00:00SPEAKERDid I ever tell you what caused my problem
00:04SPEAKERa couple of weeks ago?
00:05SPEAKER- Did I ever tell you the tale?
00:06SPEAKER- Let me tell you, sit down, Brad.
00:08SPEAKERLet's talk about-
00:09SPEAKER- Sitting around the campfire
00:10SPEAKERand talking about your audio routing.
00:12SPEAKER- Well, you know what?
00:13SPEAKERIt wasn't anything audio related for me.
00:16SPEAKERSo a couple of weeks ago, we were sitting down to record
00:19SPEAKERand I was in my Linux install, just like I always am.
00:21SPEAKERAnd things suddenly were inexplicably weird with Audacity.
00:26SPEAKERAnd it was throwing an error about not enough disk space.
00:29SPEAKERAnd then when I looked at the amount of disk space
00:31SPEAKERin my home folder, totally fine.
00:33SPEAKERBut then I looked at the disk space on root
00:36SPEAKERand it was like, you have zero megabytes available on root,
00:39SPEAKERwhich turns out to be not good.
00:41SPEAKER- That's bad.
00:42SPEAKER- It was bad.
00:43SPEAKER- I'm an expert, I can tell you that's bad.
00:45SPEAKER- Yeah, and so I looked at it
00:46SPEAKERand I couldn't figure it out in three seconds.
00:48SPEAKERSo I did the thing that I do
00:50SPEAKERand cowardly rebooted into Windows
00:52SPEAKER'cause we were both on a timeline
00:53SPEAKERand had to get the episode done.
00:56SPEAKERAnd then I came back to it later and I was like,
00:57SPEAKERoh, how do I deal with this?
00:58SPEAKERAnd what happened was I had apparently at some point
01:02SPEAKERreinstalled Snapper and not set up Snapper culling.
01:06SPEAKERSo I had 350 gigabytes of Snapper images filling the drive.
01:13SPEAKER- That'll do it, some snapshots, you mean?
01:15SPEAKER- Snapshots, yeah, yeah.
01:16SPEAKER- Yes, okay.
01:17SPEAKER- And yeah, when I got rid of the last 900 of those,
01:23SPEAKEReverything was cool again.
01:24SPEAKER- Look, when you absolutely positively
01:26SPEAKERneed to be able to roll back to any point in time
01:29SPEAKERseparated by an interval of about 15 minutes
01:31SPEAKERfor the last six months?
01:33SPEAKER- I think I had it set to an hour, but yeah.
01:36SPEAKERAnd yeah, it turns out I could have rolled
01:38SPEAKERall the way back to the moment after the first install
01:41SPEAKERof Cache OS on this machine.
01:43SPEAKER- Were those the defaults?
01:44SPEAKERThat seems crazy to me to not ship
01:46SPEAKERwith a culling policy in place.
01:48SPEAKER- Well, so this is the rolling distro thing, right?
01:51SPEAKERIs that sometimes they put new features in
01:53SPEAKERand then they add the defaults in
01:54SPEAKERand if you've adjusted those files
01:56SPEAKERbetween the time those two things happen,
01:58SPEAKERthen you don't get the new defaults.
01:59SPEAKER- Trust me, I've seen the Noctolia V4 to V5 calamity
02:03SPEAKERthat's going on right now.
02:05SPEAKER- So I thought I had that one yesterday too,
02:07SPEAKER'cause I've been watching that
02:08SPEAKERand I've been very careful doing updates to it
02:10SPEAKER'cause I'm a Noctolia guy.
02:11SPEAKER- Yeah, but I bet it wasn't that.
02:12SPEAKERI bet it was the Linux kernel 7.2 driver video issue.
02:17SPEAKERNo, 'cause I saw that also was breaking some cachey installs.
02:20SPEAKER- No, you know what I did that was stupid?
02:22SPEAKERThis was all me again.
02:23SPEAKERI had updated my Neary config
02:26SPEAKERwith a change that made it not validate.
02:30SPEAKERAnd so when it booted into Neary,
02:31SPEAKERit just didn't read the config file
02:33SPEAKER'cause it didn't validate.
02:34SPEAKERAnd so I had the thing with the cachey Noctolia V4 to V5
02:40SPEAKERon my laptop.
02:42SPEAKERAnd I fixed that by reinstalling,
02:45SPEAKER'cause the neat thing about the Noctolia stuff
02:46SPEAKERis V4 and V5 can live next to each other.
02:48SPEAKERThere's no incompatibilities.
02:50SPEAKERYou just have to reinstall Noctolia V4
02:52SPEAKERand re-enable two background services
02:55SPEAKERto make it work again immediately.
02:57SPEAKERLiterally, when I fixed it on the laptop,
02:59SPEAKERI just shelled to a different terminal
03:02SPEAKERand logged into text mode and booted it up,
03:06SPEAKERinstalled those two packages,
03:07SPEAKERand restarted the GUI and everything was fine.
03:11SPEAKER- Yeah, that's cool, I guess.
03:12SPEAKERI guess we should say, just for people who don't know,
03:14SPEAKERI guess the issue is that V5,
03:17SPEAKERthey have rewritten the thing in a native framework.
03:19SPEAKERIt used to be written in Quickshell.
03:20SPEAKER- Yeah, so Quickshell is like a framework
03:23SPEAKERfor UI tooling at an OS level.
03:28SPEAKERAnd Noctolia is the thing that provides
03:30SPEAKERkind of the things that I think
03:31SPEAKERmost people think about their OS,
03:32SPEAKERlike the launcher menu and the taskbar
03:35SPEAKERand all the kind of the placement of windows
03:41SPEAKERand all the little widgets for like Bluetooth
03:42SPEAKERand wifi and all that stuff.
03:44SPEAKER- Right, and so V5, they have moved away from Quickshell
03:46SPEAKERand have written it in a native whatever framework,
03:49SPEAKERbut apparently upgrading to V5,
03:52SPEAKERit's now looking for a V5 configuration
03:54SPEAKERand not 'cause it does not read a V4 configuration.
03:56SPEAKERAnd so it just kind of breaks
03:58SPEAKERand this is why I will never run a rolling release
04:00SPEAKERor rolling distro, I should say.
04:02SPEAKER- I mean, you just gotta keep up with your updates.
04:06SPEAKERIt's like sheetrock mud, like when you hang sheetrock,
04:11SPEAKERyou gotta do muddin' every day
04:12SPEAKERand you gotta keep it sanded.
04:13SPEAKERYou gotta apply it at night and sand it in the morning
04:17SPEAKERso you can apply more at night and sand more in the morning.
04:19SPEAKER- It's a strong pitch, you're in Linux,
04:20SPEAKERthe sheetrock hanging of operating systems.
04:23SPEAKER- I mean, look, the benefit is that when something new
04:26SPEAKERand hot and exciting comes out,
04:28SPEAKERI get to use it before anybody else.
04:29SPEAKER- Yeah, that's fine, you know.
04:31SPEAKER- Depends on how you wanna live, right?
04:32SPEAKER- There comes a time in a man's life
04:34SPEAKERwhen new and hot and exciting
04:35SPEAKERis maybe not so new and hot and exciting anymore.
04:38SPEAKER- I mean, you're not wrong, but also,
04:43SPEAKERlet me tell you about the new pandoc stuff
04:47SPEAKERI got the other day.
04:49SPEAKER(upbeat music)
05:18SPEAKER- Welcome to Brad and Will Made a Tech Pod.
05:21SPEAKERI'm Will. - I am Brad.
05:23SPEAKER- Hello, Brad. - Hi, hello.
05:24SPEAKER- Happy Friday. - Thank you.
05:25SPEAKER- Or Sunday, depending on whether you're listening
05:27SPEAKERor talking. - That's right.
05:29SPEAKERTemporal distortions are taking place around here.
05:33SPEAKERYou mentioned Audacity briefly in the cold open.
05:36SPEAKER- Yeah, I did.
05:37SPEAKERIs there scene drama or is this good?
05:38SPEAKER- Not at all. - Okay, good.
05:39SPEAKER- It seems like Audacity 4.0 might be kind of imminent,
05:42SPEAKERwhich I'm sort of excited about
05:44SPEAKERas a frequent Audacity user.
05:47SPEAKER- When did we...
05:48SPEAKERWe talked to Tantacruel. - Tantacruel.
05:51SPEAKERYeah, on the Fosbaw. - No longer works there now.
05:53SPEAKER- Yeah, he left the project.
05:54SPEAKERHe left the Muse group or whatever the company is
05:58SPEAKERthat runs Audacity now.
06:00SPEAKER- So does this mean that my Audacity timeline
06:03SPEAKERwill finally scroll smoothly?
06:05SPEAKER- Oh, they basically got...
06:07SPEAKERWhat is the framework they run on?
06:08SPEAKERWX widgets, I think is what it's called.
06:10SPEAKERThe pushing 30-year-old,
06:14SPEAKER25-year-old GUI that Audacity uses.
06:19SPEAKERThey did make some changes at some point
06:21SPEAKERto make it scroll smoothly or...
06:24SPEAKER- It's still chunks, man.
06:25SPEAKERIt's still chunks. - Yeah, it's still got...
06:26SPEAKERAnyway, 4.0 is a full-on UI redo.
06:29SPEAKERLike they have moved for the UI to Qt, QT, Qt.
06:34SPEAKER- Ah, I love Qt.
06:35SPEAKER- I guess it's pronounced cute.
06:36SPEAKERI never knew.
06:37SPEAKERI spent 25 years calling it Qt.
06:40SPEAKERAnyway, they put out a beta 2 of 4.0 in June.
06:45SPEAKER- Ooh. - I don't know
06:46SPEAKERhow many numbered betas they will be running,
06:47SPEAKERbut that does sound like probably a release is imminent
06:50SPEAKERby the end of the year.
06:51SPEAKER- That's promising. - Which is cool
06:53SPEAKER'cause they've got a little page up
06:55SPEAKERshowing what the new UI,
06:56SPEAKERor you can find videos on YouTube of it.
06:57SPEAKERIn fact, you can download beta 2 and just install it.
07:00SPEAKERBut...
07:02SPEAKER- Have you tried it yet? - I have not.
07:03SPEAKERI'm not gonna bother until...
07:05SPEAKERIn fact, even when 4.0 comes out,
07:06SPEAKERI'm not gonna move to it immediately
07:07SPEAKER'cause it's way, way, way too critical in my workflow
07:11SPEAKERto know what my audio editor is doing.
07:15SPEAKER- Very much the same.
07:16SPEAKER- Probably wait until like a 4.1 to move over or something.
07:19SPEAKERBut I'm excited to try it
07:23SPEAKER'cause they have clearly modernized the interface
07:25SPEAKERin like a profound way.
07:27SPEAKER- I mean, it's made big jumps in the last,
07:30SPEAKERI don't know, five years, six years.
07:32SPEAKER- Ever since they took it over,
07:33SPEAKERthe 3.0 series has had unbelievably huge improvements
07:36SPEAKERby the standards of Audacity.
07:38SPEAKER- And yeah, once it stopped being a destructive editor,
07:40SPEAKERall bets were off as far as I'm concerned.
07:42SPEAKER- They got non-destructive in them.
