That’s not entirely fair. Wallace’s most famous book, Infinite Jest—1,079 pages and weighing 3.15 pounds (in the hardcover first edition)—is challenging. But Wallace wrote many other things, and some of them are quite accessible.
I hope that reading and talking about DFW makes a comeback. For a while there, Book Social Media was (rightfully) aligned against sound-smart lit-bros who wouldn't shut up about Infinite Jest. I may have been one of them, because I loved (and still love) that book, so shut up.
Using Winer’s WordLand to post to WordPress encourages me to make shorter, even title-less, posts. While there are no character limits, the initial size of the form sort of adds an affordance of brevity. I don’t mind this.
TL;DR It's a love/hate thing, with love in the lead.
Here are a few thoughts on how things are going so far.
I'm still using Omarchy. I really like the tiling window setup with Hyprland. I sometimes paint myself into a corner, but mostly it makes window management fast and efficient. Workspaces on Linux are so nice.
Everything on Omarchy can be done via keyboard. Once I got used to the bindings, this has made getting around, launching apps, moving windows, etc. convenient. I'm not against using a mouse, but It's nice not to have to.
So far almost everything has worked without fuss. My Apple Studio Display works, as does its speaker volume, webcam, and microphone. I was able to print to my laser printer straight away, and never needed to install anything for it.
Speaking of installing things, using the little TUI wrapper over Pacman and the AUR is a dream. Launch the TUI, type part of the name of the app to install, and hit Return. Done. No app store, no DMGs to extract. Homebrew on macOS is pretty good, but it's not as all-inclusive and consistent.
Mostly what I like so far about Linux is how I feel about using it. I like the feeling of "Hmm, what can I do with my computer, today" rather than, "I wonder what Apple is going to allow me to do with my computer, today." Running Linux on this completely repairable and upgrade-able Framework laptop, I feel a sense of agency. It's a good feeling.
That agency, however, comes with responsibility. I'm completely in charge, here. That means when things don't work right (and sometimes things don't work right), it's on me to figure out some obscure way to fix it. I don't know where anything is, yet. Thankfully, things have been working fine, but inevitably there'll be some weird issue with the boot loader or Bluetooth will just quit working for no reason. That's when the parts of Linux I don't like will start.
I miss some things from the Mac. I miss BBEdit, Tinderbox, PopClip, DEVONthink, and others. I miss my photography workflow. Photo management and editing software on Linux is powerful, but it's not fun to use. At all. When doing any significant photo management, I switch to the Mac for now. I don't know if that will ever change. Capture One, Lightroom, and Photoshop are just too good.
Mostly, I miss having the standard Emacs bindings everywhere. It's driving me nuts to type this post in a web browser, for example. How do people deal with text like this. Arrow keys? Gross. I just want C-f, C-b, C-a, C-e, C-n, and C-p, is all.
All I know is that I'm having a lot of fun right now.
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 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:
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.
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? 😅
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.
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)_/¯.
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.
Seb let me know about his package that does all this and more: cdsync
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.
I installed vdirsyncer and khal via Pacman (Omarchy)
Here's my ~/.config/vdirsyncer/config:
[general]
# A folder where vdirsyncer can store some metadata about each pair.
status_path = "~/.vdirsyncer/status/"
# CALDAV
[pair jack_calendar]
a = "jack_calendar_local"
b = "jack_calendar_remote"
collections = ["from a", "from b"]
# Calendars also have a color property
metadata = ["displayname", "color"]
[storage jack_calendar_local]
type = "filesystem"
path = "~/.calendars/"
fileext = ".ics"
[storage jack_calendar_remote]
type = "caldav"
url = "https://my.caldav.account"
username = "nerd@example.com"
password = "averylongpasswordreally"
I ran vdirsyncer discover once and then vdirsyncer sync and it pulled my calendars down into ~/.calendars/
vdirsyncer creates .ics calendar files, which aren't useful for Emacs Diary. That's where khal comes in.
My ~/.config/khal/config file:
[calendars]
[[main]]
path = "~/.calendars/699f44f9-799a-4325-9328-aff622023096/"
color = dark green
[[other]]
path = "~/.calendars/2e7d0c52-d5c7-4e6a-aa2e-01f8eb84a515/"
[locale]
dateformat = %Y-%m-%d
timeformat = %H:%M
That tells khal where the calenders are, and sets up a usable output format for use in the Emacs Diary. The following command is where I landed.
It generates a list of calendar events from today until 10 days from now and puts the results into a file that I use as part of my Emacs Diary. Just make sure that includes are enabled:
The side of my neighbor's house (2025). Nikon F100. Kodak ColorPlus.
I was testing my first roll of Kodak ColorPlus film, so while walking the dog I took this snap of the side of my neighbor's house. It's supposed to be a throwaway, but I dig it for some reason. The more I look at it, the more I like it.
I was using the Nikon F100, so I didn't bother to think I might have set the ISO manually on an earlier roll. Sure enough, it was set at ISO 400. ColorPlus is a 200 speed film. Whoops. I noticed my mistake halfway through the roll, but figured I'd take the opportunity to push color film for my first time. It kind if ruined the "How good is ColorPlus?" experiment, but oh well.
I scanned it using the Leica SL2 mounted on a Negative Supply rig, then inverted the scans using Negative Lab Pro in Lightroom (Classic).
As usual, the colors look weird to me. The shadows have a splash of magenta and everything looks just a little off.
And yet, I love the photo. I love the diagonal monochrome/color separation. I like the placement of the rocks and the tree. I like the air conditioner unit in the center. The single sunlit yellow flower against deep shadow. And I really love the satellite dish.
SilverBullet is another tool for notes. I toyed with it last year for a bit and it was great fun. It's definitely geared toward the nerdier crowd, but for someone who wants to build a system of notes around a bunch of Markdown files, SilverBullet is a good option. I like it much more than Obsidian, fwiw.
While testing LazyDocker on Omarchy, I figured I'd use SilverBullet as a test bed. That was easy.
LazyDocker running SilverBullet
I doubt I'll actually use SilverBullet for my notes, but it's tempting.
Is it OK that I like posting in a bunch of different places using a bunch of different tools and methods? I think it's OK. Today, I don't feel like typing this in Emacs and then deploying the Hugo blog, even though it's easy and I love Emacs and static websites. Today, I feel like clicking a button, typing some words, and clicking another button, using nothing but a WordPress installation somewhere out there.
I've spent a lot of time installing and configuring software on the two new Linux boxes. Install a package and figure out where to configure it, then (maybe?) symlink and sync the configuration so that I can do the same things on the other computer. It's kind of exhausting. I realize that this is mostly a front-weighted problem, but still, it has me thinking of ways to reduce the ongoing effort.
One of those ways is to use more web apps. Omarchy makes "installing" standalone web apps easy.
I could use the Fastmail web UI for email instead of my intricate and complex Mutt or Mu4e or GNUS setup. I could use WordPress (or Kirby) for blogging and not need go/hugo/rsync, etc. I could use SilverBullet for notes. There is even a growing number of web-based image manipulation tools I could use for quick resizing/conversions.
I don't necessarily want to change my tools in order to take advantage of web apps, but it sure would simplify some things.
Some days I just don't feel like it, ya know? I don't mean writing blog posts. I mean creating, managing, and deploying the blog itself.
I just tried deploying baty.net (Hugo) from the new Framework running Omarchy, and forgot that I first needed to install Go, Hugo, rsync, and Node (for pagefind), then make sure my ssh keys were in place. It's a Whole Thing. I wasn't in the mood for it, so I came here to WordPress (aka Easy Mode) to bitch about it. So hello!
