vanderwal.net

Strong Opinion About Slide Over on iPadOS

I should say up front, I’m deeply appreciative of Apple and all the products, OSes, services, and applications they make, as most everything is done with care and craft with and eye and understanding of detail. Having interactions with develop support and internal developers now and over the years, I’ve always been impressed in their focus on getting things right and doing thing better. Nearly every interaction with Apple from customer support, sales support, Apple’s developers, and people inside Apple has been fantastic and from people who aim to do their best and look to make really solid products and services for their customers.

Apple Announces the New ipadOS

At this month’s Apple WWDC 2025 they made the announcements about the new ipadOS 26, which seems like it may be a good step forward with the new windowed interface, that moves it into looking and acting much like a Mac. There are many other updates and improvements.

Subtraction of Productivity is Far from an Improvement

But… subtraction of one prime productivity advancement that the iPad has had for many of its iterations is that of Slide Over, which if you aren’t familiar (it seems Apple isn’t), is the ability to have an app that will slide in from the side of the screen and hover in a narrow mode, while the other app (or apps, as two apps on screen has been around for a while as well) is still in view.

This meant, with one flick and (in Steve Jobs’ parlance) boom! you have a note app (my strong preference has been for Drafts) that allows me to capture ideas in markdown quickly and then (or later) push the note out elsewhere - Twitter, Mastodon, note directories that Obsidian sits over, Messages, etc.) then flick it back out of the way. It is simple, quick, efficient, and productive, which is what Apple always seemed to put as a priority.

I often have Drafts and PCalc sitting one flick (two for PCalc for the second flick), which is ONE STEP to get a productivity app of my choice in place to divert my focus from a video I’m learning from, reading I’m wanting to capture a note or to do from, a quick calculation, or whatever I want to need at the ready and then get back to focussing. This is a super power that iPad has enabled. It is what separates an iPad apart from Mac and other devices in a big way.

The New ipadOS 26 is Four Large Steps Backward for One Element of Productivity

This new window model on ipadOS 26 is nice and could be helpful, but trying to do the same quick productivity action is at minimum four steps. That isn’t a productivity gain or enhancement. That is four large steps backward Apple. Four anti-productivity steps backward. If I wanted to lose productivity like that, I would switch to Windows.

The corner quick swipe from the corner of the iPad isn’t available unless I’m using the full window interface for finger use and only getting access to Apple Notes (a really nice product, but for various reasons isn’t my first choice, nor second choice). In the new interface the quick corner access is available with Pencil swipes. The full window interface you can add a finger swipe.

But, going from a window I’m working or learning in and want to get a Drafts up and ready, if I have it in my dock it is a tap to open, get it out of the way (often two moves for placement and then narrowing it, if not also adjusting the window I’m also using, and then typing in Drafts) and that is the quickest way. Spotlight is the other option, which adds a step.

It Is an iPad not A Mac

Apple, this device is the iPad it isn’t a Mac, it has special super powers, which include the ability to help focus and be productive. With this new ipadOS 26 new functionality and capabilities are added that are helpful, but don’t take away the iPad’s strength as well. It may be those leading iPad don’t live with it as a core device and don’t care about its strengths and super powers, or they don’t understand productivity so they slipped up.

The windowed world of ipadOS 26 could easily have Slide Over and keep the super power of one flick for productivity. I’m hoping the fall release of ipadOS 26 still includes the productivity super power that sets the iPad apart and allows its users to have super productivity powers that help set them apart with the partnership of Apple’s products helping them be their best.

2025 Vanderwal.net Backend Modernization is Done

A couple years ago I thought I would update the backend code from PHP 5.6 to PHP 7 and initial progress on it was hindered by time available.

Planning the Modernization Work

A few weeks back I started looking at it again and mapped it out properly like a project. I realized PHP 7 was deprecated and I should really head to PHP 8, so that target was set. I was planning on keeping things relatively simple using a database connection quite similar to what I had used, but digging through PHP 8 books and resources on O’Reilly Learning Platform everything was using a newer more flexible method. After digging further I took the route that would take a bit more work modifying existing code (some going back to 2000 and 2001). But, as I dug into the work I realized I was only needing to modify and modernize about 20% to 30% of code on the pages and templates.

In doing this I also realized my old method of security around the system management backend was no longer working, so it had to be rewritten as well. That meant rebuilding the backend screens. Those updates went live two days ago on the 19th.

With that done it was back to the last third or so of the pages and templates that are public facing. I had already reworked the category output pages and adding pagination to them. No longer will all 121 Folksonomy categorized posts show up on one screen, only 15 at a time will. The “Personal” category has 369 posts (it is a blog so it is about me, you see, but just not all of it).

The RSS feed received a very minor update to RSS 0.92 to keep in line with many of the OG methods that remain.

The Actual Homepage has been Restructured

The homepage for vanderwal.net has been restructured to make it easier to find information that isn’t directly in the blog and I get emails and DMs about somewhat regularly. Moving it to two columns helped this. I do need to modify this to flex or grid CSS model as tweaking the layout was rather tedious.

This Modernization was like Changing the Plumbing and Wiring in a Building

This modernization was like bringing the plumbing and wiring of a building up to new building code. The walls and structure are all pretty much the same. The top layer stays the same for now.

