vanderwal.net

A Vision Pro Perspective

I have used many different VR headsets at hackathons and studio labs, but the visual quality was less than desirable. Reading in them was far less than optimal. I had found the 3D immersive capabilities somewhat interesting for training physical tasks and heightening awareness skills. But, the quality of the headsets’ visual quality and rough interaction models were large hurdles to overcome.

A couple years back (or so) I had tried the Apple Vision Pro out of curiosity at an Apple Store, after its launch and impressive walkthroughs. I was blown away with the visual quality as it was generations better than other options out there. But, the interactions with the apps and interface were incredibly simple to understand and became very quickly intuitive.

The Apple Store demo really piqued my interest. I could see its upsides for consumption. But, I could also see the potential for using it for remote work and interaction environments. That work potential became a large curiosity. The price of the Apple Vision Pro was a huge hurdle to go digging for the sake of curiosity. But, when Apple added the capability for a virtual monitor for your Mac with wide and ultrawide options, that started nudging the viability for curiosity. But, the price was still a bit too steep. I started looking at used Vision Pro models and prices were around $1k off new purchase prices. The friction there was knowing how to find one in good shape. I asked in an Apple forum I am part of how to purchase a used Vision Pro and someone in the forum had one they were thinking about selling. We chatted and worked out how to meet and purchase the device.

I figured if the two big things I had interest in it was worth the investment in the used AVP: 1) Viability for virtual meetings; 2) Virtual monitor. If it didn’t meet my interest or curiosity waned, I figured I could sell it on and get close to what I paid.

Before the Two Use Cases I Care About

The questions many ask are around:

Quality?

The quality of the hardware, visual displays, and interactions are seriously impressive. Opening web pages and reading ebooks is really nice clean and really impressive. There are no jaggies nor glitching.

Does it feel heavy?

I picked up the Annapro 2 add-on that is a brace that is padded and used at the top of the forehead area that takes the weight off your face and balances it much better. I regularly will have 2 to 5 hour sessions with the Vision Pro on and it doesn’t feel heavy nor cause neck strain for me.

How much do you use it?

I used it at least once a week, but many weeks around three times a week for tasks, virtual monitor use (more on this below), and some content consumption.

App availability?

There are apps for most things I do (many of my regular apps are available as visionOS native apps, and most other are available as iPad apps that are made Vision Pro capable), but not all apps that I really want are available as native visionOS apps. Two of the apps I really want on the device are the Drafts app (this is how I capture and surface quick notes across devices, not having it natively is a pain) and iA Writer as the Vision Pro a great device for focussed work (the input side is something). Having native Obsidian would help a lot as well, but that is more difficult as it is an Electron-based app.

I really want data visualization apps for larger data sets or data with a lot of complications, so that scaling the interface allows for better examination and interrogation of the data.

I really want Freeform as a solid whiteboard option, but it is so close and yet so far.

Isn’t it mostly a content consumption device?

The consumption capabilities of the Vision Pro are amazing, but for a consumption primary device the price is a bit much. The immersive environments to work in or consume content in are insanely well done. The immersive video content is stunning to say the least. Watching movies or other video content is a really good experience in 3D or regular viewing.

Curiosity Around Virtual Meetings

The Apple marketing pitched the Vision Pro as a good virtual interaction device. It used personas that were your face and hands. But, the big question I had around this was the ability to have meetings with colleagues that normally require hopping on a train or plane to get in the same room for 2 to 4 hours, or a couple days. That in-person interaction around plans in documents, presentations, spreadsheets, and whiteboards with a few people seems really viable. I really wanted to test it out that interpersonal interaction capability.

People that work together are most often rather distributed these days and there is no getting around that and travel isn’t cheap. But, if you can shift two or three fly-in meetings to Vision Pro you have basically paid for the device. But, if you can have more solid interactive meetings between the fly-in meetings that have better value than Zoom or Teams or even augment them with greater interaction and fidelity, that is a great win as well.

When I picked up my used Vision Pro it was still the first version of visionOS. The personas were decent and far better than other VR / AR providers, but could be better. Within a few months a major update was made and the personas really became good. Within a few minutes you forget you are interacting with a persona, and it feels normal with great facial gestures and hand and shoulders captured too.

Trying the interaction around documents and presentations with friends has been incredibly good. Once you open a document the person(s) you are interacting with shift from in front of you to arranged next to you and can point and touch what is being shared. This was and is incredibly good. I’ve done 2 and 3 hour sessions in the virtual meeting sessions and for most things it is really good where showing, talking about, interacting in shared documents, and editing is quite good.

The two limitations of this model are: 1) SharePlay is used for the interactions so it is capped to 5 people in the virtual interactive environment at a time; 2) The whiteboard with Apple’s Freeform (Apple launches Freeform) is their virtual whiteboard, which is similar to a Miro or Mural. The 5 person limitation isn’t bad and it is fine for many fly-in meeting needs for planning and check-ins, but 10 for in the same space and then have 5 person breakout sessions with much better interaction would really go a long way. Freeform in Vision Pro really need an input device and the best option is an iPad, which is rather good, but really needs a few more improvements. The iPad Pro with the Pencil Pro and the virtual shadow and the shadow for bevelled orientation seems like it was designed with Vision Pro in mind. But there needs to be some sort of pass-through to take some of the friction out of this. You can get rather proficient with a little time using the iPad Pro as the Freeform interface to do detailed work. The dedicated virtual pens lose fidelity and detail and from my perspective are a poor option.

A great advantage of using the Vision Pro virtual meetings is the focus of participants. In regular meetings most participants aren’t focussed on the matter at hand. For fly in meeting with distracted participants that is a very expensive problem. The distractions are normal and viable to keep on top of projects and problems that happen no matter if a meeting is happening or note. The advantage of Vision Pro is it puts the meeting front and center and the interactions with others in the shared virtual meeting, which is an amazingly strong value.

For virtual meetings this is a good option, but almost there and there needs to be some focus on what is needed to get there. There have been small steps, but the steps need to be more frequent and a bit larger. The other downside is a network effect problem (network effect as the converse), as there aren’t enough people who have Vision Pro devices to have ad hoc meetings with partners and clients at the drop of a hat. I have a few friends whom I interact with that I can test the advances around Share Play and different shared interaction capabilities.

Virtual Monitor

The other added value functionality I was curious about was the Virtual Monitor for Macs. I use the Vision Pro as a virtual monitor for my MacBook Pro quite a bit. The ability to use regular width screen (roughly equivalent to my 16 inch Mac Book Pro or a bit bigger), wide screen (about two screen widths), and ultra wide that wraps (about 3 screens) is really impressive. I most often use the ultrawide option when I need 3 or 4 apps open to have a screen I’m working in, one screen size for my notes, and one or two for reference.

There are two upsides for the Virtual Monitor mode. One is the ability to have Vision Pro apps open around the monitor mode as sticky notes, MindNote mindmap app, Safari floating with a page open, OmniOutliner lists open, and Apple Music. When I’m at my desk I have an external monitor to the left of my laptop stand, so I have two screens. The real life two screen setup causes more neck strain than the wide or ultrawide screen (by a long shot) and that is including the weight of the Vision Pro headset.

The quality of the pass through was a big question. The quality isn’t the same as the amazing screen on the MacBook Pro, but it is two 4k monitors with one in front of each eye. It sometimes is a little less than optimal, but if I move the virtual monitor either closer or farther back it gets to a sweet spot for really nice clarity. I don’t use the virtual monitor or ultra detail work or color precision work as the MacBook Pro screen is superior (similar for my 4k external monitor on my desk).

