We all know that I have too many blogs. What’s less obvious is that I use too many different notebooks. Here’s what’s currently in rotation:

1. A yellow legal pad. It’s nice to just throw stuff on the top page without thinking.
2. Leuchtturm 1917 A5 Notebook (lined). This is my sort-of bullet journal. I keep lists and notes here, mostly.
3. Hobonichi Techo. This is my calendar/planner. I keep appointments and important dates here. I also try to jot down a quick summary of the day or a small drawing representing something that happened.
4. Field Notes “Dime Novel” edition. I recently found this on a shelf and thought it too pretty to ignore. This is likely to become my next journal, even though I’ve cheated and started writing in it already.
5. Midori MD Notebook (lined). This is only for journaling. I like the paper and the 7mm lines.
6. Index cards. I can’t decide what goes on index cards, but I keep them everywhere, just in case. Usually, I write quotes on them so I can pin them to my bulletin board. I also have maintained a half-assed Zettelkasten on the cards, but that’s mostly died on the vine.

Is this too many? I don’t know. Some days it feels like a huge mess and I worry that I’m writing something in the “wrong” place. Other days, it’s perfect and I like having the options.

I still call this my “analog” desk. It’s for reading real books and articles. It’s for journaling. It’s for painting and drawing. It’s for sitting and staring out the window, even if the view is only that of a cul-de-sac in a boring middle-class suburb.

I sat here for a good portion of two days during a recent power outage. It was refreshing and mentally invigorating.

Back in photo.net’s and rangefinderforum.com’s prime, there was a gruff, opinionated, brilliant, and helpful forum member and photographer named Al Kaplan. He helped me a great deal after I got my first Leica.

When he died in 2010, his family sold mugs and T-shirts to raise money. I’ve kept the mug on my desk ever since.

At the end of each month, I convert my Org-journal entries into a nice PDF, print it, and put it into a binder.

It occurred to me that my daily.baty.net website content is just a bunch of markdown files that could be treated the same as my org-journal files and perhaps printed as well.

I started by concatenating March’s entries into a single Markdown file, like so:

cat 2023-03*.md >> ~/Desktop/202303-MarchBlog.md

The resulting file wasn’t in great shape for printing, so I had to clean it up. At minimum, I needed to do the following:

I’ve tried so many “read-later” services that I can’t remember half of them. They’re all basically the same: visit a website, click a button, and the article is saved to a list somewhere with all the other articles I’ve saved. Some newer services get fancy with recommendations, UI improvements, social integration, etc. but they all just gather a list of articles that I almost never end up reading. But, you know, just in case, right?