Had brunch at my parent's yesterday to celebrate Mother's Day. It was nice. My mom has been suffering from pain in her leg for a few weeks, but the combination of new meds and time seems to have helped quite a lot. I took the Leica Q2 Monochrom and made a few snaps. Here are my favorites from the day.

I have some pretty nice things. I'm fortunate and have more "stuff" than I could ever need. And yet, it seems as if I'm always buying something new. It's just that I like to try new things, whether it's tools, software, gadgets, or what have you. I want to see what different things feel like to have and use.

The photo above is from my dad's garage, taken this year. I took it because I'm always amazed at how little it changes. My dad rarely buys anything new. He just uses what he has.

Recently, I have been striving to be more like my dad. Whenever I start looking for some new thing to help me do some old thing, I say to myself, "Use what you have!" It's working pretty well. I have not purchased anything new if I already have something similar that will do the job. No gadgets, cameras, pens, notebooks, computers, etc. I already have all those things, and they work great.

I've kept a list of books I've read as a plain text (well, technically, Markdown) file for years. I wrote about it here. The public version is rendered using Github Pages at books.baty.net. This is fine, but at some point last year I also started logging books in an Org mode file, just to see how it felt. It felt pretty good!

My books.org file is just an outline with some custom properties. An entry looks like this:

** DONE Leonardo da Vinci
CLOSED: [2022-04-11 Mon 11:10]
:PROPERTIES:
:author:  Walter Isaacson
:year:    2017
:name:    Leonardo da Vinci
:url:     https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34684622-leonardo-da-vinci
:pages:   600
:rating:  *****
:END:

The outline looks like this:

That's fine, but doesn't show much information other than a short title. That's where Org's Column View comes in. Column view shows a summary of a set of headings in a customizable view. The setup for mine is this:

#+columns: %50ITEM(Title) %author(Author) %pages(Pages){+} %8rating

This sets columns, widths, titles, and even a total of the number of pages (via the {+} flag). Then, I have a block which generates and saves the column view for me. Here's that block.

#+BEGIN: columnview :hlines 1 :id global :skip-empty-rows t :indent t :match "-noexport"
#+END

Pressing C-c C-c on that block header generates a nice table view of my book attributes. Here's what the file looks like, including the column block:

I like it. It's like a little plain-text database.

I probably won’t bother backfilling it with earlier entries, but I plan to keep it updated from now on. I haven’t yet created any fancy org-mode “Capture templates” because let’s be honest, I don’t finish enough books to benefit from that kind of automation. I simply copy and paste an earlier entry and modify that. Maybe I’ll do something smarter at some point, just for fun.

Org mode is pretty great and can do just about anything.

My Epson V750 Pro, purchased in 2009, has scanned thousands of rolls of film, slides, and prints. After making strange grinding noises recently, it has finally ground to a halt.

Here are the last images it was able to scan from the most recent roll (2022-Roll-066)...

So now what? I guess I need a new scanner. I have a PrimeFilm XAs but it's 35mm only and can be quite fidgety to use. And it only does 35mm. I need to scan 35mm, 120, and 4x5 negatives.

I am trying to decide between two options: A new flatbed Epson V850, or a digital camera scanning setup. I already have most of the doo-dads needed for digital camera scanning. I just don't have a feasible digital camera and macro lens up to the task.

I'm leaning toward the Epson V850 flatbed because I'm used to the workflow and, although expensive, it would be cheaper than buying a new camera setup. On the other hand, I can use the new camera as, you know, a camera too, which would be nice.

It's just that I tried scanning with a digital camera before (Fuji X-T3) and didn't like what it did to the grain. I don't know that a higher-resolution camera and better macro lens would fix it.

What I might do is rent something like a Nikon Z7 and one of their macro lenses for a week and see if I like the results. The Nikon Z is probably what I'd look at if I were interested in a new mirrorless kit for general photography anyway.

I'll let you know how it goes.

Org-roam is "A plain-text personal knowledge management system" using Emacs and Org-mode and I put nearly all my notes in there. While it's easy to find notes in org-roam based on filename, there's no obvious way to search the contents of notes. Weird, right?

