I bought for myself, as a belated holiday gift, a brand new Royal Scriptor II Portable Electric Typewriter. I’ve been yearning for a working typewriter for at least a year now. What finally pushed me to make the purchase was my recent realization that I’ve spent at least a third of my life for the…
I’m not big on New Year’s resolutions. They seem, at my age, arbitrary. Things that a person can start at any time, they put off to the first day of the year, along with many other people. For me, the question is: why wait? That said, I do look at personal trends and things always…
On a recent walk, I saw in the distance a Commodore Vic-20, perched on a rock at the side of the bike path. I was first introduced to the VIC-20 in my 5th grade math class (ca. 1982). Our math teacher rolled it into the classroom along with a television set and we used it…
Not long ago, I suggested a feature for Evernote that would capture the last time a note was viewed. This, I thought, would be useful in determining whether a note is worth keeping around. Since then, I’ve been playing around with the new Evernote, trying to drum up some of my original enthusiasm for the…
Back in May when I made a call for suggestions on what to write here, one of the good ones was from Steve, who wrote: “Any thoughts or concerns you might have related to cyber security. Potential tips/processes you employ to protect yourself.” Ten years ago, when I was writing my Going Paperless series, I…
Evernote has made some significant improvements lately. They have completely reengineered the backend. They have refreshed and improved the user interface. And they recently introduced integrated task management–something users have been requesting for a long time. There is one feature that I would find incredibly useful that Evernote still needs: a Last Viewed date for…
Once I got the hang of how Obsidian worked for me, once I realized the power of its linking capabilities, and that it really did everything I wanted a note-taking app to do, it was natural to consider what could go into my vault. Daily notes were a given, of course. All of my reading…
Note: December 9, 2021: I wrote this post in February 2021 after I’d been using Obsidian for a little over a month. In the 10+ months since, I’ve learned a lot more and modified my reading notes process based on lessons I’ve learned in what you see below. If you are interested, you can check…
ETA: 4/1/2021: I have now posted my code for my daily notes automation script on GitHub. See this post for more details. For nearly a week now my Daily Notes file in Obsidian is generated automatically each night after midnight. I wrote a Python script that creates the note, and having the script running as…
Now that I have been using Obsidian fairly exhaustively for the last 5 days, I think I’ve got enough experience with it to share my initial impressions. I mentioned earlier that Obsidian was the notetaking tool I’ve been looking for all my life. That begs the question: what is it that I’ve been looking for…
Way back in February 2014, I was interviewed as part of LifeHacker’s “How I Work” series. Nearly 7 years have passed since that interview. A lot has changed, both in the tools I use, and the way I think about productivity, so I thought it was about time I brought that interview up to date. Here, then, is…
The new Mac Mini has been up and running for 10 days now and I have some initial thoughts. For context and clarity, I bought the newest Mac Mini (M1 2020), which is running the Apple M1 chip. I bought it with 16 GB of memory (way up from the 4 GB I have on…