Today I bought my first digital album from Bandcamp. Buying and downloading lossless (FLAC) music may not be fashionable these days, but I’m old and I still prefer owning music. The album is “High Visceral (Part 1) and (Part 2)” by the unfortunately-named “Psychedelic Porn Crumpets” I love finding new music that I enjoy. “High Visceral” is sort of a combination of psychedelic and hard rock. Right up my alley.

Roon would not launch after I installed the Mojave public beta 2 on my iMac. I found this thread on the Roon forums which suggested that I remove and re-add Roon from the list of apps in the Accessibility list in Security preferences It worked! Phew.

This blog is statically-rendered using Hugo, which means there’s no easy set of plugins (that I know of) for adding Webmentions. There’s nothing like the IndieWeb plugins for WordPress. I’ve been collecting webmentions for a while via webmention.io but needed a way to render them here. I decided to go ahead and roll my own. Well, to be honest, I just stood over Karl’s shoulder while he wrote the JavaScript for me.

Over the years I’ve switched blogging platforms a dozen times or more. I enjoy tinkering, and a personal blog is a great place for doing that. The problem is that things frequently break in the transition. I have entire swaths of images missing from 2012. Many of the older posts didn’t convert well and are filled with broken HTML. I’ve been waffling between a statically-rendered blog using Hugo and a blog running on WordPress.

I finally ran out of ink in the Lamy 2000. Refilled it with Noodler’s Bernanke black & blue “Q-E’ternity”. It dries so fast! Great for left-handed people like me.

I finally, officially deleted my Facebook account today. No need to make a big deal about it. We all know by now that getting away from Facebook is the right move. My account has been deactivated for months, but today felt like a fine day to be done with it for good. It is, after all, “Independence Day” 🙂 I just wanted to write it down.

Conversations on Micro.blog have been getting a bit feisty lately. I like this, as for a while things were maybe just a tiny bit too nice. Difficult topics tended to be silently stepped around, which could make for a bit of a Chip and Dale vibe. Nothing wrong with politeness of course. Micro.blog has been a welcome reprieve from the toxic awfulness that Twitter tends to generate. Still, this newfound friendly contentiousness has added a bit of spark to the place and it’s been fun.

It pleases me that all my tasks line up nicely in org-mode. I used to use keywords like “TODO”, “WAITING”, “CANCELED” etc. but that made for a jaggy, harder-to-scan list. Now I use “TODO”, “WAIT”, “CANC”, “NEXT”, and “DONE”. Aah, much prettier.

The Surface Book 2 is everything the MacBook Pro should be – Owen Williams: If, like me, you’re coming from the Macbook Pro with the butterfly keyboard, I promise that typing on this thing is salve for your butterfly-keyboard wounds: it’s got a perfect amount of travel, feels comfortable to use and doesn’t sound like you’re typing on a hollow piece of wood. Stories like this (long) one by Owen Williams have been around for years, but it sure seems like they’ve been increasing significantly in frequency.

For the last week or so I’ve been posting to jack.baty.net, a WordPress-managed blog. This wasn’t intentional. I’m supposed to be putting everything on baty.net, which is statically rendered (by Hugo). I guess I haven’t felt like “writing a blog post”. Instead I felt like posting stuff. WordPress makes everything so easy. Maybe too easy. I keep threatening to consolidate everything on baty.net but I’m realizing it may never happen. I’ve got baty.

Huy Tran Spacemacs is the first Emacs version I used, so I’m kind of attached to the evil-mode and SPC mnemonic key binding.But I always have a feeling that something is not right, Spacemacs hides a lot of things under the hood, and it loads a lot of stuff that I do not need during the startup. This is so tempting.

Should I continue shooting 35mm film? I ask myself this question regularly, but never make a decision. Last week I thought I had decided I was going to shoot only medium and large format film, leaving the every day stuff to digital. And I certainly wasn’t going to shoot 35mm color film, since why would I do that if I can’t use it to make darkroom prints? Then yesterday I went to a pool party and brought the Canon EOS-1v loaded with Portra 400.