I have been giving Commafeed a try as my self-hosted RSS service. It’s got a very simple presentation, decent keyboard shortcuts, presents the Fever API to RSS clients like Reeder, and has filtering capabilities (though I am having some challenges understanding their ins and outs).

The main issue I have with it is its somewhat limited set of sharing options, but that actually helped me decide to decommission Wallabag (which is not one of them). I’ve found that pretty slow and not as easy to deal with as Pocket across platforms. I wanted to like it, but it’s hard to justify for a kind of tool I’m glad to have but don’t feel a deep attachment to. So I’m switching back to Pocket, and Commafeed works just fine with that.

Stories for Tiddlywiki

The Stories plugin for Tiddlywiki lets you create a second column and divert tiddlers to it so you can have things side-by-side. I don’t use it much for my personal wiki, but for my work wiki it’s a great way to have my interstitial journal sitting open and ready in one column, and my active tiddler open in another.

This appears to be the closest to a link I can find.

Fujifilm X100VI

I am not made of stone. I preordered one. I took my X100V to San Francisco a few months ago for a work trip and renewed my affection for the series. As with Portland, I much prefer the X100s to a larger ILC for street carry. I did keep thinking, as we walked around Chinatown at night, “man, I wish this thing had IBIS.” I still liked the shots I got, but you’re managing harder tradeoffs. With any luck I didn’t preorder too late to get one before next September, but we’ll see.

I’ve long held that the X100 series could stop iterating once it had weather resistance (solved with the V) and IBIS (solved now with the VI). I suspect a faster lens would make the bulk unacceptable, so I will not hold my breath on that one. I’d like the series to match up batteries with the X-T series, too, but that might be another bulk issue, and I have accrued a collection of the WP-126S batteries between the X100F and X100V, so I’m set. I have a very thin Wasabi charger that’s great for travel. During my SF trip I had all-day walking around juice on the battery in the body and a pair of spares at the bottom of my sling.

I wonder if the X-Pro series ended with the X-Pro3. I liked mine a lot but also felt like the “anti-chimping” display was a little gimmicky, and it didn’t have IBIS. Returning to a normal rear panel of some kind and IBIS would be great, but I’m good with the X-T5 and not so hung up on the rangefinder-esque design that I’d run out and buy an X-Pro4. And if I did, I’d slap my nice 23mm on it and have … an X100 but a little bigger and more conspicuous and a few stops faster. Nope. I think the X100VI has the makings of a desert island camera.

Work

Today was IT steering committee day. I was asked if I thought my crew does more or less than traditional IT. Interesting question. My current place sells SaaS, my last place had a lot of on-prem estate (and a hyper-overbuilt network given the size and nature of the business).

At my last place I presided over the last of a desultory teasing apart of corporate IT and something we called “SRE” for a period before settling on “developer services.” For reasons I will avoid enumerating, we had some struggles with that teasing apart that persisted over four years – I left engineering, did IT, went back to engineering, then went back to IT one more time. Each time I’d chip at the problem from my new perch. It all came down to loosening some death grips in IT, reassuring corporate security that the engineers wouldn’t wrap the car around a tree, and eventually just being a little bit of a prick with the one remaining IT person who felt it right and proper to require security engineering to petition for log dumps so they could audit their own services.

“If you make him give them self-serve access to Splunk, he’ll quit,” warned the manager I had over that team.

“Well, good. He needs to be this tall to ride. If he can’t handle letting people see logs for their own services, this is probably for the best.”

I wrote a memo (the only “Mike uses his directorial ex-cathedra voice” memo I’ve ever written) explaining that everyone needed to be this tall to ride. He couldn’t handle it and quit. Wasn’t tall enough to ride.

Anyhow, I have a lot less complexity to deal with at the current place. There are still some weird “why does this route through IT” issues that pop up, but they’re pretty easily resolved by visiting my security colleagues and asking “did we do this for a reason” (seldom) and then asking engineering “would you like to remove me as an external dependency?” (usually, but sometimes I wonder if they think I’m trying to trick them).

What it amounts to is an interesting inversion of value. When I presented today about the year’s big initiatives it was mostly about portfolio governance, access management, and providing administrative uplift to the vendor management process. We still have to deal with traditional IT admin stuff, but it’s pretty contained. Not nearly as sprawling and perilous as it was at the last place.

Anyhow, “traditional for where” is the real answer. I’m glad to be doing my job in a context and era where the parts that are simple and the parts that are complex have sort of shifted around.

