Share with us what is happening in your ZK this week. November 18, 2023

Will

Swimming with Ideas

This is another installment of the What Are You Working On? thread. Add to this thread by telling us what is happening in and around your ZK journey. Join the community and enlighten us about your knowledge path trajectory. I do this for selfish reasons. It helps me clarify my goals and visualize my thinking. And sometimes, a conversation sparks an idea worth exploring.

Ideas I'm exploring with my ZK:

• Workouts and exercise programs for a 67-year-old who wants his final decade to be active.
• I'm tweaking my ZK Dashboard. I'm trimming information that is distracting and reformating some, so it is more engaging. This is an iterative process. This work fits my personality.
• I'm seriously thinking of restarting my ZK fresh. So far, the disadvantages outweigh the benefits, but the difference is getting closer to a tipping point.

Things I'm reading:

• Morris, Mary. My ideal bookshelf. 2012.
• Attia, Peter. Outlive: the science & art of longevity. 2023.
• Calvino, Italo. The road to San Giovanni. 1994.
• Calvino, Italo. Difficult loves. 2017.
• Manguel, Alberto. A history of reading. 2014.
• Davis, Lydia. Essays one. 2020.

Music I'm listening to:

Lofi Girl
Carla Bley
Darkside
Hana Rani Live from Studio 52

★★★★★

The "My rolling ten-day zettel production" is produced by a script for attachment to my daily journaling template. I do my journaling in Bear to keep personal journaling separate from my knowledge work.

Let me know if you would like to discuss any of these notes.

My ten day zettel production

Jeffrey

Peter Attia - Outlive is a real gem! Pre-ordered it back when it came out. Should be a mandatory read for most people!

Will

@Jeffrey, fill us in on how the week has been working in your ZK. What are you reading now? How is your ZK journey going?

ctietze

• The past weeks have been a flurry of macOS observations, edge case fixes, compatibility tests, and learning about higher-level programming concepts more. Like, what's the opposite of "polymorphism"? "Monomorphism"? That's hardly used, it seems.

• Finished reading Lion Feuchtwanger: Success. Disturbing novel about the ~1920's and first rise of Hitler.

• Working on the last stretch of The Archive plugin integration, and checking out what the JavaScript engine is capable of. Logging progress on this last mile here.

Last week in my ZK

• 202311181056 SWIFTPM_MODULE_BUNDLE build macro to access resources
• 202311171056 Walk all NSView subviews
• 202311162050 Mac Power Management settings to battle insomnia [insomnia of the Mac, waking up from sleep too often!]
• 202311161818 Inference rules in Martin-Löf Type Theory notation
• 202311161757 Judgment-in-Context in Martin-Löf Type Theory
• 202311161408 lvalue, rvalue, and other expression categories in C++
• 202311161353 rvalue vs lvalue
• 202311161234 Runtime polymorphisms
• 202311161130 Reserve Swift protocols for polymorphisms
• 202311161106 Replacing Swift protocol monomorphisms with structs
• 202311161038 More reliable WiFi alternatives for Linux
• 202311161036 More reliable PulseAudio alternatives for Linux
• 202311151532 Time adds a hundred properties to every class
• 202311151448 OSC remote control via UDP
• 202311150846 § Breadboard electronics
• 202311150836 Breadboard Kabel heißen Steckbrückenkabel
• 202311142237 Set NSToolbar.delegate ASAP in programmatic view creation
• 202311141631 Juice would not be worth the saueeze (saying)
• 202311141503 Email asking about copying a feature from WordCounter
• 202311141112 Recommended and maximum NSToolbar item sizes
• 202311141046 Prefer error messages over disabling buttons
• 202311131707 Resistant starches from potatoes only available while cooled
• 202311121757 Computer programming is about imperative knowlede and procedures
• 202311121751 Isomorphism means it's functionally equivalent

I wonder what our mathematicians like @ZettelDistraction do with and think of Martin-Löf Type Theory. It appears to be a formalization to write different things in a unified way using a shared (mathematical) notation. The foundational ideas don't appear new to me, though. But I'm too slow and unexperienced with that to make any informed claim.

