☁️ Overcast +25°F

Good morning. It’s 4:20 am and when do you think I’ll be able to get 8 hours sleep?

I’m still planning to spend at least a few hours each day this week on my little Rails project. So far it’s not clicking for me. I’m in the must-look-up-every-single-thing phase and it’s exhausting.

For someone who’s recently claimed that “owning” and managing music was no longer interesting, I’m sure spending a lot of time today editing metadata of my local library in Roon.

But what’s really striking about the data is the distribution of users across the instances. In the federation fantasy, given 3,070 instances, we hope that 50% of the user base is spread across 1,535 instances, and the other 50% across the other 1535 instances. That is, in fantasy land, every instance would host an equal number of users (642).

In reality, guess how many instances encompass half of the user base. Maybe 1,000? Alright, there are some big instances in there, so perhaps 100? Well, there are a lot of really tiny instances mixed in, so possibly only 20?

The answer?

Three.

Just three instances encompass 50.8% of users.

I want to be the kind of person who says, “I’m not on social media”, but instead I’m the kind of person who says “I want to be the kind of person who says, ‘I’m not on social media.'”

I prefer when people tell me what they’re interested in and what they think about things instead of always telling me what other people should do or be interested in.

The M10-R was photographed and boxed up for sale this morning. I even started creating a listing at fredmiranda.com. I canceled the listing and took the Leica back out of the box. If I could just get over the guilt of spending so much money while not getting out and taking more photos with it. If I solve the latter, the guilt should diminish. I feel like I can’t keep both the M10-R and the SL2-S kits. The problem is that I can’t decide which to keep, because I love them both. Just look at it!

Well I haven’t worked on my Rails project today, like I planned to. I just can’t muster the interest or energy.

☀️ Clear +29°F

I have a hunch that paying the log4j team would not have prevented the exploit. The idea that “big companies” should pay open-source developers is fine, but expecting it to work in real life is, at best, optimistic. First, the people actually able to cut checks are far removed from the dev team who actually know which OSS packages are in use. Second, how many of those likely dozens or hundreds of packages should be paid for and how much and who keeps track of them? I can imagine the big, obvious ones maybe getting some attention, but things like log4j never hit the radar. Maybe there could be some sort of audit system, but still feels unlikely.

Day 2 of my Rails project build. I have a long way to go, and a lot to learn before I get there. Some of it still rings a bell, though.

☁️ Overcast +31°F

How am I supposed to know what I’m good at if I never actually do anything?

I thought I’d see what the Ruby On Rails world looked like with version 7 being released recently. I haven’t written anything in Rails since like 2010. Here’s the very first fucking thing that happened:

<_20211220_083540rails-not-installed-yes-it-is-i-hate-you.png>

…soooo, same old, I guess.

It’s that simple: you are either being sold a dream so that someone else can profit before it comes true, or you’re being sold something that already exists as if it’s brand new. In any case, someone else is going to get rich as long as you conflate avaricious obsession with something also being valid.  

☁️ Overcast +32°F

Year progress: ▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓░░ 96%

Bed after midnight, up at 4:00 am. Good morning! 🥱

After much thrashing about the past two days, I’ve again settled on Lightroom Classic for photo management. I want to use Capture One because I get to better images faster. I want to use Lightroom Desktop because it’s fast and pretty and syncs everywhere. But, Classic gives me every tool I could ever need in a complete, widely-supported package. It’s got everything going for it. It doesn’t bring me joy, but it gets the job done and leaves me all the options I need.

Still trying Raycast as an Alfred replacement. If I can find a solution/replacement for Alfred’s “Universal Actions” I’ll be a convert.

Well bonjour to you too!

My wife just passed 6,000 miles on her exercise bike. Amazing.

I’m deploying this using a Raycast Script Command. If this works well, I may no longer need Fastscripts.

It’s really nice not having to think, “I need to remember to do this on the other Mac.” after every configuration change or app install I make on the new MBP. One machine is the right answer.

☁️ Overcast +32°F

It took me all of 2 minutes to stop seeing the notch on the new MBP. It’s a non-issue, although I am being more diligent about making sure apps don’t show an icon in the menu bar unless it’s necessary.

I think I’ll live with the little 14-inch screen for a spell before hooking this thing up to the 32-inch monitor. For normal writing, browsing, etc. a small screen is kind of calming. I don’t expect this feeling to last, but it’s fun for now.

