I have rented a 14-yard dumpster for the week. I plan to be (temporarily) environmentally irresponsible by throwing away everything not nailed down (either literally or figuratively). It’s going to feel great. Any environmental impact will be offset by piece-of-mind improvements.

May 10, 2023 Journal Reply by email

Updated my Leica Camera Timeline page. I’m thinking about just rolling it into a markdown file here on the blog. Maybe later.

I’m working on a custom AI chatbot and it’s not going great. I’m learning a lot, though.

I’m calling it. Today is the day that Bluesky’s “What’s hot” feed stopped being fun. Maybe it’s a fluke and the system will self-correct.

May 9, 2023 Journal Reply by email

I spent like 2 hours fiddling with the AI “Prompt Workbench” and associated AI tools in Tana. It’s neat, but doesn’t feel worth the trouble, somehow.

Read three books on a topic and you know more about it than 99% of the world. Watch news all day for years and you have a distant, water-cooler-level awareness of thousands of stories, at least for the few weeks each is popular.

David Cain, Five Things You Notice When You Quit the News

I haven’t followed the news in years. It’s better this way.

My stepson Aidan graduated (with high honors!) from MSU yesterday. Here’s a photo of he and his mom, taken outside of the restaurant in which we were celebrating. We’re all very proud of him.

Gail and Aidan. MSU.

May 8, 2023 Journal Reply by email

I’ve been putting my daily notes/journal entries here at Baty.net for nearly a month and I’ve decided it’s totally fine. I’ve always thought I should keep my random short notes separate from “real” blog posts but it turns out to be unnecessary. People can barely be bothered to visit one blog. Asking them to follow two of them feels presumptuous and maybe a little rude.

Tana is quite a compelling package, but after using it for a week I found it to be exhausting. I still occasionally check in to see how it feels and what new features have been added. I have (had?) no plans to integrate it into my workflow. It hasn’t felt like it offered enough to justify the planned $20/month subscription price. However, today I learned that they’re now thinking $10/month. Hmmm.

May 7, 2023 Journal Reply by email

And speaking of kings, I somehow still have my crown (from 1982).

The one true King

Whenever I go to Founders, a take a snapshot of this garage for some reason:

Garage at Founders Brewing

Blog post about making Mu4e better for me: A couple of Mu4e improvements

I had to call the IRS about an issue with my tax returns. It was surprisingly not unpleasant.

I didn’t think I needed something like TextSniper on my Mac, but turns out I use it many times every day. Recommended.

I’m spending time today consolidating several Lightroom (Classic) libraries. In recent years, I’ve created a new library for the new year and then I’d merge them the following year. The idea was that it’s nice to start “fresh” and not have to lug around 100k images all the time. Turns out that managing separate libraries is work, too, so I’m ditching that plan. One big catalog in LrC is fast enough, and less work.

Defederating an instance is an extreme measure and it should only be taken in extreme circumstances.

Finding out I might stop getting posts from people I explicitly follow because they happen to be on an instance being defederated by mine all because a bunch of admins I don’t know got in a spat over a user I don’t follow is just about the most annoying value proposition imaginable.

Rod Hilton, Mastodon

I like the idea of federation, but in practice (by Mastodon) does not instill confidence in the network. If Bluesky can implement federation as well as they have onboarding, I worry about Mastodon.

Also, right now Bluesky is a brimming with trans people having a blast. Meanwhile, Mastodon is loaded with people defensively sour-graping about “proper” federation or scolding each other about CWs. I don’t need to tell you which one is more fun.

May 6, 2023 Journal Reply by email

I usually prefer reading my email using Mu4e in Emacs, but the Vim (“Evil”) keybindings have been broken since upgrading to 1.10.x. (See this PR for background). This added so much friction that I went back to Mail.app and Notmuch. Recent changes in evil-collection have fixed the issue but weren’t available yet when updating Doom. The fix for now was to (unpin! evil-collection) in packages.el. Much better!

Another snag I’ve run into while using Mu4e was that sometimes I also use Apple’s Mail on macOS and iOS and any messages I delete there would only be flagged as “trashed” in Mu4e, so they would show up in the inbox, cluttering things considerably. The fix for this was to set Expunge Both in my .mbsyncrc file. Also much better! That one has been bugging me for a long time.

So the good news is that I’m back to using Mu4e for my email, and it’s now better than ever.

May 6, 2023 Emacs Reply by email

I try to name all of my files using the file’s creation date as a prefix. For example:

20230504-MyNewFile.txt

If I forget, it’s a pain to rename them, so I created a short AppleScript to do it for me.

-- Prepend Creation Date to selected files
-- Install Location: ~/Library/Scripts/Applications/Finder
-- Last Modified: 2023-05-04

tell application "Finder"
    set selectedItems to selection as list
    -- Loop through each selected item
    repeat with selectedItem in selectedItems
        set creationDate to creation date of selectedItem
        set fileName to name of selectedItem
        -- Prepend the creation date to the file name
        set newName to my stringFromDate(creationDate) & "-" & fileName
        -- Rename the file with the new name
        set name of selectedItem to newName
    end repeat
end tell


on stringFromDate(_date)
    -- yyyymmddhhmmss
    set _string to ""
    set _string to _string & my stringFromNumber(_date's year, 4)
    set _string to _string & my stringFromNumber(_date's month as integer, 2)
    set _string to _string & my stringFromNumber(_date's day, 2)
    return _string
end stringFromDate

on stringFromNumber(_number, _digitsToPad)
    return text -_digitsToPad through -1 of ("0000" & _number)
end stringFromNumber

I put the script into a Finder-specific folder, so it’s made easily available when Finder is the frontmost app: ~/Library/Scripts/Applications/Finder. (I use FastScripts to make things, er, faster).

I’ve also created a version for use via Raycast, which is identical but not “compiled”, as that seems to break things in Raycast.

May 4, 2023 Workflow Reply by email

I told you the move to microservices was a bad idea.

The move from a distributed microservices architecture to a monolith application helped achieve higher scale, resilience, and reduce costs.

Amazon, Scaling up the Prime Video audio/video monitoring service and reducing costs by 90%

I’m moving my local backups from Time Machine and Backblaze to Arq Backup (Premium). Time Machine has been unreliable and I find Arq more configurable and approachable than Backblaze. So far I’m still using Backblaze B2 to backup the Synology.

May 4, 2023 Journal Reply by email

It’s cute how each tiny new social network with like 47 users thinks it’s “not going to be full of dickheads like on Twitter”.

Arc’s concept of tabs is much more akin to buffers in Emacs.

unknown

That’s a good analogy.

I was considering a “web app only” experiment but after 10 minutes Tana wouldn’t load and I was reminded that dependency on the cloud is a bad idea.

Where’s the director’s commentary on streaming?

Damn good question, Verge! Audio commentaries are why I still regularly buy DVDs.

May 3, 2023 Journal Reply by email

Jess

Always nice when I get a chance to have lunch with my daughter

May 1, 2023 Journal Reply by email