Share with us what is happening in your ZK this week. September 27, 2024

Will

Swimming with Ideas

This is yet another opportunity to share what you are working on with your friends here on the forum. Add to this discussion by telling us about your zettelkasten journey. Share with us what you're learning. Sharing helps us clarify our goals and visualize our thinking. And sometimes, a conversation sparks a magical moment where we can dive into an idea worth exploring. I'd love to hear more from you. 🫵🏼

Here is my report on why I'm here and my current ZK work themes and ideas:

Besides the work I've been doing directly in my ZK, capturing ideas and refactoring notes, I've been programming Python extensions and JavaScript plugins using my ZK and The Archive.

My magazine journalism class has turned out to be freakin’ freaky great. I can't fathom all the insights into the challenges of captivating and concise writing this class has shown me. I've started a "Write Right" journal to collect these actionable moments.

The YAL Literature research paper has stalled. The lead has wandered off to Mexico to be the keynote speaker at a big conference. We'll miss the due date for our targeted journal's submission deadline. We'll have to find another journal to submit to or wait. Oh well, we'll see.

The notes I'm capturing this week are themed on a kind philosopher mentoring my monkey mind. I want to be a better neighbor, friend, student, and husband. I'm hoping this will help.

Books I'm reading or read this week:

• Adler, Mortimer Jerome and Van Doren, Charles Lincoln. How to read a book. 2014.[[202407311603]]
• Blundell, William E. The Art and Craft of Feature Writing: Based on the Wall Street Journal Guide. New American Library, 1988. [[202408212021]] #JAMM425 Bookshare
• Melucci, Giulia. I Loved, I Lost, I Made Spaghetti: A Memoir. 1st ed, Grand Central Pub, 2009. #food
• Leland, Andrew. The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight. Penguin Books, 2024. [[202308021949]] Reread
• Wallfisch, Mark C. Super Short Stories: Flash Fiction. Mark C. Wallfisch, 2023.
• Bergman, Ofer, and Steve Whittaker. The Science of Managing Our Digital Stuff. The MIT Press, 2016.

Zettelkasting Soundtrack:

One Deep River
Sharon Mansur
Encuentros, Vol. 1
Goose Groovy
Best of Hania Rani

★★★★★

The "My rolling 12-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 see, discuss, or critique any of these notes.

My 12-day zettel production

I hope my contribution is helpful, and I'm sure you have even better ideas.

ZettelDistraction

I have been writing and rewriting. A neural net project that feeds a transformation of the original network into itself is underway. The transformation avoids infinite regress. I cannot stop writing and programming well into the night. I use the Zettelkasten less as a learning tool and more as a waystation--when I remember to update it. It's more of a repository of things I have done that I would like to reuse. Zettlr is so slow on my machine that I may switch to logseq. Waiting for Zettlr to respond to keystrokes has been bad for the Zettelkasten. I keep revising Erel Dogg entries after they are published. Fortunately, I only have two other subscribers

ctietze

@ZettelDistraction How can it be that the app becomes that slow? Does anyone in the community or the dev have a guess?

Edmund

@Will said:

Books I'm reading or read this week:

• Adler, Mortimer Jerome and Van Doren, Charles Lincoln. How to read a book. 2014.[[202407311603]]

What are your insights from reading this book?

Edmund

This week I've started my "Year in Review 2024". Here is my Zettelkasten version:

ZettelDistraction

@ctietze said:
@ZettelDistraction How can it be that the app becomes that slow? Does anyone in the community or the dev have a guess?

It could be my Windows machine spying on me, sending unauthorized data back to distant data whorehouses for profit at my expense, in case they might have overlooked a way to separate me from my savings.

I haven't gotten in touch with them. I'll try logseq. At this point, the method is breaking down for me. I no longer care to link methodically--haphazard is enough. I only want a system that doesn't stop me from working.

Will

@ZettelDistraction said:
I only want a system that doesn't stop me from working.

You might consider trying this super cool app called The Archive. It doesn't distract you from working.

ZettelDistraction

@Will To run it, I'd need a super-cool Apple. Right now, my PC is weaker than CTietze's tea.

Andy

@ZettelDistraction So it's time to upgrade to TeXNotes (formerly known as LaTeX-Zettel).