One thing for sure is that Lightroom Classic isn’t nearly as pleasant on a smaller screen as Lightroom Desktop (my god how could they have messed up the product naming so badly?). It’s making me think about running with Desktop again.

The maintainer of Org-roam has made comments lately making me think he’s barely even using it. There are a few other active contributors but it still makes me uneasy. Guess I’ll need to figure out for real how to use Org-roam and Logseq together.

I scanned a roll of 35mm film with the Epson 750 and have decided the scan quality is plenty good enough for me. I’ll sell the PrimeFilm scanner.

☀️ Clear +33°F

I took 140 photos with the M10-R at an office Christmas party last night. I culled things down to 47 images worth sharing with the group. Here’s one of the cool Cadillac that was parked in the room.

I’ve been trying to use Lightroom Desktop (not Classic) but I don’t think I can do it. It’s fast, lightweight, and handles storage and backups and everything for me. Some days I don’t feel like naming, managing, and dealing with files. On the other hand, I can never get comfortable with not managing them. But mostly it’s that Lightroom Classic does everything except manage the actual photos. I need that more than I need the convenience.

It’s like every morning I’m a completely different person.

I’ve been watching the UPS tracker all day. The MBP was unexpectedly in town by 9:00 am this morning. I was still waiting for the status to change to “Out for Delivery” but it never did. Then, the doorbell rang! 🥳

It occurs to me that optimizing for speed of setting up a new computer is a waste of so much time. How often does the average person need to bootstrap a new computer? Right, not very often. Having 2 machines makes the effort a little more valuable, since often the setup stuff is then synced. But now that I’m about to be down to a single computer, I’m not going to worry about it at all.

Maybe I’ll take that back. It’s been three hours and I have the broad strokes done on the new MBP. But I know there are soooo many loose ends I have yet to trip over.

⛅️ Partly cloudy +65°F

It’s 65 degrees this morning, and very windy. Felt like spring, a little.

I miss Ruby on Rails. I deployed my first production Rails app for a client in 2007. This may have been before Rails was even out of beta. It was a joyful time. With version 7.0.0 released yesterday (Ruby on Rails — Rails 7.0: Fulfilling a vision), I think I’ll see what I’ve missed in the last decade or so. Node, React, SPAs, and friends never felt right to me. Rails felt right, but our developers wanted to move on. A few of them are now back doing Rails full-time. Maybe I’ll join them!

The good news is that my new MBP has finally moved from Shanghai to Alaska. The bad news is that now it’s not scheduled to arrive until Monday.

I’ve updated my Emacs config so that Org mode is prettier. I really just wanted prettier bullets. I learned that when using Doom Emacs, one can add +pretty to org’s config in init.el to get nice bullets. I’ve tweaked mine further, like so:

1
2

(setq
    org-superstar-headline-bullets-list '("⁖" "◉" "○" "✸" "✿"))

Blog post: Tabs in Emacs

I changed the theme again at baty.blog. Back to “Saima”. I still like Casper, but wanted something that felt lighter. Cleaner. Hoping Saimi can stay, but I’m always looking.

There’s a small chance that I’ll move this site from daily.baty.net to baty.blog and move baty.blog to copingmechanism.com. I used daily.baty.net while experimenting with the idea of using Hugo for the daily notes. Turns out I like it, so I’m thinking about a permanent home.

Ruby on Rails — The Rails Doctrine

Half the battle of getting going is finding a thread to pull.

The kind of photos I want to make are portraits: studio or environmental. Why, then, do I have fancy Leica M cameras when there are much more suitable cameras for the task?

Dave Pell:

…because what a throng of uninformed people say on social media is news these days.

I haven’t bought any clothes in a long time. Got a new cardigan this week.

🌫 Mist +45°F

Remember that time I used the guy in this photo as my avatar? (More in Found Negatives)

I’ve been trying Raycast and it has some neat ideas. I’m not sure yet if it’s better than Alfred, but it’s fun to try a new approach to what for me has become workflow plumbing.

I should start a new site at weekly.baty.net where I summarize everything from here and the wiki and the blog (ahem, blogs). It might also make for a sustainable and mildly interesting newsletter.

What if I were to start thinking of all my blogs and wikis and streams and such as projects? This site is my “Daily Notes” project. I have a “Wiki Project” over at rudimentarylathe.wiki. I also like the word “experiment” but I’m thinking “project” has a more bite-sized and tangible ring to it, somehow.

