Posts

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

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. ...

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. ...

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.

The Stylus Epic, HP5, and light leaks at the beach

I wanted a more generic version of my emacs lisp function for creating new posts. Claude helped me write it.

My blog turns 25 years old today

Switching between the MacBook Air keyboard and the HHKB keyboard can be off-putting. I have loved using the HHKB for years, but I’ve lost patience for the function layer and missing arrow keys. My pinky hurts too often. I’ve been using an Apple Magic Keyboard and Logitech MX Master 3, and, while I love the mouse, the keyboard was boring, but fine, except the spacebar would intermittently fail to register. That’s annoying. ...

I asked Claude to summarize my recent blog posts. Claude knows me.

I take a lot of screenshots using the built-in screen capture tool on macOS. By default, these are saved as PNG files, which are unnecessarily ginormous for my purposes, so I always convert them to .jpg files. Today I learned that the default format can be changed: defaults write com.apple.screencapture type jpg killall SystemUIServer Better.

I’ve been doing this for 25 years. I’m just not feelling it lately, ya know?

Captured in the act

I’ve rejiggered the Ghost blog I was using for this site into a dedicated photography blog. There’s a lot of cruft scattered about, and I’m using the default theme for now, but it’s a start. The idea is that it will help me focus on photography, which is something I want to do, but haven’t been doing. Sometimes I need a nudge, so baty.photo is a nudge. See Why do I need a separate site for photography? for a bit more detail. ...

Ongoing issues with choosing to journal using fountain pens.

The other day, I converted my entire TiddlyWiki into an Obsidian vault, just to see if I could. Since I still spend most of my time in Emacs, I thought it would be nice to search the vault from there. The post, From Obsidian to Emacs, by Mike Hostetler, mentioned using the Xeft package, so I thought I’d try it. Here’s my config: (use-package xeft :ensure t :defer t :config (setq xeft-recursive t) (setq xeft-database "~/.deft.db") (setq xeft-directory "/Users/jbaty/Documents/Notes/Vault/") (setq xeft-ignore-extension '("png" "jpg" "jpeg")) (setq xeft-extensions '("md")) (setq xeft-title-function #'file-name-nondirectory)) Xeft relies on Xapian for searches, so a module needs to be downloaded or built locally. I didn’t have any luck with the downloaded version, so I deleted the package, started over, and had it compile locally. The trick there was entering the prefix “/opt/homebrew” during installation, since I’d already installed Xapian using Homebrew. ...

Creating a new blog post for Hugo couldn’t be simpler. One simply creates a new Markdown file in the correct folder, making sure it contains the proper YAML front matter, and…OK, it’s not that simple. Normally I use a small lisp function in Emacs for creating posts, but that doesn’t help me on days that I don’t feel like using Emacs1. Another option would be to use the built-in hugo commands, but for some reason I never think of that. Probably because it requires that I cd to the right place and tell it what to name the file. ...

If he’s a bit manic for you, here’s part of the transcript that I’ve reformatted a bit: ...if you're a progressive, don't do this. Don't go on to the internet and go, "Hey fellow progressives, like maybe we should consider having, you know, a little - just just chill out a bit and have a bit of humility and realise that not everyone's had the opportunity to read the books we've read and not everyone's, you know, learned the lessons that you've learned. Maybe we should apply the Principle of Charity and not assume that anyone who disagrees with us has a nefarious intent and try and hear the best version of the argument, not the worst. And maybe we just need to-" They go, “Don’t you police my tone, you straight white male! Check your privilege!” ...

org-mouse is a built-in package for Org mode that lets one do some handy things using the mouse in Org files. Things like checking checkboxes and toggling subtrees. (use-package org-mouse :after org) Or just (require 'org-mouse) Clicking in [ ] Do this thing to complete it is easier than navigating to the line and hitting C-c C-c for each item. There’s no shame in using a mouse, even in Emacs. I sometimes prefer to sit back, grab the mouse, and click things. ...

I know I won’t like Obsidian this time, either. Yet, I keep trying.

What if I used Glass for my film roll posts, instead?