This modernization does allow me to hopefully finish setting up webmentions, which I’ve had partly wired since around 2021 or so. I just need the last piece to that to work. There are also other IndieWeb related updates I’m planning on making and have been waiting to get this code updated before modifying and adding them into place. By the way, if you are running your own site and/or blog, the IndieWeb community has a gem. There are a lot of resources in their wiki and pages helping anybody with their own site.

The pagination for the blog is likely going to change from a date with month focussed pagination to a page model with the oldest selection being page 1. The archive page will get a long over due update so it doesn’t stop at 2003 (looks at calendar, yep it is out of date). I’m hoping to have an archive page that shows activity, but also addresses the different post types (essay, journal, and weblog) that only lasted the first few years, but also around the 2014 code update and site move the entry type template went missing.

The category listings pages will also likely get an update and the category page may likely get some ease of moving through the posts over time, beyond general pagination.

Assistance with the Update

This being 2025 the question pops up if and how I was using generative AI as part of this. I was using Claude.ai from Anthropic with some initial questions, then I’d head to O’Reilly’s resources to validate them and learn what I needed to know (it had been about 10 years since I was knee deep into PHP). When coding and modernizing the pages and templates I’d and hit defects I’d run those past Claude to sort out what the issue may be (sometimes missing “;”, others the new query wrapper and parsing method caused me to miss something, or I had deprecated code I hadn’t converted). Claude would point out my errors and instruct me how to correct it. Sometimes it would offer a few options for approaches (some were not quite right and others were good and I needed to select a path - after verifying and learning about them further). It also would crank out code. I gave Claude instructions not to bother with large chunks of my pages and code, which it left alone.

I use Claude stand alone and used is Project function to keep things focussed. I fed it the outlines and high level task areas I have in GitHub and Obsidian and it was keeping track of what was accomplished and how the work met the goals. The most impressive thing, compared to other generative AI options is it was very strict with identifying things not viable in PHP 8 (and its iterative versions) as nothing else did this well. Claude also had the code of pages and templates I had worked on and would point out I was using a structure and method in other page and ask if I shouldn’t use that practice on the page I just fed it to sort out some defect I was working through. My code has had four or more iterations over the 25 years and my early coding wasn’t so hot and still remained. Claude helped my code get more consistent, not by it fixing it, but pointing out I had something good and modern and I should keep consistent with that. By the last couple of templates I didn’t need to have Claude check them as they worked with my own editing, but I still fed them in as it seems to help improve suggestions and catching lack of consistency of my own doing.

A year ago I tried this with OpenAI and its ChatGPT and it was a hot mess. It couldn’t keep PHP versions correct. I try it with every update and I find it really problematic and what it outputs (code and other attempts) as nothing better than mediocre and often not correct.

IDE Use

In the last 10 to 15 years the IDE I’ve used to code and work on vanderwal.net has been from Panic and either Coda or now Nova, which have worked well. I have kept a good firewall between AI assistance and the IDE. I don’t mind type ahead suggestions. But, finding deprecated code to address was something I was going to need. Some friends suggested I try PhpStorm by JetBrains, which seemed good as I’ve used PyCharm a few times in the past and really enjoyed it. I knew I didn’t want VS Code near this, as I’ve pretty much had it with VS Code (I mostly use it with Python for data analytics) due to plug-in issues and lack of ease keeping projects separated.

I picked-up a trial of PHPStorm and after a day or so I had the hang of a good portion of what I needed to do. My favorite part is the setting the exact version of PHP you are working with. It highlights where there are errors and problems. In the last couple of days as I finally was getting the hang of PHP 8 and the methods I was regularly using PHPStorm was helping with type ahead suggestions (there were a few times where I accidentally triggered them when I didn’t want them and nearly turned of that functionality - control Z is your friend). PHPStorm also can make use of GitHub CoPilot, which I don’t find helpful with OpenAI connected to it, but is better with Claude Sonnet. The downside with CoPilot is it doesn’t have access to the Project space in Claude I’ve been working with and therefore its suggestions are less on target - CoPilot with Claude is light years better for PHP than OpenAI offerings). Essentially I didn’t use the incorporated genAI functionality and I was very happy with that setup.

Posting Ease

One of the things I’m looking forward to are slightly better methods for posting to this site and managing posts. Many of the steps beyond creating and posting are manual steps, like kicking off creation of the RSS feed (I do that after a quick review of the created post as it is live, I kick the RSS feed after that review). The alerting the media, or the alerts beyond basic RSS, is also a manual step done after that review. I may automate the combination of those two kicks after a review.

Modernization Test

Just a test of the modernized update to PHP 8.3 for the system management tools.

Tomorrowland IndieWeb Movie Club Review

The IndieWeb Movie Club - IndieWeb this month has Tomorrowland (2015) — The Movie Database (TMDB) as its focus this month, which was suggested by Tantek - May 2025 IndieWeb Movie Club.

Review of Tomorrowland

I finally watched the whole of Tomorrowland. My son had strongly recommended Tomorrowland after he saw it when it first came out, saying, “this is a movie you will love”. About two or three years ago I started watching it too late one evening and was about 45 minutes in and put it on hold, but didn’t get back to it.

Rather than starting where I left off, I started all over from the beginning. I didn’t remember much from my prior watching, but watching it from the start I had the same feeling and thoughts of, “this isn’t going where I thought it would go”. I had this thought a lot. The movie is largely had non-linear chronology in many spots and plays with time concepts, which is something I deeply enjoy.

