Eh, I've got a bunch of stuff I don't remember that turns up when I go looking for something along it's lines. Resurfacing stuff I've forgotten about is half the fun of having a large knowledge base of vetted materials.
As always, good food for thought! I wish my photos were more organized. At the moment, they're scattered across several USB drives & folders plus Google Drive... they're also so many / big files that it's getting to be too much for free storage space offers.
Also, I didn't know of Craig Mod but those newsletters about walking Japan are fascinating. Thanks for introducing me to a potential new read!
"it’s hard to anticipate in advance what you will or won’t use!"
Exactly! How do I know ahead of time how thoughts and ideas will come together if, by definition, I'm hoping for something new to emerge? I save everything (digital) that pops out as interesting or will help me re-create lines of thought.
Serendipitous discoveries are a great joy for me, so I maintain daily notes and resurface the same day from past years in my notes. I don't often re-learn anything new or get reminded of a task I forgot, but I love having these little reminders of days in the past, even when they are sad.
My biggest problem with doing this in Obsidian, though, is the search, as you mentioned about potty training: it isn't great, and tools like Omnisearch don't show me the matching excerpt in their results.
Breaking things up into many, Many, MANY little notes solves that problem, but then the effort to create a new note is just enough more than adding a line to an existing one that I know I would never do, and then the file management would become an issue at some point.
I'm really hoping we get better AI search a la Notion in Obsidian soon (preferably with an easy to use locally hosted targeted lightweight model), but right now the plugins are too complicated for me to figure out.
It's also hard to choose one. I would like to see one of these plugins rise to prominence to help with this, but for now it seems we get a new one every few days.
Speaking of gnarly technical problems, when I'm reading your newsletter lately and I click on an inline link to a past article (Safari on iOS with content blockers and privacy protections on), the pages come up but only in endless twice-a-second refresh. Thought you might want to know.
Enjoyable read. Thanks. Reminds me a lot of what I’ve been writing recently.
Hanging onto everything is fine as long as it's accessible. Hoarding really becomes an issue when you don't even know what you have.
Eh, I've got a bunch of stuff I don't remember that turns up when I go looking for something along it's lines. Resurfacing stuff I've forgotten about is half the fun of having a large knowledge base of vetted materials.
As always, good food for thought! I wish my photos were more organized. At the moment, they're scattered across several USB drives & folders plus Google Drive... they're also so many / big files that it's getting to be too much for free storage space offers.
Also, I didn't know of Craig Mod but those newsletters about walking Japan are fascinating. Thanks for introducing me to a potential new read!
Oh man, Craig Mod is totally up your alley -- make sure you find his article on the little hole in the wall tea shop diner things!!
"it’s hard to anticipate in advance what you will or won’t use!"
Exactly! How do I know ahead of time how thoughts and ideas will come together if, by definition, I'm hoping for something new to emerge? I save everything (digital) that pops out as interesting or will help me re-create lines of thought.
I've never regretted holding onto a file. Only the opposite.
Serendipitous discoveries are a great joy for me, so I maintain daily notes and resurface the same day from past years in my notes. I don't often re-learn anything new or get reminded of a task I forgot, but I love having these little reminders of days in the past, even when they are sad.
My biggest problem with doing this in Obsidian, though, is the search, as you mentioned about potty training: it isn't great, and tools like Omnisearch don't show me the matching excerpt in their results.
Breaking things up into many, Many, MANY little notes solves that problem, but then the effort to create a new note is just enough more than adding a line to an existing one that I know I would never do, and then the file management would become an issue at some point.
I'm really hoping we get better AI search a la Notion in Obsidian soon (preferably with an easy to use locally hosted targeted lightweight model), but right now the plugins are too complicated for me to figure out.
It's also hard to choose one. I would like to see one of these plugins rise to prominence to help with this, but for now it seems we get a new one every few days.
Speaking of gnarly technical problems, when I'm reading your newsletter lately and I click on an inline link to a past article (Safari on iOS with content blockers and privacy protections on), the pages come up but only in endless twice-a-second refresh. Thought you might want to know.
I do want to know, thank you! I'll reach out to Substack support and see if they have any ideas why... I'm not doing anything weird on my end. 🤔