So I've been thinking about what to do with baty.net. After firing up my old-school looking WordPress blog at rudimentarylathe.org, I kind of want to move away from static blogging for a while. But I don't want to migrate the content here at baty.net.

What I think I'd like is to use baty.net as a launchpad and storage bin for everything. The home page becomes a set of links to everything else. But also, since it would be completely static and not rendered by Hugo or anything, I could just toss anything here and link to it however I like. That seems fun, right?

As a first step, I've changed the PaperMod theme to "Profile" mode, so the home page only shows my avatar and a few links. Later, I'll disconnect it from Hugo and build my own home page. I'll leave all the rendered archives where they are.

This is the plan anyway. ¯_(ツ)_/¯. It's possible the novelty of using WordPress will wear thin before anything drastic happens and I'll just write a big ol' "Never Mind" post and be done with it.

Tornadoes blew through nearby and took our power with them for a couple of days. I keep my film in a small fridge in my office, so when the ice in the freezer section melted, it soaked my large format film boxes. While disappointing, most of the film had been expired for years. Some of it was E6, and I have no chemicals to process that anyway.

Most of the boxes were already opened, so even though the remaining sheets were still in the interior plastic bags, I decided that it wasn’t worth the trouble of testing to see if the film was still usable. So I threw it all away.

Instead of feeling bad about not having that film, I was surprised to find myself feeling relieved. I could finally stop thinking about if and how I might shoot it. Was it even still good?

So now I’m looking sideways at my bags of oddball and expired 35mm film and wondering how I’d feel about getting rid of those, too. I have been going through the expired color rolls, and it’s been interesting, but color film doesn’t offer me much over nice digital files. I can’t make color prints in my darkroom, which is a big part of why I shoot film in the first place.

But the oddest thing that’s happened is that now I’m looking at my books, records, movies, cameras, RAW files, saved articles…everything. How much do I actually need? How would it feel to only have the stuff I actively use/love. You know, stuff that “sparks joy”.

I don’t want to do anything rash, but I kind of want to do something rash.

DSri Seah's (Formerly David Seah) Emergent Task Planner (ETP) is a paper-based planning tool that I used from 2012 through 2018. Here's an example from 10 years ago today:

Lately I've been using a yellow legal pad on my desk instead of my usual A5 notebook. I like having the extra room, but there's no real structure built in, so I also use the little Hobonichi Techo for listing a few important tasks for the day.

While organizing some files on my laptop this weekend, I ran into a folder full of scanned ETP pages and was reminded how effective they can be at time blocking, planning, and miscellaneous record keeping. I've been feeling a bit overwhelmed when staring at the computer, so I'm going to try the ETPs for daily planning again.

I used to use pre-printed ETP pads but I see they're not currently available, however there's a downloadable PDF on DSri's Website.

If you're a fan of analog planning tools, I very much recommend you give the Emergent Task Planner a try.

Denote and Org-roam are both great Emacs packages for taking notes. I've used each of them extensively and have waffled between them regularly. I started wondering if it makes sense to use both. It does!.

Denote's claim to fame is simplicity and structured file naming. Org-roam is great for daily notes, heading-level linking, and the cool visual graph.

I've sometimes felt (probably irrationally) icky about using Org-roam because of its dependency on external sqlite libraries. Now, with Emacs 29+, sqlite is built in, so I feel better about it.

What I wanted was Org-roam's features with Denote's naming conventions, so I installed both packages. The trick to making it seamless was to adjust the default Org-roam template so that it creates files with the proper names. Here's how I've done that.

(setq org-roam-capture-templates
        '(("d" "default" plain "%?"
           :target
           (file+head "%<%Y%m%dT%H%M%S>--${slug}.org" ":PROPERTIES:\n:ID:          %<%Y%m%dT%H%M%S>\n:END:\n#+title:      ${title}\n#+date:       [%<%Y-%m-%d %a %H:%S>]\n#+filetags: \n#+identifier: %<%Y%m%dT%H%M%S>\n\n")
           :immediate-finish t
           :unnarrowed t)))

I had been using GUIDs for the ID: property but here I've switched to IDs based on datestamps so they match the "identifier". I'm not sure this is a great idea. You may also notice that I'm not bothering with tagging here. I don't always use tags, anyway, so I don't feel the need to complicate the capture process. Besides, when I do want to add tags I can use denote-keywords-add and Denote adds to the filetags property and updates the filename automatically. This is one of the nice things about having both packages available.

