Abbreviated length and depth as lots of time has been dedicated to getting ready for the holiday this past week. The same can be expected for next as this year winds down to a close.

Top of the list, how you doing on your 40 Questions?

Digital Blasphemy released Class M.

Napkin did a Public Swarm of The Power of Now.

Napkin made some improvements to their swarming detailed in this Loom.

Ooh.directory reminds me of old-school link directories.

The last thing in the world needed right now is a new PKM system, but I heard Dendron mentioned a couple times this past week on PKMsocial.

Literally found myself on the donation page for Eloquent when I got the email about Readwise Reader’s YouTube v1 feature. Might still put some support behind Eloquent anyway, as it is so useful.

ColdTurkey looked pretty interesting as it blocks websites, games and apps on your computer from launching after preset options of your choosing. Not supported on Linux (shocker), so I found a suitable replacement for Brave called LeechBlock which blocks websites. I’ve had to do something to start putting a little control over my time on PKMsocial.

Heard Twos mentioned in an article on Medium that said it was a suitable replacement for Todoist. I do not agree.

Stumbled upon Ric Raftis who is the founder of Dynamic Community Leadership. He writes lots of articles about Obsidian there and they are some great reads. Written in such a way so it’s easy for anybody to understand.

Speaking of people from Medium, I think it would be great if WordsmithWriter joined Mastodon.

Obsidian

Publish your notes from Obsidian to GitHub

Not sure whether or not you know if you could nest callouts or not. Tears of joy ran down my face when I found out codeblocks, bullet-points and buttons worked in them.

Ghost Fade Focus incrementally fades out the text from your current cursor location. Great for long-form writers of Obsidian.

A new Obsidian Roundup is live!

Updates to Canvas, Canvas, and more Canvas!

Its easy to see that with Canvas’ popularity that we’re going to see a lot of emphasis by the community on expanding it’s functionality. Themes, snippets and other ways to dress up the Canvas are sure to follow.

The always busy Quorafind (author of MANY new Obsidian plugins) has released Obsidian Canvas Mindmap which adds traditional keyboard shortcuts like you would be used to using in a traditional mind mapper. Enter for a brother card, tab for a child card.

Obsidian Mermaid does for Mermaid graphs in Obsidian what Advanced Tables does for Tables. It provides you with a toolbar so it’s one last thing you need to keep in memory.

AI is taking over our vaults!

Insert Dall-E images with Obsidian AI Images

Generates notes using GPT-3’s OpenAI

Everyone who has been involved in PKM for any amount of time has found themselves asking the question: Is the concept of PKM flawed?

• I barely, if ever, looked at or refered back to the bulk of notes I had created. Although some of them took a lot of time to create (I literally wrote whole book summaries for a while), their value was negligible in hindsight.
• The few notes I did refer back to frequently where checklists, self-written instructions to complete regular tasks, lists (reading lists, watchlists, etc.) or recipes. Funnily enough the ROI on these notes was a lot higher than all the permanent/evergreen/zettel notes I had written.
• ..these cases were rare at best, most of these notes were never looked at again.
• There are different kinds of information, some of which don’t make sense being recorded at all. I was struggling with what to record and what not to record for a long time. For example, I took notes on programming syntax that are just useless (most of these things can be googled in seconds and they are usually decently documented already).
• Why bother doing all this? Although it feels really good, creating organisational systems and collecting notes for the sake of retaining the information itself is a huge waste of time and will leave you hoarding useless data. In the end, everything you record has to serve a specific purpose outside of ‘maybe being useful someday’.
• Did you read a book about riding bicycles and took notes on it? I don’t think so.
• Life is too short to spend it on personal knowledge management.

There are a lot of great points in this thread. I think PKM is so new that it’s easy to consider it to be a flawed system. Time will sort of the details, but I think we’re on the right path.

Media this week

Mark McElroy on his usage of Tana

Old school Linux video with my favorite quote of all time.