2023.11.20.

Should I publish longer articles as one big post, or break them up into 2-3 pieces?

Advanced outline post format

  • I created a more advanced outline post format for my Bike based posts.

  • New entries will use a new bike-outline Stimulius controller which I originally created for my Zettelkasten, so I can have basic outline capabilities for Markdown lists.

  • It gets the post content and adds toggles to each outline row, so I can open and close them.

  • It also uses block IDs as row links, so each outline row can be linked independently.

    • I don’t use Bike outline IDs, but generate them on-the-fly using checksums instead.

    • This will change as I update the content, but it’s fine.

2023.11.01.

We’re getting this little fella in the weekend.

I’m not sure what happened but I rarely listen to any podcast these days.

Sometimes I pick up an episode of something GTD or productivity-related when I’m doing chores around the house, but I stopped listening to the “6 hours-long episode of a couple of guys talking about Apple” style podcasts (except Mac Power Users).

Apple and journaling

Jason has concerns about the format of Apple Journal:

Like Apple Notes, the Journal app works without the Files app. Instead of your journal entries being discreet text files or similar that can be managed in the file system, they’re built into the app itself. It might work, like Apple Notes, using a SQLite database within the Journal app container.

I’m also moving into using more open formats for journaling, although I think there is a slight difference between a journal and a diary.

  • Keeping a journal in general is a mindfulness practice for keeping track of what I’m doing throughout the day.
  • Keeping a diary is more personal on the other hand. It helps us to write about our feelings and nice or bad things that happened to us.
    • This is the reason why I like to have the On This Day notification from Everlog in the morning.

Both of these practices provide a clearer picture, bringing us closer to the state of the past than just a simple memory.

Our memories give a false image because we can only remember the good things. This distorts the past and overvalues things that were not as good as we remember.

We can’t trust our memories, but we can trust a diary/journal, since it acts as a bookmark to the past, showing what happened in our lives. It functions as a backward tickler file, bringing things from the past to us. This retrieved information helps us to better understand ourselves in the future. We can see the difference between the past and our current state clearly, which can provide a new perspective on how we handle a current situation.

In essence: both of these practices allow us to compare our present self with our past one and draw conclusions.

So back to Apple Journal…

The only thing I see myself using Apple Journal for is the missing “add a description to multiple photos” app for now.

Sometimes I want to have a short description of an event that is stored in Photos, and since both apps are from Apple, hopefully, the integration will be better than duplicating my photos into yet another app as attachments.

Otherwise, I don’t see myself migrating away from Everlog in the foreseeable future.

2023.10.31.

The first Apple event I haven’t watched live in 16 years was today’s one because you know… we were sleeping in Europe.

2023.10.30.

  • I don’t really care about the outline display now, because I exported it into Bike.

  • I can collapse, expand, and format it anyway I want.

  • Also, adding new rows/zettels is way easier this way, so I’ll create an export shortcut to Markdown and leave it like that for now.

  • Follow-up on 09:58.

  • Also, what if I migrate my outlining workflow to Bike and generate the outline from that file?

    • It is already an HTML structure and the workflow of linking zettels and inserting them into the outline is easier on my Mac than the iPad, because it has a bigger display.

  • This would mean that the outline can link to the actual file in The Archive locally, which can be replaced with a [[wikilink]] when generating the outline from the Bike HTML.

    • I can even do this using Shortcuts, there is no need for Ruby scripting.

  • Today’s project is to write a script which generates the Zettelkasten Outline page automatically, since I have zettel IDs present with the structure in note slugs.

  • I also want to make everything collapsed under level 3.

2023.10.29.

Follow-up on “Publish daily notes to my Zettelkasten from Bike”

  • Previously

  • I created a shortcut which can export the current Bike selection to a new Markdown file in my Zettelkasten.

  • It doesn’t sync like my publish script does with WordPress, but it was easier to implement, since copy and paste between Drafts and Bike works pretty well.

    • The shortcut just cleans up the text and sets the title if it’s needed.

    • Otherwise it will create a headless zettel.

  • At the end it opens the note in The Archive app where I can edit it, or publish it using Git.

    • This shortcut actually uses the following apps.

      • Keyboard Maestro to copy and paste the text from Bike to Drafts.

      • Shortcuts to clean-up the Markdown output.

      • Then Drafts to create a new Markdown file in my Zettelkasten.

  • Here’s a demo video

    • In the video Archive complains about the “writing test”.

    • It’s not related to the shortcut.

Shortcut: Open Mastodon Posts on Micro.blog

My Micro.blog integration was broken since April. 😳

It’s a good thing that they have account logs. Otherwise, I wouldn’t figure out that my feed was too big.

I fixed the RSS feed, so new posts should be imported into my Micro.blog timeline. I also updated the sidebar to link to my Micro.blog/Mastodon profile.

I know it’s not Mastodon technically, but still easier to explain and understand than this:

You can follow me via Mastodon by searching for my profile (zsbenke@decoding.io) from your instance).

