vanderwal.net

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.

My Automations Over the Ages and Today’s View

For a few decades I’ve converted regular manual tasks into automated tasks for many things. I use short code keyboard conversions with TextExpander (TextExpander), Alfred (Alfred), Keyboard Maestro (Keyboard Maestro), Hazel (Hazel by Noodlesoft), Apple Shortcuts, and a couple other small apps and services. But, I also have quite a few scripts in python and Ruby, but a few pure bash scripts. I have a handful of apps that use Claude Cowork (Claude Cowork | Claude by Anthropic) on a schedule and used where the data is not always standard, so it aggregates and structures the data where it often later gets processed by python.

I started building and running automation scripts in the 1990s to handle tedious tasks with multiple steps, or would likely be victims for typos, and which I was handling daily. A task that would take 3 or more minutes (often longer) and had structured stable data I could search made it viable to become a script and automated. I had them to filter email to folders, filter downloads to common folders / directories, and one to turn off audio for the evening which monitored Twitter every 30 minutes for my nightly signoff (“off to read and sleep - zzzz”) and it would mute audio. I’ve had a few for audio that would capture podcasts I was on for a local copy during recording that took just one button click to set Audio Hijack Pro properly and it just worked.

Moving to the Current Adaptive Flows

The last six months (or a little more) I’ve been building aggregators to capture what I’ve done the day before (and the week prior for a manual review). I’ve also automated my morning Obsidian (Obsidian) setup, so that my daily note (or Daily Dump for my notes, in my vocabulary) templates are created for the week ahead with a python script, rather than creating a new note and use a TextExpander snippet to build the structure each morning. But, doing this I realized that I could take my daily task list and the list of potential tasks I keep at the top of my Daily Dump and script the moving uncompleted items to that day’s Daily Dump from the day prior, but also quickly run a calendar scan for the day with Claude and the BusyCal MCP to have my known items at the top of the note written directly in the note. The completed items and checked off were left on the prior day’s Daily Dump in their sections.

In order to run the scheduled python scripts I need my laptop to be awake in the background (but it still the screen remain locked) so to run early morning tasks. I found PMSET as the key to handle the wake-up for the first run and have a python script handle the remaining wake-up processes for that day.

I now have a mix of Claude Cowork Skills (which if I sort out the data is stable enough I convert them to python for consistency, speed, and sustainability) and python scripts that pull my prior day’s files created and worked on list, my items in a feed of the prior day’s additions to Instapaper, Pinboard, and a list of new items in DevonThink as PDF (with links to the PDF as well as a working URL to the source of the item), a list of Readwise articles and video transcripts, and videos I liked and sent to my personal instance of Slack. These lists are in markdown and placed into the directory Obsidian watches over. Most of them a little later in the morning are transcluded into my Daily Dump note for the day where I read through them.

Morning Process

My morning process is to read through what was done the day before and edit them to add links to other resources in Obsidian and write notes. Often I have some entries that will turn into that day’s list of things to do or one of the “potentials” list. I will take items that need to be their own item note or be included into a concept note. This keeps the items fresh on my brain and connecting things to where I can get back to them more easily.

I write this today, as this morning I found my morning automation hadn’t fully run properly, because my Sunday evening script to create the week’s Daily Dump notes didn’t run as it was a cronjob and I was cooking with the laptop asleep so the job didn’t kick off. This morning I converted the cronjob to a launchd task instead and to run on Sunday during another automated wake open window.

Weekly Aggregation

Sunday’s I also run a weekly wrap-up, that pulls everything done for the week. I’m finding this is a bit too much information for a quick review and a manual assessment for the week where I aim to map out things for the upcoming week. It is a bit too much information overload. I don’t know what I’m going to do about it. Now that I have things automated and aggregated I need to rework my human side of things.

The Value of the Automation

The goal of my automations is to give me time back and remove the manual and grunt work so I can do the thinking work. I’ve done this with personal life and work life (and large systems and projects). The current round of automation and aggregation surfaced that I am doing more than I thought I was doing. Another goal is to give more time to do the human thinking and the projects and work needed. I do this so I can do the creative human work and the human thinking work (I find large errors in summarization in nearly all generative AI and creative work so I keep that at bey and use it for grunt work that I check). The scripted automations don’t need the hand holding and I have some occasional test run to check on them to see if they need attention and honing.

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.

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.

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.

Weeknote - 3 September 2022

You are asking, “Where are you? Are you okay? Are you still blogging?”

In TikTok parlance, “Great questions. Let me tell you.” First, this standard TikTok pattern is one I find really interesting. It fills in he politeness / nicety gap that has become common in the last decade or two, where people jump into answering questions. This nod to thanking the person asking encourages questions and puts people at ease who asked a question (speaking up is often not something most people are comfortable with). But, the pattern has been used so much and is just a common / required custom, it starts to come off as forced or canned, much like required legal disclaimers. None-the-less, it is a good practice.

Well this was a long “week” (parts of this were in an end of March weeknote that needed finishing, so now edited and updated). Things on the work front got incredibly busy and hectic. I’m going to treat this “weeknote” as a catch-up of things that have held my attention over the past year.

I’m hoping to get back to posting regular weeknotes and blogging. My other blog Personal Infocloud has been quite for a long time, but been waiting for about 2 years for SquareSpace to fix a defect that impacted styling and showing full posts. I have a lot of older content I’ve long used in presentations and workshops, that I’m working to turn into videos of some of the pieces of them that are clearer for understanding in video / animated form. I’m also back working on the 70 plus set of social / complexity lenses I’ve been working on for around 14 years with that label, but around 20 years all together going back to the Model of Attraction (still a foundation for a lot of thinking and framing).

With my son off to college, I may have a little more time to write and share. I’m also looking at a digital garden model (see the last section) and as of recently Massive Wiki for a collaborative or commons approach of moving the Lenses forward (well outward).

Note Taking

I have been deep into cataloging, reading, and using the heck out of Obsidian since trying it out in June of 2020 and going all in at the end of July 2020 and it is now second nature. But, this built on my 10 or so years of taking markdown notes in a directory, which I had 8 to 10 year of text notes in that same directory (which were bulk renamed to markdown). My approach and use of aliases and front matter have changed how I do things, but more on that in the Productivity section below. Many of my issues in a quick test of Roam proved to save me from that path and set of problems, Notion not being mine and not a standard file format so I can reuse the notes easily has stopped being used, I use DevonThink but its backlinking and attempt at other Obsidian functionality was clumsy in my source archive (and I just pull in my directory that Obsidian sits on top of so search is relevant with resources saved), and with Obsidian now having iOS capability I’m really using it a lot on the go. I have a seriously strong preference for having the notes be separate from a system that wrangles and provides organizing for and around them. Having used nvAlt for nearly 10 years when it broke badly and wouldn’t open, all of the 2,500 or so markdown (and text) notes that sat under the app in a directory (and linked with file metadata tags). Putting Obsidian in the same notes directory and crating that directory as a vault things just continued on, but now with far more functionality.

