Posts

At the beginning of 2024, I had grand plans to Reduce & Simplify. I was also determined to use what I have. I’ve done neither of those things. It’s November.

I had fun today exploring my options for a browser-based workflow.

I wanted to add an :ID: property to several hundred files, but only if one didn’t already exist. I cheated and asked ChatGPT for help. It helped.

How I added a subtle link to edit the current page or post in Ghost.

There is no built-in method in Ghost for floating an image and having text flow around it. It’s a significant omission, and one which they say is “too hard” and have no plans to change. OK fine, I’ll do it myself.

The Canon AE-1 Program was my first real camera. Unfortunately, I no longer own that original from 1982, so I bought another one in 2013. It’s not a great camera, but it works. I like to put a roll through it now and then.

I spent the morning of the election with my daughter and grandson. It was a nice way to spend part of an otherwise anxiety-filled day.

OK, it’s happening again. Hugo broke my site for the second time in two updates. I got mad (again) and decided it was time for us to break up.

I’ve been back in Doom Emacs for a few days. This is how it’s going.

I am experimenting with using Org-roam again for my notes.

I sure wish Hugo would stop deprecating things.

I’ve added a search page. It uses Pagefind. It turns out I’d already begun work on this with the original site. The clue was a commented-out line in my Makefile:

I’m back to using Eleventy for my blog

Latest roll (HP5) from the Leica MP. Nothing much here to speak of, although I did use a manual flash on some of the indoor shots. I kind of like flash photos. They look like photos, you know?

Listing directories first and hiding file details by default in Dired

I kind of have an actual “wet side” now.

I sewed a drawstring bag

Improving site performance by adding Expires headers in my Caddy config.

OMG I never learn. Even when I write stuff down.

Making tags readable in Org-mode DONE headings

I’ve updated my org-mode reading list using my fork of the org-books package

This roll of HP5 from the Leica M31 was shot mostly in Grand Haven during one of our frequent walks through town and on the pier.

Self-portrait in mirror with Canonet I first decided to sunset the Canonet, in 2022 due to a few issues making it less than ideal to use. I have a short memory, and was feeling badly about the camera sitting on a shelf, so I loaded it up with a roll of HP5. Processing the roll yesterday reminded me why I’d set it aside:

I’m finding it difficult being “off” social media right now. Every time there’s a lull in my thoughts, I want to reach for one of my feeds. It’s how I avoid doing anything useful.

The new record from Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds is called “Wild God” and it’s fantastic. Nick Cave in a good mood is a rare and wonderful thing.

When a horrible billionaire ruins my wonder at the night sky

My SetApp subscription was scheduled to renew today, but I didn’t let it. I figured that if I buy the apps outright that I actually use, I’ll spend around the same amount as I would on a 1-year SetApp license for both Macs. The purchased apps would either come with lifetime licenses or a small annual upgrade fee. This means next year I’ll pay a much smaller amount for all the same software.

I’ve been testing a version of Johnny Decimal using folders and org-mode files. While doing this, I found myself frequently wanting to create a new .org file in the current (Dired) directory with the same name as the directory (long story).

Back on Micro.blog after some time away.

Roll of HP5 from the Leica MP

I spent the afternoon with my parents to celebrate their 62nd wedding anniversary. This roll of Tri-X was taken with the Hasselblad 500C/M and the 80mm Planar.

A roll of Kodak Gold 200 was languishing in the Nikon F100, so I used it up taking photos of Alice on our deck. Turns out that’s what I did with the first half of the roll, too :)

I’ve been trying to hang on to using DuckDuckGo as my default search engine, but the DDG results have become less and less useful for some reason, so I frequently head over to use Google search. Which, blech.

I was bored and feeling some nostalgia about Hugo so here we are again.

A portrait session with my aunt and uncle’s family. Taken using the Hasselblad 500C/M and 80mm Planar. HP5.

The Overstory, winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, is a sweeping, impassioned work of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of—and paean to—the natural world. From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, Richard Powers’s twelfth novel unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. There is a world alongside ours—vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe.

I may have solved at least some of my problems caused by taking notes too many different apps. I moved all of them into ~/Documents/Notes, with subfolders per app. So…

The viewfinder is kind of a mess right now. I have been thrilled to be able to use my little GR1 again, after pulling it off the shelf and finding that it does actually work. Except this morning I was reminded why I’d retired it before. The viewfinder becomes blocked by something loose in there or perhaps some sort of separation. Either way, it’s not usable when this happens, so I may have to document the issue and re-retire the camera.

Today I learned about SilverBullet SilverBullet is a note-taking application optimized for people with a hacker mindset. We all take notes. There’s a million note taking applications out there. Literally. Wouldn’t it be nice to have one where your notes are _more_than plain text files? Where your notes essentially become a database that you can query; that you can build custom knowledge applications on top of? A hackable notebook, if you will?

Whenever I change blogging platforms or domain names or simply post to several places, I feel a twinge of guilt. How will my “audience” feel about the changes? Does it confuse things?

I brought the Hasselblad to my parents house while my daughter and grandson were visiting. I underexposed the roll a bit, but the hit rate was better than expected. I love this one of my sister and Lincoln.

As often happens, I started to waffle on where to keep my notes. I blame Obsidian for this. But also Bear and Evernote and Logseq and DEVONthink and and and. 

Doom Emacs is pretty great, especially for former Vimmers. I lived in Doom for a long time because it makes so many little things nicer, without having to dedicate one’s life to customizing Emacs.

Jess on Trampoline I posted the above photo to Flickr 20 years ago today. It was my first. Flickr remains the best place to upload photos. I just wish it was still the best option for sharing them.

