notetaking

• created a new “notes” section on my website. i don’t know exactly how i intend to use it yet, i just know i’ve occasionally wanted to refer to one of my obsidian notes in a blog post. but i don’t want to create a separate blog post for the note to do that, and my “lab” section doesn’t feel like the right place either (its kinda more for technical stuff). i guess the gist of it is i’ll slowly turn some private notes into public notes.
• made some plans for a series of projects and blogged about it: data pipeline plans
• worked on my geolab database bootstrap scripts, per my data pipeline plans.
• played around with Model Builder in QGIS for the first time (via 30DaysOfQGIS). i like it.

I’ve been thinking about the capture workflow of my notetaking system a lot in the last week, and working on refining it, so that I can use it more effectively… as the concept of Collector’s Fallacy has felt particularly resonant lately.

I finished archiving all my Inoreader RSS starred items, so I have a clean slate / zero starred items in Inoreader now. This should theoretically / hopefully lead to more effective processing of newly starred items from my browsing… I use this Inoreader CLI (with a few modifications) to save my starred items from Inoreader into my INBOX folder in Obsidian. Once I’ve downloaded the recently starred items, I can make notes with them and reference them and whatever else, and then unstar them in Inoreader, paving the way for the next batch. That’s the theory at least!

Once something is in my INBOX folder, it is also in my ankibox. I’ve started experimenting with additional ankiboxes too now (based on items I’ve been adding to different IW queues for a while). I expect I’ll write more about this in the future, but so far ankibox has led to navel gazing about ankibox. But it feels like useful pondering at this point in time, as I try to figure out where the whole ankibox concept best fits within my capture workflow or “knowledge cycle”…

ankibox?

anki + inbox = ankibox

“Everything starts from a dot.”

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:

• introducing a Task Management element to accompany the P of PARA
• migrating to Obsidian and introducing Markor and using it’s QuickNote feature
  • (leading on to “My QuickNote Problem” aka my latest manifestation of Collector’s Fallacy)
• trying out Daily Notes and habit tracking
• thinking more deliberately about the type of note I’m taking
• experimenting with how I use tags
• starting to create MOCs

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.

TL;DR #

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…

What’s RandomNote? #

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…