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.

Today

I'm still working through what goes into daily notes vs separate blog posts. My old rule was that anything longer than a short paragraph got its own post. Now, though, I think I prefer keeping things in the daily posts unless they need their own post. All that's left is to define what I mean by "need".

Various & Sundry

Controversial opinion: Not everything needs to be in Markdown.

I'm looking forward to when AI becomes boring and we spend our time using it for stuff rather than talking about it incessantly.

Mimestream early impressions

I am quite enjoying Mimestream for managing email. It's fast, looks nice, and feels good to use. However, there is one thing I miss and one thing that irritates me.

The thing I miss is smart mailboxes. I want, at minimum, a smart mailbox for "Unread". Smart mailboxes are on the roadmap, at least.

The thing that irritates me is that when I process (Archive/Delete) a message, the message immediately below is then selected. I process my email from oldest to newest, so, from the bottom up. There's no option to sort messages showing oldest first. I scroll down and start reading unread messages and when I hit Delete, the next older message is selected. I've already dealt with that one, so I'd prefer if the next newer message was selected. I either need to start at the top (newest), which I don't want, or I have to click/move up a message every time. Drives me nuts.

Otherwise, I like Mimestream enough that I think I'll pay for a year during the discount offer.

Memorial Day with family with the Leica MP, 50mm Summilux, and a roll of HP5.

Various and Sundry

You may have noticed that these daily journal posts have been expanding to include what would normally be separate blog posts. This has been an organic process, and continues to evolve. Part of me prefers this one-a-day writing process. It's easy to manage and lets me combine short and long-form content as well as images, quotes, etc. This can all be in a day's journal. On the other hand, I no longer have an easily-parsable list of posts. It makes the Archives less useful. At least the PaperMod theme automatically generates links to each heading.

I switched to Arq backup a couple weeks ago because it feels like I have more control of things using Arq. However, after a few days of successful backups, I'm no longer able to either back up to Arq's cloud, nor can I see the current backups. Support is working on it. I'm able to back up to a Backblaze B2 location, but not to Arq's cloud. See what I get for "improving" my process?

Mimestream

In another example of solving a problem I don't have, I'm testing the Mimestream email client for Gmail. I'm a sucker for new ways to use email, and also for rave reviews, so I've made a few changes to my email setup in order to test Mimestream.

The "problem" for me is that Mimestream is currently only a wrapper for the Gmail API. It doesn't do IMAP, so in order to test it, I have to use my Gmail account. Since I don't get email to that account, I am forwarding my Fastmail email to Gmail. I'm using Fastmail's SMTP service to send from Gmail so that my From: address remains jack@baty.net.

So far, I like Mimestream. It's got that clean, fast, fully macOS feel that I love. I don't receive enough email to merit spending an extra $50/year on a subscription, but that doesn't mean I won't. I like nice things, and Mimestream is a nice thing.

PaperMod-ing

Every time I try a new theme, I promise myself that I won't tinker with it. That promise lasted just over one day this time. I haven't done anything drastic, but here's the list so far:

• Changed font to Alegreya Sans. Not sure how I feel about it yet.
• Added a "Reply by Email" button/link to the bottom of each post
• Tweaked blockquote element CSS. It needs more, I think.
• Forced full posts into the RSS feed. I'll never understand why Hugo doesn't come with this option built-in.
• Added "Categories" and "Uses" menu items. Do I even need categories?

I love Blot. It's just right.

But you know how sometimes you just want everything on your own server where you can touch it? Where you have access to the server redirects and access logs and everything? That's what happened to me this weekend, so I'm once again publishing using Hugo and hosting on my DigitalOcean VPS with Caddy.

Another factor driving the switch was wanting to use ox-hugo for writing posts. I know I've said that using Org-mode to write and then convert to Markdown for Hugo can feel like too many moving parts, but I had a nice setup going before tossing it for other platforms. It's really easy to create new posts as new headings in my blog.org file.

Plus, I was bored this morning and had a few hours to kill, so here we are. I'm sure there will be a flurry of unwanted RSS spam due to the new redirect. Sorry about that.

I'm using a new theme, too. I've gone with the PaperMod theme as an alternative to the Congo theme I'd been using. I was already using PaperMod on my micro.blog, so it seemed like a natural fit. It certainly wasn't because I stole the idea from Mike Hall's blog^[1]. I like it so far.

(I had originally posted this on Sunday's daily notes but it's kind of grown, so I split it into a separate post. Apologies if you've already read it there.)

Oh goody, another "Why I'm leaving social media post"! Feel free to skip this one. We've all read many like it.

For a week or so I’ve been back to posting on Micro.blog and syndicating to Bluesky and Mastodon. It has reminded me that although I enjoy sharing things on social media, doing so requires that I spend time on social media, and that no longer gives me much joy. In fact, it's often the opposite. I'm just so tired of being told who I'm supposed to like and what's OK to enjoy. Or worse, what or whom I simply must be angry about this very minute. There's a lot to be troubled by and angry about in the world, but spending my time listening to people pointing it out to me and yelling “Look how bad this is, yo!”, but not actually doing anything about it, is not something I'm interested in. No amount of feed curation seems to help.