Two things I really enjoy doing in the virtual monitor are working on system mappings as I can go really wide and tackle and working in Freeform as a virtual whiteboard (it would be so much better were Freeform inputs much better in Vision Pro in its native app). I use Canvas in Obsidian for some capturing of systems and models, I also use OmniGraffle (the Mac version, as there isn’t an Vision Pro version yet, nor a working version of the iPad app for OmniGraffle 8 - I’m moved most of my OmniGraffle work into the beta of version 8 over the last year). In OmniGraffle I don’t use paper size, as I only use it for digital work, so I can go quite wide and tall.

One other advantage of the Virtual Monitor is that for the price of three good 4k monitors the Vision Pro is around the same price.

Vision Pro Impression Today

I still have the Vision Pro and I still get a lot of value from the device and regular use. There are some weeks where much of my use in the device is consumption, but pure consumption weeks are fairly rare.

One of my favorite uses is to put it on and just focus on work and tasks. Dropping into an immersive environment or the TGV app (a virtual TGV train trip that can provide a train focussed environment through the developer capabilities). I find trains are a great focus environment to get things done for me and this app works really well to resemble that.

I am really happy I picked up the Vision Pro, particularly used, as the price point felt it was quite on target. I really would love for Apple to take larger and more progressive steps. There are times I don’t know that Apple understands the full impact and focus of all the use cases, but I’ve virtually attended a few of the Vision Pro Developer full-day series and Apple is covering a lot of ground and covers many of the use cases well. I look forward to what is coming down the road.

A Wrap to Blaugust

I’m looking back at August 2026 and Blaugust that started with the post Going in on Blaugust on August 1st, which I didn’t intend to be the first post, but it was in August (sort of, but more in a moment on that). With this overview of Blaugust I’ve had 42 posts in 31 days.

Many years ago I had a much higher number of posts per month, but that slowed and posts got longer. When I went in on Blaugust it was aiming at 31 posts in August. I figured that was an achievable goal. I didn’t intend on blogging every day and within the first couple of weeks I already had a buffer and was ahead of the one post per day rate. There were a few days (maybe 2 or 3) where I didn’t get a post in on the stated date on the blog, but all but one I had a post not long after that date is marked on my blog post.

One oddity I noticed is that my posting date and time are based on UTC not my local time and date. At some point with my current host I had my date and time in sync with my location. It really doesn’t matter that the date and time aren’t in sync. This is how the initial post wasn’t posted when I was in August yet, but was marked as such. I will take the 42 posts in the month as that seems to be a good answer. For years when my site was hosted in Australia the date and time posted was often quite off my location (except for a trip to Australia) and the posting time was fine for those reading in Austrailia.

What Was Learned from Blaugust?

As stated in another post or two this month, getting the workflow smoothed out and just getting the habit anchored was a good outcome. I had hoped to get a few of the longer and more complicated pieces posted that are in my blogfodder list, which would likely post on Personal InfoCloud. Some of those longer posts are much closer to now being finished. One I was working on today I thought would be ready to post today, but that wasn’t going to make it.

I need to sort out the workflow for the Personal InfoCloud as it is on WordPress and the block interface, which adds friction that doesn’t need to be there. But, with a few post for Personal InfoCloud nearly ready I should have a few workflow tests to hone that process as well.

I have a large list of blogfodder with posts that are mostly done needing tweaks and edits and I had hoped to get those through the process and posted, finally. But, the majority of the posts came from something at the front of mind and considered, written, edited, and posted in one flow. About a quarter of the posts were in the blogfodder list, or adjacent to something on the list.

Will the Pace of Posting Continue?

I’m not sure if a daily post pace or higher, will continue, but it may. I have some longer more complicated posts that will slow the pace. But, getting smaller posts out as things come to mind has a flow that works and that will likely keep some of the pace that has been essential to Blaugust.

With the posts to Personal InfoCloud, I’m likely going to write a shorter post pointing to it from here, or may post in both places and point to Personal InfoCloud version from here.

Things I Noticed

With Blaugust posting I had forgotten that my main blog page shows posts for the month, but also has a set minimum number of posts for the blog homepage. With a full month at a time makes for a long scroll when there are many posts. I was really wanting to work through some of the steps to move the structure of the blog to collections, Pagination Chronology Fix :: Lab :: vanderwal.net, but the time wasn’t there to tackle it.

Living in my site had me notice quite a few UI bugs that I fixed. I also found some page structure issues across the site and tackled those as well.

And…

Here’s to September with no theme, but focusing the usual focus things.

Markdown Apps Loosely Joined

I recently posted about the different web browsers I regularly use, My Browser Family, and it makes sense to go through my different apps I use for Markdown in a similar way. My use is very closely tied to my Small Apps Loosely Joined mindset (part of the Shift Happed series on Personal InfoCloud). “Small apps loosely joined” focusses on having a core adaptable data structure (like markdown) and use different apps with written content where the app has helpful capabilities that are needed in a workflow or to focus on a type of work as a step in a workflow. Much like a woodworker picks up different tools to perform different tasks and doesn’t use a saw or chisel for all tasks, the small apps loosely joined model is similar. This works and has worked insanely well for 15+ years that I’ve leaned heavily on markdown.

I end up in markdown discussions rather easily it seems. The way I have taken notes in text apps with asterisks or dashes for bullets and the octothorp (you know, this thing #) for headings goes a long way back for me (starting somewhere in the 1990s). When I came across markdown in the early 2000s, after I had looked at and tried Textile Markup, but markdown didn’t fully connect. It echoed what I had done and offered more, but at the time I didn’t see the advantage of the added capabilities.

In 2010 and 2011 I started to shift much of my note taking and writing away from apps that were siloed and lock-in models. The flow from notes from a meeting, to my personal notes and annotations, and on to writing that gets shared out was a series of less than optimal apps that all had lock-in and heavy friction. Microsoft products not only had intentional lock-in but were continually buggy. I loved (and still do) Scrivener for writing longer pieces in it due to its managing notes and scraps related to the longer writing piece, but getting things in, as well as getting things out into my various sharing / publishing workflows had a lot of friction. At this time my parents were sick and passed on. When my mom passed my laptop hard drive took it as a hint and it too left the living world. I had everything backed up and I was working off the back up drive hanging off my Mac, and was waiting on a hard drive replacement, but needed something for notes for meetings (with banks, lawyers, and so much more) that I could move across everything. I nabbed an iPad for that mobility to take to meetings have files move across and back to my Mac. This tipped me into a full markdown life.

Like Many, Not All Markdown Goes to the Web

Markdown started by John Gruber to be an easy means of writing with light structure, while maintaining decent readability and to fit his model notes, which Textile didn’t fully fit. John created markdown and the markdown conversion to HTML as a matched set. Over the years many write markdown that gets converted to HTML, but around 2010 I’d see people were using markdown that never was converted to HTML. Markdown was what they wrote in as it was highly portable and editable from any text tool or markdown app and not in buggy and lock-in software. I noticed this in San Francisco on a trip where I stopped in a couple law offices to visit friends and the receptionist and legal assistants were mostly using markdown. This surprised me, as it wasn’t something I expected. Largely markdown for writing has been in tech adjacent roles and organizations. Later year seeing high school kids and college kids using markdown for their notes and paper drafts, then pasting to Google Docs was really impressive with the deftness they worked and how they managed everything. (A funny sidenote is many who went through school this way were appalled that Microsoft Word didn’t natively understand markdown). Markdown isn’t the parent’s use case any longer.

Today markdown for me only has around 20% that gets turned into HTML. Most are notes and documents that stay in markdown or turned into Google Docs, PDFs, text in Keynote presentations, and much more. Markdown is incredibly flexible with just enough structure to get converted as needed.