Edmund

@Will said:

• I'm seriously thinking of restarting my ZK fresh. So far, the disadvantages outweigh the benefits, but the difference is getting closer to a tipping point.

Unbelievable! - What will be better with your new ZK? Any new design principles, a better workflow, a new and better tool?

Edmund

This week I’m still in an “Inspect and Adapt” phase. The formal productivity rate is very low.

Things I'm reading:

• Blake, Quentin, and John Cassidy. Start with a Scribble - Drawing for the Artistically Undiscovered. Experiment LLC, The, 2020.
• Calvino, Italo. Invisible Cities. Penguin Random House, 2010.
• Hart, Christopher. Modern Cartooning: Essential Techniques for Drawing Today’s Popular Cartoons. First Edition. New York: Watson-Guptill Publications, 2013.
• McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics. Reprint. New York: William Morrow, an imprint of Harper Collins Publishers, 2017.
• Suter, Martin. Lila, Lila. Diogenes Verlag AG, 2013.
• Taleb, Nassim Nicholas. Skin in the Game - Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life. Random House, 2018.
  

Last week in my ZK:

• Searching with Graph View using Color coding

boxcariii

@Will said:

Things I'm reading:

• Morris, Mary. My ideal bookshelf. 2012.

The title sounded interesting, so I looked it up. Mary Morris seems to be a writer, but I can't find a book written by her with that title. Is it this book: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/13528388 ?

Will

@boxcariii, sorry for the confusion. Yes, you've hit on the right book. Jane Mount is the illustrator and co-editor of this book. You've pointed out a problem I have with the Keyboard Maestro macro I use to get a list of Zotero citations. I'll have to look closer at this. The correct reference should be:

• Mount, Jane, and Thessaly La Force, editors. My Ideal Bookshelf. First edition, Little, Brown and Company, 2012.

The other book citations are correct.

The book is a quick read and a vicarious look at the books that influenced others. I was led to this book by the reference from An ‘Ideal’ Book About Books Every Book Lover Needs to Read that went, "It is a sign I've done a poor job of choosing my friends if no books are displayed when I visit their home for the first time."

Will

@Edmund said:
Things I'm reading:

• Calvino, Italo. Invisible Cities. Penguin Random House, 2010.

This one is a winner with Calvino's imaginary discussion between the explorer Marco Polo and emperor Kublai Khan.

• McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics. Reprint. New York: William Morrow, an imprint of Harper Collins Publishers, 2017.

An old favorite.

• Suter, Martin. Lila, Lila. Diogenes Verlag AG, 2013.

Could you tell me more about this title? What led you to this book?

Will

@Edmund said:
Unbelievable! - What will be better with your new ZK? Any new design principles, a better workflow, a new and better tool?

This is a reflection of the understanding that my current ZK is a landfill of crap.

ctietze

@Will

If it's any consolidation:

This leads to another question: what are we to do with what we have written down? Certainly, at first we will produce mostly garbage.

via http://luhmann.surge.sh/learning-how-to-read

Also, him calling the ZK a septic tank should be revealing that it's quite expected that you won't produce gold every day.

I also found that the early notes from 2009--2012 are not that useful to me. In part because the topics don't come up as often, and if they do, the learnings are put in a weird way. It got better after 2012, but I prefer 2018 and newer still

Edmund

@Will said:
This is a reflection of the understanding that my current ZK is a landfill of crap.

It looks like your goals are changing. I'm not in this situation yet, but have some ideas how to deal with a changed focus in my Zettelkasten. My favorite concepts are: Agile [1] and KonMari [2]

So I‘m highly interested to learning from your experiences.

References:
[1] Schwaber, Ken. Agile Project Management with Scrum. Microsoft Press, 2004.
[2] Kondo, Marie. Life-Changing Magic of Tidying - A Simple, Effective Way to Banish Clutter Forever. Ebury Publishing, 2014.

