Share with us what ideas you're grappling with in your ZK this week. April 27, 2023

Will · April 2023

Now for "Zettelkasten Show and Tell." There is no prize for the most exciting post, but if there were one for the most boring, mundane post, I'd surely win! Can you produce a clearer winner?

I'll go first again. But please take this as an invitation to share your successes and failures using the zettelkasten method. Sharing helps others learn and improve their practices. Feel free to ask for help and advice. Someone, probably more knowledgeable and skilled than me, will respond.

What are you reading?
I'm reading: Jauhar, Sandeep. Heart: a history, Simon & Schuster. 2018.

My ten day zettel production

ctietze · April 2023

We've almost everything planned for our wedding in July. That's a huge relief. My fiancée needed a smaller size of a dress she picked, and it's in limbo since January (!), which is beginning to stress her out a bit, though
My work on the app "Timing" is finished. Can't believe it's been 3 years!

Zettel production was very technical. I refactored old notes (from ~2010) about organizations and group dynamics, that's where the "Tuckman stages" come from + the note about illegal behavior in big organizations The note on "Functor"'s title is alarmingly short, so maybe that's material for Zettel feedback.

New Zettel from last week

202304200833 RAII Resource Acquisition Is Initialization technique
202304210907 Convert some pages from PDF with ImageMagick
202304210907 Select pages from PDF with ImageMagick
202304210925 Extract Makefile functions as canned recipes
202304210931 Makefile multi-line variables
202304211001 Design web apps as offline-first
202304211745 Tuckman's stages of group development
202304220901 Illegalität in Organisation muss informell sein
202304221054 ForEach for non-constant Range requires ID
202304240916 Make SwiftUI view tappable in transparent regions
202304250856 SwiftUI @State changes replace owning view
202304251014 Functor
202304251020 SwiftUI onFirstAppear modifier
202304251104 Forcing @StateObject updates
202304251120 Discardable scratchpad via local @State with external @Binding
202304251128 § SwiftUI @StateObject for owning reference types
202304251133 § SwiftUI @ObservedObject
202304251503 Button in List on iOS trigger all row's actions by default
202304252103 Obs - Stored local variable does not update view modifiers
202304261106 § Swift essential toolkit
202304261127 Swift encourages Int over UInt for interoperbility
202304270853 Keynote.app custom animation timing curves
202304270900 C-String memory management with strdup and free

Reading

Craig A. Finseth (1999): The Craft of Text Editing. Emacs for the Modern World. -- A whole book about text editor UI/UX. I expect to question some assumptions about how text editors do and should work to make The Archive better. I'm only 5% in, but I think the "Emacs" in the title is foreshadowing, because that application has a very robust way to edit text.
Baldur Bjarnason (2023): Out of the Software Crisis. Systems-Thinking for Software Projects. (Finished) -- Summary of the past 5 decades of failure in software. Opinion piece, first and foremost, but I loved the references to systems thinking in the style of Donella Meadows. Bjarnason models software projects and software teams as systems with inflow, outflow, feedback loops and such to show systemic problems.

prometheanhindsight · April 2023

@ctietze said:

We've almost everything planned for our wedding in July. That's a huge relief. My fiancée needed a smaller size of a dress she picked, and it's in limbo since January (!), which is beginning to stress her out a bit, though

Congrats on the wedding! The planning and anticipating is really stressful, but once the day arrives I'm sure it'll be wonderful!

New notes in the last week

202304271151 ITO Dopant Activation Value
202304271131 The Simple Drude Approximation
202304271124 Heterogeneous Ensemble Drude Approximation HEDA
202304271119 Problems with titration based electron counting
202304271115 Electron Quantification through Titration
202304251612 Savitzky Golay Python Code
202304191023 Types of Cube and Sphere Mixed Assemblies

My notes have been pretty sporadic since starting over in February. I'm wrestling with a mixture of not knowing what should go into my ZK, not being certain how best to format everything so that it remains useful, and general notes hygiene--i.e., having a backlog of info that I intend to eventually put into my ZK but not routine for doing such.

