movie and TV complaints

I have a note in Obsidian (originally from Evernote) that I wrote up in 2022, with some links I was going to use to support a blog post I was going to write, complaining about various issues with modern movies and TV. And I never got around to writing it. I was looking at it today, and was going to just move it from my inbox to my archive folder, but decided that actually writing the post might be more fun than starting on my taxes. So here we are. (And yes, I actually had the note sitting at the bottom of my inbox folder for four years.)

Now, plenty of other people have pointed out the stuff that’s bothering me, so this post is mostly just going to be a collection of links. If I’d actually gotten around to writing it in 2022, it might have been more detailed.

My first point of contention is sound. I find myself turning on subtitles a lot lately. Now, I’m fairly old and have a fair degree of hearing loss, so some of that is just me. But some of it is not. I don’t generally need subtitles for Tom Baker era Doctor Who, or old episodes of Murder She Wrote.

Here’s my first link: Here’s Why Movie Dialogue Has Gotten More Difficult To Understand (And Three Ways To Fix It). This is actually a pretty detailed article, and I don’t have much to add to it.

Next link: Why We All Need Subtitles Now. (Not much new there, but still interesting.)

Next complaint: picture. Everything is way too dark these days. I’ve actually given up on a few TV shows and movies, just because the picture was too dark and I couldn’t figure out what was going on. I can fix the audio problem by turning on subtitles, but there’s usually no good way to fix this problem.

I just recently finished watching the last few episodes of Stranger Things, on Netflix. While I loved the show, this last season has gotten a little too dark at times. John Oliver called this out briefly on Last Week Tonight: “Loved The Ending Of ‘Stranger Things,’ By The Way — Very Brown.” (And that reminds me: I need to read some of the articles I bookmarked about the Stranger Things finale, now that I’ve watched it, including this one by Linda Holmes from NPR.)

Anyway, here are a couple of articles I saved about this:

And the last complaint for today: length. Movies are all too long these days! I only have one link for that one: Why Are Movies So Long Now?

I worked my way through the Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes movies a while ago, and they where glorious: None of them are over 90 minutes, and most of them are closer to 60 than 90. The dialog is perfectly understandable, and the picture is great. (Assuming you’re watching the restored versions. If you’re watching a random version on YouTube, you might be getting a good version or a crappy one.)

So now that I’ve gotten that out of my system, I can finally move that note to the archive folder, and get on with my day. (Though I might still try to avoid starting on my taxes for a while longer.)

 

 

one more Towers of Hanoi experiment

OK, after my last post, I was going to spend the rest of the day watching the last episode of Stranger Things, but I got the itch to return to my AI experimentation, so I did. Specifically, I decided to try my idea to upgrade to Copilot Pro and build the app again from scratch with a different model. The end result can be found here. I set the model to Claude Opus 4.6 (high) and worked through it.

Things went much more smoothly than they did the first time (when I was using Haiku 4.5). Still, the end result wasn’t quite as good as the one produced with Claude Code.

I’ve got a 30-day free trial of Copilot Pro, so I may experiment with it some more over the next few weeks. Of course, I have a paid Copilot sub available to me from work too, so I really don’t need a personal sub, if I’m just using it to mess around a little. So I don’t think I’ll keep the personal Pro sub.

For personal experimentation, going forward, I’ll probably use my Claude Pro sub, since I’ve paid for that for a whole year.

Oh, and one more thing on the Towers of Hanoi: I’m finding myself slightly coveting the wooden puzzle shown on that episode of Astrid. I’ve looked around on Amazon and Etsy, and there are a lot of versions of it out there, but none of them really grabbed me. So for now, I think I’ll stick with the virtual versions.

more on Claude Code and GitHub Copilot CLI

Since my last post, I’ve been doing more experimenting with both Claude Code and GitHub Copilot CLI. I’d been having trouble coming up with any good ideas for little projects to work on, but I recently watched an episode of Astrid, in which the main character is working on a Towers of Hanoi puzzle. I’m pretty sure I had a little BASIC program for a Towers of Hanoi game running on my TRS-80, a very long time ago. I hadn’t thought about it much since then though. But it seemed like a good little old-school challenge I could use to spend some more time with AI coding tools.