ZettelDistraction

@Andy said:
@ZettelDistraction So it's time to upgrade to TeXNotes (formerly known as LaTeX-Zettel).

If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. TeX and LaTeX have made it virtually impossible to invent anything better.

Will

@Edmund said:
What are your insights from reading this book?

How to read a book by Adler and Van Doren is extremely idea-dense.

Minisqual sample of my insights from How to Read a Book.

• Adler and Van Doren have thought about this topic a lot.

• It is interesting to read a book on reading (How to Read a Book) while reading a book on writing (The Art and Craft of Feature Writing).
  Some of their ideas point to how authors can and should guide readers and how readers can determine the authors' intentions.

• I've read 35%, mainly the base of the foundation of their argument. I'm just now getting to the syntopical reading phase, which is the pinnacle of their argument.

• Not all reading material should be read at the same pace or with the same amount of attention.
  Reading skills are developed through pyramidic advancement, which depends on and is congruent with lower levels as we advance.

• I'm taking this very slow and expect several more weeks for the first reading using the BarBell Method.

• My second reading of my initial notes is where I expect insights.

One principle argued is the principle of arguing with the author's ideas. They provide examples using other books, but I see the value in this exercise by running their arguments through the prism explained in the chapter "Criticizing a Book Fairly." I am turning the book's ideas back onto itself even while reading it.

AI-assisted Infographic - Napkin.ai

It is interesting to read a book on reading (How to Read a Book) while reading a book on writing (The Art and Craft of Feature Writing).

Will

@Edmund, the infographic for your zettelkasting review is delicious goodness bottled and corked. It is an alluring display of where you've been and where you could head. I don't have a process snapshot like this, so recreating something like this strikes me as futile. This is a dashboard that would have to be incrementally created.

What is "Zettelkastenrunde?" Why only 26 - 29? And 29 is on fire?

KillerWhale

I'm currently getting to the end of the famous meme.

I'm discovering that Apple Notes does handwriting amazingly well, provides all Bear features I care about, is end-to-end encrypted with Advanced Data Protection on and with Pronotes and/or Shortcuts, I can have backlinks.

It's not pretty (I strongly dislike that weird font) but I might end up landing there and be done with it.

ZettelDistraction

That is to say,I would use logseq, but it drops me in this daily outline mode when I would like to create notes that follow my template. It's not obvious how to get logseq to work with the notes I have.

Andy

@ZettelDistraction said:

That is to say, I would use logseq, but it drops me in this daily outline mode when I would like to create notes that follow my template. It's not obvious how to get logseq to work with the notes I have.

I finally tested Logseq recently, and I agree that it seems extremely opinionated about structure (as I expected), which is fine if you agree with those opinions...

ZettelDistraction

I want to create a note named ID.md from the beginning. If Logseq must create log entries with titles such as Oct 2, 2024, it would be nice to have a way to make the notes in the format I use and link them to others. If I am not mistaken, one has to start with a dated log entry and insert a wiki link of the form [[ID]] to create a note named ID.md. The newly created note has none of the minimal YAML I use, an H1 header, or the ## SEE ALSO and ## References sections added automatically. The file listing sometimes shows only the ID and sometimes the ID and the H1 header. The ID by itself isn't helpful. I don't see Pandoc integration. The ability to rename notes would help. A complete list of the plugins would be a plus, instead of the first few Logseq deigns to list.

ZettelDistraction

It looks like I need to create a template:

- name:: Note Template
  - <%*
      // Split the page name to extract the user's own ID and the title
      const parts = page.name.split(' - ');
      let userID = parts[0].trim(); // User's own ID (1-5 alphanumeric characters)
      let title = parts.slice(1).join(' - ').trim(); // The rest is the title

      // Validate that userID is 1 to 5 alphanumeric characters
      if (!/^[a-zA-Z0-9]{1,5}$/.test(userID)) {
        throw new Error('User ID must be 1 to 5 alphanumeric characters.');
      }

      // Generate current timestamp in YYYYMMDDhhmm format
      const now = new Date();
      const pad = (n) => n.toString().padStart(2, '0');
      const YYYY = now.getFullYear();
      const MM = pad(now.getMonth() + 1);
      const DD = pad(now.getDate());
      const hh = pad(now.getHours());
      const mm = pad(now.getMinutes());
      const timestamp = `${YYYY}${MM}${DD}${hh}${mm}`;

      // Combine user's own ID and timestamp
      const id = `${userID}${timestamp}`;

      // Output YAML front matter and content
      tR += `---
id: ${id}
title : ${title}
reference-section-title: References
---

# ${title}

## SEE ALSO

## References
`;
    %>

ZettelDistraction

Logseq does not display media in the media subdirectory. It wants media in assets I think.

