Rolling my own theme?

I like the PaperMod theme, but I don't want it to look like the PaperMod theme. Or at least not like everyone else's PaperMod theme. It's just that I suck at layout/CSS so if I decide to dive in I'll get frustrated and things will break.

Right now I've installed the theme as a Hugo "module". This is an easy way to do it, but it might be too much an abstraction for my taste. Another option is to check it out as a git submodule, but that has its own issues.

A third option, and the one I'm considering, is to install the theme in my themes/ folder but not as a submodule. I'll just roll it right into my repo and pretend it's mine :). This makes updates more work since it'll no longer be a simple "hugo mod -u" or "git submodule update --recursive --remote". I'll need to diff and merge by hand. This is fine, since sometimes themes break after updates.

This way I'll have local copies of all of the theme's templates and I can edit them at will.

I've lost interest in everything

Please allow me to gripe for a moment.

Over the past month or so, I've noticed that my reactions to things are generally, "Meh".

I used to eagerly fire up my RSS reader to see what fun, cool things I could learn about. Lately, I just scroll aimlessly through my feeds, skim a couple of posts, shrug, and move on. Nothing is interesting enough to stop me in my tracks and send me on an adventure. That used to happen at least once or twice a day.

I roll my eyes at each new "crisis" on social media. Not because I don't care about things, but I'm weary of people posting their (typically uninformed) takes on every little thing.

I haven't picked up a camera in weeks. My photos are boring. And I'm finding other people's photos boring as well, and that never happens.

Finding a show or movie to watch is an exercise in time wasting and scrolling and watching trailers. I'll find something, watch ten minutes of it, and quit. Same thing with books, and I love books.

The only reason I'm still blogging every day is for lack of anything better to do. I switch blogging platforms all the time, but it's just a distraction with no real goal.

Winter doesn't bother me. The short days are fine with me. I can't blame the weather. I'm just in a funk and I need to pull out of it because this isn't much fun.

The default error (e.g. 404) pages in OpenBSD's built-in web server are super basic. I can live with that, but what I can't live with is that they use Comic Sans. I kid you not.

I don't know if it's supposed to be a joke, but it's not funny.

If you do a search for "httpd custom 404 page" you'll find a lot of responses claiming that changing error pages can't be done without patching httpd and recompiling. Well I'm not doing that!

On about page 4 of search results I found this post explaining how to do it. Turns out it's now possible with a simple config change:

Just add something like errdocs "/errdocs" in httpd.conf. Then put a file named err.html file in /var/www/errdocs with the generic error message or create one for each error code, e.g. 404.html.

I could have just read the man page httpd.conf(5) and saved myself a lot of trouble.

We're back on Hugo for baty.net.

For the past few months, I've been learning how to create a blog using Kirby CMS and it's been a blast. Kirby is pleasant, easy, and fun to use. I'm glad I did it.

I won't bother you with a 2,000-word rationalization piece about switching. I just felt like using Hugo again, so here we are.

I missed my nice Emacs-based publishing workflow. I missed "normal" YAML front matter. I missed having a completely static website. Who knows where we'll be in a month, but today we're using Hugo. I went back to the PaperMod theme. I don't love how boring it is, but it's clean, feature-rich, frequently updated, and easy to customize.

People make fun of me for switching platforms so often. That's fine. It's what I do. I like to play with blogs and blogging tools.

Our near-blizzard conditions continue today. Alice had a hard time finding a place to poop on our walk this morning.

Oh, by the way I've switched back to Hugo for the blog

Editing Kirby content via the server's panel

I can't remember why I switched to managing the blog via a local Kirby instance. Probably because I was doing so much customization that the content vs code syncing was confusing me. Now that development changes have settled down, I'm using the server panel for publishing. I'll cross the how-to-sync-code-vs-content-changes bridge with I get to it.

Sync is where it gets tricky

My OpenBSD experiment that I (almost) ended has been going surprisingly well. I've got most of the basic settings configured and I have a real window manager (xfce) running. The whole idea of setting up the laptop is that it will be a bare-bones system for mostly writing/blogging/browsing. Should be easy, right? Just Emacs and my org directory. Except no. I need a bunch of dotfiles, espanso macros, passwords, git, and some shell scripts all synched. Lots of work still to do, it seems. Syncthing is running, but that was a trick. Now to work on dotfiles, since I hadn't been worrying about synching those for years now.

RSS feeds and daily notes

This should show up as an update in the RSS feed. I'm mostly just testing here.

I dug through my list of subscriptions yesterday and made a few changes.

First, a couple of smaller changes. I canceled Photomator and Photo Scan. Photomator is great, and I may come to regret losing it. But for now, I don't shoot much with my phone and if I really need to edit an image, I can send it to Affinity. Photo Scan is too expensive and I can just use Google's version.

This one is big. As mentioned, I canceled Capture One. I've used C1 for years, but having both Lightroom and Capture One available forced unnecessary decisions each time I'd unload an SD card. My head knows that Lightroom is more than capable, but my heart still loves the power and flexibility of Capture One. I worry that I'll waffle on this one, but for now, it's just Lightroom.