Normal new ZK problems, but when I was actually new to ZK, I moved fast and made way too many notes with very little regard for organization or content. This is the opposite problem. I'm now over considering each note, waiting for something to become obvious before I put it in my ZK. I need to find a middle ground, I think.

Reading

Derek Parfit: "Personal Identity." The Philosophical Review, Vol. 80, No. 1. (Jan., 1971), pp. 3-27. An essay in which Parfit argues that our common conception of personal identity is not generally accurate, and that we can do away with this conception of personal identity without giving up any of the important considerations that we usually ascribe to it. It's been surprisingly easy to follow, which hasn't been my experience with trying to read philosophy in the past.

Will · April 2023

@prometheanhindsight said:
My notes have been pretty sporadic since starting over in February. I'm wrestling with a mixture of not knowing what should go into my ZK, not being certain how best to format everything so that it remains useful, and general notes hygiene--i.e., having a backlog of info that I intend to eventually put into my ZK but not routine for doing such.

Forget the backlog. Only go to it when you are prompted by what you are currently working on.

Devoting 20 minutes each morning to zettelkasting is easier than finding an uninterrupted 2.5-hour time slot in your busy schedule.

Normal new ZK problems, but when I was actually new to ZK, I moved fast and made too many notes with little regard for organization or content.

I started this way too. Enthusiasm run amuck. Eventually, you'll settle. I think hygiene is the key to slowing the pace sustainably. But life has its own plans.

This is the opposite problem. I'm now over-considering each note, waiting for something to become obvious before I put it in my ZK. I need to find a middle ground, I think.

What I do is make a note with the slightest consideration that it might be something. And I do this quickly without much editing or research, or judgment. I try to work very quickly. I keep all my notes in an 'inbox.' I schedule a time to work the contents and hygienically fix the note. Some notes get immediately deleted, as I quickly see the idea was silly. Some notes linger for a long time before I decide that I must not be interested in the idea because it has languished so long. Many notes spark pure excitement, and when I am done refactoring, they eventually turn out with the ZK herd. The key is fast capture, then careful consideration and refactoring at a scheduled time.

prometheanhindsight · April 2023

@Will said:

Forget the backlog. Only go to it when you are prompted by what you are currently working on.

>

What I do is make a note with the slightest consideration that it might be something. And I do this quickly without much editing or research, or judgment. I try to work very quickly. I keep all my notes in an 'inbox.' I schedule a time to work the contents and hygienically fix the note.... The key is fast capture, then careful consideration and refactoring at a scheduled time.

This is really good advice, thanks! I definitely think holding notes outside of my ZK for fear that they aren't ready or that I don't have the time to polish them up is a big part of my problem.

I mentioned a while back that I tend to put data figures in powerpoint slides while I work through data. So I have lots of notes worth of data that could be turned into zettel, but it'll require working through weeks of slides... Better, as you suggest, to leave that in the slides and only pull it into my ZK if it becomes important to notes I'm actively working on. Moving forward, I also can try putting the in-progress data figures in zettel as I work on them. I can polish and refactor as I go. Anyways, it's often helpful to see old data and how I was thinking through it even if that data or thinking has been overwritten by more recent work.

ZettelDistraction · April 2023

@ctietze Congratulations!

All Zettels have the new ID format. Verification of the links follows, though most of them were updated with Absurdian. I now have 466 Zettels. @Will asked to be kept abreast of these developments. @Will, I saw that Zettel on the magic of TK. I read about TK in an article by Cory Doctorow.

Next is the text, more or less, of a Zettel. This Zettel shows that I pick up gadgets like adding Zettels to a Zettelkasten: on the hunch that I might figure out what to do with them.

# LoRa.2c2b.1.0.23.0430 G1 Meshticism

The latest project concerns flashing Meshtastic firmware in a Meshtastic Mesh Device Station Edition G1 (from now on, G1), which needed the Python program esptool.py (the first two methods recommended in the Meshtastic documentation didn't work for me) and enough neurons to locate the firmware at https://github.com/meshtastic/firmware/releases and then to realize either that it was hiding under Assets or that I should click on the link in the title Meshtastic Firmware 2.1.9.d43ddc9 Alpha. Now I know that I should have gone to https://meshtastic.org/downloads. The instructions don't mention this link in context.

