Journal

I’m not saying anything new, but I feel like we’ve lost the battle for having good and useful products and services. Is it just me, or does every product seem to only grudgingly accept the actual user as a necessary evil? We’re secondary to whatever is actually making the money. Call me a grumpy old man, but I hate this trend. “Enshittification” is an over-used meme word by now, but I can’t think of a better one.

The thing about BOGO (Buy One, Get One free) is that I end up buying something I don’t need, just so I can get a second thing I don’t need.

I wish I would find something better to do.

Certain software tools click with me. TiddlyWiki, Emacs, BBEdit, and OmniFocus are the ones that I am thinking of right now. I love them all.

I noticed that the “cover” images for my posts aren’t showing up when reading my feed in Elfeed. It’s because I use absolute URLs without a hostname. Other readers, like NetNewsWire, prepend the hostname automatically. I don’t think I’ll fix it yet, because using full URLs makes me twitchy, because I’m me and I move things.

It’s unanimous, people prefer the one post/day journal format here on baty.net. “All in one place is best” seems to be the consensus. I’ll try.

I removed the “Open to Work” label from my LinkedIn profile. Not because I’m not open to work, but because I truly can’t stand being anywhere near LinkedIn. The type of people who would hire me are just as likely to find me elsewhere.

While scrolling through the Books I’ve Read, I realized that I don’t remember the first thing about most of them. There are a few standouts, of course, but for the most part reading feels like temporary entertainment. I hope some of it is absorbed and becomes a useful part of my brain, but it doesn’t seem like that’s happening.

If they had fed the language machines a diet of cupcake recipes, history might have gone another way.

Dan Milnor: Adobe Max Day One

I often analyze tools before I actually need them. That’s silly, and a waste of energy. It leads to a pile of software that I don’t need, but also a bunch of opinions about them that aren’t really valid.

I’ve added a search page here. Some notes: Searching baty.net

I just realized that there’s no way to search this blog. I wonder if I can use the same tooling as the Hugo blog. This doesn’t seem like fun.

My problem is that I love different software for different reasons. I love Tinderbox, Emacs, and TiddlyWiki equally for taking notes. Today I’ve been testing The Archive again, because it does certain things really well. Sometimes I use all of them in a single day. It’s not an effective or efficient way of working, but my love of wonderful software makes it difficult for me to avoid the behavior.

I thought that as soon as I sat my butt down at this computer after four days away that I would have all sorts of things lined up to talk about, but nothing much comes to mind. It’s 11:30 AM, so maybe later?

The best way I’ve found of preventing photos from looking too digital is to make them with film.

How about we collectively stop apologizing for how often we write on our blogs or what we write about on our blogs. Newsletters, too, while we’re at it.

Trying some things with Eleventy

Bringing back the Rudimentary Lathe blog. MWeb Editor. Continued Emacs waffling.

More on this week with Obsidian.

Obsidian again? Vision Pro hottakes are already annoying.

Generative AI, social media, blog comments

Om on the Leica Q3. Unsubscribing from finger-pointers.