Jack Baty

Now that I sort of went back to hugo on the other blog, of course Kev introduces Pure Comments. Now what am I supposed to do? 😁

I love what Kev has done with Pure Blog. It's great, but I think I need to stick with a static site for now. I'm used to it, and I have a Whole Thing built around Emacs and Hugo. It's not like Pure Blog is difficult to host or anything, but my Hugo blog is simpler. All my Hugo content starts locally, which I prefer.

It's not Pure Blog, it's me.

I'm fickle, and could be back before you know it, so I'm leaving this up, for now.

See y'all back at baty.net.

*Yin/Yang/Urinate. Leeloo and Katie (2009). iPhone

One of the draws of macOS has always been its level of polish. That's increasingly no longer a thing. Still, it's a few lengths ahead of Linux on the available software front.

The last thing I need is a 7th weather app on my phone, but Acme Weather

I'm trying hard to get good enough at using Darktable that I don't mind using Darktable. It's slow going.

macOS or Linux...one of them should go. Using both is crazy-making and I don't know if it's sustainable. I spent most of the day with Linux. I've gotten to the point where I almost prefer KDE and Gnome to macOS. It's the software, though. Darktable could eventually pull me from Capture One and/or Lightroom. We'll see. Emacs works well on both. But I want Tinderbox and BBEdit and TheBrain and Curio. I want Emacs bindings everywhere, by default. I want PopClip and Keyboard Maestro and Raycast. There are alternatives on Linux for some of them, but most feel...lesser. Thing is, I don't need any of it. I just want it. If I can get over that, I'd go all in.

Wearing my hat (2026). Leica M3 / HP5 @1600

I spend many, many hours changing and tweaking my photography workflows, just in case I actually take photos one day. Also, I've made a mess doing it.

People sometimes take the things I say too seriously. My whole blogging history is littered with temporary opinions and untested theories. I write what I'm thinking, at that moment. I'm moody and impressionable. It's my fault. Do not expect consistency.

"That's the difference between intention and drift, which is a thread running through your whole life plan." No shit, Claude. :)

The guy sure works hard at blogging. Using AI to help do that seems like a fine use case. He addresses the usual anti-AI backlash with a few choice quotes.

Doctorow, Six Years of Pluralistic

Purity culture is such an obvious trap, an artifact of the neoliberal ideology that insists that the solution to all our problems is to shop very carefully, thus reducing all politics to personal consumption choices

Ouch, but kinda.

I seem to have completely lost the thread when it comes to managing my photos. I blame Linux, but it's totally my fault, and has been happening in some form for years.

When living on macOS, I moved between Lightroom, Lightroom Classic, Capture One, and Bridge/Photoshop for editing and managing photos. That was bad enough, but now I've thrown Linux into the mix and all hell has broken loose.

None of my usual tooling is available for Linux, so I dove into Darktable, which seems to be the top contender for dealing with RAW files. (RawTheraPee doesn't attract me for some reason). Darktable is the oddest thing. It's super powerful and flexible, but the UI and workflow are inscrutable. I could learn to live with it if I had to.

So I have added digiKam and Darktable to the set of options. Not to mention a whole new OS. That's not confusing at all. 🙄

I typically keep the current month's photos on a local SSD. I've done that for January and February. Sometimes this was done on the Linux box, sometimes on the Mac. You see where this leads.

I have lost raw files. I have photos with multiple associated .xmp files because everything seems to name them differently. I have edits done in several apps. I've lost edits. Where do I edit metadata? What is the canonical location of my photos? Why does the rating sometimes come along and sometimes doesn't? What should I sync? What goes on the NAS and what stays local? I've even lost an entire sleeve of negatives. How's that even possible? It feels related.

My photography hobby is the main thing keeping me from moving full-time to Linux. It would be so nice to live on one OS, using one set of apps. I just don't know if I can commit to Darktable.

Anyway, I have work to do. This is unsustainable.

Thought I'd bring back the status block here and see how it feels. Should it go at the bottom of the daily post instead? Dunno.

I made the mistake of reading the news this morning. It made me furious (like most days), so I went to visit my grandson and now I feel much better.

There's been talk lately about why RSS readers are designed like email clients and whether they should use unread count indicators This goes back to at least 2014. The latest discussion is around Phantom Obligations.

I love seeing new approaches to things, so I bought Terry Godier's new RSS app, Current, which is designed in a way meant to avoid the sense of obligation around unread articles. Current does some clever semi-algorithmic manipulation of feeds based on frequency, importance, type, etc. It's quite clever and it looks nice. I have a few early thoughts about it.

Using Current, though, I still find myself scrolling through my feeds and hitting "Mark as Read" on everything I see but don't want to read, same as I do in other readers.

Thing is, I like the unread count in RSS readers like NetNewsWire. These aren't obligations, they're opportunities. I'm sad when the count gets to zero. Unread articles are just that. Things on my list that I haven't gotten to yet. There's no rush, and if I haven't read all of them, so be it. Sometimes, if I get "behind", I just glance at the latest articles and if nothing grabs me, I "Mark all as read" and move on. I might feel a slight twinge of FOMO, but it's fine. It's possible that Current just isn't for me.

Maybe I just need to give it a few more days, to see if I actually prefer the "flow" Current promises. It seems like a thoughtful, well-designed app that is trying to improve the experience of keeping up with our feeds. I'm all for that.

“Who among us can be happy and proud of having all this innocent blood on our hands? Who are these swine? These flag-sucking half-wits who get fleeced and fooled by stupid little rich kids...”

—HUNTER S. THOMPSON

Current is a new RSS reader. It looks interesting, but damn that page uses a lot of words to describe it. It makes simple seem complicated.

So is this going to be my main blog or what?