I could use the default projectile search, but my org-roam files live within my main ~/org directory, so the results are littered with all my other org documents. I'd prefer to only search in ~/org/roam

I use a simple lisp function to help with this. It uses consult-ripgrep:

(defun jab/search-roam ()
 "Run consult-ripgrep on the org roam directory"
 (interactive)
 (consult-ripgrep org-roam-directory nil))

I added a keybinding for it to my other org-roam bindings:

(map!
 "\C-c n f" 'org-roam-node-find
 "s-u" 'org-roam-node-find
 "\C-c n i" 'org-roam-node-insert
 "\C-c n t" 'org-roam-dailies-goto-today
 "\C-c n d" 'org-roam-dailies-capture-today
 "\C-c n c" 'org-roam-capture
 "\C-c n s" 'jab/search-roam               ;; <-- my new keybinding
 "\C-c n l" 'org-roam-buffer-toggle)

Now, with a quick C-s n s I can search my org-roam files using the blazingly fast ripgrep.

If there's a better way to do this, I'm all ears.

The last time I rewatched "The West Wing" I was once again impressed by how good people were at their jobs. How productive everyone was. I wondered how I could be that productive.

I noticed that the entire process used by the staff seemed to be carrying around folders full of paper and barking things like "Get me the file on senator Jones and the notes from our briefing!" Within minutes they would be perusing a bunch of photos and papers scattered about a desk and they'd develop a plan right then and there. Awesome!

So, I started organizing all of my projects in manilla folders. One folder per project. I called it the "West Wing Productivity System". I'd print meeting notes, mindmaps, emails, etc and put them in the appropriate folder. I kept a single summary sheet clipped to the inside with contact information, summary info, budgets, etc.

Whenever I needed to work on a project, I'd grab the folder, spread its contents across my desk, and get to work. It was nice knowing where everything was. It was nice being able to see everything at once, if necessary. (I had a big desk).

On the other hand, it was a pain when I needed to share something with colleagues. Search kind of sucked. And if I happened to be at home without the proper folder in my bag I was screwed.

It was fun for a while, but this was nearly 10 years ago. I still use folders, just not quite so deliberately. Just for the hell of it, I've brought back the system for some of my home projects. There's not a lot of risk and I get to shuffle papers around again like I'm Josh's assistant or something.

I recently read Joe McNally's book, The Real Deal: Field Notes from the Life of a Working Photographer. While I found his anecdotes occasionally interesting, I didn't really enjoy the book. I think this was because I don't much care for McNally's photographs. Here's one of his portraits.

There's no question that McNally is a talented photographer with a powerful work ethic and serious technical skills. His portraits, however, leave me uninspired. You know the style. Creatively lit with a handful of Speedlights, carefully arranged backgrounds or sets, wardrobe and makeup people, etc. The kinds of photos that get a shit ton of likes. This style is not for me.

Now, Judith Joy Ross, on the other hand, makes deeply moving, personal portraits while wandering around with an 8x10 view camera. I wasn't familiar with her work until recently. I mean, just look at these...

Simply fantastic work. I just ordered her new book: Judith Joy Ross: Photographs 1978–2015.

Now that I've moved my blog back to a static site generated with Hugo, I noticed that I was writing both my Daily notes and my blog posts in side-by-side Emacs buffers. It got me thinking about consolidating my sites even further.

The challenge was that I didn't want to simply shuffle the daily posts in with the "regular" posts. I wanted a "Daily" section. But, I also wanted today's Daily post to show on the home page, since that's where the action is.

I'm the first to admit the Hugo's templating system is a complete mystery to me. I've been using Hugo for years and I still don't know what gets rendered where or how. I mostly just throw stuff at the wall until something sticks.

After several hours of Google and wild guesses, I've gotten it close enough to publish. You're soaking in it. The home page shows the most recent post in the /daily/ folder. Then at baty.net/daily/ I show a reverse-chronological list of daily posts.

I've added a couple of tweaks. The list of Daily posts differs from the home page in that I display the full posts and not just the "summary". That was surprisingly difficult to wrangle.