Given it is 10 years beyond release, I’m not worrying about spoilers (in River Song voice or not). Much of the movie is working through crossing time and timelines from current storyline to one future timeline. The future, Tomorrowland, is a glimpse of the future created to show the possible optimistic outcome. Athena (Raffey Cassidy) is a young human-skinned bot who traverses Tomorrowland’s timeline and space to bring people in to help it become reality, but also save it. Hence, our two main characters, Frank Walker Geoge Clooney) and Casey Newton (Britt Robertson). Frank is the jaded and pessimistic creator who is back in our timeline under agreement to stay there. Casey is new to the Tomorrowland experience from her “gifted” token.

The movie leans into the Two Wolves - Wikipedia legend and storytelling device where the white wolf is positive and optimistic and the black wolf is negative and pessimistic and the one that wins is the one you feed. I felt this worked well and was a good underlying story driver.

Much of the movie was quite good, but some transitions were a bit bumpy. But, that may be intentional as much of the focus is on Casey and her perspective and at many key points she doesn’t have any understanding of what is going on, what the hole journey she is on is about, and also lacking context to have a foothold to understand what is going on. The only character that didn’t really seem fully fleshed out was the possibly evil David Nix (Hugh Laurie).

From a first watch perspective the bumpy path of the journey was a good framing and means of pulling the audience into the characters understand of what is happening.

The Wrap-up

I quite enjoyed Tomorrowland and my son’s estimate was pretty dead on. I really enjoy plays on time, timelines, and reality and this ticked the boxes well. The story was good and pulled the viewer along. The acting was good and cinematography and editing supported the time settings and moods along the storyline.

I would / will watch this again, but that will be a very different perspective. To give it a rating I’d put it at or just under 8 out of 10. It isn’t perfect nor did it put me in awe at any point, but it was quite enjoyable, ticked boxes for story focus I enjoy, and there are spots and perspectives I may be thinking about for a while.

A Blog Move and Thin Catch-up

Yah, I know. It has been a while. Some things have changed, as I’m searching for what is next on the work front. Where I was it was a bit restrictive on sharing outward, so things got a little quiet. I’m still working on the Social Lenses / Complexity Lenses and have 80 to 90 stubs of ideas in my backlog of blogfodder, for here or the Personal InfoCloud.

A Move of Personal InfoCloud

I hadn’t posted to my blog, Personal InfoCloud in a long while. I was in the midst of a 16 part “Shift Happened” series, which was hitting embracing complexity as the next part of the series. I’m not sure if or when I will return to that. But, my work agreement frowned on sharing things out and I had a long negotiation about my prior work and corpus of IP around the Complexity Lenses. But, now that I’m back and able to freely write and share again I realized my blog where that happened much of the time needed to move off SquareSpace. Why? Poor customer support and small things breaking and them blaming me, when I hadn’t touched it in years.

The last two plus months I focussed on the move out and into another platform. I had looked at a few options for a month or so prior, but SquareSpace had one easy export path out, which is to WordPress, which I could self host (I have a few small blogs and sites that I have on self-hosted WP and they are fine). While there is a lot of turmoil in the WordPress sphere, going with the self-hosted option seems viable as a transition, if not longer option. I did an export of my SquareSpace site and in 20 minutes of export I had all my posts in WP and all comments, tags / categories, most media in blog posts, and the structure was there.

While the first step was 20 minutes to get to about 80 percent of a move done, the next portion took about two months between many meetings around advisory to start-ups, discussions about next steps (everybody was holding out until after the election, then to sort out what level of chaos may ensue, now…, and finding a lot of interest it is just getting things to a reality), mentoring professionally to director and up leadership in product management and cross-functional design and development engineering (with a lot of data focus and AI), data analytics and analysis of my own 20+ years of what I know so it can be better organized for others to pick-up. But, I had a deadline of the first week of February for the move out of SquareSpace to take place, as it was the next billing cycle.

The last two months of the move of the blog focussed on getting the design transitioned over or finding a viable design theme to use and bend to something I could work with. I found something, but it came with a lot of options and capabilities, which I initially embraced, then started printing out screens to single screen PDFs and taking the red pen to them (even after the move I think there are some things that may go, but also things that need work to come back). The next big haul was touching every post fixing some media links broken and fixing the URLs, which included the pre-post name date slug as part of the post name. I got those finally sorted out at the end of last week and Thursday I started moving the domains (from where I was developing it in a sandbox), shift to the production site, adding certificates, fixing odd typography issues, fixing routing issues, and other oddities. I hit the deadline.

Move Done and Next Steps for PIC

With the move done, I didn’t realize how much stress and mental clutter I had tied up in that move. I was managing todo lists in Obsidian, GitHub, and some quick reminders with times and dates on them. I felt free to start thinking about what I was focussing on two months prior and a ton of pressure released.

With the Personal InfoCloud blog I still need to fix links that go to Slideshare as most are broken, but I need to sort out what I want to do with those presentations. Jon and Rashmi have started a new replacement for Slideshare as a modern attempt, which I need to try a bit more and assess the fit for needs.

I also need to sort out the homepage of the site, as I’ve long wanted to have a homepage that sits in front of the blogs. I have that now, but I’m not happy with it. With the deadline out of the way I can have it as one of my projects I’m working through.