GeoEng51

@Will I've tried to be selective in what goes into my Zettelkasten, with the view of it being useful to my future self or my family. But guess what - it's just a reflection of the state of my mind and what boils to the surface at different times. It's of varying quality and astuteness, and yes, even of varying usefulness. And of course it evolves, it's always a "work in progress". I'm sure even if it was suited to my tastes and needs, to me - to another, it would be a bowl of swill.

Are you perhaps being too hard on yourself? Does your current feeling about your Zettelkasten come from the ratio of effort put in to perceived benefit coming out? As @Edmund , I'll be interested in your journey on this, if you keep us informed (and enlightened). Don't be hasty, though! You've created something wonderful, no matter how you feel about it at the moment.

Will

@ctietze said:
If it's any consolidation:

This leads to another question: what are we to do with what we have written down? Certainly, at first, we will produce mostly garbage.

via http://luhmann.surge.sh/learning-how-to-read

This puts me in good company—you and Luhmann. I realized that I had become disillusioned with some of my ZK notes. Each note lies on the spectrum of being inspirational, and they move around on that spectrum. I tend to get frustrated when I tend to notice that my notes are not on the part of the spectrum that has the sun shining on them.

Feeling a passing mood, just reporting it. I don't want to make too big a deal of it. What triggered this was a look at Maggie Appleton's Digital-gardeners: Resources, links, projects, and ideas for gardeners tending their digital notes on the public interwebs and the intersection of a renewed idea of working with the garage door open. Which is what I'm trying to do here with this ongoing thread.

Edmund

@Will said:

• Suter, Martin. Lila, Lila. Diogenes Verlag AG, 2013.

Could you tell me more about this title? What led you to this book?

My first book by Martin Suter was “Melody”, which I enjoyed reading. This is my second fiction book by the same author.

More books: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Suter

ZettelDistraction

@Will said:
I was led to this book by the reference from An 'Ideal' Book About Books Every Book Lover Needs to Read that went, "It is a sign I've done a poor job of choosing my friends if no books are displayed when I visit their home for the first time."

I live under an avalanche of books. My friends and I agreed to avoid visiting each other. I'm setting up another computer this week for writing in bed, in case I'm too lazy to make it to the Monastic Study Alcove, modeled after the Juanqinzhai  倦勤斋, or the "Studio of Exhaustion From Diligent Service", which is a hall in the Palace of Tranquil Longevity built by the aging Qianlong Emperor as part of his retirement suite. But here is a Zettel.

It's deja vu all over again -- Yogi Berra. My notes on compiling SageMath from source code leave something to be desired. Since I've hit the same missing library error I always encounter when compiling SageMath with R, I have more notes to add to the ZK on SageMath 10-1, which I need for a Jupyter notebook to add to Operations Tensorielles Simpliciales, which is itself part of a larger project.

ZettelDistraction

If you have been compiling SageMath 10.1 from source this Thanksgiving weekend--and I know you have--you might be interested in the following note.

---
title: "Sage.3.0.23.1123 Sage 10.1 install"
reference-section-title: References
---

Sage.3.0.23.1123 Sage 10.1 install

[[Sage.6a2.0.23.0716]] Sage 10.0 install
[[Humn.4a1.0.23.1029]] Problems worthy of attack

#sagemath #IRkernel #r-project #github-access-token

wget https://github.com/sagemath/sage/archive/refs/tags/10.1.tar.gz

Install Python 3.10.4 from source

The last stable release of Python is 3.10.4 as of the time of this writing. This version does not have the Cython defect of 3.11+. That defect was repaired in 3.12+, but Sage 10.1 isn't compatible with Python 3.12+ and won't be until Sage 10.3.

Download the Python source from
Index of /ftp/python/3.10.4/

Untar somewhere, cd to the Python-3.10.4 directory and run

./configure --enable-optimizations
sudo make -j4 && sudo make altinstall

Then run the following.

sudo update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/python python /usr/local/bin/python3.10 1
sudo update-alternatives --config python

In $HOME/sage, run python3.10 -m venv local. Activate the virtual environment, then run the make configure, source ../minimal_sage.sh and run make build from the sage-10.1 subdirectory.

