Posts

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 We have mistaken others’ recognition of a thing for actually experiencing the thing. I find this to be tangental to making photographs. I’m not sure what I’d take pictures of if I had no way to share them. Or if I’d take them at all.

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 Do you know why I didn’t see it coming? Because the narrator is not only unreliable, he’s a liar. Also, things like, and I’m (barely) paraphrasing here, “Does she like me? I think she likes me!” What is he, 15? I was bored. Rating: ★☆☆

Testing a photo via Figure short code with a caption. Lincoln (2025). Nikon FM2n. HP5+

I wish I could quit social media. This seems like a good cause: The definitive guide for escaping social media (and joining the indie web.) Unplatform

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. source: Bad shape

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

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. Sometimes I get twitchy about having things in only one place, so today I decided I’d like to import my Apple Password passwords into Pass. It took me a minute, so I’m jotting down some notes here, for next time. ...

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. A few years ago I promised myself that if something required ./configure && make && make install I would skip it. Well, I really wanted to try it, so off I went. The make command failed immediately because it couldn’t find notmuch.h. Great, path problems. After an hour of throwing things at the wall, adding some environment variables worked: ...

Reading Jeremy’s post about keeping his personal journal helped clarify some of the thoughts I’ve been having about mine. Some Entries from My Personal Journal: On Tuesday the 12th of November, 2024, I started what I hoped to be a new habit. That is writing a personal daily journal. Over the weeks, I expanded my aspirations to include a daily check list of activities I wanted to do. I’ve been consistently keeping a personal journal for years. I write primarily using Org-journal, a Daybook.org file, and a paper notebook. My problem isn’t that I don’t journal enough, but rather that I can’t decide where to journal. ...

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: #!/bin/sh # Jack Baty, 2023 (https://baty.net) # Grab and parse weather info using WeatherAPI.com jq=/opt/homebrew/bin/jq # Save the response to temporary file # TODO: shouldn't this just be a variable or something instead? weatherfile=`mktemp` curl -s "https://api.weatherapi.com/v1/forecast.json?key=[SNIP]&q=49301&days=1&aqi=no&alerts=no" > $weatherfile now=`${jq} -r .current.condition.text ${weatherfile}` temp=`${jq} -r .current.temp_f ${weatherfile}` condition=`${jq} -r .forecast.forecastday[0].day.condition.text ${weatherfile}` high=`${jq} -r .forecast.forecastday[0].day.maxtemp_f ${weatherfile}` low=`${jq} -r .forecast.forecastday[0].day.mintemp_f ${weatherfile}` echo "${now} ${temp} | Low ${low}, High ${high}" Right now, this returns: Light snow 21.9 | Low 20.1, High 26.4 ...

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 wrote a little about Filtering server logs for use with GoAccess recently, but have since tweaked things a little. One thing I found annoying was that GoAccess reports requests separated by HTTP protocol. So HTTP2 and HTTP1.1 requests are counted separately. Not what I wanted, so I discovered --http-protocol no and --http-method no. I’m always going to want this, so I added the following to /etc/goaccess/goaccess.config ...

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? ...