The categories, post listing, and search is also something I need to re-think and get into a better state. When I moved from TypePad to SquareSpace in 2011 to 2012 there wasn’t a good way to manage this, and what I cobbled together I hated. But, for PIC the platform is something I don’t want to think about I just want to use to post things I write. WordPress has a lot more options and I played with a couple before I put a hard focus on making the deadline about 5 to 6 weeks ago.

I have quite a few blog posts ready to be written. An introduction to the Complexity Lenses (there are over 90 of them now and in my master outline of them with sub-nodes there are over 1,500 nodes all together, which each node capable of being a page to at least 5 pages of explanation). This introduction post may iterate over time, which I’m fine with and not true blog with a line in time tied to it that other posts have. I also need to write up my “20 Social Roles”, which I do a lot of work around helping organizations sort through the roles and dynamics of their work, collaborating, cooperative, and collective environments, but also tool and platform builders creating tools that close the gaps of missing support for any and all of these Social Roles.

What Happens Here?

Here at vanderwal.net I need to get back to building a habit of blogging again. The weeknote is something I may do to help my rhythm. I still write a ton, but it is all in my notes. My daily notes, or “Daily Dump”, looks an awful lot like my first 4 to 7 years of blogging here (so 2000 to 2007 / 2008), before short snippets and observations started ending up in Twitter.

I still need to spend a week of heads down work to update the underlying code that the site runs on. I started that about 2 years back, but a day or two here and there weren’t cutting it and not a good way to make progress, particularly since it requires rewriting the code on my many templates to get data out and filling the pages in. Once that is done I have a few things I really want to address, like pagination on tag pages, and fixing the flow of the blog across time.

Whew!

If you have interest in chatting and catching up, or if you have a project, product, or work you would like help with please reach out.

Take care.

The 8 Questions Answered in the Blog Questions Challenge

It has been a while since I’ve regularly blogged. I’m still writing a lot, but it is going into notes, and I need to get those back shared out. It used to be things I now put in notes, I just posted online (this sort of gets to the first question). I saw Joe Crawford answer these eight questions on his blog - ArtLung: Blog Questions Challenge ~ 16 Jan 2025. This seems like it would be a great thing to get the writing and workflow to post muscles functioning again.

1. Why did you make the blog in the first place?

I had some odd notes in HTML markup, mostly to myself, that I had posted before I started blogging. They were just HTML files roughly linked in a web directory. On this site I’ve had my links running as an HTML page since 1995, which is a couple years before I had my own domain.

In the web development community in the 1999 and 2000 I was reading sites that had become blogs. It was late 2000 when I was playing around with Blogger, mostly as a means to share links between home and work (this is what my FTP HTML files to my web directory was doing). In very late 2000 I made my first post in Blogger tied to this website. It worked on an FTP model as well at that point, but when I travelled hotels would block FTP from their hotel networks. I wrote a travel note system in PHP that allowed me to capture ideas, links, and notes. When I would get home I would introduce them back into Blogger. The travel notes turned into a CMS at work (I had been regularly rolling CMSes for work life for a few years).

2. Why did you choose to write your own blogging software?

I started with Blogger, but quickly was writing my own CMS for when I travelled. But, what I really wanted was the multiple categories added to blog posts that Grey Matter blogging software (Greymatter (software) - Wikipedia) had that Noah Gray created. I didn’t have an interest in going back to Perl as I had moved to PHP for easier development and having it be more readable code. So, I turned my Travel Notes I wrote in PHP into a more full fledged blogging tool. In Spring or Summer of 2001 I moved fully to my own hand written blogging software and It had stayed there. I still has functionality missing that I’ve long wanted to add.

I’ve updated the underlying code when I move hosts and I need to update the PHP to a newer version (I’m currently in the midst of doing that and hope by May to have that done, if not much sooner).

3. Have you blogged on other platforms before?

My Personal InfoCloud blog started on TypePad in 2005 (I had it on MovableType for a short bit, but Perl was rusty for me and I shifted to TypePad). Around 2012 that moved to SquareSpace and I’m in the midst of moving that to self-hosted WordPress. The PIC blog I just wanted to write and post, where as vanderwal.net I was fine messing with the underpinnings. I’ve setup and run a few WordPress sites. I helped get Home - Boxes and Arrows on MovableType, before MT was publicly available (Jay Allen ended up doing a lot of the heavy lifting as my worklife got very busy). Today I use Micro.blog very lightly and I need to sort out what I’m going to do with that.

4. Do you write your posts directly in the editor or in another software?

When I started blogging on this site I write in Bare Bones Software | BBEdit 15 in text, then would hand code the HTML and copy and paste that into the form, add in the title, location, type of post, and click categories to add. Around 2010 I shifted to Markdown in various Markdown editors. When the app Marked came out I started dragging the Markdown file to Marked and it would convert to clean HTML and I would check it, copy and past in to my system.

The since around 2010 or 2011 I’ve used iA Writer: The Benchmark of Markdown Writing Apps to write my blog content in Markdown. I have used Marked 2 to convert to HTML for this blog since it came out. The remainder of the workflow is to post into the CMS, it returns a blog post link, which I check through. If edits are needed I edit in Markdown, drag to Marked 2, drop in the test again for the post, and submit. If it is good, I go back to the CMS management screen and click to update the RSS feed. Then go to a push the notification something is posted to a ping service (it used to have 20+ options and now it is 2 or 3 I think).