Well, shit, now this “projects” idea has taken hold of me. Update: I started poking around looking for ideas and found Tiny Projects by Ben Stokes. He also made Paper Website: Start a tiny website from your notebook, which is the coolest idea and I’m pissed I didn’t think of it. That’s exactly the kind of thing I’m thinking about

Well, neat, Emacs is crashing again whenever I save and export from ox-hugo. I’ve tried disabling the bit that exports automatically every time the file is saved: # eval: (org-hugo-auto-export-mode). Maybe it’s got something to do with the auto-export function. I could just punt and edit these posts as individual Markdown files but Markdown isn’t Org now is it? Update: So far, so good on doing the exports manually. It’s a few more keystrokes (C-c C-e H H), but not a huge burden.

Now I’ve been poking around in static.baty.net and ran into my 10-year-old Jack Baty’s Delicious Library site. I update the photo of me while I was in there.

I think I’ve started writing here again because it’s the kind of blog I’d want to read. The wiki isn’t. I wish more people would write blogs like this one. I’d read ‘em 😁.

Would I run this site if there were an easy, self-hosted version of Drummer? I might!

I’ve moved this site from Cloudflare Pages to my static Digital Ocean droplet running Caddy. I just use a Makefile to commit the changes and push them out to the server. No delays. No build limits. Mine.

Never mind. Cloudflare gets me hosting, analytics, speed reports, and a CDN for free. The downside is a little complexity and short wait between pushing and seeing changes live. A fair trade, for now.

In an effort to stay focused and actually move toward specific goals, I’ve started clocking my time in Org mode again. This means the first two hours I logged were under “Configuring Emacs”.

Not on social media? (Hilarious)

Ode to the joy of the Leica M10 - Macfilos

You can be fast with an M-Leica without perishing from stress.

OMG OMG OMG! I’ll watch anything with Nicolas Cage in it, and this is Nick all the way down:

“Oh for crying out loud” is right. Again and again, we learn the same lesson. I can’t be near it for too long.

We’re going to an office Christmas party tomorrow. Everyone must test negative for COVID-19 using rapid tests within 24 hours prior. I’m negative. The introvert in me is a little disappointed.

🌫 Mist +27°F

My new MBP is somewhere in Shanghai and now they seem to have no idea when it will be here.

This is fun: Quirky Art Around the World: Edinburgh’s Public Pencil Sharpeners

I posted about my scanning woes: Too bad about the PrimeFilm XAs Scanner.

A pet peeve of mine is when a website complains that the phone number I entered contains non-numeric characters. Computers are smart and are perfectly capable of filtering out unwanted characters and validating what’s left all by themselves. Don’t make me do it.

It is such a relief to have lost interest in running Linux on the desktop.

Sometimes, not always, but sometimes it is just sour grapes.

I may need to talk about the camera situation, soon. I have no business having all three of these:

☀️ Clear +42°F

Every so often, Sacha Chua publishes a blog post full of Emacs news. Her posts are always full of cool Emacs tricks and news and no matter where I am in the Emacs pendulum’s swing, I fire it up and start tweaking. For example, I abandoned this site nearly a week ago, moving my daily notes back to the wiki, and yet here I am, in Emacs, writing this post in Org mode. And I must admit, it feels pretty good.

Who am I kidding?

I went clothes shopping for the first time in forever yesterday. The good news is that I found some very nice pieces. The bad news is that it was at A.K. Rikk’s so I spent way too much.

A million dollars worth of camera gear and I snap photos of my dinner.

i miss when twitter wasn't just constant crypto shilling wow

— Owen Williams ⚡ (@ow) December 13, 2021

Me too, Owen.

Wiki…blog…wiki…blog…wiki ???

It’s embarrassing, but 100% correct that I make photos as an excuse to use cameras. I blog as an excuse to use publishing tools.

☁️ Overcast +22°F

Good morning. It’s 4:15 am and I’ve walked a mile in the snow and now I’m wide awake.

Emacs is no longer hanging when writing the markdown files from ox-hugo. I wish I knew why. It bugged me so much yesterday that I set up a Ghost Pro account and started a blog to see if Ghost could manage daily posts. This is not a good idea, probably.

It appears I’m writing daily notes again over at the wiki

🌨 Light snow +20°F

Good morning. It’s 4:35 am and my ears are cold after walking Alice this morning. I’m trying to hold off until at least 5:00 am before making coffee each morning. I’m definitely watching the clock right now.

