Roll 064 (2025) / Leica MP

Here are a few photos from a roll of Kentmere 400 in the Leica MP. Family snaps, mostly. For some of the indoor photos I used a little Godox flash, totally guessing at exposure.

Ideal vs Authentic self

Will Ferrell on boring people

Immature is a word the boring people use to describe fun people.

Will Ferrell

Fixing backups on the UGREEN NAS

Running the Backup and Sync app on the UGREEN NAS would fail with the following:

"Failed to perform "MyMedia". Reason: "Path does not exist/No permission/Insufficient capacity/Incompatible with the external device system"

Not very helpful.

Some poking around pointed to illegal filenames for exFAT. I searched for the files using the following:

find . -name "*[\"*:<>?\\|]*"

This found more than 100 files. I asked Claude to help with a script to rename the files. I chose "-" for the replacement character. Here's what Claude came up with:

find . -name "*[\"*:<>?\\|]*" -depth | while IFS= read -r file; do
  dir=$(dirname "$file")
  base=$(basename "$file")
  new_base=$(echo "$base" | tr '":*<>?\\|' '-')
  
  if [ "$base" != "$new_base" ]; then
    mv -n "$file" "$dir/$new_base"
    echo "Renamed: $file -> $dir/$new_base"
  fi
done

Renaming the files worked, and the backup ran without error.

One other note, UGREEN support was fast and friendly, which I appreciate.

Ted Nelson on the future

I have seen the future– and it irks.

Ted Nelson, 1996

Roll 063 (2025), Rolleiflex 2.8D

This roll of expired Tri-X was languishing in the camera, so I forced myself to finish it with the usual self-portraits and dog photos.

Thursday, November 20, 2025

Now Playing: "Getting Killed" by Geese

Geese was mentioned by Nick Cave in the latest Red Hand Files, so I thought I'd give them a listen. I'm not sure it's my favorite, but it sure is interesting!

It's a little confusing, for sure. The plugin seems to be getting a lot of the developers' attention, so I'm optimistic it'll get simpler. For now I'm just happy that the bear can dance :)

So I replied to the mention at Mastodon from the WordPress notification. The reply showed up as expected in the Mastodon timeline. However, it also showed up on the blog's home page as if it was a regular post. I'll have to figure out how to stop that from happening.

I miss fun Twitter

An absolute classic. Makes me laugh every time. People are funny.

Now Playing: David Byrne, Who Is the Sky?

He keeps going and going. Fun, interesting song writing here.

Posting from the iPad

I'm not an iOS guy, but sometimes it's nice using the iPad on the couch or in bed. A disadvantage of using an SSG for blogging is that posting from mobile, while possible, is a convoluted mess.

Using WordPress via the JetPack app on the iPad is not the worst experience. At least it's possible. So that's what I'm doing here. I'm relaxing on the basement couch with the dog sleeping next to me and typing this on the old iPad Pro with keyboard. It's a refreshing change of pace, even if it's not something I'll do all the time.

No rules here

I have a rule book for blogging, honest, even though I seldom refer to it. I've decided to throw it away when it comes to this blog. All bets are off, people!

Future-proof, schmuture-proof

I just don't get why we suffer through using lesser software every day because "what if…?!".

If, for example, Day One goes away, I'll still have all my text/json/html/pdf exports, books, backups, etc. I can go all text then. I'd lose all the fancy bits, but at least I had them, until I didn't.

Meanwhile, I have this:

Screenshot of Day One, beginning 2011.
Ain't it purdy?

I'm all about plain text. Most of my notes from the past few years use Org mode. My blog is written using Markdown. I get it, but there are also 25-year-old WordPress blogs still plugging away nicely.

Speaking of WordPress, I'm writing this post using it. You know why? It's easy, requires no other infrastructure or dependencies, and doesn't break once a month due to software updates. ::knocks wood::.

I don't know how long this mood will last, but it's pretty strong today.

Suffering every day now just to avoid some theoretical and unlikely future event that's easy to recover from seems unecessary and even a little foolish to me.

Another one of those weeks

WordPress and ActivityPub

I've installed the ActivityPub plugin on my baty.blog WordPress blog. Let's see how it works.

This should show my profile with a follow button:

Follow

Any reactions to my post should show up at the bottom of each post. (probably only from my other account, since I'm the "1 follower" :).

Installation and setup was very quick and easy. This seems like a fine solution.

Relinquishing (some) control

My obsession with being "in control" of as much as possible is waning.

I don't want to manage everything. I don't feel like worrying about it. So far this is more a feeling than anything, but it's a pretty strong feeling.

A couple of examples:

So that's my mood today. Stay tuned to find out where else this feeling leads me.

Monday, November 17, 2025

Instead of deciding where to post things, I'll just wing it on a per-post basis, how 'bout.

Also, I typed that last sentence from the Linux box, then typed this one from macOS. I like things about both of them, so I guess I'll just never pick anything and stick with it.

I'm not sure I want to maintain a complex Emacs config

I love my (sort of) home grown Emacs config, but maintaining it can be exhausting.

Yesterday, I complained about it a little in A blog post written with NeoVim. There's so much going on. I've spent years making tweaks both small and large. This should be a good thing, but I'm not feeling great about it. It feels fragile. It is fragile.

So, what to do about it? Anything? One option might be to switch back to something like Doom Emacs. Doom is great, but I always end up spending nearly as much time tweaking packages as I do on my own config.

Another option would be to migrate away from using Emacs for everything.

::gasp!::

I've threatened to leave Emacs before. Many times. I've even followed through once or twice. The problem is that inertia (or is it momentum?) takes over. I have a decade of notes and workflows built on and around Org mode, all via Emacs. What happens to all that? Do I really want to replace all those parts with new ones? If I'm going to commit to switching to Linux (still not a certainty), the replacements are all different.

You can tell I'm in a mood because I'm posting this with WordPress. That's never a good sign.

Anyway, I'm still noodling on all of it. Thanks for listening.

Sunday, November 16, 2025

Shot at 75MPH on the highway.

Yeah, Yeah, I know. I'm not blogging here any more, right? I'm especially not writing daily posts here. I already have three other places I can do that. Well so what? Today I feel like writing it here, so ::raspberry sound here::

Today I'm blogging with WordPress, taking notes using jrnl, and keeping my task list in "Super Productivity"…on Linux. Things sure are weird. :)

Creative: The Entire Extent – Shifter

All of this nonsense attacks the foundation of photography. Photographers spending four hours adjusting color are making images that don’t look real. Light simply does not do what they are making it do.

Dan Milnor, Creative: The Entire Extent – Shifter

I've been guilty of this, but no more. These days I hardly touch the originals. I've learned that excessive post-processing adds very little and certainly doesn't turn a bad photo into a good one.