Well hello there you old-school blog enjoyer, you internet connoisseur you!
(I just learned that the English connoisseur comes from the now obsolete pre-1835 French spelling. The originators of the term have since moved on to the new and improved connaisseur (like the Dutch, which is why I was briefly confused), but in English we are stuck with our quaint little oi.)
How do you do, fellow humans?
This Sunday morning I browsed through all of my Obsidian daily entries, starting from Monday January 20, the day after The 2024 to 2025 transition post appeared, because the urge to write here has become quite persistent of late, an urge that is clearly quite oblivious to my feeling that it has become increasingly more tricky to make the time to sit down and focus on just this one thing.
I, very briefly I should add, considered feeding all of those daily posts to one of our artificial friends to extract highlights, but for the time-being, I really like that every word you read here was produced by my laborious and messy (fluids-based, for the most part) biology-based process.
This means that I read every single stupid word I wrote in those daily entries, re-experienced various emotions, some of them transformed by the ever-changing self, while I read them, and let those ideas all simmer for a while in the wetware mostly enclosed by my skull, before sitting down here and producing a new set of emotions whilst typing out a bunch of new words on this (mechanical) keyword.
Blood, sweat and tears my friends, blood sweat and tears.
Reading
Since my last entry here, I’ve been reading a lot more, something that I’m really happy about.
Besides the deep-seated and strong instinct that reading good books makes me a better human, it also turns out to be an excellent doom-scrolling suppressant, by virtue of simply pushing that activity out of one’s daily schedule.
Apart from that motivation, what has made a huge difference in my reading volume was adding audiobooks as well as Zotero on my laptop to the reading modality mix.
Where I previously would only read on my Kindle e-reader, I’ve discovered that picking the right medium for the right book means I can comfortably use these three channels during different phases of the day.
In the evening right before closing my eyes, I usually read fiction on the Kindle. After 10 to 20 minutes of reading, my eyes start closing of their own accord and my brain shuts down. Current Kindle book: Morphotrophic by Greg Egan. Egan has previously appeared on this blog for a much older creation which I really loved.
During the day in the car on short commutes, I prefer to read non-fiction books like Nexus by Yuval Harari (which I loved by the way). With Nexus at 1.5x speed, which is still very comfortable, it was around 17 hours of listening time which went by a lot faster than I expected. I’m currently on [Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst by Robert M. Sapolsky] which is super entertaining and extremely successful at repeatedly blowing my mind.
Some non-fiction books deserve even closer attention, like Max Bennett’s A Brief History of Intelligence, which I started reading on my Kindle but then completed on my laptop, using the fantastic epub reader in Zotero. With this tool I can make highlights and notes to my heart’s content.
On the topic of Zotero, the two features that would make it even more perfect for me are the iOS epub support, so I can open annotated epubs on the go, and iOS webpage snapshot support, so that I can save SingleFile snapshots of web pages from my phone like on desktop, and not just the link.
Thanks for nothing Amazon
On that topic, on February 26 Amazon killed the Kindle “download & transfer via USB” feature, the exact feature that I’ve always used to make copies of Kindle titles for my own use, most often for highlighting and further study, sometimes leading to book notes posts.
Although I really appreciated the convenience of e.g. hearing about a book, and then being able to purchase and start reading that book within minutes, this user-hostile move by Amazon is the last straw for me. All the way back in 2016, friend Stéfan warned us all about the Kindle Swindle, i.e. the way that Amazon restricts ebook rights far more than necessary, and is in essence able to “switch off” all ebooks that you have bought.
For me personally, this latest move just means that I will drastically reduce my spending on Kindle books, and anything else from Amazon, as far as possible.
101 productivity hacks for stubborn people
Also known as The Productivity Section!
A bientôt monsieur Org
In the 24/25 year transition post I talked about my apparently eternally brewing personal tension between Emacs and Obsidian.
It looks like I might have found myself in the third stage of grief, namely bargaining, when I wrote that I would explore the interplay between the two poles of Emacs and Obsidian.
