You know what I need? Fewer dependencies. Less infrastructure. This blog, for example, shouldn't be necessary.

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.

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.

• Blogging is exponential

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.

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.

• Saw
• Joan Westenberg on The Ordinary Sacred

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.

• What's this for, again?

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.

• Post-its
• 🎶 "Absolute Elsewhere" by Blood Incantation.
• We're running on Kirby now
• A useful application of LLMs

Yesterday was sunny and 70°. Today is the first day of spring and it's snowing.

I would like to stop changing things all the time, but my brain won't let me.

Well would you look at that. We're using Kirby again.

• Overthinking everything again
• Kirby revived

I'm now writing everything here locally and deploying it using rsync (via just). This way makes it easier to edit posts using Emacs. If you're reading this, it worked.

They're going to need a new acronym for DOGE. DOLTPALS, maybe (Department Of Lining Trump's Pockets And Lost Scruples).

It's interesting how much I love using Kirby when I'm posting a lot of images. It's just as interesting how I'd rather have something fully static when I'm not. Just an observation.

I'm pro-regulation. Unless of course it's about something I'm personally interested or invested in. Then leave me alone!

Not a day goes by where I'm not surprised by how uninterested I am in AI. I should be all over it. Old me would have been.

Maybe the idea is for me to do things that don't benefit from AI.

• The "I'm Back" digital film roll
• Howm updates
• My first homemade 3D print

My hobbies are: playing with software, blogging, and photography. It's OK that I do some of them more than others, and sometimes do one of them a little too much.

• Saying no

• Inventing scenarios (Dom Corriveau)
• How to Comment on Social Media (Rebecca Solnit)

My dog's schedule is all out of whack. This morning she was up and ready to go at 1:45 AM. I put her off until around 3:00 but gave in and took her for a walk. Now it's 4:45 and I've walked a mile, done some yoga, wrote in my journal, and waffled about where to post this. Another day.

Oh FFS, I see we're going to be judging apologies again. Whatever you do, try to make it as difficult as possible for people to apologize. Great idea.

• Dispair is a Goddamn Luxury
• "Ernst" teddy from Leica
• I can't find things

Hey, at least I didn't change blogging platforms today.

• Stepping back from social media
• When I'm trying to stay off the socials

The dog got me up at 2:20 AM and insisted we go for our morning walk right then. It was -1°F. This made it both too early and too cold. It also means it's now 05:42 AM and I've been up for more than three hours already. Did some yoga, read some news (big mistake!). Drinking coffee and trying not to let despair seep in through the cracks.

• OMG omg.lol
• Links for January 21, 2025

• Emacs churn

• Replacing make with just

What if I just never changed blogging engines again? Man, that would be cool.

• Dave suggests a change in scenery or perspective
• Nick Cave defends the awkward first line of O Wow O Wow
• Why am I not taking pictures?

I must admit, and I know it's only been a couple of weeks, that I'm still happy using Kirby for the blog. And I'm OK with posting everything here. This is a good thing and I hope it lasts.

Learning to want less is proving difficult. Some days I'm content with what I have. Other days I want to buy a Rolex for no good reason.

I've rearranged the Kirby panel so it's easier to change header graphics. Now I just type the name of the image I want into the Site panel and I'm done. Previously, I'd tried getting fancy. This was when I knew even less about how Kirby works, so I made it more complicated than necessary. Now it's not as cool, but easier and simpler.

Hiring a bunch of unqualified boobs for top government positions will definitely backfire. Won't it?

• Writing on a tablet
• System status: January, 2025

I wrote a long entry in my journal this morning about how unremarkable I feel. I don't mean that I don't feel good. It means that I am realizing how unremarkable I am and it's been quite jarring. Still processing.

Tim Bray::

Having enjoyed the creative output of someone who turns out to be a horrible person doesn’t in the slightest make you a horrible person.

• No more Instagram for me
• Links for January 12, 2025

It's not so much that I want people to stop pointing out bad behavior. It's just that all of social media generates this low-grade hum of negativity that, over time, adversely affects my mental well-being.

• Doom as the Bambu Labs of Emacs

My dog has had a few instances where (we think) she throws her back out. All of a sudden she'll struggle on stairs and will be in obvious discomfort. Last time was about a month ago, and it lasted a few days. We gave her doggy ibuprofen and muscle relaxers. This happened again on Wednesday evening. I can't stand it when she's suffering. She slept all night last night. No shaking or panting. She navigated the stairs and didn't hesitate during our walk this morning, so I'm hoping she's on the mend again.

