Weekender #30

• Birb watch: No signs of Handsome myna. As I mentioned in prior weeks, there is a Red-vented Bulbul that I named Booboo that comes by daily for small balls of rolled up bread. I throw them into the air and it catches them in mid-flight. There’s also Corn and Chowder, the two Red-crested Cardinals that come by the kitchen door asking for Pringles. While I enjoy interacting with these birds, its’ still no substitution for Handsome myna.

• I’m starting to realize that I’m at that tail end of a generation that is probably considered “old”, yet young enough to remember using the Unix system for email during college. I miss using Pine mail (sometimes). Maybe, it’s more that I miss how simple email used to be. No fonts, styling, images or data tracking. Just text. While I’m no longer someone that lives in the terminal shell, I still frequently use Pico or nano for text editing when I’m in a terminal window.

• Speaking of text editing, every few months, there’s a new text editor app or system that I’ll see someone rave about online, so of course, I have to check it out. Over the past year, I’ve explored Craft, Notion, Taio, and Obsidian. All of them have interesting features, strengths and weaknesses, and some feel like a bit overkill for what I’d use it for. This made me ponder my note taking app journey over the years…

  • The very first app I ever used for note storage was Filemaker Pro back in 1993. I copied the idea from Ron Knowlton, who was my supervisor at my college job. He had a database he created in Filemaker Pro called Vinyl Rolodex. The database was really simple. Each new record or note contained an auto-generated date and time stamp with a title/subject field and a notes field. It was quick, reliable and easily searchable. Filemaker Pro was, and is still really expensive for this purpose.

  • I later started using VoodooPad from Flying Meat software as my main notes “database”. It was really great while it lasted. Unfortunately, there wasn’t any iOS app for VoodooPad. Flying Meat sold VoodooPad to Primate Labs, but that was long after I had stopped using it. VoodooPad is still around, but hasn’t been updated in a while.

  • Next, I moved to SimpleNote, which was cool at the time because it had a web interface for note taking and an iOS app. In the early days, there were lots of sync issues, but overall, the app and service were great.

  • I started to notice a lot of folks moving to plain text files vs. having their notes and documents stored in a database or any type of proprietary format. Notational Velocity was the first app that I used in this way, and I later moved to nvALT. Combining this app with DropBox and any app on iOS that had the ability to access DropBox satisfied me for a long time.

  • Today, I use Drafts on macOS and iOS. I do a lot of documentation and note taking throughout my day. Lots of it is just jotting down what just happened, or maybe a note about a specific idea or topic. I need these ideas to get out of my head and into the text editor app quickly, then get out of my way so I can get back to whatever it was I was doing. Drafts, for me, is still the app I use daily because it does exactly that. The quick capture shortcut is always there, no matter what app I’m using on my Mac. Drafts on iOS has been made specifically to launch quickly with a blank page ready for data capture. All of my notes sync to all of my devices quickly, so the data is always with me. While Drafts doesn’t give direct access to the files in the app, it’s built on the premise that the text starts in Drafts but is eventually moved out of the app to somewhere else. While this was an issue prior to Drafts having a macOS app, it’s been a while since I’ve thought about text editors again. I think all of the new text editors are cool and offer a lot of different strokes for different needs.

  • One app that I really enjoyed using, but never took off was Folding Text by Jesse Grosjean of TaskPaper and WriteRoom fame. Folding Text introduced me to outlining in an app and also supported Markdown. It had a lot of nifty features such as focus, to do lists and timers, all in a plain text app. I was happy to see that there was work being done on Folding Text 3.0, if only to preserve it as a functioning app. Hopefully Jesse can figure a way out to make the app sustainable and profitable.

• Naoki Urasawa’s Asadora volume 3 was released and I quickly devoured it. I found it interesting that Urasawa wove Japan’s first Olympics in 1964 into the story, just as Japan was gearing up to host the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo.

• I’ve been trying to get exercise into my day by walking around the campus at work. Things were really hectic at work this week, but I made it a point to take a break and go for my walk. On Thursday, just as I was finishing my walk, I missed the last step walking down a short flight of stairs and almost had a really bad foot injury. My foot twisted when it missed the final step but I caught myself quickly. I felt the initial shock of pain shoot through my foot and immediately thought I had sprained my ankle. I was able to walk back to my office and take a look. It wasn’t as bad as I feared. I think I may have pulled a tendon, or just strained it. There was very little swelling, but I kept my foot elevated and iced for a day. I’m able to walk without issue, but 4 days later, my foot is still a bit tender.

• A lot of folks are into vinyl these days, but I’ve always had a soft spot for the cassette tape. Take a look at this nostalgic archive of cassette tapes and if you’re old enough to remember making mixed tapes, let me know which was your favorite brand and type. Mine was the TDK SA 90.

• This weeks groove was from Joy Orbison - still slipping vol. 1. It was great to just put this one on and have it playing in the background during my busy week. DJ/producer Peter O`Grady strung together what he considers a hip-hop mixed tape, with the addition of Voice Notes of his family members. Listen: Apple Music.