One irony is my use of Obsidian, and in particular my daily notes (Daily Dump), has me posting and sharing here less. It is ironic as I write in the Daily Dump as if I am writing to others, but the notes are just to myself (for now - this may change if I can sort out how to keep some of the reading, learning, observations, etc. separate from work or formative observations. The Daily Dump was partly intended to capture things that could be shared back out in a weeknote. Things like the Personal Operating System, which I found insanely insightful (read below), things from Sentiers and The Near Future Lab (particularly around Generalists, which I find quite similar to a bumping into a brightline for polymaths, but also bumps up against Jane McConnell’s book The Gig Mindset Advantage (more on these later as well).

With Obsidian having tags (used to aggregate related things, as a hook metaphor I’ve used for 18 years or more) and the backlinks to use as bridges to move to related materials and ideas much in the way any hypertext environment functions. I used VooDoo Pad on my Macs for roughly 15 years, but it not easily working across iPad and phone to easily read, edit, or add to the corpus had it shift out of my main workflow. I also use Drafts for quick input from mobile and sometimes iPad.

Obsidian has been amazing with its pace and quality of development over the last 2 years. The iPad version is pretty solid, but I’m usually in reach of my iPad so I’m not leaning on it all that much at the moment. This past week there were large changes to the insider build for 0.16 (it was reworking some underpinnings to improve many of community built plug-ins, themes, and templates), but it was the first time the updates broke things in my workflow rather badly. Normally updates cause no problems, but only offer benefits and improvements, with occasional bumps that are resolved in 5 to 10 minutes. But, with the bump this week, I still love it for thinking through writing and note capturing and interlinking. There isn’t anything out there that is close to it.

Read

I have been reading a lot, with a good portion coming through me trusty RSS feed reader, NetNewswire, which echoes my vanderwal.net links page.

Newsletters

While I am not a huge fan of newletters (mostly the part that they arrive in email and not RSS, but the ones that also have RSS feeds are the ones I have been sticking to). Many of these arrive on Sunday, but I really wish it were Friday night or early Saturday morning so I have Saturday and Sunday mornings to get through them and follow the links and devour what is there, but Sunday mornings many arrive and I spend the week going through them.

The one that I am a huge fan of from a general purpose is Patrick Tanguay’s own newsletter Sentiers, which I find to be a real gem. I lost track of Patrick for a while after his Alpine review stopped publishing. I would love to see his Sentiers grow to be a bit more as I find it to be such a good offering. I have been reading it regularly for about a year or a bit more and Patrick has been popping up on podcasts I follow (Near Future Lab (now mostly moved to a Discord for and The Informed Life - more on these later).

Jorge Arango’s newsletter, Informa(c)tion, is an information and organization focussed gem that arrives every other Sunday. There are always good pieces and the links are gems.

Others I really enjoy and tend to link to things that open more browser tabs are: The Marganilian by Maria Popova; Curtis McHale’s PKM newsletter; and Monocle Weekend Edition newsletter (there are many times of late were the newsletter is a bit off target, but the balance for me mostly entertainment).

Books

The Gig Mindset Advantage has been a gem, mostly as it is very familiar as it is pretty much my natural (unintended) MO (modus operendi).

The Map of Knowledge, by Violet Moller has become one of my favorite books. It quickly turned into a slow meditative read as it broke some of my prior understanding of the world of knowledge and creation of advanced math, sciences, and philosophy. This refactoring of my understanding was around the realization that most of the “great books” and works that are the foundations are just very tiny slivers of knowledge that made it through an insanely fragile process of keeping paper copies. A book would need to be hand-written to create a copy and that copy on paper would only last 50 to 80 years before it would heavily decay. I knew well that most of what Western Europe used as fodder in the Renaissance for advancement were works from ancient Greece that had been kept alive through the great libraries and education systems in Persia, Near East, Middle East, Arabian regions, North Africa, and Moorish efforts in Spain. The realization that were may not be looking at the best thinking from the “classics”, but just those that made it through time.

While I had a decent understanding of the vast contributions advancing math, sciences, medicine, and philosophy that are the foundations of much of western thinking, I didn’t know much of the who, when, and where. The Map of Knowledge goes into these areas with a very good level of understanding. The book also does a great job laying out the cycle of life for advanced learning and libraries in each of the regions and progressions through time. One of the common cycles that causes the downfall in many regions was gap in the civilization between those with advanced knowledge and learning and those in power, as well as regular poeple. That chasm between the advanced and those not caused a lot of friction, most often leading to the destruction of libraries and institutions. Many of the civilizations never returned to anything close to the advancements. But, the libraries and learning institutions dispersed and found new benefactors and locations to continue moving forward.

Violet Moller has certain given me a good foundation to learn more.

Gillian Tett’s Anthro-Vision was a book, well a chapter in that book, I’ve been waiting for for many years. The chapter on “Financial Crisis” where Tett had been researching financial markets using her background as an anthropologist for a new role at The Financial Times. Tett followed the paths of understanding in the way a good ethnographer / anthropologist does looking to understand the quiet, and seemingly foundational, areas that seem to be out of focus. This area was that of credit swaps in financial loan markets, which were what caused the 2007 housing market collapse and in 2008 at the massive meltdown of the financial markets. The model for building understanding is one that should be common, but sadly isn’t. The remainder of the book is quite good as well.

Productivity

The biggest thing around productivity is my use of Obsidian continues, as mentioned above. In a couple chats recently I have found other have brought up the backlinking / crosslinking as the most valuable feature. For those of us who have been using Macs for a while we find it reminiscent of not only wikis and their power, but in particular VooDoo Pad, which was light weight and everything was easily interlinked and backlinked and search was incredibly good. VooDoo Pad ran locally on your Mac (eventually it also could sync and run on iOS devices, but it needed a special application to run it). The genius bit about Obsidian is it is just markdown notes with an app that acts as an over watcher to connect and index things, but leaves the markdown notes fully usable by any other app or service that can use Markdown.

Having been taking notes in one directory (and its sub-directories) for some 20 years the ability to always get to my notes and use them is highly valuable. I have run through numerous other apps (particularly cloud based) that just die or go away as they are no longer popular or the owners have the wonderfully tragic combination of being ignorant and arrogant. I can pick-up any of my notes in markdown that have backlinks and they also function in Drafts or other programs. The principle of Small Apps Loosely Joined still has resonance and deep value.

Along with Obsidian and the backlinked notes, I have also been keeping a keen eye on Digital Gardening (Maggie Appleton explains this really well and had links to others also diving deeply). At some point I also stumbled upon Software for your second brain - The Stack Overflow Podcast with Alexander Obenauer talking about his quest for creation of a “personal operating system”, which he shares out in his Lab Notes. Much of Alexander’s quest became refocussed on Obsidian as it was doing a lot of what he needed and was trying to frame out so to build it. He has crated extensions to Obsidian to close some of his perceived gaps, but the underlying principle is data portability and a concept incredibly close to the Small Apps Loosely Joined.

Weeknote - 17 January 2021

Busy, but not overly productive week. I’ve been battling getting a replacement laptop actually functioning, so battling and not being productive. That scenario drives me absolutely up the wall. Going through the battles reminds me of how fairly seamlessly Apple does this.

Evenings have been trying to run errands, but finding stores closing quite early due to Covid and complications around the attack on the Capitol and Inauguration. This has left me rather tired, but also not sleeping well.