Well, my Capture One subscription renewed this morning. I hope I use it.

I got my Doom Emacs config caught up with the latest changes to my from-scratch config yesterday. I hate admitting how good Doom is, because it makes me feel like I've wasted my time writing my own config.

Oooh, my CLA'd (by John Hermanson) OM-1n and OM-2n and lenses are out for delivery so will be back home today. Maybe this will entice me to take some photos, which I've not been doing, recently.

• Lifestack
• Of two minds about Emacs

• Not doing
• I need to reset my consumption

Got my Covid and Flu shots this morning. Planning to lay low for a couple of days, but let's be honest, that's what I always do.

I was just looking through previous posts about using Kirby for this site. There was a flurry of activity about a year ago, during which I moved my editing process from the server to my local machine and back again. I also switched back and forth between Kirby and Hugo. And back again. I would love to spend the entirety of 2025 using Kirby, but my MTBF (Mean Time Between Formats) has averaged 30-60 days. We'll see.

I'm really messing with things around here this morning. Sorry for any disruption.

Still waiting for filament for the Bambu. My order from Amazon was delayed until the 7th, so I placed another order, and that one is so far still scheduled to arrive today.

I feel like I'm being a dick when I tell people that I don't care what's on their phone's home screen.

Don't put "BREAKING: " in your headline unless it's actually breaking news and not just something you personally think is important.

Watched: The Godfather (1972) ★★★★★

‎‘Deadpool & Wolverine’ review by Khoi Vinh:

The success of the Deadpool phenomenon is a symptom of something really, terribly wrong with our culture

Yep.

I was just notified that my 3D printer is "Out for Delivery". I'm excited, even though I'm not sure what I'm going to make with it, yet.

• Links for January 3, 2025

I feel much better today, after having a headache and achiness for the past couple of days. Maybe I'll actually get something done.

• Backups using Arq rather than rsync
• Links for January 2, 2025

Hello, 2025, I guess?

I'd rather not start the year on a sour note, but I am no further along any path than I was a year ago. I still don't know where to put things. I still don't know what to use to manage my photos. I still don't know whether to use one or multiple notebooks...or whether to use paper notebooks at all. I still don't know which camera to bring with me. I decide about something every morning, then change my mind by the end of the day. Then I do the same thing the next day. Over and over. It's crazy-making.

A person can be right about some things and wrong about other things. I feel like we forget this too often.

Movie: Camera (2024) ★★★

Movie: Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl (2024) ★★★★★

I guess this is a wrap on 2024, then. It's been quite a year, blog-wise. I won't claim it was productive or even creative, but still...quite a year. I see a lot of year-end summary posts, but I can't be bothered to write one. See 2022 and 2023, I guess.

Doctor Drafts:

Doctor Drafts is an Alfred workflow to help support you interact with the Drafts app

Cool, but the opposite of what I'm looking for this year.

• Change to post URLs
• Pete knows how it feels

Aaaaand....we're back to running the site using Kirby. I didn't bring any of the daily journal entries over (since September) because it would have put me off the whole project. I may go back and pick at migrating them later.

• Kirby

Who'd have thought I would dust off the Kirby version of the blog, upgrade to Kirby 4.5.0, and deploy it to the server? I would not have, in case you're wondering.

• Caught up on my contact sheets

• Over on baty.blog for a minute

• Daily Notes

Internet was out for a short time. It was kind of great.

Yesterday was a weird day. A good day, but weird.

I started playing with Pika and Bear blogs this morning. I don't know why.

• Film and digital

One reason I avoid taking part in politic discussions with strangers in most contexts is that there's no longer such a thing as a political discussion. It always, always devolves to just yelling at and past each other and I want no part of that. I don't know how to avoid that part of it, so I avoid all of it. (This is of course based on my definition of "political", which tends to be yet another sticking point in the whole scenario).

Speaking of politics, my (81-year-old) mom is laid up with a broken ankle and I was visiting her this morning. We were talking politics (see!?) and so then, of course, Trump came up. She eventually just shook her head and said, "I just want to cut off his lips!" and we moved to other topics.

Kirby needs some manual code and folder changes at the start of each month and I don't enjoy that. Too lazy to figure out the right way to fix it, so I keep doing it. Update: no I don't

I'm over-complicating things again. This blog, for one. Thinking about changing the home page to just a normal post...post...post format.