I have a new attribute in the front matter, weather, which is displayed on daily posts. This lets me display the weather differently from the posts' content. The cool feature here is that I'm adding the weather attribute automatically when creating new posts. I create posts using YASnippet, which can call custom functions at the time of expansion. Here's my "daily" snippet:

  # -*- mode: snippet -*-
  # name: Hugo Daily Post
  # key: daily
  # uuid: daily
  # --
  *** TODO ${1:title} :@Daily:
  :PROPERTIES:
  :EXPORT_HUGO_BUNDLE: `(format-time-string "%Y-%m-%d-%A")`
  :EXPORT_FILE_NAME: index
  :EXPORT_HUGO_SLUG: `(format-time-string "%Y-%m-%d")`
  :EXPORT_HUGO_CUSTOM_FRONT_MATTER: :weather "`(jab/insert-weather)`"
  :END:

  $0

Note the :EXPORT_HUGO_CUSTOM_FRONT_MATTER: :weather "`(jab/insert-weather)`" property. I have a custom function called jab/insert-weather which calls the wttr service and outputs the current weather conditions. Surrounding the function with backticks causes the function to be evaluated while the snippet is expanded. Neat! Note that I also dynamically generate the filenames based on the current date.

This all means that, in my posts.org file, I can type daily and hit tab, enter the title, and I'm ready to publish.

I had lunch with my parents recently and took a few photos with both my film and digital cameras. I shot about the same number of photos with each camera, with close to the same number of "keepers". Which do I prefer?

Here I'm showing one of each, digital and film, of my favorite from the visit.

I prefer the film image. I manipulated the digital shot in Silver Efex Pro and added a bit of grain to try and get the look I like, but I still prefer the film image.

The difference might be partially due to using the 50mm Summilux on the MP. It's my favorite lens. The digital shot was with the 35mm Summilux. Also a great lens, but lacks that certain "something" of the 50.

I don't think the lens difference explains it, though. A large part of what makes me prefer film photos is just knowing they're film photos. That means something to me, and influences how I respond to an image. One could probably use a decent HP5 preset on that image in Lightroom and I wouldn't be able to tell it from a film photo in a blind test, but I don't view my images that way. I know how they were made, and it matters.

Additionally, I can make beautiful silver gelatin prints of the film photo in my darkroom. That's important, too.

I'll probably always shoot both film and digital, but more often than not I prefer the results I get from film.

Here we are, running the show as a static blog, using Hugo. But why!? I suppose because I was bored and because it's fun.

Also because while tinkering with my notes.baty.net site I was reminded that I like the "CodeIt" theme that it uses. I thought I'd see how it felt to create a blog from scratch using my version of that theme. Turns out it felt pretty good, so here we are.

I grew tired of pushing against the weight of WordPress. The inconvenience of maintaining a static blog seemed like a fair trade. The past couple of days, I have found myself happier dealing with the inconvenience.

I'm an impressionable young man, and when I notice someone on The Internet raving about something, I want to feel that way, too. I often order whatever that thing is, only to be disappointed. For example, here are a few of the pens I bought after being told how remarkable they are. They're not that remarkable.

I normally don't like the high-speed films but I'm trying to use what's in my fridge, so here's a few from a roll of Kodak T-MAX P3200 shot at 1600 and processed in HC-100.

I’m trying something new.

I’ve become a pretty heavy user of Org-roam for personal notes. I put nearly everything there now; technical notes, contact information, project notes, vendor info, etc. These notes are all nicely linked and backlinked and live in my main ~/org directory so I can easily find things right within Emacs.

A portion of these notes might be useful to other people. So I’m exporting the shareable notes from Org-roam as Hugo-compatible Markdown files. This turned out to be surprisingly easy. You can see the results at https://notes.baty.net and the details of how it works makes a good example.

I’m sure there are a dozen ways to do this, but this seems to work quite well.

I want my per-line code comments to line up nicely, so I’ll often add a bunch of spaces by hand to make things just so. I realized that, being Emacs, there must be an easier way to handle this. Of course there is.