Insights from

I just read about Foxsy shutting from their CEO’s blog post about the company and product and his and their lessons learned, Moved on from my journey Foxsy. I was introduced to them from an investor as they were hitting an inflection point and needed help smoothing out some of the interactions, user flow model, and some language areas. The product was rather ingenious as it was a cross social platform chat service using AI to match people. Jin was in San Francisco and the rest of the team at that point and time was in Japan. It was great to read they kept going as I shifted to another project.

The glimpse inside a San Francisco start-up is rather typical from the doing everything to scrape by to keep the product going and get to the next level. I heard some of these stories when I was helping them and hearing it from Japanese guys was interesting as the story wasn’t that different from American guys, the French teams I know, nor the mixed teams from Eastern Europe and the Middle East. The small companies I knew / know in Europe, Latin America, and Singapore were a bit different, but the dedication and passion isn’t.

While I hate to see Foxsy shut, I know whatever each of these people do will be fantastic. Only a very small percentage of start-ups make it through to launch, through a few years or use, and then making money to be self-sustaining, and getting the investors some profit. Here’s to whatever is next Foxsy crew!

Read

Every January I dig out the Saint Mary’s Jan Term Catalog and look through was is / was offered. When I was at St. Mary’s Jan Term was something I deeply enjoyed. St. Mary’s ran on a 4–1–4 schedule with four courses in a fall semester, one course in January, and four in spring semester. January classes typically met for 3 or 4 hours Monday through Thursday for an intensive course on a tight subject. There are usually also travel courses for Jan Term, like religious architecture in Ireland or Italy, or sailing course in the Caribbean. My first year I had a Sports Psychology course and second year was on charisma and public leaders (this was amazing). My last year I didn’t exactly get Jan Term as I was doing a full term in Oxford at the Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Centre.

Every year I find new intriguing courses with good reading lists and I add the reading list and often start digging into a subject of a few each year. I’ve long wondered what a full school year of one month one class would look like. The Oxbridge tutorial system is somewhat similar over two months with intensive tutorials used to fill in gaps through guided self-learning, with that guidance being deep and good.

–

I stumbled on this article from a couple people, ‘Rent-a-person who does nothing’ in Tokyo receives endless requests, gratitude. This concept is an utter gem! The guy in Japan is selling his service of not doing anything, other than “just being there” for a round $96 a task. People using him to walk them to a court house as quiet support. Listening to people talk through something that they don’t want others to they know to hear or to judge them on. The service of “doing nothing” is somewhat akin to renting someone in a mature relationship that is years into that calm quiet support that gives the deep relief of not being alone and some togetherness.

Watched

Modern Doctor Who is on HBO Max. My two favorite Doctors are David Tennent and Matt Smith. There were a lot of the Tennent episodes I missed and being able to fill in the gaps is wonderful. But, also being able to watch favorite Matt Smith episodes again is something I’m looking for.

Listened

I tend to listen to a lot of music that doesn’t have lyrics or English lyrics. I don’t often listen to lyrics when they are in English, even though I will sing along or sing the song with out music. But, every now and then the lyrics stand out as they are creative. Twice this week I hit this.

One instance was going back something I used to listen to a lot and listened to driving across country with my dad, it was A.J. Croce’s self titled album. The music and production quality are really good, but the lyrics also stand out as they are witty and creative.

The other was Olivia Rodrigo’s Driver License, which was in my short list of recommended new music for the week and I had it playing in the background and the chorus of “’Cause you said forever, now I drive alone past your street” that really stuck out and I scrubbed back and relisten. That was insanely well crafted lyrically as well as musically.

Food

El Charro Mexican Restaurant in Lafayette, California Closed for Good, which may be one of the odd Covid maladies I’ve run across that hurt, beside the people it has taken from us. This was my first taco. It was also the accidental spark that got my parents and I obsessed with guacamole. When I was born this wasn’t all that far from where we lived and it was a favorite of my parents. I don’t remember going here as we moved when I was about 18 months old or so. But, we always stopped here when in the Bay Area.

I went to undergrad at St. Mary’s College of California in Moraga, which is sort of next door via back roads through the hills. When my parent would come and visit we would often goo to El Carro for lunch or dinner. One of the things my parents loved was the small dish of guacamole that came with tortilla chips, as well as salsa. From the time I was a baby my parents tried to replicate this intensely flavored guacamole. We learned many different ways of making guacamole and had a few favorites that are still really good. But, it wasn’t anything like El Charro’s.

So one day we asked about the guacamole, with my parents explaining they had tried to replicate it for 20 some years when we moved away. There was a bit of confusion, but the waitress understood and went in the back to ask. He head cook came out smiling. He explained it wasn’t guacamole, but blue cheese, a little garlic, and butter all mashed together until the blue of the cheese was a green-ish spread / dip. I’ve never seen this anywhere else. The cook had said the owner knew it from Mexico and was a special treat in a small town there. Thanks to the confusion I’ve learned many different guacamole recipes, probably more than 50, but also how to riff with the basics.

Productivity

I’ve been trying to put something in a daily dump note. The book notes and idea notes are getting to be a decent habit and being able to easily search and build on an understanding is really nice to have. Obsidian has been proving to be an insanely great augmentation layer.

Talking with a couple people using Roam this week about Obsidian has been interesting as both lost network access and didn’t have access to their notes. This also got them thinking about how to exit Roam, and the lack of API and a common framework they are feeling really stuck. There is now an option to scrape Roam to pull the content into markdown files that can work with Obsidian, and it seems it will also work with block replication. Roam is slick and what the people who love slick, but don’t consider function and the basic use cases for every platform: Do I have ownership of everything I put in?; Do I have constant access?; How do I exit?

I’m thinking through these as I have been looking at Craft, an Apple OS focussed note system that is quite similar to Notion. I somewhat like Notion and its capabilities, but getting to things, feeding them, and searching when working on things (I have to go to it and perform search and moving content in and out for writing and other workflows has a lot of friction. One solution around it is an API, which isn’t fully there. Craft being more native and sync with iCloud or other would enable what is in it being found in a search. Notion for personal use is now free and Craft is pay, but only about $4 a month.

Craft wouldn’t replace anything in Obsidian, but could help with some organization systems. I use Notion most for pushing podcast and YouTube links into them and then annotate them for refinding and reusing.

Weeknote - 10 January 2021

The first week back at work after a 10 day break was going well, other than a continual battle with my work computer that had a battery bulge that started six months ago and slowly turned into throttling, slow cursor and slow recognition of keystrokes at times, and regular crashes. The long replacement / fix cycle is pure Covid impact. After on Friday 5pm my refresh the laptop arrived, it felt like I got half my brain back spending time getting it setup (that process is still underway).

But, the insurrection actions to take over the U.S. Capitol took the focus of the week. Work Thursday and Friday was a welcome distraction, but lack of sleep and a computer doing its best to die made them not overly productive. I never thought I would see the U.S. foundations attacked in such a brutal way. Large mobs fed by outright lies trying to keep Congress from doing what the Constitution requires them to do is years and decades in the making. Chants to execute the Vice President because he said he couldn’t do what there is no legal path for him to do is beyond excuse. Attacking the the monuments to the democracy, but also attacking the Constitution and what it has laid out to protect the U.S. democracy is pure insurrection. This is a true wicked problem that is a tightly wound gordian knot of complexity. Having leader still sitting in office that supported the insurrection and the lies that created its actions is beyond me. They are sitting in seats and elected bodies they don’t believe in and want to destroy and want to run a country with a Constitution they want to destroy.

