Category: Practices

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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.

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I want to find and learn about non-fiction books I cannot read.
Meaning I don’t have the languages for them.

One of the key aspects of Europe is that there are many languages. I since long believe that is a cultural and socio-economic strength and treasure. Article 3.3 of the EU Treaty and Article 22 of the EU Charter of Fundamental rights say the same thing: The Union shall respect […] linguistic diversity.

In practice people for their interaction often retreat to something overlapping, most often English.
Within the EU institutions 24 languages are in official use. Only a few of them are used as common overlap between participants. Online, globally, nothing is truly multilingual, it’s at most serial mono-lingual. Most people don’t even get to write their names properly online. (For fun I spelled my name on my website using the proper digraph ij and not ij, and my search ranking took an immediate tumble when I did.)

I read, speak and write three languages (Dutch, English, German), and can somewhat read and speak French, and can somewhat guess when reading a few more. Whenever I travel I visit bookstores, to look at what titles are available, ignoring if I could read them or not.
Of course non-fiction bestseller titles often overlap, having been translated from English usually. Other books on display are local.

Some works in other languages will be translated into others, and if that is English, German or Dutch, become accessible to me.
However, the side effect of that is that other works that are not translated become even less visible. If I count on the fact that the most relevant Polish, Swedish, or Greek works of this moment will be translated then it will reduce the probability I will go looking for something beyond that. And I won’t know if an absence of translated works means an actual absence of relevant material. Translation acts like a filter, made up of unknown curation terms. Everything else becomes ‘dark matter’ in the words of William Marx in Libraries of the Mind, outside that language.

In order to change that, at least personally, I want to add more non-fiction titles to my ‘library of the mind’, i.e. books and their core messages that I’m aware of.
With non-fiction you can get a lot from a book even if you cannot read the language. Content overview, index, illustrations and section titles already provide a good first approximation of what a book is positing, without the need of much translation or language.

So, when it is about technology, data, philosophy, futurism, communities, change, democracy, do tell me what books I should be aware of in your language. It would be great too if you can point me to online, local to you, retailers that may have it as e-book.


A bookshop in Seville, Spain (since closed). Photo Metro Centric CC BY.


A bookshop in Athens, Greece. Photo Luke McKernan CC BY SA


A bookshop in Caen, France. Photo TeaMeister CC BY

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The video above is a conversation between Nicole van der Hoeven who hosted it, Bob Doto who wrote the excellent A System for Writing, and Tris Oaten of the No Boilerplate YT-channel (that I did not know before).
Having watched this video where PKM systems are discussed and the different approaches the three participants have, a thought emerged. A thought that I have had previously at PKM events, or when I browse through e.g. the Obsidian forum. In a lot of PKM conversations people can talk past each other due to unspoken assumptions about what your system ‘should’ be.
Not necessarily in the video above, it’s just that watching this conversation made me think about it again.

One dimension is those that assume their system is for personal knowledge. Subjective and temporal as Bob at some point clearly says in the video. As opposed to a system to store references, facts and objective knowledge.

Another is using top-down and up-front created structures vs emerging structures that are earned over time and where noticing emergent structures is newly forming personal knowledge.

A third is whether your PKM system or your Zettelkasten is seen as the whole thing, a artefact-as-is (and thus perhaps transferable in its own right), or whether one’s interaction with it, your own thinking plus your PKM system / Zettelkasten is the whole thing and thus a fully personal tool. Do you see yourself as part of your PKM system, or not?

These three differences in attitude and resulting approach determine quite a bit it seems of what you choose to do and not do in practice (such as the Folgezettel part of the conversation in the video shows).

But it seems to me we hardly ever spell out our own starting assumptions (and thus design parameters) of one’s PKM system and where we see ourselves. We merely project our own ‘givens’ onto the outside world.

What Bob Doto says in the video for instance about his practices resonates well with my own, born from personal knowledge, emergent structures and personal interactive tool.
To me PKM is personal along three dimensions, a personal system, personal knowledge, and personal management, which map well on the three dimensions of assumptions just listed. But I sometimes get the sense that to others that sounds like not as PKM at all, just as making it up as you go along. Which isn’t a false description per se, except for the implied judgement that it won’t yield results and isn’t a deliberate design choice. While I see ratchets and compounding effects.