I started out with Claude Code. My methodology was to start out by writing a “requirements.md” file and placing it in a new folder. I then launched Claude Code in that folder and asked it to generate a “PLAN.md” file, with a detailed plan to create the application. I then iterated through the steps in the plan, letting Claude do most of the work. That worked really well, and I had a running, bug-free, application in just about an hour. Checking my usage, I saw that I’d used just a third of my session limit and 4% of my weekly limit. And I was using whatever the default model was, probably Opus 4.6? You can see the whole project here, if you want.

After that, I tried the same experiment with Copilot CLI. That didn’t go nearly as well. The generated PLAN.md file wasn’t bad, but it was a good bit less detailed than Claude’s. And, while I got to a “finished” application pretty quickly, it had a fair number of bugs in it. I spent a little time working through those bugs today, and I have a finished application now, though it’s still a little rough around the edges. In terms of usage, I’m at 50% of my monthly max (though of course I’m on the free plan here). For the model, I used the default, which was “claude-haiku-4.5”. I think that may account for a good bit of the difference I saw between Claude and Copilot here, though it might not be all of it. I think that, if I paid for a Pro plan and switched to Opus 4.6 here, I would have gotten results similar to Claude. I’m not sure though.

So where to go from here? In both of these cases, I had asked the AI to create a C# console app for the game. I’m considering going back to the Claude one, and asking it to rewrite the user interface using a TUI library, like Terminal.Gui or Spectre.Console or maybe Consolonia. I haven’t played with any of these, but I’ve been curious about them, so that might be interesting.

I’ve also considered asking Claude to add a SPA project to the solution with a web-based user interface. I could either tell it to use a specific technology for that, or leave it open and see what it does. That might be fun.

I could also bite the bullet and pay for the Copilot Pro plan, and then repeat the exercise from scratch in Copilot with a better model and see how that works. And/or take the PLAN.md file from the Claude implementation and let Copilot use it. It would be interesting to see how much of a difference a good, detailed, plan makes.

Well, I’m off today for Presidents Day, and I’ve already spent a good bit of the morning messing around with this stuff. Maybe it’s a good time to have lunch, and then switch to just relaxing for the rest of the day.

Mermaid, Copilot, Claude Code, Project Euler, and some other stuff

Once again, I’ve been meaning to write up a bunch of stuff here on my blog, but just haven’t gotten around to it. In my last post, from about two weeks ago, I blogged about the nightmare that was Main St overnight construction. Well, the good news is that there’s hasn’t been any more over the last couple of weeks. The bad news is that they haven’t been able to do it because the weather has been so bad. We had a big snowstorm, followed by very cold temperatures, so a lot of the snow is still on the ground. I won’t get into all of the inconvenience that’s caused. I have other stuff I want to blog about. Let’s just say that a combination of stuff, staring with the construction, then the weather, has really put a dent in my productivity and equanimity this year.

So on to the next thing. One thing I’ve actually managed to learn and enjoy playing around with this year has been Mermaid, a language for creating diagrams programmatically. I’ve always hated creating diagrams with drag & drop tools like Visio and Lucid. I’m just not good at it. I never get things quite right. With Mermaid, I just describe the diagram in code and let the system render the diagram. It might not always look as pretty as a carefully handmade Visio or Lucid diagram, but it’s good enough for me!

I stumbled across Mermaid via a reference to it in David Sparks’ Obsidian Field Guide. I learned it by reading a book called Creating Software with Modern Diagramming Techniques, which also discussed the C4 model, which is a simple framework for thinking about how to use diagrams to describe a given computer system. None of this was really planned; it was just serendipity, but it turned out to be fun and useful. I’d recommend looking into it, if you have to create diagrams, and like the idea of doing it through code.

Topic number three: AI-assisted programming. I’ve been messing around with GitHub Copilot for a while. I passed an exam on it late last year. I’ve been using it at work, for my C# work. (A lot of my work is in AX 2012, using X++, so it’s not easy to use AI assistants for that.) I’ve found Copilot to be a mixed bag, in practice. I do use it, but it’s often more trouble than it’s worth.

I keep hearing good things about Claude Code, though. We’re not allowed to use it at work (sigh), but I eventually felt I had to give in and try it. This article about Microsoft not just allowing, but encouraging, their employees to try Claude Code was the thing that really pushed me to dive in.

So I’ve spent some time this week trying to figure it out. First, I had to sign up for a Claude Pro subscription, at $20/month. (I actually decided to go all-in and pay for a full year, at $200.) That money was another thing that was holding me back with Claude Code. Since I already have access to Copilot, I didn’t want to pay for another AI subscription. But, yeah, I gave in.

