Zettelkasten Forum


What are you working on this week? (2020-06-08 to 2020-06-14)

I'd just like to air an idea: having a weekly "What are you working on?" thread.

We are all taking notes for some reason, but perhaps it is not completely done and ready to show, but at least it could show that Zettelkasten is much more than just building a nice collection of notes.

Any interest? Thoughts? Comments?

Post edited by ctietze on

Comments

  • edited June 2020

    Sounds fun! I suggest you go ahead and create a weekly discussion :)

    Author at Zettelkasten.de • https://christiantietze.de/

  • +1!

    I am a Zettler

  • Yes! @henrikenggaard start a thread. I'd love to share what I'm working on this week. A collection of #philosophy essays by a poet that is centered around the notion of noticing.

    Will Simpson
    I must keep doing my best even though I'm a failure. My peak cognition is behind me. One day soon I will read my last book, write my last note, eat my last meal, and kiss my sweetie for the last time.
    kestrelcreek.com

  • @ctietze Well, I guess we can just start here and then I'll post a new one on Monday.

    I've been hard at work on a paper related to my research. For those playing along it is some fiber optic stuff -- DM me if you want to fascinating details :)

    It is my first major paper and my first major work using a Zettelkasten. Most of the work right now is with editing, which is mainly a matter me sitting down and working through the comments I get.

  • edited June 2020

    Ah well, in that case -- I unimaginatively renamed the discussion to reflect the outcome of your question. :sweat_smile: Maybe a fancy acronym like WAYWOW for "What are you working on [this] week" is required 💪


    Knowledge work the past weekend and this week revolved around Apple's JavaScriptCore; I started with an outline/overview/structure note this time and added links to details there at first, then cross-links as the list began to grow.

    Current snapshot:

    # 202006060857 Overview of how to run JavaScript in macOS Apps
    #javascriptcore #scripting #mac
    
    - [[202006060849]] How to execute JavaScript in a Mac app to transform values
    - [[202006060858]] Patch `console.log` into JavaScriptCore evaluation context
    - [[202006061035]] Make `context["var"] = 123` subscripts from Objective-C available in Swift
    - [[202006061142]] Exporting custom Swift type to JavaScriptCore context requires a protocol. 
      Exporting the type directly does not work.
    

    That resulted in two blog posts already.

    Most of my time, as you can see from my /now page, is spent programming, so Zettelkasten progress is rather slow.

    Author at Zettelkasten.de • https://christiantietze.de/

  • I am working for exams that start... TOMORROW. I'm using a modified ZK technique as these are notes that need to support a specific occasion with a specific structure, and may or may not be used again in the future.

    Next week (after my last exam) I plan to start doing some reading for interest, mainly around the effectiveness of communication structures in situations requiring behavioural change, and separately about social norms, and I plan to apply the ZK in a 'purer' way to support this.

  • My WAYWOW is processing and rereading a philosopher that speaks to me. Mary Oliver's last book of essays "Upstream". Just started this morning and I have 4 new notes and have added to 3 of my hub notes! Exciting - now to walk away and see if tomorrow will be as exciting?

    Will Simpson
    I must keep doing my best even though I'm a failure. My peak cognition is behind me. One day soon I will read my last book, write my last note, eat my last meal, and kiss my sweetie for the last time.
    kestrelcreek.com

  • Slowly working on a Zettelkasten guide, which I want to eventually turn into a public zettelkasten to serve as an illustration. This is a long term project. Then I've also been reading some random history stuff for fun.

  • edited June 2020

    Currently processing the book: Gerhard Roth (2007): Persönlichkeit, Entscheidungen und Verhalten. Warum es so schwierig ist, sich und andere zu ändern, Leck: Klett-Cotta.

    I gain mostly models and tools for "temperament work" which is a collection of methods to self-develop on the basis von psychological traits. Examples: Specific considerations for disagreeable people (like myself) or agreeable people, who to distinguish between true dislikes and incompetencies. This will be part of the fifth volume of one of my major projects.

    But because the book is not sooo good I often stray away and end up to use it mostly as inspiration. One example: I generated one Structure Zettel with so much routine that I opened a new Miniproject for the Zettelkasten page: A descriptive empirical study on all the Structure Zettel I currently have: Are there types, what are similarities and what are the differences.

    I am a Zettler

  • Just finished processing notes into my ZK from Ron Purser's McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality. And @Will, yes! That Oliver book is great: my favourite essay was "Winter Hours". You might also enjoy Jenny Odell's How To Do Nothing.

    Started ZK 4.2018. "The path is at your feet, see? Now carry on."

  • 2020-06-08 to 2020-06-14

    • Staying positive.
    • Set up a new savings goal of $129.
    • Added a second friend to my note mentoring efforts.
    • Continuing family history research.
    • Continuing a personal study of Robert Frost and his poetry.
    • Pondering next creative writing project.
    • Subscribed to "What are you working on this week?" forum discussion and idea.
    • Became a supporter and user of Obsidian.
    • Practicing writing less to think and say more.

    @henrikenggaard 👍 +1

  • @Phil said:
    That Oliver book is great: my favourite essay was "Winter Hours". You might also enjoy Jenny Odell's How To Do Nothing.

    If we are voting, the title essay, Upstream, is my favorite. It all great stuff really. Thanks, Phil for the book reference, looks interesting. This all falls in line with Cal Newport and his advocation for Digital Minimalism.

