December 17,

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!)

Windows 11, and more audio stuff

I feel like I’m blogging too much lately, but I also feel like I have a lot of stuff rattling around in my head, and I need to get it out.

I’ve mentioned in a recent post that we’re in the middle of a company-wide Windows 11 upgrade at work. They finally got around to pushing it out to my desktop on Wednesday and my laptop on Thursday. The desktop upgrade broke networking, which was a bit of an issue. I won’t get into the details, but I had to unplug the PC and walk it over to our help desk so they could get it working again. That cost me a couple of hours, between the upgrade and all the troubleshooting and back and forth.

The laptop upgrade was easier. I had a similar networking issue, but I knew how to fix it now, and could do that myself, in that instance. Also, I could continue working on the desktop while the laptop was updating itself. (With the desktop, I hadn’t brought in the laptop that day, so I was stuck fooling around on my phone while the upgrade was running, and while I was waiting on the help desk…)

Windows 11 hasn’t broken any of the tools I rely on for work. It’s made one or two things slightly harder to do. I don’t think it’s made anything easier. (I’ve probably said this before, but my criteria for OS upgrade success these days isn’t “does it make things better?” but rather “does it break anything important?” and “how much more of a pain is it vs. the old version?”)

I’ve been toying with the idea of upgrading my home desktop PC to Windows 11, despite the fact that it’s not really supported. (The CPU is too old.) I set a registry value that is supposed to bypass the CPU check. But that still wouldn’t allow me to run the installation assistant. So, then, I made a bootable installer on a USB stick, but that won’t let me upgrade, just do a clean install. So, anyway, that was all a waste of time.

Back on the audio stuff: There were three football games airing exclusively on the NFL Network yesterday, and I wanted to watch them. (Maybe not all of them, but I wanted to kill a little time with football playing in the background.) My NFL+ subscription lets me do that, but I couldn’t get the audio working in the NFL app on my Apple TV. This is one of those things that should just be a minor irritation, but I was in enough of a mood when this happened that I got really frustrated with it. I actually could get sound, weirdly, if I switched from my TV speakers to AirPlay output to my Sonos speakers. (I’m using a Sonos soundbar as my TV speaker anyway, but I have it directly hooked up to the TV, so the Apple TV isn’t normally aware that it’s even using the Sonos.) I’m definitely not the only person to have this issue with the NFL app. I’ve found references to it on Reddit and the Apple forums. And the NFL+ site has an article about troubleshooting audio problems, but it’s typically generic and useless.

The frustration was mostly around how complex something as simple as watching TV has gotten… It used to be that you could just turn on your TV, and, you know, watch a football game. Now I have to turn on the TV, switch the HDMI input to the Apple TV, turn on the Apple TV, launch the app, watch it lock up, force quit the app, relaunch the app, wait for it to load, find the right button to press to get into the right feed… Yeah, I know I’m an old man. I should be happy I have so many options for quality entertainment.

And a little more on my new Beats Studio Pro headphones: I found a good video review of them from MKBHD. And I used them last night to watch 65 on Netflix. “Loud dinosaur movie” was a good choice for checking them out. They worked well for that, and successfully drowned out the Christmas music outside.

I’ve been awake today since 5:30 AM. It’s almost noon now. I haven’t done much useful, but I made myself a nice breakfast, went for two walks, listened to some music, read some comics, and had a croissant for a snack, so life is good, I guess.

Evernote privacy, revisited

This is a follow-up to my post from a few days ago about Evernote’s privacy policy changes. They got so much negative feedback about the changes that they’ve decided not to implement them, and to review and revise their policy to “address our customers’ concerns, reinforce that their data remains private by default, and confirm the trust they have placed in Evernote is well founded.” That quote is from their new blog post on the subject. I’m fine with that, and it’s nice to see them reacting quickly to this. I still don’t consider Evernote to be a great place to store seriously confidential information, but I wouldn’t consider most note-taking services to be trustworthy for that.

At lot of people have looked at OneNote as a good alternative to Evernote, but their privacy statement is fairly opaque. There’s nothing terribly alarming in there, but the statement is mostly a bunch of boilerplate legalese.

If I was looking at alternatives, and I didn’t need a Windows client, only macOS and iOS clients, I’d seriously consider Bear. It’s gotten some very good reviews. And it uses CloudKit to sync data, so it’s all encrypted by default.

