November: Yes, it's late, so what?
Traditional dog waiting for their human. What the hell do you know about sadness? (don’t worry, she’s fine, just a bit tired after our walk and, well, maybe she is missing her humans: she was left with me for a few days).
RE: PARA method
Last time I wrote about PARA, a methodology of digital organization. Long story short: no, I didn’t end up using it. BUT I did re-organize a few things.
First, I completely gave up on note-taking and knowledge database apps. Evernote, DevonThink, Notion, OneNote — they are all flawed. I need to store arbitrary information (notes, PDFs, media, scans, webpages, etc), with easy search and retrieval. And you know what “app” works really well for that? File system.
Now it doesn’t matter where exactly to store all that stuff, but for convince I’m using Google Drive (not the best choice, more on that later). The point is to have one root directory with some sane organization. Here’s how mine looks like:
Folders are numbered like that for two purposes:
- Force desired sorting.
- Unique identification.
The idea comes from physical book library sorting strategy. Read here about its application to digital files.
Searching my database is easy: Alfred (or built-in Spotlight) do just fine. Creating new notes and other files is easy too: I’ve written simple Keyboard Maestro scripts which allow to create empty files of any type (not necessarily empty even, I can use templates). I’m using Mindnode extensively, so creating a new empty mindmap is a common task. If I need to write a text note, I just create a new org-file and open with Emacs.
So far, it’s a great system. Migrating it to another cloud provider is trivial. Syncing is pretty robust. And it’s future-proof.
What about todos?
Yeah, so, I switched to Android (Google Pixel 3a) when my iPhone 6s almost died, so I couldn’t use Things.app anymore. Todoist is… well, okay. It’s unapologetically web-based. Delete a task, hit Undo and it takes a few seconds to undo. Anyway, I’m trying to use todo-managers less and less. At this point, I can really live without it, which is amazing. About 4 years ago I couldn’t operate without a very complex OmniFocus project.
New courses
Two new courses are now available on Codexpanse:
Both are work-in-progress — new lessons are published every week. For the time being, course 1 is free of charge, and course 2 costs $6.99. When done, the prices will go up.
You know what, I LOVE doing these. This is what I wanted Hexlet to be back in 2008, in the very beginning. I wanted to learn and teach computer science, cool programming languages and mind-blowing ideas, the very basics and the very niche things.
In January, I’m gonna start a course about Emacs!
Co-working
I’ve been working from home since 2013. I love it, but find it difficult sometimes. Starting from December, I decided to experiment and commute to northern Helsinki 3 times a week and work in a co-working space. It’s very cozy. And sometimes, one of my work mates brings a dog to work. I mean… how cool is that!
Changing the visual, physical context helps a lot. At least, for now it does. We’ll see how it goes. Starting from January, I’m even moving to that sweet corner spot near the window!
ZipTalks fail
A week ago I tweeted this:
Got too many tech talks to “Watch later”? Introducing ZipTalks: complete summaries of good tech talks, illustrated and nicely formatted in PDF, ebook and HTML formats
I wanted to sell these sets, but didn’t generate much traction. So, I’m refunding all purchases and releasing the content for free. The first ziptalk is already available on my blog. You can still support this effort by purchasing a set of PDF/ebook versions for any price $1+.
The other two ziptalks will be published next week.
Have a good weekend! Hugs and kisses!