    Will Simpson
    I must keep doing my best even though I'm a failure. My peak cognition is behind me. One day soon I will read my last book, write my last note, eat my last meal, and kiss my sweetie for the last time.
    kestrelcreek.com

  • Great idea!

    I am finally finishing up an important step of my data consolidation project: All my old stuff from the last 15 years, which was scattered throughout different computers and external hard drives and cloud services and apps is now deduplicated in a 80gb DevonThink database - which is much less than what I had to deal with before. The next step will be to examine and organize its contents and tying up a couple of loose ends. The Zettelkasten still lives in Evernote.

    But since it's summer here finally in Finland, my weekends (on which there would be some time to do some knowledge work) will probably be spent outside.

    I also would love to pick up my Verzettelung of Luhmann's Soziale Systeme again, a book, I try to exhaust in the sense that I would like to transfer all™ its contents to Zettel. Maybe I can work on it an hour or two.

    In terms of programming, I continue to get to know yii, php and create Zettel whenever I learn something new.

  • Ooooh, yii is an interesting PHP framework for application development!

    Also very cool to get reading tips on the side :)

    Author at Zettelkasten.de • https://christiantietze.de/

  • This is a great idea.

    I'm a grad student in GIS, so I have been using my ZK to build a glossary of terms1, create notes related to particular cartographic concepts (for example, I have a note on cartographic vs. geographic scale), and notes from lecture processed beyond the "fleeting" stage.

    I am also teaching a number of history and literature seminars (I have a humanities background before doing GIS), so I've been processing my reading of Frederick Douglass' Narrative (a text for a seminar I am TAing later this summer) as well as my notes for a text we are considering for course adoption for next year. These reading notes often also become rough drafts of lecture outlines or discussion prompts.

    It's also really cool to see my ZK unfold across disciplines. Having a single ZK has led to some fascinating polymathic insights.


    1. Since I know there has been discussion of language learning on the forum, I will add that having notes on Greek vocabulary (again, from a humanities background) in my ZK has also helped with building this scientific glossary ↩︎

  • edited June 2020

    Oh this is interesting!

    My WAYWOW for this week (and really for the week before as well) has been learning to program in Python. I've been working on a set of scripts:

    1. Take [[YYYYMMDDHHMM Note]] style links (generated by Note Link Janitor for example) and convert them into regular Markdown links or as URL slugs for a Hugo site. This script can also process inline wikilinks in a particular format that I use.
    2. Take these notes and run them through pandoc to expand citations correctly, as well as extract any linked images into a separate folder and place everything into the right folders in a Hugo site.

    I have never written Python code before so this has been a very interesting (and at times frustrating) experience.

    @ctietze The "/now" page is a very cool idea! Adding it to my list of "Someday/Maybe" projects 1. Interestingly, I never considered capturing my Python learning in ZK - I've either commented my code directly or added a note to an Emacs org file to add a post to a site I created to blog about the things I learn about using software & tech in general.


    1. The idea to convert my ZK into a public blog was also a "Someday Maybe" thing but once I wrote that idea down my brain would not let me not work on it. ↩︎

  • @ctietze said:
    Ooooh, yii is an interesting PHP framework for application development!

    Yeah! Very good starting point for somebody starting out with php, too. Picking something in the beginning with good documentation is gold.

    Have you experience working with yii?

  • @matti None at all: but I believe PHP is still the easiest way to set up a web service for indie app developers who are clueluess about web development, because even the cheapest of web hosters will support that out of the box. (I'm personally very sad that using Ruby is so much more work, but what can you do :))

    The setup of a yii project was simple. That's good. I'm not a fan of all the dependencies that are pulled from the web even for the basic template, though. Still, it comes with so many useful things baked in right away that it's hard to justify not using it for pet projects that require user login!

    Author at Zettelkasten.de • https://christiantietze.de/

  • edited June 2020

    @avggeek said:

    1. Take [[YYYYMMDDHHMM Note]] style links (generated by Note Link Janitor for example) and convert them into regular Markdown links or as URL slugs for a Hugo site. This script can also process inline wikilinks in a particular format that I use.

    I just published a script that does the conversion to regular markdown links to GitHub : https://github.com/balaji-dutt/zettel-link-rewriter. It's still missing a README which I will add soon but I'm pretty sure it works :wink:

    This week's WAYWOW is to work on Script #2 of course, but I actually want to start getting back to reading and making notes in my ZK and blogging about some of the tech stuff I've learnt, both of which have fallen by the wayside as I got to grips with actually programming in Python.

  • @ctietze Yes, there's nothing you could't do with yii, it seems. I have a background in node/js and am delighted by the weirdness that is php so far. Learning another programming language really informs what you know about the other(s) and programming in itself. ;)

  • Continuing my reading of Too Much to Know and thinking about the core functions of note taking and how they play out across time.

    Then I'm also working on my CSS themes that I maintain for Obsidian app. Which is a curse because I don't really want to spend time maintaining them but I'm a stickler for visual design so I like to have things a certain way.

  • edited June 2020
    Post edited by ctietze on

    Author at Zettelkasten.de • https://christiantietze.de/

  • @ctietze LUL I got duped

  • @Nick by Ann M. Blair? How are you enjoying it?

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