Well, as I write this, it feels like I might have reached the fifth and final stage, namely acceptance, acceptance of the fact that orgmode (note, not Emacs, but orgmode), although far more powerful and flexible, is probably always going to be the silo that it currently is, in contrast to markdown (note, not necessarily Obsidian) which, while functionality-wise is but a shadow of orgmode, is hugely more accessible and inter-operates with everyone and their dogs.
You see, since writing that transition post, I’ve been creating more and more markdown notes, to the extent that I keep on running into the inconvenience of orgmode nexus nodes which I can in theory link to from markdown, but with links that are not as fully featured as markdown to markdown links.
It really does seem like “interplay” is turning into “dominance”, if you’ll excuse my multiple layers of innuendo here.
And so after a really good 10 year run as orgmode-disciple, as chronicled by 10+ years of vxlabs posts on the topic, a bunch of appearances on this blog and even the orgmode-exocortex, it’s time to read the writing on the wall, writing that upon closer inspection has turned out to be in markdown format after all.
Productivity hack of the year
In a textbook case of greatly exaggerated rumours of someone’s demise, my orgmode isn’t completely dead yet…
By far the most effective productivity hack I’ve implemented in many months, in terms of actual focus hours gained, has been the orgmode-based pomodoro timer I hacked together and wrote about in my other OTHER website TIL section.
While it was already helpful to have a boring text-based pomodoro-timer display a countdown on my macOS menubar, I had wildly underestimated how much impact the addition of the automatic do-not-disturb mode would have.
When I start the 25 minute pomodoro focus timer, my script automatically activates the so-called do-not-disturb “focus” across all of my (Apple) devices. For those 25 minutes, absolutely nothing pings or alerts, and only calls by my my inner-inner circle can get through. When the 25 minutes are up, DnD is disabled across all devices, and I can see to any emergencies that might have occurred.
(🍅 These particular paragraphs are being typed within such an interruption-proof pomodoro BTW.)
How are the children?
Why thank you for asking!
Here I would like to mention that Genetic Offspring Unit #1 (GOU#1) has now experienced the first few weeks of industrial engineering at university (which is the same as the first few weeks of most of the engineering disciplines) and seems to be loving it to bits.
It brings me great joy that, in spite of the fact that she is a wonderfully well-adjusted and socially graceful human, her engineering DNA is shining through brilliantly. This way of thinking suits her, she just seems to get it, and she’s really enjoying the work.
P.S. It also brings me joy, but also a tiny bit of concern, that she really enjoys and also sometimes makes dad jokes AT ME.
Spiritual hygiene backbone
All of that reading I wrote about a few paragraphs back somehow happens even when my days seem to fall apart due to general life chaos, various distractions many of my own (unintentional design) and/or due to will power failure on my part.
So on those days, when I finally fall asleep reading, I console myself with the affirmation that the day was not complete chaos, at least I’ve done some reading…
The same goes for my running.
A seemingly low-level function somewhere in my system needs to take me out running an average of three times a week.
Even when I don’t want to, I often find myself standing outside in my shoes and ready to go.
It does help that I’ve programmed myself with the mantra “If you’re wondering whether you should go run the answer is YES”.
During my many low-power moments, that mantra often nudges me over the edge.
My daily writing habit also seems to be getting stronger.
I might be tired, or distracted, but one of the voices often gets me to write with mind-tricks like “oh just a bullet or two man, surely you can manage that?” to which my simple mind succumbs, and before I know it, I’ve written a few more bullets, and maybe even a paragraph or two.
Unbeknownst to simple mind (shhhht), retro- and introspection have now been performed, and prepared for future review.
I have now come to realise that these three habits, namely reading, running and writing, and their various positive feedback loops, together form a pretty decent spiritual hygiene backbone.
Especially when the rest feels like it wants to flop around or even fall apart, this backbone is a robust, reliable and, quite importantly, simple construct that defines my desired internal structure, enabling me to maintain focus and humanity.