An absolutely gripping psychological thriller packed with a twist you won’t see coming Do you know why I didn’t see it coming? Because the narrator is not only unreliable, he’s a liar. Also, things like, and I’m (barely) paraphrasing here, “Does she like me? I think she likes me!” What is he, 15? I was bored. Rating: ★☆☆

Testing a photo via Figure short code with a caption. Lincoln (2025). Nikon FM2n. HP5+

I wish I could quit social media. This seems like a good cause: The definitive guide for escaping social media (and joining the indie web.) Unplatform

The evidence of the past decade and a half argues strongly that platform corporations are structurally incapable of good governance, primarily because most of their central aims (continuous growth, market dominance, profit via extraction) conflict with many basic human and societal needs. source: Bad shape

The time to snoop around for “waste” is when everything else is going so great you’re getting sort of bored. Winter reading, Robin Sloan

I came this close to moving my blog at baty.net back to Hugo. Even worse, I considered archiving all the content and starting fresh. I mean, completely fresh. No more dragging around years of images and posts that have been converted to and from several Markdown formats for various blogging engines. I still may, but I’ve given myself a reprieve this morning. Sort of. ...

Remember my recent email fiasco, during which I ended up with tens of thousands of duplicate emails? I remember it. After storming off and ignoring the problem for a week, I decided I should do something about it. Today, I fixed it! ...

I have a soft spot for Pass: The Standard Unix Password Manager, but Apple’s new Passwords app has been working fine. I use Safari, so the whole thing is very convenient. Sometimes I get twitchy about having things in only one place, so today I decided I’d like to import my Apple Password passwords into Pass. It took me a minute, so I’m jotting down some notes here, for next time. ...

All I wanted was to use notmuch on my MBP to manage email, just like I do on my Mac Mini. The only viable solution I found was muchsync. There’s no macOS installer for it1, so I figured I’d compile it myself. A few years ago I promised myself that if something required ./configure && make && make install I would skip it. Well, I really wanted to try it, so off I went. The make command failed immediately because it couldn’t find notmuch.h. Great, path problems. After an hour of throwing things at the wall, adding some environment variables worked: ...

Reading Jeremy’s post about keeping his personal journal helped clarify some of the thoughts I’ve been having about mine. Some Entries from My Personal Journal: On Tuesday the 12th of November, 2024, I started what I hoped to be a new habit. That is writing a personal daily journal. Over the weeks, I expanded my aspirations to include a daily check list of activities I wanted to do. I’ve been consistently keeping a personal journal for years. I write primarily using Org-journal, a Daybook.org file, and a paper notebook. My problem isn’t that I don’t journal enough, but rather that I can’t decide where to journal. ...

I’d been happily using Doom Emacs until just over a month ago, when I decided to start from scratch again. ...

Sometimes I just need to blow through a roll when I’m bored. This is from the Hasselblad 500C/M and 80mm Planar on HP5 developed with HC-110(b). Thankfully, Alice was handy. These were all handheld at 1/30th, which is a terrible idea. The one of me is underexposed and full of dust. ¯\(ツ)/¯ ...

Here are a few images from the first roll I ran through the Olympus OM-2n after having it overhauled by John Hermanson. The camera feels very good. ...

Fish shell welcome message showing weather conditions For some reason, I always want to know the weather conditions. I barely go outdoors, but I still like to know what’s happening. I have a few shell scripts that kick out some version of the weather. Here’s the one I use most: #!/bin/sh # Jack Baty, 2023 (https://baty.net) # Grab and parse weather info using WeatherAPI.com jq=/opt/homebrew/bin/jq # Save the response to temporary file # TODO: shouldn't this just be a variable or something instead? weatherfile=`mktemp` curl -s "https://api.weatherapi.com/v1/forecast.json?key=[SNIP]&q=49301&days=1&aqi=no&alerts=no" > $weatherfile now=`${jq} -r .current.condition.text ${weatherfile}` temp=`${jq} -r .current.temp_f ${weatherfile}` condition=`${jq} -r .forecast.forecastday[0].day.condition.text ${weatherfile}` high=`${jq} -r .forecast.forecastday[0].day.maxtemp_f ${weatherfile}` low=`${jq} -r .forecast.forecastday[0].day.mintemp_f ${weatherfile}` echo "${now} ${temp} | Low ${low}, High ${high}" Right now, this returns: Light snow 21.9 | Low 20.1, High 26.4 ...

Using GoAccess to process my web server logs is going fine. It’s nice not paying for an analytics service, but it’s definitely a messier process. I wrote a little about Filtering server logs for use with GoAccess recently, but have since tweaked things a little. One thing I found annoying was that GoAccess reports requests separated by HTTP protocol. So HTTP2 and HTTP1.1 requests are counted separately. Not what I wanted, so I discovered --http-protocol no and --http-method no. I’m always going to want this, so I added the following to /etc/goaccess/goaccess.config ...

I was tagged by Kev Quirk to complete a “Blog Questions Challenge”, so here we go. The questions are: Why did you start blogging in the first place? What platform are you using to manage your blog and why did you choose it? Have you blogged on other platforms before? How do you write your posts? For example, in a local editing tool, or in a panel/dashboard that’s part of your blog? When do you feel most inspired to write? Do you publish immediately after writing, or do you let it simmer a bit as a draft? What’s your favourite post on your blog? Any future plans for your blog? Maybe a redesign, a move to another platform, or adding a new feature? ...

Back when I regularly maintained a “Spark file1”, I wrote the following on Aug. 26, 2012: Do something with a 3D Printer Me, in 2012 Today, I can finally cross that one off the list. It’s Benchy! The Bambu Lab A1 arrived yesterday, so I did what everyone does and printed the little “Benchy” tugboat. The A1 only came with 20g of filament, and of course I forgot to order more with the printer, so the starter filament is all I had to work with. It’s so cute, though!l. k ...

Ghostty is a new, platform-native terminal app from Mitchell Hashimoto. I’ve been alternating between Ghostty and Apple’s Terminal for about a week. I like Ghostty. It feels nice right out of the box. Configuration is done via a simple text file, but almost no configuration is necessary. Sensible defaults always make a good first impression, and Ghostty makes a really good first impression. Most of the early reviews I’ve read begin with raves about how fast Ghostty is. Is it that fast, though? It’s pretty fast, actually, but it’s not noticeably faster on my Mac than Apple’s Terminal. I keep comparing the two, and I find no meaningful difference in speed for anything I do with a terminal. It’s not slower than Terminal, certainly, but I suspect that all this talk about speed is partially because we like new things and because everyone else says it’s fast. We’re an impressionable lot 😀. ...

One of the things that frustrated me about Kirby last year was handling code/template changes vs content changes. I complained about it here. Ideally, since Kirby is a PHP CMS, I would do everything directly on the server. What I’ve done more often instead, is to run a full copy locally and rsync the final product (code, blueprints, content, images, etc.) to the production instance. Content is kept in plain text files, so both code and content changes need to be kept in sync. ...

It’s the same old story. I don’t know whether I want to use one or multiple notebooks. Or even if I want to use paper notebooks at all. Here are some random thoughts about my intended notebook use for 2025. Each year for the past 13 years I have ordered a Hobonichi Techo. Some years, I write in one nearly every day. Other years, I fill the first few pages, then it remains mostly blank for the rest of the year. This morning, I (optimistically, as always) set mine up for 2025. ...