Category: Personal tools

Personal digital tools

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Working on a visual representation of the European data strategy landscape, integrated as well as alongside a textual representation this morning. It makes for a pleasant experience. The experience comes from what Zsolt Viczián’s Excalidraw plugin for Obsidian allows me to do, something I mentioned here earlier after the PKM Summit last March where Zsolt showed this.

Excalidraw drawings are basically text files describing the drawing, which are then rendered in the viewer. What the plugin supports is putting other text elements outside the drawing elements, and exclude them from the visual view. This creates two representations of the same file: one the drawing presented visually, one the text content outside the visual. Zsolt calls it the ‘flip side’ of a drawing, being a note accompanying the drawing. I see it more like two different views on the same thing. I have a hotkey (cmd arrow down) enabled to flip a note between both views.

Putting both views next to each other, and working in both at the same time, allows me a seamless mode of working, switching between visual material and text writing. As shown in the screenshot below.

Here you see the same note twice, opened in two tabs. The left side is the textual representation. It also contains an embedded auto-generated image from the visual representation but that is something I choose to do. Underneath that image you see some notes I wrote.
The right hand side shows the visual representation, a drawing of how I perceive the context of the European single market for data (at least, part of it).
I use the visual side as a Systems Convening landscape, to think about barriers, possible interventions, visibility etc. I use the text side to turn those thoughts into notes, potential actions, and links to other relevant material, or to write down things I think might be added to the visual.

Over the years my main problem with working more visually has been the lack of fluidity between the visual and the textual. Basically rendering them into two separate silos. Few tools solve that issue (Tinderbox is one). This means I usually favor the textual side of things. Where I use images, they are ‘frozen’ moments of the ever evolving textual side. The set-up this morning is not silo’d and here the creation of visual elements aids the text creation and vice versa, while I work on both in parallel in a single note. Both text and visual evolve together. Very nice.

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Bookmarked Latticework: Unifying annotation and freeform text editing for augmented sensemaking by Matthew Siu and Andy Matuschak

Back in early February I got a chance to work with a beta tool for sense making in my notes. See my impressions at the time. Matthew Siu and Andy Matuschak watched me for an hour as I used their prototype tool to start shaping a workshop design from various inputs. I was intrigued and enthusiastic, but a few weeks later due to some tech glitches I stopped using it. Today Maarten den Braber in an e-mail pointed me to Latticework from last June, describing the project as it stood at the end. It’s an interesting read, which I annotated (if you read those annotations, start at bottom of the page to read them from the top of the article (or use Hypothes.is to see them in context,there’s no way to link to the overview directly for non-users I think).

I re-installed the plugin in Obsidian, and will work with it some more. Here’s hoping some of the original glitches no longer occur.

We had a strong personal motivation for this project: we often find ourselves stuck in our own creative work. Latticework’s links might make you think of citations and primary sources—tools for finding the truth in a rigorous research process. But our work on Latticework was mostly driven by the problems of getting emotionally stuck, of feeling disconnected from our framing of the project or our work on it.

Matthew Siu and Andy Matuschak

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Gisteravond was de 6e meet-up van Nederlandstalige Obsidian gebruikers. Net als de editie van afgelopen december vond deze meet-up plaats onder de vlag van de Digitale Fitheid community en de KNVI (Koninklijke Nederlandse Vereniging van Informatieprofessionals).
De vorige keer was ik een van de facilitators, dit keer was de begeleiding in handen van Martijn Aslander en Lykle de Vries. Dat gaf mij gelegenheid meer inhoudelijk mee te doen, en dat was prettig.

Het recept was hetzelfde als wat Marieke van Vliet en ik de vorige keer improviseerden: aanwezigen droegen aan het begin een onderwerp aan, en vervolgens mocht iemand telkens iets kiezen uit de lijst (maar niet het eigen onderwerp). Zo komt een divers lijstje onderwerpen tot stand, en zorg je ervoor dat een bredere groep aan het woord komt.

Iemand vroeg of je Obsidian ook op een USB stick kunt draaien. Dat je je vault op een stick hebt, en dan op systemen waar Obsidian staat die kunt openen inclusief alle plugins etc. Ik stelde voor dat ter plekke te proberen, en het antwoord lijkt ja te zijn. Deed me denken aan de wiki-on-a-stick experimenten die ik lang geleden deed rondom het ‘patchwork portal‘, waarbij wiki’s met een lokale kleine webserver op een stick werden uitgedeeld waar anno 2005 nog geen of heel weinig internet verbinding was.

Ik was zelf benieuwd of mensen n.a.v. de PKM Summit in maart meer zijn gaan doen met de visuele technieken die Zsolt Viczián met zijn Excalidraw plugin toen liet zien. Met name was ik geïnteresseerd in of mensen bestanden tegelijkertijd als tekst en als visueel element gebruiken (hier uitgelegd door Nicole van der Hoeven). Twee deelnemers lieten het e.e.a. zien. Zelf heb ik een sneltoets voor het schakelen tussen tekst en visueel ingesteld, maar dat zag ik hen niet doen. Dat zegt me dat ze die switch weinig maken. Ik zal er zelf eens iets over schrijven in meer detail, met twee recente voorbeelden hoe dat waardevol voor me was en heel prettig en wrijvingsloos voelde.

Maarten den Braber was een van de aanwezigen die liet zien hoe hij bepaalde zaken in zijn workflow automatiseert, vanuit hetzelfde principe dat ik hanteer: geen dingen doen die uniek zijn voor Obsidian, je moet altijd ook met je platte tekst bestanden uit de voeten kunnen. Hij liet de PDF++ plugin zien, en die moet ik zeker eens onderzoeken en vergelijken met hoe ik momenteel Zotero gebruik.

