Greatest Hits
Minnie and I saw this display at a house we walked past yesterday.
I tried Grammarly yesterday and I like it a lot
I published two posts here yesterday and noticed copyediting errors after publication. This troubled me partly because I had a whitepaper due later that day, and I was concerned about sloppy mistakes in paying copy.
So I decided, “I’ve heard good things about Grammarly. I’ll give that a try.”
Holy cow! It’s fantastic!
Also, humbling.
Grammarly flagged 95 suggestions in a 2,200-word whitepaper. It suggested replacing the first three words of the whitepaper with a single word. Most of the changes it recommended were along those lines; tightening up the text by eliminating unnecessary words.
However, some of Grammarly’s recommended changes would have introduced errors in my work, and I had to dismiss those. Grammarly doesn’t run on autopilot.
Overall, I’m delighted with Grammarly, and I’m signing up for a one-year subscription now.
And yes, Grammarly reviewed this post. It recommended seven changes. I accepted most of them.
Logseq vs. Obsidian: First impressions
I played with Logseq a bit as an alternative to Obsidian, or complement for it.
Logseq seems like a simplified version of Obsidian that does less. For many people that will be a plus. Fewer options equals fewer things to fiddle with and potentially break.
Logseq is an extreme outliner. It wants everything you do to be an outline. Obsidian supports outlining, but Logseq is more opinionated and more powerful as an outliner. That’s a minus for me; I do use outlines but mainly I just write prose.
Logseq wants you to limit yourself to store everything in just four folders, and organize all your data using links instead. My brain doesn’t work that way. I make heavy use of folders.
Logseq is open source, which makes it—possibly—more futureproof and secure than Obsidian.
I don’t think I’m going to stay with Logseq. It doesn’t seem to be different enough from Obsidian to be worth the hassle of switching.
Still, Logseq seems to be a great app for people who are looking for an extremely powerful outliner. And I may come back to it.
And playing with Logseq gave me some ideas for doing a better job of organizing and using my Obsidian vault. I need to use the Daily Note more, and move blocks of text between notes using the Text Transporter plugin
I just pledged $53 to the Kickstarter for Cory Doctorow’s upcoming novel, “Red Team Blues.” In pledging, I’m supporting the excellent work Cory (who is on Mastodon as @pluralistic@mamot.fr) does on his blog and podcast, which are free.
The $53 pledge gets me a nice hardcover, which I might donate to the local library, because I’m an ebook guy. Backers at that level also get an audiobook, and an ebook too. The audiobook and ebook are DRM-free, which will surprise nobody who follows Cory.
A pledge of $1,000 or more lets you name a character in the sequel, and $3,000 or more gets you—check this out!—a deluxe hardcover with a secret compartment.
More info from Cory: Kickstarting the Red Team Blues audiobook, which Amazon won’t sell
I’ve read an advance copy of the novel. It’s terrific. Very suspenseful!
What is a “digital garden?”
I encountered the idea of a “digital garden” Friday and was instantly enthusiastic and spent some time this weekend nerding out about it. Here is the result – the beginning of my digital garden: mitchwagner.com.
A digital garden is a personal website curated by its author, with essays and information about the subject or subjects they’re excited about. Some are wide-ranging and complex and cover a variety of subjects, while others cover a single subject, such as neurology or books,
Here’s a directory of digital gardens. It’s a digital garden of digital gardens!
Digital gardens provide an alternative to chronological streams such as blogs and social media. Streams are great for finding out what’s happening and whats new now. But they’re lousy for organizing information. Also, streams are terrible for longevity. Once stuff gets pushed down off the top of the stream, it disappears. Digital gardens are places where you can organize information and keeping information available over the long term.
Digital gardens can be very simple, just an index page or a Google Doc. Or you can use sophisticated software to create complex, Wikipedia-like documents.
After a while thinking about this idea, I realized that we’re talking here about the old, 90s “personal website.” People back then would create websites devoted to their favorite bands, or hobbies, or just their own lives and interests. Eventually these got swallowed up by Wikipedia, Google and the various social media silos.
Digital gardens are an extension of, and renaming of, personal websites. That doesn’t make the idea less powerful though.
Digital gardens are exciting to me, personally, because they solve a couple of problems that I’ve been noodling about for years. One problem is that I post a lot of stuff to my streams. Some days I post a dozen or two dozen items. Most are ephemeral – links to breaking news articles, some with comments, some without. Wisecracks. Memes. Old ads and photos from the mid-20th Century.
But some of what I post seems like it should be more long-lasting, whether it’s a book review or the journal of our 25th anniversary safari to Africa last year.