For all the time and energy I spend on my logging system(s), it’s embarrassing how infrequently I actually use them to look things up. What’s even the point? I wonder if my overall happiness would improve if I just stopped doing it. Jot down a few crucial details during the week and let the river of time wash away the rest.

Today, I’m thinking that Logseq offers the best friction to value ratio, while still being local-first and plain text. It’s dead-simple to add notes and offers nice backlinks and graphing. The graph is unnecessary but is a free byproduct, so why not? It beats Roam for privacy, cost, and attitude. It beats TiddlyWiki for ease of use and usefulness outside of the app. Plus, the files are in Org format. What’s not to like?

Yeah, the contradiction of the two previous paragraphs is not lost on me.

As much as I love the idea of the Johnny.Decimal system, I’ve utterly failed at maintaining mine.

Linking Manifesto – Manifesto for Ubiquitous Linking seems useful, but how does it go anywhere?

My mood this week is one of removing the necessity, nay, the ability to customize and configure the apps I use to do stuff. For some reason, I’ve not been tweaking my Emacs config much, so that’s a relief. Back to Things, then?

Oh joy, Emacs crashes every time I save this file. I’m editing it in BBEdit right now… TAKE THAT EMACS! Ok, now I’m testing to see if it’s related to the automatic saving/exporting in ox-hugo. Hmm, seems to be. If I edit (in Emacs) the markdown file directly, all is well. So now what?

I haven’t taken enough photos with them yet, but they sure look pretty just sitting there waiting for me.

I’m hearing that AWS is down, at least us-east-1, anyway. I could smirk because I moved my personal stuff off AWS a while ago. But, this can happen to any of them, so gloating is foolish.

☁️ Overcast +39°F

Good morning. It’s 5:25 am and it feels like I have no tangible goals at all for the week ahead.

I keep thinking about running this blog as baty.blog (replacing Drummer). “daily.baty.net” is good because it explicitly indicates what the site is for. Also, it keeps me from breaking URLs and RSS feeds…again. Maybe I should just leave well enough alone.

Ever since moving the Synology to my basement office, all I hear are its drives, constantly grinding away. It’s a little crazy-making. It does help remind me to turn on some music, though.

I could stare at the pegboard in my dad’s garage all day.

Much like when helping run Fusionary, I want to be in charge of everything but responsible for nothing.

I put together a Blurb book today for 2021 family photos. I don’t love the design, captions, or layout, but if I fuss with it too much it never gets done, so I just cranked it out in a couple hours and sent it to print.

I now have 500 photos of my food in my meal gallery.

After four hours of flailing about, I’ve decided to give up on running Photoprism on the Synology. While I did get it to work at one point, it was so slow to index anything as to be unusable. And conversion of DNG files seemed to get stuck and I needed to reboot the whole machine. It just felt too abstracted and fragile, so I’m looking at Synology Photos again.

I went to post the following notes about Setapp on the copingmechanism.com blog but after only posting about photography there for so long it felt out of place. Still not sure what to do about that, so in the meantime I’m thinking of collecting longer “posts” here, but under a heading, and at the end/bottom of each day’s post. The rest will just flow top-to-bottom above that. Let’s see how it feels.

I take photos with very fancy cameras and do some detailed edit work in Lightroom. I often message these photos to family or friends. They respond with an emoji or short “Ha!” and move on. No word on the superlative micro-contrast or dreamy bokeh or light falloff or how nicely-composed they are. 🥺. Still, I know!

You’ll have noticed I’m experimenting with adding some (hopefully) subtle highlights to words or phrases within individual paragraphs. The idea is to make it easier to scan and see what the hell I’m talking about each day without needing to read so much. I don’t know yet if I’ll continue with it, so let me know if you find it either useful or annoying.

Subscribed to Story Club, George Saunder’s newsletter. (Thanks to Tully for the recommendation). I’m starting with the free subscription, but if it turns out anything like everything else Saunder’s has written, I’ll be paying.

Speaking of newsletters, now that I’ve been using a “blog” for my daily notes, it occurred to me that this format could also work as a daily-ish email newsletter. Have to think about that. Would anyone be interested in an email version of this blog, copy and pasted daily into my Substack newsletter? Now that this blog has RSS, it seems less necessary but who knows?

At some point I’m going to need to add search here, somehow.

I enjoy writing, but have no desire to be “A Writer”.

I moved my Synology to the basement and wired it into my Mac’s hub. Here are some details

What of Setapp?