Another long-time subscription for me has been the Qobuz music service. Qobuz used to be one of a very few services offering high res streaming, but I used it mostly because of it's seamless integration with Roon. However, I already have a Spotify subscription and also Apple Music through Apple One. Music is important to me, but I find that I'm either actively listening, which usually means vinyl, or it's just on in the background, for which any streaming service is fine. So Qobuz is gone and my Roon server only serves my local music library.

Saved myself $35/month. Time will tell if it's worth it.

After yesterday's Kirby->Hugo-Kirby debacle, I've been thinking about why I spend so much time farting around with and on my blog. Fair question, and one I don't really have an answer to. I guess it's my little place on the internet and I like to have the furniture arranged just so. But "just so" changes all the time, so I keep trying new configurations. It's fun. Also useless, and nobody but me cares, but still.

I canceled my Capture One subscription this morning, before it renewed for $180 for another year.

I hadn't planned to do this. The plan was to cancel my Lightroom subscription ($10/month) and run with C1 for the year. Capture One has more to offer, and I like the files I get from it better than from Lightroom. So what happened?

When canceling the Lightroom subscription, I was informed that there would be an early-termination fee of $49. I'd forgotten that the $10/month subscription was subsidized by agreeing to pay for a year. They just charge me monthly. That was disappointing.

So, canceling Adobe and renewing Capture One was going to cost me $229 today. That bugged me, so I reviewed my decision to go with C1. If I'm honest, my photo processing needs are modest. I like the option for doing all sorts of fancy things, but mostly it's a little contrast, white balance, crop, and export. LR does those things just fine.

LATER: Of course an hour after posting this, C1 offered me 30% off to re-subscribe, so I did. Then I canceled my Adobe subscription. So, the opposite of the above is what happened.

Have you ever been so enamoured with plain-text-static-html publishing that you're willing to burn down a month of implementing a blog using Kirby CMS in order to go back to using Emacs and Markdown and Hugo?

I have.

I just wanted to give a shout-out to Adam Porter for his Org-web-tools Emacs package.

I only discovered his package a month or so ago and I've used it daily since. Put a URL in the clipboard, then in an Org-document run M-x org-web-tools-insert-web-page-as-entry and bam!, the page is converted into Org's format and inserted as a heading in the current file. For example, here's Jason Velazquez's post about Blogging Platforms, all tucked away nicely in my "Blogging Platforms" Denote note...

I ran the above function, and org-web-tools grabbed the page, formatted everything, and inserted a link as a heading, the date, and the meat of the article nestled under the "Article" subheading.

Nice!

There are a number of other helpful functions in the same vein. If you frequently save links or other web content in Org-mode, it's worth checking out.

I don't need a new blogging platform, but if I did, I'd certainly be looking at Prose.sh. It's blogging via sftp and rsync, which sounds awesome.

I spent some time in Obsidian again yesterday. I do this once a month or so just to see if somehow it's changed into something I'd like to use. Obsidian is great software, in theory, but I still find it boring and unpleasant to actually use.

I did this fun thing from Derek Sivers because I wanted to play with OpenBSD and with Vultr for hosting.

Well, I played with it. It was fun. I got to see how Dovecot works and I learned how to configure Relayd and the OpenBSD httpd server.

I think I'd end up liking it. BSD feels lighter and simpler and therefore probably more secure than the Ubuntu servers I'm running.

However, I don't need another server to manage. I don't need to run my own mail server or CalDAV server. My VPS at Digital Ocean has been running (::knocks wood::) smoothly for years and I've got the configuration down.

I'll be deleting the OpenBSD server once I've moved the few sites I'd migrated there back to Digital Ocean.

Remember, Reduce and Simplify.

I may try again later with stock OpenBSD and Caddy, without all of the Sivers' stuff.

2 hours later: I was right. I spun up a fresh OpenBSD server at Vultr and configured it myself. No services running but relayd->httpd and so far the only site it's running is jackbaty.com. I like the idea of BSD so much that I couldn't give up quite yet.

Yesterday, for some reason, the menu bar stopped showing when launching Emacs. Good grief. I had to add an explicit call to (menu-bar-mode) in my init.el. Why? Who knows. I'm sure I did something to cause it, but my commit logs don't point to anything obvious.

It's another one of those mysteries, I guess ¯_(ツ)_/¯.

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.

I'm not blaming Emacs, specifically, although Emacs is frequently the day's scapegoat. Yesterday I was testing the idea of moving my Daybook back to Tinderbox. I copied last year's file and cleaned out the existing entries. Then, when I'd add a weight log entry in the new file, the entry would disappear a few seconds later. That's fun. I figured out why it was happening, but it took me thirty minutes. How much of my life is wasted on these thirty-minute (or longer) interruptions while I fix or tweak something that didn't need fixing or tweaking yesterday?