A digital garden solves that problem. I can just put up an index page of links to long-lived and notable content, and let that — rather than the blog or my biography — be my home page. I’ll continue with the blog and keep the bio. But the index page will be the main entrance to my site.
Again, this is not a new idea. Gina Trapani has been doing that a few years, and I don’t think she would say her idea is particularly original to her. But it’s still a great idea — and it’s new to me.
The second problem that digital gardens solve for me is that I’ve been noodling about ideas for projects for, well, several years now. Interviews with people I find interesting, software reviews and how-tos. Occasionally I have even acted on these ideas. But I don’t do it often because I don’t have a permanent home for them.
Resources
My digital garden: mitchwagner.com.
Here’s the article that got me excited, and introduced the idea of “digital gardening” to me: Digital gardens let you cultivate your own little bit of the internet
How the blog broke the web – Amy Hoy provides a brief history of blogs and social media, and discusses why they’re not great ways to organize information.
Hoy says there were only 23 blogs in 1999? Amazing. By late 2001 there seemed like a million of them.
Maggie Appleton: A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden – Apparently the term and idea has been around in various forms for more than 20 years. Not surprising. The internet is a tangled web. Streams and search engines are two great ways to find stuff, but stuff can still be hard to find. That’s not a new problem.
Maggie Appleton’s directory of digital gardeners and digital gardening tools
Maggie’s Digital Garden
Maggie again: A brief overview of digital gardens as a Twitter thread.
A list of artificial brain networked notebook apps – These include a couple of familiar names to me, such as Roam Research and Obsidian. They seem to be a mix of private note-taking apps, Internet publishing tools, and private apps that can also publish to the public web.
This is a take on “digital gardens” that borrows from the philosophy of “zettelkasten.” Put simply, a zettelkasten is a system of note-taking where you write down each idea separately — in its original vision decades ago, you wrote each idea on a slip of paper or index card, though now of course there are digital versions — and then link madly between related notes. Ideas can come from books, articles, thinking, observations, whatever. Zettelkasten advocates say they can come up with fresh insights simply by returning to their zettel and following the links. German sociologist Niklas Luhmann, who invented the idea, credited his zettelkasten as a collaborator on many papers and books.
You don’t have to use dedicated software for a digital garden. Mine is just an index page for my existing blog.
Second Brain – “A curated list of awesome “Public Zettelkastens 🗄️ / Second Brains 🧠 / Digital Gardens 🌱”
Digital Gardens – Another explainer with a couple of examples. The author says:
In basic terms, [a digital garden] is a different format for written content on the web. It’s about moving away from blog posts ordered by dates and categories, into more of an interlinked web of notes.
One of the main ingredients is bi-directional links between those notes, creating a network of notes, similar to Wikipedia.
I would not say that the notes have to be interlinked, Wikipedia-style. Though they can be.
gwern.net – A very nice example of a digital garden covering a broad range of subjects.
Article: My blog is a digital garden, not a blog by Joel Hooks.
I don’t use ad-blockers because I hate ads
I’m a journalist. I’m fine with ads. They pay my income.
I don’t use ad-blockers to protect my privacy. When it comes to the Internet, I’m just a typical shmo — I complain about privacy invasion but I do very little to protect my privacy.
I use ad-blockers because ad-tech makes the web unusable. Ads and pop-ups obscure the articles I’m trying to read. Which is nuts; it’s like websites are inviting hackers to come in and break their own sites. Ads slow down my Mac until the machine becomes unusable. I have a midrange 2018 MacBook Pro. It is not an underpowered machine, and yet ad-tech routinely slows it to a crawl.
We used to complain about TV commercials, but Internet advertising is way worse. TV commercials limited themselves to their own little time blocks. TV commercials didn’t shout over the dialogue on a TV show, or jump in between the camera and the actors so you couldn’t see the action.
Likewise, in magazines and newspapers, the ads didn’t creep from one side of the page to cover up the article. Nobody in 1973 was ever sitting at the kitchen table reading a magazine article only to have an ad cover up the article nagging them to subscribe to the newsletter.
The ad-tech is winning here. I use 1Blocker. It’s just not good enough, and I’m not motivated to shop around and look for alternatives, in part because it does not seem obvious to me that there is anything better than 1Blocker available.
I don’t know what the end-state here is. Maybe the best sites will start to mix subscriptions and advertising, which is a business model refined for print periodicals over the course of a century or more. And the ads will get more restrained, because the subscribers are paying customers.
By the way, here’s a secret of newspapers and magazines in the late 20th Century: The subscriptions didn’t turn a profit. They broke even, paid for the cost of production. The primary purpose of the subscription was to demonstrate to advertisers that there were people willing to pay for the periodical, and therefore these people were worth the cost of advertising too.