07:44SPEAKERThey got all kinds of like meat and potatoes,
07:46SPEAKERaudio DAW type stuff that they should have had
07:48SPEAKERfor a long time.
07:49SPEAKERBut yeah, well, whatever.
07:51SPEAKERWe should talk about other software, I suppose.
07:53SPEAKERBut I...
07:55SPEAKERMy bet is they are angling to make this
07:58SPEAKERthe blender of the audio world.
08:01SPEAKERThis is what I think this is going toward.
08:04SPEAKERIt's like professional enough and DAW-like enough
08:07SPEAKERthat it's hopefully, I think they probably are hoping
08:09SPEAKERit'll be like the thing everybody reaches for
08:11SPEAKERif they have light to medium prosumer audio editing needs.
08:16SPEAKER- So the thing I'll say about Blender
08:18SPEAKERis I think Blender's actually transitioned past that.
08:20SPEAKER- Okay, yeah, sure, I can see that.
08:22SPEAKERLike Blender is just the standard now.
08:24SPEAKER- Yeah, it's, I mean, I don't know how much you know,
08:27SPEAKERlike when you're doing animation
08:29SPEAKERand like rig and skeleton imports into games
08:34SPEAKERand stuff like that,
08:36SPEAKERbasically there's one pipeline for that
08:38SPEAKERregardless of what tool the artists use.
08:40SPEAKERAnd most studios that are starting now
08:42SPEAKERseem to be using Blender as like the ingest.
08:44SPEAKERFor years and years and years, everybody used Maya for that.
08:46SPEAKER- Oh, you mean even people
08:48SPEAKERthat have been doing it for a long time?
08:49SPEAKERLike it's just what everybody is standardized on now?
08:53SPEAKER- So usually you do that in like pre-pro
08:54SPEAKERwhen you're starting a new game.
08:56SPEAKERLike you establish that pipeline 'cause you don't,
08:58SPEAKERbut the thing you don't wanna have
08:59SPEAKERis like Bob and Sue and Jim
09:03SPEAKERall working on character rigs and animations
09:07SPEAKERand one using Maya and one using Blender
09:10SPEAKERand one using some screwy weird thing
09:11SPEAKERthat I don't know what it would be.
09:12SPEAKERSo basically you do all your stuff
09:15SPEAKERin whatever tool you choose,
09:16SPEAKERthen you export it to the common format
09:17SPEAKERand then you ingest it through the same pipeline
09:20SPEAKERso that the bugs are consistent and predictable.
09:24SPEAKERAnyway, that doesn't matter.
09:25SPEAKERThe point is there's a path from, Blender was definitely
09:29SPEAKERthat place that you described like 10 years ago.
09:31SPEAKERAnd over the last, like since they won an Academy Award
09:33SPEAKERfor the cat movie, I think all bets are off
09:37SPEAKERin terms of how seriously people take Blender now.
09:39SPEAKER- That probably goes a very long way
09:40SPEAKERtoward legitimizing it in the professional world.
09:43SPEAKER- It turns out the conversations are,
09:47SPEAKERoh, that open source thing that's where weirdos change
09:49SPEAKERwhen you do an entire feature film in the tool
09:52SPEAKERand it wins awards and it's good.
09:53SPEAKER- Yeah, that's fair.
09:55SPEAKERAnyway.
09:56SPEAKER- But we're not talking about audio today.
09:57SPEAKER- No.
09:58SPEAKER- We're talking about the antithesis of audio.
10:00SPEAKER- Oh.
10:01SPEAKER- Text.
10:02SPEAKER- Oh, the written word.
10:03SPEAKER- Yes.
10:05SPEAKERIf a picture is worth a thousand word,
10:06SPEAKERa word is worth a thousandth of a picture
10:09SPEAKERis my understanding.
10:10SPEAKERSo you and I both use notes programs.
10:14SPEAKERI think everybody does at this point probably.
10:16SPEAKER- Now we do.
10:17SPEAKEROr I guess I kind of did before
10:19SPEAKERin a very antiquated fashion,
10:20SPEAKERbut to-do lists are very hot these days.
10:23SPEAKERI don't know if you've heard everybody's vibe coding
10:25SPEAKERtheir own to-do list app now.
10:27SPEAKER- Yep, yep.
10:29SPEAKERI used Wunderlist for a long time
10:30SPEAKERbefore vibe coding was invented.
10:32SPEAKERAnd then I switched to to-dos
10:34SPEAKERand I've used a whole bunch of different of those apps now.
10:37SPEAKER- Wunderlist?
10:38SPEAKER- Wunderlist got popped by Microsoft.
10:41SPEAKERWunderlist was an early iOS task list app that was,
10:45SPEAKERI can't remember.
10:46SPEAKERIt used one of the kind of popular
10:48SPEAKERgetting things done frameworks.
10:50SPEAKER- Oh, this kind of looks like Trello.
10:53SPEAKEROr at least whatever it's turned into now does.
10:55SPEAKERLike there's a large photo of a mountain range
10:58SPEAKERbehind your to-do list.
10:59SPEAKER- Well, so I think that Microsoft turned Wunderlist
11:03SPEAKERinto the Microsoft to-do app, which is actually okay.
11:06SPEAKER- Oh, I don't know what the Wunderlist is
11:08SPEAKERthat I'm looking at then.
11:11SPEAKER- Well, it doesn't exist anymore.
11:12SPEAKERThis does look like Trello.
11:13SPEAKERThis was a list of lists.
11:15SPEAKERTrello is more than this now.
11:16SPEAKERWe can talk about that.
11:17SPEAKER- Different product perhaps.
11:18SPEAKERBut anyway, I guess this is a roundabout way of saying
11:20SPEAKERI have finally, I guess I would say modernized my notes
11:25SPEAKERand to-do regime, workflow, whatever you wanna call it.
11:29SPEAKERAnd I know you have been using this stuff for years.
11:31SPEAKERAnyway, since I've been going through these options
11:33SPEAKERand you use some heavyweight stuff in this space,
11:36SPEAKERit seems like a good time to dig back into this topic
11:39SPEAKERand talk about what we're doing
11:41SPEAKERand what we've discovered and such.
11:43SPEAKER- We can absolutely get into that.
11:45SPEAKERSo I think for me, this started with Evernote.
11:49SPEAKEREvernote and OneNote kind of around the same time
11:51SPEAKERa hundred years ago.
11:52SPEAKER- Okay, I just have to ask now,
11:55SPEAKERdid Evernote predate SimpleNote?
11:59SPEAKERWe don't need to split hairs about what came out first,
12:01SPEAKERbut SimpleNote's the first time I ever heard of this.
12:03SPEAKERSo I'm just curious if Evernote is even older than that.
12:06SPEAKER- Yeah, so I was using Evernote in the maximum PC days.
12:09SPEAKER- Oh, okay, that is way before.
12:10SPEAKER'Cause I didn't hear about SimpleNote
12:11SPEAKERuntil you were working with us at Whiskey.
12:13SPEAKERSo that is definitely before.
12:15SPEAKER- I think SimpleNote actually came off of the Diaspora
12:18SPEAKERmaybe of like Evernote deciding to charge
12:22SPEAKERin a way that people didn't like.
12:23SPEAKERSo Evernote was like a Web 1.0 application almost.
12:27SPEAKERIt required a desktop client to access.
12:31SPEAKERYeah, it wasn't web-based at least in the beginning.
12:35SPEAKERIt came around after OneNote.
12:38SPEAKERI think OneNote is actually maybe the grandfather
12:40SPEAKERof all of these.
12:41SPEAKER'Cause Microsoft rolled out OneNote
12:43SPEAKERwith their first go at tablets,
12:46SPEAKERtheir convertible laptops with the resistive pen screens.
12:51SPEAKER- Oh my God, you're right.
12:51SPEAKEROneNote came out in 2003, that's crazy.
12:54SPEAKER'Cause the name makes it sound like OneDrive,
12:56SPEAKERwhich made me assume it's a later,
12:57SPEAKERlatter day Teams Office 365-ish thing.
13:02SPEAKER- I think it's the other way.
13:03SPEAKERI think OneDrive is actually named because of OneNote,
13:05SPEAKERbut I could be wrong.
13:06SPEAKER- Interesting, okay.
13:07SPEAKER- So OneNote took everything that's good about Outlook
13:13SPEAKERand everything that's bad about Outlook
13:14SPEAKERand made it a Notes app.
13:15SPEAKERIt embeds your entire huge,
13:18SPEAKERyour list of notes into a monolithic file
13:23SPEAKERthat is then these days stored in OneDrive by default,
13:25SPEAKERI think.
13:27SPEAKERYou can do things like take pen and ink notes
13:30SPEAKERand do typed notes and do sketches
13:33SPEAKERand all that stuff all in one place,
13:34SPEAKERwhich is I think really kind of low-key
13:38SPEAKERthe coolest thing about OneNote,
13:39SPEAKERbut also it's extremely Microsoft-y.
13:41SPEAKERAnd if you're not using OneDrive,
13:43SPEAKERit's a pain in the butt to sync it.
13:45SPEAKERAnd there's a whole host of other issues with it these days.
13:48SPEAKERI've stopped using OneNote.
13:50SPEAKERSo anyway, I used Evernote for a long time.
13:51SPEAKERAnd then in the Whiskey Media days,
13:52SPEAKERI think a lot of us switched to SimpleNote
13:55SPEAKERbecause it was really compelling.
13:57SPEAKERIt was just flat text files you saved in a Dropbox folder
14:00SPEAKERand it would work itself out.
14:02SPEAKER- That's right.
14:03SPEAKERI wrote years and years of giant bomb game reviews in,
14:08SPEAKERI was using notational velocity on Mac OS.
14:10SPEAKERRemember that?
14:11SPEAKER- Uh-huh, yep.
14:12SPEAKER- It was a great app.
14:13SPEAKER- Was a great app.
14:14SPEAKERIn fact, SimpleNote clients never got better than that,
14:17SPEAKERwhich is a big part of why we're here
14:19SPEAKERto talk about this actually.
14:21SPEAKER- So I stopped using Evernote
14:24SPEAKERbecause they wanted to charge like $15 a month
14:27SPEAKERif you wanted more than two devices
14:29SPEAKERhooked up to your account,
14:30SPEAKERwhich felt icky to me.
14:31SPEAKER- That is always the killer,
14:32SPEAKERis the device limit on stuff like this.
14:34SPEAKERIt's never the storage space.
14:35SPEAKERIt's always the how many end points
14:37SPEAKERcan you access the storage from?
14:39SPEAKER- Yeah, then I switched to SimpleNote
14:43SPEAKERand I stopped using that relatively quickly
14:45SPEAKERbecause it ate a whole,
14:48SPEAKERit munged up a sink on a whole bunch of folders for me.
14:51SPEAKER- Interesting.
14:52SPEAKER- Yeah, I don't remember why it happened or how it happened,
14:57SPEAKERbut it was enough that I was like, I can't trust this.
14:59SPEAKERI gotta do something else.
15:00SPEAKERAnd then I went to OneNote for a long time
15:03SPEAKERand used that for quite a few years
15:06SPEAKERuntil fairly recently when I switched over to Notion.
