The holidays have come and gone. Was all that time and money you scurried eagerly to get accomplished before the morning of December 25th worth all the effort, or did it fall short of your expectations? There is only one thing to do now, keep moving forward.
Time during the holidays, moments spent with those we never get to spend quality time with throughout the year, we had time to reflect on things that live closer to the heart moreso than the keyboard, mouse and LED lights.
In the past, we’ve always prided ourselves on taking up the same “resolution” every year. That resolution is to “not have a resolution” so I could “feel like a winner” every December 31st. Having now violently kicked in the door to my fourth decade on this planet, that resolution seems so lazy to me now. So this year we still plan to keep it simple, but with a lot more direction: READ MORE BOOKS. Because inner-conflict seems to be such a strong suit of mine, I have a secondary resolution that wants all the attention, that being STAY OFF SOCIAL MEDIA.
So without further ado, here is the very abbreviated list of stumbled upon things and topics discussed with friends and family over the holidays.
My Mother has a set of Lifetime Cookware that was made locally in Wisconsin and is backed by a lifetime warranty if anything should go wrong with them. This isn’t something you typically hear of much anymore, especially regarding cookware.
Learned about an idea created by Brian Eno called Oblique Strategies. Sounds very interesting. Must look into this more and possibly adopt some of its greatest concepts.
There have been a couple releases by Digital Blasphemy: Arboreal (Day) and Trypophilia
We love the music SomaFM provides for the holidays, but we don’t wait around long after those holidays conclude on the calendar to get back to our regularly reschedule musical programmes. DEFCON provided me with a forgotten gem by Massive Attack from 2016 (also linked below).
MindNode is damn-fine mind mapping software. It’s also exclusive to the Apple ecosystem. Super delighted to see that Xmind now has a web app! It’s always great to see developers make software for Apple, Windows and Linux and also made a high-end web app. Shows a lot of dedication.
By all weights and measures, I’d still give the OCR technology that Google uses in Keep or the one baked into iOS system to be some of the best technologies available. Tesseract has always been the leading Open Source response to that proprietary software. Back when Androids were my mobile daily driver, I had dabbled with Tesseract briefly on my Linux machine and deemed it hot garbage. A newer Obsidian plugin surfaced recently that uses Tesseract. I gave it a spin in my Meta vault and was shocked how accurate it was. Sure, when you’re feeding it images of text from a bulky book that has text bending into the spine, Google or Apple will still be accurate 100% of the time, but neither of those are baked into Obsidian, are they? This plugin also offers its OCR technology as part of Omnisearch results. Need I praise it anymore? Tesseract sure has come a long way. Those devs must be exhausted.
The holidays always has me wildly out of my normal routine and not on the computer as much. Because of this, I got an inkling to play Xbox around Christmas. I turned it on, scrolled around on the Dashboard for too long, finally loaded in Forza Horizon but didn’t even make it thru the loading sequence before putting the Xbox back to sleep. Eleanor Konik’s article: How Obsidian Replaced Video Games & Helped Me Publish still has lasting effects over a year after it was published.
The Surfing plugin for Obsidian gets better and better with every release. They recently added Readwise capabilities and have a neat “capture this part of the screen as an image” feature that could come in quite handy.
A new year is always a good time to refresh things in Obsidian. We reset all our Style and Minimal Settings back to zero and switched-off most custom Snippets. Starting the year off with M PLUS Code Latin 60 as my primary typography for the Primary vault. Input Serif for the Writing vault.