I have always loved writing with pen and paper, and making lists is the easiest. I have changed and tried many formats, and I will continue to tweak and simplify further. Right now, I use a simplified Bullet Journal Method to plan the day, from running errands to eating the frog. Of course, I do use a lot of digital tools too (Calendar, Emails).
I’m happy to say that I’m having success helping two elderly (an erstwhile teacher and a businessperson) remember things by just writing them down. Carry a pocket notebook attached with a simple pen.
Nothing fancy, put a dot or a circle, and start your list item. Done ones are ticked or crossed out, ignored ones are crossed out, and if the list fills up on a page, that is too behind › carry forward and re-write the item.
No No. Don’t do that, don’t make it better and easy to use. I’m already addicted and spent more time than I should. Now, this app that I can keep it open all day!
Btw, can you allow me to set the font-family, font-size, etc. for the interface? I can’t even do the default `CMD + +` to zoom in.
> In my profile, what is noprocrast? - It's a way to help you prevent yourself from spending too much time on HN. If you turn it on you'll only be allowed to visit the site for maxvisit minutes at a time, with gaps of minaway minutes in between. The defaults are 20 and 180, which would let you view the site for 20 minutes at a time, and then not allow you back in for 3 hours. - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
This seems like a common problem. I am experimenting with how to consume less news (but still not miss the important bits). Built an agent that sends me daily summaries. And that's how I found this post!
Brilliant. Another suggestion then; `CMD + ,` is the default shortcut to fire the Settings of any macOS app. You need to bind the default native OS Keybaord shortcuts to the App.
It's just that the 'Fast' model picks up from a library of existing tracks using a small embedding model.
If you're really curious, you could try the 'Custom LLM' feature - specifically 'Gemini Flash'. Here's the track it created when I gave it the same input.
It titled it, "In the mood for country cowboy-ish music played for someone like John Wick bleeding out on a cold, snow-covered park bench." and here's the justification it came up with, "A weary, grit-laden Dorian lament for a fallen gunslinger, blending the cold isolation of vast reverb with the sharp, intimate pluck of a final, fading heartbeat."
For some reason, the website is down for me. I have always been fascinated by the Mongols after reading “Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World” by Jack Weatherford.
I have turned at least one friend onto history podcasts using Mike Duncan's work. Now our wives look at us like we're a bunch of two headed goats whenever we meet and talk referncing revolutionary figures and events, raving about how much more "you feel the history" when visiting Rome and Paris and know some of the history. It's great!
I just finished carlins kings of kings episodes before visiting the british museum. Carlin mentioned the contrast between what was depicted in the Assyrian and Achaemenid empires palace/throne and being able to see it in the museum with the added context made me appreciate it so much more.
Visited Rome/Pompeii with my GF and she said it was like having a private tour guide. I just felt like I knew so little and could only add sparse bits of context.
Dan Carlin has a great radio voice, and is an entertaining presenter. Hardcore history is really only okay on the history front though. Plus they are relatively shallow with how short they are.
I think Carlin himself would be the first to admit that, even does so in the intro to many episodes. I think he already suffers from the length of some of his series.
Revolutions is my go-to. I also listened to History of Rome from Duncan. And because of this History of Byzantium is on my to check out list as well. I will try the others you mentioned. I'm very eager to find others as in depth as revolutions. Thanks!
As a rule, "pop history" is full of shit and is probably better considered misinformation than anything else. I probably don't I know of a single general-audience history/anthropology book that doesn't horrify scholars of the field.
As unfortunate as it is, studying cause-and-effect is extremely complex. If it's even theoretically possible to distill it down to easily digestible ideas, that's well outside our current technical capabilities.
There's usually going to be some true and interesting information in these books, but it will be too deeply embedded in a narrative that is misleading.
However, how do one access their diary, when you stopped maintaining it? Is this targeted more at the technically inclined, high-profile people who need to keep secrets?
Personally, I believe that for something like a diary/journal, it should be in a format easily readable by most tools (so a Plain-Text or a MarkDown at best), then it is in a container/folder. Now, encrypt that container/folder instead. In the future, when you need to change the tool for Encryption/Decryption, move the container/folder.
