Every day I wake up older.

This is quite a thread about using, but never learning, Emacs. Feels familiar: Can’t learn Emacs, can’t use anything else

I changed the font here to HK Grotesk because Signika felt a little heavy.

It’s a little weird having these “journal” posts included in the site’s RSS feed, since when first published they are nearly empty. What I should do is keep them as drafts until there’s more meat on their bones. Or perhaps there’s a way to trigger their inclusion in the RSS feed separately from “Draft” status.

I spent some time in the darkroom this morning catching up on contact sheets and making a few quick prints from recent rolls. I’m not sure if I love it or hate it.

How could I not want one of these keyboards? Office Altar I.

It’s possible I could move back into Org-roam from Denote. I prefer the simplicity of Denote but Org-roam has it all, and Doom makes it all work pretty well.

September 8, 2022 Journal Reply by email

☀️ Clear +64°F

Alex referred to one of his blogs as his “daily waffle” and I feel seen. My whole life is a daily waffle. No matter what I’m doing today, it should be assumed that it’ll change tomorrow.

I’m moving a bunch of domains from iwantmyname.com to porkbun.com even though I just read about them having a prolonged outage. Is that weird? That seems weird. But, I had a few domains scheduled to renew at iwantmyname and they’re rather expensive so let’s try it. Several people I know seem to love Porkbun.

(via @ftrain)

Shortly before and shortly after Apple events is a good time to stay out of the “blogosphere”.

I’m holding out for the Apple Watch Yowza.

Migrate TiddlyWiki to Org-roam: Part 1 I’m writing this down, but I’m not going to actually try it, nope, not doing it.

September 7, 2022 Journal Reply by email

It’s been about a week using Blot and so far I’m thrilled to be back. I’ve never stuck with iA Writer for my general notes but for editing Markdown files for publishing with Blot, it’s quite nice. The combination is pretty sweet.

I’ve listed the Leica MP (Black Paint) for sale. Gasp!

The recent spate of AI tools for generative art are obviously amazing, revolutionary, and exciting. I just can’t seem to muster the energy to care.

I am so glad, now that the Mac line is awesome again, that I no longer have thoughts of Dell/Linux running distractingly in the back of my head.

I love the idea of manual typewriters. I have several nice ones. But I almost never use them.

Do I really want the artifacts of my life to be a stack of paper notebooks full of repetitive navel-gazing? Because right now that’s about all there is.

I’m feeling a digital photography phase coming on. Thinking of re-buying an M10-R. Why not a Q2 or SL2? Because I wan’t to try active photography rather than passive. I believe that the M helps with that. Why digital? Because I want to focus on taking pictures rather than the medium, process, and accoutrement.

Blot exposes a 404 log of my blog. This is great because it helps determine which content I’ve missed during migrations and where I need redirects.

Is there such a thing as “old/shiny”? That’s what Blot is for me right now.

I just installed Insync as my Dropbox client on the MBP because Maestral kept crashing. If you’re reading this, it worked. (Update: It worked.)

I have changed my mind about whether or not to capitalize tag names at least 356 times. #Standards #consistency

I just reread “Anything You Want” by Derek Sivers. He mentions the dangers of trying to “impress an invisible jury” and I realized that I do that all the time.

Shhhh, I’m typing this in Emacs.

September 6, 2022 Journal Reply by email

☁️ Overcast +59°F

I’m having one of those mornings where everything annoys me. Currently, it’s writers whining about how hard writing is. If a construction worker complains about how hard their job is, they’re “lazy”. Writers, on the other hand, seem to expect sympathy. (PS I would still like to be a writer and I would definitely complain about it.)

I just love how Arc’s pinned tabs indicate that I’m currently not on the original pinned page. It’s that little “/” there at the beginning:

Arc pinned tabs

I was at our old office building recently getting ready for being leased and took a spin down the slide. If you’re looking for a cool office in downtown Grand Rapids, MI, this would be great for you.

Spiral slide. Leica MP, HP5.

September 5, 2022 Journal Reply by email

I’ve gotten to a place where I don’t want to use any self-hosted app that requires anything more than SQLite. Don’t talk to me about locking.

I love Emacs and Hugo, but editing a markdown file in iA Writer and having it all published automatically via Blot by simply saving the file is a goddamned pleasure.

My mom and dad stopped by yesterday. I made a quick portrait of my mom. She’s so sweet I can’t stand it.

