The Lathe: Tuesday, May 25 2021

May 26, 2021

I like having a place online to keep both public and private photo galleries. For this I’ve used SmugMug, on and off, for years.

Piwigo is also pretty good for managing and sharing photo collections. It’s free, self-hosted, and it’s been around a long time. However, I don't see how it adds any value over SmugMug. I suppose I could claim that I "own my content" by self-hosting Piwigo, but I don't feel like I don't own it on SmugMug. SmugMug has been reliable and full-featured for the many years I've used it. SmugMug costs about the same ($8 per month) as the DigitalOcean droplet I'm using for Piwigo ($6 for the instance plus $2 for backups). I also get unlimited storage at SmugMug. Oh, and there are no maintenance or hosting headaches. I'm thinking I'll stick with SmugMug for my galleries. I’ve been rebuilding them after a hiatus at jackbaty.smugmug.com. So I guess Flickr is for social sharing and SmugMug is for managing/sharing collections and storage.

I wouldn't mind getting more email from random strangers. I know, email is supposed to be this horrible deluge of useless noise. Actually, it is that, but it’s also the best, most personal way to communicate with others over time. Hit reply and say hello!

I wrote a bunch of notes in Org-roam today, for no particular reason. I’d love it if I could keep my notes in Org mode, and Org-roam could help make that happen. The elephant in this room used to be Roam, but now it’s TiddlyWiki.

And speaking of TiddlyWiki, Soren Bjornstad has recently released the first edition of Grok TiddlyWiki.

Grok TiddlyWiki is a textbook that helps you build a deep, lasting understanding of and proficiency with TiddlyWiki through a combination of detailed explanations, practical exercises, and spaced-repetition reviews of prompts called takeaways.

A chief complaint about TiddlyWiki is that it’s difficult to learn. This is not unfounded. The documentation is complete, but hard to parse and there are few resources for actually learning TiddlyWiki. Grok TiddlyWiki is a fantastic resource and if you’re even remotely interested in learning more about TiddlyWiki, it’s highly recommended. My goodness, it seems that TiddlyWiki can do anything.

I got really back into Hugo and ox-hugo this morning. I dove in and now it's all happening again. This time, I made a new blog at v6.baty.net. I've no need for a new blog. Again, I did it for no reason other than that it was fun. I’ll probably post tech and writing notes there for a while. I chose using a subdomain (“v6”) so that I can change things later without having to port content or break links. I figure there have been at least five previous iterations, so let’s call this one version six.

While looking at example sites using a Hugo theme I was interested in. I bumped into My Life in E-ink by Rohit Goswami and now I'm down a rabbit hole of eReaders and pulled my Kobo eBook Reader out of storage. I’d love to escape the gravitational pull of Amazon one day.

I've connected the Kobo to Overdrive and the experience has been less than great. I was able to borrow one book directly on the device. Others, like the new Stephen King book, cause an error and I’m unable to borrow it. I’m interested in the "always available classics" section of Overdrive, but accessing it shows a network error. My preference would be to search and borrow from the library website and load them onto the Kobo, but that involves something called "Adobe Digital Editions" and I'm sure I'm not motivated enough to deal with that. Still, borrowing library books on an eReader is a wonderful thing.

Also on Tuesday, May 25 2021…

K2pdfopt for converting PDFs to ebooks
Make printouts from Firefox Reader mode look like dang NYRB artices
An entire POS system built in TiddlyWiki

Here’s a cute photo of my daughter’s dog, Sage, on his recent 10th birthday:

Have fun!

Jack

--·
Jack Baty - Director of Unspecified Services
https://www.baty.net