Maybe we need to more often precede our conversations about PKM system design choices with speaking our usually unspoken assumptions about what type of systems works for us.
Although paradoxically it may be the case that for some that isn’t perceived as a need, if they already assume there is a single cluster of ‘right’ ways of doing things. Then of course it is not needed to speak of assumptions, because what is right is external. Vice versa to me it is not PKM, is not P at all, if it’s assumed there’s a single right way of doing it for all. Then PKM is a method and productivity hack, but not a system for thinking and sensemaking.

For next year’s European PKM Summit I think I need to come up with a short way of describing that and put it on my name badge.

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Imagine you have a recipe for a dish you like. You copied the ingredients and instructions from a magazine once, or your mother wrote it by hand decades ago. You decide to use the recipe, and from its list of ingredients you make a shopping list. Some things you already have at home, other items you need to get. You think of the one or two different shops you’d need to go to, and list the different items in a way that follows the order in which you will walk through the store. Would you describe the recipe as creative output? And the shopping list? Yes, no, neither, or both? Which one would you think qualifies for copyright?

The recipe (both the directions and the ingredient list) is seen as a mere statement of fact. Copyright is not applicable. That’s why cookbooks usually have a clear curated selection stated in their title (‘The 50 most cherished Indian recipes from around the UK diaspora’), photos (the dish with a sprig of herbs positioned just so), and anecdotal flourishes (‘Upon entering the village I saw an old grandmother make this in front of her house, and she shared the family secret of this incredible sauce with me’). Because those elements do carry copyright. Just not the recipe as such. Take 500 grams of chopped tomatoes and cook for 12 minutes on a low fire. Add half a tablespoon of powdered cayenne peppers and stir. Serve cold.

Your shopping list is a unique thing in comparison. It contains a curated list of ingredients (excluding the things you already have), and you ordered them to align with your actual physical path through one or more shops that you mentally selected to go to. Maybe you crossed something out, and added it in a different place after first making the list. Maybe you added one or two other things that you need, as you are going to the store anyway. This does clear the, deliberately very low, hurdle for creative effort recognised by copyright law. It’s just that you as author perhaps think of it as ephemeral, trivial, and something you may well leave at the bottom of the shopping cart as you exit the store.
Some lists are of course solely statements of fact, e.g. a list of all the heads of state and the years of their reign, the planets in our solar system in whichever order, a bibliography of an author. When you add a little bit of purpose to a list, moving it to an unique expression of an idea you had, then it quickly becomes something else.

A creative artefact.
A list that is the result of some internal process of yours with some internal logic, even if it eludes another person encountering the list, is more than the sum of its items. Curation, selection and exclusion, ordering, at one or more levels of hierarchy, are determined by and express the intention and purpose of the list maker.

List maker.
It’s something E calls me every now and then, list maker. Because quite often my first response to anything that requires planning, thinking, or writing is ‘I’ll make a little list’. Because sitting down and making a first list is beginning the work. Writing a list is not the result of thinking, but part of the process of thinking itself.
An Outliner tool is a key digital list making aid (even if they all have their limitations). A good Outliner allows you to put making lists ‘on rails’ as Dave Winer put it.
Moving an item up or down, to the top or the bottom. Nesting a thing under another, or deeper still. Moving a nested item up a level of hierarchy. Hide the subitems under a thing, or revealing them. Make a connection with an element elsewhere in an outline or with/in a different outline. Turn lines into bullets into numberings and back. Switch between different types of visualisation, one of which is the outline. All made seamless with keyboard shortcuts.

In the 1968 Mother of All Demoes Doug Engelbart, showing his vision of what computers should and can do, impresses the audience when he moves things in a list around in an outliner and switches between visualisations of the list, before using another outline for a presentation. The list he makes is of course a shopping list.

Many of the lists I use emerged over time from my notes and work, a type of emergent and earned structure. Some have both an outline structure and a more visualised networked one (a tool like Tinderbox allows you to switch between views, so does Obsidian with Excalidraw). Some have a bit more complicated inner structure or are partly dynamic or help with decision making, making them small knowledge machines.

