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.

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.

Then yesterday, I took the following self-portrait using my new Fujifilm X-T5 digital camera in my home studio.

Here’s my dilemma: I like them both, but never equally or at the same time. One moment I love everything about shooting film with my Leica and printing using only light and chemistry in the darkroom. It feels like making art, even when the objective technical quality is lacking. In fact, the lack of technical quality is what I look for when shooting and printing film.

Then, a moment later, I can’t understand why I’d bother with all that when I could simply shoot digitally and easily produce a clean, sharp, colorful self-portrait using strobes and backgrounds without all the finger-crossed guessing and expensive failures.

What all this means is that I don’t think I’ll ever be able to commit to a single form of photography. There are too many fun and exciting options to limit myself to just one. It also means I’m unlikely to ever develop the “Baty Aesthetic™” that I always think I should have. It means I’ve no “vision”. Oh well, it’ll have to be OK that I’m all over the place, creatively.

I like the way prints look with a small black border around the image, like this:

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.

This works, but it’s difficult getting the board lined up evenly. For now, I’m writing that off as providing uniqueness but I’m still looking for something better.

I almost always print 6″x8″ on 8″x10″ paper, so this will be fine most of the time. If anyone has a better technique, I’d love to hear about it.

UPDATE: I received the following tip from Nick Fanzo: "It’s more accurate to cut the board so you hold it to one corner, expose, and then move the card diagonally to the other corner and expose again. You’ll get more even borders."

That's much better!

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.

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.

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

I feel like taking Paul’s advice and posting fast and furious on my One True Blog™. I’d like to anoint baty.net as that blog. Hang on.

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.

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.

What the internet told me was that I needed a mirrorless digital camera, a quality Macro lens capable of 1:1 magnification, a copy stand, a bright, even light source, film holders/transports for every size negative I plan to scan, and Negative Lab Pro (which requires the use of Lightroom Classic).

To scan negatives using a digital camera, I first have to mount the camera, level it correctly, set up the appropriate negative mount. Then I make sure it’s focused properly, and adjust camera settings as needed. Then for each frame, I advance the film, trip the shutter, advance, and repeat 36 times. Then I must import the raw scans into Lightroom, load the NLP plugin, convert all of them, then adjust them using NLP. Finally, I have to export positive TIFF or JPG copies from NLP. I just don’t see how this is easier. No one agrees with me, but the old way is better.

What about scan quality? That depends upon a hundred variables. Honestly, I can probably squeeze a tiny bit of quality/resolution from the digital camera scans, but the effort getting there isn’t worth it. My flatbed 35mm scans are fine, although if you read anything online you won’t believe me. “Flatbed scans are shit!” is the usual trope. OK, but they look good to me, thanks.

Also, the grain from dedicated scanners looks better. And if I’m shooting color, there’s no match for digital ICE.

I tried the new way, but I prefer my old-fashioned scanning system.

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.

It’s become a minor treasure. It’s like a journal of things that barely matter at the time, but become valuable later. Screenshots, text snippets, URLs, etc. I love it.

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?

DHH, More creative than mere humans

Fair questions. I just wish he wouldn’t keep calling us “mere humans”.

I was playing with the amazing ChatGPT and it felt like something new. Using it felt like the first time I dragged to resize a filled shape in MacPaint on my Macintosh Plus.

I imagine that before too long, just like filled shapes in a drawing program, AI will become just another boring, everyday tool. But not today. Today, to this mere human, it’s magic.

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 function^[1] 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:

Can you imagine where this leads? I didn't really get it, until having the above conversation. I'd love being in high school right now. It's like being in that brief period where calculators were still rare, so having one was like cheating. AI feels like cheating, in a good way.

This feels like the first time I dragged and resized a filled shape in MacPaint on my Macintosh Plus. Or the first time I pinched-to-zoom on the original iPhone.

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.

David of System Crafters created a video about hacking Org-roam containing something like what I was looking for in the show notes, but for Org-roam not Denote.

I took the idea and implemented it for Denote instead. All it does is search denote-directory for files with a specific pattern and append the results to my default list of org-agenda-files. It looks like this:

;; Add all Denote files tagged as "project" to org-agenda-files
(defun jab/denote-add-to-agenda-files (keyword)
  "Append list of files containing 'keyword' to org-agenda-files"
  (interactive)
  (jab/init-org-agenda-files) ;; start over
  (setq org-agenda-files (append org-agenda-files (directory-files denote-directory t keyword))))

(jab/denote-add-to-agenda-files "_project")

That's it. Now I can keep my project TODOs in the project Org files and view them in the Agenda. You'll notice that there's nothing in there that actually depends on Denote. It's all just basic Emacs stuff. That's one of the reasons I love Denote so much; even I can riff off it. I haven't found a good way to add newly-created project files to the agenda without reloading Emacs or calling the function manually, but I'll get to that later.

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.

Everyone is just so breathy and I'm exhausted by all of it.

So, instead, I've been writing journal entries on my blog, updating my wiki, and sitting at my writing desk with a pen and a notebook. It's the latter of these things that brings me a nice sort of calm. It's not really even technology but it's where I increasingly wish to spend my time.

In 2020 I wrote,

I no longer try to read longer-form articles right away. I instead send them to Instapaper and, after a day or two, review the inbox, delete the ones I no longer care about, and print the ones I do.

Reading Long-Form Web Articles By Printing Them First

I still print web pages for later reading, but I've updated the way it works.

I've replaced Instapaper with Zotero as my read later service. Zotero is overkill for this, but it's free, local, and makes the articles I save usable as references if needed.