Read

Friends shared the Rijksmuseum’s now offering high resolution images of their collection, which are stunning.

I restumbled upon SPACE10, which I used to follow but the RSS feed seem to have broken, but some of their long pieces (which is many of them) are not structured well for a long read and they have the scroll bar in the browser turned off to know roughly how far along you are in a long piece, and there are no anchors in the long pieces to link to sections of relevance. It is a really not well conceived site for people thinking about architecture and a structured world.

That said, their piece on The Digital in Architecture: Then, Now and in the Future is rather good, it reminds me of a collection of presentations on information architecture from some of the top information architects from around 2003 to 2015 or so. The piece also has a good bibliography, but nothing is linked (I’m really not sure they understand what they are doing with the web, but they content is interesting and that is likely why I pushed it off my radar in the past).

Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for fast Flow by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais finally arrived. This looks much better than what I had thought it was and may dig into it over the weekend. I picked it up to gut around the topic of teams and optimizing them, particularly around adaptive teams. I a lot of experience with building and running teams and team ecosystems in large organization and bringing helping them be modern and breaking out of the command and control as well as chain of command model non-digital companies lean on (which destroy capabilities and efficiencies and mostly died out in the early 2000s except for the dinosaur companies - for more than 20 years I’ve flipped that models and been able to vastly improve every important metric). I haven’t found good books on teams that echo not only the experiences I’ve had and have consulted others on, but ones I see as prevalent in most of the high performing companies that work the same way. I know Team Topologies is more focussed on DevOps / developer / engineering models, but some underlying foundations for improving my framing of things is what I’m looking to get out of it. There are some things I don’t fully agree with and I regularly see as problematic that are listed in headings, but I don’t know their take. What I do know is a lot of the reference materials they point to are ones I’ve long used and have in my foundations as they echo experiences and things I’ve seen in practice that are really good (I love well documented books, particularly ones that use solid references that hold up with time).

Also arrived is a used version of Paul Madonna’s Everything is its own reward, which is a book of his monochrome watercolor and sketches of San Francisco. It is wonderful and takes me back to a San Francisco I deeply miss and loved. Even though it was used, but still had the poster piece tucked into its back cover sleeve. This poster is a wonderful edition.

Watched

News…

Listened

New to me band, Her, fit the mood early in the week and I’ve added them to easy access in some playlists.

Exponent - Episode 191: Facebook, Twitter, and Trump was a good conversation that was a bit out of sync, but good from a thinking and considering the situation piece.

Postlight Podcast - WordPress and Beyond: With Matt Mullenweg was really good, as expected. Some of the side discussion that started Paul Ford thinking, really have me intrigued. I’m needing to go back and track these down.

I had A.J. Croce’s A.J. Croce album on and had forgotten how good it really is. It is so well recorded and produced as on decent headphones or sound system it sounds like you are in the room with them. This was the in the soundtrack of the cross country drive with my dad in 1993. But, even with those wonderful memories I’ve always loved this album as there is so much good music in it and the lyrics are really good with nice turns of phrase.

Productivity

I’ve gone back to a practice of daily notes (the daily dump) in Obsidian / markdown that helps keep track of thoughts. It is similar to the sections I have for the weeknote template, but include: Thoughts, read, talked to, health, watched, listened to, worked on (personal items - I haven’t kept a daily work journal in a long while, but have daily meeting notes I keep in my work environment), learned, ate, bought, added to wishlist. These last two are to keep track of why.

One of the things I’m trying to sort through in my notes, research, and writing process workflow that I’m doing between just the daily notes and weeknotes is a microcosm of my regular workflows for writing (which I’m getting back to). My notes sit in directories in markdown files that are now in Dropbox for mobile device access and Obsidian sits on top of them linking things together and all is searchable in spotlight and DevonThink Indexes it. My writing is now in iA Writer, which works best with iCloud directories, which can be searched by Spotlight, but is outside Obsidian and outside DevonThink.

I sometimes start writing in iA Writer, but they may be: Just a stub, more fleshed out but still a draft, mostly finished but not posted / published, or posted / published. I have many pieces from mid-summer around the Black Lives Matter protests after George Floyd was murdered, which really moved me, but they weren’t finished or posted. Weeknotes ran into multi-week notes, then into just idle and start from scratch. There are things I know I have written I want to point to, but they aren’t shared out (this is a common issue). I finally created a quick template for marking the state at the bottom of a piece in progress. But, this isn’t helping sort through my central repository in Obsidian where searching across that collection and interlinking to pull things closer.

I’ve swapped through a bunch of writing apps and at the moment I have no interest in moving off iA Writer as I really like it. There are some things I need to investigate for some writing coming (footnotes, tables, and possibly integration with Grammarly as I need to get back into good writing patterns and practices). In the past my long or focussed writing was in Scrivener, which I still love, but its treatment of markdown as second class citizen, which made it difficult to have a smooth workflow with for publishing to the web. I used Ulysses for a short while, but its own structures and not freely available markdown files made it not work well at all in my workflows. There is a lot I really like with Ulysses and Scrivener with notes and note management, but easy working across devices isn’t as smooth as iA Writer nor as smooth as the workflow that is easy with freely available markdown files.

Weeknote - 3 January 2021

Happy 309th day of March in the Year of Covid and welcome to the first weeknote of the year here. Having a work break since Christmas Eve has been fantastic. But, it took me about seven days to get into the swing of the break and put behind things that weren’t part of the break. This being the turn of the year many of the news and media outlets, as well as many of my favorite blogs still running were posting their year end wrap-ups and I really enjoy reading those, particularly for books, things to watch, music, and ideas to explore.

This week I stumbled onto a new podcast that is a gem for me, but also in digging through ideas, links, and related exploration to the podcast I stumbled upon one of my own posts from 2006 about technisocial architect, which still hits at an awful lot of my approach and where I’m really happy focussing (that across multiple domains with depth in beyond generalist depth, but aiming toward a polymath depth). The labelling of people with multiple depths and expertise and to this day still bugs me as old style business that haven’t modernized think in one dimensional people and most often have no understanding how to use people with serious depth (they mostly just leave to go to places that know what to do with then and respect them) and really are lost with people with multiple deep dimensions. I’ve been back to pulling others like this together as really missing them and the conversations the freely spin across different domains and open opportunities to explore adjacent ideas.

A wifi hub going south (the end of my Apple AirPorts) meant switching to something different and was concerned with lack of ease of use, but was pleasantly surprised. Having WiFi 6 seems to have improve the odd drops we’ve been having and able to set priority for devices. The odd blind spots for wifi now seem to be gone as well.

