July 16,

Obsidian resources

I’m still spending a lot of time messing around with Obsidian, trying to figure out if I can migrate from Evernote, and if I want to. I have a bunch to say about all that, but I’m going to start with a list of resources that I’ve been looking at.

There’s quite a lot of material out there on Obsidian: podcasts, videos, blog posts, etc. That’s one of the reasons why it seems worth considering. If it wasn’t good, there wouldn’t be so many people out there producing content around it. (On the other hand, there’s a lot of content out there on the internet about some pretty questionable stuff, so maybe I shouldn’t read too much into that…)

Training

There are a bunch of paid training options out there, usually in video form and running around $200 for a course. Here’s a thread from MPU Talk on the subject. A few of the examples below came from that thread.

  • Nicole van der Hoeven has a course called Obsidian for Everyone, for €200. I’ve watched some of her YouTube videos, and they’re pretty good.
  • Mike Schmitz has something called Obsidian University, which costs $150 USD. Schmitz is a co-host of Focused, with David Sparks. I don’t listen to that podcast, but I generally trust David Sparks, so I’d assume he’s legit, at least.
  • The Sweet Setup has something called To Obsidian and Beyond, for $200 or $500, depending on which tier you buy. Mike Schmitz was also involved with this course. I think it predates his Obsidian University, but I’m not sure.
  • And then there’s Obsidian Flight School, which costs $129. There appears to be a lot of content in this one. This is from Nick Milo. I’m not really familiar with him, but I’ve watched one or two of his YouTube videos.
  • And finally, there’s Obsidian Fundamentals and Obsidian Onboarding from Danny Hatcher. There are a few tiers to his stuff, with the highest being £199. I’m not too familiar with him, but he also has a lot of videos on YouTube.

I haven’t tried any of these out yet, and I don’t know if I will, but it’s interesting that there’s so much out there. (And, by the way, I couldn’t find anything on Obsidian on any of the training channels I currently have access to: Pluralsight, SkillSoft, and LinkedIn Learning.)

Podcasts

I’m not aware of any podcasts that are specifically about Obsidian, but Obsidian is a subject that comes up on a few podcasts that I follow either regularly or occasionally.

  • Mac Power Users: MPU has a number of episodes talking about Obsidian, since David Sparks is a big Obsidian user. There’s one episode in particular, 583: The Obsidian Deep Dive, that devotes the whole show to Obsidian.
  • Automators, likewise, devoted a whole episode to Obsidian: 109: Automating Obsidian.
  • AppStories did a four-part Obsidian In Depth series that starts here. Federico Viticci is a big fan of Obsidian, and there’s a lot of Obsidian coverage on AppStories and MacStories.
  • MetaMuse did an episode recently interviewing Stephan Ango, CEO of Obsidian. I found this episode to be particularly useful in figuring out a bit more about the company that’s behind Obsidian, and what their philosophy is, and how likely they are to remain on a course that’s consistent with maintaining a product that continues to be useful. (I had a hard time phrasing that sentence… Many tech companies are more about getting to an IPO or maximizing revenue or growth or whatever than they are about releasing and maintaining a good product. And the “maintaining” part is usually the sticking point…)
  • Somewhat related: I listened to an episode of Taming The Trunk recently that featured an interview with Federico Simionato, the current product lead on Evernote at Bending Spoons. Similar to the MetaMuse episode above, it gave me some insight into the current owner of Evernote, and their philosophy and plans for the product.

As you can see, I’ve been spending a lot of time researching and learning about Obsidian this week. I still haven’t convinced myself to migrate over from Evernote though. Some of the experimenting I’ve done has, at least, gotten me to clean up my Evernote data a bit, and has gotten me to think a bit deeper about how and why I use these kind of tools.

And, since Evernote has been my “second brain” for more than ten years now, going through the data in my account has sent me down some rabbit holes, remembering old jobs, old projects, and old friends. Some of that has been pleasant and some of it hasn’t. (Insert Comic Book Guy “Oh, I’ve wasted my life” meme here.)

 

trying out MarsEdit

I’m writing this post in MarsEdit, just to see if I like it better than the normal WordPress admin interface. So far, it works fine, but I’m not sure it’s that much better than just using the WordPress admin. I think maybe if I could memorize the keyboard shortcuts, it would be quite nice.

I’ll keep it on my Mac until the trial period runs out, at least, then make up my mind if it’s worth spending money on.

I’d heard of MarsEdit before, of course, but hadn’t really thought about it much lately. I was reminded of it when listening to MPU 264 with John Gruber. He uses MarsEdit with Movable Type, which I did not realize was still around and being used as a viable blogging platform. (Shows how little I know!) I’ve never been that interested in Gruber’s blog, Daring Fireball, but he does have an interesting history, and has been involved in some interesting work, so that episode of MPU was definitely worth listening to. And of course his big thing is Markdown, which the MPU hosts also love, but which I’ve never been able to talk myself into trying. I like the general idea, but I just haven’t been able to find a good use case for it, for myself.