I’m thinking about not installing (and hence not subscribing to) Setapp once the new machine arrives. Here are the Setapp apps I still have installed:

Of those, I don’t use Path Finder unless I need a quick directory comparison. There are other tools for that, but I’m lazy. I rarely use Gemini, or Better Touch Tool. I use Emacs instead of MetaImage. I already own a standalone license for Forklift, which is indispensable. The apps I’ll need to buy/license are:

CleanMyMac, $34.95/year. I use this weekly and love it. There’s an option to buy a license outright for CleanShot X $29 one time. Far and away the best screenshot tool. I use it all day. HoudahSpot, $0. I own a license. Way better than using Spotlight for search. TablePlus, $69 one time. Favorite database management tool. I don’t use it often, so this may not be necessary.

That is a one-time payment of $98 plus a couple bucks a month for CleanMyMac. If I skip TablePlus the one-time amount drops to $29.

So after a few months I’m down from $9.99/month for Setapp with access to more than a hundred apps, to just shy of $3.00/month for one app and I own one or two others outright. That extra $7.00/month gives me access to a nearly bottomless well of utilities and toys. I don’t think the savings is worth what I’m giving up. Seems I’ve convinced myself to continue paying for Setapp.

☁️ Overcast +39°F

I’m losing interest in all of it. I need more calm technology today.

Number one Productivity Tip of the day: Never install the beta.

My problem is that I define “simple” differently each day.

How many of these do we need?… Smart Contract Bug Results in $31 Million Loss - Schneier on Security

A hacker stole $31 million from the blockchain company MonoX Finance , by exploiting a bug in software the service uses to draft smart contracts.

To me, this is reason enough never to use smart contracts for anything important. Human-based adjudication systems are not useless pre-Internet human baggage, they’re vital.

Am I really bloated or is it just my body getting used to becoming fatter every day?

This is fun: A Showcase Of Lovely Little Websites — Smashing Magazine. One of them is The Web’s Timeline.

Thinking about redesigning my office:

☀️ Clear +49°F

No doubt I’ll be spending the day with the new camera. Both the camera and lens sure are pretty.

I love how most of the things I buy are meant to help me “simplify”.

Any reviewer who includes “No auto-focus” as a “Con” has no business reviewing a Leica M.

Doing my best to ignore this: 2.0 - Craft update. Thing about Craft is that it’s a fantastic app but feels too “heavy” for me. Like I’m always working on writing instead of just writing.

On the other hand, a few days back in Logseq have been very refreshing and positive.

We’re what, a dozen years in, and I don’t see blockchain doing anything useful in the world. Maybe next year?

Max Read questions why we even need to play along with the crypto debate:

Why do I have to bet at all?! Why am I in this awful, ugly, unfun casino in the first place?? Is there a way out of the casino?? And if not, can I at least just get slowly tanked on free booze and annoy people with a reminder that the house always wins?

The support I just received from the Wordpress Jetpack team was outstanding. Put one in the Wordpress column.

Every Memoji looks the same.

I know it’s going to be 2 or 3 weeks before the new MBP arrives, but I’m already working on moving everything local and not worrying about sync. This is going to feel so good.

Just boxed up the following as trade-ins for the M10-R and Summilux:

• Leica Q2
• Leica 35mm f2.0 APO Summicron SL
• Leica 35mm f2.0 Summicron-M ASPH V1
• Leica M4
• Leica 50mm f2.0 Summicron-M v4

Ouch!

Finished a roll of 120 in the Hasselblad, finally. However, I didn’t remember it was loaded with Delta 100 so I metered for 400 ISO film. Sooo, yeah.

Good morning. It’s 5:15 am and it occurs to me that my net worth keeps going down and my weight keeps going up.

It would be better to check in and see what the world is up to maybe once a week, and spend the rest of the time being up to something myself. But what I actually do is check in with the world continuously throughout each day, leaving no time for doing anything.

Guess I’ll be reloading the FedEx pages for my new camera and lens all day. FedEx says “Delivered by today” but the packages are still in Indianapolis this morning and FedEx has been wrong 90% of the time lately. Still, 🤞

Do you ever tire of organizing things on the computer? Folders, documents, photos, and on and on. I’m sure tired of it. My Johnny.Decimal-based folder system is mostly in disarray and the “_Filing Cabinet Inbox” folder is full of stuff I’ve yet to file. I don’t feel like dealing with it. It’s just busywork. I just want to pour everything into a couple of top-level folders and let HoudahSpot sort-em out as needed.