Maybe I should update the blog sidebar to link to my Micro.blog profile instead of explaining how to follow me on Mastodon.

Micro.blog would handle that too.

Publish daily notes to my Zettelkasten from Bike

  • I’m tinkering with the idea of using my Bike journal to publish to my Zettelkasten directly.

    • Blogging with Bike

    • I don’t use month based files anymore in Bike, I create a new outline for each day.

  • My Zettelkasten is a Jekyll based site, so I have to work with Markdown content.

  • In theory, I would use my publish script to manage the Zettelkasten daily notes in the same pipeline as my WordPress posts.

    • Publish from Bike to Decoding

    • Daily notes would be pre-filtered though.

      • I just export notes with the ZETTEL marker only.

      • I have to create a new Bike document for each entry before converting it to Markdown because I want to have separate notes for each entry, not just one big daily note.

  • I could use a daily Markdown file and keep that open in The Archive app, but I want to use Bike for this, because it is the best thinking and outliner tool.

    • Also I’m already writing my journal in Bike. I don’t want to have another app.

  • As an interim solution, I created a Keyboard Maestro macro which copies and pastes the current entry into Drafts (and also converts it to Markdown), where I can post it manually.

2023.10.23.

Append-only storage and developing ideas

There are multiple ways to develop ideas. Sometimes the best one is where you can’t change the history of an idea. It’s there as breadcrumbs to go back in time and see how an idea was developed.

Other people use email as an append-only note-taking tool and storage medium. From How I use append-only log to store information:

Choose any email client you like and basically dump all your PDFs, notes, digitized papers, files into it as it arrives from various sources. Just write a meaningful subject that you can search for later. You can use labels or folders to organize, but mostly just send it to an email address of your choice and archive it. Usually, you will not even read it again after you have saved it.

The E-mail format itself is well understood and has many features. The max attachment size of most service providers is around 20 MB. It’s more than enough. Try to use plain text for just taking short notes and messages to yourself. If you want to dump more than 20mb of files, just archive it or split into many emails or upload it to cloud storage and copy and paste the link to email.

When you need the information. It’s there. Always.

No more fiddling with the file managers, renaming. It is saved as it is.

Even if you would like to edit, you can just forward the message again to yourself with the edit and delete the original one.

You can also use it to schedule mails and track future tasks, TV shows, anime, movies or Reminder to yourself in the future. If you are working on a piece of text for a long time, you can just keep it as a draft and keep working. It will be auto-saved.

I am a fan of the bullet journal method. Handwritten text is immutable. The same goes for emails. Once you send it, it becomes immutable.

I don’t know if other use emails to store all their digital content in emails like me. But it’s a pretty neat trick.

Here’s how Steve Jobs used email to write his Stanford commencement speech:

In January 2005, John Hennessy, the president of Stanford, asked Steve to give the commencement address to that spring’s graduating class. Steve agreed.

On and off for the next six months, Steve took stabs at writing his talk. He emailed stories and memories to himself. He asked friends, Apple colleagues, and the screenwriter Aaron Sorkin for their thoughts. In the end, however, he wrote the speech on his own. Even three days before the event, Steve was unsatisfied with his talk. He sent it to a friend, warning, “I’ll send it to you, but please don’t puke. I never do stuff like this.” He was still refining the speech the morning that he gave it. Uncharacteristically, Steve read from the lectern, rather than memorizing his text (as he did with Apple keynotes) or speaking extemporaneously from a few scrawled notes (as he did in nearly every other talk).

Steve was happy with the speech—he emailed himself a copy a few days after giving it—but he generally deflected the praise that he received for it. “I bought it on CommencementSpeeches.com,” he joked to one person. The commencement address has been viewed millions of times online and is included[…]

These use cases are similar to how I use email threads to develop ideas in the GTD capture phase, where I’m leaving notes for myself within an email thread. All I have to do is send a reply to my own address by replying to an email, so Apple Mail keeps the message in the same thread.

One of the benefits of using this method is that I can still see the email as part of the thread, but my notes will be kept private.

This is helpful for various purposes, such as making code review comments or jotting down ideas by replying to email notifications but changing the recipient to my own address, which acts a bit like the poor men’s version of HEY’s sticky notes

I also have another app where I keep journal entries called Everlog. I’m thinking about applying the same append-only storage idea there and never editing my Everlog entries after I added them. It is also an append-only app, where entries shouldn’t be changed afterward, only deleted. I can always add a follow-up to an entry but I should never change it, so I can see how something was developed over time.

This is why I like to use Drafts for capturing and drafting ideas. I can easily edit them while I’m working on the idea, but I shouldn’t change them too much after I share them with their destination app (except when I continue working on them).

Related posts

Zettelkasten Note

2023.09.18.

Download iOS icons for Safari web apps using Shortcuts

I love how you can save web apps into separate apps via Safari in Sonoma like you can with Fluid.

