Daily notes from Jack about everything

🗓 Tuesday, December 31, 2024

I've moved baty.net back to Kirby, which is configured to work much the same as the daily notes here, so I'll be writing there for a while. Please stand by.

🗓 Sunday, December 29, 2024

I'm wondering why I bother doing any of this. My "content" doesn't really offer much to anyone other than as a curiosity or something to snicker at and say, "Sometimes that's me!" I should be out doing something useful.

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Blogging or Journaling with Curio

Curio is such a great bit of software. For a while, I used it for everything. But, as I do, I stopped because it doesn't make sense for everything. One fun way to use it is as a journal or blog. It's not for making a real blog, but its completely blank canvas makes for a fun way to build a sort of scrapbook. Here's the thing I did yesterday, exported as HTML: 2024-12-28. It's fun.


🗓 Monday, December 23, 2024

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When I showed my dad the original Toy Story and talked about how unbelievable and difficult and amazing the 3D rendering was, he shrugged and said, "So? They just use computers, right?"

That's how I feel now when seeing anything created using AI.


🗓 Sunday, December 22, 2024

I'm having all sorts of thoughts about where stuff should go today. Woke up with it. Can't shake it. I know that TiddlyWiki and Tinderbox are involved. Denote as well. It's the combination that has me confused. Still noodling.

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I have to be honest, I tend to prefer looking for stuff via a search using an HTML form on a web page. My wiki, for example. Or this site. Or my blog. As good as Emacs can do searches, I find the experience to be clunky. Even with Deadgrep, etc. When I want to look something up, I go to some web page instead of Emacs. Weird.


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I am incapable of making a decision. Or, more accurately, I am in capable of sticking with a decision I've already made. I hate it.


🗓 Saturday, December 21, 2024

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I tend to either want complete control of the thing, or I don't want to have to think about it at all. I end up in some awkward place between those two options and it's crazy-making.


🗓 Friday, December 20, 2024

At least once a week I tell myself that I'm going to shutter this blog and only post over at baty.net. Then, I actually do that for a day or two before crawling back to Tinderbox because I love Tinderbox so much.

🗓 Monday, December 16, 2024

I still like having the option to type into the main daily note in order to write things that don't get pushed to RSS feeds all over the place. It's like a private journal, but one that is in no way actually private.

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Count me among the people who dislike when someone uses AI-generated images as covers for blog posts. However, it's really no worse than using some generic stock photo, which people have done for years. Neither are useful. Hell, at least with AI the author needed to actually do something to get an image.


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Cross-posting every one of these little posts to RSS and Mastodon really does generate a firehose of randomness for the unfortunate people who follow me. I'm afraid that the solution is not going to be that I slow down. It's going to have to be that you deal with the deluge, or unfollow. This blog is mostly for my entertainment, anyway 😁.


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Nice Org HTML an improvement over Emacs' default HTML exports. It's a set of publishing hooks for rendering pretty HTML output from Org mode files. It's easy to set up and works well.


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I have an urge to try building a version of this site using Eleventy. No reason other than curiosity. I enjoyed 11ty when I used it before, so I'd like to try again. Moving away from Tinderbox for this blog would make me a little sad, though, so I'll have to be careful I don't do something I'll regret.


🗓 Saturday, December 14, 2024

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Hugo vs Tinderbox

So, I'm looking at both of my blogs and thinking that this one at daily.baty.net does the best job of wrangling shorter and longer posts and has my preferred group-by-day format. But it's built using Tinderbox, which I love, but I get twitchy not having my usual nice folder full of plain-text Markdown files. I'm trying to reconcile the non-plaintext/markdown aspects of Tinderbox with getting the desired output.


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I'm going to spend time this morning rebuilding my Emacs config from scratch. It's fun for a minute. I'm going to keep a running log here for now, since I can't yet use Emacs for it.

Had to swap emacs-plus for EmacsForMac download, since I was getting compiler errors otherwise. See #720

Using Prot's basic setup to start.

Disabled key check (setq package-check-signature nil) in order to install consult package


🗓 Thursday, December 12, 2024

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DEVONthink has started crashing shortly after launch. Not every time, just most times. It's usually quite stable, but this is an argument for not putting important stuff in fancy software. Then again, I'm typing this in Tinderbox, so yeah.


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I had configured a giant OpenGraph image for when one of these little posts gets shared on social media. I'm finding it a bit obnoxious, so I've removed it everywhere but on the home page. If an individual post has a featured image, I use that. If not, there's nothing.


🗓 Wednesday, December 11, 2024

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I still can't decide where and how to manage my photos. I sort of gave up on Lightroom because I can't get comfortable with its cloud-based catalog. I've been trying the usual suspects, Lightroom, Lightroom Classic, Capture One, NeoFinder, MuseBox, Photo Mechanic, etc. Each of them have things that I need but none of them have a combination of those things that I want.


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Hey Dave, keep posting your moon photos. I have never taken a successful photo of the moon, so I like living vicariously through yours 😁


🗓 Monday, December 9, 2024

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News consumption

Tightly controlling and limiting news consumption is one of the best things I've done for my mental well-being.


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As an experiment, I'm going to try cross-posting from here to Bluesky (@baty.net@bsky.app). I'm normally not a fan of shotgunning words to other networks, but what else am I going to post there :).


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A Good Enough Day (2022) ★★

A Good Enough Day

Honestly, I only watched this because he's a photographer. Slow, deliberate, and not always in a good way. I thought St. John did a good job, but I didn't exactly enjoy it.


🗓 Sunday, December 8, 2024

Here's what happens. I decide that it's fine to create "microblog" posts on my baty.net blog, so I start doing that, but then I don't like how the blog ends up looking. I'm reminded that this daily blog is how I want things to behave, and longer posts work just as well, so why don't I just write everything here? I start doing that, but realize that this isn't my main blog and I shouldn't split things up so much. Repeat forever.

🗓 Sunday, December 1, 2024

I spent a couple hours today copying recent blog content from Ghost to Markdown for Hugo. I think this means that the twitchiness I've been feeling about my writing and images being "trapped" in Ghost has reached a tipping point. I'm still pissed at Hugo, but it's great when it's working and I like the way my blog works when I'm using it.

🗓 Saturday, November 30, 2024

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My entire process feels overwrought. I don't need half of this stuff.