Read

I’ve been reading across a bunch of new additions as well as going back through some books and gutting them for some idea spelunking related to the Near Future Lab podcast and newsletters (see below). The Near Future Lab newsletter has been a good find and the breadth of things it is covering with some depth has been triggering some pulling together quite a few things I’ve put in notes and tucked away over the last 15 to 20 years. Relatedly, I’ve had David Epstein’s Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World out and gutting it, particularly around polymath, which Epstein has a good framing of, which I find far more helpful than the generalists, which is more of a deep generalist.

Book sales and gift cards have been adding to the stacks near the sofa during break, as well as targeted reading and gutting on subjects to flesh out some things in my notes (Obsidian has been great for showing gaps as I pulled in a couple of the blogfodder tagged notes and blogfodder lists).

One fiction book I picked and read the first chapter has me deeply enthralled is Richard Powers’ The Overstory: A Novel and was amazed with the beauty of it. It was like each word was a gem and each sentence a finely crafted bracelet or necklace. After two or three pages I was wondering if this would keep it up for the chapter, and it pretty much did. It has been a long while since I’ve read something this well crafted with language. I’ve been back reading poetry a little bit, but long for narrative this well crafted is a lot of work and I’m really impressed. But, with Overstory I’m also drawn by the story.

The end of this week I’ve been trying to catch-up with past [Near Future Lab Newsletters] as well as Jorge Arango’s writing and links (from the past few weeks). So much good fodder in these.

The “best of…” books I picked up and started reading a little bit, have not only been a source of good works in them, but I noticed the “other notable…” lists in the back of the books, which have been really good. These additional works mentioned have not only provided good pieces of interest to track down, but publications and sites that I’m now adding to my follow list. The last two or three years I’ve seen a lot of regular sources stop publishing and / or shut, which is problematic. There is a lot of fracturing and splintering of media recently. Most media is only as good as their individual contributors (which is the same as many things including analysts, contracting, consulting, etc.) and the really good individuals now have the capability to run things themselves or group with other strong individuals to build a good strong focused resource.

Watched

Early in the week I found myself watching downhill skiing, which I used to love watching as a kid. Not having Olympics this year has me wanting more skiing to watch and other winter sports (yes, I know it is a Summer Olympics year put on hold, but still).

Listened

One of my favorite sources for inspiration over the last 10+ years has been the Near Future Lab and this week they started a podcast (it is found linked in their 4th edition of their new newsletter Design Fiction newsletter - Design Fiction and the Optimistic Contrarian)and the first one is a pure gem for me. It is a discussion between Julian Bleeker, Fabien Girardin, and Nicholas Nova of the Near Future Lab. The focus is on what Giradin calls ambidexterity, or the switching of tasks and focus between domains and practice area. Julian maps that to what has been his favorite book of 2020, David Epstein’s Range, which is about the success of the generalist. This isn’t quiet your thin thinking generalists, but deeply curious multi-disciplinary generalist that go deep in across many domains and can deeply think (scientifically and exploratorily) as well as do. It is polymath as deep thinker and doer. The type of person who keep pursuing things to where there is boredom or able to hand it off to others. These folks are the ones who can easily have discussions with experts and leave the experts with new thinking and understandings beyond what they new prior.

Realizing Tidal added a ton of new music that is MQA wrapped from their Warner Music Group, I’be been rebuilding some play lists with the “master” version and listening as well. Along these lines I’m finding something is going on in Apple Music as a lot of their catalog is sounding much better running through a DAC on decent headphones (also finding Apple Music stopped scrobbling to Last.fm in December and I can’t get it functioning again, but Tidal still works).

Play

I was thinking I would play and finish Ghosts of Tsushima over break, but a discount on 2K21 made that the gaming focus. I’m a bit surprised with 2k21 as it isn’t as painful to play as it normally is with their “create a character” mode, but the GM mode is still as odd as it was last version. The storyline in the crate a character mode really wasn’t painful and felt more playable than usual and no annoying out of left field diversion thrown in.

Productivity

Obsidian has been getting a workout this week. I still need to sort out linking blocks, but I spent much of my time dumping in notes and connecting things. I need to sort out my workflow for writing, which is currently mostly done in iA Writer and that saves best for remote use in iCloud and my notes for Obsidian are in Dropbox. I need to work out a workflow for how to better handle this. One of the things I did this week was add a snippet for TextExpander for my existing blogfodder notes that were tagged in NValt. The snippet has the state for blogfodder to note if it is a stub, draft, done and not posted, and posted with a link to where it is posted. That would work to copy completed and posted pieces I’ve worked on in iA Writer, but need to sort out how to make that smooth.

20 Years of Blogging and Wrapping Up the Year 2020

Happy New Year (the 307th day of March in the Year of Covid). As of December 31, 2020 this blog is 20 years old. It started sort of on a whim in Blogger. I find a lot of things that stick start on a whim around here, either as a quick experiment (there are a lot always running) or just fed-up to the point of just do something. Curiosity strikes hard, but it does for most of the people who I spend time with and who do well around tech and digital systems.

There are now 2,103 blog posts. All but a handful are still around. The first one is gone, as it was a “Hello Squirrel!” post (20 years ago I was already insanely tired of hello world and switched some where in 1999 or 2000 and it stuck. I’ve thought about running stats to look at years of activity (in 2004 or 2005 I started Personal InfoCloud as my more work focussed blog and vanderwal.net stayed as my random thoughts and rarely edited brain dump. The top 5 used categories for this blog since its start are Personal, Information Architecture, Web, User-Centered Design, and Apple / Mac. The whole list can be found at vanderwal Off the Top Categories List - By Use. I really need to get a sparkline placed next to each as that would be really helpful to see what is popular when and something I’ve wanted to do for 15 or so years, but never got around to.

I haven’t really kept track of analytics. I would look at analytics on a weekly or monthly basis, but I really haven’t done that in a long while. I do know some of the folksonomy posts drew a lot of attention (the main defining folksonomy post was moved to a static HTML page at the strong urging of academics who needed that for citation purposes. I know a few posts drew a lot of attention inside some companies which were posted here and cross-posted at Personal InfoCloud.

I’ve used blogging to think out loud so to make sense of things, but also for refinding for myself, but also to connect with others who have insights or similar interests.

Wrapping Up 2020

This also is sort of Best of 2020, or things that I spent enjoyable time on or changed me in some good way. I don’t think I’ve ever done a year end wrap as I always feel I’m in the middle of things and a wrap isn’t really fitting when in the midst of things.

Podcasts

Postlight / Track Changes podcast over the last two or three years has become the conversation I’m missing. It is the conversations I miss having and sort of work I’ve been missing at times (I’ve had good stretches of moving things forward to help organization avoid the missing manhole covers or recover through helping understand need, gaps, and pain points to create vastly improved paths forward. Paul and Rich, as well as when Gina gets to play along have been great moments of agreement and a handful of, “ooh, that is good!” as well.

Dear Hank and John from brothers (vlog brothers) Hank Green and John Green, was one of the Year of Covid’s great find as refinding the vlog brothers YouTube channel and their books was comforting and grounding during this odd and rough year. In 2007 time frame with Hank and John were starting out I saw them as Ze Frank copycats, which admittedly they were, and I was a big fan of Ze (particularly after meeting him and having some great winding down rabbits holes of philosophy around content, community, and connection). I was entertained with the vlog brothers 2007 to around 2009, but didn’t overly seek them out and they fell off my radar. This year during the start of lock down they came back into to focus and stayed.

