Category: Personal tools

Personal digital tools

subscribe to this category with rss

Posted on
by

Early December I blogged about wanting to build a stronger habit of bookmarking and annotating in Hypothes.is (which sends everything on to my notes in Obsidian). Over the past month that has worked out nicely, with steady additions to my bookmarks and annotations, unlike before.

In that early December posting I mentioned wanting to fix two things:

Today I made a first version of tool to allow me to share to Hypothes.is from mobile. I reused the same code I made for posting within my feedreader, but with added precautions and checks because it needs to live on the open web to function.

The reason I wanted to build my own tool is that one way of doing this, through a proxy server run by Hypothes.is, will be switched off by February. The suggested replacement for mobile somehow doesn’t work in my mobile browser. I don’t know why, and felt it’s better anyway to try and build my own thing.

In this first iteration, it’s a regular webform served from one of my domains, that I bookmarked. While browsing online, I can copy the URL and e.g. the title of a page to the clipboard, and then open and populate the webform by selecting the bookmark, adding a comment and some tags. Hitting submit, sends it all to Hypothes.is. This works best if you have a clipboard on your mobile that can have multiple entries, so you have the material for one or more bookmarks and annotations on it.

So my second fix from last month I’ve now created. Probably I will iterate a bit on this, to see if I can reduce the number of steps involved.

Posted on
by

I’ve reached 2000 bookmarks and annotations in Hypothes.is. A large chunk of those 2000 bookmarks came this month, some 20% of them. Because, mostly I think, I’ve hit on the right mindset that makes bookmarking/annotating in hypothes.is a habit. Next to having a bit more energy and mental space in general than I had for a long time, that really helps too.

Exactly four years ago today I created my Hypothes.is account. I made my first annotation there only in April 2022, and started using it regularly in late August 2022.

Two thousand isn’t a whole lot of course. Annotation is not just bookmarking, and a single page can have many annotations. Still it is relatively more than the 3200 bookmarks I collected in Delicious over the span of eleven years, from summer 2004 to summer 2015, and the hundreds I saved to Evernote between 2016 and 2020. And it makes Hypothes.is the only new addition to my otherwise shrinking distributed online presence in the past years.


The graph of my annotations, a start in the fall of 2022, then a steady linear path for two years, followed by a little jump and a much flatter usage for a year, ending in a strong jump.

I noticed early this month that something seemed to be shifting in my annotations.
Three elements are part of that shift, and they combine to make a more active habit

  • I made it easier to bookmark and annotate, by reducing the friction to annotate from right inside my feedreader.
  • I let go of the internal voice that any annotation should be a ‘proper and serious’ annotation, a result of thinking. Annotation is an every day activity, creating the breadcrumbs that may result in deeper thinking later on in my notes. All annotations flow automatically into my local notes, where I can work with them and re-use them.
  • I start with a question or topic and wander where hyperlinks take me for 15 minutes or so. This is the type of browsing like it’s 1993, when that was the only way you could take in the world wide web (and actually for a short while: take in the entire web). It feels natural, and it feeds actual current interests, work-related, side interests and every day things. It makes annotation an every day activity for real.

The first two changes make it easier to start annotating. The last change makes the biggest difference, as it results in short bursts of new annotations in a steady rhythm.

Hypothes.is isn’t a widely used tool out on the open web. It is mostly used in educational settings, for classes and groups, and integrated into learning systems. It does have a few social features though, like the ability to not just follow (through RSS e.g.) but also respond to other people’s annotations. Like in the old days of Del.icio.us that is a way to find others interested in the same thing as you but from a different perspective and using different language to describe it. I have a small roll of Hypothes.is users. You can also check out who is annotating using similar tags to yours to find new people.

Posted on
by

Yesterday Martijn Aslander demonstrated the personal information tools he recently created. I came away inspired. Perhaps not by the tools as such, and more because of the pathways of thinking it opened. And because everything was so blazingly fast. All vibe-coded, as he has no coding skills himself.
I can see how the way his brain works is aided by the structure and availability of information his personal toolbox provides him. However, I myself would be more interested in shaping a personal tool like this towards being able to facilitate me in my processes and habits, as well as let me work towards actual outputs.

The Digitale Fitheid (Dutch language platform) community (Digital Fitness, the English language platform) has a monthly face-to-face meet-up in Utrecht, and yesterday was this year’s last. In the morning E had attended a session by Frank Meeuwsen on how to use Claude Code to quickly build something from scratch. In the evening I joined Martijn’s session on what he is calling his ‘Theta OS‘.

Some observations.

