4 April 2025 (Friday)
You know what I need? Fewer dependencies. Less infrastructure. This blog, for example, shouldn't be necessary.
Hi! I'm Jack 👋
I'm glad you're here!
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I can't tell you how many new blogs are springing up recently, but it's starting to feel like a lot of new blogs. And the more feeds I add to my reader, the more new blogs I discover. It's feeling exponential and I love it.
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Why sharpen my saw if I never cut anything?
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We’ve turned living into editing. When every meal is a performance, every outfit a brand decision, every hobby a pitch, there’s no space left for boredom. Or rest. Or actual pleasure. We scroll through each other’s highlight reels while quietly assembling our own, haunted by the suspicion that everyone else is doing it better—and forgetting to live in any of it.
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Just as I expected, now that Daily is all fired up, I'm once again wondering what it's for. Or, more precisely, what belongs here vs on baty.net? I've made this bed, I guess. I like having this blog as an even-more-informal place to take notes. The problem is that I made it too good, so I want to do more here. The lines blur, once again.
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Sometimes, when I can't think of anything to print on the 3D printer, I browse around the web and find something to print that I don't really need. For example:
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🎶 "Absolute Elsewhere" by Blood Incantation.
When are we going to get past this period of Metal sounding like call-and-respond between Backstreet Boys and Cookie Monster with the flu? It's been self-parody for a decade. It's a shame, because the actual music can be so good.
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We're running on Kirby now
I've migrated this daily.baty.net site to Kirby CMS. It has been a static site managed by Tinderbox for a long time. I love Tinderbox, but now that baty.net is back on Hugo, I really wanted a playground for learning more about Kirby. So, here we are.
Your RSS feed is probably complaining right now. Sorry about that.
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A useful application of LLMs
One of the things I'm finding useful about LLMs is having them summarize my own writing. For example, I threw this month's Org journal at ChatGPT and asked for a summary:
Jack Baty's journal entries from early March 2025 reflect his daily life, thoughts on photography, and personal observations. He struggles with sleep due to being woken early, enjoys organizing his journals and photos, and contemplates selling his cameras, particularly the Leica SL2 or Nikon Zf. He describes his experiences shopping with friends and family, expresses concerns about aging, and shares his mixed feelings about current events, especially regarding political figures. His reflections reveal a sense of nostalgia, motivation issues, and a desire for connection, particularly with his partner, Gail. He also documents mundane tasks, like grocery shopping and website building, while dealing with the ups and downs of daily life, including caring for his dog, Alice.
It's as if my journaling is raw material for a new set of documents summarizing my life. It's readable, accurate1, and like seeing it this way.
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Well OK, my feelings about current events and "political figures" are not at all "mixed". ↩
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3 April 2025 (Thursday)
5:12 am. The weather has been interesting. This week so far it's been clear and 30°, or raining and 60°. We've had snow, lightning, and we've had 80MPH wind gusts. Today is mild, 50° and quite windy.
Oh good, I have a dentist appointment today.
2 April 2025 (Wednesday)
Spent time this morning organizing photos from last month's Capture One session and various folders of film scans. I thought I'd like using Capture One sessions during the month, then importing them into a master catalog. It was tedious and error prone, so now I'm having second thoughts. If I was just using Lightroom this would have been done as I went along.
1 April 2025 (Tuesday)
I spent several hours yesterday playing with Neovim and, while it's quite nice these days, I would like my time back. I'm an Emacs person, duh.
31 March 2025 (Monday)
I read Joan Westenberg's "The Ordinary Sacred" with gusto. It hit hard, all the way through.
the minute your real life starts feeling like a draft folder for future posts, something is broken
Yeesh, right? Anyway, the stuff I write in this particular box never gets sent anywhere other than to the blog. No cross-posts, no feeds. You either come here and read it, or it doesn't exist. This is the part I'm starting to enjoy the most.
30 March 2025 (Sunday)
5:15 am At least it wasn't raining during our walk. I still cut it a bit short, because I didn't feel much like walking. 5 1/2 hours of sleep isn't enough, btw.
29 March 2025 (Saturday)
I had an idea. What if I used Kirby for the daily notes blog? That way, I wouldn't need to keep switching the main blog back and forth between Kirby and Hugo. I'm a genius! But I am sorry about the broken links. I'm not going to fix them, probably.