I had a couple of drinks last night and opened my laptop and accidentally launched Obsidian and thought, “Oh, I remember. This is pretty cool! I should use this for everything.” so this morning I’m staring at Obsidian wondering what now? But why not just bail on the Obsidian app and drop back into my beloved Emacs? I’ve been asking myself that question all morning. Ostensibly, I simply felt like a change of venue this morning, and Obsidian seemed as good as any. But there’s something larger lurking under the surface. ...

So, how’s it going now that you’ve committed, Jack?

Putting the new Rolleiflex through its paces by subjecting it to some self-portraits of me

Took a walk with the new Rolleiflex this afternoon

This week has been a whirlwind of blogging changes. Or, more accurately, a whirlwind of me thinking about blogging changes. I’m fascinated by the new ActivityPub features being built into Ghost. This would let me be part of the “Fediverse” without needing to belong to any specific instance of anything. I could blog and post to social media from the same place. People could follow me there, and I could follow them. ...

You may have noticed that I’ve been toying with the idea of moving my main blog to Ghost at https://copingmechanism.com. This all started because the folks developing Ghost have been working on implementing ActivityPub features directly into Ghost, and I like the idea of blogging and reading/posting to social media in one place. Mastodon is cool, but “belonging” to an instance can carry more meaning than I care for. I’m not interested in self-hosting Mastodon or GoToSocial or anything like that, so having it come along for “free” with Ghost makes it a tempting option. ...

I’m not the only one who thinks it’s too much work.

Today will involve more yard work. Mulch delivery Most of the day was spent outdoors, working on stuff. I rarely choose that option, but am always glad when I have.

I wrote recently that I’m tempted to “move the entire enterprise onto paper” and I’m more than half serious. Playing with text on the computer has become a way to never actually do anything useful. It’s fun and easy and gets me nowhere. I fired up my Micro.blog subscription again yesterday. This was probably not the right move, but I’m experimenting with my social media “identity” and Micro.blog is one option. ...

Hello again. Daily notes are back here now, after a brief foray over in Kirby and Tinderbox.

Remember my “Reduce and Simplify” goal for 2024? That was a good idea, eh?

Folder Preview is a quick look extension for previewing the contents of folders on macOS. It’s $1.99 and worth every penny. (via Andrew Canion)

I recently discovered Org mode’s speed keys option and it’s pretty great. One caveat with speed keys is that they only work if the point is at the very beginning of a heading. To help with this, I (with Claude’s help) created a small lisp function and hook to move the insertion point to the beginning of the first heading whenever I open an Org mode file. I’m recording it here in case it’s useful to anyone else. ...

The luminous and shocking beauty of the everyday is something I try to remain alert to, if only as an antidote to the chronic cynicism and disenchantment that seems to surround everything, these days. It tells me that, despite how debased or corrupt we are told humanity is and how degraded the world has become, it just keeps on being beautiful. Nick Cave, “Faith, Hope, and Carnage”

An early attempt at exporting my Journelly journal to PDF

I’m still mad at Hugo, so I’m spending time in Opposite Land. Blogging with Ghost, that is. My old theme (Kyoto) was zipped up in an archive folder, so I dusted it off and will post over there until I’m bored with it: Coping Mechanism.

So I have a couple of static blogs and two kind-of-static blogs. This is fine, I suppose, because I consider both blogging and software to be hobbies. But man, what a mess I’m making. I’m sensing the urge to recoil from all of it. I’m feeling like the whole Linux thing is a rabbit hole leading nowhere. Also, trying to shoehorn everything into Emacs is not yielding the benefits I read about in the brochure. ...

I bought a new car today. Before we get to that, I’d like to tell you about my old car. Ever since I’ve been able to drive, I’ve been fascinated by BMWs. Reading Car and Driver magazine from cover to cover was a monthly routine. Car and Driver loved BMWs. BMW was marketed as “The Ultimate Driving Machine” and I believed it. In 2019 I was shopping for used car. I walked into the local CarMax intending to buy a Jeep Grand Cherokee. As we were walking around the lot, I spotted a black 5-series BMW and thought it would be fun to take a look. I asked how much they wanted for it, and it turns out that BMWs depreciate wildly in the first few years, because the price for the 2016 BMW was comparable to the Jeep I had my eye on. In other words, it was within my budget. ...

Yeah, I’ve been distracted by a couple of new static blogging tools. I think both are interesting and worth a serious look by anyone looking for simple, local-first, Markdown-based blogging. I’ll try to write a bit more detail about them, but for now, check them out yourself. BSSG is a complete static site generator written in Bash. The only dependency is a markdown processor. Cmark is recommended and simple. I use Pandoc. It’s simple, fast enough, and has a refreshingly easy to use theming system with a ton of built-in themes. Then there’s LMNO.lol, which is even easier. Create a single Markdown file with all your posts, then just drag and drop the file into lmno.lol and boom! you have a blog. This one is a hosted service. Check them out! I did: linux.baty.net and baty.blog are BSSG blogs and lmno.lol/jbaty is at lmno.lol. ...