Jack Baty Daily

I've been using a CPAP machine for nine years. It's been a life saver. My sleep study recorded more than 40 "events" per hour. It's as if I would stop breathing nearly once every minute. Not great for sleeping. The old machine has been acting up a little and shows a "Motor life exceeded" message when starting up, so I went in today for a new one. Not much has changed. It has a heated hose and "auto-start", but I'm probably not using that. I can manage pushing a button twice a day. The cool thing is that now I have an extra machine for the odd night I end up just sleeping in the basement.

Dave Rogers mentioned the Nathan Macintosh special, Down with Tech, so I watched it. Pretty funny, because I agreed with most of the things he said.

Right now Obsidian and Emacs are in a fight to the death in my head. I'm afraid my sanity could end up as collateral damage.

I should have adored this. Everything about it points to something I'd enjoy. I just didn't, though.

Now that I'm tinkering with Obsidian for managing my Blot blog, I'm all excited about writing there, so I'll need to think about how to divide content between there and here. It should be obvious: short, narrative posts about nothing in particular go here, and longer posts about specific things go there. It's never that easy, though. I'll just wing it, I guess.

People don’t want to use PWAs; they want real apps.

Which people? I want to use PWAs. I'm people.

This one, for example. I get what Keenan is saying, and sometimes feel the same way, but with such a "fun" headline, I'm going into it with a bad attitude. Everyone is different, I guess.

I was about to head out of town this morning when I saw Keenan's post about the effort involved when trying to keep up with RSS feeds (among other things).

His playful title struck me the wrong way, and I said so, in a way that I felt was clever because I used the same formula for my post's title. I fired off the post and left.

On the drive home tonight, I was telling my wife how I wish more people on the internet, when feeling critical, would just shut the hell up instead of yelling about what's wrong with everything.

It occurred to me that when writing this morning, I'd done exactly what I was complaining about. The silly thing is that I enjoyed Keenan's post, and I should have kept how I felt about the title to myself.

Sorry Keenan.

I am unusually excited to have learned that both Remind and Wyrd are actively maintained. Remind is the most powerful reminder tool in existence. I used it for years, but gave it up at some point for "easier" options. I assumed it was dead, but Dianne is still at it today. She started working on it in 1989.

I develop and print my own film. I write with a fountain pen on paper. I'll be summarizing the articles myself, thank you.

I bought a new typeface, Berkeley Mono. It's lovely and I'm making it my default monospace font everywhere.

Jackie Chan does things with his body that are physically impossible. All while being very funny.

I thought this was a masterpiece when I first saw it. Now, I think it's just very good. I thought Hunter overdid it, and Hurt always does that thing where he cocks his head to the side and shrugs. Brooks though. :chefs kiss:

This is not something I planned, but I am in the midst of organizing everything using the Johnny.Decimal system (with some tweaks) and then pointing an Obsidian Vault at it. This way, my file system is my index. Otherwise, there is no way I'd maintain an index. It's not going great, but I'm persisting. Stay tuned.

Alice woke up at precisely 3:00 a.m. and was raring to go for a walk. I was...less raring...but off we went anyway. Now it's still early (4:23 am) and I've checked my email, reviewed a few photos, and written in my journal. Now what?

After reading USENET, the OG social network, rises again like a text-only phoenix, of course I had to fire up Gnus and start reading news. It's fun, but so so old-school. I did learn about Eternal September, which offers free Usenet accounts and is text only (no binaries).

I eagerly signed up for EchoFeed at launch, thinking it would help with cross posting from my blogs to Mastodon. It works great, but I've disabled it for now. There are too many variables to consider when cross posting and no one configuration covers them. Sometimes it should include images, sometimes not. Sometimes I want just a title and link. Other times I want the entire contents. EchoFeed works great and does what it's supposed to do, but it's more trouble than it's worth for me right now.

I had a thought recently. I dismissed it at first, but it's been stuck in there ever since. I'd like to open a shared darkroom space. I don't know if it's a "community darkroom" or if it's a rental space, but I feel like it would fill a niche that may or may not need filling around here. I'd like to try.

I have to remind myself how dumb it is to spend time inventing a "use case" for a bit of software, just so I have an excuse to play with it. It should be the other way around: "Hey, I need to do this important thing, what software (that I don't already have) would work best for doing it?"

It occurred to me today that there are similarities between blogging and photography when it comes to which tools I choose at a given moment. Lately I have been much more into the film photography process and have been avoiding digital. Analog photography is more work, prone to error, and less convenient. But, when it works, I really love the results. And I love having the artifacts. This is how I feel about using Tinderbox for my blog. It's a pain. It can break at any time. It's way less convenient than just clicking Publish in, say, Scribbles. But I enjoy the process, the results, and having a document containing all of my notes forever. Tinderbox:Film=Scribbles:Digital I guess. Reminded me of an earlier post/quote: Convenience and meaning

I've added a list of backlinks to each post (if any exist) at the bottom of individual posts. The drawback to using the built-in Tinderbox linking is that they aren't exported as links if the target has HTMLExport disabled. I usually disable export for older posts because it speeds up exports. We'll see how it plays out.

This was a lot of fun, and quite sweet. No real surprises, but I was smiling throughout most of it. Olivia Colman is the greatest.

Spent time working through a file reorg. It started after I couldn't find my copy of the Johnny Decimal Workbook I had purchased months ago. Seriously? Currently I'm setting up an index using an Org-mode outline which maps to the file system layout. This way I can use the org-attach features to jump quickly to the folders from the index. And I can drag files into the outline and have them put in the correct folder. Adding notes to subtrees let me keep notes about everything in the same place. I don't yet know how this will play out, but it's interesting.

I used to record the movies I watched in the same Tinderbox document as this blog, so there was some prior art scattered around for blogging about movies. I've updated the templates and queries so that movie reviews are displayed properly on at least the detail page. I'm not sure yet how to handle them on the home/daily pages, but it's a start. Also, the additional content isn't yet included in the RSS feed. Doing that feels like too much work today. I'm also wondering if this wouldn't have been easier in Kirby.

Blood Simpleton

I'm kind of over courtroom dramas, but this was better than expected. Sandra Hüller was phenomenal.

Everyone in this movie annoyed me. It could be because I'm old, but I don't think so.

Yesterday sucked, computing-wise. The short version is that iCloud ruined my day.

I am not about to defend the CEO of Kagi here, but I don't think anyone responding to this Mastodon post actually read the exchange with anything resembling a non-biased attitude. And if someone they weren't pre-disposed to dislike had responded directly, they'd be bragging about it.

I bought the Johhny.Decimal workbook a few months ago and this morning I couldn't find it. This is so perfectly me.

Now I'm looking for a box of matches.