15:09SPEAKER- The games, indie game studios and startups
15:16SPEAKERare pretty universally on Notion these days,
15:18SPEAKERjust 'cause it's a kind of one-size-fits-all groupware tool
15:23SPEAKERthat you can pay a flat rate per seat in your company.
15:27SPEAKER- If they're charging by the seat,
15:28SPEAKERthen I understand why companies are just using that now
15:30SPEAKER'cause that's the billing model
15:34SPEAKERcompanies like to engage with.
15:36SPEAKER- Yeah, and for most of this stuff,
15:39SPEAKERthe neat thing about Notion
15:40SPEAKERand both its strength and its weakness
15:43SPEAKERis that it does all of this stuff.
15:44SPEAKERSo if you want a bug tracking tool like Jira
15:48SPEAKERand a work tracking tool like Jira
15:49SPEAKERthat'll let you do Gantt charts and waterfall charts
15:52SPEAKERand all that kind of your agile coding business,
15:58SPEAKERyou can have their templates
15:59SPEAKERthat will let you build those pages in Notion
16:01SPEAKERthat are shared across everybody in your org
16:03SPEAKERor the right people in your org.
16:04SPEAKER- I see why, yes.
16:05SPEAKEROkay, I see why that's so popular.
16:06SPEAKERI will say that is way beyond the needs I had
16:09SPEAKERat the outset of this, which we'll get into.
16:11SPEAKER- Yeah, it is a business-ass business tool
16:16SPEAKERin a lot of ways.
16:19SPEAKERLike I said, Gantt charts, you can do scheduling there.
16:22SPEAKERIt has all these, it has a giant template store
16:25SPEAKERthat people have uploaded templates
16:26SPEAKERthat are both free and paid that will let you do things.
16:29SPEAKERLike all of my time tracking for different clients
16:32SPEAKERis in Notion these days.
16:34SPEAKERSo I have an app, I have one app
16:35SPEAKERthat'll do hourly tracking.
16:36SPEAKERI have one app that does daily tracking
16:38SPEAKERand they're different for different clients, right?
16:42SPEAKERSo all of my stuff, when billing comes
16:44SPEAKERat the end of the month, I hit a button
16:45SPEAKERand it tells me how many hours go in the invoice.
16:47SPEAKERAnd then I just send that off to the clients.
16:49SPEAKERIt's very easy.
16:50SPEAKER- Man, that's a lot of functionality.
16:52SPEAKER- It is wildly functional.
16:54SPEAKERBut the thing that is neat about Notion
16:57SPEAKERis that it's at core, it's just a souped up Wiki.
17:01SPEAKERIt's, you know, you open a page,
17:04SPEAKERyou can make links to another page off of any page.
17:07SPEAKERYou can backlink up the chain, up the tree,
17:10SPEAKERyou can link all over.
17:12SPEAKERYou can turn any block of text into anything,
17:15SPEAKERany other kind of item.
17:16SPEAKERSo like, if you have just a bunch of lines of text,
17:21SPEAKERyou can turn that into a checklist by highlighting,
17:23SPEAKERby selecting those lines of text, right clicking
17:25SPEAKERand going to turn into, you know, checklist or task list
17:29SPEAKERor whatever your item is.
17:31SPEAKERIt's really, really great for taking fast, dirty notes
17:36SPEAKERand turning them into something that's useful
17:39SPEAKERand like, you know, documenting, like working in games,
17:43SPEAKERa lot of the work is documenting the stuff that you've done
17:45SPEAKERand the choices you've made so that the people
17:47SPEAKERwho come after you can like reverse engineer
17:49SPEAKERwhat you've done when they need to figure it out
17:50SPEAKERthree or four years down the line.
17:53SPEAKERAnd a lot of studios for years used like Confluence,
17:56SPEAKERwhich is a product that Confluence and Jira and Trello
17:59SPEAKERare all the same company these days.
18:01SPEAKERAnd so you can pay your 10 bucks a month per person
18:04SPEAKERto Confluence and Jira and Trello,
18:05SPEAKERor you can pay it to something like Notion
18:08SPEAKERand get like all of your note-taking stuff in one place.
18:12SPEAKERThey've added a ton of AI stuff.
18:14SPEAKERSo the reason we're talking about this now
18:15SPEAKERis that a lot of this has changed over the last few years
18:18SPEAKERwith the addition of the various levels of bad AI
18:22SPEAKERand occasionally good AI.
18:25SPEAKEROne of the things that is pretty good on the Notion stuff
18:28SPEAKERis if you're paying, you can do meeting transcriptions.
18:30SPEAKERSo you add it to your meetings
18:32SPEAKERand you get pretty clean attributed transcriptions
18:37SPEAKERof everybody on a Zoom call.
18:39SPEAKERLike it'll put the person's name and put what they say.
18:42SPEAKERAnd like you can get a nice clean transcription
18:46SPEAKERfor people who aren't there.
18:47SPEAKERIt doesn't, it offers summaries and stuff like that,
18:50SPEAKERwhich I find to be pretty high risk
18:53SPEAKERif you're not, if somebody who was in the meeting
18:55SPEAKERand paying attention isn't actually going over them
18:57SPEAKER'cause it does, it has made up stuff in my experience
19:00SPEAKERon those, I haven't used that in six months
19:02SPEAKER'cause it was making up too much stuff
19:04SPEAKERto flip the button on and pay for.
19:06SPEAKER- Honestly. - Yeah.
19:09SPEAKERThe other thing that it does do though
19:12SPEAKERthat's kind of neat these days on the AI front
19:15SPEAKERis you can vibe code those apps that you want.
19:19SPEAKERSo like I probably wouldn't use it for the time tracker
19:22SPEAKERjust 'cause it's pretty simple
19:23SPEAKERand there's a bunch of templates
19:24SPEAKERin the download store for that.
19:27SPEAKERBut for, like if you had, I don't know,
19:32SPEAKERif you wanted to make a content calendar for Nextlander
19:35SPEAKERthat had, that was really specific to your organization
19:39SPEAKERand gave you like a form to type stuff in
19:41SPEAKERand then multiple views to see how that data
19:43SPEAKERwas in the database, you could totally do that.
19:45SPEAKERIt would take about 10 minutes and it's pretty powerful.
19:48SPEAKERI don't think that stuff's available on the free tier.
19:51SPEAKERBut the free tier is very robust.
19:53SPEAKERYou can hook multiple clients up to it.
19:54SPEAKERYou can share pages with people.
19:56SPEAKERLike I've been on the free tier of Notion personally
19:58SPEAKERfor years and years and years.
19:59SPEAKERIt's never been inadequate for my needs.
20:01SPEAKER- Oh, really? - Oh, you don't pay for it.
20:02SPEAKER- So I get it through most of the people I work with
20:05SPEAKERare paying for it on the accounts
20:07SPEAKERthat they provide me inside their intranet
20:10SPEAKERor whatever you call the cloud-based intranet these days.
20:14SPEAKERBut yeah, I don't pay for a personal account anymore.
20:16SPEAKER- Apps suite.
20:18SPEAKERLike your kind of Google Workspace style groupware
20:21SPEAKERseems like your Teams, your Office 365.
20:25SPEAKER- The other cool thing is you can do everything
20:28SPEAKERin Notion from the text mode.
20:29SPEAKERLike you don't have to right click at all.
20:31SPEAKERIf you want to turn, if you want to make like a task list,
20:33SPEAKERyou can type /list.
20:35SPEAKERIf you want to make a new page, type /page
20:37SPEAKERand then it opens up a new tab.
20:38SPEAKER- That speaks to me.
20:39SPEAKER- Yeah, if you're a keyboard person,
20:42SPEAKERit's pretty, pretty good.
20:43SPEAKER- It's nice to never lift your hands from the keyboard
20:46SPEAKERif possible. - Oh, and the last thing,
20:48SPEAKERand this is the thing I did at the beginning with Notion.
20:51SPEAKERThey provide robust tools to both export
20:54SPEAKERand import data from other products.
20:56SPEAKERSo like it was one of the only places
20:58SPEAKERI could get my old recipes out of Evernote with,
21:00SPEAKER'cause I used Evernote for recipes for years.
21:04SPEAKERIt will export like a big giant folder of markdown files.
21:08SPEAKERNow, if you want to move, so for example,
21:11SPEAKERwhen Studio was shutting down that I helped out,
21:14SPEAKERI helped them export their entire Notion database
21:17SPEAKERfrom their paid plan that was all group-weared
21:20SPEAKERinto one owner free account
21:24SPEAKERso that it was still accessible to them,
21:25SPEAKERbut they lost some of the paid features,
21:27SPEAKERlike the ability to turn whole chunks
21:29SPEAKERof your Notion database into a Wiki and stuff like that.
21:33SPEAKER- Does it, well, I assume it does export cleanly
21:36SPEAKERto things like markdown.
21:36SPEAKERI mean, it sounds like there's way more formatting
21:39SPEAKERand relational metadata stuff in there
21:42SPEAKERthan something like markdown could display or embody.
21:46SPEAKERLike, I assume it just kind of strips out extraneous stuff
21:49SPEAKERand just gives you the flat text files.
21:52SPEAKER- Yeah, so that's exactly what it does.
21:54SPEAKERIt doesn't handle the kind of linking around
21:57SPEAKERand the deep trees that you can,
21:59SPEAKERlike you can make an infinitely deep Wiki
22:03SPEAKERwith links to links to links to links to links in Notion.
22:07SPEAKERJoplin doesn't, like the Joplin and I would say the one,
22:12SPEAKERObsidian don't really have those kind of concepts
22:15SPEAKERas a software, so it will produce something
22:18SPEAKERthat you can then import.
22:19SPEAKERIt'll be messy and you'll have to kind of reorganize it
22:22SPEAKERwhen you get it in the new place.
22:23SPEAKERBut it is, it does provide good tools in, good tools out.
22:27SPEAKERNow, the apps and databases that you build in Notion
22:30SPEAKERprobably won't come out in a meaningful way, obviously,
22:33SPEAKERbut it does give you the raw,
22:34SPEAKERit does give you the raw forms and the tables
22:36SPEAKERand all that stuff, so like the information is there
22:39SPEAKERif you wanna then go vibe code your own Notion app analog.
22:45SPEAKERUgh, yeah, seems, that seems exhausting.
22:48SPEAKER- Yes, it sure does.
22:49SPEAKERYeah, I think we've talked about that sometime
22:52SPEAKERin the last few months, like that idea
22:53SPEAKERwhen LLN started getting big and started proving
22:56SPEAKERto be like decent at generating code or building apps
22:59SPEAKERfor people on demand or kind of a la carte,
23:02SPEAKERthat idea that like, oh, software as,
23:06SPEAKERsoftware development as a profession,
23:07SPEAKERespecially on the low end is dead
23:09SPEAKERbecause everybody's just gonna make their own apps now,
23:10SPEAKERbut like how many end users want to do that?
23:14SPEAKERHow many end users actually wanna go through
23:15SPEAKERthe upfront cost of specking out even verbally
23:19SPEAKERto a chatbot the app they want and then also staying on top
23:22SPEAKERof making sure it keeps working the way they need it to
23:25SPEAKERas like underlying OS has changed, you know,
23:27SPEAKERlike things are always gonna break over time,
23:29SPEAKERlike most people just want to do their work.
23:32SPEAKERThey don't want to do more work to be able to do their work.