Another one I’d look at, if I only needed macOS support, is Quiver, which is billed as “a programmer’s notebook.” One of the issues I have with both Evernote and OneNote is that they’re not great for plain text, specifically program source code. But I really need something I can use on iOS and Windows, so a macOS-only program wouldn’t do me much good.

Healthcare in America right now

Here’s an interesting article on Obamacare, which unfortunately turns out to be largely a waste of time to read, due to a couple of key sentences near the end:

There’s one significant problem with all these ideas, of course: They’d need to pass the Republican Congress and be signed into law by Mr. Trump.

Source: Politics Aside, We Know How to Fix Obamacare

So, it’s a good thought exercise, but it isn’t going to happen.

And here’s another article that doesn’t leave me feeling good about the current state of the healthcare system in America:

To put it in very, very blunt terms: This is the health equivalent of a carjacking.

Source: Surprise! Insurance Paid the E.R. but Not the Doctor – The New York Times

I already knew about this one, of course. I’ve read about it before, and was actually a bit worried about it, when I went in for hernia surgery last year.

Installing DD-WRT on my Netgear router

After last week’s Netgear vulnerability scare, I started thinking that maybe it was time to install DD-WRT on my router. I’ve used DD-WRT in the past, on a Linksys router, but I never tried installing it on my Netgear. I think I looked into it when I first got the router, and either it wasn’t yet available for the router, or it was, but there were some issues, and I was afraid of bricking it.

Well, I’ve now overcome any lingering fear and went ahead and installed the DD-WRT firmware. So far, it’s working great. It installed easily, using the old Netgear web interface. It took about five minutes to load. After it came up, I spent about ten minutes configuring everything, and double-checking stuff. (The version I installed was updated about a month ago; the Netgear firmware hadn’t been updated in years.)

For the wireless setup, I just used the same names and passwords that I’d used on the original Netgear interface. All of my devices seem to have connected to it with no issues. This is a far cry from some of the grief I’ve had in the past with wireless setup. (When I look at the available wireless networks from my apartment right now, by the way, I’m seeing about 40. That’s a far cry from when I set up my first Apple Airport Base Station, back in 1999 or so. I was the only person in range with a wireless network back then. I’m amazed this stuff works at all, with so many devices competing with each other.)

I have to admit that I’ve kind of lost track of the various wireless security modes. I used to understand this stuff really well, but I haven’t had to keep up with it recently. I set my networks to “WPA2 Personal Mixed” and that’s working, so I guess that’s good enough.

I haven’t enabled any fancy advanced features in DD-WRT yet. One thing I might play around with is the NAS support. The router has a USB port that you can plug a hard drive into. I had a drive hooked up to it for a while, but gave up on it because it was too slow to really be useful. But maybe it’ll work better with DD-WRT than with the Netgear firmware. I’ll have to try that at some point.

great Kindle covers

These guys make some great covers for the Kindle. They’re pretty expensive though. I guess I’ll stick with the one that came with it.

It seems like I haven’t been blogging about anything other than the Kindle lately. There’s no particular reason for that. I just haven’t had much else to say. I think I’m nearly done fighting the cold I caught a couple of weeks ago. I should, hopefully, be fine by Christmas.

Weird Wii Stories

Wow, am I the only one who managed to buy a Wii without any drama? Kotaku has a bit on a CNN reporter who supposedly had a bit of a problem getting a Wii, and the comments on Kotaku would indicate that a number of other people are still jumping through hoops and going a bit nuts about the whole thing. Honestly, when I bought mine a couple of weeks ago, I just walked into the Times Square Toys R Us, picked up a Wii, waited in line, paid for it, and walked out of the store, no problem. Everyone in line was civilized. It didn’t take more that a half-hour.

PHP

Check out phpmac.com for information on running PHP on a Mac.

I’ve just started playing around with PHP a bit, since there’s a chance we’ll need to do something with it at work. Everything else we’re doing is ASP.NET, but we’re outsourucing something that’s liable to be done in PHP. As usual, I’ll probably end up supporting it after it’s delivered. I’ve got nothing against PHP, but it sure would be nice if I didn’t have to learn yet another scripting language!