I have to admit, my recent email fiasco has really taken the wind out of my Emacs sails. If I'm using Emacs, I want to use Notmuch. If I'm using Notmuch, I want to use it on both Macs. If I can't do that, I kind of don't want to use Emacs. Those things don't necessarily follow, but that's how I'm feeling.

One of the qualities I like about the way this Tinderbox blog works is its lack of necessary decisions. There's only one kind of post. The only choice is whether or not to display a title. I suppose the option of writing directly in the daily parent note, (which isn't included in the RSS feed), is a decision, but still. Over on baty.net I choose between a main daily note, a sub-note, or a full-on blog post. I find myself often starting in one place, then changing my mind later. This site is easier to deal with that way.

Dave's bramble photo is prettier than mine. I hope his post's title is a Led Zeppelin reference :).

I made some Journaling changes like 3 days ago. A lot has happened since then. The important thing is that I got mad at Emacs again. Not Emacs, specifically, but what Emacs does to my system. So, I fired up Tinderbox and started putting stuff in my LifeBook.tbx document instead of my Daybook.org file. I do this occasionally, and, while I don't regret it, it's not a good idea.

There's simply no chance that I'll pick one and stick with it. I wish that wasn't true.

At this point, with Emacs I'm falling for the sunk cost fallacy. I've got too much invested to change.

It makes me twitchy when I don't use Tinderbox for too long. It's one of the most interesting, powerful, and flexible apps I've ever known. It's a pointy-clicky graphical counterpart to Emacs. It may not be quite as tweakable as Emacs, but it makes up for it with ease of use.

And it makes a great blogging tool. You're soaking in it.

I think it's time for another sabbatical from social media. There is so much terrible shit happening right now, and social media just amplifies it. If I thought that was helpful, it would be one thing, but it's not helpful. It's debilitating.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 😁.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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 :).

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.