This blog (baty.net) goes back to sometime in 2000. I was poking around the Internet Archives and ran across jackbaty.com from 2002. It looked like this… I can’t explain why those old posts aren’t here, but I’m grateful that the Archive has copies. Wouldn’t want writing like that to disappear, now would we?

Matt Haughey: The apple touchbar is the fucking worst. Agreed, and my dislike of the TouchBar is nearly equaled by that of the horrible keyboard.

The Lost Picture Show: Hollywood Archivists Can’t Outpace Obsolescence The most chilling prediction I heard came from a top technician at Technicolor. “There’s going to be a large dead period,” he told me, “from the late ’90s through 2020, where most media will be lost.” This sort of thing terrifies me. I still feel that film stock has a much better chance of survival than digital files, especially for the creators who can’t afford to constantly migrate to newer formats ever few years.

Tim Bray · Still Blogging in 2017 "But on my phone, an irritating goober at the screen’s foot says ‘open in app’, trying to tempt me out of the blogosphere, off of the Web. I guess lots of people go there but I’m not gonna." Me neither, Tim.

I now have an account on Manton Reece’s new micro-blogging platform Micro.blog. Micro.blog is a new social network for independent microblogs. I’m here: jack.micro.blog. It’s a hosted blog, meaning I can post and host there. It’s a paid option ($5/month) and seems to work well so far. I need this because creating and publishing short, title-less posts using Hugo just isn’t worth the effort yet. I like having a quick and easy web UI for posting.

I recently bought a fantastic digital camera, the Fuji X-Pro2. It’s fast, well-constructed, and works in a way that a camera should work. It looks and feels great. In fact it feels almost like using a Leica film rangefinder. I take more photos with the Fuji than with film cameras and nearly all of them are exposed correctly, in focus, and contain 24 Megapixels of raw data to work with.

After a couple of weeks on Mastodon I’m cheering for its survival. That’s not correct, Mastodon is federated, so any single node (instance) is only part of the network. So maybe it’s better to say I’m cheering for whatever new thing gets us on the federated bandwagon. Right now Mastodon is the strongest contender. I have accounts on three instances, and I’m using each of them differently. The first is @jackbaty@mastodon.

I don’t want to jinx it, since she’s only been with us for a few hours, but I think I love her. Josie's first day at home (2017)

I shot a roll of Tri-X with the F3 at my dad’s house while celebrating his 76th birthday. Dad. Nikon F3. Crystal and Tillie. Nikon F3. Dad and Jess. Nikon F3. Mom. Nikon F3.

While scrolling through Twitter today I realized that the signal-to-noise ratio on the internet has skewed way toward noise. It’s been this way for a while but today just seemed especially bad. Occasionally I’ll become so frustrated that I quit social media. It never sticks. I find such wonderful things online. The people I follow on Twitter or Medium or RSS write or link to beautiful, smart, educational stuff. I love it.

Medium makes me nervous. I’ve never known exactly what it is or what it wishes to be. I’ve never liked the sense of importance imbued on things written there. I don’t know if they’ll just disappear one day, taking years of writing with them. And yet, Medium can be a wonderful place. I want them to succeed. I want people to publish great content while avoiding the click-bait tendencies of many publications.