At First Many Apps Only Sort of Joined

This 2011 timeframe was the heyday of small light markdown apps. I picked up many apps and found a few that worked well. I was knee-deep in the markdown matrix table that Brett Terpstra maintained that showed the markdown app and the capabilities and compared what seemed like well over 60 apps. I used Simplenote, Byword, 1Writer, Ulysses, and Bear notes quite a bit and have kept them around but don’t use them as much due to friction for where and how they keep markdown files and some interfaces didn’t evolve. I also have used Working Copy, Git on iOS on Mac and iOS (iPad) for working on larger documents across devices and with others.

Moving to Less Friction for Markdown Loosely Joined

Apps that stayed around and were added in respected where I kept my notes and work. Most of the notes and writing stayed in a notes directory, but also were in project work. My notes directory on my Mac was linked out to iCloud so I could have access from my iPad or other devices. For a long stretch my basic notes app on my Mac was NVAlt, which allowed for tagging the markdown files, which meant that while they lived in my notes directory, I could aggregate all project work in the project folders, other media, and notes all with a file tag on Mac. This was fine until NVAlt stopped opening.

My Menagerie of Markdown Apps Now

My markdown notes that NVAlt sat over (which also included a folder from Notional use) had a few thousand notes when it stopped opening. But, the markdown notes weren’t owned and controlled by NVAlt and I could use nearly any markdown app I had to open and edit them. I wanted something very close to NVAlt.

Obsidian

In June 2020, after trying to find a replacement for how I worked with NVAlt I tried a few apps, but the one standout was Obsidian which slid perfectly into the exact role that NVAlt had for me. This role was to sit over the directory of notes and oversee them, but functionality on top of the markdown notes. Obsidian added even more capabilities (which most of my other markdown apps also adopted portions of over time). Obsidian is where my daily notes, drafts of longer pieces, meeting notes, and so much more go. Everything is relatively findable and refindable through backlinks (wikilinks) that are bridges between notes (but also with a plug-in Strange New Worlds - Obsidian Plugin I can see what other notes link to the note I’m linking to, and part of the magic is the note I’m pointing to doesn’t need to exist to see those links), tags to aggregate related notes with that tag, and search.

The other great advantage of Obsidian is transclusion, where one note can be added in as a view into another note. I can start a note in a meeting note or a daily note, then highlight a section and extract that section as its own note, but then transclude that note back in to show it where it was. This extraction and transclusion allows for that one piece of notes to mature and / or be included as a transclusion into other notes. The transclusions can also bring in a sub-heading into another note to show the section in the sub-heading. (I have a longer take on how and why I don’t use zettelkasten, which is similar to what I learned going into college for how to have far better study habits and write papers far more easily, but it also broke contextual understanding and really broke multiple contextual relationships).

iA Writer

My longer form markdown writing app is iA Writer. Often an idea for writing will start as something small in Obsidian (often in a larger note) and gets fleshed out a little there. But, when it starts getting longer I will extract it as its own note and then pick it up in iA Writer to take it farther. I love iA Writer as the interface is quite plain and it is just me and words and minimal structure. I often will create sub-headings early in longer pieces as outline structure to be filled in. Then it is just writing. The iA Writer app also has some light grammar checking (which fits my needs well), a quick preview to see your work as output that has some design and layout in the UI. It can be turned into a very minimal interface as well with focus on the line your cursor is on and just a few lines around that active line.

By and large, iA Writer replaced Scrivener and Ulysses as my longer writing app. The segmentation and notes capability in these other apps have made their way in as sort of similar forms into iA Writer (not everything, but enough for me). What largely caused iA Writer to replace the other two was very little friction getting my writing out into other outputs. Dragging the proxy icon to Marked (now Marked 3) is all that I need to get to HTML, styled PDF, or Word.

Marked (now Marked 3)

The Marked app, which is now in its 3rd major version, is the markdown conversion and clean-up app of choice. Marked has a lot of different capabilities, including proofing, writing statistics (like readability score and much more), writing support with proof reading, linting, and support for a wide set of markdown capabilities. Everything for using Marked for converting markdown to other formats is quite customizable and rather straight forward if you have some skills.

MarkEdit

The MarkEdit. app is one app I use as my default markdown file opener. It is like Mac’s TextEdit app, but focuses on markdown. It shows all of the markdown marks in plain sight. I find the showing everything raw is a good thing for review and understanding structure quickly.

I receive markdown files from others quite a bit, I also have access to other’s Obsidian vaults, and I have many markdown files that are spread all around my Mac and cloud environments. When opening one of these from search or a link I want to keep it outside of my Obsidian so they don’t get included and intermingled. This is really helpful reading and editing other’s shared Obsidian vaults as I can open, read, edit, and then close it while keeping clear of my Obsidian. If I want to copy something from my notes in Obsidian to another’s Obsidian, the two apps for two different environments look different, which helps reduce errors.

BBEdit

Another plain interface for markdown I use is BBEdit by Bare Bones Software, which supports markdown, but is the jack-of-all-trades text and basic coding tool. BBEdit is a go to for a lot of different text and coding needs where clearing out the cruft of an IDE or app is needed. I often open markdown documents in BBEdit when there are a lot of consistent text modifications I need to make. I have pulled in large outlines I have made in markdown and I need to do much work with nested levels in the outline.

Drafts App

I use Drafts for text and idea capture when I am away from my Mac. Everything from quick atomic notes (like where I parked, name of a book mentioned when at coffee, etc.). Drafts has long had solid voice-to-text for all Apple devices (iPhone, Watch, iPad, Mac) so it a great capture application. Drafts also has a highly adaptable capability for what to do with the note once captured, like sending it to my notes directory that Obsidian sits over. It is fully markdown capable. I can take a voice-to-text note on my Watch when driving, or invoke Siri and have it open Drafts to a blank not and tap the mic and leave a voice-to-text note that automatically is save and I can open it when I park and add some markdown elements and use and action to send it off to Obsidian, text message, or so many different end points.

iPad Apps

I started using markdown heavily, largely because my Mac hard drive crashed and I was taking notes on an iPad. I’ve gone through a lot of different iPad apps for markdown.

I have Obsidian, iA Writer, and Drafts, which I use pretty much the same way as how I use them on the Mac. Obsidian on iPad is a bit more limited, but still good for capture and modifications of notes in the directories I have it sitting over. I have Drafts always available as a slideover option off to the right of the screen.

I have Editorial for iOS as a relatively plain markdown editor. I don’t use it as much as I used to, but good to know it is there and it is quite capable.

The iPad also has small focussed apps for certain tasks. I use TextCase for changing capitalization in notes. I use Terminology by Agile Tortoise, which is the same developer as Drafts, as a really good reference tool when writing on iPad.

Trying a Couple Apps

There are a couple of apps that I’ve been trying on Mac, which may have a place. The first is Lettera, which is a markdown editor for Mac by the makers of Bear, which is currently in a limited beta. When I was using Bear notes app I loved the interface as it was clean, but what I didn’t like about Bear was the lock-in of notes in the app, as there was too much friction to use a note outside of Bear. Lettera is the markdown editor that is free of Bear. It still seems to default to a Lettera folder in iCloud, but opens markdown notes from anywhere. This may be a better reading and annotation app (it has easy to use callouts) for some of the uses I’ve used MarkEdit.

The other app is one I’m trying again as I used it 8 years ago (or so) when it was in beta and free, but became fragile, buggy, and would crash. It looked good and was rather simple. They changed from the free app to a paid app with the same name. I ended up with two versions with the same app with the icon and it was difficult to discern which was the flakey app and which was the good. Once the good version became pay, so I had neither working. This was Typora. In recent months many new to markdown have been talking about Typora and I get asked about it. Today I finally downloaded it again after deleting both of my instances of it a few years ago.

