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 🤷‍.

As a huge fan of Denote, I still sometimes dabble with other ways of taking notes in Emacs.

For example, I like the way Howm does notes. I have a growing set of Howm notes, but they feel isolated from my other notes. For a while, I tried keeping Denote and Howm together but it felt like swimming upstream. I bailed on that and broke them apart again.

More recently, I learned about an Org-roam-alike called Org-node. I like org-node quite a lot. There are no enforced file name rules, as in Denote. Any Org-mode heading or file can be a node. All one needs to do is give it an ID property. It's very fast at finding notes. I pointed org-node at my entire ~/org directory. Finding a node is still basically instant.

This got me thinking about Howm again. If I were to add an ID to new Howm notes, I could browse them in the cool, modified-date way that Howm uses, while also making them linkable/searchable with org-node. It doesn't matter where the files are within ~/org. Another advantage is that org-node uses the more standard [id: ] linking method rather than Denote's [denote: ] links.

To make this easy, I added a hook in the use-package configuration for Howm, like so...

:hook
  ((howm-mode . howm-mode-set-buffer-name)
   (howm-create . org-node-nodeify-entry)  ;; <-- add to org-node
   (org-mode . howm-mode))

That's it. With that hook, new Howm notes automatically call org-node-nodeify-entry, which does the right thing. with the file's front matter. I'm going to try this for a while and see how it goes.

Don't ask me why I occasionally try to move away from Emacs. I can't explain it. Under duress, I'd say it's because Emacs swallows the world, and I like changing things up. Doing everything in Emacs makes that difficult. Org-mode is unmatched, but it's also essentially useless outside of Emacs^[1]. I get a little twitchy about that. Also, sometimes a package update throws a wrench into my Emacs config or I become tired of C-x C-whatever all the time and so I start shopping for a replacement.

Anyway, this was supposed to be about Obsidian, which lives and breathes Markdown^[2]. I can't tell you how many times I've (re)installed Obsidian, thinking this time it'll stick, for sure!

It hasn't stuck yet, but I was determined to give Obsidian the entire month of December to win me over. I made it as pretty as I know how to. I installed the few essential plugins. I created some nice templates. Each morning I'd fire up a new "Daily Note" with my fancy template. Then...nothing. Even though I already knew this, I simply don't enjoy using Obsidian. There's something about it that doesn't jibe with my brain. I don't like how the sidebars work. I don't like how it handles attachments. It doesn't feel right, ya know?

I keep trying to use it because there are things I like about Obsidian. I like that it can do a lot of fancy stuff, easily, and right out of the box without me having to spend hours figuring out why my hand-made Lisp function isn't working. Linking is easier in Obisidian, and although the Graph is mostly useless, it's still cool to look at. "Unlinked mentions" is a great feature for apps like this, too.

The best thing about Obsidian, though, is it works on macOS and Linux without fuss, and it syncs easily with just about any sync tool. Or I can pay for Obsidian Sync, which is even nicer. Oh, and it works on iOS, which comes in handy.

So for a week I tried emphasizing the things I like and ignoring the things I don't. It didn't work. Obsidian is almost certainly the Right Answer for many people, even me, probably. I couldn't do it. I caved after only a week.

That means I'm once again back in Emacs. Emacs is too good at too many things, so I'll probably never be able to leave it permanently. I'll just occasionally become annoyed with something about it and try switching to something else for a minute...again. Maybe Octarine next time 🤔.

Well, I finally did it. I deleted my 50,000-photo iCloud photo library and moved everything to self-hosted Immich.

Here are some of my notes from the process^[1]. It was actually much easier than expected. Shout out to a couple of tools, first.

osxphotos

Python app to work with pictures and associated metadata from Apple Photos on macOS. Also includes a package to provide programmatic access to the Photos library, pictures, and metadata.

I installed it with using Homebrew:

# Add the tap
brew tap RhetTbull/osxphotos

# Install osxphotos
brew install osxphotos

This thing is brilliant. It has a million options and can do pretty much anything with an Apple Photos library. Here's the command I ran to export the entire library in a way intended to work well with an Immich import, along with its output.

osxphotos export /Volumes/MinistackSSD/iCloudPhotosExport \
> --skip-original-if-edited \
> --sidecar XMP \
> --touch-file \
> --directory "{folder_album}" \
> --download-missing
Using last opened Photos library: /Volumes/MinistackSSD/Photos Library.photoslibrary
Created export database /Volumes/MinistackSSD/iCloudPhotosExport/.osxphotos_export.db
Processing database /Volumes/MinistackSSD/Photos Library.photoslibrary/database/Photos.sqlite
Processing database /Volumes/MinistackSSD/Photos Library.photoslibrary/database/Photos.sqlite
Photos database version: 5001, 11.1.
Processing persons in photos.
Processing detected faces in photos.
Processing albums.
Processing keywords.
Processing photo details.
Processing import sessions.
Processing additional photo details.
Processing face details.
Processing photo labels.
Processing EXIF details.
Processing computed aesthetic scores.
Processing comments and likes for shared photos.
Processing moments.
Processing syndication info.
Processing shared iCloud library info
Done processing details from Photos library.
Exporting 47508 photos to /Volumes/MinistackSSD/iCloudPhotosExport...
Exporting 47508 photos ━━━━━━━╺━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━  18% 0:15:032025-12-05 13:27:39,721 - osxphotos - WARNING - photoexporter.py - 1172 - AppleScript export has failed 10 consecutive times, restarting Photos app
Exporting 47508 photos ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 100% 0:00:00
Processed: 47508 photos, exported: 47731, missing: 35, error: 0, touched date: 95260
Elapsed time: 1:08:39
➜  ~

If there's a better combination of options for that export command, it's too late now. Besides, just look at the README. It's overwhelming!