If I want to rename/tag a bunch of files at once, I can use the denote-dired-* commands. Any time the database gets out of whack when doing this, I just run org-roam-db-sync and we're back in action.

One other bonus is that all of my original Denote links (e.g. denote:ABC123) still work so I haven't bothered converting everything to use Org's id: style links. In order to include my Denote files in Org-roam's database, I did need to add an ID: property to the top of each of them. Fortunately, I use the ID property for org-download/org-attach so most of them already had IDs.

Using both Denote and Org-roam seems to be working fine. Am I missing anything that might cause issues later?

Sometimes I just need to change things up in order to renew my interest. This blog has been languishing lately, so I decided to change themes again to see if that helped. Rather than deal with implementing a completely new theme, I instead rolled back to hugo-PaperMod.

There is a bit of CSS work to do, and I'm missing a couple of nice shortcodes from Congo, but overall it's a pleasant change.

I sold my previous Q, a Q2 Monochrom, in spring of 2022. I was all in with the M10-R at the time, and I didn't feel the need for another small-ish digital camera, so the Q2M was sold.

I've been shooting digital with a Leica SL2 since early this year. It's a really nice camera. I had intended to make portraits of my extended family but have not done any of that yet. What I've been doing instead is taking random snapshots wherever I happen to be. The SL2 isn't great for lugging around making snapshots. It's big and heavy and not ideal for casual out-and-about shooting. I would often take my original Fuji X100 instead. The X100 is a fine camera, but is showing its age. I set out to replace it with a new X100V but the internet has gone bonkers over that camera and they are never in stock.

The thing that finally put me off the SL2 wasn't the camera itself, it was that I really missed the APO-Summicron-SL 35mm lens. I wanted another one. And maybe the 75mm while I was at it. The Sigma lenses are very good, but still feel like a compromise. Looking at images I'd made with the APO Summicrons had me wanting another so I started shopping for used copies and realized that for the price of a used APO 35 I could almost pay for a Q2. So that's what I did. Do you see how, in the end, I saved money? 😆

I bought a used (made in 2022) Q2 from a seller on fredmiranda.com and it should arrive on Friday.

Irreal: reacting to someone questioning Emacs keybindings:

The question is an honest one. He doesn’t like the current bindings and wants something he feels would be more coherent. But here’s the thing: the question doesn’t make any sense.

I can make any changes I want; you can make any changes you want; and OutOfCharm can make any changes he wants. If you don’t like a particular (or every) binding, it’s trivial to change it.

Irreal, Red Meat Friday: Better Emacs Keybindings

This is a common response in discussions around keybindings. "Just change them to whatever you want!" They often follow that up with "I use the vanilla bindings" which doesn't help their argument.

First, while the actual technical requirement for changing bindings is indeed trivial, choosing which method to use and where to use it is not. A newcomer reading the docs and various blog posts about changing bindings will come away exhausted and more confused than before. It takes effort to figure that out. It's after all that that it becomes trivial. Or it would be, but now that I've figured out how to do it, you're asking me to decide what every damn binding should be. It's not that I am forced to change all of them, but once it starts, I feel like I have to. I don't need that kind of pressure. Should I use Evil? Maybe general.el? Maybe I should make SPC my leader key?

No. I'm not doing that. I want someone with common sense, good taste, and modern sensibilities to decide on a set of keybindings for me. And no, the vanilla ones aren't it. I want it to be like when I started using Doom or Spacemacs or whatever and the bindings made sense in short order. I didn't want to spend my days thinking about what every binding should be. If one or two of them bother me, then I'll change them. Otherwise, I'll just carry on living my life.

The reason I had a negative reaction to the "Just change them yourself, it's trivial!" response is that I spent a good part of last weekend revamping my vanilla config's bindings. It was not fun and it was definitely not trivial. I'd have preferred something out of the box that didn't hurt my brains and my hands.

