I spent Fathers' Day with my dad and my daughter, so that was pretty perfect.

I spent much of the day trying a from-scratch Emacs configuration. It's going…ok. Emacs from scratch (again)

This photo of Alice (above) is from a roll of HP5 that I put through the the Hasselblad (500C/M) yesterday. The Hasselblad V series are my favorite cameras alongside the Leica M. Medium format film renders in a way that 35mm doesn't. And the Zeiss lenses are so good. I wish I used it more often. Maybe I will.

I've been fighting the urge to rebuild my Emacs configuration from scratch. Doom Emacs is powerful, complete, and offers all I might ever need, but I sometimes get twitchy around relying on it. I'd like to free myself from its wrapper macros like after! and map! so that I remember how Emacs works by default. I like the SPC leader configuration in Doom, but I worry that my muscle memory will become useless one day. And Doom is big. It makes me feel like I'm dragging things around that I'll never need or want. This is more imagined than real, but it nags me.

Sometimes I want to feel closer to the tool.

I'm about four hours into it and it's not going great. Have you any idea how many quality-of-life improvements Doom includes? It's a lot, I'll tell you that.

I thought a starter kit would be helpful, so I tried the new beta of system crafters' Crafted Emacs. I don't think it's for me. Using custom.el for everything seems weird. Maybe I'll revisit once they're through the beta period.

My next step was to swipe some of Will Schenk's configuration from his post Setting up emacs re-re-dux. Will's sensibilities seem to align pretty well with mine, so this was helpful. Also, he's using NANO Emacs, which gets me to a nice-looking and well-behaved setup without a ton of magic or unnecessary overhead.

…another three hours later…

I've pulled in the best parts of my Org-mode configuration, tweaked anything that depended upon Doom, and now I'm typing this.I haven't cursed in nearly an hour, so I must be getting closer. I still need to fix the feeling that I'm about to die by 1,000 cuts, but this is the first time I've done this and not gone crawling back to Doom within an hour or two. And I'm sorry if this seems shallow, but I think it's because NANO Emacs makes the whole thing look very nice.

Technically by using NANO Emacs as a crutch, I can't call it "from scratch" but it's the closest I've ever been to a non-Doom-mostly-hand-rolled config and I'm kind of excited about it.

I wanted to make a list of the types of information I need to record and what the requirements and attributes of each of them are. The goal was to learn and try to determine which tool or tools might actually work for me. You know, based on what I need, not just what I want to play with. But, and get this, I couldn't decide where to write it, so I didn't. My note-taking process has become unmoored and I don't know how to fix it.

I spent time with the Zed editor. It's fast and feels crisp and snappy in a way that VSCode never has. But it's primarily a programming editor so too many of its features aren't relevant to me.

Just spin up a goddammed forum and be done with it. (re: #reddit)

I'm well and truly bored with people pointing out mistakes made by things like ChatGPT.

A thing I'm trying: Forming some kind of Rudimentary Lathe

MWeb is a "Markdown writing, note taking and static blog generator" for macOS and iOS. I played with it briefly, since I'm on another of my "wean yourself from Emacs" kicks. It's nice. The site generator looks pretty good. I'd say if you're a folder-full-of-markdown-files person, MWeb is worth a look.

Whenever I decide to edit a file in something "nicer" than Emacs, I start out feeling relieved. Then, ten minutes later, I'm so annoyed that I crawl back into Emacs.

I need a reset. A re-calibration of some sort. I have been spinning my wheels for months, with little to show for it. I want a job, but haven't been putting the necessary pieces into place. I spend my days changing my process, my software, my priorities, and my plans. I'm thinking about all the wrong things. I need to find a way to stabilize all this.

Most of the time, Emacs feels like a superpower. Other times, though, it can feel like a gigantic waste of time and energy.

Normal Person: "Is there a better way to do the things I need to do?"

Me: "I should create a complex, overwrought process using every tool at my disposal just in case one day I need to do something with it."