The problem with subscription models on the Internet is that there are too many newspapers, magazines and blogs to subscribe to, particularly if you might only want to read one article. This seems solvable, but it’s a big deal for now. 🌕
Help Garry Armacost, a Vietnam vet, fight cancer and VA bureaucracy
Garry Armacost, was wounded fighting for his country in Vietnam. Now he’s in the fight of his life, against cancer and the bureaucracy of the Department of Veterans Affairs.
Garry is a big, cheerful, quiet 75-year-old who lives in San Diego. He needs cancer surgery for his survival. The surgery is complicated, long, done robotically, and requires sophisticated post-operative care.
Garry has had bad experience with post-operative care at the VA, which proved nearly fatal in 2012. Fortunately, Garry’s son, Chris, is a doctor, and arranged for the head of urology at Sharp Memorial to do the surgery.
But the VA has refused the transfer because they don’t want to cover the cost.
“What price do they put on Garry’s life? Apparently not much,” Garry’s wife, Linda, writes in a Facebook post. “We have called, argued, pleaded, tried to talk with the Director, to no avail. We’re wondering if these will be our last days together. It didn’t need to come to this.”
Garry was wounded in Vietnam, and earned a purple heart. He came home, raised a family, and worked a long career for various railroads in the Northeast. He is now retired and lives with his wife, Linda, in San Diego. Linda is active in local Democratic Party politics, which is where I met her.
Please help Garry and his family. If you have any ideas on who to contact and otherwise how to influence the VA to give him the treatment he needs, let me know and I’ll pass the word. You can contact me directly at mitch@mitchwagner.com.
If you work for the VA or know someone who does, please put in a word to get Garry’s transfer approved. Contact your Congressional representative and apply pressure.
Share this post far and wide on social media.
The VA needs to be held accountable to provide care, not just for Garry, but for every veteran. They were there when we needed them – now we need to be there for them, when they need us.
“It may not work for me," says Garry, “but hopefully another vet will have a better outcome.”
🌕📓
Passover was a really big deal when I was a kid
We had the second seder at our house, with upwards of 20 aunts, uncles and cousins swarming over the place. Our cousins Janet and Barry even brought their dog; Mom couldn’t stand dogs but she made an exception for Dusty.
Dusty is still one of my alltime favorite dogs, although I believe Janet and Barry prefer Custer, their next dog. And now that I think of it, Custer is a weird name for a dog.
Jimmy Fallon said in an interview once that when he was growing up, his parents didn’t have friends. They had brothers and sisters and cousins. Says I to myself on hearing that: Holy crap. I thought that was just us. My parents socialized frequently, but it was almost always with people genetically related. Though my Dad did have one or two old friends he grew up with, whom he saw once or twice a year.
Mom was usually not a great cook, but she did a great job with the seder, working for days and putting on the full spread. Mom and Dad seldom drank, but they had a little wine with dinner – Manischewitz and Mogen David, of course! – and laughed a lot. My uncle Nat and Aunt Harriet were the only real drinkers in the family; my parents kept a bottle of vodka in the house for when they came to visit. We told the same jokes every year and never got tired of them.
To this day I am only a social drinker. I like beer and wine and Jameson’s and I went on a martini kick for a few years. But I don’t drink when I’m at home and I can go for weeks and months without having alcohol, and I do not miss it. 🌕
We kept kosher for Passover for the full eight days. The rest of the year we were lax. I like to say that we were pizza-and-chinese-food-on-paper-plates kosher – the foods we kept in the house were kosher, and we kept the proper two sets of plates, one for meat and one for dairy. But we brought in pizza and Chinese food regularly, and when we did, we ate it on paper plates. When I was an adult, it took me some time to get used to eating pizza on regular dishes.
I loved matzoh during Passover, and gobbled it up plain, or with margarine, rendered chicken fat or cream cheese. I never got tired of matzoh during Passover, but I stopped eating it and switched back to bread the moment I could, and never had matzoh, or wanted it, the rest of the year.
I've been drinking a meal replacement shake called Huel for breakfast for months
For several months, my daily breakfast has been about a pint of a thick “nutritionally complete” liquid, called Huel.
Huel is a powder you mix with water to make a milky liquid, like a thin milkshake. You can add more water to make it thinner, or less to make it thicker. You can use vegetable milk, or mix it with fruit or peanut butter for added flavor. The powder itself can be unflavored, or vanilla, chocolate or berry flavored. I’ve tried all three, and settled on the vanilla as my favorite.
I used to eat a real breakfast every day, fruit and cottage cheese, but when I started Huel in November I needed to get a running start in the morning and keep running all morning.
