Hasselblad 500C/M. Zeiss 80mm Planar f/2.8. Tri-X in D76" Hasselblad 500C/M. Zeiss 80mm Planar f/2.8. Tri-X in D76 I love the Hasselblad lenses. This was the 80mm Planar. Josie finally sat still for me.

I’m beginning to feel like cross-posting everywhere is rude to readers in many cases. Who wants to see the same content everywhere they turn? My followers on Twitter and Facebook don’t overlap much, so most people see my stuff only once. On the other hand, the type of content that is useful differs on each platform, so sending everything everywhere may not be wanted. Plus, does everything that comes out of my head really need to be seen by everyone, automatically?

I have always been a keyboard guy. For as long as I can remember, I’ve used big, clicky, important keyboards. The way a keyboard feels and sounds has always been, well, key to my typing enjoyment. Then along comes the iPad and its Smart Keyboard. Now that I’m spending a great deal of time typing on the little Smart Keyboard, I’m finding that switching between that and my dear old Apple Extended Keyboard II on the desktop is a bit of a shock.

I love sharing my photos. I joined Flickr in 2004 and after that just about every other service imaginable, with Instagram being (reluctantly) the latest. But recently I’m finding a sort of joy in not sharing photos. Specifically, I’ve noticed that I haven’t bothered scanning or posting any of my recent Polaroid or Instax images. They’re instant, analog, and each one is a precious artifact. I haven’t been deliberately not posting them anywhere, but now that I’ve noticed it I like the idea.

Contact Sheets as Art One of the great things about medium format film is that when you make contact sheets you automatically get displayable artwork. I make two prints of each, one for the binder and one for the wall.

Whenever a drive fails in one of my Macs, I usually re-install everything from scratch. This happened to me again recently when the internal drive on my iMac failed. It feels good to start with a clean slate and re-evaluate what I need (or don’t). I’m now finally back in action after a week of the usual set of “Oh yeah, I forgot I need to symlink that” and “How did I build this last time?

I haven’t written JavaScript in years, and I wasn’t very good at it then. So, I’m taking some baby steps in that direction, via Learn You The Node.js.

It was a bright, defrosted, pussy-willow day at the onset of spring, and the newlyweds were driving cross-country in a large roast turkey. When my long-preordered first-generation Kindle finally arrived in 2007, it seemed like magic. One of the first books I bought for it was ”Skinny Legs and All”, which was my first Tom Robbins novel. That first Kindle was weird and funky and not for everyone. Much like Tom Robbin’s novels, in a way, but I loved them both.

A few quick thoughts on using the iPad in anger this week. Contrary to everything I’ve ever believed, I’m starting to think of the iPad as a content creation device. I look at the screen and see Affinity Photo and Ulysses and Procreate and Linea and it makes me want to pick one and just make something. I would not have believed it had I not dove in and given it a fair shot.

My blog is a bunch of Markdown files in folders. I like it that way. I have thousands of posts going back to 2000, all rendered quickly and nicely with Hugo and served securely with Netlify. Then along comes Blot and messes things up for me. Blot is great because it easily creates a blog out of a folder full of Markdown files. Even better, it does it via Dropbox so there are no build/commit/push/deploy steps.

The more I use my iPad for “work” the more I like it. This is unexpected, and the trend does not seem to be slowing. In other words, maybe it’s not just novelty. This means that in order to work easily in both desktop and mobile environments, I must rely on apps that work well in both. Taking that further, it means that I want to use the same app everywhere.

baty.net is currently a static site, built using Hugo and served by Netlify. In order to publish, I have to create a text (markdown) file in a certain folder, with a bit of specific YAML front matter. Then, I have to commit the changes and push to its Gitlab repo. Netlify takes it from there. Since the entire site also lives in Dropbox, creating the file is pretty simple on the iPad.