99% Invisible is a weekly breath of fresh air that digs into just one more subject from beautiful Downtown Oakland California. I am continually learning from it and go digging for more information after their podcast.

Matt Mullenweg’s Distributed isn’t quite regular, but I make room for it. Matt has had some really insightful podcasts that also have me digging for more and really am happy to see all that Matt has built so far. It is great that Matt is largely open with his sharing insights and information about they do things at Automattic, but also the guests from outside are really good.

Dave Chang Podcast seems like has a ton of content coming out and I can’t keep up. My favorites are when he is talking with other chefs and restaurant owners. The podcast was really good to listen to during the pandmic as Dave and guests dug deep into the challenges and economics around the effects of the shutdowns.

No Such Thing as a Fish is often my weekend morning listen. Last winter I caught their live DC show, which was great to see after many years. A show where you can get informed and laugh like crazy is always a win in my book.

Newsletters

Newsletters are a love / hate thing for me. The hate mostly is that they are in mail apps where doing useful things with content in them in my information capture for refinding, connecting with other similar things, giving attribution, and coalescing into something new or an anchor point for exploration is tough when in any mail app or service. But, I love a lot of the content. The best newsletters have HTML pages that are easy to search, find things, and interconnect ideas in. The Tiny Newsletter newsletters do this fairly well, Substack does this quite well (and can be RSS feeds), some custom solutions (like Stratechery) do this insanely well, while Mailchimp is miserable with this in so many ways (sadly none of my favorite sources is in Mailchimp, which is ironic and also frustrating).

The perennial favorite for years is Stratechery and keeping up with Ben Thompson’s take and really well thought through explanations are one of the few things I intentionally track down and at least skim (some of the subjects I know really well and look to see where Ben has a different take or a better framing for understanding).

This year perennial favorite New York Times columnist David Leonhardtt (whom I in only recently in the past year or two realized I know and see regularly) took over the daily news summary, New York Times Morning newsletter and it has become what I read as I’m getting up. The insights and framing are really good. But, also pulling things into focus in the NT Times that I may have missed is an invaluable resource with an incredibly smart take no it all.

One added midway this year is the daily MIT Technology Review’s own MIT TR Download that is edited by Charlotte Jee. The intro section and daily focussed editorial is always good, but equally as good are the daily links as I always find something that was well off my radar that I feel should be drawn closer.

My guilty pleasure that I read each morning on my coffee walk (I walk to get coffee every morning as working remotely I may not make it out the front door that day) is the Monocle Minute and Weekend Edition newsletter. Which during the week is quick, informative, breezy in a familiar tone, that cover international business, politics, global focus, travel, and more. I’ve long had a soft spot for Monocle since the started. The Weekend Edition newsletters are longer and have a highlight of someone, which I deeply enjoy, and focus on food, travel, media, the good things in life. The recipes on Sunday are also something I look out for.

The non-regular Craig Mod newsletters, Ridgeline, Explorer, and general newsletter are a good dose of calm and insight.

One of my favorite voices on systems, design, and information architecture is Jorge Arango and his biweekly Jorge Arango Newsletter is a gem of great links. I’m always finding smart and well considered content from this newsletter.

Music

I changed up my listening setup for headphones a bit swapping some things around and now enjoying things quite a bit.

I’ve been writing a bit about music in my weeknotes, but Lianne I don’t think has made the write-ups as I seem to be listening to her music during work wind down as it draws my attention and focus.

• Snarky Puppy
• Lianne La Havas
• Tingvall Trio
• Construction
• Yosi Horikawa

Books

2020 was a year of picking up books, but given the state of things reading wasn’t fully functional.

There are two books, which I am still working through, or more akin to meditating through that really struck me in 2020.

The first is Violet Moller’s The Map of Knowledge about a stretch of about 1,000 years and how classical books and knowledge were lost and found. She focusses on nine different periods. The background for how books were copied to stay alive (with far more frequency than I imagined), how the big libraries of the world were kept, whom they served, and how they went away and their collections lost or destroyed. This book deeply challenged a lot of underlying beliefs and, looking back, silly assumptions about keeping knowledge and the vast knowledge we have (which is only a tiny slice of what has gone before us). Reading this book, sometimes just a few pages at a time, causes long walks and deep consideration. It has been a while since I have reworked a lot of foundations for beliefs and understandings so profoundly. A lot of this book also reminds me of my time at the Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies that also challenged me and pushed me in similar ways, but that was more of setting foundations and extending them than reworking them.

The other book, which I’m still working through is Eddie S. Glaude, Jr.’s Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and its Urgent Lessons for Our Own that I had been looking forward to it since I heard about it late in 2019. As we hit summer in 2020 and the murder of George Floyd sparked a deep reawakening of the realities of race issues in the United States it brought back memories of the 1980s and 1990s and thinking and working through similar ideas. That deep caring and belief that things were better and had improved were shattered as reality reared its head. I had stumbled onto James Baldwin after returning from living in England and France for the last semester of undergrad and a little bit more. I returned to the U.S. with really bad reverse culture shock and one of those challenging understandings I had was around race and very little in the U.S. felt right nor on inline with a united anything. This bothered me deeply for a lot of reasons, but part was being threatened just by hanging out with good friends who were running errands and they were verbally abused (and I feared worse was coming) by just walking in a store and I was a target of the same because I was with him. There were many times like this. After living in England and France this was clear it was mostly an American thing, particularly in educated circles where skin color wasn’t the first consideration it was who you are and what you believe and do. Baldwin echoed these vibrations of reality that trembled through me, it made me feel not alone in this, but he also gave urgings to stand up and be a different way. Over the years this faded, until the torch march on Charlottesville, Virginia and then the long series of murders at the hands of people who should be protecting not wrongly dishing out their perverted mis-understanding of justice. Begin Again has had me thinking again, believing again, and acting again, but taking it in small meditative steps and also reworking my foundation.

William Gibson’s Agency was a good romp and included a handful of places I know quite well, which really help me see it. I hadn’t finished reading Peripheral, but have it on the list to do.

John Green’s Paper Towns was a wonderful read and his view on the world and use of language is one I find comforting, insightful, and delightful. I have The Fault in Our Stars queued up. I also picked up his brother Hank Green’s An Absolutely Remarkable Thing and made it about a third to half way through and it was reminding me a lot of 2005 to 2010 or so and things I hadn’t fully unpacked, so set it aside for a bit. I really enjoyed the characters and storyline, but I needed something that was a little more calm for me.

Lawrence Levy’s To Pixar and Beyond which was an interesting take on one person’s interactions with Steve Jobs and Pixar, which I found incredibly insightful and enjoyable. I’ve read a lot of books on Steve Jobs, Apple, and Pixar over the last 20 to 25 years and this added new insights.

James and Deborah Fallows’ Our Towns: A 100,000-Mile Journey into the Heart of America has been a really good read to help understand and get insights into where America is today with what are the thinking and beliefs.

The Monocle Book of Japan is really enjoyable as it is beautifully make. It is part picture book with the great photography that is in Monocle(https://monocle.com) as well as brief well written insights into many different facets of Japan and life in Japan.