5. When do you feel most inspired to write?

Most days I write thoughts I’ve been mulling as I wake. I capture links of interest I’ve read and write about those through out the day. In the evening I try to clear out open tabs and capture links then.

Sadly, in the last 4.5 years, since I’ve had Obsidian I just write in Markdown in there in a Daily Dump structure note template I have. Those all sit in the same directory as the Markdown for blog posts, as they are all notes.

I really need to get back in the habit of posting, at least a weeknote, if not more regularly. I have a long stack of writing to hone and post into Personal InfoCloud (more than 80 “blogfodder” items in a list for there - my past job didn’t take kindly to blogging, so I’ve held on to a lot of writing that just needs to get out).

6. Do you publish immediately after writing or do you let it simmer a bit as a draft?

Here on vanderwal.net in the Off the Top blog, it is pretty much what it says on the tin. As it is written it is posted. I’ve been trying to edit a bit more to fix missing letters, missing words, and making shorter sentences (that last bit becomes a rabbit hole), but mostly it goes out as I hit the last period. Marked 2 does some grammar checking and other lightweight edit helping, but not much more than that goes in to it.

7. Your favorite post on your blog?

Most posts I forget I’ve written once posted. The act of writing and posting clears them from my head, which is part of why I blog - so to clear my mind for other things. But, I think my favorite isn’t in the actual blog but adjacent to it, Model of Attraction - First Draft :: vanderwal.net, which is a brain dump while on a flight after the inkling of the idea for it was seeded. It was going to go into the Off the Top blog, but I set it apart as a draft. There are many posts I’ve written about attraction since that time -Attraction :: Off the Top :: vanderwal.net. The Model of Attraction is the underlying foundation for a lot of approaches to thinking through and assessing things technical, social (along with grad degree with deep social sciences and analytic / quant).

8. Any future plans for your blog? Maybe a redesign, changing the tag system, etc.?

I am in the midst of updating the PHP on the back end to bring the site’s code current. Once that is done I really need to add pagination to categories, a better previous and next navigation, calendar / chronology focus display of posts, and site search. I’ve also long wanted to have concurrent category views, say “folksonomy” and “data visualization” for better .

The other thing I really am wanting to do is to have a Digital Garden section shared out, like Maggie Appleton lays out here A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden and does on her site, or as Tom Critchlow has been tending to on his site - Tom Critchlow. Move. Think. Create..

Delicious Library Shut Down

Will Shipley who created Delicious Library, a personal book collection tracking app for Apple’s Macs (It started there and then moved to iPhone / iPad as well), announced on Mastodon, Delicious Library Removed from App Store - Will Shipley. Shipley also took down the site for Delicious Library. The unsentimental background for Delicious Library can be found at Wikipedia - Delicious Library - Wikipedia.

You Don’t Know Delicious Library?

Delicious Library was an utter gem of an app. It was wonderfully designed and looked like one’s bookcases, with the book covers facing out. The metadata for the book, which it could support an abundance of, was easy to use and it could pull some of the metadata from Amazon through its API. The rest was up to the user of the app. If you enjoyed books and well crafted apps,

Delicious Library was the gem that people raved about and love to tell their friends about. The product was one of those apps in the mid–2000s that stood out, not as an Apple related app, but a great one across all platforms (others were Skitch and Apple’s own Keynote). Delicious Library when it was open and others were around, people would ask what it was and to show them how it worked. Great apps excel at not only filling a need, but also bringing delight, as well as showcasing a platform.

Wired has a great review and overview of the app and the people behind it and the response from users in a 2005 article - Monster Fueled by Caffeine.

I still was feeding my Delicious Library app, but in the last few years with my use of Obsidian and the book search plug-in (it pulls its metadata from Google’s Books API) I log all my new books in there. But, the ease of data entry and fun and legacy collection of books I have in it I still feed Delicious Library. The ease of use the last, maybe, 10 years or so was just holding up the book’s barcode on the cover or dust jacket so Delicious Library’s use of the Mac’s camera could read it and pull in the data from the Amazon API. That was so simple.

The End Came Quickly, Then Slowly

The end of Delicious Library came when Amazon pulled access to their API without warning nor discussion (very much in Amazon’s usual form). This broke the core ease of functionality and Shipley (who has been an Apple employee for a while now) who doesn’t have the time to rework Delicious Monster to use another source (like the excellent Google Books API, but Google is also wildly erratic with what is continues to offer as services and products).

You can still manually add data to your Delicious Library and it still functions rather well. But, it is a slow movement into the sunset for a wonderfully delightful product.

Weeknote - 3 September 2022

You are asking, “Where are you? Are you okay? Are you still blogging?”

In TikTok parlance, “Great questions. Let me tell you.” First, this standard TikTok pattern is one I find really interesting. It fills in he politeness / nicety gap that has become common in the last decade or two, where people jump into answering questions. This nod to thanking the person asking encourages questions and puts people at ease who asked a question (speaking up is often not something most people are comfortable with). But, the pattern has been used so much and is just a common / required custom, it starts to come off as forced or canned, much like required legal disclaimers. None-the-less, it is a good practice.

