It’s weird how I spend a few days relaxing in WordPress, then I wake up one day and think, “Maybe I’ll generate my whole website with Org-mode and Emacs!” I probably won’t do that, but I sometimes consider it.

I don’t want photography be just another way to generate files to play with on the computer.

The temperature dipped to freezing for the first time this year. This usually means it's truly the end of summer. Blech.

At some point, for some reason, Zen changed the New Tab behavior when opening new tabs:

NEW TABS HAVE BEEN REMOVED, instead we are opting for opening the URL bar and then pressing enter to open a new tab (‘zen.urlbar.replace-newtab’ to false in about:config to revert)

https://zen-browser.app/release-notes/#1.7.5b Features section.

I don’t approve, so I found the setting to revert it using about:config…

zen.urlbar.replace-newtab = false

Much better.

Thing is, I prefer using an SSG for my blog, but I've been posting using WordPress over at baty.blog for a few reasons:

• I sometimes like a change of venue
• I like the Twenty Twenty Five theme
• It's nice having built-in comments and analytics
• If I wanted to change themes, it's just a few clicks
• Dragging images into the editor is so easy
• Anything I might want to do is probably available as a plugin

But still, I would rather use an SSG like Hugo.

Instead of switching to WordPress, I think I would be OK if I had a new theme. Something with the following attributes:

• Full posts on home page, with the option to use <!-- more --> or whatever for extra-long posts.
• No dependency on featured images in order for it to look good. I'll add an image to the post if I want one.
• Need to pin the daily post each day.

Honestly, if I could find a theme that worked and looked like the Twenty Twenty Five theme but it was for, say, Jekyll, I'd consider switching to Jekyll. I just want to look at my blog and think, "Aah, that's nice". Currently, I don't.

I thought about firing up Claude Code and having it help me, but I really don't want to build and support my own theme.

I’m becoming a fan of this awkward kit. The F100 is such a sleeper and can be had relatively cheaply. I ended up with that weird-looking SB-20 flash as part of a local Facebook purchase. There might be something to this TTL flash, auto-focus, auto-exposure photography thing.

My therapist asked me why I thought it was a problem to have so many blogs/cameras/notebooks/etc. and I couldn’t give her a good answer. It often feels like a problem, but is it? Maybe not. Maybe I’m just having fun and that’s fine.

I’m using WordPress lately because it’s easy and I don’t have to think about anything but the typing. Images are easy to add and it can do fancy things when it needs to. Sure, it’s a bit bloated and janky, but if what I do most of the time is hit “New post” and write, who cares?

I swear to god if I see one more person accuse someone else of being “complicit” with one evil group or another because they happen to use a product that is somehow remotely tangental to that group I’m going to become complicit. Fuck off.

I have so many great cameras, and I have the free time to use them. Yet I've barely been taking any photographs. Why is that? I'd love to figure it out.

I wake up every day wondering who I'm going to be that day.

Both WordPress and Hugo have things to like about them, so I keep using both because I don't want to miss out on the good things about one when I decide to use the other. It's silly, but there we are.

• STATUS: Weight: down. Sleep: Dunno, the Pebble said 1.5 hours which is a bit off
• TODO: Therapy, groceries, maybe clean the closet
• WATCHING: Bingeing the 3rd season of “The Diplomat”

I impulse ordered the new Pebble smartwatch as soon as it was announced. At the time, I was looking for excuses to stop wearing my Apple Watch, and this seemed as good as any.

The watch arrived yesterday. It’s very white :). There was no setup to speak of other than downloading the app so I can pick from thousands of faces. That should keep me busy for a while. I love e-paper screens.

I haven’t spent much time playing with everything, but I feel like we’ll get along fine. My only complaint is that there’s no way to rotate the display so that (as a lefty) I can comfortably use the watch on my right wrist.

The only thing I’ve done is to add a Timer app and assigned it to a long press of the middle button. Time, weather, notifications, and timers are my primary uses for a smartwatch, so I’m covered.

I'm trying to spend as little time as possible on any social media. I'm finding it difficult.

I started posting over at baty.blog again for some reason.

It's nice having a pocketable point-and-shoot film camera with me. Normally for me, this either means an Olympus Stylus Epic or Ricoh GR1. Both of these are having issues, so I impulse ordered a Canon Sure Shot AF-7 from eBay. It was $30 shipped, so there wasn't much risk.

Here's a self-portrait using the self-timer from the first roll (Kentmere 400) through the new camera:

As you can see, it's not terribly sharp and some frames (like this one) show a light leak. Still the camera is so simple to use that it almost makes up for those shortcomings. I still like having a built-in flash and miss it on other cameras. I like the snapshot aesthetic.

I'm not sure how often I'll end up using the AF-7, but it's fun to have around and cost very little.

Oh, and here's a fun review: Canon Sure Shot AF-7 review: The ‘Owl’ that’s a hoot to shoot | Kosmo Foto

Me, on this day in 2019:

For like a week now I've gone to bed with the ThinkPad and using Linux to actually do stuff. It's fun. Not easy or care-free, but for the first time I'm having a little fun.

It'll stick eventually.

The 3.1.0 update to Omarchy has been released. The Discord channels are awash with people having trouble with the update, but I ran it on both my machines anyway. No issues so far.

Some days I want to live entirely within Emacs. Some days I want to live in a browser. Some days I want to live in terminal and TUI apps. These things, while not mutually exclusive, don't get along well.

