What ideas are you wrestling with this week? February 2, 2023
What are you working on this week? Share with us. We're all friends here.
What I'm Working On
12 New Zettel in the Last 7 Days.
Below are the titles and one-sentence summary/meaning of each zettel that I added to my ZK this week. 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. If any of this interests you, or you have a question about some technical aspect, please comment or DM me. If you have questions about form or content, I'm happy to discuss anything on this list.
Will Simpson
My zettelkasten is for my ideas, not the ideas of others. I don’t want to waste my time tinkering with my ZK; I’d rather dive into the work itself. 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
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Comments
Working my way through Tim Carpenter's (2022) "To Photograph is to Learn How to Die," an essay with digressions.
Wrestling with the same "ideas" (assuming they rise to that level of ideas) as any other week.
The code I was working on last week, RYLR998-LoRa, now works directly with a PC and a CP2102 USB 2.0 to TTL module serial converter. The python code will need an exception handler for the RPi.GPIO module, which will not run on a Windows 11 PC. The exception has to allow the code to run if the module and the code it references cannot run on the hardware platform you happen to use.
The tiny RYLR998 transceiver module can transmit and receive digital chirp spread spectrum signals for several kilometers. Now I have three of these modules, two connected to two Raspberry PI 4Bs, and one connected to a PC through a USB to Transistor-Transistor-Logic converter, as shown:
The point? The gadgets I'm playing with are COTS (commercial off-the-shelf) electronic devices interconnected only with GPIO connectors. I keep implementation notes in my ZK. (Apologies if this is excruciatingly boring--I have an extra class amateur radio license, though I prefer to play with sub-microwave components instead of making contacts on shortwave or on VHF and UHF repeaters. Chirp spread spectrum on the 900MHz band works well for text messages in Manhattan--the signals find their way out of buildings.)
While resuscitating (or disinterring and re-animating) my childhood interest in radio electronics, I ran across the Amateur Radio Booklet, which makes use of an interesting open font designed for computer screens called Inter. I mention this nice font here because of another Zettelkasten.de forum post: A relatively new monospace font that is easy to read, and it's free. I happen to like the Inter family of fonts even more than the Cousine and Courier Prime fonts mentioned in that thread.
As for math, I'm rusting out and must return to my simplicial matrix module project...
The conversion of the ZK to an alphabetic index with a new ID Format is coming along. Obsidian can handle relinking automatically, which is a capability not available in Zettlr. Obsidian has the annoying habit of creating a file if a WikiLink is clicked (inadvertently) and there is no file that the WikiLink resolves to. The new IDs begin with a keyword of up to four letters, followed by an optional Folgezettel if I feel like it, and a timestamp. I might update my github wiki pages to reflect these "developments."
GitHub. Erdős #2. Problems worthy of attack / prove their worth by hitting back. -- Piet Hein. Alter ego: Erel Dogg (not the first). CC BY-SA 4.0.
Thanks for the link to the Amateur Radio Booklet (I am also a "ham", albeit with a modest license, what they call "advanced basic" in Canada) and to inter - always interested in legible fonts.
Work Blog
I'm still working away on the blog I'm doing for young engineers at work, called "It's what you learn after you know it all, that counts". Post #5 is about to go live next week. I find it's taking 10+ hours for each post, which is from 4000 to 8000 words long. The posts rely heavily on my ZK - it's nice to see it having such a practical application.
Also spent several days this past week paring down several posts into a presentation that I'm doing on the same topic for some graduate students at the University of Alberta.
It's been fun; haven't run out of steam or enthusiasm yet, but that may happen after a few more posts.
I've written 17 zettels this week, but they were in a smattering of subjects. The categories include:
I want to become world-class in product strategy, so my personal goal has been to produce 3 zettels per day in product strategy -- either learning new concepts or applying them in my job directly.
However, this week I grew tired of the same-old, so I decided to follow whatever my mind felt like pursuing. It was a nice reprieve from structure.