23:34SPEAKERYou know, it's like, I think paying five or 10 bucks a month
23:36SPEAKERfor a lot of people is gonna continue to be more appealing
23:39SPEAKERthan paying an LLN fee and then making
23:42SPEAKERtheir own to-do app, right?
23:44SPEAKER- I think that's correct, but with an asterisk.
23:46SPEAKERThe thing, a VC that I follow that's actually kind of smart
23:49SPEAKERand does a lot of hardware stuff posted an article
23:51SPEAKERand I'll see if I can dig it up and maybe we'll put
23:53SPEAKERin the show notes a week or two ago where they said,
23:56SPEAKERlook, if your business has like business intelligence stuff
24:01SPEAKERthat is crucial to the way your whole system operates
24:06SPEAKERand you're running that out of spreadsheets,
24:08SPEAKER'cause like, I don't know if you're like,
24:10SPEAKERdo you know why Microsoft made Access?
24:13SPEAKER- Like original Access?
24:14SPEAKER- The original Access software, yeah.
24:16SPEAKER- It was like in the '80s or '90s?
24:18SPEAKER- '90s, but yeah.
24:20SPEAKERThey made that because they kept seeing businesses
24:23SPEAKERbuilding things that should have been databases
24:24SPEAKERand spreadsheets.
24:25SPEAKER- Oh yeah, yeah, absolutely.
24:27SPEAKER- And that happens a lot.
24:28SPEAKERLike a lot of times somebody will be like,
24:30SPEAKERoh, okay, I know when the tool you know how to use best
24:33SPEAKERis Excel, everything looks like it should be a spreadsheet.
24:35SPEAKERSo you'll have like your content calendar
24:38SPEAKERand your like all of the work that you're doing
24:41SPEAKERon scheduling or go to market or whatever
24:44SPEAKERin a whole buttload of spreadsheets
24:45SPEAKERthat are unwieldy and difficult to use.
24:48SPEAKERAnd his argument was, if you have business crucial,
24:52SPEAKERthis is a surprisingly businessy podcast all of a sudden,
24:54SPEAKERbut if you have stuff that's important
24:56SPEAKERto the way your business operates
24:57SPEAKERand you're running it out of spreadsheets
24:58SPEAKERand it shouldn't be a spreadsheet,
25:00SPEAKERthat's a perfect vibe coding opportunity.
25:01SPEAKERLet the person who made that really complicated
25:04SPEAKERnightmare spreadsheet go in and give them some cloud tokens
25:07SPEAKERand tell them to build an app for it.
25:09SPEAKERAnd that like, that is exactly the use case for this stuff.
25:11SPEAKER- That's a different, to be clear,
25:13SPEAKERI was talking about the individual end user,
25:15SPEAKERlike the consumer level end user, you know,
25:18SPEAKERjust the average person who lives a life
25:20SPEAKERand just needs to like keep a list of a to-do list organized
25:23SPEAKERlike that's where a lot of the argument
25:25SPEAKERfrom the LLM advocates was coming from.
25:28SPEAKERIt's like, everybody's just gonna make their own apps now.
25:30SPEAKERAnd I'm like, I think like your average,
25:34SPEAKERyour average like working mother, for example,
25:36SPEAKERis not interested in maintaining a to-do list app
25:38SPEAKERon her own, she's just gonna pay the five bucks a month
25:40SPEAKERfor whatever the, I don't know what app is appropriate here,
25:44SPEAKERbut you know what I mean?
25:45SPEAKERLike people that just have busy lives
25:47SPEAKERand have other concerns are probably gonna be fine
25:50SPEAKERcontinuing to support like thoughtfully developed software.
25:54SPEAKER- Have you read Harry McCracken?
25:56SPEAKERHarry McCracken, who was the former editor-in-chief
25:59SPEAKERof I think Macworld, I can't remember.
26:04SPEAKERAnyway, Harry's a long time fixture in tech journalism
26:07SPEAKERand is one of the good ones.
26:09SPEAKER- Yeah, I've heard the name.
26:11SPEAKER- He has been writing a series on Fast Company
26:14SPEAKERabout vibe coding his own word processing app.
26:16SPEAKER- Oh yes, I saw at least one of these pieces going around.
26:20SPEAKER- And it's worth reading just because like he's,
26:26SPEAKERhe's basically built a thing that makes him very happy
26:28SPEAKERand does exactly what all of his other software does
26:31SPEAKERwith like two asterisks for the things
26:33SPEAKERthat he uses on the day-to-day.
26:36SPEAKER- It's worth digging into it and reading.
26:40SPEAKER- What I learned by vibe coding my own word processor
26:43SPEAKERis the name of at least the first piece on this.
26:48SPEAKER- I feel like maybe he wrote about it
26:49SPEAKERon Jason Snell's blog, Six Colors as well,
26:52SPEAKERbut I'm not 100% on that, but anyway.
26:55SPEAKER- Anyway, yeah.
26:56SPEAKER- Yeah, so the vibe coding stuff like probably doesn't apply.
26:58SPEAKERI don't think the AI stuff has really turned on
27:00SPEAKERfor free accounts except for maybe the meeting transcription.
27:02SPEAKER- Yeah, for specific businesses that have bespoke needs,
27:06SPEAKERit makes a lot more sense, obviously,
27:08SPEAKERespecially where you're paying somebody
27:09SPEAKERto dedicate their time to making the thing
27:11SPEAKERyour company needs.
27:12SPEAKERThat's obviously a totally different
27:13SPEAKERand potentially more valid use case.
27:17SPEAKER- The other thing about Notion is that it does those things
27:20SPEAKERlike Jira and Trello and all the Gantt charts
27:22SPEAKERand waterfall charts and all the producers kind of stuff
27:25SPEAKERwell up to a certain scale.
27:27SPEAKERLike once you get above a certain team size,
27:29SPEAKERyou probably want a more dedicated piece of software for that
27:31SPEAKERso it's why it's popular in the kind of studios I work with,
27:34SPEAKERthe smaller, like under 30 people,
27:38SPEAKERlike startups, not necessarily,
27:41SPEAKERlike I can't imagine that EA is gonna replace Jira
27:44SPEAKERwith a Notion database for their kind of bug tracking
27:48SPEAKERand stuff like that.
27:49SPEAKER- Yeah, that makes sense.
27:50SPEAKERI guess we should talk about my path through this stuff.
27:52SPEAKER- Yeah, let's talk about what you've been,
27:54SPEAKER'cause you've gone on a kind of a journey discovery here,
27:56SPEAKERit seems like. - A little bit, yeah.
27:57SPEAKERI ended up at a place.
27:59SPEAKERI'll roll back a little bit.
28:00SPEAKERI also used simple, or I'll talk about my needs here
28:03SPEAKERand what prompted all this.
28:05SPEAKERI also use simple note, like I said,
28:08SPEAKERaround the time you were using it.
28:10SPEAKERNow that you mentioned it,
28:11SPEAKERyes, I have seen a ton of sync conflicts with simple note,
28:13SPEAKERbut I always blamed that on the client I was using
28:16SPEAKERand I don't know if that's fair,
28:17SPEAKERbut I never used the official simple note client
28:20SPEAKERand I don't know if that even existed
28:21SPEAKERback when you were using it.
28:22SPEAKER- It did, yeah. - It did, okay.
28:24SPEAKER- I think that the sync conflicts came up
28:26SPEAKERas a result of a big bug that they had
28:28SPEAKERthat was interfering when I had my problem with Dropbox.
28:33SPEAKERWith Dropbox sync specifically,
28:35SPEAKERthe way it does those kind of partial file changes.
28:38SPEAKERAnd I think that that's what caused my data loss,
28:40SPEAKERif I recall, but it's been a long time.
28:42SPEAKERAnd then they made some changes
28:43SPEAKERto the way the syncing protocol works as a result of that.
28:47SPEAKER- Okay, okay, I don't think I ever lost,
28:48SPEAKERyeah, I don't think I ever lost data,
28:50SPEAKERbut I would definitely end up with duplicate notes
28:51SPEAKERthat have like weird suffixes tacked onto the name
28:54SPEAKERand had to try to figure out like,
28:56SPEAKERokay, which one's the real one, the new one here?
28:58SPEAKER- Well, let's look at timestamps.
29:01SPEAKER- No, but the other thing, like I said, though,
29:02SPEAKERis like outside of notational velocity,
29:04SPEAKERI just never liked any of the third-party clients
29:06SPEAKERthat existed for Simple Mode.
29:07SPEAKERI mean, at least they allowed third-party clients
29:09SPEAKERand that's cool, but like the Windows ones in particular
29:11SPEAKERwere always just like janky afterthoughts
29:14SPEAKERthat somebody like started working on five years ago
29:17SPEAKERand has not updated since then, you know?
29:19SPEAKERAnd it's just like, oh, this kind of still works,
29:21SPEAKERbut it's sort of a mess.
29:22SPEAKER- Bad software you download from the Microsoft store.
29:25SPEAKER- The other thing about Simple Mode
29:27SPEAKERis it never stopped working for me,
29:30SPEAKERbut I always, especially these days,
29:32SPEAKERI was always just a little surprised
29:34SPEAKERthat it was still around every time I would go to use it.
29:37SPEAKERIt's just like, wow, I can't believe
29:38SPEAKERthis hasn't gotten sold off and then shitified or shut down
29:41SPEAKERor like my, you know, my Skyrim Dawnguard review
29:45SPEAKERis still there from 2012 or whatever year I wrote that,
29:49SPEAKERyou know what I mean?
29:49SPEAKERLike, I was just like, this whole endeavor feels
29:52SPEAKERa bit ancient in a way that like,
29:53SPEAKERI don't want to leave valuable data in this anymore.
29:58SPEAKERI kind of want to be able to control it myself
30:00SPEAKERand that's what really prompted this.
30:01SPEAKERLike this really started as an effort to replace Simple Mode
30:05SPEAKERand also to get more organized 'cause I am just not,
30:08SPEAKERI have, especially the last few months
30:11SPEAKERhave not been very organized to have a lot of stuff
30:13SPEAKERthat has backed up that I need to get done
30:14SPEAKERjust on like the personal, you know,
30:18SPEAKERpersonal maintenance end of like, oh,
30:19SPEAKERthere's tax stuff I haven't done and blah, blah, blah.
30:21SPEAKERLike I just need, I need everything in front of me
30:23SPEAKERthat needs to be done so I can keep track of it better
30:26SPEAKERso that was the extent of my needs
30:28SPEAKERwhen I set out to do this.
30:30SPEAKER- I think that they had a service too that they paid for
30:33SPEAKER'cause I'm looking at this, I find all of my,
30:37SPEAKERI find all of my notes from like 2012 here it looks like.
30:41SPEAKER- On Simple Note?
30:42SPEAKER- On Simple Note still.
30:43SPEAKER- Still got 'em.
30:44SPEAKERTo their credit, I will give them credit,
30:45SPEAKERthere's a very easy one-click export option.
30:47SPEAKERIf you log into your, log into the web interface,
30:50SPEAKERyou can click one button and have it give you a zip file
30:53SPEAKERwith every single note you have in it
30:54SPEAKERas an individual text file.
