All I’ll say is that I watched the entire film, but you probably shouldn’t. I’m still entertained by Will Smith, though.

Hobonichi, Field Notes, Leuchtturm1917, Epica The final week of December is a good time for planning. I spend the week organizing things, tidying up my desk and files, and laying out plans for the year. One thing I evaluate each year is how I intend to use my paper notebooks. This doesn’t mean I don’t allow myself to change things up, but I at least go through the exercise of thinking through my intentions.

This post is being written in Emacs (Spacemacs) and is being posted to WordPress via Org2Blog. If it works, great. As much as I enjoy writing posts in MarsEdit, there are times it’s nice being able to post something directly from Emacs.

Paul Strand is interesting. “Strand, Under the Dark Cloth” is not.

A Masterclass featuring Annie Leibovitz looked like a great idea, so I paid the $90 and signed up. I enjoyed listening to her perspective and insights on shooting portraits. She works hard on concepts, plans meticulously, and has a “vision” for what and who she’s shooting. The class, however, felt more like a 2-hour documentary than a class. I can’t recommend it at the $90 price. On the other hand, if you’ve already paid the $180 annual subscription fee for the “All Access Pass”, the class is included and is well worth your time.

The end of each year always has me thinking about simplifying things. To that end, I’m going to try consolidating my online presence. I’ll no longer be posting here at baty.net. For blogging, I’m going to try posting everything at jack.baty.net. Anything longer or more “important” than a tweet goes on the One True Blog(tm). For shorter things, I’ll probably use Mastodon and cross-post to Twitter and via RSS to micro.

Dynamicland: No screens, no devices. Just ordinary physical materials — paper and clay, tokens and toy cars — brought to life by technology in the ceiling. Every scrap of paper has the capabilities of a full computer, while remaining a fully-functional scrap of paper. I’m not even sure what this is but it looks fascinating.

I made a couple large format photos of my SX-70. The camera has been fully restored by 2nd Shot and is working great. Shot using a Crown Graphic on HP5+ and developed in HC-110 Dilution B.

I record my weight nearly every day. My bathroom scale uploads the data to a couple of tracking sites, but I also record it in a CSV file, like this… Date,Weight 2017-12-15,193.9 2017-12-14,193.3 2017-12-13,194.4 2017-12-12,195.8 2017-12-11,198.7 2017-12-08,196.7 2017-12-07,196.5 2017-12-06,197.6 2017-12-05,198.7 2017-12-04,201.4 2017-12-01,199.1 2017-11-30,199.2 I’ve always wanted to learn more about R, even though I generally have no need for it. And while it’s certainly overkill, I decided to graph my weight using R and Org-mode’s Babel mode.

Marcin Borkowski: The idea is quite cool: you mark some word (or a combination of words) in your Org-mode file, and then every occurrence of this particular word or combination of words becomes a link to the marked one. I’d never heard of Radio Targets in Org Mode, but I love the idea.

I’m so happy to have discovered this Mailmate bundle which lets me create a TODO in my Org Mode inbox directly from an email message in Mailmate.

It seems like everything I do requires additional, mostly unnecessary work after I do it. For example: When I finish a book I update Goodreads, record it in my media log, and sometimes write a quick blog post about it. After watching a movie I add it to letterboxd, also record it in my media log, and make sure it’s properly cross-posted everywhere via IFTT. Once I’ve finished a roll of film or imported an SD card I scan, edit, caption, export, and upload to one or more of SmugMug, Flickr, my photoblog, or Instagram, and in the case of film, I make a contact print in the darkroom and carefully file away the negatives.