Share with us what is happening in your ZK journey this week. December 8, 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. 🫵🏼

Do you want to do a live video chat with me about our adventures in Zettelkasting? Ping me at @Will, and we can schedule a time.

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

• The value of zettelkasting lies in the processing of information.
• I'm thinking about intellectual maturity and the tools used in zettelkasting. I'm focusing on honest ways of development instead of the immature and dishonest ways of working in my ZK.
• Reinvigoration my love of mind mapping. Learning to use an iPad to draw and write. My handwriting could be better, and I am confused about where to put my hands. The best way is a mix of laptop and iPad.

• I discovered a plethora of new music.
  Our thinking extends to our environment. The tools we use and the interactions we choose extend our thinking. Higher-quality tools and interactions lead to higher-quality thinking. It is a spectrum. Each day, try to level up 1%. Some days, we'll backslide. Life can be like that, but remember the parable: fall seven times, get up eight.

• JAMM425 is over, and I’m on winter break.

Books I’m reading or read this week:

• Blundell, William E. The Art and Craft of Feature Writing: Based on the Wall Street Journal Guide. New American Library, 1988. [[202408212021]] #JAMM425 Bookshare
• Dicks, Matthew. Storyworthy: Engage, Teach, Persuade, and Change Your Life Through the Power of Storytelling. New World Library, 2018. Bookshare

Zettelkasting Soundtrack:

Sergio Díaz De Rojas
Angel Soul
Peter Bradley Adams
COWBOY CARTER
Isaac Chambers
Chris Le Blanc

★★★★★

The "My rolling fifteen-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 fifteen-day zettel production

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

Edmund

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

• The value of Zettelkasting lies in its ability to serve as a dynamic thinking tool that fosters creativity, critical analysis, and long-term knowledge retention.

What I’m reading:

• Great Thinkers. [1]

I’m playing with ideas:

• Rules: 1. Choose a random quote from a great thinker. 2. Connect the given idea with your Zettelkasten.

Examples:

• “Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.” - Carl Gustav Jung
  Friction, such as conflicting ideas or questions in my notes, can be a source of insight. Zettelkasten thrives on connecting seemingly contradictory or irritating ideas, which can deepen my understanding.

• “The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity.” - Carl Gustav Jung
  A Zettelkasten isn’t just about filing information; it’s about fostering creativity through connections. By engaging playfully and intuitively with your notes, new insights emerge naturally.

• “Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.” - Aristotle
  A Zettelkasten helps me organize my thoughts and track my intellectual journey. By reflecting on my notes, I understand my learning patterns and interests, aligning my knowledge system with my personal growth.

• “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” - Marcel Proust
  A Zettelkasten is not just a repository for new information but a tool for seeing connections and insights in what I already know. By revisiting and linking notes, I want to cultivate new perspectives and deepen my understanding of familiar concepts.

Reference
[1] The School of Life. Great Thinkers: Simple Tools from Sixty Great Thinkers to Improve Your Life Today. Hardcover – Illustrated, 30 Jan. 2018

Hamish

Firstly: It's almost a calendar year since I started my Zettelkasten and ... wow, I wish I'd known this idea and started my Zettelkasten way, way back in my life.

Currently I'm wondering about slips that have become old, a bit stagnant, and not really of any value (or, worse, damaging). My Zettelkasten is in Google Docs so it wouldn't be difficult for me to identify slips that haven't been edited in the past year. One of my tasks this week is to see what slips I created a year ago, read them, and see if any are just rubbish and can be deleted.

GeoEng51

@Hamish said:
Currently I'm wondering about slips that have become old, a bit stagnant, and not really of any value (or, worse, damaging). My Zettelkasten is in Google Docs so it wouldn't be difficult for me to identify slips that haven't been edited in the past year. One of my tasks this week is to see what slips I created a year ago, read them, and see if any are just rubbish and can be deleted.

It's a good idea to examine old, little used zettels and, if they are of little value, cull or improve them. But age shouldn't be the determining factor. I've been creating/maintaining a ZK for about 4 years and there is little I throw away but much I review and improve.

andang76

I'm developing my little section about good nutrition.
I'm trying to study how to find the good balance of proteins having to manage vegetables to eat and vegetables to limit

ZettelDistraction

The Pironman5 Project

A network-accessible digital Zettelkasten deserves local network storage. My Zettelkasten directory lives in OneDrive, which is suboptimal. Cloud storage isn't a file backup service; cloud storage providers deny customers access to their files for any reason. Intermittent Internet service interferes with note-taking. File synchronization errors sometimes lead to multiple versions of the same file.

Yesterday and today, degraded Internet connectivity prevented me from using and downloading files from OneDrive. I'm still stuck with intermittent, degraded service, but not for long: this weekend, I assembled a Raspberry Pi 5 with 8GB RAM, a Samsung 970 EVO Plus 2TB solid-state drive in a Pironman5 case, and attached an additional 2TB Samsung 970 EVO Plus SSD through a USB connection, used for the Zettelkasten network drive. With minimal programming on the Pironman5 system, I now have a Windows Share available on my local network for my Zettelkasten, backed up to the internal Zettelkasten drive (not shared), OneDrive, and an external Western Digital drive. Once my ISP restores Internet service, the networked drive will have a complete Zettelkasten, and my work will have fewer points of failure, one of them being OneDrive.

Aside from that, while working, I find writing increasingly necessary to stay on track.

