Posts

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: (setq org-goto-interface 'outline-path-completionp) (setq org-outline-path-complete-in-steps nil) Now, the target list is a simple completion window showing the entire outline.

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. I found this to work: (setq org-use-fast-todo-selection 'expert) The default, I think, is “auto”

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 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. ...