I'm considering bringing back the /notes section of the blog. For a minute I planned to modify the template so that /notes didn't display or require titles. Thing is, I don't want to go down the customize-my-blog-all-day path right now. I'm busy enough with the move to Linux. Maybe later.

My reef tank continues to confound all efforts to make it pretty.

The most pressing problem is a serious outbreak of Aiptasia. I've been unable to keep up with it using chemical methods^[1]. The most common non-chemical suggestion is to introduce Berghia Nudibranch into the tank. The only thing these "sea slugs" eat is Aiptasia.

My tank is only 32 gallons, so I ordered six slugs. The medium ones (1/2-3/4 inch in length) run about $17 each. The expensive part was shipping. They must be shipped overnight, so shipping was $56. Yeesh.

They arrived yesterday and I began to drip-acclimate them. Once acclimated, I placed their jar on its side on a live rock. They all eventually crawled out onto the rock in about two hours. They immediately disappear into crevasses and holes in the rock. They are nocturnal and remain hidden most of the time, so it's likely I'll never even see them again.

I'm told it can take months for them to seriously dent the Aiptasia population, so now I wait.

Are you sick of me talking about Linux, yet? I am. But this is such a big change in my entire computing world that it's hard not talking about it. I'm running Fedora/KDE on my desktop and have had few issues. Yesterday, I scanned another roll of film using Vuescan and editing them in Darktable. I didn't hate it, which is an improvement. The only way to judge something is to use it for a while. Familiarity breeds contentment. Or something :).

By the way, I posted something related to this on the linux blog: How I feel when using Linux

It's so easy to be kind to people. Why do so many people find it difficult?

Weaning myself from Emacs is like a minor hobby for me. Or at least you'd think it was, based on how much time I spend on it. I've only ever succeeded once or twice, and only for a short time. There is simply nothing like Emacs and definitely nothing like Org mode. Besides, I have a decade of notes in there. Nearly every note-taking, text-editing problem I've ever run into has been solved either by me or someone else in Emacs. I'm comfy there.

And yet, last week I tried leaving Emacs again.

I was sucked in by the promise of Markdown being available and useful just about anywhere, with any modern tool. I was tired of C-x C-something for everything. For example, opening my Emacs bookmarks means C-x r b and for some reason I always have to look at the keyboard while typing it. Yes, yes, I can rebind it if it bugs me, but that's a can of worms I've regretted opening before.

It's possible that the thing I thought about most has been the native Emacs bindings in nearly every app on macOS and the fact that they're not everywhere on Linux. Assuming I'll never be able to go all in with only macOS or Linux, I thought I might try covering more bases by switching to Evil mode in Emacs. True Vim bindings aren't always available, but most apps and CLI tools, etc can fake it pretty well. Vim can fake it pretty well, too, and I spend a lot of time there.

So I dug out my vanilla evil-mode config and went to town. I hated it immediately. Mine was a half-ass configuration I cobbled together from a bunch of blog/Reddit posts. It was inconsistent and broken in places.

You know what does Evil mode really well? Doom Emacs.

So I spent a few hours this morning (re)installing Doom and migrating the important bits of my vanilla config over.

Doom tries to do too much, but it does a pretty good job of it. I'm modal-editing my way around everything and it's like coming home. I'm sure I'll start stubbing my toes on things at some point, but for now, the problems I traded for it are worth it.

I'm kind of tired of everything related to the internet right now.

I'm on macOS this morning. Every day it's different. Sometimes I change multiple times in a day. It's fun, but crazy-making and unsustainable. I should pick one, but I can't.

☀️ Clear +27°F

Journal (Daily) posts don't show up on the home page, currently. I can't decide if that's a good or bad thing. On one hand, I don't need to worry about journal posts cluttering up the "important" stuff. Except then they disappear into the void, so I may decide to include them after all.

The other bit of trouble I ran into was the default RSS feed in the Blowfish theme. Hugo's default rss template is lacking. It only sends the summary and doesn't include any featured images. You'd think all theme developers by now would have dealt with that. I've done it myself a half-dozen times, but nope. I had to build one. It now includes the full content of each post, and the featured image, if available. The next thing is to include the Reply By Email button

In How about some blogging stability for 2026? I wrote that I resolved to not change blogging platforms more than once a quarter. This would be an easy goal for most people. For me, though, it's a bit of a challenge.

I was bored this morning, which is never a good sign. For something to do, instead of changing platforms, I decided to change Hugo themes instead. Totally within the boundaries, right?

Anyway, we're trying the Blowfish theme. It's a derivative of the old Congo theme that I quite liked before it was mostly abandoned. Moving themes with Hugo is never simple, but I think the only thing I've lost are featured images. In PaperMod, they're controlled with front matter. In Blowfish, it's done via naming convention. This means that any of my old posts that have cover images I'd like to keep, I need to rename the image files. It's easy, but will be tedious so I'm just going to pick at them over time.

