What ideas are you wrestling with this week? January 19, 2023

Will

Who cares what I'm working on? We're more interested in what you are working on/collecting and integrating into your ZK. What kinds of challenges do you face? What discoveries has zettelkasting led you to?

What I'm Working On

I've fallen into a rabbit hole. I'm programming a ZK tool for The Archive that will bring notes together in a way that exposes their connecting ideas. Looking at the history of this project, it is something I've been working on and off again for a year, and it is so close to releasing into the wild, I'm having a hard time sleeping. We'll see.

11 New Zettel in the Last 7 Days.

Titles and one-sentence summary/meaning of atomic zettel. These are the ideas I'm currently wrestling with. They represent a 7-day window of new notes.

This is generated with nothing held back. I can use help. I would love to talk to you about anything on this list or answer any questions. If any of this is of interest to you, please start a thread here, DM me, or get in touch via email.

chrisaldrich

@Will, There's so much great looking material here, it's almost overwhelming on where to start. I almost feel like I should be reading all this in addition to everything else I've got on my list.

Some of the direction with respect to writing, writing practice, and even your woodworking makes me think you'd appreciate the subtle idea hiding in this old blogpost I ran into in April 2021: https://jsomers.net/blog/dictionary.

ZettelDistraction

I must second @chrisaldrich before someone else does and I have to use another ordinal.

Now I have the curses python library working with the REYAX RYLR998 LoRa chirp spread spectrum transceiver module, using asynchronous, non-blocking I/O calls. No threads whatsoever, just a transceiver loop that prioritizes receiving over transmission, one character at a time. The code is for off-grid texting with a Raspberry Pi 4B, the aforementioned module, and a PC, though I hope to move the code to a standalone microprocessor device with a small screen and a keyboard. The RYLR998 is capable of transmitting short text messages for at least 8 kilometers line-of-sight with 100 mw of power (20 dBm--the units are decibels per milliwatt), and a few city blocks in the steel and glass Manhattan jungle. (UHF sub-GHz frequencies can make their way out of buildings.) Some line-of-sight distance records over 100 km have been set with similar devices in Europe. This performance is achieved using techniques of information and coding theory to modulate signals at low power and at slow coding rates that can be demodulated below the noise floor by the receiver. LoRa devices are typically used in remote sensing for low duty-cycle low-power long-range applications in agriculture, climate science, civil engineering, manufacturing, IoT smart home systems, etc.

As for notes, I mostly record what doesn't work. I plan to go through the mathematics of the LoRa protocol in a few weeks. For now the focus is operational.

The code is here: https://github.com/flengyel/RYLR998-LoRa

ZettelDistraction

I had forgotten that I have been saving recollections of my dreams in my Zettelkasten. Here is one of them.

I had a strange dream that I was standing in one of the corridors of a hotel-like building that had rooms furnished with a bed, a small desk and chair, and a lamp. A man in a jumpsuit was making a bed in one of the rooms I had been peering into. He stepped into the corridor to tell me that my room was ready.

"Why am I here?"

"You're here to die," the man said.

"I see. Do you know what my condition is?"

"I don't know. I only make the beds and clean up. Someone else will tell you."

"The room is nice." I had aged and was now mentally diminished. I stood in the doorway not knowing what to do.

GeoEng51

@chrisaldrich Yea - fantastic article in the jsomers link - thank you so much!!

Has anyone tried to follow Somer's advice for getting the 1913 Webster's dictionary installed on their Mac? It doesn't seem to work for me (MacBook Pro, M1). I see there is an iOS app for this dictionary, but not one that is tied to the Dictionary app on the Mac OS.

ctietze

@GeoEng51 I do have the dictd_www.dict.org_web1913.dictionary bundle/folder stored in ~/Library/Dictionaries/ for ages and that still does the trick on Ventura on my M1 without changes. The linked article contains M1-specific instructions at the bottom as well. If that doesn't work, DM me.

Looking at the screenshot of the search for prolix in the old Spotlight menu bar helper reminds me how good Spotlight used to work for me. Now the dictionary search is buried four scrollable result pages down the search preview window most of the time for me. It's okay with "prolix"; then it's just out of view.

Of course you can't reorder Spotlight search results. ☹️

---

Week of moving out

Billy Joel provides the fitting tune: we prepare to move into a new apartment. Lots of things have been organized already by now. We also found a follow-up tenant already yesterday.

• Read "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" for the first time. Quite the quirky story, actually! Was in anticipation of a cinema/movie night friends organized to watch Blade Runner (2007 edition) as supplementary material for their book club. Turned out nobody in the """book club""" appeared to either have read the novel or were inclined to talk about the movie, so the sense of urgency was not called for
• Read "macOS by Tutorials", a programming book, to check out how Mac app development is explained to newcomers to the platform in 2022 2023. No Zettel have been made form that, yet.
• Finished implementing a language switcher to the blog, premiered on the most recent blog post. More to come

Zettelkasting

After my recent Zettel request for feedback I've played with some personal note about family members and my personal "lineage" -- i.e. the family history as it started for me at my grand-parents (I never met my grand-grand-parents) and trickling down. Very early days, but it's a surprisingly fun start.

Apart from that, mostly technical notes that culminated in using my secret tech wiki more and writing about a higher-level concept. Small wins

Will

@chrisaldrich said:
@Will, There's so much great looking material here, it's almost overwhelming on where to start. I almost feel like I should be reading all this in addition to everything else I've got on my list.

Some of the direction with respect to writing, writing practice, and even your woodworking makes me think you'd appreciate the subtle idea hiding in this old blogpost I ran into in April 2021: https://jsomers.net/blog/dictionary.

I'm late to the game, but I now have the gear and am ready to get going. Thanks for linking me up with John McPhee's genius. His book Draft No. 4 has languished on my to-read list for a while. After reading last night the first page of his April 29, 2014, New Yorker article with the same title, I felt a creative explosion. I need to process Draft No. 4 before writing anything else. This feels like a true mentorship. I imagine Harry Potter felt the same excitement working with Dumbledore. McPhee even resembles Dumbledore.

Chris, thanks to your guidance, I've embraced Webster's dictionary as a powerful writing tool. With gratitude and excitement, we embark on the adventure of a lifetime.

MikeBraddock

@chrisaldrich, @Will Thanks for the Webster Dictionary tip.