After a couple of days with 500.social I'm wondering how useful "general interest" communities are to me. I love the idea, but in practice it's mostly a small group of people posting about anything and everything. I can get that anywhere, but more of it, right? Without at least some sort of unifying theme, I'm not sure what it's for, yet.

• Home page content changes
• Gravatar is over
• It's a gold standard for a reason

The first small customization I tried in SilverBullet has not worked. I do better when small wins are easy.

I get to babysit for Lincoln this afternoon, so I'm just killing time until then.

• Dave responds about politics and communities
• The GR1 has other problems

Arc Browser is better than Safari in many ways, but Safari is quieter, somehow, and most of the time that's what I prefer.

I decided to change how jackbaty.com is generated. It's no longer exported from an Org-mode file. It's now a Markdown file and I create the HTML via Pandoc. I also added Simple.css for some added purdiness.

• Politics and communities
• I brought my cameras and barely used them
• 500 Social

SilverBullet feels like a cross between TiddlyWiki and Obsidian with a dash of Emacs.

We are heading up to the annual Family reunion in Newaygo today. Everyone normally gets along fine. I hope that continues this year.

I turn 60 years old today. That seems like a lot.

I'm once again thinking about decommissioning the Synology. It's something that will break and I don't want to deal with fixing it. I'm not seeing useful updates to the OS or apps (e.g. Photos) so right now it's just a Plex server. I'm running another Plex server on the 2014 Mac Mini, which handles things well enough.

I may need to pause my SilverBullet testing. The index page keeps getting hosed. My templates disappear and the file gets renamed with extended characters. I've been hitting it pretty hard from various browsers/domains so this might just be me doing things I shouldn't, but still. I'd report it, but have no idea how to reproduce it. It's happened 3 times so far.

• Printed photos
• Emacs vs and or SilverBullet

"...an endless stream of people doing what everyone else is doing."

I have no idea what I want to do or be or create or any of it.

The Democrats could nominate a half-awake baboon and that's who I'd vote for.

I don't want to do anything that depends on attacting attention on social media.

Would you like to know the real reason many of us prioritize using open, plain text formats for our notes? Because we switch note-taking apps too often.

• Monday
• SilverBullet

The new iPhone Mirroring feature in Sequoia is pretty cool.

Today I'm feeling like I want to get rid of everything and start over.

• Capture

Posted using Tinderbox, Blot, TiddlyWiki, and now Kirby. All today. Cool

My sites were down for a while this morning. I'd done some server updates and restarted. Caddy didn't start automatically because for some reason Apache was already started. I don't remember installing Apache so ¯_(ツ)_/¯. Anyway, disabled Apache and started Caddy.

👉 Who am I responsible to here? - Jack Baty Daily

It's so weird. I wake up, walk the dog, make coffee, journal, then sit at the computer and plan to fire up all my old blogs, just because. Then, I spend an hour in the darkroom, come back, and feel like just staying here in Kirby. It's like I'm a different person throughout each day. I'm either crazy, or a polymath.

👉 Roll-167 (Ricoh GR1. HP5)

I'm starting to feel like Evernote is worth the subscription price just as a place to toss things for later, just in case.

• What if I didn't have "Posts"

Last week I deleted my old web/static server at Digital Ocean. I just realized that's where my Gitea instance lived. Oops.

Someone tried to kill Trump at a rally yesterday. I may hate the man, but I don't wish him dead. I just want him gone by natural causes...something like, say, votes.

Most of what I share publicly is behind-the-scenes work. This would be fine if I ever actually produced scenes from it.

👉 Post: Roll-166 (Hasselblad 500C/M. HP5)

Shooting film is more work than digital...until it's scanned. Then, the only thing there is to do is remove a few dust spots, tweak exposure a touch, and you're done. I prefer this.

• Save your negatives
• So many choices
• Regretting one's camera roll

The whole conversation around Rick Beato's recent video is annoying and stupid and so far, everyone on both sides is wrong.

• Purged the things that want to take over for Emacs

🍿 The Bikeriders (2024)

I have an article due in a week, so this morning I thought I'd get at least an outline put together. I paused, then stopped, because I didn't know which app to use for writing it. Eventually I went with Emacs/Org-mode because that's where I'm comfortable, but the pause was telling and frustrating.

I married Gail 5 years ago today and I could not be happier. Best decision I ever made.