Two minutes of searching revealed a short bit of lisp that does the job nicely:

;; Align comments in marked region
;; Via https://stackoverflow.com/a/20278032
(defun jab/align-comments (beginning end)
  "Align comments within marked region."
  (interactive "*r")
  (let (indent-tabs-mode align-to-tab-stop)
    (align-regexp beginning end (concat "\\(\\s-*\\)"
                                        (regexp-quote comment-start)))))

Here’s an example of what I was working on, with horribly un-aligned comments.

(setq org-roam-capture-templates
  '(("d" "default" plain "%?"
    :target (file+head "%<%Y%m%d>-${slug}.org"
                       "#+title: ${title}\n#+index: \n#+setupfile: ~/org/_SETUP/EXPORT\n#+setupfile: ~/org/_SETUP/org-roam-publish-fancy.setup")
    :unnarrowed t)
    ("P" ;; Key
     "Public (published in /public)" ;; Description
     plain  ;; Type
     (file "~/org/roam/templates/PublicTemplate.org")  ;; Template
    :target (file "public/${slug}.org") ;; Target
    :unnarrowed t)
    ("p" ;; Key
     "project"  ;; Description
     plain   ;; Type
     (file "~/org/roam/templates/ProjectTemplate.org") ;; Template
    :target (file "projects/%<%Y%m%d>-${slug}.org")    ;; Target
    :unnarrowed t)))

Then, here’s that same thing after executing jab/align-comments

(setq org-roam-capture-templates
  '(("d" "default" plain "%?"
    :target (file+head "%<%Y%m%d>-${slug}.org"
                       "#+title: ${title}\n#+index: \n#+setupfile: ~/org/_SETUP/EXPORT\n#+setupfile: ~/org/_SETUP/org-roam-publish-fancy.setup")
    :unnarrowed t)
    ("P"                                               ;; Key
     "Public (published in /public)"                   ;; Description
     plain                                             ;; Type
     (file "~/org/roam/templates/PublicTemplate.org")  ;; Template
    :target (file "public/${slug}.org")                ;; Target
    :unnarrowed t)
    ("p"                                               ;; Key
     "project"                                         ;; Description
     plain                                             ;; Type
     (file "~/org/roam/templates/ProjectTemplate.org") ;; Template
    :target (file "projects/%<%Y%m%d>-${slug}.org")    ;; Target
    :unnarrowed t)))

Much better. It’s cool because it uses comment-start so it works with any language’s comment syntax. There are probably 17 other ways of doing this that I haven’t discovered, but this works.

Every day is a new day in Emacs.

As usual, this roll contained a few self-portraits, a few of Alice, and a few of “stuff”. My favorites are the ones taken in my dad’s garage.

When I drag and drop an image into Emacs, I want the attached file to end up in ./img/YYYY/. This is how I tried configuring org-download in my setup (I use Doom Emacs):

(setq org-download-method 'directory
        org-download-image-dir (concat "img/"  (format-time-string "%Y") "/")
        org-download-image-org-width 600
        org-download-heading-lvl 1)

For some reason, org-download-method was being reset from 'directory to 'attach after loading, and this broke things. I thought maybe I needed to set the variables after org-download was loaded, so I did this:

(after! org-download
  (setq org-download-method 'directory
        org-download-image-dir (concat "img/"  (format-time-string "%Y") "/")
        org-download-image-org-width 600
        org-download-heading-lvl 1))

That didn’t work. At startup I was seeing this error:

Error (org-mode-hook): Error running hook “org-fancy-priorities-mode” because: (void-variable org-download-image-dir)

Huh. I guess not everything can be set after org-download, so I tried only setting org-download-method

(after! org-download
  (setq org-download-method 'directory))

This worked. The other settings are done in the (after! org block.

It feels like I have to fight Doom too often, but the details and refinement of Doom is worth the trouble.

I’ve settled on WordPress for this blog. (“settled” is a fluid word for me, but let’s assume I mean it for now). However, I prefer to do most of my writing in Emacs and Org mode. To help with this, I’ve configured org2blog and I’m writing this post with it.