My mom

I’ve decided to migrate baty.net to Blot. Sorry in advance for any breakage.

Maybe I should stop writing about my camera setup changes. It’s embarrassing.

I read this today: “side note: there are no crappy teams, only crappy managers”. There are certainly a fair amount of crappy managers, but this statement is horseshit.

Most of today has been spent contemplating a full-on move to digital photography. I haven’t felt as much like dealing with film.

September 4, 2022 Journal Reply by email

⛅️ Partly cloudy +67°F

My stomach is a wreck this morning and I don’t feel like writing a newsletter. Maybe later.

Discord is an abysmal, noisy, UI nightmare that is eating our institutional knowledge at an alarming clip and it needs to go. Let the gamers have it back.

September 3, 2022 Journal Reply by email

☀️ Clear +67°F

I shouldn’t even be here, yet here I am. Remember this?:

Not that long ago

Which camera should I bring to the MSU tailgate today? I’m thinking the MP with 35mm Summilux and some HP5. Does a better kit even exist?

Why do you suppose I spend so much time tinkering with various blogs and blogging software? Is it because I don’t have much to say, so it’s easier to play with tools instead? Do I honestly enjoy it?

I’m typing this in iA Writer because it’s lovely software for editing Markdown files.

This post, in iA Writer

And now I’m typing this in iA Writer on the iPad via synced Dropbox folder. Not terrible!

I tried migrating the sync settings for this blog from Dropbox to Google Drive. All I had to do was click a button and Blot moved everything for me. But then it never updated after that so I switched back to Dropbox. I’d stopped using Dropbox so I needed to install it on my iPad and was immediately interrupted with so many upsell ads that I almost threw the iPad across the room. It’s a shame what Dropbox has become.

September 2, 2022 Journal Reply by email

Remember Blot.im? I do. I loved blogging with Blot. Hmmm, you mean I can start creating simple Markdown files in a folder and be done? No rendering or elaborate syncing/deployment requirements. No real dependencies at all. OK then! (Can you tell I’ve been a little frustrated with my Emacs, Org-mode -> Hugo situation?)

I made a quick Espanso trigger for generating Blot front matter. (I had to escape the curly braces with a backslash so you’d have to remove those):

  - trigger: ":blot"
    vars:
      - name: mydate
        type: date
        params:
          format: "%Y-%m-%d"
      - name: mytime
        type: date
        params:
          format: "%H:%M"
    replace: "Date: \{\{mydate}} \{\{mytime}}\nTags: \nIcon: 🗓️ 🌀🔗🎵📷📚 \nSlug: \{\{mydate}}\nDraft: Yes\n\n# "

So typing :blot gets me this:

Date: 2022-09-01 15:16
Tags: 
Icon: 🗓️ 🌀🔗🎵📷📚 
Slug: 2022-09-01
Draft: Yes

# 

I add tags and delete all but the relevant Icon and I’m off and running.

September 1, 2022 Meta Blot Blogging Reply by email

I met a friend for lunch today and drank a couple of beers while I was there. I guess I’m out of midday-beer practice because now I have a headache and want to sleep.

I see a lot of links to Why your website should be under 14 kB. A noble goal, but that ship sailed so long ago it’s gone over the horizon.

September 1, 2022 Blot Blogging Journal Reply by email

Last week I decided that I’d like to write with a bit more discipline than what I’d been doing in the journal entries, so I fired up a new Ghost instance at RudimentaryLathe.org.

The original intent was to only use the new blog for publishing my newsletter, “The Lathe”, but once everything was running I was reminded how nice it is to write and publish a blog using Ghost. It made me want to write everything over there, which of course creates a dilemma for us here at baty.net.

Just when I’d finally gotten to a point where most of my published writing was in one place, I went and added another place.

For a moment I considered replacing Hugo with Ghost here at baty.net and importing the content. But, I’d promised myself I’d stop changing platforms here and I would love to keep that promise. Every time I move to a new platform I either lose images or introduce layout issues or otherwise simply regret it.

For now, I’m going to keep both, and I’ll probably spend more time blogging and publishing the newsletter over at rudimentarylathe.org. Daily journal posts will remain here. If this continues, I may modify the theme so that the home page displays more journal entries. I might also only show recent blog posts as links, since they won’t be updated as often.

So, the short answer is that both sites will be updated. I hope that doesn’t cause my handful of readers too much trouble.

August 22, 2022 Blogging Reply by email