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2023-06
Things Left Unimplemented… and I'm Unsure if I Ever Will
Having been around the PKM block a few times, I’ve gone snipe hunting once or twice in the PKM space. Here are some pitfalls I’ve found.
Importing Readwise Into BASB In the past, I’ve included importing Readwise comments in my implementations of BASB.
It was often a pain to set up, created a lot of name conflicts when searching (which might be valuable to some, but wasn’t to me), had occasional problems with unsupported characters, and generally just didn’t give me anything useful.
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My BASB Implementation in Org Mode v2023-06
The meat and potatoes of the series! The stuff you’ve probably been waiting for!
Rather than dump the entirety of my init folder on you, I’ve opted to give a more narrative explanation of how the system came to be. If you are unclear about anything, please reach out on the socials and I’ll do my best to clarify.
Reminder: I use the term BASB to refer to the solution we’re building in Org.
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What Makes Org Mode Hard for PKM
Spoiler alert, it’s NOT the parentheses.
Why BASB in Org is Hard The big thing that makes Org Mode difficult for PKM is the same thing that makes it strong: it’s flexibility. In particular, the concept of a single note from BASB when translated to Org Mode is… unclear! You could have it be a single file. Or a single headline. Or only some headlines, which you could delineate by property or by tag or by file.
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Should You Choose Org Mode?
To those who are emacs and Org mode curious, I’d like to give you a few things to consider about emacs and org mode.
Be mindful, there are some dangerous opinions below. You can reach out on the socials if you want to challenge me on them.
Reasons to Choose Emacs + Org The Basics It’s open source in the truest sense of the word It works on plain text files, a format you can bet on for the next 50 years It’s flexible enough to handle everything from notes to contacts to recipes to journaling and beyond It’s extensible, in small ways and big ones For many (especially programmers), this might be enough.
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My Path to Org Mode
Since this isn’t my first attempt at working with a PKM tool, I thought I would kick off this series by recapping the tools I’ve used thus far.
Pre-2020… Org to Other Tools to Org Again My first attempt at using org mode was with a vanilla installation of emacs many many years ago… but it was a somewhat lackluster experience. In addition to having no idea what I was doing (and no community to ask for help), I insisted on using Org headlines as if Org was a pure outliner (with no folded text underneath headlines).
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Building My BASB in Emacs - 2023 Capstone Report
The capstone project for the Building a Second Brain course is a public description of the system you’ve built. Since I opted for Org mode this time around, I thought a slightly more thorough explanation of my history, perspective, and opinions on building a second brain with Org.
I call my solution BASB (pronounced “BAZZ-bee”), as Jarvis seems to have been taken many times over.
I hope that documenting the system will help others who are walking a similar path in the future.
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2023-03
Challenges Showing Text From a Simple JS Function in Logseq
Technology | Personal Knowledge Management
There are some open source projects that are plain, simple, and describe well what they do. curl is the classic example (along with most Linux utilities), but File Converter is another. It does what it does, it doesn’t do what it doesn’t.
And then, there is Logseq.
All I wanted to do is dynamically create some text from a javascript function that’s different every day. I feel this is doable in there somewhere, but I’m absolutely stumped trying to connect the dots from A to B to make it happen.
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2023-01
The Seasons of TODO Systems
It’s funny how some TODO systems are better suited for certain times and situations than others.
Once upon a time I had a TODO system in Todoist with recurring tasks, reminders, views that only showed the shortly upcoming important tasks… a very programmed system. I’d moved away from it because it began to feel stifling, settling on something that was more akin to software development with a backlog and flexible prioritizing based on regular reviews.
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2021-07
Being the worst at Obsidian can make you better than you've ever been
As I was working on puling together a weekly review for myself and exploring what a CRM in Obsidian might look like, I had a realization that I think is worth repeating:
Being “bad” in Obsidian and doing something “wrong” is the correct way to go about things.
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Getting Started with Zettelkasten
For a number of reasons lately, I’ve been looking into the Zettelkasten method of knowledge management, which I’ll talk about at length in a future post.
One thing I want to highlight before I even get there, though, is just how daunting it is to get started.
It’s not even that the process of turning more temporary notes into your own synthesized ideas is that difficult to understand. It’s that a key step in the process, linking new ideas to previous ones, is frightening when you’re staring at a blank page.
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