Daily notes from Jack about everything

🗓 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.


🗓 Friday, November 29, 2024

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Ignoring Tinderbox because it's weird and expensive is a costly mistake, in my opinion. It makes Obsidian look like a kid's toy. Gives Emacs a run for its money. Developed continuously for 20 years. Deep, powerful, flexible, stable.


🗓 Thursday, November 28, 2024

Do you ever wish I only had one blog? Me too.

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I've exhausted my supply of internet today, so it's time to make our annual Thanksgiving Pizzas.


🗓 Wednesday, November 27, 2024

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I'm having so much fun with software right now, I can hardly stand it. Emacs and Tinderbox and Aspect and TheBrain and Evernote and Curio, and and and. It's all great stuff. I'll complain about not being able choose things tomorrow, maybe, but right now it's a blast.


🗓 Monday, November 25, 2024

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I keep futzing with Ghost on baty.net because I can't seem to get completely comfortable using Ghost. Yesterday, I changed themes again. This time, to Kyoto. It's a bit less in-your-face than Journal was. I've tweaked colors and layout and moved things around a little. I'm not sure I love it. See what I mean? I just don't want to change platforms again.


🗓 Sunday, November 24, 2024

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I love writing in paper notebooks, but at some point there's always a lull. When that happens, there's nothing to click on.


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22 Jump Street (2014) ★★★★

22 Jump Street

I get such a kick out of these movies. It's like after the first film someone took a bong hit and said, "Hey guys, want to do it again!?" So they did.


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RackNerd had good VPS pricing for Black Friday ($18.00/year for 2.5GB) so I ordered one. Then, while I was sudo this and ssh that, I remembered that I don't enjoy this stuff as much as I used to, so I stopped. I'll finish it later.


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If you post "Notes" on Substack, I'll never see them.


🗓 Saturday, November 23, 2024

This Tinderbox blog is better suited to be the One True Blog™ than Ghost or Hugo. I don't know what I should do about that. If anything.

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golden-ratio.el

macosxguru mentioned the golden-ratio emacs package, and it sounded useful, so I tried it. I didn't like it. My brain doesn't jibe with windows moving around on their own accord, I guess. But what was worse was that somehow, my Org files were being overwritten by the capture dispatch buffer. I lost my critical Daybook.org and Todo.org files and had to restore from backups. I've no idea how that could have been happening, but it started as soon as I installed golden-ratio and stopped when I deleted it. No thanks :).


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Banalities intentionally made difficult by shooting them on film.

Dante Stella

I think about this sentence a lot.


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I would like to read more articles in which the authors stop doing so much throat clearing or sidetracking so that we all know that they know about something tangental and maybe they don't approve of it.


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In yet another example of worrying about something that hasn't happened...

I've been switching between Capture One and the Adobe apps for photo management for years. That's normal, but one of the reasons I've been twitchy about Lightroom Classic is that "what if...?" feeling. What if they stop supporting Classic and force everyone to the new Lightroom? I've been dealing with feelings about this since...2017. I should stop doing that.


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As long as moving Mastodon instances doesn't bring my posts along, I'm thinking Bluesky is a safer long-term bet for my posts. I hate that I actually typed that and don't think it's crazy. I also hate that almost no one cares about federation or the risks involved with putting our trust in bluesky. Hell, I'm thinking about doing it, and I understand the problems. I, like most people, sometimes just want a place to hang out with everyone and have some fun. Right now Bluesky is more fun.