Misc

Selling cameras is usually a mistake

Posted on May 27, 2021 by Jack Misc

I’ve owned a lot of cameras and lenses.

More than average , I’d say. I’ve of course sold more than I currently own. With few exceptions, I regret selling any of them.

Remember how the Nikon F6 printed exposure data between frames?

/content/images/wordpress/2021/05/49801270101_cfb239991d_o-1024x707.jpg — Self-portrait with horse head. Nikon F6.

Or how nice it was having aperture-priority auto-exposure on the Leica M7?

/content/images/wordpress/2021/05/7989894332_70b83798b4_o-1024x683.jpg — Lobster Buoys. Mount Desert, Maine.

Or the Mamiya 6 with its giant square negatives in an easy-to-shoot package?

/content/images/wordpress/2021/05/33394942058_822b1a595f_k-1024x1033.jpg — Self-portrait with eggs. Mamiya 6.

I’ve been thinking about this lately while pondering all of the money I have tied up in various cameras and how infrequently I use some of them. My head tells me to sell everything I’m not using often, but my heart won’t let me. I always, always regret selling camera gear, so I think I’ll hang onto all of it for now. At least until circumstances dictate that I cannot.

A reluctant Lightroom user

Posted on May 18, 2021 by Jack Misc

I’ve never loved editing photos in Adobe’s Lightroom (Classic) . It does the job fine, and it has all the tools one might need, but it’s no fun. I prefer editing with Capture One Pro .

As much as I enjoy the editing process in Capture One, it otherwise feels like working on an island. C1 has no way to sync photos, the plugin/extension options are very limited, and while it works with other editors, it doesn’t do it as seamlessly as Lightroom. And so on.

Lightroom’s ecosystem is hard to beat. It works with nearly everything. I can sync with the mobile Lightroom CC library. It works with every plugin one could possibly want (most notably, Jeffrey Friedl’s and Negative Lab Pro .) There’s no end to the presets and styles available. If I want to do something with a photo, Lightroom is more likely to be able to handle it.

Lightroom’s cataloging is more capable than Capture One’s. Or at least it feels easier to use. I’d prefer not having to rely on a specific vendor’s tool for managing my lifetime of photos, but it’s better than only having them scattered in folders. Believe me, I’ve tried it that way numerous times. It’s liberating, but only for a moment, then it quickly becomes frustrating.

And of course I don’t like having to pay a monthly subscription to Adobe. That said, for $20 a month I get Lightroom Classic, Photoshop, Lightroom CC on all my devices, and 1TB of cloud storage. It’s a pretty good deal.

While I’m still looking for excuses to go back to Capture One, I am, reluctantly, back in Lightroom Classic for the majority of my photo management. For now.

Writing everything in TiddlyWiki and publishing just the public parts

Posted on May 8, 2021 by Jack Misc

I take all my notes in TiddlyWiki now, and publish most of them to wiki.baty.net .

For the past few years, I’ve published my wiki using TiddlyWiki. I write daily, publicly sharable notes there. Private stuff goes elsewhere…or did, until yesterday.

It’s the “elsewhere” part that drove me nuts. I have a private Roam database in which I would track things I don’t want to share. Or maybe I should write it in Org mode . Or Obsidian , or Craft , or or or. The difficult part for me has been that I want to take a note about, say, a new camera purchase. There are two components to it, the information about the camera itself, and information about the purchase. The former is public, the latter is private. This means I create one note in TiddlyWiki and one in, let’s say, Roam. There are dozens of examples like this, and it’s crazy-making. I thought I could manage this using links or copy/paste but it sucks trying to do that. I could also make everything public or private. Neither of these are feasible.

If only I could keep everything in one place, but only publish things I wanted public. Then, a few days ago, Soren Bjornstad came to the rescue with his video, A Tour Through My Zettelkasten .

Wow, other than building an amazing Zettelkasten, Soren has implemented nearly everything I needed in order to go all-in with TiddlyWiki for my own wiki.

A few highlights:

Public and Private tiddlers
Sensible tagging and organization
Override the “copy permalink” feature to substitute public URL when on localhost
Scripted rendering and publishing of public wiki
Specific behavior when viewing public vs private editions
A number of other nice touches

I borrowed some of these and integrated them into Rudimentary Lathe . Now, I’m taking all my notes in TiddyWiki. I’ll describe the process a little.