There are many types of lists I regularly make and use.

  • Checklists for various processes and events (like travel), and periodic reviews
  • Dashboards, which are (check)lists in two dimensions, that ensure I take into account all aspects of something.
  • Daylogs with links to appointment notes, listing events, links to things I found and interstitial journaling.
  • Maps of Content (or elephant paths as I call them)
  • Memory palace overviews (listing loci) of places I might use as mnemonic device
  • Card decks for spaced repetition.
  • Outlines of texts I’m writing, outlines of presentations, both with links to underlying notes and references.
  • Interests I currently have (questions, examples) and how I might see them as elements of practice, knowledge fundament etc.
  • Tasks lists, selected on context (train, home office, company office etc), effort, energy level and time needed.
  • A spreadsheet that provides, yes, my shopping list for larger parties, based on the list of participants, their dietary requests etc., based on previous parties and amounts consumed.
  • Book lists

Book lists are like any list in that they involve selection and ordering too. They are also a bit more than a creative artefact.

Book lists are libraries.
Any list of books you create is a library, even if it’s a library of the mind that you make tangible in a list.
The list of books that are in my home office book case for instance is a simple example describing that part of the actual collection of physical books in our home. But there are more book lists I work with.
All the books, whether I (still) own them or not, that I have read in a given year.
All the physical and electronic non-fiction books I own and have not read yet, by topic. Or don’t have yet but thought interesting enough to note. They form a reservoir of preselected books I thought might be of interest at some point, that can serve as a research tool. That list I call my anti-library.
Or a similar list for unread fiction books I have, to use when selecting a new book to start in.
A list of books I may want to acquire at some point (generated from what I come across online and in shops that looks interesting or fun, without buying it), a library of wishes of sorts.
A list of books I definitely do not want to own or read, which contains books I have regularly come across thinking they looked interesting, and then realising I had rejected them a few times in the past already, and also contains authors I want to avoid.

These lists overlap, interlink and morph. Most of my daily note making is in the shape of lists, where items may get extended into paragraphs. Using outliner functionality I move them around, extend, link and change them. Parts get shunted into their own notes, some becoming a note in my core personal knowledge notes, others ending up in more mundane notes. Most will remain where I wrote them. Some will become lists I use more frequently or have a structure that is a piece of personal knowledge in itself, such as the ones listed above.

Making lists is not a chore or something predefined, but key to the work of eliciting meaning from all the disparate things I encounter in a day. It allows manipulation of all the small bits of information, from which meaning and structure may emerge. It’s a way to locally reduce entropy in my notes where useful.

Make lists. As your creative artefacts, as your libraries.

left part of screen shows an outlined list, right part shows Doug Engelbart during the 1968 Mother of All Demoes.
State of the art list making, 1968. (Screenshot of the 1968 demo by Doug Engelbart of an outlining tool)

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I’ve been long fascinated by memory palaces. As a primary school kid and again as a teenager when I encountered the concept, I concluded that, while fascinating, they were more effort than what I would gain. My memory was fine, and first conjuring up a set of locations and then visualising evocative things in them to remember something seemed an awful lot of upfront trouble.

In recent months I’ve looked at memory palaces and other mnemonic techniques again. Reading Wayfinding by Michael Bond gave me insights into the role of the spatial brain in remembering, but also mental health and ageing. Reading Lynne Kelly’s Memory Craft gave me lots of insights both in various memory methods, as well as the effort and repetition that goes into them and which thus supports learning. Both were fun reads.

I decided to create a memory palace in my home office, which now has 45 loci.
Which leaves me with the question, what do I want to remember in it? And, I don’t know!

I find it quite hilarious that I can’t come up with something worthwhile to put in a memory palace! 😀
However I suspect that it might be the same for others. Searching forums for memory techniques, most applications are focused on showing off how well the methods work. Memory competitions to remember a random deck of cards in sequence in a few minutes.

Not a whole lot examples of memory palaces used for something ‘real’ and significant to its user.

Do use memory palaces? What do you remember with them for the long term? Why that? Would a note to link to be enough too?