• Avoiding the sirens' call

It's clear to me that people who don't fret about how they take notes are those with jobs to do and lives to lead. How can I be one of those, too?

🍿 Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (2024)

• SwiftOnSecurity - human nature
• Everything.rss is deprecated

• Manuel is mad at The Browser Company

Today is the last full day of having the in-laws in town. It's been fun, but my introversion is beginning to show.

Obsidian is a big dumb waste of my time. Why do I keep letting it in?

My in laws rented a car and are out on their own today, meaning my wife and I are also free from entertaining. We'll probably both spend the day doing as little as possible. That's my goal, anyway.

I find all current discussions about AI to be boring and annoying.

👉 Post: Roll-164 (Leica MP/HP5)

• Film vs Digital and value over time
• Pandoc to PDF issues
• Into Doom and out again

I spent some time today moving my vanilla Emacs config aside and ramping back up with Doom Emacs. Now, I'm not sure why I did that.

• My 20-year anniversary with Flickr

It's July 4th and we're going to a nearby beach. Like everyone else, probably. Wish me luck.

• Making up with Emacs

My wife's sister and her fiancé are arriving from New Orleans today, so I have a week of entertaining and "being on" so I expect to be exhausted.

I have zero confidence in the Ladybird browser making meaningful inroads, but one can hope.

🍿 Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F ★★★

🍿 The Fuzz ★★

Farted around with Kirby again this morning. I fixed the og:image and og:description metadata. Improved the layout of movie pages. This is the fun and useful sort of futzing that I don't mind doing.

I saw that Supacel was seeing 100% on Rotten Tomatoes. Should be worth a look, even though I said I was done with anything superhero related. I should have listened. I simply don't care about superhero stories anymore.

Emacs made me so mad on Monday that I've not launched it since.

• Tolstoy on doing the simple thing

Hang on, I'm trying something

• AI hype is a different kind of hype

Some days I care deeply about, well, everything. Other days (such as today, so far), I could not care less about anything.

"Reduce & Simplify" does not mean install Keyboard Maestro, Jack.

I keep reaching for Evernote instead of Bear or Emacs and it's embarrassing.

• Now that I'm back in my custom Kirby blog...

I took a digital camera (Ricoh GRIII) on my walk yesterday. I was feeling lazy and the GRIII is tiny, easy, and makes great images. I don't know yet if this is the start of a digital phase, but I've been shopping for new cameras.

Not one second of the "debate" passed my eyes or ears last night. I was expecting to see my social media timeline filled with obnoxious gloating this morning, but instead I'm getting quiet, fearful, dejected tones. Shit.

I've deleted my Ghost instance on PikaPods. I guess that settles that for now, then.

The Supreme Court continues to lay the groundwork for a world I want no part of.

Do I even have a lane?

• Poem: I'm sorry

I was quickly refunded for the Ghost theme I'd purchased. I can't say enough good things about Aspire Themes. This frees up $150 for something fun. Or maybe I'll use it to assuage the guilt I feel for paying for an Evernote subscription.

• See? I'm already tweaking things

Here we are again, in Kirby. Sorry for any disturbance.

Watched Furiosa last night and when I told my daughter she should watch it she said, "I saw the other one and it was just a bunch of mumbo jumbo on a moving vehicle." I give up :).

So, I'm editing this journal entry on the server via an Emacs Tramp session. I swore I wouldn't bother with doing that, but here we are.

I experienced a bit of what I'm calling "Leica Guilt" recently. Walking the pier in Grand Haven, I heard someone say "Leica" a few times as people passed. I'll write a bit more later, but it bothered me.

To no one's surprise, I'm feeling twitchy about Ghost again. Every post is one more thing buried in Ghost's database. I know, exports blah blah, but still. My blog doesn't feel like mine, ya know?

I wondered what it would be like to write a journal post in Kirby again, so here we are. 👋🏻

There's a lot going on around here today, so I don't have time for this nonsense. Probably a good thing.

• Welcome back, Kirby

• A different blogging mood
• Prepare for changes here

• Instagram is depressing

• Maybe it's not hallucination

Shouldn't I be out doing something?

• Generative Remove
• OpenAI just gave away the entire game - Atlantic
• Motivations

There is a looming battle between my TiddlyWiki and Kirby here for daily notes. I'm going to give daily.baty.net a break while these other two duke it out.