30:56SPEAKER- Yeah, here's a link to the Whiskey Media Platform 2.0 docs
31:00SPEAKERfrom the post Whale Rock purchase I think.
31:02SPEAKER- Wow, man, hot 14-year-old trade secrets on this podcast.
31:06SPEAKER- We got products I love,
31:08SPEAKERthe Sennheiser HD 580 headphones, still love those.
31:12SPEAKER- Solid.
31:12SPEAKER- Yeah, a bunch of articles I wrote.
31:14SPEAKER- Those are eternal headphones.
31:16SPEAKER- Yeah, seriously fuck comments, that's just, that's all.
31:18SPEAKERThat's the entire note.
31:20SPEAKERYeah, okay.
31:22SPEAKERAnyway, did Simple Note ever support markdown
31:27SPEAKERor formatting options or did it?
31:29SPEAKER'Cause I only ever used it as plain text.
31:32SPEAKER- Oh yeah, you could do markdown
31:34SPEAKERfrom the beginning I think.
31:35SPEAKER- Interesting, maybe the clients I used didn't support that
31:38SPEAKERor I don't know.
31:39SPEAKER- You might've had to flip it on.
31:40SPEAKER- Yeah, that's possible.
31:41SPEAKERAnyway, whatever, I have delineated
31:43SPEAKERwhy I was trying to get off of Simple Note.
31:46SPEAKERBut just to further drive the point home,
31:47SPEAKERall I needed was like a store of notes
31:52SPEAKERthat could do like basic formatting,
31:54SPEAKERlike markdown style format and a to-do list.
31:56SPEAKERLike I needed something that it was like,
31:57SPEAKERI ideally could like check boxes as I finished things,
32:01SPEAKERyou know, and like at least visually represent
32:03SPEAKERwhen tasks were getting done.
32:05SPEAKER- That makes sense.
32:06SPEAKER- All that is to say, I didn't need anything relational
32:08SPEAKERor hierarchical or any of the stuff that Notion does,
32:10SPEAKERwhich is probably the biggest reason I didn't look at Notion
32:12SPEAKERfor people who love Notion and are wondering why.
32:15SPEAKER- Yeah, but like the other problem with Notion
32:18SPEAKERis it is proprietary backend stuff
32:21SPEAKERand it lives on a service that somebody else is hosting.
32:23SPEAKER- Yeah, so that's what I was trying to get away from.
32:25SPEAKER- Yeah, like I understand not wanting to be part of that.
32:27SPEAKERI don't really have a choice,
32:29SPEAKERso I've leaned in on that front.
32:31SPEAKER- And then, you know, I also wanted a place
32:32SPEAKERI can store or safely store like product keys,
32:34SPEAKERyou know, like Windows product keys
32:36SPEAKERor like other things that I just need to keep for years
32:38SPEAKERand be able to refer back to, you know,
32:40SPEAKERand also ephemeral stuff like a doctor's appointment details
32:45SPEAKERand just little stuff to jot down.
32:47SPEAKERI just wanted all that to live in one place.
32:48SPEAKERI didn't want to, I certainly didn't want it to be
32:50SPEAKERlike Google docs or anything like that at this point.
32:52SPEAKER- It's really nice to take all of your notes in one place
32:55SPEAKERand have a place that's searchable.
32:56SPEAKER- Yes, yes.
32:57SPEAKER- 'Cause it turns out those two things together
33:00SPEAKERpower up your note taking ability
33:01SPEAKERand your ability to work on stuff.
33:03SPEAKER- Like I've also just got like text files
33:04SPEAKERlaying all over the place, like just individual,
33:06SPEAKERlike a lot of it, like my habit was to just open Notepad
33:09SPEAKERif I was like on the phone with the doctor
33:10SPEAKERand like, you know, and then I'm saving a random text file
33:13SPEAKERwith the where and when of my next doctor's appointment.
33:17SPEAKERAnd it's like, is that on my Windows desktop?
33:18SPEAKERDid I save it on my NAS somewhere?
33:20SPEAKERLike this is not a good system.
33:22SPEAKER- No, the answer when you get the,
33:24SPEAKERwhen you schedule the next appointment
33:25SPEAKERis just to make the appointment in your calendar,
33:27SPEAKERright that moment.
33:27SPEAKER- Yeah.
33:28SPEAKER- Literally stand there and open it up
33:30SPEAKERand do it while you're at the doctor's office.
33:32SPEAKER- What if you have a calendar
33:33SPEAKERand just didn't use it for stuff like that?
33:37SPEAKERI don't know, it's a little too formal.
33:40SPEAKER- I can't out the person who told me this the other day,
33:44SPEAKERbut I was talking to someone and they told me that they're,
33:46SPEAKERI was like, hey, what's your calendar look like
33:48SPEAKERfor that day?
33:49SPEAKERAnd they opened up their alarms app
33:53SPEAKERto see when they have alarms set for Tuesdays and Thursdays.
33:56SPEAKER- Wow.
33:57SPEAKER- And I was like, oh, this is not a tenable way
34:00SPEAKERto handle this.
34:01SPEAKERWhy would you do this to yourself?
34:02SPEAKER- I have had some bad experiences with,
34:05SPEAKERI don't know which platform you're talking about,
34:07SPEAKERbut alarms on iOS and on the watch especially,
34:10SPEAKERnot doing what they're supposed to be doing seemingly.
34:15SPEAKERAnyway, okay, so like I just needed like basic markdown
34:18SPEAKERand a to-do list and like something
34:19SPEAKERthat ideally I could control the data myself.
34:21SPEAKERSo didn't really look at Notion for reasons mentioned.
34:24SPEAKERI, the other thing is I kind of wanted it to use
34:27SPEAKERlike cloud storage I already use, you know?
34:31SPEAKER- Yeah.
34:32SPEAKER- Like and have access to and control to the extent possible
34:36SPEAKERand not pile up another subscription
34:39SPEAKERor another like monthly fee, if possible.
34:41SPEAKER- Yeah, if you're paying for Dropbox or OneDrive
34:43SPEAKERor Google Drive or whatever, it's nice.
34:45SPEAKERIt feels like you should be able to use that storage
34:47SPEAKERfor all the things.
34:48SPEAKERThe promise of Dropbox originally was,
34:51SPEAKERhey, you can buy some storage from us
34:53SPEAKERjust like you would a server
34:54SPEAKERand then you can use it with all your stuff.
34:55SPEAKERAnd that worked for a long time.
34:56SPEAKER- Yes, yes.
34:57SPEAKERSo I briefly looked at Obsidian.
34:59SPEAKERI had installed the Obsidian iOS app.
35:00SPEAKERLike a lot of people like Obsidian and like--
35:02SPEAKER- Obsidian's really good.
35:03SPEAKER- Yeah. - Yeah.
35:04SPEAKER- It seemed good.
35:05SPEAKERThe thing that kind of made me just not really
35:06SPEAKERgive it much of a shot is the sync options on iOS
35:09SPEAKERseem extremely limited from what I could tell.
35:12SPEAKERI haven't looked at it in a little while.
35:13SPEAKERI hope this has not changed since the last time I did this.
35:15SPEAKERBut, and I think some of these restrictions
35:17SPEAKERare maybe imposed by iOS, not by Obsidian.
35:22SPEAKER- That I don't know about.
35:23SPEAKER- You can pay the Obsidian fee and sync to their cloud fine
35:27SPEAKERif you want to do that.
35:27SPEAKERBut like I said, I was trying not to like get involved
35:30SPEAKERin another proprietary cloud storage option.
35:33SPEAKER- Yeah.
35:34SPEAKER- Other than that though, you can only sync to iCloud
35:37SPEAKERby default on iOS with Obsidian.
35:40SPEAKER- I think that's why that's their way
35:42SPEAKERto get you to pay their $4 a month.
35:44SPEAKER- Yeah, so, and I need this to be cross-platform
35:47SPEAKER'cause I'm gonna need it on Windows all day long
35:49SPEAKERand like theoretically on Linux at some point as well.
35:52SPEAKERAnd I just did not want to deal with--
35:54SPEAKER- Obsidian is cross-platform for its worth.
35:55SPEAKER- Yeah, it is.
35:56SPEAKERYeah, no, no, no.
35:57SPEAKERI mean the cloud storage needed to be accessible on.
36:00SPEAKERAnd so there, I guess there are probably ways
36:03SPEAKERto get iCloud working persistently on Windows
36:05SPEAKERbut I didn't want to deal with that.
36:07SPEAKERLike you could use our clone.
36:08SPEAKERI looked into this, you could use our clone
36:10SPEAKERto mount your iCloud storage the same way.
36:12SPEAKERI already do that and then we'll get to this
36:14SPEAKER'cause that ended up coming in very handy here.
36:16SPEAKERI already do that for Dropbox, OneDrive and Google Drive.
36:20SPEAKERThe iCloud integration with our clone,
36:23SPEAKERif best I could tell, like we'll basically lose
36:25SPEAKERyour authentication every 30 days.
36:27SPEAKERAnd so you have to keep going in
36:28SPEAKERand reauthorizing its access with iCloud every month.
36:32SPEAKER- That's the problem with all non-Apple iCloud syncs
36:36SPEAKERin my experience, including stuff like Apple Music.
36:38SPEAKERLike I have to log into Apple Music every 30 days on Linux.
36:41SPEAKER- Yes, and I just did not want to deal with that either.
36:45SPEAKERAnd so I kind of just, I was like Obsidian seems
36:47SPEAKERpretty robust but I just didn't want to deal with that stuff.
36:51SPEAKER- If you're paying the four bucks a month to Obsidian,
36:53SPEAKERI think it's quite good.
36:54SPEAKERI think if you're not paying the four bucks a month
36:56SPEAKERto Obsidian, I'm less impressed.
36:58SPEAKER- Yeah, and to further illustrate why I didn't want
37:01SPEAKERto just be in another proprietary cloud sync,
37:03SPEAKERI want these files locally.
37:04SPEAKERI want like, if the company is hit by a meteor tomorrow
37:08SPEAKERand ceases to exist and all of their data centers are gone,
37:12SPEAKERI mean, this is pretty catastrophic.
37:14SPEAKERLike it's not likely to play out that way, but I just wanted--
37:17SPEAKER- Would you say that, but Amazon lost some data centers
37:20SPEAKERrecently due to reasons.
37:21SPEAKER- Sure, yes, right, and that did happen.
37:23SPEAKERLook, the world is a bit chaotic right now.
37:27SPEAKERI would hope that Amazon has some like
37:29SPEAKERgeographical redundancy, but--
37:31SPEAKER- Here's the interesting thing about that,
37:32SPEAKERis they say, hey, you shouldn't keep your data
37:34SPEAKERin one data center.
37:36SPEAKERTheir policy is we have multiple data centers
37:38SPEAKERso you can clone your data across multiples
37:41SPEAKERand pay us more for that.
37:42SPEAKER- I was gonna say, I bet they would love to charge you more
37:44SPEAKERfor spreading your data around anyway.
37:46SPEAKER- I mean, I don't know if you remember,
37:48SPEAKERbut when we did the Whiskey Media panel of experts
37:50SPEAKERbecause the data center in Northern Virginia,
37:53SPEAKERtheir data center in Northern Virginia was out,
37:58SPEAKERthat was their official solution to that was,
38:00SPEAKERyou shouldn't keep your data in one data center.