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. I've gotten myself into this mess, and it's my problem to fix, but how? Maybe it'll mean declaring config bankruptcy in Emacs. Maybe it'll mean dropping all my "fancy" tools and going with the simple, stable ones (are there such things?).

Reminder to self, from Thomas Paine: "The more simple anything is, the less liable it is to be disordered." Things are disordered right now.

I'm still noodling on it. It's all related to my grand Reduce & Simplify plans for this year. I just wanted to vent a little.

A few months ago I became twitchy about my aging Synology so I replaced it with an old Mac Mini. The idea was that I understand how Macs work and if something breaks I can more easily deal with it.

I never unplugged the Synology, though. You know, just in case.

A week ago I started getting emails from the Synology that Drive 1 was failing. What I should have done is to unplug the thing and move on. But what I did was to order a new 8TB Seagate Ironwolf drive.

Yesterday, I powered down the Synology, pulled out the bad drive (it required no tools) and put the new drive in its place.

I booted it up and was told that the pool was degraded and needed repair. I clicked Repair and 8 hours later everything is running smoothly. I didn't need to restore files from a backup or anything.

Of course this means that I'm second-guessing my move to the Mini. The Synology has always been easy to manage and has just worked. My unease about how to fix it if something breaks is probably unnecessary.

Great, now I have two servers to deal with. This is how I "fix" things and I need to stop it.

If forced to come up with a theme for 2024, I'm going with "Reduce & Simplify".

I haven't formally defined it yet, but the gist of it is to use what I already have, remove things I rarely use, and rely on fewer, simpler things.

Having many choices is great, until it's not. I crossed that threshold a while ago and it's not good for my brain.

So, one app per task. One notebook. One bag. Less software. Consolidate and remove. Those sorts of things.

The "simplify" part means I should choose the simple option. An example of this is that I'll be narrowing my eyes at anything that needs to be paired, synced, or charged. Opt for the other thing where feasible.

The more I lean into using Org-mode files for everything, the more isolated I'm feeling. It may be irrational, because "plain text", but having to export or otherwise translate everything when I post to my blog or other tools is becoming less fun. Org-mode Island is beautiful, but lonely.

Later: Jeremy Friesen reacts to the above with his take on the isolation of using Org-mode. Here's some follow up.

I keep printed calendars for the current year and month pinned above my desk. It's often easier to just glance up to see dates than to open a calendar on the computer/phone.

I used to use timeanddate.com and that works great, but I'm now using pcal because it's...nerdier I guess?

Here's the shell script for the yearly calendar (I just execute it within Emacs). It runs pcal with some options, then converts the postscript to PDF, then opens in it Preview.

And here's the one for only the month of January.

I like that I can include a little note in the footer (e.g. "Reduce and Simplify").

The output for the monthly PDF looks like this:

Earlier, I wrote...

Org-mode Island is beautiful, but lonely.

Jeremy Friesen reacted to my post with his own thoughtful take on the isolation of using Org-mode:

Amongst the Org-Mode Archipelago // Take on Rules

Org-Mode is my home hearth. Here I prepare my food. And sometimes I bring that food, wrapped up for transport, to a public place so that I might share. On a few occasions, I bring partially prepared ingredients and throw them in the collaboration soup; where we churn the ladel together.

I’m alone during my Org-Mode usage, but I don’t feel lonely in being here.

I quite like that, and it made me think about what I meant by "lonely". Using Org-mode pretty much requires that I also use Emacs. I love Emacs, but I love other apps, too, and often like to change what I use. With Org-mode, that's not feasible.

So, maybe "isolated" or "lonely" aren't the right words for how I'm feeling. Maybe it's "restricted" or "confined". Maybe it's not "Org-mode Island" making me feel lonely, but rather "Emacs Prison" making me feel trapped 😅.

This is a hot topic for me right now, as I've spent the past couple of days in my usual year-end frenzy of "what should I be using for notes/tasks/journals?!". Should I go all-in on paper? Should I just use Apple's default apps? Should I use best-in-class apps like DEVONthink or Tinderbox or OmniFocus?

What I've realized is exactly what Jeremy said, Org-mode is where I live and I'm comfortable there. I'm staying.

My Beyond the Infinite folder is now its own Denote silo.

A Denote "silo" is just a folder that contains a .dir-locals.el file. The .dir-locals.el file sets the denote-directory variable, causing Denote commands to look only in that folder (and subfolders) rather than the default Denote folder. It's like opening a separate "vault" in Obsidian, etc.

Since I use the Beyond the Infinite folder so differently than my main set of notes, a separate silo seems appropriate.

My .dir-locals.el file is just the basics...

;;; Directory Local Variables.

((nil . ((denote-directory . "~/Desktop/Beyond the Infinite"))))

To make things easier, I added a Hazel rule that watches the "Beyond the Infinite" folder and renames new files using Denote's conventions.

I haven't created any custom commands for switching between silos yet. The Beyond the Infinite folder is bookmarked in Emacs so it's already easy to get to.

Denote has become the place where I put nearly everything. I really like it.