Posts

Putting the new Rolleiflex through its paces by subjecting it to some self-portraits of me

Took a walk with the new Rolleiflex this afternoon

This week has been a whirlwind of blogging changes. Or, more accurately, a whirlwind of me thinking about blogging changes.

You may have noticed that I’ve been toying with the idea of moving my main blog to Ghost at https://copingmechanism.com. This all started because the folks developing Ghost have been working on implementing ActivityPub features directly into Ghost, and I like the idea of blogging and reading/posting to social media in one place.

I’m not the only one who thinks it’s too much work.

Remember my “Reduce and Simplify” goal for 2024? That was a good idea, eh?

Folder Preview is a quick look extension for previewing the contents of folders on macOS. It’s $1.99 and worth every penny.

I recently discovered Org mode’s speed keys option and it’s pretty great. One caveat with speed keys is that they only work if the point is at the very beginning of a heading. To help with this, I (with Claude’s help) created a small lisp function and hook to move the insertion point to the beginning of the first heading whenever I open an Org mode file. I’m recording it here in case it’s useful to anyone else.

The luminous and shocking beauty of the everyday is something I try to remain alert to, if only as an antidote to the chronic cynicism and disenchantment that seems to surround everything, these days. It tells me that, despite how debased or corrupt we are told humanity is and how degraded the world has become, it just keeps on being beautiful.

An early attempt at exporting my Journelly journal to PDF

I’m still mad at Hugo, so I’m spending time in Opposite Land. Blogging with Ghost, that is.

I bought a new car today. Before we get to that, I’d like to tell you about my old car.

If I were to only have one computer, I’d use notmuch for email in Emacs. I might also import non-email stuff as notmuch messages so I can search everything in one place.

I started using Blot for my blog in 2017. Blot is a really nice way to publish a blog from a folder full of Markdown files. Blot’s author, David, is exceptionally helpful.

Hugo is actively developed and still gets a lot of attention. This is fine. What’s not fine is that it seems like every third update introduces breaking changes.

Nostalgia is some powerful stuff, ain’t it?

Today I learned about BSSG, a static site generator written using Bash.

It’s my dad’s 84th birthday. I had the M3 with a roll of HP5.

“There is a computer disease. Anybody who works with computers knows about it. It’s a very serious disease and it interferes completely with the work. The trouble with computers is that you ‘play’ with them!”

I don’t mean to be rude, but I don’t care much what you think. OK, that’s not exactly true, I care deeply what you think. Maybe it’s more accurate to say that I don’t worry about what you think. Are you mad that I keep switching platforms? Sorry, not sorry. Are you annoyed that I use words like “just” and “maybe” and “really” too often? Yeah, me too. We’ll get over it. Does it bother you that I don’t do enough throat-clearing before mentioning something that has become problematic? You’ll be fine. Would you prefer that I only write about Emacs? Not happening.

Kirby CMS uses plain .txt files for content. Since the bare .txt files should not be accessible with a browser, one normally uses a path matcher in Caddy and then denies requests based on a path, like so…

I saw the Irreal post about Journelly, but mostly ignored it because I wasn’t looking for a new iOS journaling app. He did mention that Journelly is by Álvaro Ramírez, author of Plain Org, lmno.lol, and others, so that made things more interesting.

I’ve migrated daily.baty.net to Kirby CMS. It has been a static site managed by Tinderbox for a long time. I love Tinderbox, but now that baty.net is back on Hugo, I wanted a playground for learning more about Kirby, without moving the main blog back and forth between Hugo and Kirby. So, here we are.

I ran across something neat while reading the Mu4e release notes

I thought it would be neat to include the date and weather on the images I use for my journal entry covers here on the blog.

I maintain a list of shell commands for updating Make/Model/Lens information in film scans. I’ve always run this via babel in a code block in an Org mode file. Something like this:

I was feeling envious of the Obsidian Web Clipper, which is quite fancy, so I thought I’d try leveraging it for use with Denote.

I upgraded PHP to v8.3 (from 8.2) today on the server running baty.net. I don’t pretend to be an Ubuntu sysadmin, so I’m writing it down, just in case.

I’ve not been shooting much film recently. Yesterday, I was bored and in a mood, so I grabbed the Hasselblad and fired off a roll using Alice as my model. Only one frame was good enough to share. I really like it, so it was worth sacrificing the other 11.