Comic-Con Day Four

I’ve posted a blog entry for every other day of the con, so I might as well post one more, for Sunday. My friend Bill came to the con, but only for Thursday and Sunday, so I had a chance to hang out with him again a bit today. That was cool, since I’m usually on my own for these things. I went to the DC “Young Justice” panel with him, which was not actually about the Young Justice cartoon, rather it was about several DC books featuring young heroes. I’m not reading any DC books right now, but it was interesting to learn a bit about what they’re doing. Plus, I got a free copy of Justice League #1, which means that I now own exactly one “New 52” book.

I spent most of the day in panels, going to the “Cartoon Voices II” panel, and a couple of others. I managed to avoid buying anything at all, other than coffee, at the con on Sunday.

The trip home was fairly uneventful. I managed to get a seat with extra legroom on the flight, so that was nice. And the flight was only a little late getting in. And the drive home went smoothly.

Overall, it was a nice enough con, and a nice vacation from NJ and work. I came home with some new books, but few enough that they fit in my luggage. (I still have a huge backlog of stuff to read, much of it purchased at past cons. But, as I keep reminding myself, that’s a good problem to have.)

Back at home, NJ is still way too hot, and the A/C in my apartment is still not quite working as well as it should be. So, here I am, back in reality. I’ve got tomorrow off, to get laundry done and try to get back on east coast time. Then, back to work on Wednesday.

Lotus Domino 8.5

I upgraded our main Domino server to 8.5 a couple of weeks ago. It’s holding up pretty well so far, though it has crashed once. I was going to call IBM support on that, but I didn’t get around it it, and the server hasn’t crashed again, so I’m hoping that was a fluke. I’ve been meaning to write up some notes from the upgrade that might be useful to anyone else in a similar environment to my own, but I hadn’t gotten around to it until now. I hope I can remember everything I wanted to mention.

First, if you’re upgrading a mail server to 8.5, there’s a bug in the installer that deletes some important files, such as dwa7.ntf, from the previous install. See this forum post for a complete list. That should be fixed in 8.5.1, but for now, back up those files before upgrading.

Second, I got a weird error message during the upgrade that I can’t quite remember right now. The bottom line on that was that I had to uninstall 8.5, reboot, and reinstall, and everything was fine. So, if you get a weird error at the end of the install, don’t panic, just uninstall and reinstall.

IBM’s documentation on the upgrade process is spread out in various places, and can be somewhat hard to find. This knowledge collection on the Domino wiki is a good place to start. And this document provides a good step-by-step walkthrough on what to do right before and after upgrading. Basically, doing fixup/compact/updall, and stuff like that. It looks like they’ve actually updated this doc since I last looked at it. It shows a modification date of 7/8/09, just a few days after I did my upgrade.

After the upgrade, this blog post has a nice list of things you should look at and think about. Not everything in the list is likely to be applicable in every environment, but it’s a good list to review. There’s probably at least one thing on there that you haven’t thought of.

On the client side, I have installed the full 8.5 client (with Designer and Admin) on my own machine, and a couple of others. I’ve also rolled out the 8.5 “basic” client to a few people. The basic client looks and works pretty much like the 7.x and 8.0.x client. The full client, on the other hand, looks a lot different. I experimented with the full client for 8.0, but gave up on it, since it was way too slow. They’ve really fixed the speed issue with 8.5, but it’s still slower than the basic client, and I wouldn’t recommend rolling it out to anybody with less that 2 GB of memory.

Looking at the designer and admin clients, the admin side isn’t much different from the 7.x or 8.0 admin clients. It looks and works pretty much the same. I’m sure there are some improvements, but I haven’t really noticed anything different yet. On the designer side, though, there are a lot of changes. The basic designer screen has been changed quite a bit. When you get into actually changing a view, or a form, or a script library, or whatever, the experience hasn’t changed much. But the basic interface around the edges, for picking a design element to work with, is different. And there’s something going on the first time you open a database or template in the designer. I’m not sure exactly what it does, but it adds a few new objects to the database. I don’t think you can normally see these objects, but they show up in TeamStudio Ciao.

Ciao is a great tool for version control that I’ve been using for some time. It hasn’t been updated for 8.5 yet, but it does work OK, for the most part. I did have a problem opening up one template in Designer. I think something happened to corrupt it when I first tried to open it. After that, I couldn’t get it to open at all. I had to trash it and restore a copy from backup tape. That one worked fine. I’m not sure if the problem I had was caused by Designer or Ciao. EIther way, I should mention that I e-mailed TeamStudio support, and got a call back the next day from a couple of guys there who filled me in on their plans for 8.5 support. Basically, they’ll be supporting it as of 8.5.1, which is fine. I really appreciate them for getting back to me and being honest and clear about their 8.5 plans. With a lot of companies, getting info like that out of them is like pulling teeth.

