Am I overthinking it? Of course I’m overthinking it. Let’s face it, I enjoy trying different ways of publishing and tinkering with the tools for doing so. Once in a while, I spread myself a little too thin and consider drastic consolidation. You know, the dream of One True Blog™. In an effort to figure this out, I thought I’d write down the types of content I post most frequently, and where that content might belong. ...

This has been a tumultuous week for me, photography-wise. Early in the week, I made this silver gelatin darkroom print of a 35mm frame of HP5 film. On my walk. Ada, MI Silver Gelatin print (Leica MP, HP5) It’s a photo of some weeds I took while out walking. That’s it. But I made it using my favorite camera and it’s a “real” chemical photograph on actual paper. I like it very much. ...

I like the way prints look with a small black border around the image, like this: Darkroom print hanging to dry I know some people file their negative holders but that means no cropping and there’s no way I’m precise enough with framing to not crop about 90% of my images at least a little. What I did instead is cut a piece of poster board ever so slightly smaller than my usual print size. I place this over the image after making the initial exposure and do one more quick 5-second exposure for the border. ...

I took the MP on my walk and was determined to shoot an entire roll. It was overcast, dreary, and the path I walk is pretty boring, but I did my best and made it through the roll. Path More weeds on my walk Self-portrait in mirror This roll was shot at 800 and developed in HC-110 (Dilution B) for 7.5 minutes.

The first roll of 2023. Shot in the Leica MP with the 35mm Summilux. Also, the first roll scanned using the new Epson V850. HopCat interior My desk Accidental flash

If it behooves you, instead of thinking any more about Twitter—hit us with some PDFs, some incomprehensible sociology, a fact about your town, some poetry no one cares about, political theory that will never land, obscure social history, climate links, math things, some tech so obscure 20 people use it. We want your inner noise. Just push the gas on your own ephemeralism and launch us into the future. Paul Ford, Mastodon ...

In the beginning, there were blogs, and they were the original social web. We built community. We found our people. We wrote personally. We wrote frequently. We self-policed, and we linked to each other so that newbies could discover new and good blogs. I want to go back there. Monique Judge, Bring back personal blogging, The Verge Me too! I never left, really, but I would love to read more personal blogs again. Lots more.

Epson V750 film scanner on my desk I tried, I really did. The Wise Old Internet guided me into changing my film scanning process from a dedicated flatbed scanner to using a mirrorless digital camera setup. I did everything right. I bought good equipment and the right software. I hated it. To scan using my flatbed, I load the negatives, hit “Prescan”, confirm that things look ok and press “Scan”. I go do something else for a while and come back to a folder full of JPGs. I edit the files by adjusting contrast and cropping as needed in Lightroom or whatever and I’m done. ...

I collect a lot of “stuff” on my computer. I’m one of those lazy people who just drop most of it onto my Desktop and assume I’ll figure out what to do with it later. The problem is, I rarely actually figure out what to do with most of it. Late last year I created a folder on my Mac’s desktop named “Beyond the Infinite” 1. Anything that ends up on my desktop that isn’t important enough to file away but is something that I’d still like to keep, “just in case,” gets tossed into Beyond the Infinite. ...

AI continues to enthrall everyone. Here’s DHH on AI creativity vs humans: Why shouldn’t the same be true of AI generated novels, plays, or movies? What realm of creative production does not benefit from the out-of-the-norm inferences that computers have already proven they can make within the bounds of chess and go to great effect? Is what we call human creativity all that different from a large language model anyway? A distillation of observations, inputs, mimetic tendencies, and a wetware random generator? ...

There are some great tools for bringing web content into Markdown files, but few that offer the same utility for Org-mode (Orgdown) files. For example, I use Markdownload extension all the time. It works great with nearly every site I use it on, but instead of Markdown, I’d prefer having Org syntax, so I’ve worked around it by creating a function1 which converts the current region from Markdown to Org. (defun jab/md-to-org-region (start end) "Convert region from markdown to org, replacing selection" (interactive "r") (shell-command-on-region start end "pandoc -f markdown -t org" t t)) I copy the Markdown from the Markdownload window, paste it into an Org buffer, and run the function. It’s not perfect, but until someone creates an “Orgdownload” extension, it’ll do. (Pretty please, will someone create an Orgdownload extension?) ...

I’m a latecomer to AI, but I just had my first real AI revelation moment while using OpenAI’s ChatGPT. I asked it an honest question that I had and got a complete, sensible, and correct answer. It’s like if Google had a brain, or if I asked an assistant to look something up for me and report back. Here’s part of the thread: Figure 1: Me, chatting with a computer about Emacs ...

I’ve recently switched from using Org-roam to using Denote for my notes. Org-roam is powerful and cool, but I prefer the more straightforward approach of Denote. I keep all my notes in Denote, including notes about current projects. For example, we’re planning to remodel our kitchen. This is a project and so I have a Denote file named “20221130T130143–kitchen-remodel-2023__house_project.org”. In this file, I keep a list of TODOs. In order to see these TODOs in my Org Agenda, I need to add the file to org-agenda-files. This can be done a few ways, but all are manual. I am forgetful, so I wanted a more automated way to keep my org-agenda-files up to date with Denote projects. ...

I’m overwhelmed by social media right now. Visiting Twitter just makes me anxious because it’s become an even bigger shit-show and all anyone can talk about is how much of a shit-show it is. And Mastodon is almost worse, since the only topics there right now seem to be the Twitter shit-show (but everyone calls it “birdsite” for whatever stupid reason) or how Mastodon is or isn’t confusing or is or isn’t racist or else over-explaining what the “fediverse” means to the future of the internet. ...

An update to my process for printing and reading long-form web articles

A fresh new theme always feels good

It seems I’ll never be able to decide where to publish my “Daily Notes” blog entries. I waffle between here on baty.net, the wiki, or my old blog dedicated to daily posts, daily.baty.net. I’m once again leaning toward writing them on the wiki, since they can be back/linked to/from my other notes about everything. It’s also super simple to create posts there. And, for some reason they don’t seem to disappear down-river like they do on normal blogs like this one. ...

I’ve been testing the hot new Tana app for the past week, and I’m exhausted. First, I don’t need a Zettelkasten. If you’re being honest, you probably don’t either. And yet, we spend hours or days learning the “proper” way to build one. Then we set up our new system, using paper or digital or both, roll up our sleeves, and waste time putting stuff into it. The worst part isn’t the putting of stuff into my PKM (Personal Knowledge Management) system. The worst part is all of the tinkering around where to put stuff and how to classify/tag/organize it. ...

In mastodon technology Shutdown, Ash Furrow writes: I have sad news that I have decided to shut down the mastodon.technology instance. In accordance with the Mastodon Server Covenant, the server will be shut down no earlier than December 1, 2022. Ash Furrow I’ve been on the Mastodon.technology instance for nearly 5 years. It’s been great, but given the coming shutdown I needed to find a new instance. I almost gave up on the whole Fediverse. After all, I’ve been on Twitter for nearly 20 years already. Never had to move or change anything. That’s of course no guarantee, but you know. Plus, it’s Twitter. ...

The more notes I put into Org-roam, the more I want to put there. My Org-roam directory has always been in ~/org/roam, meaning that my database was limited to files I put in that directory. The rest of my org files have been in ~/org, so they’re out of “reach” of Org-roam. Sometimes, though, I wanted link from, say, my Daybook.org file to one of my Org-roam files, thereby making that daybook entry part of my org-roam database. ...