Baty.net – A weblog by Jack Baty

Printing daily.baty.net

Posted on April 1, 2023 by Jack Emacs

At the end of each month, I convert my Org-journal entries into a nice PDF, print it, and put it into a binder.

It occurred to me that my daily.baty.net website content is just a bunch of markdown files that could be treated the same as my org-journal files and perhaps printed as well.

I concatenated March’s entries into a single Markdown file, like so:

cat 2023-03*.md >> ~/Desktop/202303-MarchBlog.md

The resulting file wasn’t in great shape for printing, so I had to clean it up. At minimum, I needed to do the following:

Convert the YAML titles into Markdown headings (e.g. “title: Saturday, March 4, 2023”)
Remove all YAML delimiters (“—“)
Remove all date lines (e.g. “date: 2023-03-31T05:59:55.10-4:00”)
Convert absolute image links to relative links

My first approach was to create a Text Factory in BBEdit. Text Factories are bundles of text transformation commands in a handy UI. Here’s what it looks like:

This worked fine, and I assumed I was finished, but I wondered if there might be an easy way to do the same thing in Emacs. I’m terrible at writing lisp, so I cheated and asked ChatGPT to write it for me. To create the prompt, I copied those descriptions from the same screenshot shown above. It was a list of things like `”Search and replace “](/img/202” with “](/img/202″`

ChatGPT wrote the function, added comments, and then summarized how it came up with it. It was wrong about a couple of things, but it got me maybe 75% of what I needed in 2 minutes. Say what you will about AI, but it’s still darn helpful. After some tweaking, I ended up with the following function:

(defun jab/process-daily-blog-export ()
  "Converts Markdown file of concatenated daily.baty.net entries"
  (interactive)
  (save-excursion
    ;; Replace title: lines with ## heading
    (goto-char (point-min))
    (while (re-search-forward "^title: \"\\(.*\\)\"$"  nil t)
      (replace-match "## \"))

    ;; Remove YAML delimiters "---"
    (goto-char (point-min))
    (while (re-search-forward "---$" nil t)
      (replace-match "\n"))

    ;; Make image paths relative
    (goto-char (point-min))
    (while (re-search-forward "](\/img\/202" nil t)
      (replace-match "](./img/202"))

    ;; Remove lines matching "^date: "
    (goto-char (point-min))
    (while (re-search-forward "^date: .*" nil t)
      (delete-region (line-beginning-position) (line-end-position)))))

Like I said, I’m terrible at writing Lisp, and there may be a dozen better ways of approaching this, but this works and was easy to do (with AI’s help).

All that remains is to add my usual Pandoc header and print using the same template as I use for Printing web pages and I have a nice, printed copy of my blog.

Distraction free, but…

Posted on March 30, 2023 by Jack Meta

I’m typing this using the new “distraction-free” option in WordPress 6.2. It’s certainly a nicer experience for simply writing, but the problem is that it’s still Gutenberg and that means a less-than-ideal overall writing experience. Even a little better is better, though, right?

My read-later service is made of paper

Posted on March 30, 2023 by Jack Analog

Several sheets of paper with web articles printed on them — My read-later backlog

I’ve tried so many “read-later” services that I can’t remember half of them. They’re all basically the same: visit a website, click a button, and the article is saved to a list somewhere with all the other articles I’ve saved. Some newer services get fancy with recommendations, UI improvements, social integration, etc. but they all just gather a list of articles that I almost never end up reading. But, you know, just in case, right?

I started printing long-form articles that I wanted to read in 2020 and that continues today. It’s the first read-later service that has stuck with me. My process for printing articles works great. I love the concise, two-column format I get from my Pandoc template. The Pandoc->LaTeX->PDF typesetting is so good and makes long-form text super easy to read. That, along with double-sided printing keeps the page count nice and low (it’s less annoying for the forests).

The printed articles are stapled and stacked on my reading desk. When I feel like digging through them, I sit down, grab a pen and highlighter, and slowly and calmly read stuff. It’s low-tech, offline, and comes with zero distractions. The minor friction around collecting articles keeps me from dumping everything into the pile. I only keep what I actually want to read, instead of everything I might maybe (but probably not) get to someday.

It’s a good system.

Wavelength Messenger

Posted on March 30, 2023 by Jack Software

This is not a review, but I wanted to jot down some notes after a few days in a new app that I’m enjoying very much: Wavelength Messenger. You might like to read John Gruber’s post for details.

