Posts

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. wget, as it happens, has WARC support built in via the –warc-file option. I added that to my usual set of switches and put it all in a shell script, like so. #!/bin/sh # warc-archive.sh https://example.com warc-file-name wget \ --mirror \ --warc-file=$2 \ --warc-cdx \ --page-requisites \ --html-extension \ --execute robots=off \ --directory-prefix=. \ --wait=1 \ --random-wait \ $1 This creates a compressed, self-contained WARC file along with a mirrored set of files comprising the entire site. ...

Derek Sivers posted about how he handles backups and it got me thinking about how I handle backups. I feel like I’m mostly covered. I use Backblaze on my MacBook Pro for continuous, off-site backups of both the internal SSD and the attached “Media” drive containing my photos, videos, etc. I clone “Media” to a separate external drive once a week. iCloud syncs my ~/Documents and ~/Desktop folders, so that should be covered. The headless Mac Mini is also using Backblaze. The Synology is synced nightly to Backblaze B2 storage. ...

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 thinking about no longer doing this. This morning I was daydreaming while waiting for a folder to finish rsyncing to a server and I was mesmerized by page after page of lines like “.git/objects/fb/70e546350cc4106caf1225706b44c85087ed27” scrolling by. I checked a few of my projects and was surprised by how much space all those .git/ directories use. ...

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?”. I love Obsidian for a minute because of what it does and the fact that it’s not whatever I’d been using previously. It’s refreshing and finding new plugins to play with is good fun. But it’s janky. Why don’t more people complain about it being janky? It’s just blech to actually live in. It feels weird and loose and sloppy to me. ...

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. Using paper is more work, but it’s worth it. Here are a few random thoughts I’ve had about it recently. Paper’s immutability is something you’d think one would put into the “Cons” column, but I find it to be its greatest feature. I’m fickle and uncertain and my digital notes suffer because of it. When I write something in a (paper) notebook, there it is, forever. I can scribble it out or copy it onto later pages, but I can’t change my mind and move it somewhere else based on whatever “system” I decide upon that day. It’ll always be right in that spot, in that notebook. I love this. ...

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. For the past few months, I’ve been learning how to create a blog using Kirby CMS and it’s been a blast. Kirby is pleasant, easy, and fun to use. I’m glad I did it. I won’t bother you with a 2,000-word rationalization piece about switching. I just felt like using Hugo again, so here we are. I missed my nice Emacs-based publishing workflow. I missed “normal” YAML front matter. I missed having a completely static website. Who knows where we’ll be in a month, but today we’re using Hugo. I went back to the PaperMod theme. I don’t love how boring it is, but it’s clean, feature-rich, frequently updated, and easy to customize. ...

Canceling things brings mixed feelings

I canceled my Capture One subscription this morning, before it renewed for $180 for another year. I hadn’t planned to do this. The plan was to cancel my Lightroom subscription ($10/month) and run with C1 for the year. Capture One has more to offer, and I like the files I get from it better than from Lightroom. So what happened? When canceling the Lightroom subscription, I was informed that there would be an early-termination fee of $49. I’d forgotten that the $10/month subscription was subsidized by agreeing to pay for a year. They just charge me monthly. That was disappointing. ...

I just wanted to give a shout-out to Adam Porter for his Org-web-tools Emacs package. I only discovered his package a month or so ago and I’ve used it daily since. Put a URL in the clipboard, then in an Org-document run M-x org-web-tools-insert-web-page-as-entry and bam!, the page is converted into Org’s format and inserted as a heading in the current file. For example, here’s Jason Velazquez’s post about Blogging Platforms, all tucked away nicely in my “Blogging Platforms” Denote note… ...