The next stumbling block for me was knowing that Claude Code is oriented more towards Linux and Mac developers, vs. Windows. It relies on Node.js and npm, which are… not my favorite tools. GitHub Copilot is integrated right into Visual Studio and VS Code, so you can get started with it quite easily, if those are the tools you’re using. (And, for me, they are!)

After some weeping and gnashing of teeth, I finally decided to set it up in WSL on my Windows 11 laptop. That wasn’t too hard. I initially used it in conjunction with a repo I had on my Windows drive, and which I was trying to work on in Visual Studio 2026. But that’s not a great way to work. Claude Code needs to be able to build and run your project, and if I’m doing that on the Windows side, it’s going to leave Claude crippled.

So, then, I took the leap and set myself up for .NET development under WSL. (That, also, wasn’t too hard.) So the setup I settled on is, basically, opening a WSL prompt in Windows Terminal, changing into my project folder (now in the WSL filesystem), running “code .” to open my project in VS Code, then running “claude” from the prompt to set up the Claude Code environment. (Using VS Code from WSL is described here.) So I switch back and forth between Claude Code running in the terminal and VS Code.

Once I started doing that, I was surprised to see that I could chat with Claude Code from a chat window in VS Code. Honestly, I’m not even sure how that happened, since I didn’t install the Claude Code extension in VS Code. I’m going to have to figure that out at some point.

But my main way of working was to chat with Claude in the terminal session, let it change stuff in my project, then review it in VS Code, and build and test it there. (I did let Claude build and test it a bit, too. That worked.)

The project I choose to use for my Claude Code experiment was my Project Euler repo. (I last messed around with it back in 2023.) I’ve found that Claude Code can easily solve Euler problems by just typing “implement a solution for problem XX” and then letting it go. That’s probably because so many other people have solved the problems, then blogged about them. So Claude probably has a bunch of solutions and information about the older problems in it’s training data, so it’s all baked in. But I wanted to use trial and error, and actually learn some stuff, so I figured out how to prompt it to work with me rather than just doing the work itself. Part of that was explaining my intentions in my CLAUDE.md file. (I’m not sure how much that helped, but I think it did.)

So, at this point, I know I’m only using about 10% of the power of Claude Code. Maybe less. There’s a lot more I could try. Small steps for now. I’m making progress!

Main St construction, shopping for earplugs

It’s been a rough week. I was surprised on Monday by some exciting new overnight construction work, happening right outside my window. Here’s an announcement about it, on the Somerville web site, and here’s a page with some more information. The work is supposed to be happening overnight, from 8 pm to 5 am, and might continue through to the end of March.

I’m truly hoping that this isn’t going to be going on every night between now and March 31, but I’m honestly not sure. The last time they did something like this, it was emergency work, and they got it done in less than a week. But this seems like it might be a much longer project.

I’ve been spending a lot of time this week trying to get my head around this, and figure out how to deal with it. So far, I’ve been through four nights of it, and it’s been pretty bad.

For now, I’m looking at various options for plugging up my ears and blocking out the noise. I’ve got some old earplugs, that I’ve used in the past, and I’ve been using those this week.

I’ve got some Leight Plugs, like these ones, that I’ve had for a long time. (I think I found them in my parents’ bathroom when I was clearing out their house.) They don’t really work for me. Too small. And I have some Flents Quiet Please earplugs, which I’ve also had for a long time. I bought those myself, and have used them in the past. They work OK for me, but they’re not perfect. (And apparently they no longer make the ones I have. They make something similar, but it’s not quite the same design.)

So I’ve been shopping around, looking at other options. I ordered a couple of things from Amazon, and they arrived yesterday. First, I got some Macks silicone earplugs. I haven’t tried them yet. The silicone earplugs are a bit different from the foam ones. With the foam ones, you compress them a bit, put them in your ear, then let them expand. With the silicone ones, you roll them into a ball, push them into your ear, then mold them to fit. (I think.) I’m curious to see if they work better than the foam ones.

I also bought these Alpine SleepDeep earplugs. They’re reusable plastic earplugs. I tried the M/L size last night. I got a good fit in my left ear (which is the mostly deaf ear), but a not-so-good fit in my right ear. I had to push it in maybe a bit too far to get it to stay in, and I woke up with maybe a little wax issue this morning? I might try again tonight. Or try the small one in my right ear. Or maybe just give up on them for now, and go back to the Flents foam ones for now.