I am surprisingly content with using Zen browser.

I'm typing this in neovim/lazyvim for some reason. Sometimes a change in venue is refreshing, right?

I've optimized myself into a completely broken system.

• STATUS: Sleep: 6h 50m
• TODO: Figure out Linux backups, I guess.
• WATCHING: Started "The Chair Company". Funny, but cringy, as expected.
• LISTENING:

I should probably write more about Linux and the NAS and the little Canon AF-7 and the sorry state of the US, but I don't have the energy to put the words together in a useful way. So I'm kind of doing it one sentence at a time here in the dailies.

If I'd have stuck with one system/process for longer, I'd really have something. As it stands now, all I have is a big fat mess.

• STATUS: Sleep: 5h 50m. Weight: I don't weigh myself on the weekend.
• TODO: Water change in fish tank
• WATCHING: Finished "Task". ★★★★
• LISTENING: J. Geils Band "Bloodshot"

I don't know where to put things. I have several dozen files in my Downloads folder and I've no idea what to do with them.

All the second engine does is fly you to the scene of the crash.

-- Pilots

It's possible I've bitten off more than I can chew. New desktop and laptop. New OS on both. New NAS. New media streamer (Jellyfin rather than Plex). New Immich install (via Docker on the UGREEN NAS). New photo editing software (Darktable). It's a little overwhelming. My M4 Air is taunting me from the shelf over there.

• STATUS: Sleep: 7h 30m yay! Weight: ⬇️
• TODO: Visit grandson
• LISTENING: Ratt, "Out of the Cellar" on cassette

Thinking about including a status thingy at the bottom of my daily posts. Got the idea from Warren Ellis. Do I actually do enough to justify writing it down every day? Maybe.

Gruber doesn't get art: Matthew Inman of The Oatmeal: 'A Cartoonist's Review of AI Art'

• STATUS: 6h 24m sleep. Weight is ⬇️.
• TODO: Organize computers/cables. Water change in fish tank.
• READING: The Tools by Phil Stutz and Barry Michels
• LISTENING: Painkiller, by Judas Priest

I'm still working on my photo workflow in Linux. It's gotten to the point of being tolerable, but it's still not enjoyable. Darktable is powerful but there are too many ways of doing everything. I feel like I'm just throwing stuff at the wall, hoping it turns out. I suppose I will eventually find a process that works consistently, but right now I'm not even close to that. I really miss Capture One.

I've spent a ton of time and money moving my film scanning workflow from a flatbed to using a digital camera. My results using Darktable's Negadoctor module have been lackluster, so I re-scanned my last roll using the Epson flatbed. I still feel like it's faster and less fussy doing it that way. I loaded the TIFF scans in Capture One, selected all of them, and hit "Auto" and that was it. They look better than the ones I futzed with forever in Darktable. I haven't timed it, but I'd bet that the total time from dried film to shareable images is significantly faster using the flatbed. Sigh.

I mean, if you're going to start using new computers running a new OS, you might as well get a new, unfamiliar NAS and an updated Orbi router kit while you're at it. That's what I did. Chaos!

I haven't been mentioning Omarchy or the Framework laptop lately because I don't feel like being scolded for "supporting projects that promote facism" which is of course not what they're doing, but whatever. I'm not interested in arguing about it, and I'm not going to clear my throat before every mention. fwiw I like both products very much. Send me an actual apples-to-apples equivalent and I might switch.

I'm trying not to miss my Mac but I kind of miss my Mac. Not being able to develop a comfortable photography workflow might be a dealbreaker for Linux. I'm still trying, though.

I'm still finding things that I'd changed in my PaperMod fork that I kind of need now that I've switched to the stock version. The Reply-By-Email button, for one. My improvement to image rendering from yesterday doesn't work in the RSS feed because it uses a relative URL for the image. I had fixed this in my fork, so I copied that over. I also tried adding the reply button there, also.

Here's an image to test the RSS version of the link:

Now to figure out the reply button. It's in the XML but I don't see it in Innoreader but do in elfeed.

The UGREEN NAS arrives today. I've pulled everything off the old Synology that I need and will move those drives into the UGREEN and format everything. I hope this doesn't turn out to be a maintenance nightmare. It's going to replace the little Mac Mini server and the drives hanging off it, which has been working fine.

I finally got around to updating Hugo's image_render.html so that I can use normal Markdown for images rather than a Hugo shortcode. I used the version from Alec's blog and it seems to work great. Here's an example:

Markdown-mode in Emacs can hide markup so things feel a bit more WYSIWYG, but I've turned that off by default. Don't WYSIWYG Markdown editors sort of defeat one of the purposes of Markdown? Plus, I don't get confused about what is actually in the post this way. I can see the URL for links without C-c C-l-ing all the time.

Aaaaand, we're back.

Sometimes I really like WordPress. It lasts a week or two.

I cleaned a few things up around here. The big one is that I'm now using the stock PaperMod theme rather than the mess I made in my own fork. I'll probably tweak, but I don't want to maintain my own theme.

I also removed /notes from the navigation. I don't need them. I may find some other way to indicate/present shorter posts, but for now it's all either a post or a daily note.

Who knows if I'll end up back there. Some of the cool upcoming ActivityPub stuff might draw me. For now, though, it's Hugo at Baty.net.

The idea that "...endorsing ANYTHING is 100% endorsing that anything's beliefs." is horseshit, btw.

Sometimes one really needs to go out of their way to borrow trouble.