A lesson learned: I needed to locate a 20V 2A USB C power supply for the G1. By carefully not reading the documentation and using a 5V 3.5A power supply, I enabled the three 18650 lithium-ion batteries in the optional 12V Battery Docker for the G1 to discharge to zero.

Last night, I located a spare Wacom 20V USB-C power supply for a Wacom Mobile Studio Pro 16. This was in a tub of electronic parts stored under the bed--no lesson learned there. Now the 18650s are fully charged. I purchased parts before I knew what to do with them. Only after I bought two Meshtastic text messengers and turned them on along with the G1 did I realize what I had done: I had purchased a router--the G1--for a mesh network.

The network stopped working after some attempts to configure the mesh, leading to a search for the latest firmware for the G1. This time, I read the G1 wiki, which noted that the

"Meshtastic Mesh Device Station Edition G1 ha[s] been supported by the official [M]eshtastic repository on Github from firmware version 1.3.42. Thus, the latest firmware [can] be downloaded from the [M]eshtastic project's releases page: https://github.com/meshtastic/Meshtastic-device/releases."

The G1 came with version 2.0.0; I had upgraded to the latest stable release (2.1.5) but decided I wanted all three devices at the same firmware version (2.1.9+).

Next: connect a flat-panel circularly polarized 915MHz antenna to Station G1 without blowing the power amplifier or causing the Battery Docker to shut down from the RF.

The ZK serves as an engineering notebook--among other uses. I hope that I have learned my lesson.

Will · April 2023

@ZettelDistraction said:
I now have 466 Zettels. @Will asked to be kept abreast of these developments.

Thanks for letting us know about the number of zettel you've created. I don't remember asking "to be kept abreast of these developments," but it is interesting that you've been able to curate 466 zettel while working. Some of us have the 'retirement advantage.'

@ZettelDistraction said:
@Will, I saw that Zettel on the magic of TK. I read about TK in an article by Cory Doctorow.

This is exactly the seed of the note. Cory is a smart thinker and has a crackerjack style of writing. I was introduced to using TK when writing a first draft by reviewing Steven Pressfield's Writing Wednesdays: The Magic of TK. I can't figure out what got me on to Steven Pressfield's 2016 article, but my current project has more flow using this method.

The Magic of TK 202304231735

ZettelDistraction · April 2023

@Will said:

@ZettelDistraction said:
I now have 466 Zettels. @Will asked to be kept abreast of these developments.

Thanks for letting us know about the number of zettel you've created. I don't remember asking "to be kept abreast of these developments," but it is interesting that you've been able to curate 466 zettel while working. Some of us have the 'retirement advantage.'

@Will
I write continuously during my time off and use the ZK for work.

Here's a reminder about "developments"--perhaps I took it out of context: https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/comment/17380/#Comment_17380

@ZettelDistraction said:
@Will, I saw that Zettel is on the magic of TK. I read about TK in an article by Cory Doctorow.

This is exactly the seed of the note. Cory is a smart thinker and has a crackerjack style of writing.

I would also describe Cory Doctorow's writing style the same way: crackerjack. He's a gifted writer.

I was introduced to using TK when writing a first draft by reviewing Steven Pressfield's Writing Wednesdays: The Magic of TK.

I find Pressfield oPressive. Besides, he wrote about TK in 2016, seven years after Doctorow's post in 2009.

Incidentally, anything you post online is subject to unattributed borrowing, even if you stamp it with CC BY-SA 4.0. Unattributed use of CC BY-SA 4.0 licensed work nullifies the license. Unattributed borrowing of my online writing has been recurring for years. I found another one recently (part of a pattern) and wrote about it in a previous version of this post, but I removed it because I have better things to do on this "bitch of an Earth," to quote Pozzo from Waiting for Godot.

PS @chrisaldrich's Hypothes.is annotations are to-the-point and valuable.

ZettelDistraction · May 2023

I forgot to mention a project: Enzyklopädische Geschichte des folgezettel.

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Share with us what ideas you're grappling with in your ZK this week. April 27, 2023

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# LoRa.2c2b.1.0.23.0430 G1 Meshticism

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