  • Martijn’s Theta is mostly a dashboard on local information. It shows him lots of different pieces of information at a glance. Each of these things, hotel bookings, books, payments, tasks, quantified self measurements and more, can live and be accessed in their own little apps and silos, but he uses the dashboard to combine them in context. At the outset he said that having his own established ontology (in the information sense, not the philosophical) was a prerequisite. That sounds very true, as the purpose here is having an extremely personal tool. The value is in combining various information sources on purely personal criteria on the fly.
  • His tool stack is sqlite (a lightweight database, installed by default on my Mac), with node.js (to run javascript), and regular html and css for the front-end using the local webserver on his laptop. I didn’t have node.js on my Mac, installed it now to be able to try some things.
  • He is not a coder, so everything is vibe coded with Claude Code. And while maintaining that makes him able to quickly create things, he spent some 500 hours in Claude Code in the past months. Makes me wonder what he could have done in those 500 hours if he hadn’t used it. I do recognise that given his nature, a organised path of exploration and learning would not have been feasible, though might well have resulted in a similar proof of concept after 500 hours.
  • Because of this he wasn’t really able to conceptually discuss the results other than what it does on the front-end and what it means to him. When asked about the architecture of the tool he therefore asked Claude Code to whip up a description.
  • In working with Claude Code he did not feed it his personal information, but abstracted structures. E.g. to incorporate a CSV with personal information he would provide the structure and a bit of dummy data to get a parser or importer and change the database structures. Then use the importer for the actual data outside of Claude.
  • To Martijn Theta is for surfacing and combining little pieces of data and information. He also uses markdown notes a lot (with Obsidian as viewer), but Theta keeps all the small pieces out of his notes. Only when he combines things into something more informational he brings it into his markdown notes. I find this distinction makes sense, as I am usually adverse to ‘make Obsidian do everything for me’ type of efforts. I use several tools that work on my Obsidian notes but do not attempt to be part of Obsidian. Largely absent yesterday was the other way around in the demo / discussion: getting small bits out of Obsidian into his dashboard.
  • The entire thing as it is now is a tool that clearly and visibly had an evolutionary path, as opposed to a planned-for structure and design. This appeals to me a lot. It is the same with my own personal tools and system of notes. Others sometimes remark on how it would impossible for them to create something like it for themselves. Thing is, neither could I. The current state evolved over time, and does not lend itself to reconstruction. That this sense of evolution stands out to me after a few months of Martijn spending that 500 hours in total on his Theta OS too, to me is a strong argument in favor of his approach.
  • This is reinforced by how he clearly builds intensively on his own structures and habits. As I often remark too, I am predictable to myself, and it means any software tool you build for yourself can make choices based on that predictability. If I want to save something I know which attributes I care about, and in which form I want to have them available. If I make a shopping list I know the order of the supermarket shelves of the store I’ll visit. If I’m near a Dutch railway station in the evening, it is most likely I intend to take a train home, that type of thing. The same is true for my information strategies. I know where I store my book notes and how, as I’ve been doing it for ages etc.
  • Building on that predictability he makes functionalities in Theta highly contextual. If he bookmarks a LinkedIn profile, it means he wants a person note with a few distinct fields from the profile (e.g. current role and location), and bookmarking then means the creation of such a person note in the same way as all his existing person notes already are. If it’s a recipe it pulls out the recipe, converts cooking terms and measures to Dutch terms and measures, and makes the ingredients available to dump into a shopping list.
  • Similarly everywhere he has a ‘copy to clipboard’-button in his Theta, it has a contextually determined template, so he can paste it into something else in the way he needs it at the destination. I use those templates in different places already, the way I send a bookmark to my blog, my annotation tool, and how an annotation is imported into my Obsidian notes, how I save a webpage in markdown to my notes, are all determined by a template that takes the same basic information but styles and orders it differently based on purpose and destination.
  • That contextualisation sometimes needs persistent data from outside. He incorporates such data into his local database. E.g. all the place names for the Netherlands, so he can recognise a place name in his own material, or search with any of them across his material. Or the list of translated cooking terms mentioned above.
  • He created his own e-mail client interface (using IMAP to access his mail accounts). This allows him to create processing geared to his own routines. E.g. a button to process an e-mail as a hotel reservation, or as parcel delivery announcement, or to pull location or event data from etc. That information then surfaces in his dashboard where it is made useful. It resulted in a rather long row of specific processing contexts but I can definitely see the power of it. Like I tinker with my ‘ideal feedreader’, doing the same for an ‘ideal e-mail interface’ where the point is to not let things reside in e-mail but make it findable and useful outside of it makes a lot of sense. And again, because you are predictable to yourself it is obvious what ‘outside’ means in each instance.
  • He created ‘companion apps’ (using Mac’s Xcode to make them for iOS, I wonder if something similar for Android exists) for his phone, allowing him to access and work with information on the go.