Blot.im has been down for going on two days now. I assume this is due to Amazon's AWS issues over the past 24 hours. Still, it's a bummer. As a defensive maneuver I've moved the site back to Hugo, at least for now.

Update: Blot is back online after the "server was caught in a deathloop", so perhaps it had nothing to do with AWS. Still, I'm going to hang out here in Hugo for a bit.

Mike Hall is on a roll with his Denote setup. I'm following it all closely because I use a nearly identical set of tooling, except mine is not nearly as well thought out or complete as his. His latest adjustment is around org-gtd and Things. I've been using org-gtd for a week or so and I'm also not sure it'll stick. Mike created a nice way to generate links between Denote notes and Things that has me thinking.

Speaking of Mike Hall, He recently posted about how he's generating a searchable, static HTML version of his Denote notes so that he can look stuff up while on his phone. All I want from my Denote notes on iPhone is the ability to find and read them. I asked Mike to share his setup, which he kindly did. A few path tweaks and I was up and running in no time.

If y'all were born in the 50s or 60s you'd have done things exactly the same as we did. And if we were born in the 80s or 90s we'd be bitching about it, same as you. Just like your kids and/or grandkids will be bitching about all the stupid things you're doing that will turn out to have been mistakes.

This is how too many headlines read to me:

"Court refuses to overturn rejected ruling not banning those refusing to undo denying a double negative."

When creating a new project folder (group) in DEVONthink, I often make use of Templates. Templates are just files in a folder somewhere that get copied into the DEVONthink database. For example, I have a project "starter" Tinderbox document named "Basic Project Template.tbx". When inserting the template file into my DEVONthink project, it uses the same name as the original, which isn't helpful. DEVONthink is very scriptable, so I wrote an AppleScript to rename the selected document the same as the enclosing group/folder.

Well, I didn't exactly write it. It's more like I conjured it.

I first tried copying an existing script that seemed like it would give me a head start and set to modifying that. I didn't know how to refer to the enclosing group in AppleScript so I started to browse DEVONthink's dictionary. It occurred to me that maybe I could just ask ChatGPT for help, so I typed:

"Write me an applescript to rename an item in DEVONthink to the name of its enclosing folder"

ChatGPT wrote the following:

tell application "DEVONthink 3"
    -- Get the currently selected item
    set selectedItem to content record of viewer window 1
    
    -- Get the enclosing group (folder) of the selected item
    set enclosingGroup to parent 1 of selectedItem
    
    -- Get the name of the enclosing group
    set enclosingGroupName to name of enclosingGroup
    
    -- Get the name of the selected item
    set selectedItemName to name of selectedItem
    
    -- Generate the new name by combining the enclosing group name and the selected item name
    set newName to enclosingGroupName & " - " & selectedItemName
    
    -- Rename the selected item with the new name
    set name of selectedItem to newName
end tell

It worked great on the first try. The only change I made was to remove the "selectedItemName" from the final name. What a world.

I'm not convinced that much has improved meaningfully since we started optimizing for digital.

I woke up from my trance and bailed on my disjointed bricolage of Fastmail->Gmail->Mimestream. Cobbling various pieces together just so I can use a single mail client on my Mac seemed...shortsighted. Mimestream is nice, but not that nice, you know?

So I'm back in MailMate and/or Mu4e. Oh, and sometimes Apple Mail. But I'm thinking about switching back to notmuch from Mu4e. Now that I say it, I'm not sure this is any better :). At least I'm not relying on Gmail now, I guess.

Dammit I just lost an hour on Mastodon even though I'm supposed to be "off" social media. I have nothing to show for it, either. It's insidious!

I lost my head for a second and thought maybe I'd do the whole "Emacs from scratch" thing again. This time, I tried the new beta branch of Crafted Emacs because I like their approach on the new version. But yeah, it's beta and things broke and I'm not good enough to troubleshoot. Back to Doom for now.

There's a difference between "The simplest thing that could possibly work." and "The simplest thing that might actually work."