For a while, I tried maintaining a combined RSS feed that included posts from all my sundry blogs. I kept it at /everything.rss. It was managed as part of my WordPress blog, and since I’ve stopped using WordPress, I’ve been redirecting /everything.rss to the feed for baty.net, which is either /feed or /index.xml, depending on my blog platform of the day.

A few quick thoughts after just over a month with the new Nikon Z f

Scrolling with the Logitech MX Master in Safari sucks out of the box. The following from this Reddit thread helped, even though it required installing 2 additional packages.

While tinkering with Obsidian recently, something I liked was having a daily notes template with a Dataview query showing the other files I’d added that same day. I added something similar for Denote. It’s a Yasnippet:

I’ve gone back to using Espanso for text expansion. As powerful as Keyboard Maestro is, every time I reach for it I feel like I’ve already lost a battle somewhere. Text expansion macros are about all I use KM for these days, so it’s not much of a disruption.

Finished a roll of HP5 today with some shots of my grandson, of course. Here’s 4 from the roll.

On macOS, hitting CMD-Shift-. in Finder toggles the display of hidden (.dot) files. I wanted the same thing in Dired mode.

Using both Howm and Denote for my notes in Emacs. But why?

Scrolling with the Logitech MX Master in Safari sucks out of the box. The following from this Reddit thread helped, even though it required installing 2 additional packages.

I like having a felt pad on my desk, but I don’t like how it sometimes causes mouse movements to become choppy.

Ladybird: Ladybird is a brand-new browser & web engine. Driven by a web standards first approach, Ladybird aims to render the modern web with good performance, stability and security.

A week ago, I toyed with the idea of using Gnus for reading Email in Emacs. As expected, I hated it at first. But then…

Hang on a sec… digg reboot

I went down a rabbit hole with the built-in Remember mode in Emacs today.

lmq-10/denote-search This package provides a search utility for Denote, the simple-to-use, focused-in-scope, and effective note-taking tool for Emacs.

We look good together, no? When I bought the Nikon Z f recently, the way I intended to offset the cost was to sell the Leica SL2. The mistake I made was to buy the Nikon before selling the Leica.

My use of Howm has continued to grow organically. In other words, I don’t set out to use Howm, it just happens :). One of Howm’s unique features is its TODO implementation:

We are born with hearts that want to leave a mark on the world. This ability is not lost, it is taken from us.

Currently, my blog has two types of posts, Journal and Post. Journal entries are comprised of things I collect or think about during each day. I post one per day. Posts are your typical blog post. Posts are (usually) a bit longer and are about a single topic.

AlphaSmart Neo 2 I started free writing again a couple weeks ago, but this time I’m doing it digitally, using the AlphaSmart Neo 2. I dove hard into “Morning Pages” after reading Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, but it didn’t last long. I mean, c’mon, there’s no way I can consistently write 3 lined pages, longhand, every morning.

I “settled” on using notmuch for my email, but now I’m reconsidering that decision.

The other day, while bored, I shuffled around the house and burned through a roll of film, just for something to do. I took photos of random stuff that I use or see every day. The photos were boring af but, for some reason, because they’re film I think they’re kind of cool.

You are all a bunch of sick freaks.:

Heh, Dave noticed that I bought a new camera and now he’s thinking about new cameras.

In a desperate attempt to spark some enthusiasm for photography, I bought a Nikon Zf. I know, this is not the best approach, but it’s what I did so here we are. I’m jotting down a few quick thoughts and first impressions. (This isn’t a review. Just notes to myself about the camera).

Linus Torvalds (Mastodon): I’m a card-carrying atheist, I think a woman’s right to choose is very important, I think that “well regulated militia” means that guns should be carefully licensed and not just randomly given to any moron with a pulse, and I couldn’t care less if you decided to dress up in the “wrong” clothes or decided you’d rather live your life without feeling tied to whatever plumbing you were born with. And dammit, if that all makes me “woke”, then I think anybody who uses that word as a pejorative is a f*cking disgrace to the human race.

I’ve decided to exclude “Journal” posts from the RSS feed. Thing is, I like how it feels to write stuff here knowing that it’s not “going anywhere”. If something shows up that is particularly brilliant, I’ll create a separate post. Since most things are decidedly not particularly brilliant, I’ll feel better keeping it to myself (and the handful of loonies people who actually come and visit the website).