And of course I’ve looked at other options. Happy Ears look kind of interesting. But they also look like they’re maybe a gimmick.

And there are some high-tech options. I remember reading about the Bose Sleepbuds some time ago, and being interested in them. Bose discontinued them, but the rights to the product got sold off and they’re now sold as Ozlo Sleepbuds. I’m curious, but maybe not curious enough to spend $275 on them. The Anker Soundcore A30 earbuds are similar. They sell for $200 on Amazon. (Here’s an article from ZDNet that covers both these and the Ozlo Sleepbuds.)

I wouldn’t mind trying out either of these high-tech solutions, but I feel like I should give the low-tech options a fair chance first. And I feel like maybe just sticking a wad of putty or foam in your ears might be a better solution for loud construction noise than high-tech earbuds. Those might be better for masking/minimizing sounds that aren’t quite at the “jackhammer outside my window” level.

I guess I’m just going to experiment with a few options for the upcoming week and try to figure out what works best for me. I’m really worried that the next couple of months might be a bit of an ordeal.

Evernote to Obsidian – point of no return

I’ve been chronicling my journey from Evernote to Obsidian here on my blog; here’s a link to my last post about that. I thought I’d write a post today to mark the “point of no return” with this project.

This morning, I deleted all of the notes from my Evernote account, and canceled my paid account. I didn’t completely delete my account; I now have just the free version, so if I need any of my old notes in the next week or two, I could probably log in and pull them out of my trash. But, for all practical purposes, I’m committed to Obsidian now, as my “trusted system.”

I think I’ve got Obsidian set up the way I want it now, but there’s some stuff I want to clean up and/or tweak. First, I’m still trying to clean up all of my images/attachments that came over from Evernote. I initially put them in separate sub-folders for each notebook that I imported from Evernote. Now, I’m trying to consolidate them into one top-level “_resources” folder. As I’m doing that, I’m cleaning up file names on them a bit. A lot of them have names like “img_1234.jpg” or “snapshot.1.jpg”, so I’m trying to rename those to be a bit more unique and descriptive. I initially tried a plugin that automatically renamed them to match the name of the note that they were referenced in, but that plugin seemed to cause some issues, so I gave up on that. Now, I’m going through them a few at a time. I’m not renaming all of them; if they’re already named with a date/time stamp of some kind, or anything else that’s reasonably unique, I’m leaving them be. This is still probably overkill, but it’s also giving me a chance to look at some of the older notes and clean them up a bit too. Eventually, I’ll be done with that.

I’m also experimenting a bit with how I’m going to record my day-to-day activities and task completions. I’m using the tasks plugin, and that’s working well so far, as a replacement for Evernote reminders. To record day-to-day activities, in Evernote, I used to keep a year-long task note, named “Tasks 2025” (or whatever year it was), with a bulleted list of ongoing projects and simple to-do items at the top. On any day where I was working on stuff, I’d create a date-stamped list of stuff I worked on that day. That list would get pushed down below the master project/to-do list when I was done with it, so, by the end of the year, the note would be a reverse-chronological list of everything I’d done that year. (Well, not everything, but you know what I mean.)

In Obsidian, I was initially going to keep doing that. But then I thought about trying daily notes instead. I started that on January 1, and it’s working OK so far. But I have a bit of a hybrid system now, where I’m using a combination of three notes to track things:

  1. A “tasks” note that is just a bunch of task queries, to show me what’s due today, what’s due in the next week, and a master list of all pending tasks.
  2. A “Tasks 2026” note, with that master list of tasks, projects, and simple to-do items.
  3. A daily note each day, with the list of stuff I did that day.

So that’s probably too much stuff. I should probably consolidate the note with the task queries and the note with the project (etc) list. But I haven’t settled on how I want that to look. Either way, I think I’m on the right track. I just haven’t converged on exactly what I want yet.

I still have a couple of friction points with Obsidian. Sync is occasionally not as reliable as I’d like it to be. I guess I need to get used to looking at the little sync status icon in the lower right corner of the screen and not exiting Obsidian until it’s green. (Evernote sync had been very reliable lately, and I’d been taking that for granted. I guess that was because Evernote had really transitioned to an online-first experience, while Obsidian remains a local-first experience. The Evernote client, I think, was constantly saving stuff to their back-end; the local database was probably being treated as just a cache, really.)