I fiddled around with Workflowy a while back, and it has been in the back of my head, since. There is something about the whole outliner thing that is compelling, but when I see examples from people who are heavy outliner users in the wild I get this sense there’s a sweet spot between “useful chunking of information” and “stilted and hard to consume/digest,” and … we all have different cognitive styles, I guess is all I’ll say.

As near as I’ve been able to piece together some ideas out there in note-taking land, I’d like my personal notes setup to involve:

• A daily log
• A daily personal task list
• The ability to digress from the log

I’d like my log to be somewhat structured, meaning timestamped entries of a consistent format.

I don’t care if my personal task list for the day has much metadata, because we’re closer to the “shopping list” end of the spectrum than the “project management” list. I guess it can have no metadata besides “have I done it yet.”

Digressing from the log doesn’t mean much besides, “is it easy to think of something, quickly make a new node/page/tiddler and start typing.”

The apparent term of art for all this stuff is “intersitial logging.” That is fewer syllables than “keep track of what you’ve done during the day,” but has the benefit of higher syllabic density.

An outliner is a pretty good tool for those things because it brings some structure, favors the terse, and frees you from worrying about managing the arrangement of the text in favor of managing the arrangement of the content.

Outlining with Streams

Digging around for outliners for Tiddlywiki I came across Streams, which sticks a little outliner widget in each Tiddler. Click the “+” button, and you’re in a node in your outliner. Tab to indent, shift-tab to outdent, grab the nodes by their handles to reorder. Each node, in turn, is its own Tiddler.

I am not entirely sure how I feel about that last part, and if it were not for a filter you can apply to your sidebar to hide all the subtiddlers Streams produces in the open and recent lists, I am pretty sure I would hate it. But you can drop some code into the sidebar shaddow Tiddler to clean all that up and only see the root of a stream.

There’s enough there to play around, anyhow.

I made a simple Espanso trigger to timestamp my log entries:

# Make a timestamp
  - trigger: ":log"
    replace: "''[{{mydate}}] '' "
    vars:
      - name: mydate
        type: date
        params:
          format: "%r"

So, open a new node in the outline, type :log, start typing.

Finding the escape hatch with Streams Fusion

Because I’m a nervous soul who is always wondering how to back out of things like this, there’s also the Streams Fusion plugin, which gives you a little icon at the bottom of a stream to merge all the sub-nodes in a stream into a single, unified chunk of text.

That’s cool, because in a daily log you can be creating a proliferation of digressions and sidebars, not all of which qualify as full-fledged chunks of thought or interesting directions. So, click that button at the end of the day and all the nodes in the outline are turned into normal markup (links intact, if you added any) that looks like an outline, but all the child tiddlers from the root are removed and nodes you linked in a digression become backlinks to the newly merged daily log.

Alternately, you can turn the outline nodes into simple paragraphs. This morning I came across something while I was reading, started outlining, said all I’d had to say about that stream of thought, and went ahead and merged it all into a normal tiddler.

In evolving practice I don’t know whether I’ll fuse many daily pages or not. The part of me that doesn’t like the underlying sprawl of nodes even if I’ve hidden it from myself is still paying too much attention to what’s going on underneath. It’s a fine line between due diligence and unhealthy perfectionism. The benefit of fusing logs will be improved searchability for log entries themselves, since search results will go back to a single day’s log page instead of its child nodes. That seems to be kinder to future me.

Tasks in my log with Espanso and regexps

Once I decided to let the Streams experiment run, I waffled around about how to integrate tasks into my log. The “interstitial logging” people encourage a single, unfified stream of log entries and tasks created as they come up. Tiddlywiki’s core conception of tasks is that they should be nodes (“tiddlers,” yes) with a todo tag. That’s a little cumbersome in the Streams workflow.

So I did a quick experiment with the Sticky Todo plugin as a way to make a Streams node a task.

Sticky Todo uses markup like this to turn any text into a todo that appears in your sidebar:

<<sticky "Take out the recycling">>

That’s not too hard to remember, but it’s sort of type-y, so I made an Espanso shortcut that leverages its ability to do regexps:

- regex: ":todo\\((?P<todo>.*)\\)"
    replace: "<<sticky \"{{todo}}\">>"

So I can start a node with :todo(some task) and Espanso replaces it with <<sticky 'some task'>>

It’s 7 keystrokes minus the task content instead of 13? Plug it into the table and bask in the efficiency!

Espanso is useful for stuff like this where there’s no way I could figure out how to get Tiddlywiki to automate this in any reasonable timeframe.

Al is off in Mexico, so I’m being more verbose than usual over social media because I am trapped in this house with myself, a list of a few things I ought to be doing, and plenty of discretionary time.

