Weeknotes – Week 38

🧘‍♀️ While I sincerely doubt that anybody sent out any Internet Search Parties on my behalf, but for approximately the past four-and-a-half weeks we had been taking part in our annual self-imposed social media break. Typically we aim for a month, sometimes it goes for little longer and this year it was. It is worth pointing out that I was not able to entirely step away, as this was first year doing this while my also helping my sister take care of the social media aspect of her small business. It is always good to take some time to step away and not care about the the small details of everybody else’s lives. Last year I did not include Mastodon or any other Fediverse technology in my break, but this year I did because those are used much more than the corporate silos. I sincerely enjoyed the Weeknotes updates from everyone during that time. 🤗

📸 In my ongoing self-taught journey toward Manual Mode, for the past several weeks I have been using back button focus on my camera and really enjoying it a lot. Did not experience as much of a learning curve as many posts online forewarned about. (just start doing it…)

💜 I got pretty excited about this Obsidian plugin called Image Converter, and started going pretty wild with it converting all my images to WebP format. That’s when I realized how many PNGs are utilized across my vault. Very solid plugin tho. I feel like WebP is a step towards the future of images on the web. What will replace PNG tho and do such in a smaller filesize?

💜 Another plugin that provoked my curiosity is called Attachment Manager. You can bind attachment folders to particular notes, Download images in a note to the assigned attachment folder, hide the attachment folders in the file explorer and rename things if you rename the note. It also has the functionality of the Paste Image Rename plugin baked into it. The plugin seems to have what I would call Linter or QuickAdd level configuration associated to it, and I have failed to take the time and sit down to make it work for me. It really does look promising.

💜 The newly adopted Properties in Obsidian has truly made a profound difference for me. Can’t quite put my finger on what exactly it is that makes it so different, because it’s just engaging with metadata in a different way. Maybe that’s exactly what makes it so much more enjoyable? Tell you this right now. When you switch you switch your “created” or “modified” values to a “Date” type, it will then have a link on the right hand side of the cell that links to that dates corresponding Daily Note. That makes my entire soul warm and fuzzy. 😊

💜 kepano uploaded his Vault structure to GitHub. Makes me want to use Dataview again, but I wont really use it the same way. I never did last time.

Honorable plugin mention: @ Symbol Linking

🎧 The desire to start tracking my music again meant walking away from using mpv over the command line as my primarily means of listening to music. It came with an unexpected perk. It got to start using Clementine and Strawberry again (currently back on Clementine for reasons I wont go into!) which was my default audio player back in the day. If I’m not listening to local music files on my computer then I’m more than likely listening to one of Soma FM’s stations. I have worked out various ways over the years to catch the names of songs that grab my attention so I can look into these artists and albums at a later date. I realized earlier this week that I can simply Copy the current track playing in Clementine. This simple discovery allows me to to literally paste it twice and have it 1) added to my Obsidian vault and tagged and 2) rendered a search results page on YouTube. The latter has inspired me to start a handful of public playlists based off the stations on Soma FM.

🎼 Very random. I have always deeply enjoyed the Another Late Night/Late Night Tales compilation albums for the past twenty years. Like most people my age, I was part of that “digital music revolution” and used to spend large amounts of time back in the day burning my own compilation albums for people, and would spent insane amounts of time debating the order and flow of these albums. So if there was a different universe where for whatever reason Late Night Tales asked me to curate a compilation album for them, I have decided to actually start putting one and debating its order and it’s flow. This local m3u file has been on my external hard drive for years with only a few songs on it. But I’ve been adding to it for the past couple of months and I’ve decided to make it a public playlist on YouTube as well. Aiming for 20 some odd tracks. Obviously I don’t have a spoken word piece of my own (hmm…) to provide but I do have a couple of not-so-short Short Stories that could suffice for a public YouTube playlist. Definitely would have a ball finding something to take a photograph of that would be in the spirit of their other album covers.

🥲 Confession. Made it less than a week before I had signed up for Readwise again, after having cancelled my account. Needed Reader. I had no idea how much I was using it until it was gone. Good lesson. Old cliches proven true over and over again.

🌇 There are some great apps for iPhone for tracking the sun (Alpenglow, Sun Tracker AR) but if you’re on the computer and would like that functionality and more be sure to check out Photo Ephemeris.

🍲 Michael Burkhardt started a website called Recipes We Actually Use. This is really intriguing to me because I have struggled to come up with a universal way to store my digital recipes. I really thought CookLang was going to be it, but I never latched onto it. I’ve tried everything but definitely wanted to do something markdown based. Sharing them in a public space would have only been an added bonus. I will definitely be keeping an eye on this passion project of his to see where he takes it.

🐧 Somewhere during my break of social media, I realized that my clipboard utility (parcellite) was only holding the last three entries of my clipboard. This proved to be something of a pain while I was shuffling around text and archiving things between Obsidian and my website. Parcellite has been on my essential Linux software list for as long as I can remember. It is one of the first applications I install and configure on a new Linux machine. This bug of only holding the last thre entries gave me the motivation I needed to try out one of its competitors – CopyQ, and boy am I glad that I did. It does all the things Parcellite did, but this fine application also holds onto images in it’s history!

There was a whole lot we did not cover here in this post, but we’re going to cut it here and tie a knot in it for now. It is currently 03:57 on this 19th day of September, 2023. Have a wonderful Tuesday and great rest of your week! ■

If you correct your mind, the rest of your life will fall into place.
— Laozi

Top 5 Artists – According to Last FM (Aug 15th – Today)

• Purrple Cat
• Bethesda Softworks Music
• Niccolò Paganini
• Coldplay
• Khruangbin
• Raimu

🌸