I think there are two different concerns mixed together:
1) Can I still read my data in 10 years? That’s mostly about open, well-documented formats + an export path. A journaling app can still be “safe” here if it can export to Markdown/plain-text (or at least JSON) and the on-disk schema is documented.
2) Can I decrypt it in 10 years? That’s about using boring primitives (AES-GCM, Argon2/scrypt/PBKDF2) and keeping the crypto layer simple. If it’s standard crypto, you’re not locked to one vendor the way you might be with a bespoke format.
The “plain files in an encrypted folder” approach (Cryptomator/VeraCrypt) is totally reasonable—and arguably the simplest threat model—but you do give up a lot of what makes a journal app nice (full-text search, tags, structured metadata, conflict handling, etc.). SQLite + client-side encryption is a fine compromise if there’s a solid export and the KDF/password story is strong.
The biggest real risk is still: losing the password. A printable recovery key / key export would help more than switching formats.
yeah, currently you can export your journal to json or markdown files. So you can walk away at any point.
Vendor lock-in is one of the main things i wanted to avoid. That's why I sticked with boring and standard libraries and encryption as much as possible.
Thanks for the feedback!
You could store the encrypted contents in an IPFS collection or just use old DHT. Obviously someone else needs to access the content to keep it fresh (even if they don't have the ability to decrypt it), but considering it's markdown you could run an "official" seeder that seeds everything or just have each client run an IPFS node etc.
You could also use plain markdown files, any free Markdown editor/IDE, and git, and sync with a remote Git repo using gcrypt for encryption (git-remote-gcrypt).
It's just a bit of a pain to set up, and also, not mobile-friendly.
Ah. You will also like another story that popped up here some time back.
A Canadian science-fiction writer, Robert J. Sawyer, made an Archive available complete with extensive resources on how to use it. In addition, fully text-searchable PDFs of the original manuals, totaling over 1,000 pages, were also available. He is a dedicated WordStar user.
And my USB-DOS project includes it, for a complete environment you can boot and run direct from USB, without installation, on any PC which supports legacy boot.
I still run a MacMini (2012) with Catalina, and it just got a security update. Long back, the drive got an SSD upgrade, with max-out RAM. It still serves as a Media Server. Unfortunately, I don’t want to find out or fix, but my other Macs running Tahoe are unable to access the drives there directly, and a few other issues. I used to just mount it on my local drive like a file server. I had attached two drives, one as an offline Apple Photos copy and another for Dropbox. Both seem to have stopped working the way I want.
But hey, it still works. Survived a bad fall while cleaning up, duck-taped as the screws are not screwing.
Either someone or I, of course, turn on a Note Taker that can transcribe the meeting notes. That file can go into Obsidian.
Unfortunately, most people don’t refer back to it and would wait for someone to do it as part of the spec or project tasks assigned by the Project Manager.
However, I love taking notes in meetings using graphs, arrows, boxes with text, etc. Sometimes, I use an iPad with the Pencil, but I prefer a pen on Paper. This one is usually the one that gets shared, and people seem to like it for understanding the context or for referring back to what they heard during meetings in a simpler, yet faster/easier way.
My methods are inspired by Dan Roam’s Books. I browse/re-read the books pretty often. https://www.danroam.comhe
Similar to mine. I use Apple Notes for quick, ephemeral notes and for Shared Family Notes. If they are the ones that are more important, they go into the plain-text notes in the Obsidian folder.
The Notes folder(s) is sync with a Cloud Service. So, I use iA Writer[1] (a brilliant Notes App) to have a pleasant writing experience on other mobile devices. They are just Markdown, so I can open them in any Notes App that supports Markdown. I paid for iA Writer once, like 10+ years ago.
I’m happy to say that I’m having success helping two elderly (an erstwhile teacher and a businessperson) remember things by just writing them down. Carry a pocket notebook attached with a simple pen.
Nothing fancy, put a dot or a circle, and start your list item. Done ones are ticked or crossed out, ignored ones are crossed out, and if the list fills up on a page, that is too behind › carry forward and re-write the item.
Early stage, but it seems to be working.
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