Loni

I stopped using Zettlr because it would present some kind of slow, sluggish behaviors and strange patterns of lags. The tool is quite heavy, and that's normal : the main core of Zettlr is Electron.

@ZettelDistraction said:

Logseq does not display media in the media subdirectory. It wants media in assets I think.

Yes, it does, but you can change its behaviours with the "config.edn" file. I think there is an option to put medias on an other folder.

ZettelDistraction

I tried the assets="media" trick in config.edn. No joy.

GeoEng51

@ZettelDistraction said:
I want to create a note named ID.md from the beginning. If Logseq must create log entries with titles such as Oct 2, 2024, it would be nice to have a way to make the notes in the format I use and link them to others. If I am not mistaken, one has to start with a dated log entry and insert a wiki link of the form [[ID]] to create a note named ID.md. The newly created note has none of the minimal YAML I use, an H1 header, or the ## SEE ALSO and ## References sections added automatically. The file listing sometimes shows only the ID and sometimes the ID and the H1 header. The ID by itself isn't helpful. I don't see Pandoc integration. The ability to rename notes would help. A complete list of the plugins would be a plus, instead of the first few Logseq deigns to list.

I don't think this is correct. If you want to create a new note in logseq, click on the search icon (magnifying glass) and type in the name of your note. As you do so, logseq attempts to match what you type to an existing note but also gives you an option to create a new note using the text you entered into the search field. Once the new note has been created, you can add whatever template you want. I use "aText" to create a few templates that I use often, and then type in a three-letter shortcut to have that template added to the new note.

What you are missing is @Will's nice keyboard maestro macro to automate this a bit more, but the above is sufficiently "low friction" for my purposes.

GeoEng51

@ZettelDistraction said:
Logseq does not display media in the media subdirectory. It wants media in assets I think.

Yes, that is correct. When I transferred all of my The Archive files over to logseq, that included copying the files in the "media" subdirectory into logseq's "assets" subdirectory. I also had to adjust the link to each media item (I prepared all of my notes for transfer using a Python script and this was one of Python's tasks).

ZettelDistraction

@GeoEng51 said:
I don't think this is correct. If you want to create a new note in logseq, click on the search icon (magnifying glass) and type in the name of your note.

I know it wasn't right: I was being lazy. Soon after that, I wrote a template (with assistance from a certain AI). I may or not rename the media directory "assets" and link to it. Possibly. Or else update the files with the new name. Hard to imagine that Logseq claims I have almost 1000 notes. The interface strikes me as odd, still. The New Note template above isn't found.

ZettelDistraction

The template was a wild goose chase. Javascript doesn't execute. I cannot get what I want from this system. Will need to purchase a supercomputer to work. An eight-core I9 at lease. Preferably 64 cores. Then Windows might work at a reasonable clip with Zettlr.

GeoEng51

@ZettelDistraction said:
The template was a wild goose chase. Javascript doesn't execute. I cannot get what I want from this system. Will need to purchase a supercomputer to work. An eight-core I9 at lease. Preferably 64 cores. Then Windows might work at a reasonable clip with Zettlr.

Haha! Good one Why not just create your template in something like aText and then also create a three letter macro to invoke it?

https://trankynam.com/atext/

ZettelDistraction

Thank you for this. I have downloaded aText on a machine that, in 2024, is like those PCs we read about in the 1990s that people would throw out when they became unmanageably slow. I laughed then. Not any longer. Combine that with having aged suddenly--my cognitive ability has taken a nose dive.

ZettelDistraction

@GeoEng51

aText macros work in Zettlr, which already has macros!

However, logseq doesn't know what to do with YAML.