Safari tries to fetch the default icon, but sometimes it’s not that pretty or it’s even in a wrong aspect ratio. Finding proper app icons is hard, but a lot of web apps have iOS versions, so why not use their icons?

I created a shortcut, which lets you search the App Store and download the raw app icon. Now you can also use the proper iOS style icon for the web app.

You can download the shortcut from here.

Here’s a video on how you can use it.

2023.08.09.

2023.07.06.

So people are running between Facebook and Twitter and vice-versa. And I’m just sitting here relaxed because I give away my last fuck about any social network.

I just want forums, blogs, and RSS.

2023.06.15.

2023.06.09.

Saving Siri replies as images

I just discovered that you can drag out complete Siri responses on the Mac and save them as images. It can be useful for saving reference data or images from the web.

Of course, you can also take a screenshot of the Siri window using the ⌘⇧4 keyboard shortcut, then pressing Space and selecting the Siri response.

2023.06.08.

Apollo is shutting down on June 30th.

It means that I officially end up using any social network.

I stopped using Twitter when Tweetbot was killed. I’ll do the same with Reddit too – which I liked better because the community was awesome, but I’m not going to visit a site that kills a superior app like Apollo.

All I need nowadays is a blog and an RSS reader and I’m good.

2023.05.21.

Get A Notebook And Write Stuff Down

Greg Morris writing about notebooks:

You don’t need to start a second brain, or do some weird PKM stuff, you just need to have a place full of things that will help you out. Record things you find interesting, things you need to remember, things that might help you work later on, literally anything you might need later on. You don’t need to start a commonplace book or anything, you just require a notebook around, all the time.

I start to wonder if there is a more straightforward way to manage ideas other than keeping a full PKM or Zettelkasten.

2023.04.07.

Adding Bike Shortcuts integration to my publishing setup

  • Previously…

  • I created two new shortcuts which are helping me to start to write a new post from Bike.

    • The first one called “Open Decoding File”, which opens (and optionally creates) the current month’s file.

      • I have monthly files, because of how my publishing script works.

      • It publishes every post from the currently opened Bike file, so I don’t want to keep the same long outline around for blogging.

        • It regenerates each post every time I’m adding a new one.

        • If there is a breaking change in the system, I can archive old files and just start a new one.

    • The second one just inserts today’s date into the top, with an “DRAFT” block which can be used to start writing a new post.

      • I added a Keyboard Maestro macro to run this one from Bike.

      • I can press ⇧⌥⌘T to add a new date block on the top.

  • These shortcuts are using the Shortcuts integration which is available in the preview version.

  • Here’s a demo video.

2023.03.23.

My Notebook System – ratfactor

This year is going to see my journal/log’s 10th anniversary and 100th notebook.

I read the whole article and took a lot of notes which inspired me to think about how I can consolidate my capture (logging) habit a bit more into one place, but still keep multiple capture tools.

After finishing this essay, it feels like Dave accidentally invented GTD for himself in a different form based on a stream of captured ideas that are moved up in the chain to have projects and next actions.

The part at the end where he writes about weekly, monthly, and yearly recaps feels very GTD-esque.

I actually tracked my time in a notebook like this before. I had a timestamp of when I started and when I ended a session of work. I have a long history of working in sessions, as I used to do a lot of freelance work, which requires time tracking (a session means that I focus on one task for a more extended period of time). My only question is how Dave transcribes his notebook entries into his digital system? I did it by hand, and it was awful.

Anyway, this is an excellent write-up of a fantastic system that I’m going to use as inspiration.

2023.03.22.

Ultra-mobile writing environments

So one thing I consider a compelling use case for a big iPhone and a small iPad mini is using them as a mobile writing environment. I could easily publish an essay from my iPhone or iPad mini just by thumb-typing. I want to explore this use case in more detail in the future.

We have had people doing this for years now, watch and read the following stuff from Patrick Rhone or Yuvi Zalkow.

I have a MacBook Pro and iPad Pro to write, so why am I interested in this phenomenon? I like when people think outside the box regarding their device usage.

The iPhone and the iPad mini are considered content consumption devices by almost everyone, which I’m afraid I have to disagree with. I create all kinds of things using these devices. I take photos, write notes and blogposts, sometimes create/edit Shortcuts, and SSH into remote servers to fix issues. Heck, I even edited an entire podcast episode on my iPhone using Ferrite while I was sitting on the train. It was actually quite fun to do. Being an owner of a big phone like the iPhone 14 Pro Max, I’m even expecting myself to use it more to create rather than consume.

Thumb-typing lengthy notes and blog posts on these devices maybe seems to be an ineffective way to write. Still, there is a focused environment to be found here—especially if you set up iOS to send only essential notifications—so even a smartphone can be a device that makes you focused.

I’m not going into details on notifications here, but let me just tell you, it’s not your smartphone that makes you distracted. It’s your laziness to set up notifications properly that makes you distracted.