Hi, I’m Jack Baty 👋

Here are some (probably) unnecessary things I’ve been doing.

Whatever. It’s a nice distraction, OK?

Just seeing if this thing still works.

The new M4 MacBook Air arrived, and it changed how I have things set up around here.

It seems I’ve finally actually “Reduced & Simplified” something.

I wanted a different view into my org-journal history, so I imported it into Day One Plain text is great, but has limits. I’ve been journaling in plain text (.org) with org-journalsince 2018. It’s just a bunch of .org files in a folder. It’s great, and, you know, future-proof. Before Org-Journal, I used Day One for journaling as far back as 2011. Day One is pretty, powerful, and available everywhere. There are “on this day” and “today” features that I find useful. It integrates smoothly with the Photos app, and it stamps entries with the current location and weather conditions. Add fast sync on all devices with end-to-end encryption, and it makes for a darn nice journaling setup. ...

Baty.net is going to move back to Ghost, I think. Y’all will I’m sure get a chuckle out of it and I’m happy for you. :) I’ve noticed that when running both Ghost and Hugo blogs, when I want to post something, my default is to reach for Ghost. It’s just easier overall. Plus, I can have that sweet, sweet @jack@baty.net Fediverse handle that I loved but didn’t want tied to my blogging platform. ...

Joan Westenberg, in The Cult of Hard Mode: Why Simplicity Offends Tech Elites: …hard mode is where status lives. This is exactly what I’ve been thinking about lately. It hurts to hear it out loud. Read the article, but here are a few quotes that reminded me how far down the complexity rabbit holes I’ve traveled. And under it all is the same impulse: make it harder than it needs to be, so I can feel smarter than I am. ...

Daily notes. What are they for? I guess it’s like having a legal pad open on my desk, where I can write whatever I’m thinking about at any time. The problem for you, dear reader, is that you’re subjected to all of it. I feel a little guilty about that. Not guilty enough to stop doing it, of course. I am a different person every day. Too different.

If there are “Notes” listed under this post, it means the thing I’ve been working on here is…working, I guess. (Update, they’re missing from the RSS feed. I’ll work on that later.) Trusting your own judgement on ‘AI’ is a huge risk: Something seemingly working is not evidence of it working. (Long, but worth reading). I dunno, seems to me that if it’s working, it’s working, but I suppose that’s his point. One can argue that AI is bad for the environment, or bad for artists, or stealing, and you’d have a point. But when you argue that “Well, it doesn’t actually work. It can’t think!” then that’s where we part company. Even though I agree with a lot of the article, it’s the kind of thing someone writes when they really really don’t wan’t something to be true. I swear I’m going to stop commenting on all this nonsense and go back to the super-cool homeopathic software I co-wrote (aka “vibe-coded”) today. You know, the one that’s working. I don’t need to prove anything to you. ...

When a simple app “cleanup” on my Mac Mini went way WAY too far.

At $10/month, SetApp is a good deal, especially if you use more than a handful of the included Apps. I’ve been a subscriber since early on. I have two Macs, so the subscription is $15/month. Still a good deal, but I did the math and realized that I could purchase most of the apps I use outright for less than a 1-year SetApp subscription for a single Mac. This wasn’t always the case. For a while there, I had a couple dozen apps installed. My goal this past year has been to whittle that down to the essentials. Here’s what I ended up with as of this morning. ...

I wrote the following in 2021 but can’t find where I posted it, and I’m feeling it again, so I’m recording it here It feels like everyone (or at least those in my bubble) is consumed by the “how” of note-taking. Tools, workflows, processes, backlinks, and on and on. Obsidian? Roam? Paper? It’s fun to explore and interesting to read about and there is no end of things to distract myself with. ...

Maybe I’d blog better if I was a more gooder writer.

The past week has been weird for me, blog-wise. Normally, I fire up a daily post every morning because I want to. I then keep my eyes peeled for interesting things to post about. I like posting stuff on the blog. Lately, though, I haven’t felt like it. Examples? After many years of wanting a Rolleiflex, I bought one a couple weeks ago. I’m excited about it and I have thoughts about it, so why haven’t I posted anything? ...

While visiting my grandson this morning, I finished a roll of expired Portra 400 in the Rolleiflex. When I got home, I didn’t feel like developing the roll. C-41 processing is a whole thing. It’s not hard, but I don’t love it. Still, I’m usually excited to at least see what’s on the roll. Today, I wasn’t. Not a great sign.

I try to avoid writing about LLMs but sometimes fail.

As of Sunday, June 1, 2025 at 10:00 AM, all of my sites (including this one) are being served using Caddy on a FreeBSD server from Vultr. Yesterday everything was on an Ubuntu server at Hetzner. I would have prefered to stay at Hetzner, but they don’t seem to offer FreeBSD. Why have I done this? I don’t really know. Many years ago (early 2000s), I ran FreeBSD for all our client’s servers. We only moved to Linux because “that’s where everyone was headed” at the time. I’d always liked FreeBSD, so I wanted to try it again. ...

I’ve been going through my Lightroom library and noticed a couple things. First, I used to just walk around with a camera and take pictures of things. Some of them are pretty good. Second, my Lightroom catalog has everything and I’m wondering if abandoning it was a good idea. My mates at lunch today are all in with AI. One works at a startup, the other for a large manufacturer. Both manage development and product teams. Both claim to be “10 times more productive since using AI.” One said, “I get things done now that I’d never even attempted before AI.” ...

One of the reasons for my Ghost/ActivityPub experiment was to try to better integrate both short and long posts. Since that didn’t pan out, I started thinking about how I might manage it with Hugo. It turned out to be relatively easy. I added a /content/notes folder. Then I made a tweaked Hugo list template that doesn’t render a title and instead displays the entire post content rather than just a summary. And finally, I added a custom RSS feed just for notes. ...