Editing the wiki locally.

I use TiddlyWiki as a local Node.js app. While one of TiddlyWiki’s great features is that can be just a single HTML file, running it locally as a single-page web app via node.js makes things a bit more flexible. Also, it’s the easiest way to allow for saving changes in Safari. The file structure looks like this:

├── files/
├── plugins/
├── tiddlers/
└── tiddlywiki.info

All tiddlers are kept as separate “.tld” files in the tiddlers folder. Here’s an example:

created: 20201220181044760
creator: jack
modified: 20210505182021507
modifier: jack
revision: 0
tags: Public
title: Leica APO-Summicron-SL 35mm ASPH
type: text/vnd.tiddlywiki

[img[files/2020/leica-apo-summicron-sl-35mm.jpg]]

I prefer primes, so this is the one I've chosen for the [[Leica SL2-S]]. Watching Peter Karbe admit it's is desert-island lens and suggesting it's the best lens Leica has ever produced made the decision a little easier.

I have over 2300 of them currently. Another nice side effect is that git diffs are much more usable on individual text files than on a giant HTML file.

Public vs Private content.

Any tiddler I want to be public gets a “Public” tag. That’s it. The export script is smart enough to automatically include all system tiddlers, etc so that everything works.

As a useful helper, each tiddler displays a “Publish this tiddler” checkbox to make adding the tag easier, as well as serving as a handy indicator of private vs public status. The export script updates one of the configuration tiddlers so that the published version doesn’t show this checkbox.

I can’t tell you how huge this is. Not having to choose the tool or app for new notes is so liberating. I can now write and link freely with everything and can still share most of it publicly.

Hosting

I’ve never used Github Pages for hosting any content, so thought this would be a good opportunity to try it. Basically, I keep a separate repo of the public version and pushing to that repo automatically publishes it. Super easy to set up.

Publishing workflow.

Soren was kind enough to share a version of the script for publishing his wiki (publish.sh), which I’ve modified slightly. Here are the highlights.

PRIV_FOLDER="rl-wiki"
PUB_FOLDER="public-wiki"

FILT='[is[system]] [tag[Public]] -[[$:/plugins/tiddlywiki/tiddlyweb]] -[[$:/plugins/tiddlywiki/filesystem]] -[prefix[$:/temp]] -[prefix[$:/state]] -[prefix[$:/sib/StorySaver/saved]] +[!field:title[$:/sib/WriteSideBar]]'

WIKI_NAME="index.html"ext_image_folder="extimage"

“FILT” is the tiddlywiki filter for determining which tiddlers to include (and exclude). The [tag[Public]] bit is the key to the public/private thing.

Then we export tiddlers based on the filter and settings above.

"$(npm bin)/tiddlywiki" "$PRIV_FOLDER" --savewikifolder "$pub_wiki" "$FILT"

Next, generate a single HTML version of the wiki and copy over the separate image files..

"$(npm bin)/tiddlywiki" "$pub_wiki"
    --render "$:/core/save/all" "$WIKI_NAME" text/plaincp -r "$pub_wiki/output"/* "$pub_ghpages"cp -R "$PRIV_FOLDER/files" "$pub_ghpages"

Isn’t TiddlyWiki amazing!?

Finally, we commit and push the public wiki to Github…

if [ "$1" = "--push" ];
then
echo "Pushing compiled wiki to GitHub..."
cd "$pub_ghpages" || exit 1
git add .
git commit -m "publish checkpoint"
git push
else
echo "Not pushing the wiki to GitHub because the --push switch was not provided."
fi

And voilà!

A few nice odds and ends.

Soren’s “Reference Explorer”, seen at the bottom of individual tiddlers, replaces my handmade backlinks display. His is much fancier. I removed a few tabs I don’t use, and may exclude the tags at some point. I conditionally exclude the explorer from my Daily Notes pages. (anything tagged “DailyNote” hides the explorer.) Another nice tweak is that if I add a “refexplorer-hide” field to any tiddler and set it to “true”, the explorer is not shown on that tiddler. Nifty.

TiddlyWiki comes with a button for copying a permalink to each tiddler. The problem with that for me is that when I’m running the wiki locally, permalinks look like this

http://localhost:8080/#CommandLineInterface, which obviously won’t work. Soren’s version of the button replaces localhost:8080 with the live hostname, e.g. https://rudimentarylathe.wiki/#CommandLineInterface . This saves me a ton of copy/paste/edit hassles.

