Tech

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. ...

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. ...

I don't know what the over/under was on my Fedivers-via-Ghost experiment, but yeah, it’s paused.

So, how’s it going now that you’ve committed, Jack?

I’m not the only one who thinks it’s too much work.

Folder Preview is a quick look extension for previewing the contents of folders on macOS. It’s $1.99 and worth every penny. (via Andrew Canion)

I’ve gone back to using Espanso for text expansion. As powerful as Keyboard Maestro is, every time I reach for it I feel like I’ve already lost a battle somewhere. Text expansion macros are about all I use KM for these days, so it’s not much of a disruption. I bookmark Espanso’s config folder in Emacs so I can jump right in any time. The expansion macros (“matches”) are contained in YAML files and can be as simple as: ...

Scrolling with the Logitech MX Master in Safari sucks out of the box. The following from this Reddit thread helped, even though it required installing 2 additional packages. Here’s the useful part of that thread: Install Logitech Options+ (sigh) and set: Logi Options+ (Plus): Customization App for Logitech Devices What a gross bit of software, but it’s necessary here. I’ve read that once this process is done, I can delete the app completely, but I haven’t tried that yet. ...

Hang on a sec… digg reboot I’m here for this!

My use of Howm has continued to grow organically. In other words, I don’t set out to use Howm, it just happens :). One of Howm’s unique features is its TODO implementation: ...

I “settled” on using notmuch for my email, but now I’m reconsidering that decision. Notmuch is great, but using it forces me to have two email stores. One is IMAP (via Fastmail). The other is my local notmuch database. Mbsync keeps things kind of synced, but it’s really only a few flags. Notmuch doesn’t delete or move email on the server. This means I’m managing, for example, my Inbox, in two places. It’s not hard, but is it necessary? ...

You are all a bunch of sick freaks.: The worst part is how you enable each other. “Hey guys, just finished my basic home automation setup”, and then you post a system diagram that looks like the blueprint for a nuclear reactor. Fourteen Docker containers just to manage a suite of ‘internet of things connected shitware. I enjoyed this :).

I got big into TiddlyWiki around 2018, when I created my Rudimentary Lathe wiki. For a few years there, I put stuff into it daily. I sometimes drift away to something New/Shiny, but I always end up back in TiddlyWiki. Off the top of my head, here are a few things I like about TiddlyWiki: ...

Now that I’ve solved my Notmuch sync problems, I’m more inclined to move ahead with converting other content into emails and indexing them using Notmuch. I thought I’d start with my blog posts. ...

I hesitate to use org-goto in my Org mode files because I find the UI for it to be confusing. In a recent post, Streamlining Navigation in Org-Mode using an adapted org-goto, James Dyer makes some nifty improvements. The TL;DR is this: (setq org-goto-interface 'outline-path-completionp) (setq org-outline-path-complete-in-steps nil) Now, the target list is a simple completion window showing the entire outline.

You’ll notice that baty.net is back to using Hugo1. I really like Kirby, but every time I use a platform that’s not fully static, I get twitchy, and I got twitchy. I’m using a new theme, Anubis2, which I find to be easy to read and just the right amount of boring. It doesn’t have all the features of the PaperMod theme I was using, but it’s simpler, and simpler is what I was after. ...

Listing directories first and hiding file details by default in Dired

Improving site performance by adding Expires headers in my Caddy config.

Making tags readable in Org-mode DONE headings

I’ve updated my org-mode reading list using my fork of the org-books package