Today I went on a small posting tear over last night’s movie (The Caine Mutiny, 1954) and that led to a cascade of other thoughts, all dutifully dropped into a Mastodon thread that I immediately thought better of, but will allow to stand. The nice part about self-destructing toots is that nothing remains regrettable for long.

But I thought “I wish I’d just written that stuff down somewhere else,” because there are things in there that are part of a broader thesis I’ve been worrying at for a while, and I hate the tightrope walk of saying partially thought-through things in public.

So I thought about my Obsidian vault but realized how purpose-made to work it is. I thought about a second Obsidian vault and that would probably be perfect, but no fun. I picked Obsidian for work because it strikes the right balance of free-form text and enough task management stuff that I can do the thing I like to do there, which is make in-line tasks in my notes. It is also sort of dull.

Then I thought “you sort of have a commonplace book in DayOne,” but DayOne is a Mac and iOS thing, and I have exported it but not found a home for it. (Yes, there’s a web option now. I don’t know how I feel about that, because I don’t own that server.)

… and there’s Tiddlywiki, which is super compelling, but wasn’t super compelling for my work notes bakeoff. I needed to set up too much too quickly, and there are things it does not want to do, or that it can do but I do not want to figure out. But it seems fun and simple, and something about it is very compelling even if it wasn’t quite right for how I’d like to use a tool for work. Different headspaces, I guess, and I like the idea of supplementing the boundaries between headspaces through the subtle effects of tools.

So I blew up my half-started Tiddlywiki and started afresh with something I think will meet my needs:

• Daily pages are titled by ISO 8601 (2024-02-24)
• Daily pages have a “log” heading
• Daily pages have a “made today” section (<<list-links filter:"[sameday:created{!!created}!is[system]]">>)

Those are the out-of-the-box things.

I added two plugins:

• Shiraz. It has a node explorer that drops a table with backlinks, transclusions, and common tags at the bottom of a note.
• Stickies. Select some text, hit the keystroke, and the text becomes an inline todo that shows up by filename under a tab in the sidebar. Perfect for “this reminded me of something, I want to get back to it, here’s a reminder and a link back”

Seems like a good foundation, addreesses a hangover I had from shifting away from Mac for so much day-to-day stuff.

I was very, deeply bothered by Tiddlywiki’s failure to yield on a few points, so I took some time to work on them wondering how much of the Obsidian workflow I’ve come up with could be repeated in the context of a single-file wiki. Mixed success, I suppose, that could be less mixed if I were less automation-oriented.

But basically:

Area and People pages

I keep a standard page format for areas, people, and projects. Areas are non-timebound, non-project areas of concern or relationships. The GRC org is an area, as are “portfolio management,” “security engineering,” and “the people team.” Projects, Areas and People use the same template because they need pretty much the same thing: A list of tasks, a list of related tasks from outside the page, and a simple log. I guess these are tickler files in some parlances.

In Obsidian, a standard page for these things has a “tasks” section, a “related tasks” section, and a “log” section; and it has a primary_tag property. “Tasks” are ad hoc, one-off things specific to each entity, while “related tasks” are any tasks anywhere else in the system bearing the area or person’s primary_tag. The “related tasks” block just looks like this:

tasks
tags include grc

So if I’ve got a project somewhere else in the system, or drop a GRC-related task in some meeting notes, it gets sucked into that list. By convention, my primary tags are terse abbreviations, always in lower case. I could drop that convention, but it’s helpful for setting up pages in a standardized way that lets me just start using the page vs. modifying places where I want to pull in the primary tag. Turbo-laziness, basically.

The “log” section is nothing special. I do use the Quickadd plugin to make it easy to log something from anywhere by running a Quickadd log anywhere action from the command menu. So I invoke the keystroke, get a prompt for the file to append a log entry to, start typing “Areas/” or “People/” and pick the autocompletion, enter the log entry, and I’m done. The snippet itself is - {{DATE:HH:mm}} {{VALUE}}\n and QuickAdd allows me to target the ## Log heading to append the entry. I’ve got a clone of it for my daily journal page, just to shave off selecting the page.

In Tiddlywiki, I cobbled together a few things to get this rough effect:

I use the TodoList plugin, which provides the ability to drop in a snippet that creates a little ad hoc log widget:

<<interstitial-ui caption:"! Log" width:"" base:"$(currentTiddler)$_log">>

The base property gives the list a unique name, either to isolate the log entries to that page (with no base, all log items appear everywhere the snippet is used) or to allow reuse of the log elsewhere in the wiki.