Well this was a long “week” (parts of this were in an end of March weeknote that needed finishing, so now edited and updated). Things on the work front got incredibly busy and hectic. I’m going to treat this “weeknote” as a catch-up of things that have held my attention over the past year.

I’m hoping to get back to posting regular weeknotes and blogging. My other blog Personal Infocloud has been quite for a long time, but been waiting for about 2 years for SquareSpace to fix a defect that impacted styling and showing full posts. I have a lot of older content I’ve long used in presentations and workshops, that I’m working to turn into videos of some of the pieces of them that are clearer for understanding in video / animated form. I’m also back working on the 70 plus set of social / complexity lenses I’ve been working on for around 14 years with that label, but around 20 years all together going back to the Model of Attraction (still a foundation for a lot of thinking and framing).

With my son off to college, I may have a little more time to write and share. I’m also looking at a digital garden model (see the last section) and as of recently Massive Wiki for a collaborative or commons approach of moving the Lenses forward (well outward).

Note Taking

I have been deep into cataloging, reading, and using the heck out of Obsidian since trying it out in June of 2020 and going all in at the end of July 2020 and it is now second nature. But, this built on my 10 or so years of taking markdown notes in a directory, which I had 8 to 10 year of text notes in that same directory (which were bulk renamed to markdown). My approach and use of aliases and front matter have changed how I do things, but more on that in the Productivity section below. Many of my issues in a quick test of Roam proved to save me from that path and set of problems, Notion not being mine and not a standard file format so I can reuse the notes easily has stopped being used, I use DevonThink but its backlinking and attempt at other Obsidian functionality was clumsy in my source archive (and I just pull in my directory that Obsidian sits on top of so search is relevant with resources saved), and with Obsidian now having iOS capability I’m really using it a lot on the go. I have a seriously strong preference for having the notes be separate from a system that wrangles and provides organizing for and around them. Having used nvAlt for nearly 10 years when it broke badly and wouldn’t open, all of the 2,500 or so markdown (and text) notes that sat under the app in a directory (and linked with file metadata tags). Putting Obsidian in the same notes directory and crating that directory as a vault things just continued on, but now with far more functionality.

One irony is my use of Obsidian, and in particular my daily notes (Daily Dump), has me posting and sharing here less. It is ironic as I write in the Daily Dump as if I am writing to others, but the notes are just to myself (for now - this may change if I can sort out how to keep some of the reading, learning, observations, etc. separate from work or formative observations. The Daily Dump was partly intended to capture things that could be shared back out in a weeknote. Things like the Personal Operating System, which I found insanely insightful (read below), things from Sentiers and The Near Future Lab (particularly around Generalists, which I find quite similar to a bumping into a brightline for polymaths, but also bumps up against Jane McConnell’s book The Gig Mindset Advantage (more on these later as well).

With Obsidian having tags (used to aggregate related things, as a hook metaphor I’ve used for 18 years or more) and the backlinks to use as bridges to move to related materials and ideas much in the way any hypertext environment functions. I used VooDoo Pad on my Macs for roughly 15 years, but it not easily working across iPad and phone to easily read, edit, or add to the corpus had it shift out of my main workflow. I also use Drafts for quick input from mobile and sometimes iPad.

Obsidian has been amazing with its pace and quality of development over the last 2 years. The iPad version is pretty solid, but I’m usually in reach of my iPad so I’m not leaning on it all that much at the moment. This past week there were large changes to the insider build for 0.16 (it was reworking some underpinnings to improve many of community built plug-ins, themes, and templates), but it was the first time the updates broke things in my workflow rather badly. Normally updates cause no problems, but only offer benefits and improvements, with occasional bumps that are resolved in 5 to 10 minutes. But, with the bump this week, I still love it for thinking through writing and note capturing and interlinking. There isn’t anything out there that is close to it.

Read

I have been reading a lot, with a good portion coming through me trusty RSS feed reader, NetNewswire, which echoes my vanderwal.net links page.

Newsletters

While I am not a huge fan of newletters (mostly the part that they arrive in email and not RSS, but the ones that also have RSS feeds are the ones I have been sticking to). Many of these arrive on Sunday, but I really wish it were Friday night or early Saturday morning so I have Saturday and Sunday mornings to get through them and follow the links and devour what is there, but Sunday mornings many arrive and I spend the week going through them.

The one that I am a huge fan of from a general purpose is Patrick Tanguay’s own newsletter Sentiers, which I find to be a real gem. I lost track of Patrick for a while after his Alpine review stopped publishing. I would love to see his Sentiers grow to be a bit more as I find it to be such a good offering. I have been reading it regularly for about a year or a bit more and Patrick has been popping up on podcasts I follow (Near Future Lab (now mostly moved to a Discord for and The Informed Life - more on these later).

Jorge Arango’s newsletter, Informa(c)tion, is an information and organization focussed gem that arrives every other Sunday. There are always good pieces and the links are gems.

Others I really enjoy and tend to link to things that open more browser tabs are: The Marganilian by Maria Popova; Curtis McHale’s PKM newsletter; and Monocle Weekend Edition newsletter (there are many times of late were the newsletter is a bit off target, but the balance for me mostly entertainment).

Books

The Gig Mindset Advantage has been a gem, mostly as it is very familiar as it is pretty much my natural (unintended) MO (modus operendi).