Games

Ghost of Tsushima is one of the best games I’ve run across in a long time. It is utterly beautiful, the transitions are quick, and the game play (while quite bloody) is fun and not over taxing nor complicated. I’ve really enjoyed prior Sucker Punch Production’s games, I the Infamous series has been a real favorite (although hearing a slow moving empty garbage truck with rumbling diesel engine still puts me on edge as it sounds like the Dustmen from the first Infamous game). The storyline in Ghosts is really good as well and has kept me moving through the game after taking a break. I love the open map as well, which sizable and insanely beautiful.

MLB the Show is continually one of my favorite sport sim games as the game play is quite good, the visuals are amazing, and the team management and different ways to play through a season are really enjoyable. It gets so many things right that most other sport simulations don’t. I quite like sport sims as they have a fixed time, which makes it easy to stop or at least consider how long you have been playing and then get back to other things.

Fifa 20 and 21 continued to be really fun and enjoyable. The graphics and game play improves quite a bit each iterations and this last entry was no different. Much like the Show I find Fifa really relaxing to play and fun to manage teams and work through improving them.

Others I’ve enjoyed and played Death Stranding, No Man Sky, Journey, and Grand Tourismo. Death Stranding I didn’t finish even though I was enjoying it, the theme wasn’t really working well with the Covid–19 pandemic, but I know I will return to it. I’ve sunk a fair amount of time exploring in No Man Sky again and really enjoy it. I’m still playing Journey after all these years and still like it a lot as it is calming, familiar, and time limited. Grand Tourimso is still one of the most gorgeous games and fun to just drive around in.

Watching

I’ve written a fair amount in weeknotes about these three. There is more I liked, but I I haven’t really kept good track of those things.
* The Crown
* Ted Lasso
* Mandalorian

Productivity

The big shift has been Obsidian, which has become the layer over my existing notes that are in markdown and already in directories. I looked at Roam Research, but quickly realized it is most everything I try to stay far from, which is the content isn’t in my possession (if anything goes south I’m stuck), there are no APIs to extend use, the subscription is expensive for something not fully built and not well thought through, and a whole lot of arrogance from the developers (this is something to steer very far from, particularly if things aren’t well thought through).

Obsidian has me not only finding things in my existing notes, but allowing for interconnecting them and adding structure to them. The ability to have block level linking is really nice to have as well, but I haven’t really made use of that yet. I have been writing a lot more notes and pulling notes and highlights out of books. In the past I have used VooDoo Pad wiki on Mac and loved it and Obsidian gives me that capability and with storing the notes on Dropbox I can search, edit, and add from mobile as well.

Obsidian may be my one of my favorite things from 2020 and one that will keep giving for years to come.

Weeknotes - 29 November Through 13 December 2020

This is a triple weeknote, largely because after posting the last weeknote I started in on moving this blog and its CMS, the whole site, another site or two on the same host, and some other apps running on the same host and a stack of email addresses. It was simple and complicated at the same time, but I wrote about the site move prior when the DNS propagation finished. That post was the 2,100 post to the blog here (in its various forms) that started 20 years ago at the end of this month. That move and some other things ate time that attributes to content for here.

Thanksgiving week, that included the annual photo walk through Georgetown and making dinner with the usual duck breast and its accompanying blueberry leek thyme reduction. A lot to be thankful for with work consistency and health. Thursday morning came with a doctor’s call with all clear for tests, following quarantine after not feeling well the prior weekend. In these times it is really good to be overly cautious, but still a relief.

This weekend could have been longer by Saturday I was wiped out and started on the action part of moving this site and all the digital accretion around it to its new home. The evenings this week will hopefully be wrapping that up. This weeknote is the last change to anything on the current host before the move.

The middle week was mostly site move and related matters when not working or running a shuttle service for one or waiting for a set of negative test to come back for the shuttlee and who was quarantining with me.

This week allows for catching up on some listening and watching favorite teams, some movies, and shows.

Watched

This week’s episode of The Mandalorian (Season 2, Episode 5) was one of the best yet in my opinion. Not having watched any Akira Kurosawa, but reading a lot of reviews of The Ghost of Tsushima game that I have been really enjoying for a few months and enjoying the visual tapestry and story telling and reviews point to much of that as Kurosawa style. Mandalorian had a lot of the storylines and visual fingerprints that would also point to Kurosawa.

I also got back to watching movies and shows a bit. I think I’m in the midst of three series have partly intrigued me.

I watched Crazy Rich Asians, which I enjoyed, but it echoes a lot of other movies and story lines I spent much of the time trying to remember what it is that it was harkening back to.

Listened

A long awaited delivery of an a tweak to headphone listening arrived and I’ve been going back through some of my favorite songs to listen to so to hear different dimensions. Yosi Hoyakawa’s Bubble and Fluid are two of them. Both can be utterly stunning for sound quality, but also spacial representation.

I also went through some of the Edition Records offerings I have, particularly Daniel Herskedal and his Slow Eastbound Train album and The Roc. I listened to Alexis Ffrench Evolution album, which has some of the most breath takingly calming music I know of. I took a spin through some really dense Prince music, Peter Gabriel, and wonderful Stevie Wonder. Listening to Snarky Puppy really helped see the clarity and opening up of the space in the music. This band that is ever changing can be dense and swims in complicated patterns and being able to hear into the music more with more separation and clarity was fantastic. The last listen that really opened up and became more wonderful to me was Construction that really becomes more moving, as in a sense of drifting.

In listening to Snarky Puppy I also stumbled upon a YouTube video of drummer Larnell Lewis of Snarky Puppy and other bands listening to people play some of his complicated Snarky Puppy pieces. This was wonderful, he was so overjoyed, but also his ability to give constructive positive criticism was amazing to watch. I’ve been a fan of his playing for some time, but never seen any of his own social media contributions. I’m hooked.

Food

Last week the local market had petrale sole, which is not all that common here and I did a quick picata with corn starch and rice crumb crust cooked in olive oil and brown butter with capers and lemon. This is one of my favorite dishes. One my dad used to whip up for sand dabs or petrale sole on a Saturday night. I’m not going by a recipe, but going off what I can eat and a slightly more healthy version than just full on browned butter. It is such a quick happy meal with a little broccoli that has been thrown in the pan after the fish if flipped.

Productivity

Getting my site moved was a relatively large chore. Using a mind map and OmniOutliner to set the steps and order of the move and what was completed really helped (there are still a few things that need wrapping up, but that will come in time). One thing I thought I was going to be getting is a server in my timezone, but it is set to GMT / UMT, so my blog posts would have a local timestamp. Just adding that to my to do list.

One of the things I’m trying to do is get back in a better habit of tracking things in Obsidian. Having it be my own has been a great help and I am deeply thankful I didn’t go down the route of Roam (mostly because I own it and can shape it how I want to and need to use it). The mobile capture is still one extra step from tossing something in Drafts and that text step to dropping it in the directory where Roam sits. I have quite a few things in Drafts I need to comb back through, do the push and the clean up.