• Trust but verify
• Social media is at it again

I can't believe I'm considering moving the Kirby installation back to server-first. Have I learned nothing?

It's been one of those weeks. Again. Now I'm here in Kirby and using Bear and Day One and Lightroom and anything else that doesn't require me to care about file organization and naming. See File Management Fatigue.

You know, technically, I don't have to manage the content files here in Kirby. That's what the panel is for.

• Separate blogs

I started building a movie review template for the blog, but I seem to have lost any energy I had for that kind of thing.

• Sub-apologizing for DHH

• Easy vs Cool

• Of two minds
• I kind of want a Stream Deck
• Oh right, now I don't like it either

• MailMate
• RSS fix
• Crush this

• Even having one blog requires too many decisions

I just added notes about the new Casual Dired Emacs package to the wiki, Obsidian, and as a Howm note in Emacs. It's going to be one of those days, I guess.

What I'd like is my Baty.net blog and Emacs for notes and THAT'S IT!

I'm mad at the trend of creating giant social media (open graph) images for blog posts that don't otherwise have images. They're basically ads.

• BBEdit shell worksheets

• Daily notes, where?

Is it really a "walled garden"? Maybe it's actually a "gated community".

I'm not even going to talk about the past couple of days with Emacs and Obsidian duking it out. It's exhausting. fwiw, Emacs is still the winner, but I've wasted so much time.

• Hey
• Moods
• Moods II

What if, instead of social media, we all just shut the fuck up?

I've already forgotten how a lot of this blog works. This makes things slightly frustrating when I'm not in the mood to dig in. Guess I have no choice, if I actually want to write here. Which I do...right?

So, what I'm seeing, is that people who don't use TikTok think it should be banned and people who like using TikTok think banning it is stupid. Not surprised.

Something I've discovered since moving all of my stuff into a Johnny Decimal layout is that I never use the numbers. Or at least I haven't yet. Kind of undermines the whole idea, no?

• Cross-posting to Mastodon

Some days I like writing in Tinderbox. Some in Emacs. Some in a textarea on a Kirby-managed website. Today, I'm starting with the latter. If I was "finished" with my Kirby setup, I might spend more time here. However, there are things that I want to change but I don't have the energy to figure out how. Maybe I don't want it badly enough, but I'm living with it for now. Or writing other places instead.

• Cross-posting from baty.net

Yesterday I thought about letting this blog just idle. Today I want to live here. My brain hurts.

Upgraded Kirby to 4.2.0. It's telling that when I saw an update to Kirby I thought, "Well crap, I don't feel like upgrading." Even though upgrading is pretty simple, I worry that something will break and I'll be spending my day dealing with it. So far, upgrades have been flawless, so I should relax.

But I'm having one of those days.

• Lonely blog

I'm elsewhere for a bit.

• Please stand by

Please stand by

I'm finding that there's too much to think about when using Kirby. Should I edit content locally or on server? How should I handle upgrades? Routes? Kirbytext or Markdown? PHP? It's too much.

• 3 blogs and a wiki

Kirby is really nice, but I'm still trying to get comfortable with it.

• Baty.blog

I should just make baty.net into a redirect to whichever blog I'm active on at the moment.

Every third link I click on one of my blogs is broken. I hate that I've created such a mess. Some days I'm determined to clean it all up, once and for all. Other's, I don't care as much and figure I'll just leave it be.

• Hitting the bricks again

I'm impossible. I've been posting daily notes over on daily.baty.net for a couple of days, after swearing that I was going to focus my attention here. Sometimes I convince myself that this is just me playing with stuff, but I can't describe how frustrating I get with this whole enterprise. Why can't I just have a blog like everyone else?

I've added the "Reply by Email" link to individual RSS feed items. (h/t Dave Rogers)

Joy, now the baty.net/feed doesn't validate and the changes I've made to the template don't show up. Caching? Who knows. I don't feel like looking into it right now.

• RSS feed changes
• Nitro for macOS

Day 2 of the new Mac Mini setup. I'm already tired of it.

Oscars hot take: Christopher Nolan is not the "premier director of his generation." Both Yorgos Lanthimos and Denis Villeneuve make better films.

Someone noticed that a few links from my old substack were coming up 404. I moved those posts over here, and then started bringing other stuff over from the old sites at v13.baty.net and baty.blog. I soon realized it was going to take hours to finish, so I stopped. I suppose at some point I should migrate or consolidate everything published later than the 2020 archives but right now I don't feel like it.