The Map of Knowledge, by Violet Moller has become one of my favorite books. It quickly turned into a slow meditative read as it broke some of my prior understanding of the world of knowledge and creation of advanced math, sciences, and philosophy. This refactoring of my understanding was around the realization that most of the “great books” and works that are the foundations are just very tiny slivers of knowledge that made it through an insanely fragile process of keeping paper copies. A book would need to be hand-written to create a copy and that copy on paper would only last 50 to 80 years before it would heavily decay. I knew well that most of what Western Europe used as fodder in the Renaissance for advancement were works from ancient Greece that had been kept alive through the great libraries and education systems in Persia, Near East, Middle East, Arabian regions, North Africa, and Moorish efforts in Spain. The realization that were may not be looking at the best thinking from the “classics”, but just those that made it through time.

While I had a decent understanding of the vast contributions advancing math, sciences, medicine, and philosophy that are the foundations of much of western thinking, I didn’t know much of the who, when, and where. The Map of Knowledge goes into these areas with a very good level of understanding. The book also does a great job laying out the cycle of life for advanced learning and libraries in each of the regions and progressions through time. One of the common cycles that causes the downfall in many regions was gap in the civilization between those with advanced knowledge and learning and those in power, as well as regular poeple. That chasm between the advanced and those not caused a lot of friction, most often leading to the destruction of libraries and institutions. Many of the civilizations never returned to anything close to the advancements. But, the libraries and learning institutions dispersed and found new benefactors and locations to continue moving forward.

Violet Moller has certain given me a good foundation to learn more.

Gillian Tett’s Anthro-Vision was a book, well a chapter in that book, I’ve been waiting for for many years. The chapter on “Financial Crisis” where Tett had been researching financial markets using her background as an anthropologist for a new role at The Financial Times. Tett followed the paths of understanding in the way a good ethnographer / anthropologist does looking to understand the quiet, and seemingly foundational, areas that seem to be out of focus. This area was that of credit swaps in financial loan markets, which were what caused the 2007 housing market collapse and in 2008 at the massive meltdown of the financial markets. The model for building understanding is one that should be common, but sadly isn’t. The remainder of the book is quite good as well.

Productivity

The biggest thing around productivity is my use of Obsidian continues, as mentioned above. In a couple chats recently I have found other have brought up the backlinking / crosslinking as the most valuable feature. For those of us who have been using Macs for a while we find it reminiscent of not only wikis and their power, but in particular VooDoo Pad, which was light weight and everything was easily interlinked and backlinked and search was incredibly good. VooDoo Pad ran locally on your Mac (eventually it also could sync and run on iOS devices, but it needed a special application to run it). The genius bit about Obsidian is it is just markdown notes with an app that acts as an over watcher to connect and index things, but leaves the markdown notes fully usable by any other app or service that can use Markdown.

Having been taking notes in one directory (and its sub-directories) for some 20 years the ability to always get to my notes and use them is highly valuable. I have run through numerous other apps (particularly cloud based) that just die or go away as they are no longer popular or the owners have the wonderfully tragic combination of being ignorant and arrogant. I can pick-up any of my notes in markdown that have backlinks and they also function in Drafts or other programs. The principle of Small Apps Loosely Joined still has resonance and deep value.

Along with Obsidian and the backlinked notes, I have also been keeping a keen eye on Digital Gardening (Maggie Appleton explains this really well and had links to others also diving deeply). At some point I also stumbled upon Software for your second brain - The Stack Overflow Podcast with Alexander Obenauer talking about his quest for creation of a “personal operating system”, which he shares out in his Lab Notes. Much of Alexander’s quest became refocussed on Obsidian as it was doing a lot of what he needed and was trying to frame out so to build it. He has crated extensions to Obsidian to close some of his perceived gaps, but the underlying principle is data portability and a concept incredibly close to the Small Apps Loosely Joined.

Not quite a Weeknote - Life Demarkation Summer and Brother Mel

Friday was my 2nd week since my 2nd vaccination for Covid–19 so things are a bit freer for me, should I take that path. I am deeply relieved to have had the vaccine and to start thinking about life on the other side of this pandemic, but also realizing there will be a 6 month or 9 month booster shot needed to keep the protection fresh and adapt it for new strains, much like the flu shot.

The French Open and a Time When it was My Comfort

This being the end of May it means The French Open has started and one of my markers for my seasons and cycles comes to mind. Back in 1988 I returned from Europe from studying (I took my last semester of undergrad in Oxford at the Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies and staying with my friend in Lyon (with about a week camping trip to Corsica)) to come back to the US to go through graduation at St. Mary’s College. I was going through some rather rough reverse culture shock and shifting to post college live. But, watching The French Open, the Today Show (it was traveling around Europe), Wimbledon, and The Tour de France (I grew up watching it and loved cycling) kept some tentative connection to Europe that kept me sane. I had some Roland-Garros and French Open t-shirts and beach towels that were gifts from an aunt who strung rackets for some at the Open.

I hadn’t had much of connection to The French Open prior to that summer, but it is something that has stuck. It brings comfort, but also brings some understandings of the world a bit closer. That summer I also found James Baldwin’s books and Notes of a Native Son and some other writings of his, which really struck home. I understood Baldwin’s comfort with France and challenging mindset of the US. Baldwin’s thinking in writing about not feeling a part and finding something with a life and mental models in another place somewhat comforting as it wasn’t just me. I grew up with Sesame Street and everybody gets along and treats each other the same way as a common mindset and thought that was the way things were, but living outside the US had me see that wasn’t the case and things I didn’t see or wasn’t able to see as I didn’t have another perspective I could see clearly.