Most of the other friction points are just little things that I need to get used to, or find ways to work around. I’ll get there.

New Year’s Day 2026

Well, here we are, with another New Year’s Day post. I’ve been doing these posts since 2008 or thereabouts. It occurs to me now that I should create a category for these posts, so I can see them all together. So I just did that. The category is NYD, and I have added it to all (or most) of my previous New Year’s Day posts.

Health

2025 was a bit of a rough year. Honestly, it didn’t start well, and it didn’t end well. I started the year sick, and I ended the year sick. There were a good number of healthy days in between, of course, but right now I’m fighting a cold (or flu or whatever) that’s been on and off since Thanksgiving. And I had my second bout of COVID in 2025, in July. That was unpleasant.

Travel

I don’t think I left NJ at all in 2025. No trips to NYC or anywhere else. I didn’t even go too far within NJ. I finally closed my E-ZPass account and returned my tag last month. I hadn’t used it since 2019.

Weight

I started the year at 165 pounds, and ended it at 167. (It’s gone as high as 169, but hasn’t stayed that high for more than a day or two.) I’d hoped to keep it at 165, but I haven’t quite managed to do that. In 2024, I went from 160 to 165, and the year before that, from 150 to 160. So I’ve cut my yearly increase from 10, to 5, and to 2 pounds. So that’s progress!

Exercise

It’s kind of funny that Apple Fitness doesn’t have a fancy “year in review” function the way so many other apps/services do. Going into the Health app, and looking at some yearly graphs, here’s what I see:

  • I’m averaging around 500 move calories per day over the last year.
  • I’m getting an average of 7800 steps in per day.
  • I’m averaging 28 minutes per day of exercise.

I also just downloaded an app called Fitness Wrapped, which is supposed to generate a year-in-review, but it requires payment before showing me the 2025 summary. It looks interesting, but I don’t know if I want to pay for it.

Either way, I think I did fine on exercise in 2025. It seems to be down from 2024 (550 move calories and 45 minutes exercise per day), but it’s fine.

Work

We didn’t do performance reviews this year, but I did get a small raise. It was slightly bigger than 2024’s raise, but smaller than 2023’s, for what that’s worth.

In January 2025, I transitioned to a new boss. (My previous boss is now my boss’s boss, so he’s moved up a bit.) The new boss is someone I’ve worked with for years, and I think we have a good relationship. It can be hard to tell, when you don’t have a formal performance review or any other structured review, but I think I’m doing OK.

Learning

My 2024 performance review included a goal (from my previous boss) that I pursue a SAFe Certification. I wasn’t that enthusiastic about it, but I figured I should give it a try, so I did a bunch of e-learning around it, including a long series of videos on O’Reilly Learning. The cert exam is pretty expensive, and I never got an OK to go through with it, so I dropped it at some point and concentrated on other stuff.

I also mentioned in interest in pursuing an AZ-204 certification in my New Year’s post for 2025. I did actually go through with that one, and two other Microsoft certs. I passed the AZ-900 in April, the AZ-204 in June, and the GH-300 in December. So I’m a bit proud of getting all of that done.

This year, I’ll need to renew the AZ-204, if I want to keep my “Azure Developer Associate” status. I have until June to do that. And the renewal test is simpler than the initial one; you can do it without all of the Pearson OnVUE nonsense. So I’ll probably do that.

Books

Now onto some fun stuff. My Goodreads 2025 reading challenge shows me as having read 60 books. I think it was actually more like 50; the challenge picks up stuff from my Kindle that it probably shouldn’t, but I’m not going to try to clean that up.

I finished reading A Memory of Light in January, so that finished up the Wheel of Time series that had taken up so much of my time in 2024. I didn’t take on a similar project in 2025; I just read a bunch of random stuff, really.