I guess the last thing I should mention is the mail template. I upgraded myself, and a few other users, to the new template. I like the look of it, for the most part, but I’ve found myself having a hard time getting used to a few things. Follow-up flags have, for some reason, been moved from the left side of the inbox view to the right side, for instance. No clue why they did that. And yes, I know I could customize the view and put them back on the left. I really like the way they’ve implemented a more traditional multi-select functionality into the template. It’s nice to be able the ctrl-click and shift-click and have that behave the same way it does in any other Windows app. I could probably write a few more paragraphs on the mail template, but I’m going to restrain myself.

One more thing I should mention: The key functionality for 8.5, as far as I’m concerned (coming from 7.x), is the new out of office service. I think this was actually introduced in 8.0, but we skipped that release. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had people complain about the old out of office agent. Everyone always expected OOO replies to be instantaneous, and they weren’t. Even after explaining it to certain people, they would often forget, and ask me about it every time they went on vacation. And some people just couldn’t accept that Domino didn’t have a way of returning OOO messages instantaneously. Oh, and don’t get me started on the access control issues that could arise with enabling and disabling the OOO agent in a user’s mailbox. So far, the OOO service seems to working fine. OOO messages are returned quickly, and enabling/disabling the thing doesn’t seem to be a problem. I haven’t read too deeply about how it works, but it does, and that’s good enough.

So, heck, this was an unusually long and rambling blog post. If there’s anything in here that helps anyone else out with an upgrade, then it was worth writing. And, even if no one else ever reads it, at least I’ve gotten some of this stuff out of my head.

Windows 7 in-place upgrades

Based on this article and this one too, both by Woody Leonhard, it looks like I won’t be able to do an in-place upgrade from Vista Ultimate to Win 7 Pro. I’m running Vista Ultimate on my desktop PC and my Inspiron laptop, and I was actually hoping to do an in-place upgrade on them both. Oh well. I guess if I’m forced to do a wipe & clean install, then that gives me the opportunity to switch from 32-bit to 64-bit too.

I was really hoping I could get away with an in-place upgrade though. It wasn’t that long ago that I did a clean install of Vista on my desktop PC, when I bought a new hard drive. It took a lot of time to get everything re-installed and set up after that. And, on the laptop, I’m a little worried about getting all the Dell drivers installed and working after a clean OS install.

I guess if I have to do it, I’ll figure it out. I’ll probably try 64-bit on the laptop, and see if it works. If it does, that’ll be great. I’ve never had a 64-bit OS on any of my Windows machines at home, so that’ll be something new. My desktop PC has a 64-bit chip too, but it’s an older AMD chip, so I’m a little leery of trying a 64-bit OS on there, without first replacing the motherboard and CPU with something more modern.

more iPod Touch and MobileMe stuff

I see that Apple is extending all MobileMe subscriptions by 30 days to make up for the hiccups in the first few days of the service. That’s nice of them. MobileMe is working OK for me now. I’ve input stuff on the web, on my Mac, and on my iPod, and the sync is working fine no matter where I enter stuff. I’d still like to get the birthday issue straightened out though.

When I set up the 2.0 software on my iPod, I initially turned on “push”. That works well, but really drains the battery. I’ve got “pull” turned on now instead, and I’ve got the thing configured to check once an hour. I hope that’ll clear up the battery issues. I wonder if they could make the pull functionality work a bit more intelligently, so it doesn’t kill battery life.

I’ve looked around at a number of productivity apps for the iPhone / iPod Touch. I haven’t found one that looks like it’s all the way there yet, for what I need. There are a few interesting apps that don’t actually sync with their desktop counterparts yet. Things is a good example. Ditto for Dejumble.

I think my preference right now would be to have an iPhone version of DevonThink, Backpack, or maybe Yojimbo. With full sync, of course. I’m not sure any of these apps are going to get iPhone versions soon, though.

PSN / Underground linking

I went through the process of linking my PSN and PlayStation Underground accounts today, which apparently means that I now have a little ID badge that I can display on this web site:

Kind of pointless, huh? I guess maybe at some point it’ll be useful for something…

Verizon

I got my Verizon bill today, the first bill since I got my new phone. Hoo boy. I’ve been on a $15, 25 minute per month, plan for the last few years, and that’s generally been enough time for me. Sometimes I go a bit over, but usually not by more than a few minutes.

I went a little nuts with the new phone though, and racked up $75 in additional charges. Since it looks like I’m already well over the 25 minutes for this month, too, I’ve decided to switch to the $40 plan, which gives me 450 minutes. That ought to cover any ridiculous amount of phone usage I can manage, and it’ll let me use Mobile Web with (relative) abandon.

The $15 plan, though, was some kind of special plan that I’ll probably never be able to get back into, though, so that’s a bit of a pain. And I’ve always been kind of proud to have a calling plan that was cheaper than anyone else’s. Well, I knew it wouldn’t last forever!