The current Typora has a lot of capabilities now, far beyond what it used to have. It has a similar interface, until you open settings then it has a lot of customizations. Typora can now cover a lot of ground. Much of it is covered in other apps I have, but I may find my current model of having different apps for different uses that are incredibly good for the purpose I use them is my preferred way of working. Having different apps helps me focus on what I am doing in that app to the markdown file and the task and focus needed from me for that task. To get to the same thing in Typora I would have to go to settings and make changes to keep that focus, but the context of the different app isn’t there. Moving between apps I will also keep the markdown file in multiple apps and see an edit in one instantly show in all the other apps (what good magic is this). Typora nice interface with additions for math UI (through LaTex) and charts (through Mermaid) may be a draw to keep it around.

Honey, The Thing Ate My Blog

In the past few months I’ve looked at the history of my blog analytically and captured some of it in, Personal Blog Data Analysis - Looking at 25 Years :: Off the Top, and I could see the changes in posts over time. I used to joke that “Twitter ate my blog”, as what I was posting on my site, was going into Twitter and not my site. Looking at the analysis that transition is clear. I have my archive of tweets from my three accounts (my main one turned private and two public accounts with one more work-related and the other responses to others and tracking sports).

Twitter vs. Blog

During that time posting to Twitter, my posts grew less frequent, but also longer. Twitter helped me write shorter sentences as it started with just 140 characters available. During this time I was still also keeping regular notes in text in my Notes directory. I most often used NVAlt that allowed for tagging the note file and it had really good search for the Notes directory that predated my using NVAlt by 10+ years (I started keeping notes there in 2003 in text, OmniOutliner, and HTML, but shifted to mostly text until about 2010 when it was a mix of text and markdown).

As my use of Twitter dwindled and conversations I had been having there moved to back channels and topic-focused groups, my blog post didn’t come back. The ideas and content had outlets, but that wasn’t my blog.

Notes Stayed Local

In June 2020 I had been trying to find a new notes app that worked similarly to NVAlt, which had stopped opening in the prior year. I had a few text and markdown apps I used to add notes to my normal location (one was Notional, which I used for about a year). I tried Notion for a short bit, but not having local notes and it being cloud only made it a serious no go for me. I tried Logseq, a couple apps heavily focused on zettelkasten, and I tried Obsidian. Obsidian stuck for a lot of reasons, but the most important was I just set it to watch over my existing Notes directory and just keep going. The ability to use backlinks / wikilinks, tags, and transclude notes was a great fit.

I went back to a daily note pattern using my Daily Dump set of sections as prompts for quick access to an area in the note to capture ideas and notes around things found, worked on, and ideas I cared about. The ability to have concept pages and hubs that linked back to everything related, make notes in my Daily Dump and then highlight a section and extract it out as its own separate note and bring a transclusion (see it in another context) back into the Daily Dump and other relevant concept pages, was magical.

It became the note platform I’ve long wanted. I was capturing and making notes in it a lot. Notes could easily turn into blog posts. But, they weren’t turning into blog posts they just stayed notes. “Obsidian ate my blog” became my tongue-in-cheek joke. But, it was pretty much what happened.

I was writing in my notes, much like I used to blog. From short snippets to longer worked-through ideas and concepts. It was pretty much (and still is) all in my notes that Obsidian sits over.

The Daily Notes Out to Blog

I run analytics on my Obsidian notes and I’m creating and touching 10 to 20 different notes a day. Some of these, thanks to Blaugust, have been turning into blog posts, which was my intent with Blaugust. But, I also have been fleshing things out that started as blog post ideas and I flesh them out in my “Thoughts” section of my Daily Dump note (just like this one is). This new idea blog posting isn’t helping work through my large (over 100 notes) that are flagged as “blogfodder”. Many of the blogfodder ideas are half-done and sitting for months or years. Others have been nearly fully drafted and need an edit. Some have been stuck because the post (in my belief) needs another post or two to set the foundation for the post that to be shared out (I realize this as I go to point to a post that doesn’t exist, as it is only regular content in Keynote for workshops, presentations, and work engagement foundation setting).

I’m starting to work through the some of the blogfodder. But, I’m working on my daily notes becoming blog posts more regularly. Blaugust has been helping move from notes to post. When Blaugust wraps I need to see where all of this lands.

Adjusting Daily Aggregation for Less Friction

Sunday I hit a point where my daily automations (which I layout in part here - My Automations Over the Ages and Today’s View in my morning process and weekly process) and placing the outputs into my Daily Dump note sections was really making for a lot of friction in my note taking / note making. Additionally, it was breaking focus and holding my concentration on what I was trying to capture in my note’s sections.

How Daily Dump Notes are Setup

My Daily Dump has 14 sections: Plans, Thoughts, Review, Read, Talked With, Listened, Watched, Productivity, Worked, Learned, Played, Ate, Health, Bought, and Added to a wishlist.

The intent with the subheads in my note is to quickly jump to the section as I run across something or am thinking through and idea or concept and capture the thoughts or what I consumed and ideas from it, so I can get back to it later in my notes. But, since this is markdown and in Obsidian I can take the notes with its subheading and text, extract it, and then transclude it (move it out and link it back in to show it in another note). But, having each day’s note relatively clean (the exception is the Plans section for things brewing and on the front burner to do are moved from the prior day’s note to the current day’s with a python script that keeps the completed tasks on the prior day and removes things not completed and moved them to today).

Friction from Adding Aggregation to the Sections

The daily aggregations pulled in things captured from various reading and copying or favoriting tasks that get automatically captured in Instapaper and Pinboard, as well as all the files I created and modified. I also have notes from Drafts that I capture on the go and tagged to get pulled in aggregated, as well as a list of things I watched online that I want to track, but also list of videos watched where I’ve captured the transcript in Readwise I may want to review (and likely do a further clean-up step).

All of this was getting aggregated into collective notes by type and transcluded into the relevant groups in my Daily Dump note. This added a lot of friction to the intent of my Daily Dump for quick easy drop into a section and capture a note and then after sort out how I may handle it. Add to this, Sunday my Weekly Review runs and captures all of this from the week and compiles it into one note so with a heat map at the top so I can review it to see what I’ve been doing and find things to cut back on or put focus on for the upcoming week. The Weekly Review was transcluded into Productivity, which is ironic as all of this adding of aggregation transclusions was making me really unproductive.

The Fix to Bring Back Focus and Quick Capture

On Sunday I had enough of the friction and took time to sort out a solution. I liked the capture and the ability to scan through and find things I need to continue working on or make a change on, but having it in my quick capture notes area made it tough.

I added a “Review” section just under Plans and now all aggregations and transclusions go there. The best part is when I’m not reviewing it, a heading in Obsidian can be collapsed, which gives me focus on everything else.

On Sunday I did a quick manual restructuring of my note by putting everything aggregated into the Review section and then collapsed it. This was a magical focus trick.

Updating the Python Script that Automates Transclusion

Sunday I did the first edit of the python script that takes the aggregations notes created earlier in the moring and transcludes them in and repointed them to not go into the other categories, but all go into Review. This hasn’t run perfectly yesterday nor today (it works when I trigger it to run manually, but not from the trigger to run the script), but it is getting closer.

Protecting Focus is Key

Protecting focus and being able to quickly shift focus and be productive is key and has been something I’ve been working to do since I was a kid. Over the years I’ve learned the distractions and how to pull focus and calm back in. Removing the friction from abundance of information already in where I needed clean space to quickly capture created the large problem.