In case you're wonderng, I ended up with Evil mode, general.el, SPC as leader, and a mishmash of self-inflicted wounds that I now have to maintain myself forever. ¯_(ツ)_/¯.

I don't know if you noticed, but I've been posting my Daily Notes over on daily.baty.net again for some reason. I tell myself the reason is that I don't like how this blog feels/looks when the entire site becomes not much more than a list of dates.

Scanning the Archives should be useful. Currently, it's not. And search suffers, too. I've been around this block so many times I've worn a path.

If I'm being honest, I think the real reason is that I missed using Tinderbox and I missed the way that daily.baty.net works.

I know that some people who read this blog have told me they prefer that I keep everything here rather than them being forced to chase me all over the internet. I'm sorry for the inconvenience.

If you're interested, the daily post summary RSS feed is https://daily.baty.net/index.xml and the feed for each individual post is https://daily.baty.net/allposts.xml.

(But keep this site's feed handy because who knows what'll happen)

I want to be nice but I don't always feel like I'm nice.

My daughter and I must have watched "The Little Mermaid" 1,000 times while she was young. Today, we went to see the new live-action version at the theater. She was actually giddy at times. Just before the part where Ariel is on the rock and sings "Part of your world!" while the waves kick up beind her, Jess was tapping my arm saying, "It's happening, it's happening!" and bouncing in her seat and clapping her hands together, grinning. She's 34. It was wonderful.

I tried, Obsidian, I really did. But I just can't get into you.

For the month of July, I was determined to try again. I went all-in with Obsidian for daily notes, project notes, tasks, journaling, all of it. After two days I knew that it wasn't going to work for journaling or tasks. Then after a couple more days I knew it wouldn't work for project notes. I was left with my "pkm" notes and daily notes.

Obsidian for PKM or a Zettelkasten might make sense^[1]. It's got all the linking, the graph, and the tooling for it.

But it's still Obsidian, and I just don't like it. I don't like how it looks (I've tried like 30 themes). I don't like the way I get sucked into using plugins for everything, whether I need them or not. Most of all, I don't like how Obsidian feels. The word that comes to mind is "Janky". It's much better than it used to be, but it's still off somehow. I'm not blaming Electron, but that's probably part of it.

Plus, this bugs me more than it should every time I see it:

If I'm going to depend on a tool and live in it, it's gotta feel right. It needs to resonate. Obsidian doesn't.

I'll revisit again in a year or so, but for now, I'm back in Emacs.

If I reach for Keyboard Maestro I've already lost.

90% of "Street" photography is absolute crap. Walking around NYC snapping random photos of other people walking around NYC isn't enough. But that other 10% is completely wonderful.

Oh joy, we're at that phase where everyone is either posting about Threads or complaining that everyone is posting about Threads. Oh me? I'm above it all, can't you tell? What I know so far is that after 20 minutes on Threads I already like it more than Bluesky. Probably just the novelty of the vibe, if there is one.

Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their cage.

-- Lewis Hyde

I'm forcing myself to use Obsidian for the entire month of July. It's fine. We just don't get along for some reason. I can't help but think that it's the right answer, though.

I've stopped posting to the top area of the blog during the day and am back to creating one post per day and writing everything there. I don't know where it will land, but I didn't like the work of moving everything every morning. Seemed like unnecessary faffing. Instead, maybe I'll embed something from Flickr or Glass. That way I can simply replace the embed and not worry about managing image files, etc.

The Realforce R2 keyboard is very nice, but not using the HHKB is driving me nuts. I'm so used to the HHKB's weird layout that a "normal" layout feels incredibly clumsy. I'm sure I'll get used to it, but do I even want to?

My Hugo workflow defaults to using "bundles" and therefore is optimized for including images and yet I only use images in a small percentage of posts. I think I'll change it back to

I hate Discord, too. For anything other than gaming or small group chats, it's useless.

I've got HHKB pinky again so I'm switching to the Realforce keyboard for a while, even though the Escape and Delete keys are a mile away now.

What of my wiki?