Immich CLI

Immich has a handy CLI. I used it to import that entire Apple Photos export.

Installed the CLI via npm:

npm i -g @immich/cli

Then, after authenticating with immich login, I ran the following:

immich upload --recursive /Volumes/MinistackSSD/iCloudPhotosExport --album

Three hours later, all of my photos were in Immich, with the original Albums and metadata intact. Most of the duplicates were skipped, and I used the Immich duplicate finder to remove the remaining ones. Immich is still chugging away at scanning for faces and running OCR on text in the images. This will take a while, but my library is all there.

After running a backup on the Immich library, I deleted all of my photos from iCloud. Scary, but they'll be in "Recently Deleted" for 30 days, just in case.

The plan is to treat my iPhone as just another camera. I configured the Immich iPhone app to import everything from Photos automatically, so all I'll need to do is clean things up and delete them from Photos every so often.

This is a big change, but it alleviates some of my concerns about relying on Apple/iCloud. It feels good having everything locally on my NAS. Sure, I'm now responsible for everything, but when it comes to my photo library, that's OK.

On macOS, I prefer Capture One as my RAW editor, but C1's cataloging features are weak. Plus, I'd prefer not having my catalog and editor so tightly tied together. I'd love to get out of the Adobe ecosystem, so I don't want to get too deep into using Lightroom Classic for my catalog. Photo Mechanic is great, but has gotten too expensive.

I thought I'd revisit NeoFinder. I'm glad I did.

NeoFinder is really good at keeping track of all kinds of media on all kinds of storage. I've put 2025's photos and some other projects into it as a test, and it's impressive. Also, the app just turned 30 years old, so, Lindy Effect.

There are all kinds of handy tools to manage photo metadata. Here's just one menu:

Oh, and it's inexpensive ($39.99) with no subscription required.

My current plan is to catalog everything using NeoFinder, then export the edited keepers to my Immich instance for sharing/faces/albums.

I considered using digiKam for this, as it's nicely cross-platform, but I don't think it'll cut it for the whole catalog. There are some nice tools built into digiKam, so it will remain in the toolbox.

The next step is to move everything out of iCloud Photos into Immich. That's a whole 'nuther project.

In November, I experimented with using only CLI tools. How did it go?

I'd give it a 7 out of 10.

The other two CLI-based productivity tools I used for the month were Taskwarrior and nb. Taskwarrior is very good at managing tasks, but I don't know if it'll stick as my main task app. There's too much typing involved with keeping things updated (adding tags, projects, etc.). The TUI helps, but I'm not sure it's enough. I'm currently tinkering with Super Productivity as more GUI-ified option, but I'll probably just end up back in Emacs org-mode like I always do.

I'm still exploring nb. It's surprisingly deep and capable, and I'll miss it if I stop using it.

I don't know what I'll use nb for, exactly. It's not like I don't have too many places to keep stuff already. Still, it's neat and handy. The downside is that typing the entry ID gets tedious: e.g. nb edit 157. Another issue is that when there are thousands of files, listings can get pretty slow. For example, in my "kb" notebook, searches can take 10 seconds or longer to return all results. I'm enamoured of it, though, so I'm keeping it around for now.

For email, I'm still using aerc for quickly checking messages. I alternate between aerc and the Fastmail web UI. Both are fine, but I'm surprised by how much I miss Apple Mail on macOS.

The thing that puts me off sticking all CLI, all the time is that sometimes I just want to kick back and drive with the mouse for a while. Being forced to use a keyboard for everything puts me off after a while. I'm happy to be wrapping up the experiment, but I'm hanging on to the CLI tools I've learned to enjoy using.

"Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.”

Kurt Vonnegut

In Baty.net • What do I even mean by "Simple?", I was looking for a definition of "simple". I aspire to simplicity, but never seem to find it.

For example, I switched my daily.baty.net blog between Kirby and Tinderbox three times in three days. One day, I want posting to be simple, so I use Kirby, because it's an easy-to-use CMS. The next day, I want hosting to be simple, so I go back to using Tinderbox as an SSG because static sites are simple to host.

The same thing happens with baty.blog vs baty.net. Simple means just typing stuff and hitting "Publish", right? WordPress makes that so easy, I should just use that. But then Zola is just markdown files generating a static website, so that's what I mean by simple.

And photography? Digital photography is the simple option. I don't have to deal with film and scanning or darkroom printing or any of that. Or maybe film photography is simpler. Really, using a small, manual Leica means all I need is a roll of film, a light bulb, and some chemicals. A fully manual camera is simple because there are no settings to fiddle with and it doesn't even need a battery! Or wait, a modern digital camera is even simpler because I can just point and shoot without thinking about focus or exposure or ISO, etc.

Taking notes using markdown files in a folder couldn't be simpler. I can use anything to edit them. And maybe Obsidian to manage everything. No, that gets too complex. Instead, my stable and very personal Emacs configuration is the simplest thing, right? Everything is right there in Emacs. All my notes for the past 10 years or so are in org-mode files. Simple!

Thing is, I switch between all of those options so often it makes me dizzy. No matter what I'm using or how I'm using it, the other thing eventually looks simpler to me, so I switch.

You know what would be the simple solution to simplicity? Stop changing everything all the time! If I would just lean into Emacs and be done with it, my writing/note-taking/task management system would be done and done. If I would realize that I'm emotionally inclined to using an SSG for publishing, I could post everything here using Zola. Simple as can be.

Anyway, long story short, the key to simplicity isn't finding the simplest possible thing. The trick is to stop looking.

But will I ever be able to stop looking?