I've stopped using subheadings with multi-paragraph contents in these daily notes because I like scanning a list of titles as a way to find stuff. Burying them in daily notes makes it harder.

I understand why people are upset about Reddit's API changes. People are always upset about something Reddit is doing. And I feel for Apollo's developer. The whole thing sucks. I've never used Apollo. I go to the website and visit a few of my favorite subreddits every once in a while. I just don't feel any outrage about the whole thing, sorry. I am attributing this to my recent withdrawal from social media. I guess since no one has been telling me to be upset, I'm not.

Some days I fully enjoy managing email within Mu4e. Other days, I hate it. Today is the former.

I started reading the MPU forums this morning and was immediately reminded that I should never read the MPU forums. I do plenty of navel gazing around note-taking and software workflows and everything else already. I don't need more of it, thank you.

Day 2 running Sonoma on my MBP. I've not noticed any significant issues so far. Maestral crashed a couple of times at first, but seems to have settled down.

I don't get many emails these days. Nor do I send many. And yet, I spend an inordinate amount of time futzing with how I get and sent emails. I'm doing that thing again where I overthink my email process.

The only hard requirement I have with email is that it uses my own domain name. Hence, jack@baty.net. Email is still the key to many things, so allowing someone like Google to control that key is a no-go for me. My wife still uses a Comcast address, can you imagine? I get hives just thinking about it. She gets a lot more email than I do, and never gives any of this a second thought. ¯_(ツ)_/¯.

I've been using Fastmail for my personal email for years. I have no complaints or issues with the service. I pay $50/year and it comes with 30GB of storage. It's fine. I don't love Fastmail's web UI, but I nearly always use either Apple Mail or Mu4e (Emacs) for reading mail, so no biggie.

Except along came Mimestream, which for some reason I'm completely enamored with. Mimestream only works with Gmail, so I've unadvisedly configured Fastmail to forward to my Gmail address and my Gmail messages to send via Fastmail's SMTP service so they're From: jack@baty.net.

I can't figure out what it is about Mimestream that I like so much. There's no filter for "Unread". There are no smart mailboxes at all. I can't drag and drop messages into other apps or my Desktop. When copying links to emails, it uses the URL for the web version of Gmail instead of a link to the message in Mimestream. Oh, and it will (eventually) cost $50/year so I can use a mail app with a free service. WTF, dude!?

I'm never going to use only my Gmail address (remember the first requirement), but I may convert my Fastmail account to a forward-only account from the (Fastmail owned) PoBox service. That'll save me like $30 a year, but I'm not convinced it's a good idea. Point being that I'm considering all of this. This is what I mean by overthinking my email.

And so here I am, contemplating a transition from Fastmail to Gmail. It's as if I've forgotten that this whole thing started because I wanted to play with a new Email app. I was hoping that writing this down would trigger my "Use What You Have" mechanism but instead I've started pulling apart my mbsync/Mu4e config to work with Gmail, because I'm a masochist with too much time on my hands.

For the few of you who’ve been following along, you’ll have noticed that I’ve changed blogging engines several times recently, even more frequently than my usual pace.

The most recent moves happened over just a few weeks. I went from WordPress to Blot to Hugo and back to WordPress. I wrote this about moving away from WordPress only two months ago:

Mostly, I switched because I don’t enjoy using WordPress. WordPress is powerful and easy and everywhere, but the editor is unpleasant and everything just feels heavy and overwrought. I also tire of plugins nagging me to “Upgrade to Premium!” all the time. I tell myself I can live with it, but in the end I never can.

It’s no different now. I am less than two days into using WordPress and I’m already frustrated. It’s so damn janky and the editor sucks hard. For example, if I select all the text in a block and cut it, only one character is actually deleted, but the whole block ends up in the clipboard. Similarly, after selecting text, hitting the delete key does nothing. It’s maddening.

