Please stand by

I'll be over at baty.blog for a bit

I’m feeling like a break from all this SSG-ness. I’ll see you at my WordPress blog at baty.blog for now.

October 1, 2025

CalDAV to my Emacs Diary

How I’m pulling my Fastmail calendar entries into Emacs diary entries.

September 29, 2025

Ah, blogging

So many options. So little patience.

September 29, 2025

Including Emacs diary entries in Howm menu

⚠️ Note that this doesn’t work properly. There’s a “nil” at the end. Howm has a handy menu for viewing tasks and notes. One thing I wanted to add was my Emacs diary entries for the current date. This took 3 things: First, I created a function for inserting the day’s entries from Emacs diary in the current buffer. (defun my/insert-diary-entries-for-today () "Insert diary entries for today at point." (interactive) (let ((diary-list-entries-hook nil) (diary-display-function 'ignore)) (let ((diary-entries (diary-list-entries (calendar-current-date) 1))) (if diary-entries (dolist (entry diary-entries) (insert (cadr entry) "\n")) (message "No diary entries for today"))))) (and by “I” I mean Claude, mostly) ...

September 26, 2025

Why does it matter if I use Emacs or not?

It makes no difference what software I use.

September 25, 2025

I wanted to try Linux so I bought 2 computers

I had better be right about this.

September 21, 2025

How to have only one blog

this is a question, not a manual

September 21, 2025
Lowfree keyboard

Lofree Flow84 keyboard

I got a new keyboard.

September 17, 2025
Photo of the deck

Denon DRS-810 Cassette Deck

I got a different new cassette deck and it’s pretty neat. Weird, but neat.

September 16, 2025
My desktop running Omarchy

It's all upside-down (computer-wise)

i run arch btw

September 15, 2025

Dusted off the Jack Tries Linux blog

Remember that time I was trying Linux “for real” and even created a blog to write about it? It was more an excuse to play with the clever BSSG blogging engine, but still. Well, I’m doing it again. This time with Omarchy, so I dusted off the BSSG blog and pushed a quick update. But, but, Omarchy! | Jack Tries Linux. Don’t expect much. This usually lasts about 3 days before fizzling out, but it’s always a fun-but-frustrating 3 days.

September 11, 2025
SANSUI AU-6900

Sansui AU-6900 Integrated Amplifier

New old stereo gear is wonderful

September 5, 2025
Film cameras on my desk

It's just that I prefer film

Sometimes I think I should quit shooting film. But I never do.

August 30, 2025

The Mylio conundrum

I’ve tried to make Mylio work a few times. Maybe this time it will.

August 28, 2025

Where have I been this week?

In case you’re wondering, I’ve been posting over on the wiki and daily.baty.net this week. I was in the mood for a change of venue. Also, I kind of got spooked by a small surge in traffic here. For someone who posts in public every day, I still don’t like being watched. So, I write in places that fewer people know or care about. It’s weird, I know.

August 27, 2025

The Grindification of Hobbies (Alistair on YouTube)

YouTube video about how hobbies aren’t fun anymore

August 22, 2025

I think I need a workflow intervention (aka Stop Leaving Emacs)

Rambling about a little loop I find myself going through with Emacs vs Not Emacs

August 21, 2025
Curio screenshot

Curio 32

Every year I renew my subscription to Curio, even though I haven’t used it much recently. I renew mostly to support development of one of the nicest, most thoughtful apps on macOS, but another reason is that George continues to add truly useful and interesting features year after year. I don’t know how he does it. Check out the Curio 32 Release Notes for details. Standouts for me are multiple project windows and improvements to Journal sections. I don’t need another journaling tool, of course, but I often consider it.

August 20, 2025
Black and white self portrait

Roll 046 (2025) / Ricoh GR1

The Ricoh GR1 looked sad in the “broken camera” drawer, so I loaded it up with a roll of HP5 and gave it a shot. It worked just fine. This time. Sometimes the LCD stops working. Sometimes the viewfinder gets blocked by something loose inside the camera. Usually it’s both those things, but this time I got through the roll without issue. It’s a great camera when it works. ...

August 20, 2025
Black and white film self portrait

Roll 045 (2025) / Rolleiflex 2.8D

I enjoy using the Rolleiflex so much that I am able to ignore how difficult it can be to focus and how sometimes it flares badly.

August 19, 2025