At that time, I was working with an international workgroup. I’m based in San Diego, which means I got into work when everybody else around the US had already been working for hours and colleagues in the UK were already into late afternoon. I didn’t want to take time out to eat breakfast, even though my body demands it.
When I read about Huel in this article by Nicole Dieker, I said sure, why not. And I liked it and stuck with it.
And I feel fine. I no longer have that morning scheduling pressure but I’ve stuck with Huel. It takes some of the complexity out of the day. And I like it.
Some people, including Nicole Dieker, above, take Huel for two meals a day, but that’s too many for me, because I like to eat. Just not as often as my body seems to need me to eat.
Some people take all their meals with Huel, but that’s not a good idea, because you risk nutritionally deficiencies. Human beings are evolved to consume a variety of foods to get a broad range of nutrients; it’s why your dog and cat are happy eating kibble every day but you’d go nuts if you always ate exactly the same thing every meal.
Huel is one of several “meal replacement” liquids that have come on the market in the past few years. They all have pretty much the same marketing pitch: Eating three meals a day, plus snacks, is a hassle. Meal replacements are designed to replace the fast-food burger you consume at your desk, not the meals you enjoy with family and friends.
Meal replacements are particularly touted for people looking to get off a junk food diet.
Soylent is the most famous of these meal replacements. I’ve tried Soylent and like it fine, but I went with Huel this time around on a whim, because of that article.
Also, Soylent is made with chemicals but Huel is made with real ingredients: Oats, tapioca, flaxseed, sunflower, coconut, peas, rice, etc.
(Yes, I know that those so-called “real ingredients” are ALSO chemicals. You know what the fuck I mean, piglet..)
As Huel notes on its website: A liquid meal made from a powder sounds weird and dystopian, but it’s actually an old idea: Flour is an example of a powder that becomes food, and soup is an example of a liquid meal. Both have been around for thousands of years. Many people have smoothies for breakfast. Huel is just a variation on that. 🌕
Automating micro.blog categories using emoji. Nerdy fun!
Listening to the Monday microcast with @macgenie and @manton yesterday, I learned that you can use filters on micro.blog to search for text in a post you write, and automatically include that post in a category.
So you can automate micro.blog to search for any post containing the word “beer,” or the beer emoji 🍺, and put that in a “beer” category. Instructions are here.
Additionally, micro.blog uses emoji in lieu of hashtags, which I like. Because emoji are awesome and hashtags are ugly.
Later, in the evening, I set up an automated, filtered category for “best of,” using the full-moon emoji 🌕 for a filter. I chose that emoji for no other reason than that it is a nice emoji, and won’t get in the way of people reading the post.
So now I have a blog category for my best posts, to distinguish them from the daily flow of ephemera.
I’m also thinking of using emoji with IFTTT or Zapier to control cross-posting to Twitter and Tumblr.
One of the things I love about micro.blog is that it manages to be both simple and powerful, which is a rare combination.
And now because this post contains that full moon emoji, it should automatically appear in the best-of category, without my having to do anything about it.
Coronavirus breaks my iPhone: FaceID doesn't work when you wear a mask
Privileged person problem: When I go to the supermarket, I keep the shopping list on my iPhone. When I’m wearing a mask, Face ID doesn’t recognize me. I have to open my iPhone by entering the passcode a dozen times or more.
I heard about a feature called “Setup Alternate Appearance” for situations where you have an “appearance that can look vastly different.”
I tried it with my mask on this morning. Nope, didn’t work. It said I had something obscuring my face and I should try again.
Joanna Stern has more on the whys and wherefores at the Wall Street Journal. The iPhone needs to see your eyes, nose and mouth. It’ll work for many sunglasses but not all. It supposedly works when men grow and shave off facial hair, and when women wear or don’t wear makeup.
There’s apparently a workaround to the mask problem: masks printed with images of the lower parts of faces on them!
Doctors who’ve been living with this problem for years offer suggestions: Just use pen and paper, bunch up your interactions with the iPhone in batches all at once, tell someone you trust to unlock the phone for you, ir continue typing in your passcode like a savage.
Stern notes, and I can confirm, that you can punch in your passcode and otherwise use your iPhone while wearing thin nitrile gloves on with trivial additional inconvenience. 🌕
What will you do the day social distancing ends?
I think we’ll be cautious and not rush out to any restaurants or crowded social gatherings.
But I think I’ll absolutely take the dog to the park, Lake Murray, where we used to walk every day. Stop and talk to people. Let Minnie sniff out some other dogs. That sounds lovely. With Julie of course if she wants to come. 🌕