Now my big next step is sorting out the time to actually get a good weekly review done from what I’ve aggregated. The capture has been really good, but I just need to get better about protecting time on Sunday (or move this to Saturday) so I can sit and focus on what was done, what I can reduce and what needs focus to get done.

Fragile Automation Systems

I have a set of early morning aggregation automations I run and in the last few months I’ve run into oddities with regular automated syndication of data streams. I have quite a few things that push to a Slack channel, but it something keeps changing with Slack and it isn’t capturing anything. Much of it seems to be on the Slack end of things where inbound connections route to a Slack bot and not to the hardwired channel in the instance.

Slack used to be the stable and solid endpoint for tracking data, but something has changed.

I have a few different services that have triggers for automating capturing, copying, and writing data in another service where I can more easily make use of it through pushing it to a calendar, spreadsheet, central messaging (where I control when I pay attention to it), and moving it into a format for review or to work with on some calm cadence. Slack is one of the calm endpoints, and sometimes midpoint where I pull certain things in the last day or two from Slack to be in full view with other related items working around.

My keyboard shortcut app of choice for more than a decade has been hitting odd security lockouts that keep it from working. The lockouts are from other apps or services and they lock it from working across the device. I have around 15 to 20 shortcuts I use regularly to insert templates, drop in URLs, add dates, and more. But, when it gets locked I type the three or four keystrokes and nothing happens. It is like being in a dreamworld and a door won’t open. After an hour or few the lock goes away and it works. I’ve contacted the vendor and they are trying to sort out what is now causing this.

When then the automations and silent systems break or an interface is empty, but should have quite a few things in it and there are only a few, it is a little disconcerting. Fragile services aren’t new, but many solid services for years are now increasingly fragile and that trend needs to reverse.

Open, Do, Close

Today I was writing mostly for something that may post tomorrow on a sort of collaborative / swap post.

One of the things I’ve been doing a lot of the last few months as I dig into a focussed task and upon completion, it is the closing of tabs, archived documents, note resources logged, and various apps for the focussed push are saved and closed. Today I mostly wrapped this writing project and turning back to document reviews. I don’t want to do the close the tabs and apps until I finish going through a review and edit.

My writing and posting workflow for blog posts now has a smoother flow and clean-up. The deleting of the open views and then the app as I reverse out of the workflow steps. Then go through the tabs and resources opened to validate what I’m writing and get things properly checked.

I currently have a handful of things I’m reviewing and trying to get conversations moving to good outcomes. But, they need quite a few things open and shifting contexts. I need to have task / project apps, tabs, documents, and resource opener and wrap-up in progress app or automation.

Halfway Through Blaugust

At the halfway point of Blaugust following my saying I was in on Blaugust and aiming for 31 post in August, it is time for a check-in. On the 16th of August I have 22 posts (counting this post), which is more than I expected. I had two personal goals for the Blaugust endeavor: 1) Get back in the habit of posting and comfortable with the workflow; 2) Make a dent on my long list of blogfodder.

Back Comfortable with My Workflow

Not only am I comfortable with my workflow, but I’ve made tweaks to it. I have a lot of Daily Dump notes with things written out in the sections that could easily turn into a blog post. Now I have a smoother flow taking those notes and quickly extracting them to their own note, immediately having it transcluded back in, add the blog note framings, as well as blogfodder tracking, which makes it very quick to extract, wrap it for a post, and run through the edit and posting steps.

I am not only more comfortable with my process, but I’m feeling like I’m back living in my site again. I am using my blog search as I prep a note to potentially post to see what I have that may be similar or nice to add to a post as a reference. I also have been finding quite a few small UI gaffs that needed fixing and knocking them out. All pages in the blog area should have “Blog Search” in the navigation. There were layout twitches in layout switching between blog main page and individual post pages, which has been there a long time. This twitch isn’t fully gone, but far less noticeable.

Another thing I did was add some categories to accommodate creative and fiction posts, which I have been trying to sort out what to do with them. I may have another option at some point, but for now I have a decent option.

Making a Dent In Blogfodder List?

Uh… On this front I have knocked out a few items on the blogfodder list, cleaned up the list a little, but the list got a bit longer. Many of the posts for Blaugust have been new ideas and not coming out of the blogfodder list. Many of the items on the list are longer pieces and need more work, but they are likely going to be posted on Personal InfoCloud, but I will note here that I’ve posted there (just like the old days).

Some of those longer pieces will cover: “folksonomy and LLMs” (this question comes up a lot and helping quite a few understand the realities and frame their needs); “My working with AI since 2008”; “My AI policy for my sites (in short nothing read was created or edited by AI)”; “AI and Social Computing (particularly around teams and organizations)”; and other topic. I have quite a few others I swore I have posted over the years, but nope, so I’ve queued those up as well.

My Browser Family

Browsers come up often in discussion. But, in a recent MacSparky Labs meetup, one of the discussions started going deep on browsers. I mentioned how and how much I abuse my browsers. Also, how I manage the volume of what flows through.

My Browser Use

I have four browsers open on my laptop nearly always. I use Choosy to route links coming in to the browser I want it to go to. I don’t count my RSS feed reader, NetNewsWire as a browser, but see it as a pre-browser. I use Safari, Google Chrome, Zen Browser, and DEVONagent Pro as my core and are always open. I also use regular Firefox, but not as much.

Safari - The Triage Workhorse

Safari is my browser that takes a beating and often where I open a tab for general reading. I use quite a few extensions, which all work well in Safari. The regular extensions are for passwords, Readwise (for local highlighting extraction and full page capture for future lighting and annotations), Instapaper (this is less for reading later, but capturing and sending a link to my personal Slack instance as well as feeds DevonThink RSS aggregation), Choosy (used to push a link to another browser for a focussed task), Obsidian web clipper, screen capture for full page capture, Stop the Madness, and Wayback Machine.

The biggest advantages for Safari are how well ad blocking works from extensions, the Reader view, and having an insane amount of tabs open at once (I’ll often find I have 1,000 tabs open after 60 days, which it is so easy to open the left sidebar, click tabs, command+A to highlight all open tabs, copy, and paste into a markdown document as a good bulleted markdown list of title and link lists - then commit “tab bankruptcy” and close the window and start a new one).

Chrome

I use Google Chrome mostly for things Google, like YouTube, Google Maps, Google apps, some social networks which get JavaScript heavy. Chrome can handle some heavy use, but nothing like Safari can handle. There are a lot of sites that only work properly in Chrome, which feels like poor development practices of the late 90s and early 00s are back again.

Zen Browser

Zen browser is built on Firefox and replaced my use of Arc browser for its Spaces (compartmentalized browsing sections with their own tab collections) and left sidebar tabs. Zen is my browser I work in (other than the first Space, which is more fun regular access). I have 12 Spaces with one with productivity focus for things around Obsidian, note making, my vanderwal.net related resources, Personal InfoCloud site related resources, Apple Developer, techno-social cognition research, O’Reilly Media related research, one for grad student mentoring, and others for focussed related reading and notes.

I really like the Firefox foundation with all the extensions offered, good security, good privacy, and incredibly good PDF resources built-in. There is a lot open at once in the Zen browser as well and it just keeps chugging.

DevonAgent Pro

DevonAgent Pro is one I use mostly for one purpose, capturing pages as single continuous PDFs and directly add them into DevonThink and easily annotate the metadata. When in Safari or Zen I use the Choosy extension to open the page into DevonAgent and click command+option+P to capture the logged-in page easily. There are extensions for DevonThink, but it is a bit buggy at times and often doesn’t capture my logged-in state, so DevonAgent Pro becomes my go to. I will also use it for research as it has nice features to easily capture assets and its direct connection to DevonThink.