I have a profoundly negative reaction to the word "colorway". Just say "colors".

Dave noticed that I forgot to change the time when updating the date on a recent post. Fixed. (thanks Dave!)

I'm increasingly convinced that the single thing I've wasted the most time on has been capturing and organizing miscellaneous "knowledge".

• Just answer the phone, you baby

I've had the same roll of Tri-X in the MP for weeks. I don't deserve such fine things.

• Tinkering with Dave
• I keep posting over on baty.blog
• Moving posts here from baty.blog

Upgraded Kirby to 4.1.2. Bug fixes, mostly.

I really don't want to talk about tools anymore, but that's all I know how to talk about. Should I tell you how I've been forcing myself to use Obsidian again? I can't seem to stop trying.

Speaking of my websites (huh?), I'm increasingly uncomfortable with having content in Kirby's format. I want "normal" front matter. You know, like Blot handles properly. Uh oh.

It's possible that there's a limit to how much information about Apple I can stand to look at every day. I believe I've reached it.

I can feel myself changing, but I remain stuck between phases. It's frustrating to know that changes are coming while feeling powerless to affect those changes. Or to encourage them to hurry the f*ck up.

The other day I wrote that, "I've been writing some version of the same five blog posts for nearly 25 years." and I've been sort of sad about that ever since. Have I really not grown at all? It feels like I haven't grown at all. Maybe I need a new hobby.

• New music?

Alluvasudden CTRL-e stopped moving the point to end of line in Emacs (Evil mode) and I really hate when stuff like this happens.

Speaking of breakage, Python never works on my machine. Every single time I upgrade Python half of my scripts break. How do I nuke & pave Python?

I hate the word "sublime"

I'm trying hard not to be a downer today but I feel like a downer today. Maybe ignore me until tomorrow? I feel so buried in tech that it's hard to breath.

It's been nice only posting to one place for a couple days. Takes the pressure off. I wish I didn't get bored, though.

I'm kind of bored with the internet. As I read through my RSS feeds and Mastodon just now, I felt myself shrugging or rolling my eyes at everything. This has been happening a lot lately and is definitely a Me problem, but it still ruins my time online. I get it, the climate is going to kill us all, blogs are cool again, Biden is old, Apple something something, someone did something problematic and we should all hate them, AI is the devil, AI is Jesus, and so on. It's boring.

I took just 3 days off social media last week and it was nice, but boring. How can I learn to not be bored while also not being on social media?

I'm Nukin' and Pavin' today.

OMG I've been writing some version of the same five blog posts for almost 25 years.

Well, I've gone and made everything too complicated again. Notes, tasks, blogs, text editing, cameras, sharing, reading...all of it. The phrase "nuke & pave" comes to mind.

• My Leica timeline

I am the kind of person who owns both a signed 1st Edition of "Infinite Jest" and a reading copy of "Infinite Jest". This makes me feel smugly superior but also like the kind of intolerable wisenheimer that I can't stand.

• Easter egg on O'Reily Auto Parts website

Here's something. Since where I'm writing this now on a Journal post does not get sent to RSS, maybe I'll put links to all my other posts here. That way people who don't use RSS can visit this site and find links to all my other posts on various blogs that I can't seem to give up. It's a thought.

• Post: Blogging experiences
• Editing in the live Kirby panel
• LazyVim

Some feelings about baty.net today.

I like Kirby but I don't like the format of the content files. I should ignore this, but it seems I can't.

• Platform changes

I wonder what I'd do if I didn't sit in front of a computer all day.

• Quote: John Maxwell on unimportance

Is it enough to just exist every day?

Whenever someone calls a YouTube review "honest" it just means that they agree with it.

• Fujifilm X100VI

Today I'm asking myself what it would feel like to be an Obsidian user

• Does anyone know what they are doing?
• Now I'm futzing with Obsidian (again)

I would like to use handwritten notes for everything, but computers exist.

• Using Denote wrong?

I'm in a mood. Stay tuned.

It's all just computers talking to other computers now.

Okay, so now Jennifer Lopez is working in some kind of dystopian factory with no windows and several OSHA violations. She is dirty, like beautiful-person dirty, where there’s some dirt smeared on her arms but her titties are still sky-fuckin’-high.
Scaachi 😆: Here's What Happens In Jennifer Lopez's Movie, This Is Me...Now

Whenever I post things on 3 or 4 different sites in a day, I know it's time to reel things back in. But where is "in"?