The drawback of the log is that the widget stores everything in JSON, not as part of the page itself. Were one committed to using Tiddlywiki forever, that might not be so bad. I know myself better than that, and believe this pattern essentially recreates the drawbacks of any database-driven site. Maybe there’s an export option, but it’s also an impediment to simple search of the live wiki: You get back the associated lump of JSON, not the page that is presenting the lump of JSON.

The real answer is probably “don’t use that logging widget, figure out how to automate this some other way.”

TodoList allows the use of a todo list widget as well, but I couldn’t figure out how to surface its todos anywhere in the wiki. I am okay with violating Prot’s advice about mixing ephemeral tasks with notes, but only if there is a way to sweep up todos in one place for review and safety. So instead I use TiddlyWiki’s native task functionality, which involves a button that modifies the basic “New Here” functionality for a given Tiddler, but appends the primary tag of a given Area or Person page to a todo tiddler. When I click the task button, it makes a new tiddler with a todo tag and the current tiddler title as a second tag.

Then I have some template code to enumerate todos for a given Area or Person page:

! Tasks

<$list filter="[!has[draft.of]tag[todo]tag{!!title}!tag[done]sort[created]]">
  <$checkbox tag="done"> <$link to=<<currentTiddler>>/></$checkbox>
</$list>

! Completed tasks

<$list filter="[!has[draft.of]tag[todo]tag{!!title}tag[done]sort[created]]">
  <$checkbox tag="done" checked="yes"/>
    <$link to=<<currentTiddler>>/>
</$list> 

I don’t have enough Tiddly-fu to do in Tiddlywiki what I can do in Obsidian, which is drop in a task on any page from anywhere in a single keystroke. Not the worst limitation, and the proximate workarounds aren’t that bad.

What you end up with is that todos are just tiddlers with a todo tag. As opposed to the widget solution, they’re more searchable, and you can add notes about a given task in the body. You can also make a big todo page that lists every single unclosed todo in the system for review. I like it as a concept, especially since you could associate a given task tiddler with a variety of pages by adding the right tags.

Projects

In Obsidian, project pages are the same as area and people pages. In Tiddlywiki, the limitations of the native task management are such that I decided to get another plugin: Projectify.

It bolts a nicer GUI onto Tiddlywiki’s native task management to provide some project structure around the tiddler-as-task pattern. It includes a global entry widget for an inbox you can invoke from anywhere in the system (maybe that code will help me understand how to get the logging I want).

It’s a pretty nice plugin! I think I would be willing to use it full time, since it could even blow up but still leave me with data in files I could figure out how to migrate or continue to use. Unfortunately, development of the fork of the stalled original project seems to have stopped as well. I don’t have enough of a sense of how the Tiddlyverse works to know how much that matters.

Bottom line

We’re all spoiled for choice. With a few tweaks, I think I could make a go of Tiddlywiki. I just don’t know how to get some of the automation/ease of data entry I can get with Obsidian. If I lifted my notes out of Obsidian I would lose a few things that currently connect notes via the tasks and dataview plugins, but I limit use of those things to nice-to-haves.

Other Obsidian details

I’ve got a smallish list of plugins holding my Obsidian stuff together, easing data entry, and making my templates smarter:

• Custom File Explorer Sorting: Just lets me put the file explorer sidebar in a better order (pushing utility folders to the bottom, raising my task list to the top)
• Dataview: For pulling in related notes in my people, area, and project pages.
• Front Matter Title: Lets me use Denote’s “metadata-in-filename” convention but see the human-readable title of a note in tabs and the file explorer
• QuickAdd: A way to add content to pages. I can pop open a dialog to select a page, type in some text, and it gets plopped at the bottom of a given heading.
• Tasks: The standard Obsidian task management plugin
• Templater: Lets you add JavaScript to your templates at initial render. It’s how I enforce the Denote filenaming scheme.

If pressed, just Tasks would be the must-have. QuickAdd would probably make the list. Templater and Front Matter Title mostly exist to enable the Denote file naming, which is on my “nice to have” list.

The Milkmade

I got a nut milk maker. It looks sort of like a Mr. Coffee, but instead of a coffee basket there is a nut/grain threshing chamber. You fill the reservoir, dump maybe a quarter cup of your preferred nut or grain into the threshing chamber, and press a button. 12 minutes later there’s a 20 oz. carafe of nut milk.

It’s a little grainier than what you get at the store, and a little less creamy. Letting it chill in the fridge (it comes out at 180F) and drinking a cup of it wasn’t as good as store bought – maybe a little bitterness in comparison – but I did some reading and made another batch where I dropped in a pinch of salt, a splash of vanilla, and a teaspoon of monkfruit sweetener, and that was pretty good.