There are nearly 3,500 entries in my wiki. That's a lot of my life's information, stagnating, and it worries me. Not because there's a risk of losing it, but because it feels like I wasted a lot of time building it and now it just sits there, which is not what a wiki is supposed to do.

For a few years, the wiki was where I wrote the kinds of daily posts that I'm now writing here. Also, I'm now keeping my notes in Org or Markdown files using Denote in Emacs. The wiki is languishing.

Except here's what I've noticed. When I discover something I want to remember, I still reach for the wiki first. Related to that, when I want to look something up that I am sure I'd written down, more often than not I find it on the wiki, and quickly. For some reason, the stuff I put into Denote just sort of disappears. Sure, I can grep/find/ripgrep/ag/BBEdit the dickens out of the plain text files, but I find it to be less useful and more difficult.

So yeah, this is unsettling.

It bugs me when someone in a movie plants a bomb or listening device and there's always a light on it somewhere that blinks. I was watching an episode of "The Blacklist" and when they inserted a tracker in Reddington's neck it was blinking. Blinking! Do they really believe that we viewers are so stupid that we need to be reminded that "Hey! It's a device!"? Apparently so. Maybe there's some real-world reason that I'm not aware of, but I can't think of what that might be.

I hate to admit it, but Obsidian makes a lot of things really easy that would take me much longer in Emacs.

I'm having feelings about my notes being full of denote:NNNN-style links. It worries me.

If you were in a position to get your kid into Harvard, you would do it. I get a kick out of people who claim otherwise.

Hey anyone want a Bluesky invite it's a new site where everyone is just trying so very hard to out-clever each other while smugly poking fun of other social networks.

Lots of smoke still lingering from the fires in Canada.

I spent a good chunk of this morning setting up the new Mac Mini (2014) as a Plex server. Everything seems to work, but it is pretty slow.

DHH descends

The original American promise that this is a country where you can make it regardless of where you came from has always been challenged in practice, but it's a beautiful ideal, and it'll shine just a little brighter now that the Supreme Court has dismantled one of the few remaining systemic impediments to its realization.

David Heinemeier Hansson, The law of the land

I don't know if that's the worst paragraph in DHH's latest piece, but it's one of them. Also maybe the one where he writes, "Like I can imagine Americans coming out of the 1950s Red Scare must have felt." when talking about the "ideological crusade" around diversity. What a shit-heel.

I have always had questions around Affirmative Action (mostly out of ignorance), but I read his post with no small amount of anguish as (another!) of my tech heroes revealed themselves to be selfish, ignorant, racist, and wildly wrong about so many things. His increasingly disgusting political/social views have finally tainted my usual alignment with his technical opinions to such an extent that I'm no longer comfortable giving him any of my attention at all.

It's hard to know what is a defect, and what is merely a surprise. The cult of usability has enshrined the belief that anything a novice doesn't expect is a defect.

Mark Bernstein, Neovictorian Computing

I spend my days sharpening my knives but never actually cut anything with them.

People are claiming it would be stupid and foolish to meet with Meta about their Fediverse plans and sign an NDA. I dunno. I might rather know something and not be able to share it than not know the thing in the first place. Besides, it's almost always better to talk with someone, even your enemy, than not.

David Foster Wallace, on tourism:

To be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a pure late-date American: alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way you can never admit. It is to spoil, by way of sheer ontology, the very unspoiledness you are there to experience. It is to impose yourself on places that in all noneconomic ways would be better, realer, without you. It is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful: As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing.

DFW, Consider the Lobster

I'm increasingly weary of complexity in any form. I can't decide where Emacs lands on the complexity scale.

I think I've figured out why I never seem to stop using Emacs. It's because Emacs resonates with me in a way that no other tool has.

Can we stop saying, "This is The Way" now? If not, in retaliation I'm bringing back Mork's "Nanu Nanu".

Thanks to a post from Brett Terpstra, I've gone and ordered a 2014 Mac Mini (16GB/1TB) for $100 cleaned, tested, bootable, and shipped from Orchard Resales. The intent is to perhaps replace my overwrought Synology setup. Or maybe I'll just set it up separately for other "stuff".