Putting it all together.

When I’m ready to publish, I open a terminal and type prl (for “publish rudimentary lathe”)

prl is a script…

#!/bin/shcd ~/Sync/rudimentarylathe./scripts/publish.sh --push

That’s it.

I wish more people would spend time getting to know TiddlyWiki. It’s amazing. It’s a Quine , which makes it ridiculously flexible and powerful. And yet it’s very simple. It’s also a free, local-first, easily-distributable, storable, backup-able single HTML file.

TiddlyWiki is fun, fancy, and
future-proof. I live there now.

May is “Easy Mode” month

Posted on May 1, 2021 by Jack Misc

I’m exhausted. I think it’s because I haven’t been working in more than a month and my brain has had too much free time to “figure stuff out.” (Yes, I know how it sounds to complain about exhaustion while not having a job!)

As an experiment, I’m going to live the month of May in “Easy Mode”. This means I’m going to solve problems with quick, obvious, easy solutions. I’m going to use the easy-to-use tools. And I’m going to make various processes as easy as possible.

Examples? Sure!

Roam not Emacs
Lightroom CC not Photo Mechanic and Capture One
Things not Org mode
Day One not Org Journal
WordPress not Hugo
Streaming music not FLAC/MP3 files
Netflix not Plex
Books not Kindle
Walks not Workouts
Mac not Linux

It could be argued that some of these are backwards, but this is where I’m starting, and the gist is: nothing fancy for a while.

★★★ 3 stars by default

Posted on April 29, 2021 by Jack Misc

Here’s my star rating system for everything:

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Loved it!
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ It was good
⭐️⭐️⭐️ It was OK
⭐️⭐️ I didn’t like it
⭐️ Hated it

With me, everything gets 3 stars by default. Books, movies, photographs, everything: 3 stars right off the bat. I always assume that this new thing or person or conversation will be OK at the very least. This applies to more than just media. It applies to people, too. Sometimes I’m disappointed and end up with 1 or 2 stars, but more often than not I’m surprised and delighted and my opinion of something or someone goes up rather than down.

Too many people seem to start out assuming everything and everyone only deserve 1 or 2 stars. They expect to dislike everything by default. This doesn’t seem healthy to me. Why go out of your way to look for trouble?

My new note-taking system: Don’t take notes.

Posted on April 12, 2021 by Jack Misc

It feels like the entire world (or at least my corner of) is consumed by the “how” of note-taking. Tools, workflows, processes, backlinks, and on and on. Obsidian? Roam? Paper? I read it all. It’s fun and interesting and there’s no end of things to distract myself with. A distraction is all it is.

None if it really matters, though, and yet we endlessly split hairs and wring our hands and gaze at our navels over irrelevant minutiae. It’s exhausting. I’m not one of those people who wear “I never change my system” as a badge of honor. I can’t seem to stop. I’m too curious for that. FOMO and all.

As an attempt to extract myself from this loop, I’ve decided to stop taking notes for a while. This doesn’t mean I’m going to stop writing. Writing isn’t note-taking. Nor is journaling. I’ll still do that. That’s what all of this is supposed to be for, isn’t it? But I won’t be jotting down my recent thoughts about minimalism or digital record-keeping or the details of a conversation I had with a colleague or how much I paid for the wrench I just ordered.

No more Roam vs Obsidian vs Tinderbox vs Org mode vs The Archive or what-have-you until I stop obsessing over which is better or more private or more open source or if it uses the right kind of Markdown. No more worrying about whether I’m taking “smart” enough notes or if this one should be “evergreen” or not. How long should a zettel be, anyway?

I’m willing to bet there are lots of smart, productive, happy people around that take very few notes and aren’t missing anything. I would love to be one of those people.

Are automatic backlinks useful?

Posted on April 10, 2021 by Jack Misc

When I started using Roam, I found the way it handled backlinks to be a revelation. Other software does backlinks, but Roam’s implementation made it feel new. Suddenly, backlinks felt necessary.

I started writing everything in Roam’s Daily Notes, and I’d link things by putting brackets around each word or phrase that I thought I might want to review later. I made lots of links. After a while, I noticed that many (most?) of these linked words and phrases would end up as empty Roam pages containing nothing but backlink references.

In effect, what I was doing was creating saved searches.