This works since setuptools could not install with later versions of Python.

[setuptools_scm-7.0.5] Installing collected packages: setuptools-scm
[setuptools_scm-7.0.5] Successfully installed setuptools-scm-7.0.5
[setuptools_scm-7.0.5]
[setuptools_scm-7.0.5] real     0m23.514s
[setuptools_scm-7.0.5] user     0m7.328s
[setuptools_scm-7.0.5] sys      0m5.734s
[setuptools_scm-7.0.5] Copying package files from temporary location /home/flengyel/sage/local/var/tmp/sage/build/setuptools_scm-7.0.5/inst to /home/flengyel/sage/local
[setuptools_scm-7.0.5] Successfully installed setuptools_scm-7.0.5
[setuptools_scm-7.0.5] Deleting temporary build directory
[setuptools_scm-7.0.5] /home/flengyel/sage/local/var/tmp/sage/build/setuptools_scm-7.0.5
[setuptools_scm-7.0.5] Finished installing setuptools_scm-7.0.5

Compile R with --nolock

The latest R source is R-4.3.2.tgz. Use this. The default installation directory is /usr/local. Need to make install as root and chown to flengyel:flengyel. Then create /usr/local/lib/R/site-library, or numerous errors occur with sage-10.1 make build.

options(repos=c(CRAN="https://cran.wustl.edu/"))
repos <- "http://cran.wustl.edu"
lib.loc <- "/usr/local/lib/R/site-library"
install.packages('pacman', repos, dependencies=TRUE, INSTALL_opts='--no-lock')
mypks <- pacman::p_lib()
saveRDS(mypks, "~/mypks.rds")
mypks <- readRDS("~/mypks.rds")
install.packages(mypks, lib.loc, repos, dependencies = TRUE, INSTALL_opts = '--no-lock')

We need to run

devtools::install_github('IRkernel/IRkernel')

However, I needed to install.packages('devtools') which failed due to a missing dependency corrected with install.packages('stringi').

then finally devtools::install_github('IRkernel/IRkernel'). This led to

Using github PAT from envvar GITHUB_PAT
Error: Failed to install 'IRkernel' from GitHub:
  Timeout was reached: [api.github.com] Resolving timed out after 10000 milliseconds

Resolve DNS for api.github.com (DONE), and regenerate API token (DONE)

Regenerated token for R: ghp_censoredsAlP0oGLm8

The GitHub Personal Access token can be regenerated at:

https://github.com/settings/tokens/1262267121

A specific environment variable needs this during the IRkernel installation within R: GITHUB_PAT from above.

 Sys.getenv("GITHUB_PAT")
[1] "ghp_invalid3J3qPPFRYn5JPBbOUiH2j5mbm"

 Sys.setenv(GITHUB_PAT = "ghp_censoredygJmJMbuEOsAlP0oGLm8")
 Sys.getenv("GITHUB_PAT")
[1] "ghp_censoredgJmJMbuEOsAlP0oGLm8"
 devtools::install_github('IRkernel/IRkernel')

Then IRkernel::installspec(). Looks like this did the trick

Will

@ZettelDistraction
I claim to be an introvert, so friends know I'll be terrible company and not visit and interrupt my reading.
It sounds like you're having a quiet, relaxing weekend slaying the dragon.

I'm grateful to have you as a friend.

ZettelDistraction

@Will said:
@ZettelDistraction
It sounds like you're having a quiet, relaxing weekend slaying the dragon.

It's still snorting, deploying sulphuric farts (a noxious phenomenon well-known in ancient lore but airbrushed out of the modern, multi-volume heroic adventure chronicle), and coughing up embers. Then I must do the same on another computer dragon, installed on a shelf in the bedroom, once the first succumbs to the command line.

I'm grateful to have you as a friend.

Aw shucks, @Will. Likewise.

ZettelDistraction

@Will

This is the Internet premier of a rare, suppressed engraving of such a dragon unleashing its sulphuric flatulence while perched atop a city. It's about time that fantasy fans knew the truth.