Anything but finish something I started, right?

It takes some of the fun out of it knowing that moving the content here to a different platform will be a significant project. I wrote something similar about using Tinderbox over on daily.baty.net. Basically, I'm ever completely comfortable with anything. This might explain some things :).

I've been experiencing Capture One fatigue I think, so I almost went back to Lightroom.

• Dream journal: Poor grades
• Flickr subscription decision

I've posted the same photo on both blogs because I can't decide where I want to put stuff. You know, the usual.

• Over on the daily blog today

Meta note: I've switched local Kirby development from Caddy->php-fpm to Laravel Herd. It seems like a newly-endorsed method and it also gets me on-demand PHP versions and easy management of multiple sites. So far, so good.

• My life

Now that I have the blog working how I wanted, it's become too complicated. Be careful what you wish for.

I'm keeping this little rant out of the RSS feed because it's embarrassing. I still have no clue what I want to do about notes. Emacs and Org-mode are the answer, and yet today I was tinkering with nb and still testing Logseq and came this close to re-installing Obsidian. Emacs is, effectively, a silo. I don't want to have to live there, but once you're in...you're in. Breaking out has been a haphazard nightmare of tooling and testing. I hate it. Just use Emacs and be (stay) done with it all. And yet.

• Library card generator

Blog note: I'm now including titled notes in the list of posts on the Archives page. Hopefully this prevents things from getting "lost" in the daily shuffle. And speaking of the archives page, I've condensed the layout considerable. I'm worried that it's harder to read now, but the density is way up at least.

• Ordered a Kobo Libra 2

• Blake Crouch on assigning value
• Deleted 21 apps

• do something photographic today

This is the second daily post I've generated using Tinderbox. It is such a terrible but compelling thing to do. I should stop now.

When I become disenchanted with social media, I withdraw into posting places that don't "go anywhere". For example, the post-text part of journal entries are not included in the RSS feed, so it's like private notes to myself, even though they are technically public. Same with the wiki. Unless explicitly tagged as "Feed", wiki entries aren't sent anywhere. It's just me putting words on a website. Some days that's all I want.

Upgraded Kirby to 4.1.0. No noticeable side effects.

I was a bit crabby earlier, but it has turned into an absolutely gorgeous sunny day around here so that mood was unsustainable.

• Superior smugness
• Attention grabbing
• All of the options are too many options

This post was published using Tinderbox, just to see if I could. The Kirby content file is generated via an export template in Tinderbox. I have no idea what I might do with this, but it's a neat idea. I think. If I update and republish, what happens?

If Kirby formatted its content files using "normal" YAML front matter it would be perfect.

• Changes to the home page

Neat, I'm mentioned in the latest Kirby CMS newsletter. It's a link to my post about implementing my daily notes here on the blog.

Kirby is so nice but it requires PHP to run and it stores data in text files that aren't as portable as they could be. It's got me twitchy again (still?). Not going back to Hugo, though, that's for sure. But then why am I still blogging with Tinderbox over on daily.baty.net? That's about as software-dependent and non-standard as it gets.

• Hits to feeds

I have NotePlan, Logseq, Obsidian, and Emacs running. Cool, cool.

Everything could go here. Just sayin'

• Everything.rss

• Your everyday AI companion
• Niko Kitsakis - In Praise of buttons

I spun up a WordPress "pod" at PikaPods because I wanted to take a peek at the refreshed Kubrick (2024) theme. I'm not linking to it because it'll almost certainly be gone in a week.

I pine for the days when people would say, "Thank you. I accept your apology."

• Ideas for your personal website

Whenever I visit my grandson I spend the rest of the day with a kind of buzz on.

• Paisa

Spent time this morning taking baby steps toward running this (Kirby) blog on OpenBSD using httpd. I can get the home page to load, but nothing else works (images/links/etc). I've posted a question on the forums so we'll see if that gets me anywhere.

Bragging about blocking someone or being blocked by someone on social media is something I just can't understand.

I'm interviewing for a position that I'm ideally qualified for, at a company that sounds great to work for. I would be a valuable addition, I'm sure of it. I'm just not used to convincing people of that. 🤞

I write so poorly at times that I'm probably actively poisoning LLMs.

• Logseq is so close
• My wiki is priceless

I sat down at the computer and fired up a new post for Hugo in Emacs, forgetting that yesterday I switched back to Kirby. So it's going to be that kind of day, I guess.