Making fun of people or things publicly is a chickenshit move and seems to be the raison d’etre of most people on social media lately.

I’ve been using Alfred Camera | Simple Security at Your Fingertips with an old iPhone 6 as a front door camera. The free version was good enough (one camera, one viewer, limited features) but suddenly the app became riddled with obnoxious ads. I can pay $16.99 for no ads or subscribe for $3.99/month to get no ads plus the extra features. Maybe I should research a privacy-conscious, local-first DIY solution.

Twitter Is The Worst Reader by Fonda Lee

Never in the history of Twitter have I ever seen an apology be accepted or actually reduce the abuse

The trouble with letting just anyone join is that they do.

I have a tiny urge to dismantle my Roon NUC, go back to just using streaming with Apple Music, and putting the NUC to use as, say, a Photoprism server. I just don’t feel the need to “own” digital music the way I used do.

It’s here!

I was hoping to spend some time away from the computer today, but instead got sucked into watching videos about and around the M10-R and Summilux 35mm. Then I watched more about photography in general. Then I realized that 80% of YouTube channels are crap content factories, publishing for the sake of publishing and have long ago run out of interesting things to say. So, basically, I’ve wasted most of the day. I did get a haircut, so at least I’m devastatingly handsome.

Camera and lens have shipped and FedEx says arriving tomorrow but they’ve been wrong about the last 9 out of 10 deliveries so I’m not getting my hopes up. 🤞📷

More and more of my days are spent fighting the feeling of tech exhaustion. I’m tired of all of it.

I wish I would never have purchased the Leica APO Summicrons for the SL2-S. I’m trying to sell them to fund the new camera but they are just so astonishingly good that I’m having a hard time.

☁️ Overcast +32°F

I remain very much undecided about keeping this daily blog in Org mode or moving it back into TiddlyWiki. If anyone is reading this and has an opinion, I’d love to hear from you. The thing about the wiki is it’s always right there in my browser and it’s already done. No need to configure/tweak/change much ever. There’s something to that. On the other hand, this blog is managed in a single org mode outline and is published to a nice-looking blog with RSS and everything. It’s “normal”, which seems like it would be better suited to casual readers. So…yeah.

Made a small donation to Internet Archive. You might consider doing the same. It’s a precious resource.

Blog post: From workbench to writing desk – Coping Mechanism

I made a few counter offers to the trade-in values of some gear I’m giving up. Waiting to hear back from Ben. If it’s good, I’m going to have a new Leica M (Digital) and fancy lens soon.

I see @jack has resigned as CEO of Twitter. I’ve been mostly OK with him over the years. I’m mildly interested in what others think, but not enough to listen to 27 million hot takes by 27 million newly-minted experts in whatever field they think this falls under.

I’m trying hard to not be one of those people who are bitter and cynical about everything. I think it’s working, but it’s definitely uphill. Based on my social media feeds, most people don’t make it. (Or aren’t even trying.)

Don’t assume you know the motivations of others…people or companies. You don’t.

I am about to be the owner of a Leica M10-R with 35mm Summilux-M FLE. Wow. I had to give up the Q2, 35mm Summicron-M ASPH, 35mm APO Summicron-SL, and my M4 to cover it. We’ll see how it feels in a few days!

🌫 Mist +33°F

Good morning. It’s 5:20 am and this morning’s walk was through 2" of new snow. Alice likes to roll in it.

I almost left the MP sitting on a table at the restaurant last night. What an idiot. I don’t deserve nice things.

Still waffling about splitting these daily notes out of the wiki. This is mostly because I got into a lazy mood yesterday in which I stopped wanting to work to maintain anything. This blog doesn’t require effort to maintain all the time, but there’s a lot going on in support of it. If any part of that breaks down, I’m going to lose interest quickly. Another aspect is that when I was doing this in the wiki, everything was in the wiki. That’s kind of nice. One big HTML file with it all right there. This blog has everything in one big org outline, which is nice, but in order to get a usable, parsable website out of it, it needs to be rendered. The wiki is already a fully functional website. I like that part of it.

Vinegar YouTube cleaner for Safari

And now the YouTube player situation has gotten bad enough that we need another extension to fix it. That’s where Vinegar comes in. Vinegar also replaces the YouTube player (written in who-knows-what) with a minimal HTML <video> tag.