I noticed something similar in my TiddlyWiki at rudimentarylathe.wiki . The automatic backlink references at the bottom of each note were in most cases links from one of the daily notes, and this ended up as a collection of backlinks like “2021.04.10 – Daily Note”. Not very helpful. Would I be better off just searching for the topic in question? I think so, so I recently changed the note footer on the wiki to do just that. It now shows a list of “tiddlers” with the most mentions of the current tiddler and also those with titles containing the same word. You know, like saved searches.

I’m starting to question the value of automatic backlinks in my notes. I still want them, but I’m not sure I need them the way I thought I did. They no longer feel necessary, but are they useful?

I started thinking about this again after re-reading Sascha Fast’s post, Backlinking Is Not Very Useful — Often Even Harmful . I had an adverse reaction to the article when I first read it. I thought it was mostly sour grapes because Roam was eating The Archive‘s lunch. I read it as, “The Archive doesn’t have automatic backlinks, so they must be bad and you don’t need them!” There was this right in the first paragraph:

Automatic backlinks are not only automatic when there is software that is showing them for you. If you create a backlink apparatus by habit it is still automatic. The automatization software would then be in your head

That felt like some rationalization gymnastics right there. I looked up “automatic” and it said, “done or occurring spontaneously, without conscious thought or intention”. A habit of manually creating links still involves conscious thought and intention.

And then the article went on to try and cast automatic backlinks as “linking notes” vs manual linking as “connecting knowledge”. I thought that was a bit of a semantic crutch.

Here’s another stretch…

Just think a moment about how difficult it really is to use the internet and its web in a productive way. The single most productivity-destroying problem with using the internet is the temptations link provide. The same is true for your Zettelkasten if your link structure is not well-groomed.

To compare the distraction of links on the internet at large to those within my own writing in a curated Zettelkasten doesn’t seem at all relevant.

I was looking for problems with the article going in, and I felt that I found them straight away, so I skimmed the rest with a jaded eye and a bad attitude.

I may have overreacted.

Now that I’ve spent a year building my notes using tools that make backlinks easy and automatic, I’m coming around to Sascha’s point of view. I have hundreds of empty “pages” containing nothing but backlinks. There’s no context, no color. No knowledge. It’s just “linking notes”. Here’s Sascha’s closing comment:

Backlinks are a perfect example on how features of software not only can be useless but actively harming you work by redirecting your attention towards to the superficial belief that you need to place links, instead of trying to connect knowledge.

I still feel that “harmful” is an exaggeration, but I better understand his point now that I’ve had some time with it.

The answer to the title of this post is, of course, “It depends”.

Many people use the term “zettelkasten” for any old pile of notes. But for a true zettelkasten, one containing notes specifically intended to help garner and build one’s knowledge over time, automatic backlinks aren’t as useful. Explicitly linking between ideas and notes and providing context for the links is much better.

For other collections of notes, though, automatic backlinks can be very helpful, even though they aren’t functionally much different from saved searches. For example, I keep notes about people I know. Having backlinks created automatically whenever I link to “Mom”, for example, is a nice way to see all of the times I’ve mentioned her, right there next to my notes about her. This, for me, is very useful. Hi mom!

Doom Emacs from scratch

Posted on March 10, 2021 by Jack Misc

A week ago I decided to cancel Doom Emacs and go back to building Emacs from Scratch , and once again I was reminded what a terrible idea that is.

Seriously, stock Emacs, even with a leg up from Nano Emacs , gets so many things “wrong” that I could spend the rest of my life fixing things and still wanting more. I thought building from scratch would help me avoid Configuration Fatigue . Wow, was I wrong.

So, back to Doom. I started from scratch with the usual…

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs ~/.emacs.d~/.emacs.d/bin/doom install

Then I edited init.el and enabled just a few non-stock things. “Zen” mode, org-journal, and pandoc-mode. Otherwise, it’s right out of the box.

I copied the gotta-haves from my original config.el. Most of these are around file paths, Org mode, and LaTeX. Plus a few of my favorite key bindings. Otherwise, I left it alone. So far.

Doom Emacs is simply too good to pass up. It handles all of the little behavioral and visual tweaks that would otherwise take forever to learn about and modify on my own. Half of the things it does for me I just expect to be part of Emacs, and am surprised when I find they’re not.