Photo Mechanic is the fastest, most powerful tool for ingesting/browsing/exporting photos. It’s always been a little expensive, but I’ve had a license for many years.

Most of the information I’ve written down about my cameras is either on my wiki or in random blog posts. I’ve decided to try and consolidate things in a new, separate wiki (using TiddlyWiki). It was trivial to drag and drop my original camera notes from the main wiki into this new wiki. I then copied the wiki file to my server, and it now lives here:

Tinderbox is an unusual, powerful, quirky, and amazing piece of software. I don’t understand why more people don’t use it for everything. Maybe because it costs $298 and that’s expensive by today’s app store race-to-the-bottom pricing situation. It’s worth every penny, though.

Recent versions of the new Lightroom (Desktop, not “Classic”) have added features making it feasible for me to use.

I’m tired of moving things around on my computers

My brain isn’t necessarily fast, but it’s always in a hurry.

I want things to be simple and without distraction. I want to avoid futzing all the time. To this end, I often try to move away from using Emacs for everything. Emacs is not simple, no matter how hard I try to force it to be simple.

I like the way Bear limits my options<

There are times I don’t feel like blogging the hard way1. When that happens, I look to simple, hosted, CMS-based blogging tools.

How about I stick QR codes on index cards as a way to quickly find the original reference?

My on-again-off-again relationship with Hey email is off again

So far today, (as of 9:57 am) I have installed three apps that I had deliberately avoided installing on the new Mac Mini.

Howm and TiddlyWiki share some features that I like

In the spirit of /Now and /Uses and /Hello pages, I’ve created a /Nope page.

Software doomsday scenarios take the fun out of everything

Reducing complexity is never accomplished by adding complexity.

I like this calculator better than the one it replaces

Look what I found in the garage:

I switched from using Lightroom Classic (LrC) to Capture One Pro (C1) “for good” back in 2021. It wasn’t because of Adobe’s subscription model, or because I had some vague aversion to Adobe, the company. It was because I felt like I was getting better images, faster, with C1.

I know, I know, the reMarkable 2 tablet is designed as a digital replacement for writing on paper. It’s not necessarily meant as a document reader. But that’s what I’ve been using it for.

howm is an Emacs package for taking notes. It was recommended to me recently, so I thought I’d take a look. The project page says “howm: Write fragmentarily and read collectively.” Worth a shot, right?

I bought a miniStack STX to go with the new M2 Mac Mini

Things would be easier if I stopped worrying about all sorts of meaningless computer things

As much as I would love a new X100VI, I don’t actually need one.

I don’t like the way Glass shows images in a desktop browser when the browser window is wider than around 1,000 pixels. I prefer the layout in narrower windows, but I never have mine that narrow. This means whenever I’m browsing Glass, I have to shrink the window.

This morning it took over 30 minutes to copy a 70MB file from my MBP to the Synology over WiFi. The wait resurfaced my thoughts about having an always-on computer on my desk with some fast, attached storage.

More like Perfect Movie_

A tactical, localized reset of my system(s)

I used to use Evernote as a junk drawer. Now what should I use?

I’ve been tinkering with keeping offline copies of websites (mostly mine), and have always used either wget or httrack. I wasn’t aware of the WARC format until recently, so I thought I’d try creating a few WARC archives.

Derek Sivers posted about how he handles backups and it got me thinking about how I handle backups.

For many years I’ve put every new folder full of anything into a new Git repo. I never questioned it, I just did it because that’s what you do.

I’m just coming off a week using Obsidian. Obsidian is really good and powerful and easy to use and extensible and probably the correct answer to the question, “Where should I keep my notes?”.

When is trying to avoid futzing actually just more futzing?

In which I think about using Lightroom again.

Notmuch can be used as a search engine from within Mutt and it’s super fast.

Using Mutt for email is awesome, but it makes me want to do everything in a terminal

After 12 years of using a Hobonichi Techo, I’m giving it up.

I’m really into paper-based tools lately. This is often a reaction to over-thinking my (digital) note-taking process. And oh my have I been over-thinking that process lately.

The new Saxon album is really good.

An extension for easily copying text from a web page into TiddlyWiki

OldBoy remains as powerful, beautiful, and unsettling as the first time.

The default error pages in httpd are awful

We’re back on Hugo for baty.net.

Canceling things brings mixed feelings

I canceled my Capture One subscription this morning, before it renewed for $180 for another year.

I just wanted to give a shout-out to Adam Porter for his Org-web-tools Emacs package.

I don’t need a new blogging platform, but if I did, I’d certainly be looking at Prose.sh. It’s blogging via sftp and rsync, which sounds awesome.

I spent some time in Obsidian again yesterday. I do this once a month or so just to see if somehow it’s changed into something I’d like to use. Obsidian is great software, in theory, but I still find it boring and unpleasant to actually use.

I tried OpenBSD. It’s nice. I don’t need it right now. (Or do I?)

It shouldn’t take so much time to keep my stuff running smoothly.

A few months ago I became twitchy about my aging Synology so I replaced it with an old Mac Mini. The idea was that I understand how Macs work and if something breaks I can more easily deal with it.

If forced to come up with a theme for 2024, I’m going with “Reduce & Simplify”.

The more I lean into using Org-mode files for everything, the more isolated I’m feeling. It may be irrational, because “plain text”, but having to export or otherwise translate everything when I post to my blog or other tools is becoming less fun. Org-mode Island is beautiful, but lonely.

Generating yearly and monthly calendars using Pcal on the command line

Following up after reading Jeremy Friesen’s response to my earlier post