote. I miss the ridiculously flexible and powerful export features. I miss using something that feels like it was made just for me. Something free and that I have complete control over.

I soon forget about all the time I'd wasted spent futzing with init.el or writing little lisp functions to do some silly and likely unnecessary thing that I love.

Then I'll find myself needing to open an old .org file. I launch Emacs, and I'm suddenly faced with my familiar, comfortable editor. After getting what I need from that .org file, I open my org-agenda just to see what I might have missed. Then I clean up my ~/Desktop folder quickly using Dired. You know, while I'm there.

It occurs to me that I might have been premature in moving away from Emacs 😆. I can feel it happening again: the return. I create a new org-journal entry, just for the hell of it. These entries usually begin with something like, "Uh oh! What I'm I even doing back here?!" It feels familiar. Feels like home.

One hardly notices the feeling of being sucked back into using Emacs. It just happens. It's like gravity. And you're simply there again.

Bear is one of those apps that either clicks with you or it doesn't. Unless you're me, for whom sometimes it clicks and sometimes doesn't.

I'm trying to follow through on my promise to Reduce & Simplify this year, so for the past week, Bear has been clicking for me.

I first used Bear in 2016 and have dipped into and out of it ever since. The reason for leaving Bear has always been that it's "too simple". The reason I end up back in Bear is because it's "so simple". You see how it is?

For the past few years all of my note taking and most of my writing has been done in Org-mode files using Emacs. What an amazing combination that is. I have many custom functions and configurations that help make using Emacs fast and efficient. I can't even tell you how much time I've spent configuring Emacs exactly to my liking. And that's the problem. Nearly every time I use Emacs, I end up digging into my giant init.el file to make "just one little change". Then suddenly it's two hours later and I'm reading Reddit posts about how someone somewhere did something similar. It's fun, but it's becoming less important to me.

All of the above also applies to Obsidian. The only difference is that it's quicker to get rolling in Obsidian. But also, the influencer-driven community around Obsidian makes finding useful information even more difficult. Why am I wasting time looking for a "better" plugin right now, anyway?

With Bear, there's not much to do other than write. Sure, it can be tempting to venture off into the weeds of #nested/tag/efficiency, but that gets boring pretty quickly. I admit to adding a few Raycast extensions and a Shortcut or two, but after a couple of days, I feel like I've done everything I need.

Another thing I like about using Bear is the lack of file names. After spending years rearranging my file naming scheme every six months or so, it's liberating to simply not care. Spaces in names? Don't care. Date prefix? Nah. Standardize on lowercase? Doesn't matter. And I don't have to think about where to put anything. How refreshing!

"But is it future-proof?" Well, if Bear goes away tomorrow, my backups are just a bunch of Markdown files that I can continue to use however I choose. Plus, notes can be exported in many formats at any time. That's future-proof enough for me.

Using Bear feels great right now. It's beautiful to look at, pleasant to use, simple, and it syncs everywhere with no additional dependencies. I'm spending most of my time in Bear writing notes rather than playing with Bear. Will I become frustrated by Bear's constraints? Maybe, but right now I'm Reducing & Simplifying and that feels good.

There are times I don't feel like blogging the hard way^[1]. When that happens, I look to simple, hosted, CMS-based blogging tools.

Recently, I've been experimenting with Pika and Scribbles. I like both of them. They are both simple, clean, easy, and inexpensive. Choosing either of them for a blog would be fine.

There is one thing that concerns me a little, and that is the hobby nature of these tools. I don't mean to be dismissive by calling them "hobbies", but I can't help but feel that these kinds of tools are always at risk of being abandoned when their authors' attention shifts to something new.

This is one reason I no longer use any of Dave Winer's stuff, no matter how clever. They tend to just go away.

One exception I know of is Blot.im. I've been using Blot on and off since 2017. David still updates it regularly and still answers emails quickly whenever there's an issue.

The Lindy effect applies here, and is worth thinking about when considering new tools.

I'm happy to support these efforts. I subscribe to Blot and have paid for a lifetime subscription to Scribbles. I'm still evaluating Pika. The decision about whether to actually commit to them for my blog is more difficult.

When I write a quote or note on an index card, I try to record some version of a reference. Most often this is just a title, author, and date of the article or book. When I need to revisit the source, I then need to look it up based on what I'd written on the card. This is fine for physical books, but I had an idea today that could make it easier for digital sources.

What if I put a QR code pointing to the source right on the index card?^[1]

I have a little Niimbot label printer that can print QR codes. I just paste the URL, and it generates the QR code automatically. What I don't love about it is that I have to get out my phone to make the labels and the app is pretty awful. And trying to run the iOS app on macOS is an exercise in frustration^[2].

Here's my first run at this:

The QR code could contain anything, really. Not only URLs. I could encode a link into an Obsidian vault, or the path to an Org-mode file, etc.

I'm not sure yet if this is a terrible idea or not, but I feel like it's worth a try.

After a time away from Hey email, I impulse subscribed again. And once again, after a short time, I already don't want to use it. I have reasons.

When Hey (hey.com) email was first launched, I signed up immediately. It was a fresh take on email and it felt nice. Hey either resonates with you or it doesn't. With me, it did. I paid for a year or two, and used it (on and off) for a long time. I never fully adopted my jbaty@hey.com email address because, well, I know me. Also, I already have an email address.

I still think Hey is a good service. Its opinionated way of dealing with email is clever and useful. However, I can't get over the fact that it doesn't use normal IMAP. This means there's no way into my email other than using the Hey web interface or iOS app. It's fine, but makes me feel trapped. Email is one of the few remaining things we have that doesn't lock us in.

Linking to emails is something I do all the time. Links to Hey emails are easy to make, since they're just web URLs, but I don't trust using them in my notes because once again, I know me, and those links will be dead once I, inevitably, go back to using "normal" email.

There's something about the web UI of Hey that introduces more friction than I like. It's fast enough, but it just feels a teeny bit janky. I can't explain it, but it wears on me.

A smaller, but irritating aspect of using Hey is that one of the guys who runs the place can't seem to stop saying stupid shit in public. I try to allow people plenty of leeway when it comes to differing opinions, but his keeps getting worse and the smug, know-it-all-ness of it bugs me.

And honestly, I don't get that much email these days, so a fancy workflow for processing it is overkill.

So, I've stopped forwarding my email to Hey and am back in my usual Fastmail->Apple Mail combination. If I get bored, I can always install the wonderful Mailmate or something like it to play with.

So far today, (as of 9:57 am) I have installed three apps that I had deliberately avoided installing on the new Mac Mini.

MailMate because I just quit Hey but still wanted something different to play with. I've used MailMate on and off since sometime in 2013 I think. It's a powerful, flexible, text/Markdown-first email app.

TheBrain because I'm still looking for the "Everything" app, and in my experience, TheBrain has been the best at that. If I'd never stopped using it, I'd be able to find every single thing and everything associated with that thing.

Bike Outliner because sometimes I just want a quick outline without all the fuss of Tinderbox or Org-mode. Bike is nice for that.