July was an exciting month.
Following my last post a whole bunch of purchasing ensued. In fact, the next posts are all going to be retrospective as I’ve built my PC now!
The last couple of months have consisted largely of what I’ve come to call passive research - aka I discovered Linus Tech Tips videos on YouTube and have watched a copius amount of them…
For a couple of years I’ve had the intention of building a PC for myself – something I haven’t done in a very long time. In fact, I’ve never built a PC from scratch for myself before. Back in college, in hardware class, is the only time I’ve gone from an empty case to a working computer. Around the same time, but outside of college, I did a little bit of cobbling together the better components from old computers I could get my hands on to upgrade the computers of friends and family. But I never built my own machine.
At the beginning of my experiment I intended to write regular updates on what I was getting up to, however I haven’t really done that.
If I had been doing that, here are a few things I retrospectively imagine I would have written about:
I have plenty of rambles and reflections on all of these things in my notes but I haven’t quite nailed down the habit of publishing any of it…
For continuity of my experiment I felt I should mention that I have migrated from Joplin to Obsidian.
In fact, I migrated about 2 months ago now. So, as far as my journey into building a notetaking system is concerned, I’ve been using Obsidian for almost as long as I used Joplin (which was about 3 months).
I haven’t felt like writing a comparison of these apps, as I did when I moved from OneNote to Joplin. But I do want to point out the 2 main reasons I made the switch to Obsidian.
“A man is not dead while his name is still spoken.”
One day I discovered the existence of Looking Glasses. It was so long ago now that I don’t remember exactly what led to it, but I know I found http://www.bgplookingglass.com and became quite intrigued by it.
A Looking Glass is a system that network operators might use to find out Internet routing and BGP-related information. They provide insight into how a particular router connects the Autonomous Systems that make up the internet.
But this post isn’t about Looking Glasses, it’s about something else I found. So back to my story…
I made a RandomNote for Joplin button for macOS. You can find the bash, python and AppleScript concoction here.
Apologies to non-macOS Joplin users, I have not made any other verions of this.
But if you like sticking things together, the bash and python elements could be of use to you…
I discovered the concept of “RandomNote” via Tiago Forte’s PARA series. To describe it at surface level: he created a button that opens a random note from his Evernote notes.
The purpose of such a button is to aid in serendipitous rediscovery of your old notes. That’s not going much deeper, to be honest. To see what inspired me into action I encourage you to read Tiago’s post about it. He has a way with words which I do not.
The rest of this post is an extension of the “API / Automation Friendly” criteria from my OneNote vs Joplin blog post.
As explained in my previous blog post, I have started an experiment on my notetaking methods.
Before I had the idea for that experiment I dived into using Microsoft OneNote, because I was so excited to try out P.A.R.A.
I did that because I’ve used OneNote in the past, so it was familiar. But, within a couple of days of falling further down the P.A.R.A. and Zettelkasten rabbit-hole, I changed my mind.
I found Joplin.
Recently I decided to do something about my notes and notetaking methods.
Up until a few weeks ago, my notes were an increasingly unwieldy pile of .txt files. I was using Slack as a blackhole means of getting the odd link from my phone to my laptop.
It wasn’t great. Notes were seldom revisited. The majority of things put into Slack remained there…