I missed that @kookma released a version of Mehregan for TiddlyWiki

Mehregan is a Tiddlywiki based app for personal knowledge management with Zettelkasten concept.

I fart around with different cameras so much because I shoot the same subjects all the time. It would be better to use the same camera but with different subjects.

☁️ Overcast +26°F

Good morning. It’s 5:54 am and I have different coffee this morning and I don’t love it.

I’m supposed to journal and blog as ways to write about what I’m thinking and feeling, but I too often instead write about writing about what I’m thinking and feeling.

I hesitate to publicly compliment people because so much of social media is people blowing smoke up the asses of others for attention. That’s not what I’m doing when I compliment someone. This is why I often send a (private) email instead.

Progressive Rock, NWOBHM, and pre-Nu Metal are the best genres of music.

Maintaining the blog and the wiki is kind of unnecessary, but I do like the clean, tidy, mobile-friendly rendering of this theme. And I like writing in Org and Emacs. One decision yet to be made is whether to stop the Daily Notes completely on the wiki, and just point out any significant new content from here. Or who knows, I could end up back all-in TiddlyWiki. Wouldn’t be the first time. I’m having fun right now, though.

I’m pretty much over trying to manage email in either mutt or mu4e. I just sent a long note to someone using Mu4e and the formatting was terrible, mostly around line breaks (there weren’t any). Looked good in Emacs though! I don’t care enough to fight it. Mail.app it is.

🌨 Light snow +27°F

I like to be seen, but I don’t like to be watched. It seems like half the houses in my neighborhood have Ring doorbells and it makes me uncomfortable while walking the dog.

So far, having the Q2 in a box is not disturbing at all. In fact, it’s a relief.

Keyboards don’t need to be wireless, but mice sure do.

I wish Safari’s pinned tabs persisted across tab groups.

The built-in Weather app on iOS is good enough. I can probably delete the 35 other weather-related apps I’ve installed.

The Friday after Thanksgiving used to be one of the best days of the year, but after being on sabbatical for so long, it feels like just another day. And an annoying one, since everyone and their brother is out shopping so I’ll need to avoid going anywhere at all today.

I’m still thinking about consolodating my 2 Macs into one new MBP. Last night, Fish shell kept throwing errors on the Air, even though it uses the same config as the Mini. The fact that I need to worry about syncing the configs is another reason for this line of reasoning. I’m so tired of managing the environment in two places. Another solution is to use stock Apple apps like Notes and friends and just let things take care of themselves but we all know that won’t happen. Another aspect of this is that when I’ve nothing specific to do, a 32-inch monitor is rife with distractions. I can usually see a half-dozen app windows at once. Any of which could distract me at any moment. The thing is too big to maximize windows.

I ordered a new computer today: MacBook Pro 14" M1 Max. I think this will be a great thing to have done. I have reasons, of course. And I have also, of course, convinced myself they’re damn good reasons. Mostly, I want to only manage one computer. Can you imagine not worrying about sync or configuration, or settings or picking up where you left off? I can.

And now I want this: 4K Ultra Short Throw Laser TV Projector- VAVA

I took the straps off all my cameras today and it feels wonderfully liberating. I hate straps, and I never go anywhere I need to dangle the camera from my neck the whole time, so this is great.

☁️ Overcast +48°F

Good morning. It’s 5:48 am and I just had nearly eight ours of uninterupted sleep. My brain is buzzing. Oh, and happy Thanksgiving, ‘muricans.

The worst part about blogging with something like Hugo via text files is that when I read something on the website and want to edit it, I have to go way over into another app, find the file, edit, and republish. Where in something like TiddlyWiki or Ghost I can simply click the edit button. Even Drummer is just a browser tab away from the actual thing.

To add a Drummer-inspired image floating down the right side of a paragraph (like the Hugo logo above), do this…

1
2

#+attr_html: :class imgRightMargin
[[/img/foo.jpg]]

The #+attr_html: must be directly above the image link, along with any other attributes like #+caption:

I must admit that having this blog and my personal (org) journal in 2 side-by-side Emacs buffers is pretty sweet.

Oh, and Org mode kicks Markdown’s ass all the way down the street and back.

I love that this place is 100% mine. I can host it where and how I like. I can modify it if and when I like. I decide what goes where and how it gets there. There’s something to be said for all this, even though it’s a little more work up front. A fair trade-off. The only part I don’t have complete control over right now is hosting. I’m using Cloudflare Pages via Github so I suppose they could muck things up, but I’m not worried about it because everything is local-first and I can simply push it out to a tiny VPS anywhere and I’m back in action.