I’m still using the default Doom theme, which isn’t my favorite, but I’m trying to resist farting around with that for at least a couple of days while I get settled back in.

Book logging in plain text

Posted on March 6, 2021 by Jack Misc

Of all the ways I’ve logged books, I’m thinking that plain text remains the best. I’ve been adding books to a text (Markdown) file for while now and it’s not pretty, but it works. And it will always work.

I publish a copy at www.baty.net/books books.baty.net

Like I said, it ain’t pretty. On the other hand, I use it regularly by simply running little searches. If I want to know how many books are read in 2020, it’s just grep 2020- books.md | wc -l and I get 14. To see the actual books, it’s even easier: grep 2020- books.md which gives me this:

A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books by Nicholas A. Basbanes (2020-01-05) | ★★★★
How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell (2020-02-05) | ★★
The Instructions by Adam Levin (2020-02-15) | ★★★★
The Wisdom of Insecurity by Alan W. Watts (2020-03-06) | ★★
American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins (2020-03-09) | ★
Recursion by Black Crouch (2020-04-05) | ★★★
Devoted by Dean Koontz (2020-04-23) | ★★★
The Soul of an Entrepreneur by David Sax (2020-05-04) | ★★★
Shakespeare for Squirrels by Christopher Moore (2020-06-09) | ★★★
Network Effect (The Murderbot Diaries, #5) by Martha Wells (2020-06-24) | ★★★★
Dark Matter by Blake Crouch (2020-07-19) | ★★★★
The Permanent Portfolio by Craig Rowland (2020-07-22) | ★★★
More Effective Agile by Steve McConnell (2020-10-10) | ★★★
Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits (Zoey Ashe, #1) by David Wong (2020-12-27) | ★★★★

Or, how many books have I read by Christopher Moore? grep 'Christopher Moore' books.md:

Coyote Blue by Christopher Moore (1999-01-01)
The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove by Christopher Moore (1999-01-01)
The Griff: A Graphic Novel by Christopher Moore (1999-01-01)
Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal by Christopher Moore (2008-12-24)
Island of the Sequined Love Nun by Christopher Moore (2009-03-12)
A Dirty Job by Christopher Moore (2010-12-28)
Bloodsucking Fiends by Christopher Moore (2010-12-28)
The Stupidest Angel by Christopher Moore (2011-01-01)
Secondhand Souls by Christopher Moore (2015-11-12)
Noir by Christopher Moore (2018-05-15)
Shakespeare for Squirrels by Christopher Moore (2020-06-09) | ★★★

It’s not perfect, and leaves out any kind of social discovery, so I also enter books in both GoodReads and StoryGraph , which honestly only takes a few minutes per book so it’s hardly a burden.

I love that my plain text book log is so lightweight and simple.

It’s not a good darkroom, but it works

Posted on January 12, 2021 by Jack Misc

My last house had a proper darkroom. It was a little janky, but there was a big sink, room for three enlargers, a wet side, a dry side, etc.

When I moved into my new house, I originally planned to turn an extra room in the basement into a shiny new darkroom. That didn’t happen, so I’ve been using the bathroom instead. It works fine.

Here’s my fancy darkroom.

The worst part of the whole thing is that tiny faucet. At minimum I should put in a tall one. As it is now, I need to fill a 1qt measuring cup, and then use that to fill containers. It’s a pain. The HomePod is nice because I can just tell it what to play in the dark.

I don’t have a fitting for the faucet to run a hose into the washing tray, so I just let the faucet pour into it.

I ran some string across the shower to use as a hanger for drying prints and film. Works great.

Here’s the meat of the operation. This is the bathroom closet, converted into the “dry side”. There’s room for this Leitz Focomat V35 enlarger. The V35 is a fantastic piece of equipment, but only enlarges 35mm film. I’m considering something that can do medium format as well. I have two 4×5 enlargers in storage but there is no way they’d fit. I can, however, make 4×5″ contact prints on 5×7″ paper. I love making those, so that should do.

There’s room for all sorts of photo paper and chemicals. I’ve only been making enlargements up to 8×10″ so some of this is no longer needed but I can’t bring myself to get rid of it. I also store my film scanner here.

Anyway, that’s it. That’s my darkroom. I was planning to not shoot any film in 2021 but I don’t think that’ll stick, so I dusted everything off and mixed up a fresh batch of chemicals in preparation for spending more time here.