On the train home, I started exploring both sqlite and node.js in more detail, to figure out if and how I may want to add it to my local personal tool set.
Can I use this to reignite my work on my personal toolsuite? That work is more aimed at facilitating myself in my processes and helping me achieve outputs.
Despite going to bed late, I woke unexpectedly early, given the holidays and weekend, and felt the need to explore more. So the session definitely kicked something in gear. It does need my personal approach of course, and I have plenty of relevant notes on this from the past years to use for it. Years ago, back in 2017, I already gave the effort a name too, Aazai.
I set up sqlite and node.js this morning to have a sandbox to try some building blocks out.

Posted on
by
I have been using Hypothes.is, an annotation platform, for a bit over 3 years now (my account is 4 years old).
Storing bookmarks and creating annotations that way is easy. A browser add-on makes it one click (and the writing of course) to add an annotation.

Using the Hypothes.is Obsidian plugin also means any annotation comes into my notes seamlessly through the Hypothes.is API.

I use the same API to be able to post to Hypothes.is from within my personal feedreader’s reading flow (I can also post directly to my Obsidian notes there). This means I can annotate something without opening it separately in the browser at all.

Over time I’ve looked in wonder at the speed and volume with which Chris Aldrich uses Hypothes.is on a daily basis. To me it indicates that it is his main connection between his browsing and his rough notes. He hit 10k annotations three years ago already.

Although I have mostly reduced friction for making annotations themselves, my mental model of annotations and my practice haven’t much shifted since I started using Hypoythes.is in earnest in August 2022. (Around the time Chris mentioned above hit 10k annotations.)
One pitfall is similar to ‘I should write proper blog posts‘, ‘I should properly annotate‘. Meaning not having more than 1 annotation for a site or posting isn’t ‘proper’. Only annotating things I’m reading with focus count! That sort of thing. It means a much stricter curation than necessary. The only actual question is if I want to be able to find something back again. If so, then I should add it. It’s not only annotation, it’s bookmarking too.

That goes hand in hand with me more deliberately setting aside time for myself to explore things online. Something that I lost sight of a good while ago. Finding my way back to a sense of wonder, also means wandering about online, starting from a question or notion, and following the breadcrumbs others have left on the open web. This is the good old web-surfing habit of old.

The past week I deliberately spent more time browsing and bookmarking/annotating. My annotations jumped by over 100. As a result I added several interesting scientific papers to my Zotero library, added a few books to my library, and generally had a good time finding things I didn’t know I was looking for.

Hopefully this evolves in a stronger habit of bookmarking and annotation.

Two things I intend to do, to reduce friction for this even more.
One, currently from within my feedreader I can post to either my blog or to Hypothes.is, but not both. I want to change that, so that the same thing can serve two purposes simultaneously. (Or better yet, not for now, what if I could have my own instance of hypothes.is that is also visible as a category / stream in my website?)
Two, I haven’t figured out yet if I can get hypothes.is to work on mobile, for the initial bookmarking of a site. My mobile browser regularly has a lot of open tabs at the end of a day, some of it useful to retain.

Today I hit 1700 bookmarks and annotations. Let’s see where that number stands in 3 months, as a measure of a renewed bookmarking and annotation habit.

Posted on
by

Bryan Alexander provides an overview and interesting analysis of his current social media presences and what they mean and have meant for him, his work and interaction.
His summing up of the various platforms that used to be and currently are online places he frequents reminded me of how I talked about my online presences around 2007. What they did for me, and what I shared through these platforms.
I called it the Long List of My Distributed Self back then.

It read:

Blog, what I think about
Jaiku, what I am doing
Twitter, what I say I am doing
Plazes, where I am and where I was
Dopplr, where I will be
Flickr, what I see
delicious, what I read
Wakoopa, what software I use
Slideshare, what I talk about
Upcoming, where I will attend
Last.fm, what I listen to
and then there is my LinkedIn, my Facebook, my Xing, my Hyves, my NING, and my collaborative tools MindMeister, Thinkfold, and Googledocs.

That list these days is much shorter.

The utility of social software and web2.0 as we called it then, not social media, is that of leaving longer traces. Traces for others to stumble across, so that interaction can happen. As a way of ‘finding the others’, creating conversations and emergent networks of connections.

