Baty.blog

Welcome to Jack Baty‘s blog about everything

  • Capture my thoughts? What thoughts?

    I’ve carried one kind of paper notebook or another on my person for years. Moleskine, Field Notes, Travelers, you name it. The idea is to “capture my ideas and thoughts” while on the go.

    I’ll be honest with you, I don’t really have many thoughts or ideas, on the go or otherwise. I can’t remember the last time I was walking or at the store or whatever and thought, “Oooh! That’s a brilliant idea, Jack! Thank goodness I have this notebook with me!”

    Mostly what I write in these notebooks are grocery lists or the name of a TV show someone said I should watch.

    Who are these people that have all kinds of ideas while out? I want to be one of those people, so I still carry my notebook everywhere. Just in case, I guess.

  • Org-social

    tanrax/org-social:

    Org Social is a decentralized social network that runs on an Org Mode file over HTTP.

    You can create posts, interact with groups, make replies, mention other users, create polls, or personalize your profile. All this without registration, without databases… Just you and your Org Mode file.

    It’s a ton of fun for us emacs nerds. Follow mine here:

    https://jackbaty.com/social.org

  • Andrea Pitzer: You don’t have to swallow frogs

    But the truth for nearly everyone is simpler. You don’t have to turn your back on the big issues, but you also don’t have to import the entire national crisis into your personal one.

    Source: You don’t have to swallow frogs

    The article discusses the recent Ezra Klein/Ta-Nehisi Coates interview.

  • We’re here for now

    I made it official, I'll be blogging exclusively here at baty.blog for a while. Sometimes, by "a while", I end up meaning "two days", but it is what it is. It feels really good for those two days, at least. I'm having fun. I like the theme enough. I don't mind dumping short and long posts at random here. You all may have a different opinion, but it's my blog, right? 😅

  • Hello, from WordLand

    This is a test post to see how well Dave Winer's new WordLand works in Zen (Firefox). I had issues in Safari. So far, it seems fine.

    Since I'm using Linux, I no longer have access to MarsEdit for posting to WordPress, and I still like avoiding Gutenberg for simple posts like this.

  • The Framework is the most exciting laptop I’ve ever broken – Cory Doctorow

    Helping other people use technology requires humility: you have to want to help them realize their goals, which may be totally unlike your own. You have to listen carefully and take care not to make assumptions about how they “should” use tech. You may be a tech expert, but they are experts on themselves.

    Source: Pluralistic: 13 Nov 2022 The Framework is the most exciting laptop I’ve ever broken

    This is why I’m not good at tech support. MOVE! But also, he’s right about the Framework. It’s awesome.

  • Jeremy Mann on waiting for change

    We cannot just sit and wait and hope that something will change in a way we wish it to.

    Jeremy Mann, “Red Rabbit 7”

    That explains the reading on my scale this morning, I guess.

  • WordPress tooling

    The sheer volume of tooling and resources around WordPress is a compelling argument in its favor. As long as I don’t have to use the Site Editor, I think I could live here.

    I like having anonymous comments (for now). I like detailed analytics built in. I like having an enormous amount of plugins available (even though I hope I don’t need any of them). I like having a bunch of utilities for managing posts and categories and tags. I like the “Press This” bookmarklet for quickly quoting stuff.

    I dislike Gutenberg, but if I’m honest, I dislike anything that’s not Emacs, so what’re ya gonna do? ¯_(ツ)_/¯.

  • CalDAV to Emacs diary

    Please, there must be a thousand ways to do this that I haven’t discovered. If you know of anything simpler, I’m all ears.

    I use the Emacs Diary all the time. I prefer it to using only Org-mode dates in my agenda. The tricky piece is getting the stuff from my CalDAV (Fastmail) calendar into the diary.

    Hanno’s post, Managing calendar events in Emacs got me started. Their post is more geared toward Org dates, but it gave me a good leg up.

    Basically, it’s this:

    (more…)

  • Make a new decision later (quote)

    The strength of making a decision is making it. You can always make a new one later.

    Source: Optimizing for Taste