When I've found an article that I want to print and read, I visit the page and use the excellent Markdownload web clipper extension. Markdownload grabs the meat of the article, converts the HTML to Markdown, and (optionally) adds front matter and metadata to the document. Here's an example:

---
created: 2022-11-12T08:40:29
source: https://www.wired.com/story/tweet-dying-revolutionary-internet/
author: Paul Ford
documentclass: scrartcl
classoption:
- twocolumn
---

# A Tweet Before Dying | WIRED
source: ([www.wired.com](https://www.wired.com/story/tweet-dying-revolutionary-internet/))

> ## Excerpt
> The revolutionary internet is over, and we don’t have much to show for it. A new start is out there, somewhere.

---
i find it a good philosophical exercise to imagine the last tweet. It could come centuries hence, when a cryptobot offers a wistful adieu to another cryptobot, or in 2025, when Donald Trump, the newly ...

I add the documentclass and classoption front matter manually. These options are used by my pandoc template^[1] when converting the Markdown file to PDF using Pandoc. The rest is handled automatically by the extension.

Once I have the Markdown file, I convert it to PDF either via a BBEdit script or pandoc-mode in Emacs.

Here's what the PDF looks like:

After that, it's off to the printer.

Admittedly, the setup for this took me some time, but now that the hard part is done I can go from web page to a typographically beautiful printed document in about a minute. It's been totally worth it.

I have always struggled with Hugo theming. I have some sort of mental block around its templating and content layout. My earlier theme, LoveIt, was nice enough, but I could not make heads or tails of how it worked. There was too much magic for my taste, so I went looking for something simpler.

What I found is Congo. Congo may not be simpler, but it's a different kind of complicated. It's magic that I (mostly) understand.

So, I've installed the theme module and implementing my first round of customizations. The big change is that I show the most recent journal post on the home page. Congo is built with lots of customization options in mind, so I'm feeling pretty good about getting it to a place where I'm not annoyed all the time.

Currently, featured images are broken because (of course) Congo does them differently than earlier themes. I'll work through fixing those soon.

If you see anything you hate or that is otherwise broken, let me know

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.

On the other hand, I quite like having all the stuff I write–most of it, anyway–in one place; here at baty.net. So there's that.

For the handful of you who read my sites any kind of regularly, where would you like the daily notes to go? And second, if you prefer them on the blog, should they be included in the main RSS feed? I don't like polluting feeds with my usual circular interests, but maybe they're useful to some.

Hit the ol' reply link below and let me know what you prefer. Even if it's "None of the above." 😄

UPDATE: The overwhelming response was to leave the daily journals here at baty.net. OK then!

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.

I made the mistake of reading "How to Take Smart Notes" by Sönke Ahrens and browsing the forums and that sent me on a spiral of worrying about atomicity, what to do about "fleeting" notes, how big is a Zettel? and so on. In other words, I was more concerned with finding the proper method of managing my notes rather than focusing on what was actually in them and what they were for.

This week's tinkering with Tana hasn't helped. Tana is the next iteration of tools based on things like Roam Research, Notion, etc. I like it. It's a bit like TiddlyWiki and Tinderbox in that it allows for additional attributes to be associated with each node and makes these ontologies easy to search, link, parse, summarize, etc. It makes some complicated workflows pretty easy to implement. I think a lot of people will dig it.

The problem is that this flexibility leads to a lot of hand-wringing over the best way to utilize all this power. The Tana Slack channels are teeming with questions about workflows and structure and attributes and on and on. It makes me tired just reading about it.

I'm not sure I need a system around, for example, the best way to surface the minutiae from interstitial journaling. In fact, just using the phrase "interstitial journaling" is a dead giveaway that I've already been overthinking it. Settle down, Jack!

Anyway, I'll keep playing with Tana for fun, but I'm probably not going to continue using it for my notes. It's not something I will benefit from, especially considering the amount of effort I'll put into setting it up and getting everything "right". I'm exhausted and I think I'll go back to using paper. Or maybe Emacs.

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.

Anyway, I've settled on the Fosstodon.org instance. I'm not a 100% FOSS person, but I find that group to be interesting and "my people" so I'm hoping they forgive the occasional reference or recommendation around proprietary tools.

I'm @jackbaty@fosstodon.org there.

Thanks, and best of luck to Ash.

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.

I started wondering what would happen if I put everything into Org-roam. Or, at least made everything available to Org-roam. To that end, I changed my org-roam-directory to my top-level ~/org folder. Now anything can be an Org-roam node. All I need to do is add an ID property to a heading or file by running org-id-get-create.

So far I don't see a downside to this approach. I have made Org-roam nodes out of Daybook headlines, Journal entries, even TODO items. All linked up and networked as part of my database. I don't know how well this will scale over time, but I'll cross that bridge when I get to it.

I splurged on a new Apple Studio Display for my home office. It's only been 24 hours but I couldn't be happier. I wish it wasn't so expensive. Even the "base" model is too expensive. And no way I'm paying another $400 just so I can adjust the height. That pisses me off a little, but the display is gorgeous, so all is forgiven.

Here's why I bought one:

• My 32-inch LG was too big. I know that sounds crazy, but too much screen real estate is a distraction for me.
• I wanted 5k. Whenever I switched between the (4k) LG and my internal Retina MacBook Pro monitor, the difference when reading text was pronounced. Moving to the internal Retina display felt like putting on glasses.
• I wanted built-in speakers and camera. I keep the MBP in clamshell mode, so I needed to have extra speakers on my desk and didn't like the clutter.
• The hardware is beautiful. I stare at my monitor nearly all day, every day. The Studio Display is simply nicer looking than anything else I've seen. This alone doesn't justify the purchase, but it sure helps.

I've taken the LG to my temporary office in our old building, so it's not like it's going to waste. The new Studio Display is a great upgrade, though.