My wife believes that I have some kind of processing disorder that causes me to quickly become overwhelmed by too much simultaneous input. She discovered this after several visits to the local Costco. After a few minutes in a busy Costco, I sort of shut down and become surly. I can only think about leaving. I’m no fun in a Costco.

This disorder is probably why I dislike Discord. A few minutes in a busy Discord server and my eyes sort of glaze over the same way they do in a Costco. I can’t wait to get out of there.

I prefer old-fashioned web forums. Forums are calm. Even busy ones. People can gather around a topic, post threads, and then discuss them, in context, at their leisure. I can find a topic, then easily scan the whole conversation. Discourse does a great job of this. Discord recently added forum-like features, but they feel tacked on and not that different from the main areas.

When I’m visiting a product’s website and see a link to “Community”, I cross my fingers, hoping that the link leads to a Discourse forum and not a Discord server.

Forums, however, can feel a little distant. Impersonal. It’s a challenge to find a good balance between real-time chat and more leisurely forums.

What about Slack? I’ve used Slack since the beginning. Loved it. But it feels heavy. The macOS “app” still uses too much juice and the web app feels janky. Switching between Slack workspaces is cumbersome and it makes me feel too far away from the workspaces I’m not currently in. Slack channels aren’t lightweight enough to use as threads, and Slack’s threads still feel like the place conversations go to die.

Wavelength balances all this nicely. I can see every group I’m in, and which ones have new activity. I can quickly pop in and join the conversation threads I’m interested in. Creating a new thread doesn’t feel like a big deal the way it does in forums. Although so far in a few groups everyone is just using one long thread, so we’ll see how that plays out.

The AI integration feels trendy, but I’ve been surprised at how often I’ve used it. It’s handy having AI right there in my messaging app.

The big thing missing for me is the ability to search messages. I understand that end-to-end encryption creates challenges around searching, but if they can manage to magically move thread history from peer to peer, I bet they can manage search. We’re going to need it.

Wavelength is a good-looking, good-feeling app that is good at group discussions. I like it.

Short

Posted on March 28, 2023 by Jack Meta

Short posts are fine.

Journal posts are back on daily.baty.net

Posted on March 24, 2023 by Jack Meta

I’m sorry, but as much as I like the idea of maintaining only one blog, I just don’t enjoy composing my daily journal entries in WordPress. I’m once again writing them in Emacs and posting them on daily.baty.net using Eleventy.

I took the opportunity to use a simpler layout using less CSS and I think it reads better but let me know if you disagree. I’ll surely continue to tweak things.

The RSS feed is daily.baty.net/feed/feed.xml or daily.baty.net/feed/feed.json depending on which flavor you prefer. Consider the daily-notes-at-baty.net experiment closed.

Nick Brandt on using a digital camera – I hated it

Posted on March 23, 2023 by Jack Photography

I brought a Hasselblad 60 megapixel medium format digital camera to Africa with me. I took photos side by side with my film camera. The digital camera’s images were sharper. They had more detail in both the shadows and the highlights. The digital camera made photographing very, very easy.

And I hated it. … In fact, had I photographed using a digital camera from the beginning, I’m not sure that I would have liked a single photograph that I had ever taken.
Nick Brandt, I am the Walrus

His animal photographs are astonishing. And he uses short (50-100mm equiv. on 35mm film) lenses on film cameras. Amazing.

NICK BRANDT. LION BEFORE STORM SITTING PROFILE, MASAI MARA 2006

Leitz Elmar 9cm f4.0

Posted on March 22, 2023 by Jack Photography

This Leitz Elmar 9cm f4.0 is by far the worst lens I own.

Leitz Elmar 9cm f4.0 lens mounted on Leica SL2

And yet, I’m drawn to it for that very reason. I’m feeling a pull toward low-fi digital. Or at least imperfect digital. I’m not tempted to go buy a 2003 digicam like the kids are doing, but I’m also not drawn toward the APO-Summicron-SL that I used to shoot with.

This Elmar is quite soft and has such low contrast that it seems like there’s something wrong with it. As an example, here’s a mirror self-portrait straight out of camera:

Awful, right? Gloriously, satisfyingly awful!

This lens has been sitting on a shelf for years because I didn’t see the point, when so many better lenses are readily available. But now I’m thinking that maybe I’ll find a few “shitty” lenses to shoot with and see how it goes.

It’s time to get back to work

Posted on March 20, 2023 by Jack Misc

After a two-year sabbatical, I’m ready to head back to work.

I wrote a few notes about how that might look: Hire Me.

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