What about Hugo, then? Hugo is a great SSG. It’s fast, capable, and mature. It’s also difficult (for me) to tweak. I find its go-based templating format to be unfathomable. Yesterday, I couldn’t figure out how to make “page bundles” with relative image paths work in the RSS feed. It’s death by 1,000 cuts.

In theory, both WordPress and Hugo are the best choices for me, depending on if I’m feeling like using easy or hard mode, respectively. But neither work in the long run. I’ve written all this down so many times, but I never listen.

So, after re-reading Blot is just right, I feel like I was right. I looked at the old blot site and the way it looks appeals to me. It’s simple. It’s calm. I like it. I moved to Hugo because I was in one of my moods where I want to be in total control over everything. With Blot, the biggest thing I lose is that I can’t touch the rendered site. But, I have all of my content locally, so what’s the big deal, really?

I’ll miss built-in comment and analytics, the easy management of images, and the infinite supply of plugins. I won’t miss the janky editor, the heavy rendered pages, or plugins constantly upselling themselves.

Stand by while I re-do everything. Again.

I've had my salt water reef tank for nearly a year, so I thought I'd post an update. The gist is that it's been both easier and more difficult than expected.

It's easier because I was worried that doing water changes and parameter checks would be complex or difficult. They are neither. I do a 15% water change every week, and test for Nitrates, Nitrites, Phosphates, and Calcium every 10 days to two weeks.

It's more difficult because pest control in a salt-water tank can be a bitch! Algae is a constant thorn in my side. I just can't seem to be rid of it. The tank has suffered outbreaks of green hair algae, red slime "algae" (quoted because it's actually Cyanobacteria and not algae), and now bubble algae. I've also got a little Aiptasia that I'm keeping an eye on.

Everyone talks about a tank's "ugly" phase and now I know what they mean. I think I'm coming to the other side of it, though. Algae is often caused by too many nutrients and/or waste, causing the Phosphate and Nitrate levels to rise. Algae love Phosphates and Nitrates, so the trick is to reduce them. To do this, I've drastically reduced how much food I introduce. After conversations with some experts, it's obvious that I've been over-feeding. The other change I made was to shorten the period during which the tank lighting is at full. I'm now only running full lighting from 11:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. rather than from 10-6. I think I'm finally starting to see the algae weaken and recede.

As for fish, I hadn't added any because of Tony, the Royal Gramma. Tony was an asshole. He was constantly picking on Pierre the Cleaner Shrimp, and I love Pierre. He also flared up and fought with anything new in the tank. Tony was beautiful, but I kicked him out. Messing with Pierre was his last mistake. I gave him to the local fish store so they could re-home him.

With Tony gone and the algae on the decline, it was time to start adding things. This week, I've introduced three new corals: Palythoa Grandis^[1], Acan Red, and Green Star Polyps (GSP). I also got a little Emerald Crab. We named him Craig.

Even though it can be frustrating at times, I enjoy the tank very much. It's so much fun to just sit and watch things happening. It's like a whole world in there and it's amazing.

Today

Day 2 of my week long experiment using Obsidian for writing notes and blog posts. I still don't like it. And yet I'm spending plenty of time farting around with themes and such, so at least it feels familiar 😁.

I just noticed that my posts' images aren't showing in the RSS feeds because I'm using Hugo's page bundles which I guess generate relative links. My old theme handled this properly, but PaperMod doesn't. Also, cover images aren't included in the feed. I swear I'm going to end up back in WordPress if this keeps up.

Today

We need fewer shows like "Succession" and more shows like "Painting with John".

I decided to dip into the socials today because I wanted to check on the Vision Pro thing and hooboy I hate everybody already.

Obsidian Again?

I don't like Obsidian, and yet here I am typing this post using it with a new vault containing the entire Hugo tree.

Why? I'm not entirely sure. I've been having this feeling lately of being "trapped" in Emacs and Org-mode. I mean, Org is useless outside of Emacs, and all of my notes are in Org-mode format. Org files are plain text, too, but they're pretty ugly and noisy when viewed in any other editor. I don't know, it's been making me twitchy, so I fired up a new Obsidian vault. Markdown is everywhere.