Firefox

While I keep the four above always open, I also use Firefox as my Facebook browser when I go there as it does a really good job keeping Facebook’s creepy privacy tendrils at bey along with a plug-in that is a Facebook fence.

I also use Firefox for a handful of Streamlit • A faster way to build and share data apps browser-base data analysis web apps. Firefox does a good job keeping things contained and the interactive data builds in Streamlit won’t impact anything else.

Weeknote Considerations

One of the things I deeply enjoy reading each week is other people’s weeknotes. Well, not everybodies weeknotes. I have 4 to 8 different people who share weeknotes that I check in on. It is like getting the weekly catch-up and it is calm and quaint (in the good way). I really like them and I get concerned if they miss a week.

For a while I was posting weeknotes (found with the tag: Weeknote :: Off the Top :: vanderwal.net). I posted 25 of them. They were recaps of things I found of interest and wanted to share in that prior week (or so). I stopped posting them as the timing was tough at the end of the week, but the creation was getting easier as they just were things I’d pull out of my daily notes to myself in roughly the same categories.

Not Sure If I’ll Return to Posting Weeknotes Again

I am really not sure that I will return to posting weeknotes again, but it is a rather Ouroboros-shaped reason. In the past year or so I set up local (on my laptop) search of my own blog, which moved to the Lab - vanderwal.net, and then on to my blog portion of my site.

In searching my own content to see if I’ve posted on a subject before, I would find what I was looking for in a weeknote post. But, going to the post it was buried in the muddle with other things. I also was finding using categories to find related content when it was surfacing weeknotes and I’d have to dig in the weeknote to find the relevance it was connecting to. Both of these bothered me and from a finding, pointing to, and sharing with others perspective. I really think it is a less than good experience.

The weeknote for me was a means to get back to posting to my blog more regularly. I joked that Twitter ate my blog in 2006 (I’ve seen my data and it sure did). Then moving to a better note tool and note making daily that had me writing again in pretty much my old manner like blogging, but I just wasn’t posting. I didn’t complete the workflow for it to be a blog post. I would write and reuse locally, but the next steps in a blogging / sharing workflow did’t happen. A little over a year ago when I updated my blog management tool, that was part of the backend update, that made posting easier and I was posting a little more. But, when I’d look it was a week or more stretches between posts and I’d been writing like I was blogging, but I was my own reader.

Using Blaugust (Going in on Blaugust :: Off the Top :: vanderwal.net) as impetus to get the workflow back part of my habit of finishing the steps is a good thing for posting, I think.

My Notes to Post Workflow

I’ve kept notes in text in a directory since 2003. It started as plain text along with dash or asterisk bullets. That turned into using Notional and then NVAlt at some point. When NVAlt stopped opening I set Obsidian to watch over the directory in June 2020 and I’ve not looked back. I did a quick modification and the notes that weren’t in markdown (I fully shifted my writing to markdown in 2011 when I had a hard drive crash and access to application that wrapped notes made my notes something I couldn’t open for a few days and with my parents passing and needing notes, a proprietary container was no longer an option – actually it is a bad idea from the start).

I keep a Daily Dump markdown note that is structured with sub-headings as prompts and keep notes in there. One of the things I love about Obsidian is the ability to have transclusions, so when I am writing in my daily note, but it makes sense to have it as a stand alone note to reference, or to become a blog post, I just highlight the segment and right click to export that to a new note and it links to with a backlink (think wiki link), but putting an exclamation mark in front of it brings that note into the daily note to show it.

This means I can create a note that has a “blog-shape” to it that started in my daily note. It is in markdown and I have a title on it and other metadata. It lives in my note directory. I click the ellipses in Obsidian’s right corner of the panel to “Show in Finder”. The finder window for Mac opens with the markdown note highlighted. I right click on it (I don’t use a mouse, so double finger tap is actually what I do) and select to open the file in iA Writer. iA Writer is my longer writing app, but also what I review and edit something that I will post (or transform to a more formal document). When that is done I drag the proxy icon for the file in the titlebar of iA Writer to the icon for the Marked app (Marked 3) in my Dock and it opens and I select “preview toggle” and it shows me very well structured HTML (it matches the scripting I did years ago to do much the same, but is much less hassle) then I highlight and copy and paste into my site’s blog management tool, add the title and select categories and it is posted.

The multiple apps all are working with regular markdown all in the same file. I modify something in one and it changes in all the other interfaces. I own the files and they can be opened in any text app or any markdown focussed app. IA Writer I really like for calm focussed writing, reading what I’ve written, and editing. Marked (now Marked 3) just does a nice markdown conversion to very good standards compliant HTML, plus adds the sub-header IDs for anchor links, which I used to do mostly by hand when I ran my own convert to HTML scripts. Marked also can transform markdown to structured Word, well designed PDF, and more, yet I use it for the one simple task.

In my blog management screen, I manually trigger the build of my RSS and then trigger syndication notifications after I have run a manual visual check and test all the links. Once I’ve finished writing it is 2 to 5 minutes to edit in iA Writer and post.

Automating the Daily Dump Note

In work and personal life I’ve long been an automator. It started in the ’90s, but actually started when I was a kid and talking with my dad about systems, making them more efficient, and removing steps, and automations. Any manual rote step I look at and think about making it a click or “just run”. I’ve used Obsidian since June 2020 and have a lot of things in my markdown notes trigged by TextExpander.

Reducing Steps Setting my My Daily Dump Note

Little by little I’ve been building out some automations for my note taking that sits under Obsidian’s watchful eye, but may start elsewhere or seeds start elsewhere. In the morning I run some automations that sweep up videos of interest I forwarded to myself from the prior evening or that morning that are in a personal instance of Slack. I have one that pulls in notes in Drafts with a specific tag then archives the note. One last piece I’d really like to add is to have my known items from across my calendars dropped in at the top of that Daily Dump note.

Getting the calendar dump is something I’d really like to have before I get to my laptop in the morning. But, each of these automations could and should be automated and dropped in the note before I fully get to it as well.

This takes one thing… having the note.

Creating the note with the series of headers and subheadings is something I usually do in a new markdown note with TextExpander each morning. But, I can’t automate with TextExpander (or I haven’t sorted out how to trigger that from a far).

Automating but Not with Apple Shortcuts

I started a couple days ago thinking that since I had Actions for Obsidian I could easily create a new Daily Dump with the correct future date as a title and have it trigger the Templater template for the note with the correct date. I quickly got the file created properly, but in over 4 hours that included a couple hours the following day it was still not working properly. This also included a few different apps and pieces and if any of them change it breaks.

Since I not only wanted to create one note with a template for the next day, but to have a few days ahead created (say a week at a time). I gave up on Shortcuts and in under 20 minutes I had a python script doing exactly what I wanted. This included setting up a cronjob to run it on Sunday evening and have a week of notes set.

Using the Output

This morning I opened Obsidian and one of the future day’s notes I had setup as tests was a click away and I was capturing an idea. This is a nice change and one I wished I had done long ago.

The next step is automating bringing in the aggregation automations notes and dropping that into my Daily Dump.

Weeknote - 15 March 2026

I thought this week was going to fully turn the corner on a cycle of sinus tears, light infection, better, and then start it over again. It has been messing with sleep and having a clear head. I’m hoping thing are sorted.

Am I back posting weeknotes regularly? I love reading other people’s weeknotes and have a handful of favorites. I also miss getting things of interest shared out somewhat regularly.

