Hi! I'm Jack 👋

One of the macOS-only apps I don't want to live without is Tinderbox.

I've been using Tinderbox for so long it's become second nature. It's phenomenally powerful and fun to use. I stop using for periods during which I'm feeling like everything should be plain text. When I come to my senses and just want my stuff to be useful, I bring Tinderbox back into rotation. One of my favorite things to do with Tinderbox is generate this blog.

I did that this morning. We're back to using Tinderbox for this blog. Sorry for any disruptions to your RSS feed.

Just the wiki and the blog and the other blog and that's it. That's all I need!

I spent time today working on a decent workflow between Lightroom (Classic) and Immich. After wrangling Mylio for a few days, I decided it was a nice-but-unnecessary part of my process. Also, it's too expensive. There's an Immich plugin for Lightroom and it seems to work well. I'm still tweaking things, but I'll try and write up a summary once I've gotten it all dialed in.

I almost forgot that I'd pre-ordered a Pebble 2 Duo! It should ship in September. Pretty cool. I keep finding novel ways to avoid wearing my Apple Watch.

I asked Claude to summarize my recent blog posts. Here's what it came up with:

The overall picture is of someone deeply thoughtful about their digital tools and workflows, but perhaps caught in analysis paralysis about the "right" way to do things. Your writing suggests both technical sophistication and a desire for simplicity that sometimes conflict with each other.

Claude, when asked about me

That's no hallucination.

The mental overhead of "switching tools" is less than you think. Probably much less than the effort it takes to shoehorn everything into one tool.

If you honestly think that every person who is excited about AI is either a shill or a sucker, then I feel sorry for your world view.

If your idea of fun is finding ways to tear down things that people cherish, I feel sorry for your world view and we probably can't be friends.

The world before social media was bigger. I'd like to return to that world.

This isn't my usual style, but it's smooth and comforting today.

I continue to overthink everything related to my blog(s). I want specific things for specific posts, depending on my mood that day. It’s exhausting. The dream of course is to have One Blog. I have 4 active sites right now. That’s more than one, for those who are counting.

The new baty.photo blog I’ve set up for posts about photography feels like the right move. That one stays. I like using Ghost for that.

It’s the daily.baty.net thing that has me conflicted. I like how both the Tinderbox and (currently) Kirby versions work. They’re good for showing a rolling set of random stuff, separated by day. baty.net, running Hugo, is less suited for it. It’s a combination of long posts, short posts, and these daily notes. The daily notes don’t feel like they belong there, which is why I keep trying to move them elsewhere. Except I don’t much feel like maintaining two places. Both the Kirby and Tinderbox versions are custom and fairly complex to use and maintain. Do I really need more of that?

Thing is, none of this matters. Most folks visit via RSS anyway. And those who do actually come here, well, they don’t really care how it works. They just want to read the latest stuff (for some reason).

OK, it just happened again. I’m reading this and realizing it doesn’t belong in a daily note. It should be a separate post. In Hugo that means moving a file on disk and renaming it and modifying the front matter. Ugh, right? Using Kirby, I just toggle “Show title” and it does the right thing. Now what? Kirby isn’t static. It’s not difficult to host, but it’s not simple, either.

See how I am? Like I said, it’s exhausting.

(Originally posted on baty.net)

And then later, I moved back to Tinderbox and pasted this there.

The incessant hand-wringing over the "dangers" of LLM use has become so tedious. People who have no idea what they're talking about are pasting together bits from other social media rants and telling us WHAT WILL DEFINITELY HAPPEN if we continue to use LLMs. None of us have any idea what will happen, so please stop pretending that you do.

I'm finding that I have little patience for writing anything more than a few sentences. It makes putting together "real" blog posts too much work, so I post short bits here or on Mastodon instead. I don't know that I care.

Can you imagine what things would be like for me if I'd have just stuck with one or two approaches to everything. Given any task, I probably have 3 or 4 ways of doing it, each of them wildly different, but fully formed. This means I have a decision to make for everything all the time. It also means that I second guess every decision. Every time. It's kind of exhausting.

I was watching a video in which a long-time successful photographer was describing his motivation and ideas and creative approach and all I did was skip ahead and yell, "BUT WHAT CAMERA DO YOU USE!?" and now I'm disgusted with myself.

I'm thinking that sitting at a computer all day is bad for my health, mental and otherwise.

I imagine life without being able to consult my many deliverables from my phone and some unpleasant part of my personality sends a jolt to the pain and nausea centers, hitting the intersection of old work trauma and pigheaded nerd completionism.

Mike Hall - Seeking Friction

I know the feelings, but I'm learning to repress them. I've also been thinking a lot about the value of friction. What is just the right amount?

Since I'll be down to a single computer soon, I thought it would be fun to move things out of the ~/Sync folder, since I won't be needing that.

hahahahaha

Do you have any idea how many places I hard-coded that path? I knew there'd be some, but my life the past two days has been all about updating paths. In scripts, code, settings, symlinks, everywhere. It may have been a mistake.