  • I read a few Robert A. Heinlein novels that I thought I hadn’t read before, but which I discovered that I had read, probably in my teens. So that was interesting.
  • I was going to read a few Kurt Vonnegut books, but I see I only read one, Breakfast of Champions. Maybe I’ll get to a few more this year.
  • I managed to finish The Stand, by Stephen King, which I’d started in 2019, and then abandoned. That’s a very long book, and took a good chunk of time to get through.
  • I got on a Star Trek kick near the end of the year, and finished the Rise of the Federation series. I also started the Prey series. I’m almost done with that. (I was going to try to finish off the last book yesterday, but didn’t quite make it.)
  • I didn’t do a lot of self-help reading this year. I did finally manage to read How to Win Friends and Influence People, but that’s about it.
  • And I didn’t do much book reading for professional purposes. I read one random book on AI, and started another. I’ll probably mark that second one as “abandoned” on Goodreads and give up on it. I wasn’t getting much out of it. At this point, I guess I’m mostly doing all of my professional learning in video form, via O’Reilly and Pluralsight.
  • My comic book reading this year was pretty random. I read through a few volumes of Greg Rucka’s Lazarus series. I’m enjoying that, and should get back to it soon. I read all three volumes of Ed Brubaker’s Velvet series. I really enjoyed those too.

For next year, I’d like to maybe make some progress on my backlog of Dresden Files novels, Laundry Files novels, or maybe Discworld. (I said the same thing in last year’s post, and didn’t do any of that. So maybe in 2026.)

Summary

2025 felt like a “let’s just get through this” kind of year. I don’t blog about politics much, but… geez. And my health has been up and down. I’m hoping 2026 will be better, on several fronts, but I’m not sure it will. I’m pretty sure I’ll get through it though. I’ll end with links to a couple of funny New Year’s Day comic strips: Over the Hedge and Lio.

Christmas 2025

I’ve been looking back at old journal entries in Day One, and posts on this blog, and it looks like I’ve been at least a bit sick every Christmas so far this decade. And this year is no exception. I’ve been having issues on and off all month. I thought I was getting better yesterday, but I had trouble sleeping last night and feel worse today. So, today, I’m in a state where I haven’t had enough sleep, my nose is stuffed up, and my stomach is bothering me.

So all that is to say that I’m not going to be very ambitious today. Rest and recuperation. Plenty of fluids. All that.

Meanwhile, I’m still working on my Obsidian setup. I’ve started watching the Obsidian Field Guide, from David Sparks. I paid for the full $99 “plus” version. That seems like a bit much, but I’ve been listening to his MPU podcast for years without supporting it, so I might as well toss some money his way.

It’s pretty good, though it’s a couple of years out of date at this point. (It was made in 2023.) For instance, he covers Dataview rather than Bases. I’ve worked my way through about half the course. I’ve found it oddly relaxing. There’s something about learning a certain kind of thing… It’s hard for me to put my finger on just what it is. Maybe it’s just that I’m not going to have to take an exam on Obsidian, like I have with the other stuff I’ve been learning this year. (See previous posts on  AZ-900, AZ-204, and GH-300.) Anyway, I think I’ve going to spend some more time today working through the videos. It seems like a dumb thing to do on Christmas, but I don’t have enough energy for anything else, really, and I’d rather do this than watch TV right now.

I’m aware that, with something like Obsidian, you can go down a rabbit hole, where you’re spending so much time learning stuff and tweaking your setup, that you don’t actually get anything useful done. But I think I’ve got a pretty workable system figured out at this point, and I’m probably only a little less productive with Obsidian now than I previously was with Evernote. Hopefully, I can soon get back to the point I was at with Evernote, where I’m not thinking about the system too much, and I’m just using it effectively.

last day of vacation

Well, today is the last day of my week-long “vacation.” It wasn’t really much of a vacation. The weather was terrible, and I was feeling kind of sick all week, so I just stayed home and tried to get some stuff done, and relax a bit.

I managed to get my Evernote to Obsidian migration done, I think. There are still a lot of things I could tweak, but I think I’ve established a usable system that’ll work for now.

Here are links to my previous Obsidian posts from this week:

    1. from Evernote to Obsidian, take two
    2. Evernote to Obsidian, work in progress
    3. Obsidian, day three

I haven’t had any sync issues, since the one I mentioned at the end of the “day three” post. I’m hoping that was just a fluke. My plan is to cancel my Evernote account early in the new year, before it renews.

Obsidian, day three

Well, I’m now on day three of my vacation week, and day three of my Obsidian setup. (See here for day one and day two.) I’m going to write up some notes below on various things I’ve been working on.