Here's another, more frank depiction. No one slayed dragons for their gold. The ancients slayed dragons to clear the air, as I am attempting now by making these vital engravings public.

ZettelDistraction

@Will. The dragon of sulphuric incontinence is still active.

Installed /home/flengyel/sage/sage-10.1/src
[sagelib-10.1]     error: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '/home/flengyel/sage/local/lib/sage/ext_data/notebook-ipython'
[sagelib-10.1]     error: subprocess-exited-with-error

But this is easily rectified--or "rectumfied."

mkdir -p /home/flengyel/sage/local/lib/sage/ext_data
cd /home/flengyel/sage/sage-10.1/src/sage/ext_data/
cp -r notebook-ipython /home/flengyel/sage/local/lib/sage/ext_data
cp -r graphs/ /home/flengyel/sage/local/lib/sage/ext_data
cp -r threejs /home/flengyel/sage/local/lib/sage/ext_data
ls -latrs /home/flengyel/sage/local/lib/sage/ext_data

ZettelDistraction

One last thing was needed to get to completion.

[sagelib-10.1] Successfully installed sagemath-standard-10.1
[sagelib-10.1]
[sagelib-10.1] real     2m38.060s
[sagelib-10.1] user     0m18.266s
[sagelib-10.1] sys      0m30.938s
make[2]: Leaving directory '/home/flengyel/sage/sage-10.1/build/make'

real    2m54.899s
user    0m22.734s
sys     0m34.734s
Sage build/upgrade complete!
make[1]: Leaving directory '/home/flengyel/sage/sage-10.1'

And that was change to the shell script to run the configure script. I had to add --with-system-igraph to get to this point. Here is the "minimal-sage.sh" script for SageMath aficionados.

# Source these varibles
export PATH=${HOME}/sage/local/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:
export SAGE_HOME=${HOME}/sage/sage-10.1
export SAGE_LOCAL=${HOME}/sage/local
#export SAGE_BUILD_DIR="$HOME/tmp/sage"
export MAKE="make -j4"

 # python3.12 installed in SAGE_LOCAL
./configure --prefix=$SAGE_LOCAL \
            --enable-r_jupyter \
            --enable-4ti2 \
            --with-system-givaro=yes --enable-d3js=yes --enable-gap3 --enable-gap_jupyter \
            --enable-pari_galpol --enable-pari_jupyter --enable-pysingular \
            --with-system-igraph=yes \
            --enable-singular_jupyter --enable-lidia --enable-coxeter3 --enable-lie \
            --enable-p_group_cohomology

ctietze

I get serious PTSD from skimming the notes of this setup procedure. (I really hate installing weird open source stuff from the command line, because I eventually forgot to copy one or more steps to my setup instructions Zettel, so next time I want to upgrade the software, I break something. Which often means: everything.)

ZettelDistraction

@ctietze said:
I get serious PTSD from skimming the notes of this setup procedure.

The installation on the new i9 8-core computer went quickly, mostly because I was starting with a new install of Ubuntu Jammy. Only a few of the steps were needed--the R 'devtools' download was simpler, though I still needed a GitHub access token. I created a Python virtual environment to avoid the system-wide corruption and bit rot that catches up with all of us--eventually.

Now I am down to replicating my ZK setup, to facilitate Zettelosophical investigations in bed, in case the journey out of bed to the Monastic Study Alcove, shown below, is too arduous.

Sascha

@ZettelDistraction Almost perfect. I'd rotate the desk a couple of degrees to the right if it works with the light from the window. This gives you more space and better feng shui.

ZettelDistraction

@Sascha said:
@ZettelDistraction Almost perfect I'd rotate the desk a couple of degrees to the right if it works with the light from the window. This gives you more space and better feng shui.

@Sascha: thanks. But for the furniture opposite, I would reposition the desk. Most of the junk on the shelves, which includes a couple of 900 MHz transceivers, sub-gigahertz antennas, old notes, certified mail return receipts, anatomy flashcards, Bluetooth headphones, a disposable razor, ancient cassette tapes, and patch cables could be discarded, except for the electronics and writing supplies, which go into storage--if there is any storage.