GeoEng51

@ZettelDistraction
I feel your pain regarding cloud services - they are fourth line of defence for me, after storage on my computer and on two independent external drives. And they are useful for synching between computer and mobile devices. But it would be crazy to treat them as your reliable and only storage backup solution. Your solution is impressive!

ctietze

@ZettelDistraction I never used OneDrive, but I assumed you could work from a local copy like with Dropbox or Google Drive?

I can recommend Nextcloud (self-hosted, on a Pi for example) for this. You have a copy, the server has a copy, and it sync changes seamlessly.

Network drives sound like you'd be missing 1 local copy on your work machine?

ZettelDistraction

@ctietze, I forgot about NextCloud (you mentioned it in another thread), but I don't mind not having a local working copy. The Pironman5 and LAN become points of failure, but I have backups on other disks. Like Dropbox and Google Drive, OneDrive synchronizes cloud storage with local working copies. My troubles surfaced during a protracted Internet service outage. I'll dig out my USB CD/DVD drive and use it for read-only backups to recover from total global annihilation.

---

I forgot to send this:

@GeoEng51 said:
Your solution is impressive!

Now it's my turn to be impressed: I wrote a Windows batch file to "seed" the network storage drive with my Zettelkasten and related files from OneDrive. The batch file runs robocopy. The initial backup took over an hour since it had to download files from cloud storage and many PDFs.

With the network drive initialized, I fixed the YAML headers of 30 files. Somehow, I got it into my noggin to rerun the batch file. Double-plus ungood: thirty Zettels reverted to their prior state in a second—impressive. I had to redo the work and remember to reverse the source and destination directories in my robocopy batch file. The batch file lives in the Zettelkasten directory, meaning both copies needed the drive reversal.

A flaw with volatile storage backup, such as disk backup, is inadvertent overwriting and erasure (case in point). Against that, the Zettelkasten directory is a carelessly maintained Git repository. Now that the Zettelkasten's home is a network drive on a Raspian Linux system, automating version control on the Pironman5 will help if I overwrite something again.

With the source and destination corrected for the new working setup, I have an initialized network drive with OneDrive as the first backup. I have to add a cron job on the Pironman5 to back up the Zettelkasten directory on the external USB SSD drive to the internal SSD drive and add an external Western Digital drive to the PC backup script. With the dual backups tested and verified, the next task is to automate the batch file from the central computer connected to the LAN, from which the network storage drives are accessible and directly connected.

Working with Obsidian on the external SSD drive attached to the Pironman5 through Wi-Fi is more than fast enough. I no longer wait for downloads from Microsoft, and duplicates arising from sync errors in the source directory are no longer a concern.

ZettelDistraction

I decided against NextCloud since it needs additional client code and configuration.
Also, copying Git repositories from Raspian to Windoze doesn't work well—cloning and mirroring work better, but automating this is more than I want to do (I'm regressing to the mean or less). Relying on the versioning in OneDrive will work until it doesn't.

ctietze

@ZettelDistraction Fair, I'd just be worried that the Pironman5 is the actual holder of the notes, and not the device you work on. So if your Wi-Fi router breaks, your notes are just gone for a while? I can see how this edge case doesn't bother you, but I would not be able to relax with a setup where my work device doesn't hold the stuff I work on

ZettelDistraction

@ctietze

Engineering is about trade-offs—if anyone knows this, you do, no question. I'm following Google's prescription to copy files to three physical devices—an engineering trade-off. Psychology is another one of those trade-offs, but my cortex tells the limbic system a story that overrules the limbic system's fear of working on networked attached storage. Here's the story (I'll need to draw a diagram):

Physical network

The Pironman5 exports the primary copy through an ethernet connection to the LAN, to which my work computer has an ethernet connection. I have no problem working on a computer in another room on the exported Zettelkasten through Wi-Fi. The Pironman5 eliminates the ISP as a point of failure; I have had service outages more frequently lately.

Protocol

Every computer has an encrypted SMB3 connection to the Pironman5 working copy P:\Zettelkasten.

Backup devices

I have mirrored backups to OneDrive (on my computers), a Western Digital drive attached to the LAN, and two internal backups on the Pironman5: a mirrored copy on the internal drive (not exported) and a cumulative backup on the Pironman5 external USB drive. I am not done with backup devices. If the LAN fails, I still have the OneDrive copy of the Zettelkasten.

In practice

The setup is responsive (at least at the human-like speeds I'm capable of): I no longer have conflicted copies within the Zettelkasten (OneDrive is another story), and I have eliminated the ISP as a point of failure the next time I lose service. I haven't taken network and drive latency measurements compared to working on a local disk, but I don't know whether this is worthwhile, perhaps in another life. Windows 11 occasionally prompts me for the Samba password to the Zettelkasten drive.

Points of failure

The points of failure: the Pironman5 and its internal and external Samsung 970 EVO Plus SSD drives, the CAT6 ethernet cables, the Wi-Fi/ethernet router, the drive on each computer, power supplies, and so on. If I were working at NASA or the European Space Agency, the list would be complete, or else.

What counts as a point of failure depends on what counts as a "system." For me, these are the modular, replaceable-in-principle components. I'm not counting the practically irreplaceable systems, such as the electrical grid, for which a systemic failure will take everything offline. Likewise, I can't insure the apartment building against collapse or disappearance into a sinkhole, but now we are well beyond what counts as "the system." Still, giving thought to this tells me my backups are incomplete, not to mention my analysis.

[If I connect to OneDrive exported to a share through the Wi-Fi, I get duplicate files (Copy of XYZ20241220.md), but that's a nutty, suboptimal working arrangement.]