Bryan Alexander is the only blogger I never met in person and yet see as part of my inner circle of bloggers I’m in touch with through my feedreader. That interaction goes back 20 years. Talking about leaving longer traces.

All that in a context where the number of users on these platforms was smaller and, most importantly, well before the currently remaining of those platforms turned on them and started manipulating what everyone saw. Which ultimately moved them completely away of enabling longer traces, and made it harder to find the others. That affordance having been replaced by shoving those (and things) that are already highly visible in everyone’s face, without anyone seeking those out intentionally. And now adding the still denser fog of generated slop.

The change in those platforms, replacing lengthened human traces with adtech’s engagement optimising masquerading as such, has shortened that 2007 long list of my distributed self.

A range of services on that list shut down or were acquired and then subsumed, Jaiku, Plazes, Dopplr, delicious, Wakoopa, Hyves, NING, Thinkfold. Some of those in terms of functionality I still miss, especially delicious, Plazes and Dopplr.
Others showed themselves less capable of / suited for the type of longer traces and finding of others I was interested in, such as Upcoming, Last.fm, Xing.
Those that survived became toxic, Facebook, Twitter, Slideshare, Foursquare. My use of collaboration tools moved to less public environments although open source and self-hosted.

The current list of my distributed self is short, much shorter than in 2007.

  • Blog, this place here, still the main element, and across all of these service past and present the most long lived one and the one under my own full control. It generates conversations, although less in the comment section. Regularly though people, also first time commenters, respond using email.
  • Flickr, still in use, for 20 years now too, but it’s not much of a social space these days, more a convenient archive that I automatically add to from my phone. I have removed (almost) all embeddings of Flickr photos in this site and replaced them with a local copy of the image and a link to their location on Flickr, preempting any tracking unless one clicks the link. While I may still decide to do away with Flickr too at some point, currently its utility as a searchable and chronological archive of 43k of my photos is still high for me.
  • Hypothesis, a new entrant in the list, is a very useful annotation tool, that functions somewhat like an alternative for delicious, the bookmarking tool of old. It has a social aspect, centered around the annotated text, and while ‘finding the others’ through it doesn’t happen often it happens often enough to be delightful.
  • Mastodon, which does Twitter like it’s 2006, which I use from a single person instance, avoiding the scaling that led Twitter et al astray. I cut the ‘longer traces’ aspect short on Mastodon, deleting entries after a few days. Born out of practicality (Mastodon bloats the needed database volume at astonishing rates), it is also a recognition of those messages being ephemera, conversations in passing. Finding the others is still very possible through it, and messages I don’t want to treat as transient originate in my blog (which I then automatically cross post to my separate Mastodon profile), and resulting conversation comes back to my blog as well.
  • LinkedIn, which I can barely tolerate these days, since its timeline degenerated substantially early on in the pandemic. Mostly still there because I completely ditched that timeline (by unfollowing all contacts) and am treating LinkedIn as a self-updating rolodex. It means that I don’t regard or experience it as a social software tool for interaction or finding the others any more.

I shift my behavior as a given system changes how it operates, Bryan writes. True.
Those system changes have over time tended to making one’s online traces harder to stumble across (by reducing interoperability, closing off, and eroding the very building block of the web, the link), and making finding the others harder (even the strongly diminishing quality of web search itself is part of that). A likely answer to that is more distributed approaches, with your self at the core, and navigating widening circles of contacts found through other contacts. The triangulation for that still works but it does take more attention and effort. The trouble is that for most of us it’s not within our agency to do that technologically ourselves. A balancing between that and the avoidance of centralised silos (old and new) is to be sought. Here be dragons, not unicorns.

In reply to SPARK! Toon random kennis in Obsidian by Frank Meeuwsen

Leuk Frank! Ik heb het nog niet geprobeerd of bekeken, maar ik ga dit denk ik proberen te gebruiken om een random quote uit mijn map van web clippings te halen en af te beelden bovenin mijn Daglog. Om op die manier blootgesteld te worden aan dingen die ik al een keer bewaarde. Je vraagt naar aanvulling: zou je in plaats van een map ook naar een enkel bestand kunnen wijzen? Bijvoorbeeld naar de annotaties van een boek dat ik net las, zodat ik dat als het ware verder verwerk door toevallige interactie er mee.

… op mijn Obsidian homepage laad ik continu een random paragraaf uit de Tao Te Ching. Door op een button te klikken verandert de paragraaf en kan ik naar het origineel doorklikken voor verdere studie. Ik maakte hiervoor een eigen script…. Kun je hier iets mee? Zo ja, waar gebruik je het nu voor?

Frank Meeuwsen