Watched

Mission Impossible is Sort of Wachable

The tail end of last week I watched what I thought was the last (latest) installment, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One - Wikipedia. I started watching late and I hadn’t looked at the length before I started. It was decent and enjoyable. I found it to be one of the better of the Mission Impossible series. I really liked the first movie and some along the way I have found to be decent, but some are a slog. I enjoy the travel and some of the film production, but the scripts are think and acting meh (I really am not a fan of Tom Cruise). But this 7th in the series was decent entertainment. As it ended I realized there was the actual “final” installment and given I thought the 7th was enjoyable there may be hope. I was not right, it was a slog with story segments far too long and with that there were logical gaps.

Seven Dials is Rewachable

Later in the week there was a quiet evening and I needed a break and opted for Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials - Wikipedia on Watch Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials | Netflix Official Site. I wasn’t expecting much as one of the Agatha Christie shows that Netflix had done in the last few years was not really watchable. Seven Dials was more than watchable, I found it to be quite good and a good interpretation. The Seven Dials is a Agatha Christie mystery that leans into a serious nod to P. G. Wodehouse, which I found to be well done (as well is something I was in need of). The main characters were really enjoyable.

Work

Search Me

I did a little tweaking around blog search for here, but not fully pulled it into this blog. It is sitting the Search from the Lab for vanderwal.net. I updated the database engine and switched to InnoDB to get search for 3 letter words and larger working.

I then had the issue of old blog entries where I didn’t have a title and the title is what I make linkable from search. I thought I only had a few handfuls of posts that lacked titles, but it was a few hundred. While adding titles is a good background repetitive task, I moved to adding a permalink under the body of the post snippet in the search results, but also added the post ID as a proxy header to give some consistency.

Category Tweaking

Through searching my posts across 25 years I would click to read a post and go to click a category that I believed would take me to other related content, I found I had categories missing. I added in about 5 or 6 categories and went back and searched and added the categories to posts.

Personal InfoCloud Posts

I have a few posts for the Personal InfoCloud site brewing. There are many things I have thought I have posted there over the years that are just written out in my notes and not edited nor posted. I have one I’m reworking a little.

I have also been going back through many Model of Attraction focussed posts and ones around the InfoClouds (Personal, Local, Global, and External) and sorting out what is posted and not. Related is sorting out what posts I have relate to the roughly 100 Complexity Lenses (at the top level - has also used Social Lenses as its main label in the past, but there is so much more in there than social) and the more than 1,500 nodes in all.

I also have a few posts around software development and product development around subjects that people, teams, and organizations seem to be continually missing or tripped up by.

General Posts

I posted the other day about Adding a Museum Category - Off the Top - vanderwal.net in relation to the IndieWeb Carnival - IndieWeb that James is running this month on museum memories - IndieWeb Carnival March 2026: Museum memories | James’ Coffee Blog. When James mentioned this a while back I was thinking I had a couple or small few museum memories I could post, but started a short list. That list turned into more than 30. There may be more than one post for sure. It may be a series or collection (hence added the category). But, I also have some broader theme posts that are growing on the subject.

My blogfodder list is rather long. But, modifications I’ve made to my workflow and blog management process in Obsidian
(I’ve been using it to sit over my nearly 30 years of text and markdown notes for the last 6 years and finding it really valuable) are making it better to get notes moved to blogfodder, and honed enough to post.

Productivity

Going Back to Bartender for Menu Bar Management for a Bit

I’ve been using Ice for my menu bar management on my MacBook Pro M4 since Bartender was sold and became questionable. Ice has not been updated since macOS 26 has been out (I don’t want anything Liquid Glass added) and with many apps getting a bit unstable on macOS 26 (particularly if they convert to Liquid Glass) and I’m trying to get things sorted.

I saw Bartender 6 had some recent updates and listing of changes and are now being more transparent. I also saw a quite reasonable upgrade price so went for a test of it and did the upgrade. It has been good and not all that different from Ice, but it doesn’t have the small bugs Ice had with the hidden menu bar displaying in odd locations under the menu bar.

Grammar Checking

Trying Harper for Grammar Checking

I stumbled onto and have tried Harper: The Private Grammar Checker, a medium capability grammar checker for English. It has an Obsidian plug-in, which I tried. I realized running a grammar checker on my rough notes isn’t a great match for that part of my workflow. It is easy to flip on an off in Obsidian and often notes turn into something more and that is where Harper may provide assistance. Harper is OpenSource and available on GitHub as well, which means I can run it through DeepWiki to get a decent overview of Harper - Automattic/harper - DeepWiki.

Often my writing and planning starts as rough notes in Obsidian. Since everything is in markdown and markdown is great example of Small Apps Loosely Joined where the file can be picked up in various different applications and use the apps to their best. I pick up the note and initial rough pass in iA Writer to flesh things out more. iA Writer has some light grammar checking and in prep sharing the writing out I use Marked 2, which also has some grammar checking. I’ve been looking for something with a little more assistance. I’m going to try Harper in some other of its options.

In grad school I and for long after I used Grammatik as part of WordPerfect and I really liked both and miss both. Grammarly has never fully been a fit for me and with its recent issues it still isn’t going to be part of my consideration. I’m not a fan of AI involved in my writing process.

I Have Webmentions Working

I have had a partial setup for Webmentions for a few years. I have had getting it properly sorted on my to do list for a few years. In the last week ArtLung ~ Joe Crawford was on a call and started asking questions about it and two or three questions and adding one element to my headers completed the cycle. I now have webmentions enabled, but I receive them in my RSS feeds and am not (likely may not) exposing them.

I Have Webmentions Out Going working with Omnibear

A month or two back I joined a call to look at updates and testing for Omnibear, mostly to learn more about it. But, in about an hour i was running Omnibear as an extension in Firefox and I’m authenticating through my Micro.blog account and site as the foundation for sending replies to others through Webmetions. I really like Omnibear as it shows if a site has enabled to receive a webmention and allows comments, bookmarks, and favorites. Having this in the sidebar (well sidebar in my Zen browser where I use it most) is really nice.

Getting the summary Complexity Lenses - An Overview Out

I finally got a “simple” overview post out and posted today to my Personal InfoCloud site - Complexity Lenses – An Overview – Personal InfoCloud.

This post isn’t really long. It is a short version of a few elevator pitches about my Complexity Lenses / Social Lenses. Today there are more than 90 Lenses (actually just shy of 100) and each have elements that are beneath them and many elements have components under them. My full outline in Outlining Software For Pros - OmniOutliner - The Omni Group has more than 1,500 nodes between the parents (lenses) and children combined.

Getting this boiled down to a few paragraphs is a bit of a chore, to get at a high level explanation why the Complexity Lenses are used to tease apart complex environments to see more clearly through the fog of complexity (and even help make a dent to find something to hold onto in times of chaos). Every attempt to tease this out and whittle it down turned into something I didn’t like. These also turned into something more dense than I wanted.

Breaking it down to sentences

Today I looked at the task item for the Overview on my list and then clicked to look at the current state of the draft (or more like multiple drafts) and decided to take a different route. I took the core sentences and put them into a box in an Obsidian Canvas and honed each sentence a bit. I had about 10 sentences and moved the boxes around to get an order. I put lines between the sentence boxes that would be a paragraph.

I then looked at what I had and started asking the editor’s questions: “What are the Lenses”; “What is the value to people using them”; and down the line was “What is the background”. I didn’t have the first answer to the first question at the top. This helped change my structure, which helped keep things relatively tight (for me). I then realized I had a gap in the middle around what are traits of people who use the Lenses and have success with them look like, so I pulled that in.

I had a set piece around “seeing through the fog of complexity” that often helps start the Complexity Lens portion of a talk, so I added that in. The final paragraph became a mixture of other summarizations I’ve used across the years and edited that down.