Instead of simply changing the "theme" configuration setting, I created a whole new site by copying everything over from the PaperMod version. This is probably doing things the hard way, but it feels less like a permanent move. If it turns out I don't love the new theme, I can just copy over a couple of new post markdown files and deploy the old version. I like to keep my options open.

I'm typing this in NeoVim on the Framework running Fedora/Gnome. Earlier today, I fired up the Mac Mini and thought, "Man, this is how I want to do computing." This, in direct opposition to how I've felt about it for the past few months. As part of the new year, I'd "decided" that I was putting the Linux experiment on hold indefinitely. I'd fired up Tinderbox for blogging at daily.baty.net as part of my new move back to macOS.

None of these things stick. I'm about to shut down this laptop and move over too the Mac Mini running Tahoe and remind myself why I don't want to live there. It seems like somewhere I'd like to live. Do I really want to not have control over my operating system? Do I want to live with Liquid Glass even though I hate it?

Anyway, like I said, chaos^[1].

Over at Irreal, Blogging Platforms:

For me, blogging is all about writing and sharing my discoveries. The last thing I want is to worry about is my blogging platform. I want it to be as transparent as possible so I don’t have to think about it. I just want to write my post in Org mode and push a button to publish it.

Most days, this is what I dream of, too. Picking something and sticking with it would be good for me. So far, I've not been able to do that, even for a short time it seems. Maybe 2026 will be the year! :)

How about this for a resolution... Don't change blogging platforms more than once a quarter.

Ha!

I sometimes wish playing with tools wasn't so much fun. It would be better, I think, to write more, tinker less. Except that I mostly write about tinkering, so that's sort of self-defeating, no?

Let's recap.

2025 was comprised of Kirby, Ghost, WordPress, Hugo, Zola, Eleventy, Blot, Tinderbox, Emacs, and TiddlyWiki. That seems like a lot, even for me.

We're ending the year with baty.net on Hugo, daily.baty.net on Tinderbox, baty.blog with Blot, and the lathe still built with TiddlyWiki.

That's too much to manage. I dream of having One True Blog, but we all know that's not happening. Going into 2026, I'm going to try and limit it to 3. This blog, the daily blog, and the wiki. I sometimes wonder why I have both the wiki and daily blogs, but I have never been able to settle on one or the other.

Three blogs seems like plenty to keep me busy. If I can figure out how to not change how they're made every other day^[1], we should be good.

Sooo, I thought I wanted a new theme but that didn't work out, so I changed my mind and decided to go back to my old PaperMod theme. Trouble is, that theme was made for Hugo^[1], so I also had to move things back to Hugo. Had to! 😀

I like PaperMod well enough. It's not the full-post-on-home-page I was looking for, but its excerpt handling is good enough for who it's for.

One positive side effect is build times. Zola takes up to 12 seconds to render the site. Hugo takes 1.5 seconds. That's a meaningful difference.

So, we're doing Hugo for now. Sorry about your RSS feeds!

[!NOTICE] Update: I went with something else :) Then again, maybe I want the previous theme instead

A few years ago, I wanted to know what type of home page layout people preferred for a blog. The options where:

1. Full posts
2. Title and Excerpt
3. Title only

The results looked like this:

Personally, I agree, full posts are best. Especially when there's a way to truncate a very long post with a "more..." link. For some reason, though, theme makers seem to think that the other two options are preferable. I have never found a theme I liked for Hugo or Zola or Eleventy or any of them that show full posts in a simple way. This is why I keep glancing over at baty.blog, which is currently running on Blot. I like the theme, and I like how Blot works.

Thing is, that's not my real blog. This blog at baty.net is my real blog. It's the one people read and subscribe to. I could probably guide people over to baty.blog, but why? I could maybe migrate everything to Blot and run that at baty.net, but that almost guarantees a bunch of broken stuff, so I'm reluctant to do that. Besides, I have a thing for static sites, and while Blot starts out as just Markdown files, it's still a hosted, rendered service.

Tabi is a nice theme, but it's a "title and excerpt" thing. What I really want is a new theme that works for all types of posts. The closest I've come is with the daily.baty.net blog. I like the way it collects things by day. I like that I can write long and short posts and they both "fit". I like that I can even write some things that aren't part of the RSS feed.

Maybe Claude could translate that theme for use with Zola or Hugo. I feel like that would be frustrating, though. Or maybe I'll do the move-everything-to-blot thing. I dunno.

What I may do is take another look around at themes and see if I can find a suitable one. Recommendations are welcome!

My daughter has been sending me adorable AI-generated images of her and my grandson in various Christmas get-ups. They're so fun and cute and she's having a blast.

It makes me wonder, though, what happens 20 years from now when she's scrolling back through her photos and sees these. Will she remember that they're faked? How will she know what's real and what's not? How will my grandson?