Seeing the clay courts of Rolland-Garros bring that right back. But, also refind the focus of life long learning that the Oxbridge systems prepares one for. As well as some of the heavy reading I did that first summer back in the US.

Brother Mel

Thinking of this and having some time unfocused from work and time to think of the passing of Brother Mel Anderson who was President of Saint Mary’s College of California. This one hurt a bit, as a lot of who I am and became as an adult I owe to Brother Mel. When I was at St. Mary’s he lived in the dorms across from one of my good friends and while waiting for my friend to get back to his room so we could study or head off to do whatever I would chat with Brother Mel. We got into some good deep discussions early and spent a lot of time talking with him. He would ask if I knew about something and when I wouldn’t I would get books and rip through them to have follow on discussions. He was an intellectual mentor constantly pushing, but also opening doors to understanding how the world worked, and deepening appreciation for the arts, food, and better understanding the world around.

My first summer at St. Mary’s he asked if I wanted to work on special projects for him, which was ripping apart one of the freshman dorm’s hallway walls and reinforcing them to make them stronger and a lot more quiet. I was also running room service at the Oakland Airport Hilton, which was a blast. I was living with a friend in Berkeley in his fraternity’s old apartment building (it had an amazing roof top view of The Bay). But, as I was mostly around campus during the summer and not many other students (but basketball camp was going on, which meant I got to meet and know the Barry brothers who taught me how to shoot a basketball properly). I got to know the campus and the Christian Brother’s community quite well and would usually have a meal with Brother Mel once during the week. At the end of that summer Brother Mel asked if I was going to do anything fun before school started and I thought I may had to New York City, but my mom shot that down. My response was, “well, if not New York now then Europe next summer”. I had no idea that Brother Mel would take two to three students every other summer on trips around Europe, so he offered.

The following summer it was supposed to be Brother Mel and another student heading to Europe for just under four weeks. The other student had to back out a couple weeks before the trip due to a tumor found on his thighbone. Another he offered to go wasn’t able to do it on short notice, but was a friend of mine from the year before and rowing crew. One stop was Oxford to have an interview with the Centre I had applied to study at for my last semester (that was approved the week before we left). We stayed in London at a Christian Brothers house, Paris, Lyon, Florence, Luzern, Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Heidelberg, and Amsterdam. Between each city we would take the train and I would read, but Brother Mel would talk to me about where we were going and provide history and talk about what to expect. We would head to museums, trek about the city, have one decent meal, and hit historic spots. It was amazing. It was akin to the old school Grand Tour, and it really opened my eyes to seeing the rest of the world. It was a great preparation for years later heading to conferences around the globe to speak and small really interesting gatherings around the globe with smart folks digging into various early ideas in a domain.

That following summer I was back from Oxford and Lyon, which I was well prepared for and kept in good touch with Brother Mel until I moved to the DC areas. It wasn’t as easy to pop over to St. Mary’s, but I stopped in a few times on trips back to say hello and catch-up. He is deeply missed and I’m deeply grateful for his life and his amazing impact on mine. He opened my mind and the world, but also helped me believe in myself, which I hand’t learned to do up until I met him.

Weeknotes - 07 February through 28 February 2021

This is a late posting of a combined set of weeknotes, which doesn’t cover much. This stretch started with a sinus series of sinus infections and then the side issues stayed. But, at the start of it went through the Covid–19 tests as a precaution (yes, the one where a swab is inserted into your nose so deeply they must be testing past lives too). The sinus issues have remain, with improvement and regression. Work has also been cycling through some deep model work where foundations and goals shift, in a very complex environment and taking mapping of models and needs from very complex into something more simple for initial framings that can adapt.

Read

“Posti (yes, the Finnish postal service) recently launched a new concept complete with good lighting, dressing rooms, an organized recycling area and wrapping stations. Designed for city-centre workers who would rather not have their goods delivered to the office, the concept allows for outfits ordered via e-comm to be tried on in a dressing room and then sent back if they don’t fit. There’s also an array of paper, boxes, ribbons and stickers for wrapping and sending gifts that would challenge even the best Japanese department store.” from - Monocle Weekend
Edition: Sunday: Finnish line

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Matt Webb writes about Memexes, mountain lakes, and the serendipity of old ideas and focuses on note taking, particularly smart people have reservoirs of notes they have taken and can pull at them to quote and interlink ideas easily.

Listened

On the walk listened to Ted Radio Hour - It Takes Time. Which broke into four segments: Sloths with zoologist Lucy Cooke, neuroscientist Matthew Walker, architect Julia Watson on long time and deep time(also has a book Lo―TEK - Design by Radical Indigenism) , and NASA engineer Nagin Cox who talks about different time patterns needed for working with Mars day time and keeping in sync.

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Paul Ford and Rich Ziade had another gem, well the pretty much all are, in today’s Postlight Podcast - No AI Needed: Fix The Old Before Bringing in the New as they get into the Gartner and enterprise always looking at the shiny but not dealing with the underlying messes.