Wrapping it and Posting

With this in Obsidian Canvas I copied each sentence back into my draft and wiped the initial variations of drafts I had been trying to bludgeon for months. I did a quick read through and another light edit. Then I moved it into Personal InfoCloud and posted it.

I’m may tweak it a little in coming weeks. But, this post will likely be pinned to the top on the Personal InfoCloud, so I can regularly refer to it. This referring and pointing capability is something I haven’t been able to do and I’m happy to have it now.

Swan Song's AR Design and Creation

I have a serious soft spot for the movie Swan Song (which stars Mahershala Ali and Glenn Close that is set in the near future in the Pacific Northwest. I was a fan of its soft and deep thought invoking exploration of life and replication, but also its near future view of technology. While others have been excited by the Minority Report’s manic augmented reality (AR) interface, the design and use of near future AR as part of work and personal life was really good. To say I was fascinated, may be putting it lightly. Swan Song (2021 Benjamin Cleary film) - Wikipedia was released in 2021 and Apple had yet to have announce Apple Vision Pro with its visionOS and really good graphics and workable interface. The visual and interaction design of what the main character (Cameron) worked in was incredibly good. Once Apple Vision Pro was out it felt like Cameron’s interfaces and interactions were part of the future road map.

The Design Studio Behind the Digital Interfaces and Interaction Design

Being that Swan Song movie was part of Apple Studios - Wikipedia I was believing Apple had a part in the creation of the user interfaces and interaction design of the AR in the movie. But, poking around in Vimeo I stumbled on the design reel for Swan Song - Territory Studio, so I finally found the studio that created the AR and digital design elements in the film.

Territory Studio’s Design Overview

Territory Studio’s page for the high level design overview of what they created for Swan Song is really good. I had been feeling like Swan Song’s design and AR team were more closely tied to Apple as their AR interaction design is very much like Apple’s sensibilities, with a more muted palette from a calm future. A lot of things that are in Apple Vision Pro’s user interface and interaction design patterns seem to have been hinted at, if not felt like they were previewed in Swan Song. But, I’m not so sure of the connection or how specious it may be.

The Territory Studio page has highlights of their visual / virtual design language, personal UIs, home office AR, AR home gaming, speculative hardware, smart watch UIs, and virtual mimoji. I really would love an even deeper dive, as this is much of the virtual interactive world I’ve been waiting for, and been hoping to see come to life for years prior to the film.

There is a whole lot in Swan Song that I loved from the time it was released, which was a couple years or so ahead of Apple Vision Pro being released. The headset-less AR and interaction design is one piece. But, I also was deeply taken by the whole story, cinematography, and feelings the film evoked, but also the keep thinking and consideration it evoked.

Swan Song Demo Video from Territory Studio

The show real from Territory’s work on Swan Song is in Vimeo: Swan Song Breakdown Reel - Vimeo

My Writing Process with Obsidian

A few times lately my writing process has come up as it relies heavily on markdown for portability, longevity access, flexibility, and using the Shift Happened – Part 2: Small Apps Loosely Joined – Personal InfoCloud. The Small Apps Loosely Joined concept is something I use heavily for many things, but for writing the use of markdown I use the concept quite heavily.

Recently in a IndieWeb gathering, James who runs and writes James’ Coffee Blog shared his process and workflow for writing through to posting on his site, which was similar to my own process, but uses different tools along the way. He had something in his process he was looking to improve upon so I walked through my process.

My Process has Morphed Over the Years

My current writing process is an extension and evolution from my initial processes that trace back to college. But, it was in the late 1990s and early 2000s that my current process formed iterated upon. My early writing for blog posts and articles all start in markdown, which years back was well structured text and sometimes HTML for the structure.

My notes prior to formal blogging (started at the tail end of 2000) that I posted to my site were all hand coded HTML (or raw coding). If a note was going to turn into a blog post it quickly was marked up, and often as I was making the note or post.

Automate Early

One of the core elements I learned in the 1990s was to automate early for anything you can automate, use the tools you have at hand to help yourself be more productive. Most of my writing up through around 2010 was text and then quickly turned into HTML markup, as it is simple to do. But, the tough part is connecting related content, which is why I created my personal content management system (CMS) to run this vanderwal.net blog in 2000 and fully put it to use in 2001 (I used Blogger for a bit early on). Taking rote patterns and automating them was a great addition to help my process in 2000 to now.

In 2010 I shifted all of my note taking to markdown as moving across apps and devices made using other note making methods difficult to access and use. This shift to full markdown for notes, helped my writing move from notes to posts and articles much easier.

Markdown Workflow Process

Today and the last 5 years my notes start most often in Obsidian (and on mobile in Drafts, which is great for the good practice of get it out of your head and then sort out what to do with it). I have many notes flagged as “blogfodder” and track those through the writing process and moving them from a stub of an idea, to draft, not posted but ready, and posted (which includes a link to where it was posted). I’ll have another post about my new blogfodder process, which I’m really liking.

The writing starts as a note and gets fleshed out, if it is needed. If it is a short item I may stay in Obsidian and then grab and drag the markdown file in the Finder to the next step (I will get to this shortly).

Quite often I will leave Obsidian and from it click to open the Finder with the markdown file highlighted and then open that file in iA Writer - iA Writer, which is a nice focussed writing app for markdown, with additional capabilities. I often use the old journalism marker for needs attention (tk!) or “to correct” for things that need links, fact checks, or reference notes. Once I’m happy with the writing and structure in iA Writer (or Obsidian) I move to the next step.

Move to Prep for Posting

In years past I would take the markdown and quickly take the markdown structure and convert it to HTML markup by hand. Around 2013 or so I started scripting this transition, but the script was fussy. I’m not sure when, but it wasn’t long after this, I ran across Marked 2 - Marked 2. I think I started using Marked to convert markdown to PDFs and Word documents (for things that need to be sent out for formal article transformation in publications from Word). But, I realized Marked 2 had really good markdown to HTML conversion that was as good as my script, but not fussy. As I moved to Obsidian with properties in front matter and a footer with blogfodder tracking, it can remove all of that with ease, translate external links very nicely, and remove all backlink notation.

It is often in Marked 2 that I find markdown problems or the tk! marks. Marked 2 also includes some light grammar checking, which I appreciate and I’ll work through those suggestions. Then I flip to the HTML markup view and make edits, if needed, there.

Open My Blog Entry Form

Once I’m happy enough with the post I open my blog entry for for vanderwal.net or Personal InfoCloud and paste the HMTL into the form for the body of the post. On vanderwal.net I add in the title, location, type of post (these days everything is a weblog, but in the past it was more diverse), then select the related categories and submit it. Then I just to look at the post and review it again. If it needs an edit (up until July 5th) I would go into the database and make edits to the post there, but now have an edit process in my CMS (after 25 years, I figured it was about time). Once that is done, I go click to generate the RSS feed for the site, and send out alerts to services that share out links and summaries farther.

Wrap-up of the Workflow

This workflow is now done, except for seeing spelling errors or things not right and needing tweaks.

The process that starts in a markdown note, then progresses through to a more formal writing process and flow. I replaced a lot of manual steps that I didn’t think were difficult nor took a lot of time and automated the steps that do exactly what I had been doing with the same level of care, but saving time and reducing errors.

I don’t use AI in any of this writing process. I run across too much AI written content that is lifeless and doesn’t sound like the writer any longer. I’ve stopped reading many colleagues who used to have great ideas and a great personal voice, but are now just bland slop through the use of AI that tilts at, but doesn’t achieve mediocrity.

I have my own quirks and writing patterns, which I am fine with. I don’t write to impress, but to get honest ideas and understandings out. I blog and write to find connection with others of like or similar minds.