I worry that it won't matter to her or anyone else that their pasts are imaginary. Well, it matters to me and it makes me sad.

My first serious foray into Linux was driven by how deeply I fell immediately in love with Omarchy. Omarchy made me realize that I could totally live in Linux. If I wanted to.

The big draw of Omarchy for me was Hyprland and window tiling. I've tried a few other tiling window managers (e.g. i3) but they were either too hard to configure or felt janky. Omarchy's version worked great, with great keybinding support. It felt good to no longer spend half my time in the OS moving and resizing windows. Omarchy's rendition of Hyprland made it easy and fun.

The downside of tiling window managers is they Always Be Tilin'. Sometimes I don't want that. When an app like Darktable opens a tiny dialog window, and that window suddenly fills half the screen, while shrinking the main window, I don't enjoy it. Yeah, I can toggle specific windows to float, but it's inconvenient. And I'm sure I could wrangle Hyprland to do the right thing with the right apps in the right workspaces, but figuring how to do that is low on my list of fun things to do.

I had fond memories of the way Pop!_OS let me toggle tiling on and off, and when I learned that their new "Cosmic" desktop offered that feature, it made me want to try it.

The other distribution that I got along well with was Fedora. Turns out that Fedora has a Cosmic "Spin", so I dove in and installed it on both the laptop and desktop.

I spent the rest of the weekend getting everything installed and configured to my liking. It went pretty well, although it took some time to get the hang of software installation (dnf vs pacman, etc).

How's it going so far? Honestly, kind of so-so.

While the ability to set window behavior per workspace is nice, Cosmic behaves more like macOS. When I click on an app in the dock, it whisks me to whichever workspace that app is currently running in. With Omarchy, it would open a new instance of the app in the current space. I prefer that behavior. It's more consistent and less jarring.

I'm finding it more difficult to find and install software in Fedora. Omarchy had handy TUI apps for both the official repository and the AUR. They were nearly identical. And I found almost every app I wanted right away. In Fedora, I feel like things are spread out a bit more. It could be just a matter of familiarity, but this didn't happen with Omarchy.

Fedora/Cosmic wins on ease of configuration, though. It took me 30 seconds to remap my CAPSLOCK key to Control. That's the first time I didn't struggle with that in any distro. It was right where I looked for it and it was a simple, specific setting. Nice. The other configuration bits are nearly as straightforward. I don't hate using a config file to set things up, but having a GUI available is handy.

Cosmic has worked smoothly, for the most part. There are a few glitches here and there, but most of them have been minor. Not all of them, though. Here are a few notable problems I've run into.

• Can't install jrnl due to incompatible python versions (of course)
• None of the file managers will mount SMB shares
• Emacs had issues installing some packages

Overall, Fedora and Cosmic feel pretty strong. Some of my complaints are due to lack of familiarity, and I assume most of the bugs will be ironed out as Cosmic is updated. I'll be sticking with it for now^[1].

I'm over 60 now, so I often react differently to certain things than younger people do. Badly, most of the time.

Take, for example, the rise of "Video Podcasts". To me, that's always seemed a contradiction in terms. "Podcasts are audio!," I'd grumble. I don't know why I cared, because I never listen to podcasts, anyway.

I do, however, watch a lot of YouTube. Like, a lot. Too much, but I'll deal with that later. Recently, I was watching a lengthy video about some topic or another, when I realized that the entire thing was just two people talking into microphones while a camera was running. Then it happened. One of the guys said something like, "You can follow this podcast here or on...". Dammit! They called it a podcast. Was I really watching a podcast? Damn kids!

Lately, I've found myself watching YouTube videos via Apple TV. It's a nice way to kick back and browse things to watch. Better than going through random trailers on Netflix, I think.

One reason I don't listen to podcasts is that I can't process background audio while doing anything else. It simply turns to noise, so unless I'm sitting quietly and just listening, podcasts are a waste of my time. And I struggle just sitting and listening.

On the other hand, watching a podcast keeps me focused on the material, even if it's only a couple of talking heads. Interesting!

Anyway, it occurred to me that I am now a person who watches YouTube "podcasts" on the TV from the couch, and I don't know how I feel about that.

Tinderbox has a great feature that indicates the size of a note using a tiny icon next to each note. This makes it easy to see which notes are long or short at a glance.

I've tried to recreate that here, since at first glance every post is the same. I would have gone with the built-in method by showing the word count, but that takes work to read; 250 and 550 look the same at a glance .

Instead, I place one of three small icons next to each post.

𐄚 = quick read (<200 words)
𐄜 = medium read (200-500 words)
𐄞 = longer read (>500 words)

I'm not sure those are the right limits, so I'll tweak them if it feels wrong.

It looks like this:

I realize it's not self-explanatory. It probably should be, but I didn't want to add clutter. If you know, you know, I guess.

So much for not futzing with the Zola templates 🤷‍.