I wish I’d stop writing about the tools I use to write about the tools I use.

I was so bored today that I grabbed the first camera I saw with a partially used roll (the Nikon F100) and walked around the house snapping anything at all. One of the shelves in my office

I got big into TiddlyWiki around 2018, when I created my Rudimentary Lathe wiki. For a few years there, I put stuff into it daily. I sometimes drift away to something New/Shiny, but I always end up back in TiddlyWiki. Off the top of my head, here are a few things I like about TiddlyWiki:

Now that I’ve solved my Notmuch sync problems, I’m more inclined to move ahead with converting other content into emails and indexing them using Notmuch. I thought I’d start with my blog posts.

I hesitate to use org-goto in my Org mode files because I find the UI for it to be confusing. In a recent post, Streamlining Navigation in Org-Mode using an adapted org-goto, James Dyer makes some nifty improvements. The TL;DR is this:

You’ll notice that baty.net is back to using Hugo1. I really like Kirby, but every time I use a platform that’s not fully static, I get twitchy, and I got twitchy. I’m using a new theme, Anubis2, which I find to be easy to read and just the right amount of boring. It doesn’t have all the features of the PaperMod theme I was using, but it’s simpler, and simpler is what I was after.

When I have two Emacs windows split side-by-side in a frame, calling org-todo opened a full-width window at the bottom of the frame. This would be fine, but then when dismissing the selection window, it would wipe my previous window layout and I’d be left with a single giant window.

Sometimes what looks like selfishness is really just self care.

I wasn’t planning to put journal posts here. I don’t like how they fill up the archives with a list of dates. Yet, here I am.

I’m happy using Fish for my shell. One thing I’d not gotten around to after switching is finding a good directory jumper. The original z doesn’t work well with Fish. I used to use fasd and autojump, but thought I’d look around for something new. For some reason, I’d never heard of zoxide: A smarter cd command. Combined with zoxide.fish: Tab completion and initialization for zoxide in fish shell, zoxide does the job nicely.

I’ve spent a lot of time over the past couple years forcing various blogging platforms to behave the way I want them to. That is: Daily notes grouped by day, with stand-along posts scattered between.

The Social Media Sea Change - by Anne Helen Petersen

Pagefind makes me happy. It is a static search library that is so easy to configure and use that I can hardly believe it. Here’s a quick summary of how I implemented Pagefind search here in the Anubis2 Hugo theme1.

Twibright Labs: Links It’s a Lynx-like web browser. I don’t quite understand why I would want to use it for everyday browsing, but it’s fun to see what sites look like without all the hubbub. Here’s this site in links:

An absolutely gripping psychological thriller packed with a twist you won’t see coming

Testing a photo via Figure short code with a caption.

I wish I could quit social media. This seems like a good cause:

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.

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

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. 

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. 

Reading Jeremy’s post about keeping his personal journal helped clarify some of the thoughts I’ve been having about mine.

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:

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 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:

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.

One of the things that frustrated me about Kirby last year was handling code/template changes vs content changes. I complained about it here.

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.

I like the idea of building my own Emacs config, so I set Doom aside and (re)built my own configuration (mostly) from scratch.

I like the idea of building my own Emacs config, so I set Doom aside and (re)built my own configuration (mostly) from scratch.

Deleting things I don’t really need is liberating.

A roll of HP5 through the Olympus Stylus Epic.

It’s been nearly a month using Ghost, so it was time to switch back to Hugo.

Some former Nik Software people are building a new tool for managing photo libraries. It’s called Aspect. I’m a sucker for any photo-related software, so I installed the beta and spent yesterday testing it. I took some notes after using it for a day.

Every note-taking app handles file attachments differently. Most of them do it poorly. What I’ve found surprising is that I actually like what Org mode does with attachments. I might be the only one who does.

All I want is Letterboxd for books. LibraryThing is the Craigslist of book trackers. Goodreads is icky. TheStoryGraph has a layout I don’t get along with. Bookwrym is decent, but doesn’t feel that great. Plus, I don’t care if my reading list is “federated”.

How to export a note with images from Tinderbox and end up with a fully self-contained HTML archive.

I bought a nice Nikon FE2, but I don’t love it enough to keep it.