I’m using org2blog pretty much right out of the box. Just a single blog configuration with the following tweaks:

<div class="org-src-container"><pre id="nil" class="src src-emacs-lisp"><span style="color: #4078f2;">(</span><span style="color: #e45649;">setq</span> <span style="color: #6a1868;">org2blog/wp-track-posts</span> <span style="color: #a626a4;">(</span><span style="color: #b751b6;">list</span> <span style="color: #50a14f;">"~/org/baty.net/.org2blog.org"</span> <span style="color: #50a14f;">"wordpress"</span><span style="color: #a626a4;">)</span><span style="color: #4078f2;">)</span>
<span style="color: #4078f2;">(</span><span style="color: #e45649;">setq</span> <span style="color: #6a1868;">org2blog/wp-default-categories</span> <span style="color: #4078f2;">'</span><span style="color: #a626a4;">(</span><span style="color: #50a14f;">"Misc"</span><span style="color: #a626a4;">)</span><span style="color: #4078f2;">)</span>
<span style="color: #4078f2;">(</span><span style="color: #e45649;">setq</span> <span style="color: #6a1868;">org2blog/wp-default-tags</span> <span style="color: #4078f2;">'</span><span style="color: #a626a4;">(</span><span style="color: #50a14f;">""</span><span style="color: #a626a4;">)</span><span style="color: #4078f2;">)</span>
<span style="color: #4078f2;">(</span><span style="color: #e45649;">setq</span> <span style="color: #6a1868;">org2blog/wp-show-post-in-browser</span> <span style="color: #4078f2;">'</span><span style="color: #986801;">ask</span><span style="color: #4078f2;">)</span></pre></div></code></pre>

I haven’t figured out how to use authinfo.gpg for logging in automatically yet, so for now I’m typing my password in each new emacs session.

There’s a nice “which-key”-like UI for everything.

It’s been years since I’ve done this. It seems to have gotten quite capable. I’ve yet to exercise things but so far, so good.

If you’re reading this, everything worked.

One downside is that this workflow suffers from some of the same issues as static blogs. Specifically, if I’m reading a post and find something I’d like to edit, instead of just hitting the “Edit” button, I need to go find the post in Emacs, make the change, and re-publish. We’ll see if I hate it. Maybe I’ll use Emacs for initial drafts and first edits and then simply live in the WordPress editor for future edits.

I’m feeling twitchy about owning the Leica M10-R.

The M10-R is an astonishingly good camera. World-beating build quality, timeless design, and a fantastic 40-megapixel sensor, all in a small, beautiful package.

Still available new in 2022 for an eye-watering $8,995 (I bought mine used), the M10-R is also a ridiculously expensive camera. Buying one is a big deal and a significant investment.

I am fortunate enough to also own Leica M film cameras, and being able to share lenses between those and the M10-R is very handy. And OMG those Leica lenses! The control layout and handling are the same as well. It’s like having both a digital and film platform for using 70 years of tiny, wonderful Leica lenses. I can carry a full film and digital arsenal with 2 bodies and lenses in a tiny bag.

So, why am I feeling twitchy?

I worry about having such expensive, relatively delicate equipment swinging about around my neck. It makes me nervous. It’s hard to relax and make photographs when I’m so worried about losing or breaking the camera I’m carrying.

Unlike film Ms, digital M cameras depreciate steadily in value. Not as quickly as other digital cameras, perhaps, but still, the trend is downward.

But mostly, I feel guilty having such a fine camera because I’ve barely used it. I’ve been shooting mostly film for the past month or so, leaving the M10-R idling in the bag. I can justify the expense for something I’m using all the time but to have the M10-R sitting in the bag “just in case” is hard to stomach.

Still, I love the camera and I’m keeping it. At least for now. I know me, and I know that the digital-film pendulum will swing back the other way soon enough, and when it does I’ll be glad I have the M10-R.

My wife bought an awful, kitschy plastic lamp and set it on one of the floor speakers. I, of course, balked.

That was a week ago and somehow the lamp is still there. I hate the lamp, but I don’t mind the light that it throws against the wall, and my wife loves it and thinks “it’s adorable”. Who am I to judge?

I took a photo of it. It’s just another boring snapshot by a film photographer looking for excuses to finish the roll. It’s exposed the way I intended and it’s composed nicely, but it’s not a great photo. I love it anyway.

I love the photo because it makes me smile. It makes me smile because I love my wife and it reminds me of one of the many reasons why. That’s the best kind.