I’ve started posting directly to Twitter and/or Mastodon rather than posting to Micro.blog first and having it cross-post for me. I like deciding what goes where and whether it needs minor changes to wording, etc. I also don’t feel the need for an actual microblog any more.

I’ve removed the dayname from each post’s “slug” because I want to be able to hack the URL by putting in a date and don’t want to need to know what day that date was on. So we’re back to /2021-11-25/. Sorry if I broke any links.

I’ve also added date/author info to the bottom of individual posts. I like seeing the date and time a post was last modified. The theme came with author and License stuff built-in, so I kept that, too.

I boxed up the Q2 today. I’m just testing the waters to see if I miss it. If I don’t, I’m going to trade up to an M10-P (again).

☀️ Clear +37°F

Good morning. It’s 5:55 am and this morning’s walk was pleasant and uneventful. Very dark.

06:41 Since I’m writing this in an Emacs buffer, it feels more natural to add my notes from the top down rather than reverse-chronologically. Should I timestamp each note like I did this one? (A: No, I don’t like it.)

Sorry if today’s notes become awash in Emacs minutiae. I’m working this out. There’s no question that I much prefer writing in Emacs than a text area in TiddlyWiki or the Drummer outliner.

Good grief, Soulver is such a great app. I’ve used it for years and almost forget it’s not built-in. Soulver 3 - Notepad Calculator App for Mac

I need to decide on permalinks. Currently, they are /YYYY-MM-DD (:slug in Hugo). The files are actually rendered into yearly folders e.g. YYYY/YYYY-MM-DD.md. The duplicate year bugs me a little. Perhaps I should go with something easier to read for the slug, like YYYY/MM-DD-Weekday.md. Today’s would be “/2021/11-24-Wednesday”. After thinking about it, I am going without the fake year subfolder but am adding the weekday because I like knowing that without having to look it up. Settled!

The free version of Cloudflare Pages is limited to 500 “builds” per month. That means I can re-render this blog 10 times a day and still have plenty left. I bet I push the wiki at least that many times, so I do need to be a little careful. Worst case I just move the whole enterprise to a static site on my server and rsync to my heart’s content.

I’m having a hard time getting comfortable using iCloud drive for syncing everything. I’ve already moved ~/org out since paths get wonky even when using symlinks to fake them. The iCloud process has hung twice recently. A sync solution can be slow, or weird, but what it can’t be is unreliable.

I have been unable to play from Roon to the KEF LSX speakers for nearly a week. I’ve tried everything I can think of. I’m no using AirPlay from the Apple Music app. Not ideal, but at least it works.

I finally finished the roll in the M6. I took it out of the camera only to discover it’s Portra 400. Color, dammit. I don’t have any fresh chemicals. The only reason I have any mixed is that I’ve been too lazy to dispose of them. Screw it, I thought, and fired up the JOBO anyway. They’re drying now. I don’t know how they’ll look, but there’s something on there. Update: There was something From Roll 043 (Leica M6/Portra 400)

There are several ways to approach images in ox-hugo. I’m trying three of them in this post :). First, I drag and drop an image into the buffer and it’s automatically, via org-attach, moved into ./attach/XX/UUIDfilename.jpg. A link is inserted and when rendering markdown, it uses Hugo’s “figure” short code. This is the easiest option to do, but has the most moving parts. I don’t like that I don’t have control over the precise path. Second, I just link to the URL of an image in SmugMug. Super easy, but I do have to upload the image then grab the “share” link. Not bad. The third option is to generate a local file link like [[img/foo.jpg]]. This feels the most self-contained and tidy, but means exporting a specifically-sized image, naming it something, copying that name, and moving it into the static/img/etc. folder. I’ll probably try all three ways for a bit to see which feels best.

I’ve been having a lot of fun in the darkroom lately.

Blogging with Drummer feels like using someone else’s bathroom. I really have to go, and it’s a nice bathroom, but it’s not mine and I can’t really relax, ya know?

ox-hugo feels a lot like Drummer

I was cleaning up some old files and ran into a folder full of Org mode files that had at one time generated my Hugo-based blog.

In the folder is a file named “posts.org” which is an Org mode file, thus is basically an outline that renders out as a blog. Same as Drummer!

<_20211123_115444posts-org.png>