Another component is that I find myself reaching for social media the second I'm not doing anything else. Any pause in "real life" and I'm back to doom scrolling or looking for something to entertain me. This seems unhealthy, so I hope to tame it by forcing myself to ignore social media entirely.

I don't know if it's possible for me to just quietly write things here on the blog and never share them where they might actually be read, but I'm in the mood to pull things back and just live quietly by myself for a while. I reserve the right to change my mind at any time.

I expanded the paragraph I'd written earlier about social media in a separate post: Withdrawing from social media

Instead of posting directly to social media, what about posting a short summary and a link on Micro.blog each day? That might feel too much like advertising, but should reduce the need to monitor replies quite so frequently, but still allow me to more likely share things. Something to think about.

Creative tools based on generative AI are amazing and feel like technological miracles. They allow people who may not have an intrinsic ability to create things using existing tools to express their creativity in all sorts of new ways. This opens up so many doors. On the other hand, I find that when scrolling through feeds, I skip over images that look (too) amazing because they're "probably just from Midjourney". And now, after playing with the Generative Fill features in the new Photoshop, I am impressed but also melancholy. Nothing is real anymore. The urge to tamper with an image and the ease with which it can be done is going to mean that fewer and fewer images will remain authentic. It doesn't matter how cool a photo is, if it's faked, it's fake and therefore meaningless to me.

Some say that only providing an email link for comments on a blog will prevent readers from benefiting from any conversations that might be had on a topic. I agree with this, but it doesn't offset the negative effects caused by the performative nature of public comments. So, send me an email. If I feel like others are missing something valuable from our conversation, I'll update the post with a summary. How's that?

I've started unsubscribing from feeds/people who offer little other than barely-informed hot takes, snarky commentary, or "That's BAD!" finger-pointing.

Om Malik on the Leica Q3:

No matter how you look at it, the Leica Q3 design team made a classy product feel cheap and inelegant.

Well, that seems like quite an exaggeration, no?

Some folks are not going to like that Leica introduced a flippy screen on the new Q3, and Om is one of them. I haven't handled the Q3 yet (has Om?), but I'll reserve judgement. There's no arguing that a tiltable screen isn't handy, but it's fair to argue whether one is necessary. Leica apparently thinks it is, as does every other manufacturer.

Late in the article, Om writes:

I am not a Leica Q guy. I have never liked the Q range of cameras...

Well then, thanks for your take I guess. I'm a big fan of Om and his work, but this all seems a bit reactionary. All this talk has me really missing my Q2, though.

The other day I wrote this:

Knowledge should reside in the notes, not in the software used to manage the notes.

I'm feeling like software has been hindering me more than helping me. I spend too much of my time building overly complex workflows in Emacs or Tinderbox or Obsidian or whatever. These crazy workflows often introduce dependencies and push the actual knowledge up into the process/software. This seems like a bad idea.

As a respite from all the complexity, I've been putting notes and logs into Bike Outliner. I tested Bike when it launched last year, but I was so deep in Emacs-for-everything mode that I quickly dismissed it. Too quickly I think.

I've always preferred writing in an outliner, and Bike is just so damn nice to work in. And it's ridiculously simple. This simplicity might normally turn me off, but for the moment it is keeping me focused on the notes and not the tooling. I mean, there's nothing much I can do in Bike other than write notes. This is a feature.

Sure, complex software can be used simply. Just ignore all those unnecessary features, right? Maybe, but there's always the background hum of "what if I just...", and I often underestimate how much that noise undermines the work.

I recently found my original Fujifilm X100 in a box in our storage unit. I have such fond memories of the camera, so I knew I would enjoy using it, even today.

I was surprised to learn that I didn't enjoy it as much as I thought I would. It still feels great to carry, but it's not quite as nice to actually use as I expected.

It's kind of slow. Slow to power on. Slow to focus. Slow to navigate. This shouldn't bother me, as I often use old, manual-focus cameras and I'm used to working slowly. I guess the difference is that if I'm going ask the camera to do things, it should be faster than I am. The X100 isn't. It's not unusable, but it takes a bit of the joy out of using the camera.

I can live with slowness, but what I'm finding the most troublesome is the tiny, awkward controls on the rear of the camera. Specifically, the Menu/OK button. I cannot seem to press that button without accidentally pressing one of the surrounding buttons first. It's maddening.

What about image quality? It's fine, I guess. Honestly, I prefer the look of the files from my little Ricoh GRIII. Coming from the 50MP of my SL2 makes the 12MP X100 files feel a little limited. I'll keep tinkering in Lightroom to find the right mix of adjustments, which will probably help.

I do like the black and white conversions I'm getting, though. I don't know what it is, exactly, but they have a certain grit to them that I like.

Will I use the X100 every day? Probably not. It's a fun, cute, small, rangefinder-style camera with an optical viewfinder, so I'm sure I'll bring it out occasionally.

I'm mostly stuck at home this week while our kitchen is being remodeled, but I did take a few snaps with the Fuji. Here are some samples.

I've been head over heels in love with Arc for a long time now. So far, the only thing I don't like about it is that there is no support for bookmarklets.

Convert bookmarklet to Chrome extension to the rescue.

I've tested it with two bookmarklets so far, and it seems to work fine.