38:03SPEAKER- GitHub was profoundly down for like most of Monday
38:06SPEAKERthis week, which hit me as I tried to click on a Wiki
38:09SPEAKERhosted on GitHub to try to fix something I was messing with
38:11SPEAKERand like, I guess I'm not doing that right now.
38:14SPEAKER- Nope.
38:15SPEAKER- Anyway, so yeah, like I wanted the files locally
38:17SPEAKERso that if I ever decide to pivot to something else,
38:20SPEAKERI can just take my data and move it to another thing.
38:23SPEAKER- Just out of curiosity, did you, did any of these,
38:27SPEAKERwhen I went through this whole process and settled on Notion,
38:29SPEAKERthe one hole that Notion had that bummed me out
38:32SPEAKERis there's no ability to do like handwritten sketches
38:34SPEAKERon an iPad with a pencil or anything like that?
38:36SPEAKER- Oh, I hadn't, I didn't even look into that stuff.
38:38SPEAKERI don't have a pencil for my iPad
38:40SPEAKERand don't do stuff that way, so.
38:43SPEAKER- So Obsidian didn't do that.
38:47SPEAKEROneNote and Google Keep both do,
38:48SPEAKERwhich we'll talk about in a little bit.
38:49SPEAKERNotion does not.
38:50SPEAKERAnd then most of the best options
38:53SPEAKERfor that kind of note taking on iOS
38:54SPEAKERseem to be extremely limited to just Mac platforms.
38:58SPEAKERSo we're not gonna talk about those today
39:00SPEAKERfor folks just who are asking, I guess.
39:02SPEAKER- Real quick, the other one I looked at
39:04SPEAKERbefore I had got to something I landed on is Logsec.
39:07SPEAKER- I don't know what that is.
39:08SPEAKERI've never heard of that one.
39:09SPEAKER- L-O-G-S-E-Q.
39:11SPEAKER- Okay.
39:12SPEAKER- So there were a couple of open source options, of course,
39:14SPEAKERgiven my goals, that's what I was gonna lean toward.
39:16SPEAKER- Yeah.
39:17SPEAKER- There are a couple of those that we'll talk about
39:18SPEAKERand Logsec is one of them.
39:20SPEAKERI basically pulled back on that one
39:23SPEAKERas soon as I got to the, how do I sync this
39:25SPEAKERto cloud services part and saw that that stuff
39:27SPEAKERis seemingly quite early with that thing.
39:31SPEAKERAnd also maybe limited to people
39:34SPEAKERwho support the project right now.
39:36SPEAKEROr like you need some kind of like authorization
39:38SPEAKERlike by being a donor to even access the sync stuff.
39:42SPEAKERIt wasn't clear.
39:43SPEAKER- So you can't leave your stuff in like a Dropbox folder
39:48SPEAKERand it just syncs so you can't put your store
39:49SPEAKERin the Dropbox folder?
39:50SPEAKER- I think ultimately you can do that.
39:52SPEAKERBut there was some kind of verification process
39:54SPEAKERyou had to go through to be able to access those features,
39:56SPEAKERthe sync features because they're early, they're not.
39:58SPEAKERAnd the other thing is I will cop to not having
40:03SPEAKERlike very thoroughly researched the stuff
40:05SPEAKERbecause I basically was just dabbling
40:07SPEAKERwith these different apps until I found one
40:08SPEAKERthat did everything I needed.
40:09SPEAKERBut I also saw some aspects of Logsec's syncing stuff
40:14SPEAKERhad been deprecated or like features had been rolled out
40:17SPEAKERand then gone unsupported, I believe.
40:20SPEAKERAnyway, there were just enough kind of red flags
40:21SPEAKERthere on like being able to do the cloud stuff
40:23SPEAKERthat I was like, ah, I'll keep poking around.
40:26SPEAKER- It looks like they're on the Obsidian track too
40:29SPEAKERof hey, if you want, we're gonna provide a service.
40:32SPEAKERLike, look, I support them having a service.
40:35SPEAKERI support Obsidian having a service
40:37SPEAKERthat they pay for easy syncing.
40:38SPEAKERSimpleNote does the same thing, honestly.
40:40SPEAKER- Yeah.
40:42SPEAKER- 'Cause if that makes their business works and yeah.
40:45SPEAKERAnyway, but not part of your requirements.
40:47SPEAKER- But like, again, the thing for me is like
40:49SPEAKERI already have a million logins for everything
40:51SPEAKERand I already have Dropbox and OneDrive and Google Drive
40:54SPEAKERand a NAS and a VPS, you know, like I've got a lot of stuff
40:58SPEAKERalready that I'm keeping up with and like adding another,
41:01SPEAKERyet another service I need to like authorize and log into
41:04SPEAKERis just, it's just too much from the end user perspective.
41:08SPEAKERReal quick before we got to Joplin is the one
41:10SPEAKERthat I'm actually using, which we'll talk about,
41:12SPEAKERbut you very briefly, you wrote OneNote and Google Keep
41:15SPEAKERin here in between, which you might wanna touch on.
41:18SPEAKER- Yeah, so I think both of these are,
41:22SPEAKERwhen we talk about, when we've talked about this
41:23SPEAKERin the past, that's the thing that always people always say,
41:25SPEAKER"Hey, I love Google Keep," or "I love OneNote,"
41:28SPEAKERand that's great.
41:29SPEAKERBoth of those are fine.
41:30SPEAKERI've had data loss problems on OneNote
41:33SPEAKERthat were mostly related to OneDrive syncing problems
41:35SPEAKERbecause they're really opaque about where they store
41:37SPEAKERyour file and where they store your stuff.
41:40SPEAKERThe monolithic, the way OneNote saves,
41:44SPEAKEROneNote does let you save a local file, which I do like,
41:47SPEAKERbut the way they save it in their obscure OneNote format
41:50SPEAKERand it's like a monolithic giant file
41:52SPEAKERwith all of your stuff in it seems incredibly high risk
41:55SPEAKERto me in the era that we live in, so that's out for me.
41:59SPEAKERAlso, there's obviously no Linux client for OneDrive.
42:02SPEAKERI think you can use it on the web now,
42:03SPEAKERbut if you have it in your One, sorry, for OneNote,
42:07SPEAKERI think you can use it on the web
42:08SPEAKERif you have your OneNote file in a OneDrive folder.
42:12SPEAKER- Yeah, which, like I mentioned, OneDrive does mount
42:14SPEAKERjust fine with our clone, so you can do that.
42:16SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah, yeah.
42:18SPEAKERThe Google Keep, I'm not interested
42:21SPEAKERbecause of Google, frankly.
42:22SPEAKERI used Keep for a while when I was on Android phones.
42:24SPEAKERIt was really good.
42:26SPEAKERIt is one of the few things that does,
42:28SPEAKERthat lets you do sketches with text
42:31SPEAKERin a fairly transparent way, but yeah, I'm not, no thanks.
42:37SPEAKERAnd it's web-based, which I don't love.
42:38SPEAKER- Oh, yeah, no, that's not great.
42:40SPEAKERI am with you.
42:41SPEAKERI mean, I don't know if I've mentioned this here,
42:42SPEAKERbut I think I maybe have elsewhere.
42:44SPEAKERLike, I've been thinking for a while
42:45SPEAKERabout even getting off of Google
42:47SPEAKERfor our basic workspace suites,
42:50SPEAKERlike mail and calendar and stuff,
42:52SPEAKERand moving to fast mail or something like that.
42:54SPEAKER- We should do an episode about that,
42:55SPEAKER'cause my consulting business doesn't have Google Mail,
42:59SPEAKERbut I do have to use Google accounts for everything else,
43:01SPEAKERbecause sharing documents, everybody uses Google Drive
43:04SPEAKERand Google Docs for everything.
43:06SPEAKERSo you basically, if you don't have an account,
43:09SPEAKERthen you're always eternally logging in as a guest,
43:12SPEAKERwhich sucks.
43:13SPEAKERYou're always gonna need basic Google access
43:15SPEAKERjust to work with other people.
43:17SPEAKERBut I'm talking about for our work email,
43:21SPEAKERand stuff like that.
43:22SPEAKER- We absolutely don't need to pay for Gmail anymore.
43:24SPEAKER- Yeah, and on the next later side as well,
43:25SPEAKERI need to just start, I need to pop a fast mail trial
43:29SPEAKERand just mess around with it and see how it-
43:31SPEAKER- Let me tell you, I have a code, and you'll get 10% off.
43:34SPEAKER- All right, good to know.
43:36SPEAKER- So yeah, we're not gonna talk about either of those,
43:38SPEAKERjust 'cause both of us have spent a fair amount of effort
43:41SPEAKERgetting off of Google and moving more services onto Google
43:44SPEAKERat this point is not gonna happen.
43:45SPEAKER- Right, right.
43:46SPEAKERAnyway, okay, Joplin is what I'm using now.
43:48SPEAKER- Yeah, Joplin is I think the juice here,
43:50SPEAKER'cause I like Joplin a lot.
43:51SPEAKERI used the Joplin for a fair amount of time last year.
43:53SPEAKER- Oh, you did?
43:54SPEAKER- Yeah.
43:55SPEAKER- Oh, I didn't realize that, okay.
43:56SPEAKER- I think it's still installed even.
43:57SPEAKER- Okay, so what is it about Joplin that drew me to it?
44:00SPEAKERI mean, again, it's another of the open source ones,
44:02SPEAKERand it feels like the most purely open source,
44:05SPEAKERlike just like, hey, we're just doing this
44:06SPEAKERand putting it out there.
44:08SPEAKERThe big one though is I Googled Joplin sync options
44:12SPEAKERand got a page with like two paragraphs on it
44:16SPEAKERthat just very straightforwardly said,
44:17SPEAKERhere's how this works, it's extremely simple,
44:19SPEAKERhere's what the services we support, go nuts.
44:23SPEAKERSynchronization is possible with Joplin Cloud,
44:25SPEAKERNextcloud, S3, WebDAV, Dropbox, OneDrive,
44:29SPEAKERor the local file system is what they say.
44:32SPEAKERAnd I was like, cool. - Yeah, that's wild.
44:33SPEAKER- All right, I already use two of those,
44:35SPEAKERor three if you count local file systems.
44:37SPEAKERAlso, it's not super material here,
44:38SPEAKERbut they mentioned that the cloud storage support
44:44SPEAKERis in the form of like basically a lightweight driver,
44:46SPEAKERlike all of the storage backend is built into the thing
44:49SPEAKERand to support new cloud storage options,
44:53SPEAKERpeople just need to write like a very simple plugin.
44:56SPEAKER- It's like a Lua plugin or something, isn't it?
44:57SPEAKER- Well, I don't know what it's written in,
44:59SPEAKERbut they basically just say,
45:00SPEAKERmost of the sync process is done at an abstract level
45:02SPEAKERand access to external services like Dropbox
45:05SPEAKERis done via lightweight drivers,
45:06SPEAKERit's easy to support new services
45:08SPEAKERby creating simple drivers
45:09SPEAKERthat provide a file system-like interface.
45:12SPEAKERIn other words, the ability to read, write,
45:14SPEAKERdelete, and list items.