After moving my blog back to Hugo recently, and dusting off my ox-hugo config, I've been writing blog posts using Org, too. It's so cool to have one big Org outline and kick off properly-formatted Markdown files from each heading. Except when something weird happens. Then I start wondering why I'm writing in one plain text format just so I can immediately convert into a different plain text format. Seems kind of...unnecessary.

There's no denying that Obsidian can do nearly anything. Plugins are plentiful and easy to use. Beats the hell out of adding package configuration and then copying and pasting 30 lines of Lisp just to get something to behave properly. I had the Templater plugin generating front matter for Hugo posts in about 10 minutes. Compare that with the hours and hours I spent trying to get YASnippet to do basically the same thing in Emacs. And heaven forbid I need to tweak it.

So here I am, dipping my toes back into the Obsidan waters. Maybe it'll stick this time. I'm going to run with it for a week and see if I can find a rhythm that doesn't suck. I have two vaults. One is for PKM-type stuff. And the second is for Hugo. Wish me luck. I already miss Emacs. Maybe I'll end up back in Emacs and just change my default Denote filetype to Markdown instead.

I noticed today that my CSP (Content-Security-Policy) Caddy's baty.net virtual host was not working. Whoops. I think I've fixed it, but if you spot any weird loading issues let me know. Here's the relevant section from my Caddyfile:

header * {
    Content-Security-Policy "default-src 'self'; font-src 'self' https://fonts.gstatic.com/; style-src 'self' https://fonts.googleapis.com/;
script-src 'self' https://plausible.io; connect-src 'self'"
    Cross-Origin-Embedder-Policy "require-corp"
    Cross-Origin-Opener-Policy "same-origin-allow-popups"
    Cross-Origin-Resource-Policy "same-origin"
    Permissions-Policy "accelerometer=(self), autoplay=(self), camera=(self), cross-origin-isolated=(self), display-capture=(self), encrypted-media=(self), fullscreen=(self), geolocation=(self), gyroscope=(self), keyboard-map=(self), magnetometer=(self), microphone=(self), midi=(self), payment=(self), picture-in-picture=(self), publickey-credentials-get=(self), screen-wake-lock=(self), sync-xhr=(self), usb=(self), xr-spatial-tracking=(self)"
    Server "baty.net"
    Strict-Transport-Security max-age=31536000;
    X-Content-Type-Options nosniff
    X-Frame-Options DENY
    X-XSS-Protection "0"
}

FWIW, I'm back to an "A" rating at securityheaders.com.

Today

Spending my days far away from the incessant chattering of social media has been a welcome step in the right direction. I miss many of the people there, but I am convinced that the gains made around my mental well-being has made it worth the losses.

If Hugo theme developers would standardize the way featured images work, life would be easier for me. Or at least changing themes would be easier.

Yesterday I decided to move my PKM into TheBrain because TheBrain does a good job of letting me see connections and related thoughts. This morning, I gave up on that and went back to Emacs because I'm already sick of having to find the "right" place to put everything. It's all so familiar. I wonder what tomorrow will bring.

No more video games

It's time to give up on playing video games. It's not that I waste time playing games, it's that I waste time trying (and failing) to enjoy playing games. Everyone loves games, so I figure I should too. But I don't.

I buy every new gaming system that looks fun. Then I read all the reviews on Metacritic and listen to friends rave about the latest Zelda or whatever. Well then, I think, if it's that good then I should play it! I buy the game, play it for an hour, become frustrated or bored, and never look at it again. This happens every time.

Yesterday, I received a physical copy of "Disco Elysium - The Final Cut" for the Switch, based on many reviews and a recommendation. I played it for less than 20 minutes before becoming bored and knowing I'd never finish it.

I feel like I'm missing out on something great, but at some point I have to admit to myself that I'm just not that into video games and that I should stop trying so hard.