In the past week I’ve been able to pull back and recall information easily from Obsidian, which has related context. I’ve done this from mobile devices and laptop. The mobile access has been a real treat. I really need to find a good port for Delicious Library into structured Markdown for my books, particularly series like those Charles Stross has as keep track of what I’ve read, what I have, and what is coming up.

Weeknote - 15 November 2020

Happy 260th day of March in the Year of Covid.

The wonders of smell. Not from the lack of smell from Covid–19, but the muted smells from wearing a mask. Losing a sense seems like a great tragedy, be it hearing or sight. But the senses don’t stop there, as we have touch - which seems like it would be detrimental to lose yet that is what happens when someone becomes paralyzed. Taste, I’m realizing is an odd one, as it is so heavily intertwingled with smell that it isn’t fully clear what would be lost.

It is the muted smells and the temporary loss of smells that has me in awe from wearing masks (other than it is God’s way of reminding you that you didn’t brush your teeth). Taking off one’s mask when outside is something magical. The muted sense of smell from wearing a mask, becomes magical when taking it down or taking it off getting a solid direct nose full of the wonderful world around. The background scents that go un-fully noticed on walks of trees, freshly wet pavement, a car engine cooling, all the different flowers and plants, the creek that has filled or when it is drier than usual, fires in fireplaces, and wafts of food being prepared. Taking off one’s mask when nobody is around, or just lowering it is like a firework show finale with all the scents hitting full saturation at once. It is a bit magical. Yet, within a few minutes the smells fade into the background and seem difficult to pull out of the air unless masked again, which does happen. The one scent I don’t find all that magical is vehicle exhaust, which I’m finding is one smell that really lasts. I’ve never noticed it before Covid times, but it is sure present now.

Thanks to Covid–19 and one of its traits of infection can be the loss of scent, one of the first things I do each day after waking is smell things. I smell the back of my hands, fingers, and wrist and then wash my face and hands and smell. Every morning I am relieved that I can smell.

Related, I restumbled upon Monocle’s “The secret to putting on perfume” video that focusses on scent and the use of it as a personal layer of attire, as in scenting for the occasion or work role or environment.

Watched

I finished up Season 3 of The Crown on Netflix so I’m good to start Season 4. I’m utterly impressed with the story telling and film work. The stories don’t seem to fully hew to what I remember reading and hearing retold, but I’m fine with that. I’ve really liked the crafting and developing of characters.

This week I also have been watching some recent and older Monocle Videos, which some seem to be fully Monocle productions and some are Gestalten produced with Monocle. What strikes me is how well they are made as the color grading, edits, cuts, transitions, and tempo are all well done, but they also all are similar going back years to older Monocle videos.

I was good to watch a Netherlands win today over BIH, as they have been a bit lifeless scoring under the new coach. There may be hope.

Listened

I found the 1998 Grace Jones album Private Life: The Compass Point Sessions, which has an 8 minute version of “Slave to the Rhythm”, which is a Hot Blooded Version mix. This song brings back a lot of memories of college, nights out in San Francisco, living in England, and wandering Paris. The odd thing is I didn’t own Island Life the album the original version was on, nor have it on mix tapes. It was ambient life sound track. I have some music that I owned and had on tape and I can tell you the shoes, socks, coat, and places quite vividly when I hear that music. Slave to the Rhythm always seemed to be background soundtrack to some wonderful times and this 8 minute version, which is largely instrumental fills to get to 8 minutes is the perfect background for running errands after the sun has gone down.

Food

This weekend’s grocery errands had a bit of focus on Thanksgiving, as far as sorting out what is stocked and where. With my county back down to Level 1 Covid reopening stores are down to 25% capacity and counting the number of customers in the store and lines starting again.

The weather turned a little bit cooler so made a pot of chili (beef and black bean) that was quite dense, but also really good. My son went through two bowls and it was gone in 3.5 bowls.

Play

A couple days after work I took some time to play through a bit more of Ghosts of Tsushima. I am still amazed withe the scenery and I’m looking forward to being done and just wandering the open map.

Productivity

I’ve been reworking how I’m going to handle blogfodder in Obsidian notes, which start as a link to a piece from someone or some other source. I have been keeping a list in notes, but that was one of the things that I had reworked and been keeping it in an outline, just a tag one note files, and a link on the source in Pinboard. I started a blog fodder note file that links to the source, person, and a note page for what could follow. These may turn into mid-week posts as the notes seems to be turning into 50% to 75% done responses.

Weeknote - 1 November 2020

There was a point this week that took me back to March or April and wearing masks to go out the front door and wondering would this last long enough that it felt normal. The old adage of a habit is made with 21 days of doing the same thing. It is far past those 21 days, but it not only seems like something we have been doing naturally forever but feels like walking out the front door without a mask it like walking out without your keys. I stepped out of the car and had my mask on and realized it was normal and natural, so much I didn’t think about it. It seems really odd and not so smart to see people without them.

I’ve given my hosting company notification that I don’t want to be moved to their new place as GoDaddy shuts down my hosting company I’ve been with for 7 to 10 years. The options they offer is a giant step backwards, so moving on. I have found a good replacement that is relatively similar, and a bit better. The next 3 to 5 weeks things will be moving here. I have part of the 10 apps and services I run partly mapped out, but have been waiting to sort out the destination to understand the scope of the move and if all the languages used will work. Mail may be my biggest pain, but that may be one of the last things to move.

The past few work cycles have me worn, but getting insanely high kudos from vendors about finally cracking some tough patterns that have been pain points for many others. That combined with election related matters I’m a bit drained and been really cranky. I did vote in early voting, which was relatively quick and easy, after seeing wait times over 45 minutes (at times it was 90 to 120) earlier in the week.

Read

I’m reading an early copy of a friends book that is really good and pretty much nails one of the small pieces that create massive positive differences, but are rarely noticed nor focussed on. Many organizations focus on innovation, and while some do it incredibly well most are a farce and are just copying practices from other companies with different problems and not understand the problems and starting from there (hence, the innovation doesn’t really have much positive value). I am looking forward to getting through the rest of the book, but also seeing it out and available for everybody.

Watched

Like that, I pretty much gave up on Deadwind after the first episode, as the second I didn’t make it through. The story is interesting, but also close to a few other things I’ve watched recently. But, I also I tend to watch things while wrapping other things up and not having enough of a foothold on Finnish I was having to pause, back up 30 seconds to a few minutes to understand what I missed which had me realizing I didn’t miss much or I didn’t care about what I missed. That was it and moved on.

I’ve been hoping to finish season 3 of The Crown, which I find to be some of the best writing and film craft around. By writing some is the words, but much of it is the setup and drawing and building of an arc and story line.

Also catching up on Somebody Feed Phil, which I really like but usually watch with my son, but we got distracted and missed a couple.

I’m holding off on Mandalorian for a couple weeks. But, it looks really good and looking forward to it.

Listened

Incomparables on Ted Lasso was really good and was a great reminder of just how good Ted Lasso was. I nearly started back watching it again from the beginning.

Productivity

Obsidian has released and then updated block referencing functionality. I haven’t had time to focus on it nor sort through a couple use cases I really things this may help with. One is keeping book notes tied with the book, but using block referencing to place subject / domain related ideas in their subject page and similarly with subject related quote files.