45:16SPEAKERSo I get, that's not relevant to us necessarily,
45:18SPEAKERbut the point is developers, open source developers
45:21SPEAKERmay come along and add other services
45:23SPEAKERin a fairly lightweight way in the future.
45:25SPEAKERThat's just a neat detail to me,
45:27SPEAKERwhether it actually manifests or not.
45:29SPEAKER- I mean, I think it has manifested though
45:31SPEAKERin judging by all the weird stuff they support.
45:34SPEAKER- Right, yeah, that does seem plausible.
45:37SPEAKERAnyway, I installed it and set it up with Dropbox
45:39SPEAKERand it took five minutes.
45:40SPEAKERLike you authorize it as an app with Dropbox,
45:43SPEAKERyou know how most of these platforms
45:45SPEAKERwill let you add apps that can access your stuff,
45:49SPEAKERwhich again, like I basically just had
45:51SPEAKERto kind of log into Dropbox and go through that process.
45:54SPEAKERThat was also very easy and then it was syncing to Dropbox.
45:57SPEAKER- Does it store stuff in your Dropbox
45:58SPEAKERlike that add apps folder?
46:00SPEAKER- Yeah, I'd never done that before,
46:02SPEAKERbut yes, it is in the uppercase A apps folder.
46:05SPEAKER- Yeah, it's funny, that's where like 1Password
46:07SPEAKERand all this stuff used to live
46:08SPEAKERand now hardly anybody uses that anymore, it seems like.
46:12SPEAKER- Interesting.
46:13SPEAKER- I mean, obviously 1Password uses
46:13SPEAKERtheir own backend service now.
46:16SPEAKER- Here, I'll just get to the biggest con of Joplin though,
46:20SPEAKERbecause you mentioned this with, which one was it?
46:24SPEAKER- OneNote.
46:25SPEAKER- Yeah, so 1Note is the other offender here.
46:27SPEAKERSo Obsidian and LogSec do this the good way.
46:30SPEAKERI don't know about Notion.
46:30SPEAKERI'm guessing Notion is probably all kinds of...
46:33SPEAKER- Notion's all in the cloud.
46:34SPEAKERYou don't have a local copy in general.
46:36SPEAKERI mean, I'm sure there's a cache, but it's not like...
46:37SPEAKER- Oh, wow, I didn't realize it was that.
46:40SPEAKER- You flag stuff as what you want available offline.
46:42SPEAKERSo like when I'm getting ready to get on a plane
46:44SPEAKERwith my laptop, I'd tag the tree.
46:46SPEAKERLike basically I choose the trees I use most recently
46:49SPEAKERto be cached locally.
46:50SPEAKER- Okay, so that is a thousand percent not appropriate
46:53SPEAKERfor what I was looking for then,
46:54SPEAKER'cause I'd want all the data locally.
46:56SPEAKERSo Obsidian and LogSec, a couple of their,
46:58SPEAKERor one of their big selling points
47:00SPEAKERis that you can just point them
47:01SPEAKERat a raw directory full of markdown files
47:04SPEAKERand they will just use that and not modify them.
47:07SPEAKERLike you will just continue to have raw markdown files
47:10SPEAKERavailable on your local device.
47:12SPEAKER- You can actually have multiple clients
47:13SPEAKERattached to that same folder
47:15SPEAKERand all sorts of weird stuff happens, but it works.
47:17SPEAKER- So I really wanted that,
47:19SPEAKERbut unfortunately Joplin does not do that.
47:21SPEAKERIt kind of abstracts all your notes into a sort of a database
47:25SPEAKERlike they are still plain text files,
47:27SPEAKERbut they're not readable by the user.
47:29SPEAKERLike you can't just go open your note files
47:31SPEAKERand mess with them.
47:32SPEAKER- So there are,
47:33SPEAKERhaving tried to do the notion to Joplin import last year,
47:37SPEAKERthere are a bunch of tools that work on that database file.
47:40SPEAKERSo like there are people who've written software
47:43SPEAKERthat lets you manipulate it in ways that make a lot of sense
47:47SPEAKERif you have problems or whatever.
47:47SPEAKER- Oh, you mean the Joplin database or the Joplin database?
47:50SPEAKEROkay, that's good to know.
47:51SPEAKERI mean, yeah, being such an open project,
47:53SPEAKERthat's not surprising at all,
47:54SPEAKERbut I don't think it's gonna be an issue.
47:56SPEAKERIt was not my favorite.
47:58SPEAKERLike it was definitely a like grit my teeth.
47:59SPEAKERLike I really wanted the data to just be like plain text
48:02SPEAKERaccessible to me,
48:03SPEAKEReven if everything else in the world burns down,
48:06SPEAKERwhich it's not.
48:07SPEAKERBut for a couple of reasons,
48:09SPEAKERI don't think it's gonna matter much.
48:10SPEAKERI mean, it'll let you export everything as Markdown,
48:12SPEAKERof course, locally without ever touching a server.
48:15SPEAKER- Yeah.
48:16SPEAKER- So as long as the installer for a Joplin client
48:18SPEAKERis available somewhere on planet earth,
48:21SPEAKERin the event of civilizational collapse,
48:23SPEAKERI can still export all of my stuff as plain files.
48:26SPEAKER- If we have civilizational collapse,
48:29SPEAKERyou're not gonna be using your text files probably.
48:32SPEAKER- I think my stash of windows products keys
48:34SPEAKERis maybe not gonna be my primary concern at that point.
48:37SPEAKER- Well, I was just saying,
48:38SPEAKERbut also like it's straightforward
48:41SPEAKERto get the stuff out of there, right?
48:42SPEAKERLike that's the important thing.
48:44SPEAKER- Right.
48:45SPEAKERAnd so here, the other reason I think it doesn't really
48:47SPEAKERmatter what the on-disk format is for me,
48:49SPEAKERis that the Joplin has an end to end encryption option,
48:52SPEAKERwhich I also flipped on.
48:54SPEAKER- Okay.
48:55SPEAKER- Because I'm storing this in Dropbox
48:56SPEAKERand theoretically my Dropbox could be compromised.
48:59SPEAKER- Ah.
48:59SPEAKER- And somebody could get in there and get the stuff.
49:02SPEAKERIn that instance, having plain text files of,
49:06SPEAKERyou know, presumably I'm gonna have years and years
49:08SPEAKERworth of personal information in here at some point.
49:11SPEAKERLike having all that plainly readable to anybody
49:12SPEAKERwho somehow got into my Dropbox account
49:14SPEAKERwas maybe not great anyway.
49:16SPEAKER- The other big benefit of having it in the database
49:18SPEAKERis that the search is basically free
49:21SPEAKERin terms of time and cost and indexing.
49:23SPEAKER- Sure.
49:24SPEAKER- The indexing, when I imported 10 years of Notion Notes
49:28SPEAKERinto Obsidian, it took a really, really long time
49:32SPEAKERto build the first index.
49:33SPEAKER- Sure, I could see that.
49:34SPEAKER- And then the search was kind of chonky even after that.
49:36SPEAKER- Right.
49:37SPEAKERSo because I'm using the encryption option,
49:39SPEAKERI wouldn't be able to read these files
49:40SPEAKERoutside of Joplin anyway.
49:42SPEAKERSo maybe not a huge deal since I'm storing it
49:45SPEAKERin a commercial cloud service.
49:48SPEAKERBut the encryption was also very easy.
49:49SPEAKERYou just put in a passphrase and it encrypts everything
49:51SPEAKERand that's kind of it.
49:53SPEAKEROne, two, three, four, five, six.
49:54SPEAKER- Yes.
49:55SPEAKERSo currently I'm only using this in Windows and iOS,
49:57SPEAKERbut it's synced back and forth just fine
50:00SPEAKERwithout any issues as far as I can tell.
50:02SPEAKER- The Joplin clients for Linux are good too as I recall.
50:04SPEAKER- I believe it.
50:05SPEAKERI mean, they're Electron based.
50:07SPEAKERLike I assume all of these are.
50:08SPEAKERI mean, the client gobbles hundreds of megabytes of memory
50:11SPEAKERlike every other Electron app,
50:13SPEAKERbut I think you're just kind of putting up with that
50:15SPEAKERin this world at this point, right?
50:18SPEAKER- I mean, Electron is sadly a cost of doing business,
50:21SPEAKERI think, in a lot of these spaces.
50:22SPEAKER'Cause like the Notion app is an Electron app.
50:24SPEAKERI feel like the Obsidian app was native on Linux.
50:28SPEAKER- That's possible.
50:29SPEAKERYeah, I guess I shouldn't paint with an overly broad brush,
50:31SPEAKERbut anyway, the Joplin client certainly in Windows
50:35SPEAKERis fairly memory heavy, big footprint, et cetera, et cetera.
50:40SPEAKERI haven't tried this,
50:41SPEAKERbut there is a terminal client for Joplin.
50:43SPEAKER- Oh yeah.
50:44SPEAKER- Which is, it's Node.js.
50:46SPEAKERSo you need to install a Node backend
50:50SPEAKERor runtime and NPM and all that stuff
50:53SPEAKERif you want to get into it.
50:55SPEAKERIt is said to have a vim-like command structure
50:57SPEAKERand a hotkey syntax.
50:59SPEAKERSo I'm sure I'll try that as well.
51:01SPEAKERI mean, there is some appeal to running that
51:03SPEAKERand not having to run the big Windows client,
51:04SPEAKERbut also Windows client's fine.
51:06SPEAKERI have plenty of RAM.
51:09SPEAKER- I will tell you there have been times
51:10SPEAKERwhere I've been sitting at a server on a terminal
51:13SPEAKERwishing I had easy access to copy and paste stuff
51:16SPEAKERfrom my Node's app.
51:18SPEAKERI think keeping it generally GUI driven
51:20SPEAKERwith standard copy paste features and all that stuff.
51:23SPEAKERI might try the client, the terminal client at some point,
51:25SPEAKERbut it's not really a main selling point for me,
51:27SPEAKERalthough I'm glad it's there.
51:29SPEAKER- Yeah, I'm just saying like,
51:30SPEAKERif you have Dropbox hooked up on your server
51:32SPEAKERand you want to have, like that gives you a way to paste,
51:36SPEAKERlike it lets you do the thing that's hard right now for me,
51:39SPEAKERwhich is that I do research on a Windows machine.
51:41SPEAKERAnd if I can't remote into that server from the,
51:44SPEAKERI mean, on a Linux machine, on a desktop machine,
51:46SPEAKERif I can't remote into that server,
51:48SPEAKER'cause it's down or something,
51:50SPEAKERthen I end up having a monitor open with commands
51:53SPEAKERand typing the commands in like a caveman.
51:55SPEAKER- Sure. - And it's not great.
51:56SPEAKER- Oh, you know, actually that's a good argument
51:57SPEAKERfor just setting that client up as a fallback
52:00SPEAKERif I can't get to it any other way,
52:01SPEAKERnow that you mention it. - Yeah, yeah, yeah.
52:03SPEAKER- That brings me to another,
52:05SPEAKERthis is not necessarily a feature of Joplin
52:07SPEAKERthat is a good selling point,
52:07SPEAKERbut the way I set it up, I think, is worth noting,
52:12SPEAKERwhich is, okay, I'm trying to think
52:14SPEAKERwhere to start in the stack here,
52:16SPEAKERbecause I'm storing the database
52:17SPEAKERor all the files on my Dropbox, as I said,
52:19SPEAKERbut it would be nice to,
52:21SPEAKERI think you can see where my mind is.