If I expand my aText :zxc to obtain

---
id: Well202410051321
title: "Well202410051321 Well well well"  
reference-section-title: References
---
# Well well well


## SEE ALSO


## References

This works in Zettlr, but Logseq turns notes into outlines and renders YAML like so:

In Zettlr, we can see what Logseq is up to:

- ---
  id: Well202410051325
  title: "Well202410051325 Well well well"  
  reference-section-title: References
  ---
- # Well well well
- ## SEE ALSO
- ## References

It moved the YAML to the first indent and turned the H1 and H2 headers into indentations. This is double-plus ungood. Let's fix the YAML, at least in Zettlr. Now we have proper YAML, but the H1 and H2 headers have become bullet points.

All right, after another manual change, we have

What happens in Logseq?

No wonder my markdown zettels "disappear" in Logseq. As @Andy put it, "Logseq is opinionated." That understatement that doesn't do justice to the injustice Logseq does to software compatibility. Markdown can go to Hell, apparently.

GeoEng51

@ZettelDistraction I put my YAML all in the first line of a note, as follows:

id:: Well202410051325
title:: "Well202410051325 Well well well"
reference-section-title:: References

Note you should use double colons for each "label" plus use "shift + enter" to put all the information in the first bullet point but on multiple lines. I can't remember what this is called right now, but it is Logseq's method of recording YAML items. I'll look this up further and try to explain it better, later today.

Note also that logseq uses the "#" symbol to designate a tag, so typing something like "this is meeting #5" produces a tag called "#5". I have to remind myself of this frequently

ZettelDistraction

@GeoEng51 Thanks for that. I believe logseq calls those double-colon-suffixed variables "properties," though I wonder how these will look in "unopinionated markdown." OK, logseq needs Shift+Enter instead of Enter, and it cannot make sense of ordinary h1, h2, and h3 headers (not to mention h4, h5, and h6). I need to understand where else logseq deviates from military-grade markdown (I mean "unopinionated markdown"). Since logseq isn't behaving the way you expect markdown to act, I'm not entirely ready to cut over from Zettlr to logseq. But I am willing to hasten my exit from this mortal coil futzing with it.

This means that the triple-dashes that ordinarily enclose the YAML header in markdown cannot be written in logseq since it isn't a markdown editor per se. It's an idiosyncratic markdown editor. Instead, logseq wants to see double-colon-prefixed properties. All right, all play along--for now.

GeoEng51

Yes; you've got it - properties. Logseq does recognize different headers, by the way, using the normal markdown symbols of #, ##, ###, etc.

Edit: Logseq recognizes those headers in normal bullets, but not in the first line if it contains properties.

ZettelDistraction

@GeoEng51 said:
Yes; you've got it - properties. Logseq does recognize different headers, by the way, using the normal markdown symbols of #, ##, ###, etc.

This is not my experience. It does not display syntactically correct markdown. Logseq expects a distinctive subset of markdown to which special symbols are added. I'm afraid I have to disagree that logseq can handle the full markdown specification. The following is what logseq can render. The YAML header isn't present. Logseq replaces this with a nonstandard list of "properties." The h1 and h2 headers must occur inside markdown lists, which is not the standard way of doing things.

Here is the raw markdown that logseq produces.

id:: Well202410051325
title:: well well well
reference-section-title:: References

- # well well well
    - ## SEE ALSO

      To use logseq somewhat like ordinary markdown, your h2 subsection header needs to come after a bullet mark at the second level. That's not ordinary markdown. That's "logseq markdown." Also, SHIFT-ENTER must be used to keep the text within the section.
    - ## References
-

Zettlr, which understands and renders standard markdown syntax, renders it as follows:

And this is how logseq renders it:

Logseq's markdown assumptions deviate from the standard. Perhaps @ctietze or someone more likely to be taken seriously than me could weigh in despite my having presented decisive evidence. Even if it is straightforward to reconfigure logseq to render markdown without requiring section headers to occur within markdown lists, the deviation from the YAML header standard requires post-processing to work with Pandoc, possibly including modification of the Pandoc template for latex.

It seems like a lot of unnecessary work for an idiosyncratic approach that differs markedly (no pun intended) from The Archive and Zettlr, among other applications that adhere to the markdown standard. But let's try another markdown editor than Zettlr. Zettlr isn't free from markdown problems. If we try again in PanWriter, we'll see something we can almost live with, and maybe even warm up to. Maybe.