Just because you don't like something, doesn't mean it's bad.

• Lesser equipment

I take a photo of this loading bay every time I go to founders, usually with a film camera. Today I only had the GRIII so I used that and applied my HP5 preset in Capture One. Saved me a lot of time, actually.

• The death of Ello
• Mad at Hugo. Not mad at Kirby.

The weather. The blog. Logseq and Denote fantasy

I'm fine.

• Rolling my own theme?
• I've lost interest in everything

Our near-blizzard conditions continue today. Alice had a hard time finding a place to poop on our walk this morning.

• Sync is where it gets tricky
• Editing Kirby content via the server's panel

Alice was up at 3:30 which is a little early, but at least we got to have a nice long walk through a beautiful blanket of fresh snow.

I'm still waffling on what to do with this very text you're reading. It's part of the "Journal" entry content in Kirby, which I don't include in the RSS feed. I love this because it gives me a less public space to ramble about whatever. It's sort of a personal journal that people crazy enough can read if the wish to. The problem is that nearly everything I post could be a real note post (such as those below). Those get published to the feed and also have their own separate page, which I like. Anyway, I guess I'll just keep making it up as I go along.

• Dodged the Hugo bullet
• I'm going to go ahead and suggest you stop saying "I'm going to go ahead and..."

After yesterday's Kirby->Hugo-Kirby debacle, I've been thinking about why I spend so much time farting around with and on my blog. Fair question, and one I don't really have an answer to. I guess it's my little place on the internet and I like to have the furniture arranged just so. But "just so" changes all the time, so I keep trying new configurations. It's fun. Also useless, and nobody but me cares, but still.

• Subscription changes

Have you ever been so enamoured with plain-text-static-html publishing that you’re willing to burn down a month of implementing a blog using Kirby CMS in order to go back to using Emacs and Markdown and Hugo? I nearly did that today. Close call, but it's still idling in the back of my head, so no promises.

The problem I have is that once I get a system to a stable place, I want to change to a new system.

• Today's battle, Kirby vs Hugo

I remain tempted to keep writing directly in the freeform area of each daily note and make the individual (sub)notes the only other posts. In other words, I'd eliminate the main Posts section as their own content things. The Posts page would show every individual daily note, uh, note. This is how the old daily.baty.net works and I still like it. The problem is that what I write here is not included in the RSS feed. This is by design, but perhaps that needs to change.

Blog post: Org-web-tools.

• Prose.sh
• Multitudes
• Analytics
• Non-plain-text guilt

I now have OpenBSD running on a laptop. I think OpenBSD on a laptop might be the wrong choice for anything beyond, "Cool, I'm running OpenBSD on a laptop!"

Repeatedly asserting something, I don't care how many times, doesn't make it true.

My Mastodon feed right now is chock full of people telling other people why some thing or person or group is bad and why we all must stop using/supporting/talking to them or else we are also bad and it's exhausting and I'm not interested.

• OpenBSD on a laptop is eluding me
• Happily using ZSH again
• Skipping the good parts

Now that I've had my "ideal" configuration for blog posts for a few weeks, I'm realizing that I've added friction and I'm not sure how to feel about that. I can write in the main daily note entry, or a note attached to a daily note entry, or a full-on individual Post. This means I have to decide where to put everything I want to write. I've half a mind to either go back to everything just being a post or else putting everything, including posts, as part of each Daily note. Careful what you ask for, is what I'm saying.

Also, it's nice having a place to just stream-of-consciousness it throughout the day without worrying about polluting anyone's RSS feed or social media timeline. It feels like a Members' Only thing, since one has to actually visit the site in order to read this. It's very freeing for some reason.

New post: Ending my OpenBSD Experiment

• Obsidian is not at all joyful to use

New post: The care and feeding of my system in which I whine about what I've done to myself.

And of course now Emacs is crashing regularly. Might be a tipping point.

Sometimes the deer stay put
and we watch each other as I walk by
but mostly they run away

• Fish Shell

Yesterday I was convinced that I should keep tasks out of Org-mode and use OmniFocus instead. I need my todos on mobile right? Now I'm not sure. I need reminders on mobile, but not my giant todo list. I'll need to figure this out, today.

On the Journal page, I'm now showing a list of the notes created on that day in addition to any post text. Hoping this helps keep stuff from getting buried.

• Formatting dates in org-capture templates