Two unremarkable days this weekend. I enjoyed them very much. Now waiting for the Sauna to heat while I prepare tortillas.

Just finished 911 lonestar season 3. All in all a very good (pretty long!) season. I love the modern, progressive tone, the optimism, the altruism on display.

I’m unhappy to note that JavaScript tooling has stayed just as opaque as last time I had to use it professionally.

Turns out: solving hard problems under time pressure is hard. Who knew! 🤪

I, as a non native writer (and an error prone one in general), so wish mb would sync edits between my blog and my mastodon account. cc: @manton

Dev Notes

Good to see that state management in SPAs is still hard since the last time (3,5 years ago) I used one of these frame works. This time it’s vue3 last time it was react.

The long afternoon walk with the dog made me incredibly tired today.

Notes on Notes

Previously

An interesting difference that just occurred to me: Knowledge management and idea generation are not the same things. They are related, but a note system and its user may have to decide if they’re building an archive or if they’re building an idea generator. I’d say the latter is much more valuable for individuals.

Previously

Readwise Reader… You were the chosen one! Their feed reader cannot handle daring fireball’s feed. And it’s a long standing issue. Great. I guess I’ll have to take my feeds to a dedicated rss reader app once more?

Notes on Notes

As somebody who has taken notes for a long time now, I have gone through iterations of my setup to interact with them (last year I tried to use Agenda for my periodic and project notes, which I later abandoned in favor of using exclusively Obsidian again). In the process of moving from one app to the next it was not uncommon to leave notes behind. Not always did this happen intentionally. My current incarnation of my notes system consists of about 5000 notes, when I started to move from Evernote to Obsidian I left thousands of notes behind. If I’d need to guess, a count of all of my notes ever written reaches probably around 100000. As I have a full-time job, a little family and little time, my current situation doesn’t allow me to do work on my notes all the time.

So I will probably never be able to collate, deduplicate and unify all my notes into my current system. But I have learned that this is really also not as important as one might think at first. I use my notes system as a way to think and generate new ideas. The argument for having a notes system like this continues usually this way: “…and the more ideas you have, the more you’ll create/find…”. But I think more important than the total amount is to reach a critical mass of notes, which seems to start for me around 50 or so. By this point I seem to be able to always find something to connect to something else. There is always something else to elaborate, so ideas are generated, which is exactly the goal of my system.

I don’t need all my 100000 notes to do it. These 50 notes also don’t need to be perfect notes, or only capturing “atomic” ideas. Some are short reflexions, others are definitions, quotes, maybe a picture, a copy and pasted line of code. Often times they are daily notes that log what I have done that day with links to other notes. (See also: The three types of notes I take)

Heterogeneity and being in various states of completion are really not a problem, as long as there is enough of a critical mass in the system to generate new notes.

EDIT: You may be interested in my little constellation of “Notes on Notes” about the process of working with a notes system:

Forward

Games

Playing Stellaris again, which I do every time a new dlc comes out. The newest dlc is a “First Contact Story Pack” and I do love it a lot. Just a great game. I have played it hundreds of hours and am still enjoying the occasional round (which can take me upwards of 30 hours).

I was (and am) so enamored with an article I read that my sleep deprived self decided in the morning after walking and feeding the dog to take notes for three hours instead of going back to sleep. Now I’m exhausted.

Nothing better than tortilla leftovers for lunch. 😋

Task Management

Peviously.

I don’t know why, but I may have for the first time really understood how OmniFocus' repeating event functionality works. Amazing how much complexity they managed to cram into this feature. I can actually express all my recurring tasks in my task manager. But: It almost certainly means that I’m stuck with OmniFocus, because no other app can do this.

Forward

Having learned about mastodon’s capabilities of being a ddos tool, I wonder: Are URL previews a dark pattern in itself?

I feel like you could argue they are, because they may seriously mislead you (a preview could be tailored in a malicious way), scale badly in a federated context (in the naïve case as implemented by mastodon) and responsibility for the problem is not as easily attributed. Should I as the user feel responsible?

It also shows that fundamental design decisions about software architecture are still very much a centralization problem. Or rather: They express the reality that somebody has to make a decision about these things. Having your own instance doesn’t change a thing about that. If the protocol defines link previews in this way you have to follow suit in order to be compliant. No way around that.