Muhammed Kilic liet zien hoe hij over meerdere apps heen dezelfde tags, links en indexes gebruikt. Hij noemde daarbij hoe ik dat ook doe in mijn hypothes.is annotaties (links naar bestaande notes, taken, tags opnemen waardoor het in Obsidian meteen in context staat), maar liet zien dat hij dat ook in Zotero doet. Dat doe ik niet in mijn annotaties daar, en toen hij het liet zien vroeg ik me af waarom eigenlijk. Ik link wel vanuit Obsidian naar Zotero, maar in mijn annotaties verweef ik in Zotero mijn notes en tags veel minder. Eens over nadenken, en uitproberen.

Tot slot merkte ik dat het in een groepsgesprek als dit lastig is om min of meer standaard ook te laten zien wat je beschrijft. Je moet je dan maar voorstellen wat iemand daadwerkelijk doet, ipv het te zien. Voelen we ons kwetsbaar in het tonen van onze tools en werkwijzen? Het aantal malen dat ‘tell’ ook met ‘show’ werd ondersteund was daardoor beperkt, en dat is jammer vind ik. Voor een volgende keer zou het ook leuk zijn om in plaats van over aspecten te praten eens iets van ieders gehele implementatie te zien, en daar vragen over te stellen.

Had a good workshop from TNO this morning about data space connectors, but what also stood out was how well the flow was working in Obsidian for me during the session.

I started making notes as usual in Obsidian, and then the facilitator started building a visual map of how different elements of a data space set-up work together.

I quickly turned my note into a note that is also an Excalidraw drawing (I could also have started from the note/excalidraw template I have, but only belatedly realised I hadn’t done that). I drew my own diagram alongside the presentation.


A note that is also an excalidraw image at the same time

Then we started working hands-on with some software which had a web interface. Following the links I added in my notes, I opened that web interface inside Obsidian itself using the Surf plugin.
This allowed me to very quickly alternate between visual and text as well as online material, taking and adding screenshots etc, all without ever leaving my note really.


Browsing a software tool inside Obsidian

As this emerged I realised how smooth it felt.

From now on I will aim to prepare for such sessions as this morning in a similar way.

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Bookmarked Why te database version and how it’s going (by Tienson Qin)

Long time blog buddy Jörg Kantel, aka der Schockwellenreiter, points to the discussion above, on how Logseq is moving away from running on top of you file system towards a database tool. I understand how that may help solve the issues they indicate w.r.t. collaboration and synchronisation, but like Jörg I don’t like it when my stuff is locked away in some database structure I don’t have ready acces to from inside other apps and scripts. It’s why e.g. Joplin is out of bounds for me. For Jörg it’s even more key I think, as he seems to be blogging directly from his markdown files. (I write my blogposts in markdown in Obsidian, but have a micropub script to push it one time / one-way to my website.)

There’s an intriguing remark further down that page that they will maintain both the markdown files and add a database on top, to provide other tools access. I wonder how that will work in practice, and how it impacts the things they intend to solve with the database. I use the closed source Obsidian, and it too has some data stored outside the files that keeps track of graphs etc., and I wonder if this is what they mean or not.

Jörg is looking at Foam as a result. When I started using Obsidian a few months after its launch in March 2020, Foam was more like an idea on top of VS Code editor than an application. I could be tempted to look at Foam again, but using VS Code as its base is something that doesn’t appeal to me.

We’ll continue to support both file-based and database-based graphs, with a long-term goal of achieving seamless two-way sync between the database and markdown files. This will allow you to leverage the benefits of the database version while still being able to use other tools

Tienson Qin

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In reply to It is bigger than a tiny little textbox by Dave Winer

What is biggger than a tiny little textbox, like the ones we get on social platforms, and a full blown CMS, like the editing back-end of my WordPress site? Asks Dave Winer. My current answer to that is: where I’m writing this reply now.

Mid 2022 Dave Winer talked about two-way RSS, which morphed into textcasting by the end of 2023. Now he’s looking at an editor that would work like that.

In my personal feed reader I added a form to post responses. You see Dave Winer’s posting that I’m responding to, and the response form.

The editor I am writing this in, is a simple webform underneath an entry in my feed reader. See the image above. Allowing me to respond while I’m reading feeds, and then move on to reading the next bit.

The editor allows me to set a title, keep the the title of the thing I’m responding to, or have no title. It can cater to different types of response (bookmark, favourite, reply). It can send to several WordPress sites (my blog, my company’s, the Dutch IndieWeb community site, and my company’s internal team site. As a post or a page.

Me writing this post in the response form in my feedreader.

But not just post to a website. It can post an online annotation to my Hypothes.is (the ‘H.’ response option at the top), and it can post to my local Obsidian markdown notes (the ‘obs’ site option underneath the edit boxes).

It accepts categories and tags as the same thing. The receiving site or location determines if one of the key-words is a category locally and treats the rest as tags.

It doesn’t use RSS except as source of the item I respond to, it uses the Micropub standard to talk to websites. It could use RSS or OPML. It accepts HTML and posts as Markdown to my notes. I just started tinkering with my feed reader and response form again, so I can take Dave’s question into account while doing that.

Now, the question: What’s between a tiny little text box and a full-blown content management system?
The question we intend to answer.
That’s what textcasting is for, to identity the essential features. This editor supports them.

Dave Winer