Obsidian Sync

I signed up for Obsidian Sync, at the $8/month Plus level. For now, I’m paying month-to-month, so it’s actually a $10/month plan. I wasn’t sure if I needed Plus or Standard. My vault is around 700 MB, so it’s under the 1 GB limit. But I initially had some attachments that were over 5 MB, so that might have been an issue. I think I’ve removed or resized all of those now, so I could probably make do with the Standard level. The Plus plan also gets you a full year of revision history, which is nice, so I might stick with that either way. I’m not sure yet.

I’d previously experimented with simply putting my vault in OneDrive and iCloud. OneDrive worked fine for PC/Mac sync, but wouldn’t have worked on iOS. I thought iCloud might work OK on iOS, but it’s a little iffy. So, for now, I’m paying for Obsidian Sync.

Obsidian Sync does seem to work fine on iOS and iPadOS, but there’s one thing I’ve noticed that I didn’t initially think about: Obsidian, even on iOS, is local-first, so your whole vault gets synced to your iPad and iPhone. That’s not a huge problem, but it’s interesting to see that the Obsidian app on my phone is using 800 MB of storage, while Evernote is only using 500 MB. I think Evernote caches a certain amount of information locally, but the design is online-first, so (I think) it’s always going to try to get info from the cloud.

Tasks

My big project today has been converting all of my Evernote reminders to tasks. I’m still a little nervous about this. I’m losing the email reminders and iOS notifications that Evernote provides. So I’m going to have to be good about looking at my main task note in Obsidian. This is how I track important life stuff, like paying bills, so if it falls apart, I’m in trouble.

I’ve now done the migration, and I have 70 tasks in my vault. I did the migration manually, rather than trying to create a script to do it. I wanted to be able to review all of the notes associated with the reminders, and think about them, and maybe revise them a bit.

One thing I did to make this all easier: I assigned a shortcut key to the “create or edit task” command. I used Alt-T for that (Opt-T on the Mac). The pop-up dialog for this is reasonably easy to use. I do have one big problem with it though: there’s no date picker. When I’m setting due dates on tasks, if they don’t need to be done on a specific day, I like to set them to the closest Saturday, which is my usual day for taking care of random to-do items. I guess I’ll have to live without that for now.

To actually view the tasks, I have a “task note” with a number of task queries on it. For now, it looks like this:

task note

(I tried to insert the code here, but WordPress got confused, so I’m just putting a screenshot here.)

So not too fancy. I’d really like to find a way to format this a bit better. Maybe in a table? If there’s a way to show task info in a “base”, I haven’t figured it out yet. I did use a base to show all of my Evernote reminders, and that worked well. I might as well stick that in here too:

views:
  - type: table
    name: Table
    filters:
      and:
        - '!note["EN-Reminder"].isEmpty()'
        - note["EN-Reminder-Done"].isEmpty()
    order:
      - file.name
      - EN-Reminder
      - EN-Reminder-Done
    sort:
      - property: EN-Reminder
        direction: ASC

This is basically showing all notes that had an Evernote reminder, but did not have a “reminder done” date.

In working through my reminders/tasks, I’ve noticed that a lot of them are just reminders to review a given annual subscription before it renews. I think I might look at seeing if there’s a way to categorize these specific tasks and separate them out. Maybe a “#subs” tag or a property. And once I started thinking about properties, I started thinking that I could have a specific type of note with a number of specific properties that I could use to organized my subscriptions. Maybe properties for renewal date, cost, URL, and so on. Well, that’s a project for later maybe.

Images

I may have gone a little overboard with image cleanup today. I installed this plugin, which is a simple little script that renames all images on the current note to match the note title. So, for instance, ‘IMG_1234.jpg’ becomes ‘drivers license 2014.jpg’. It only does this for one note at a time. So I went through my main archive folder and ran it on, probably, around 400 notes. And did some general note cleanup along the way.

I think I need to stop myself from going overboard with miscellaneous note cleanup. It’s easy for me to go down a rabbit hole of doing low-value file maintenance tasks and losing sight of the big picture. This has been a problem for me, in general, really. Obsidian really gives me an opportunity to waste a lot of time fiddling with unimportant stuff, and I need to watch out for that.

(Update: I had some sync issues after all of those image file renames, so I think I’m going to delete the plugin linked above. I don’t know if the sync problems were due to the plugin, or something else, but… better safe than sorry. And I’m hoping that the kind of sync issues I just had aren’t common with Obsidian sync. If they are, then I’m going to need to go back to Evernote!)