The CGM has taught me that cow milk in any quantity past “a splash in my tea” has a drastic effect on my blood sugar. It’s the kind of spike I never would have noticed with finger stick testing – tends to be fast and well within the two-hour post-prandial window – but I couldn’t unsee the spikes, and I don’t neeeeed cow milk, but like it over my cereal or with protein powder. So if I’m gonna be a nut milk lifer, I’m glad I can make my own.

I know that is easier said than done.

“Bits of our identities” are conversation starters, signifiers, hints, badges, clues to deeper things about us, personal reminders, and anchors.

“Anchors.”

“That was a very anchoring conversation.”

“This is a real anchor around my neck.”

Which is a weird way to start a post about note-taking apps, but here we are.

Like, Emacs is part of my “Unix person” origin story. I can’t name another software tool I’ve used as consistently for 33 years. I suppose the Unix paradigm itself edges Emacs out for personal longevity, but not by much. And when I think about everything I was doing with that first Ultrix account in 1991, “running Emacs” is the only thing that remains from the list. No more Netrek, I don’t use USENET in a way that would be recognizable to Past Me, and if the work I did on the Landsraad assembly hall for the DUNE MUD remains – getting cones of silence to work felt like a real triumph – I haven’t been around to visit it for a few decades.

It is a bit of an anchor in the putatively good sense of the word “anchor.” Technological comfort food. One of the first things that goes on any new machine, and one of the first server-side things I test when I’m trying out a new remote access tool. But also a bit of an anchor in the not-great sense of the word, in that I will pay the “figure out how to express this in elisp” tax for hours, well beyond practicality or reason.

Most recently, I was ignoring some excellent advice from Prot regarding people who want to use his excellent Denote for task tracking:

“If you want my opinion though, be more forceful with the separation of concerns. Decouple your knowledge base from your ephemeral to-do list: Denote (and others) can be used for the former, while you let standard Org work splendidly for the latter—that is what I do, anyway. … “Do not mix your knowledge base with your to-do items.”

… and the complexity was piling up and up, the tradeoffs were getting worse, and there was simply no joy in the experience because I had gotten myself into that bitter “make this problem yield” mindset that eventually leads to less understanding and more hacked-up, suboptimal stuff.

I just don’t have time for it right now.

So it makes sense that my fallback position was “maybe Logseq would be fine,” because it’s got the whole “supports org-mode syntax” thing going on – leave the door open for a return to Emacsland once I have more time – and perhaps because it is just odd enough to tickle another bit of my self-image. Mercifully, the second I tried to solve a problem of moderate complexity I realized how much time I’d have to invest to do anything besides pick code samples up off the sidewalk and pop them in my mouth. So I backed away slowly.

And after that it makes sense that Tiddlywiki got a look because it has been around forever and there is a sort of cheerfully prosaic attitude among its users. But the plugins started creeping in and I was trying to get it to do stuff it doesn’t really want to do without a lot of third party assistance, so the whole “it’s very simple” thing was not allowed to find much expression.

So there I was, and I’m sort of glad that I chased my tail over the past few weeks because it tired me out a little, but left me with an idea of what I wanted to do: Take notes in a connected manner, blend a little of PARA with space for a slipbox approach, and have inline todos, and I wanted it to sync across a few devices.

Obsidian does all that very well. There is always the risk of plugin creep, but in past Obsidian experiments that has been less about extending the core feature set and more about removing repetitive work. The simple mission of “write notes, link between them, keep track of tasks” doesn’t take much, with mobile and sync managed competently. It runs on every platform I’d care to run it on.

It’s a little dull. But after a few days of “just using it” and adding little affordances here and there from past vaults as I’ve remembered them, it has the benefit of just working in a non-dramatic, non-head-desking, simple way. I haven’t had to really think about it much. I haven’t inadvertently broken it or misconfigured it in such a way that I’m scrambling around a minute before a meeting trying to get back into my own notes. It’s of sufficient maturity that you can look up the answers to things and they are often in written form, which minimizes the whole “if I see one more YouTube poster frame of a slack-jawed influencer taking 30 minutes to explain something I could have copied and pasted in ten seconds I’m going to do a murder” thing.

I was inclined to say “and it says nothing about me, at all.”

But it does say a few things: “Doesn’t want to think about this problem he created for himself in any more detail,” “will settle on Markdown even though it is inferior to org,” “can stand being associated with people who think a graph of their notes is interesting and useful if it means not having to think about this any longer,” “will pay for sync,” “considers seven plugins normal and reasonable, would not admit to nine,” and – most likely and eventually – “always seems to creep back to Emacs even though it seemed like he knew better last time he did this.”