52:23SPEAKERI'm trying to eliminate points of failure here.
52:25SPEAKER- Yeah. - And so if Dropbox
52:27SPEAKERgets meteors dropped on it tomorrow.
52:29SPEAKER- Well, you'll still have the files
52:30SPEAKERlocally on your hard drive.
52:31SPEAKER- Well, I'd have to look,
52:33SPEAKERI don't know how the Windows app handles it, actually.
52:34SPEAKERI don't know if it,
52:35SPEAKERI guess it does probably cache those somewhere,
52:38SPEAKERbut that's, even a cache is ephemeral,
52:39SPEAKERlike I, you know, the-- - That's true.
52:41SPEAKER- The canonical storage is on the Dropbox,
52:44SPEAKEReven if they are occasionally getting mirrored
52:46SPEAKERto the wherever the Windows app lives.
52:49SPEAKERI don't actually know if that's the case or not.
52:51SPEAKER- You can R-clone it, right?
52:53SPEAKER- Yeah, that's exactly where I'm going with this.
52:54SPEAKERSo years ago, I've talked about this before,
52:56SPEAKERI set up R-clone mounts on my Linux server
53:00SPEAKERfor all my cloud storage stuff,
53:01SPEAKERDropbox, OneDrive, the various Google drives that I use.
53:05SPEAKERI don't really use it that much.
53:07SPEAKERLike I set it up 'cause it was cool,
53:09SPEAKERand then it's come in handy a little bit here and there,
53:10SPEAKERbut it's not like something I use every day.
53:12SPEAKER- Can I ask a stupid question about this?
53:14SPEAKER- Sure.
53:15SPEAKER- How's the performance on the R-clone Dropbox?
53:18SPEAKER- Oh, Dropbox specifically, 'cause I was gonna say,
53:19SPEAKERI think it varies based on how each cloud service
53:22SPEAKERis gonna vary in how it serves data to you,
53:25SPEAKERbut it is noticeably slow
53:28SPEAKERbecause it's not mirroring anything locally.
53:30SPEAKERIt's like everything exists on a server,
53:32SPEAKERbut you can access those mounts.
53:33SPEAKERI mean, they are literal file system mounts in Linux terms,
53:37SPEAKERjust like every other, you know,
53:38SPEAKERjust like you mount a USB drive,
53:40SPEAKERyou're also mounting these so you can go in the command line
53:43SPEAKERand LS the files in your Dropbox, but it-
53:46SPEAKER- It just takes forever to enumerate for me.
53:48SPEAKERIt's like five, 10 seconds sometimes.
53:49SPEAKER- It is, that's probably the biggest reason
53:52SPEAKERI don't use it very much is that it is pretty slow to use,
53:56SPEAKERbut it can come in handy
53:57SPEAKERif like the web interface breaks or something.
54:00SPEAKER- Well, it's great for like the G drive
54:04SPEAKERand the other services I use are all really, really fast.
54:08SPEAKER- It's just Dropbox. - Oh, interesting, okay.
54:11SPEAKER- They used to have like a Dropbox cache thing
54:13SPEAKERthat would cache the folder structure and stuff like that,
54:16SPEAKERthat they've deprecated.
54:17SPEAKERAnd I don't know what the solution to the,
54:19SPEAKERI wondered if you had found a solution.
54:20SPEAKER- Oh, you mean- - This is why I was asking.
54:22SPEAKER- You mean with our clone and Dropbox?
54:23SPEAKER- Yeah, with our clone and Dropbox.
54:24SPEAKER- Interesting, interesting. - They used to have a hack
54:26SPEAKERthat fixed the problem from a usability standpoint.
54:28SPEAKER- Interesting, so I had never,
54:29SPEAKERI'd almost never used my Dropbox mount for whatever reason.
54:32SPEAKERIt's mostly been Google Drive.
54:34SPEAKERIn fact, here's a, this is a little sidebar.
54:36SPEAKERHere's a random example of why it was nice
54:39SPEAKERto have these things, these mounts sitting around.
54:42SPEAKERGoogle instituted, I think this is new
54:44SPEAKERor it only started affecting me recently.
54:47SPEAKERGoogle instituted some security feature in Google Drive
54:50SPEAKERor maybe it's a browser level only feature
54:52SPEAKERwhere trying to start multiple downloads at one time
54:55SPEAKERgets blocked as a security precaution.
54:57SPEAKERHave you seen that? - Oh.
55:00SPEAKER- Maybe it's a feature of the, I don't know,
55:02SPEAKERthe specific Chrome that I, I don't know why this started,
55:05SPEAKERbut like at least once a week I download audio stems
55:10SPEAKERfrom Vinny and Alex from Google Drive for next time
55:13SPEAKERor like when I'm editing the ramble cast,
55:14SPEAKERI need to pull down their local audio recordings
55:16SPEAKERand I would go, I'd always go
55:17SPEAKERand download both of those simultaneously.
55:21SPEAKERAnd it got to the point where only,
55:22SPEAKERand I always would go in alphabetical order.
55:25SPEAKERSo I would like. - A to V.
55:27SPEAKER- Right, so like I basically, I would always download Alex
55:30SPEAKERand then Vinny and for some reason it was,
55:32SPEAKERit got to the point where it was downloading Alex's
55:34SPEAKERand then refusing to download Vinny's.
55:36SPEAKERWeird, and there was no error popping up saying why.
55:39SPEAKERAnd I was like, what is going on with this file?
55:41SPEAKERAnd eventually I figured it out.
55:44SPEAKERBut in the interim, when it was like, oh, what crap,
55:46SPEAKERI need to get this podcast edited like this morning.
55:49SPEAKERI don't have time to troubleshoot this.
55:50SPEAKERI just went to my Linux mounts for that Google Drive
55:55SPEAKERand just copied the file and the command line over.
55:58SPEAKERAnd it was like, fine, whatever, I've got the file now.
56:01SPEAKEREventually, like I said, eventually I figured out
56:03SPEAKERthat it was some browser level security thing where it.
56:06SPEAKER- Weird. - It basically treats
56:07SPEAKERmultiple downloads at a time as like a malware vector
56:10SPEAKERor some kind of potential for abuse.
56:13SPEAKERAnd I have this. - That's weird.
56:14SPEAKERIs this in Chrome?
56:15SPEAKER- It is a Chromium build.
56:17SPEAKERI'm using Chromium for that stuff, which is maybe,
56:20SPEAKERmaybe they're trialing that actually.
56:22SPEAKERMaybe that's a trial feature in Chromium
56:24SPEAKERthat's not rolled out or something, anyway.
56:26SPEAKER- No rolling distros, but rolling browsers.
56:28SPEAKERThat's what I'm hearing. - Yeah, well, anyway.
56:31SPEAKER- Get on that Zen life.
56:32SPEAKER- Human beings are a land of contrasts.
56:35SPEAKER- I know, I know.
56:35SPEAKER- And anyway, it was just a random example
56:37SPEAKERof like having that Linux mount for that Google Drive.
56:40SPEAKERIt was like, oh, that was handy in a pinch.
56:41SPEAKERAnd this is another one of those cases
56:44SPEAKERwhere I've got my Joplin store in a Dropbox,
56:49SPEAKERbut I just went and set up a timed job on my NAS
56:51SPEAKERto like every two hours, just rsync the Joplin folder
56:54SPEAKERfrom my Dropbox to my NAS.
56:56SPEAKER- So then you always have the background.
56:58SPEAKER- Right, right, so I've basically got a mirror
56:59SPEAKERof the Dropbox Joplin stuff on a local machine
57:03SPEAKERwhich in turn theoretically gets backed up here.
57:07SPEAKER- I do like that a lot.
57:08SPEAKER- Layers of redundancy and backups.
57:10SPEAKERAnd like I've always got, like I said,
57:12SPEAKERa copy of that data on a machine I own,
57:15SPEAKERwhich was the goal here.
57:17SPEAKER- I think Joplin, my experience with Joplin
57:19SPEAKERwas that if you're just keeping notes for you,
57:21SPEAKEReven if you're syncing them across multiple devices,
57:24SPEAKERit's really, really good for that, right?
57:26SPEAKERLike it gives you what you need.
57:28SPEAKER- I don't think it has the same kind of groupware
57:31SPEAKERkind of features that like Notion or Evernote
57:34SPEAKERor any one of the other things has.
57:36SPEAKER- Absolutely not.
57:37SPEAKERI'll briefly touch on the client,
57:38SPEAKERbut I really haven't dug that much into it.
57:40SPEAKERBut also I don't know that there's all that much
57:41SPEAKERto dig into.
57:42SPEAKERI mean, it's just a text editor.
57:44SPEAKER- Yeah, it's a plain text, I mean.
57:46SPEAKER- It does markdown.
57:48SPEAKER- Yeah, I almost think we, talking about this,
57:50SPEAKERI feel like maybe we should do an episode on markdown.
57:53SPEAKER'Cause like the story of markdown is fascinating.
57:55SPEAKER- Yeah, I didn't realize it's John Gruver
57:57SPEAKERand Aaron Swartz who made it,
57:59SPEAKERwhich is like, oh, those are names I know from other domains.
58:02SPEAKER- Yep, you're burning pod here.
58:03SPEAKERI think we have the possibility
58:06SPEAKERof getting one of these people on, I think.
58:07SPEAKER- Totally, oh, interesting.
58:09SPEAKERAll right, well, I wrote in our show notes here,
58:11SPEAKERI wrote this has been a good way to learn markdown,
58:13SPEAKERbut then I wrote markdown is so simple,
58:15SPEAKERI'm not sure you need to learn it.
58:17SPEAKERSo you can learn it in about five minutes.
58:18SPEAKER- Markdown is really easy.
58:20SPEAKERIt is, if you spent time on bulletin boards
58:24SPEAKERin the early 2000s or the nine UBBs specifically,
58:28SPEAKERit's very reminiscent of like BB code and all those.
58:31SPEAKER- Or if you were on IRC, you were doing versions of this
58:33SPEAKERwith that did not render to formatted texts
58:35SPEAKERthat just stayed plain ASCII,
58:37SPEAKERbut you still knew what they meant for emphasis.
58:40SPEAKER- But yeah, markdown's real good.
58:41SPEAKER- Like I spent years putting an asterisk around words
58:45SPEAKERon either side to denote like bold or italic kind of emphasis
58:49SPEAKERon IRC without it actually resulting in any,
58:52SPEAKERyou know what I mean?
58:53SPEAKER- You can make your lists, you can do all that stuff.
58:55SPEAKERMarkdown is quite good.
58:56SPEAKER- Yeah, so I'll say real quick,
58:58SPEAKERI don't know if this is common to some of these others,
58:59SPEAKERbut Joplin defaults to this split view editor,
59:02SPEAKERor it's kind of like a, it's a split pane,
59:04SPEAKERlike editor on one side and sort of rendered output
59:07SPEAKERon the other.
59:08SPEAKERAnd there are options there around, I set the editor,
59:11SPEAKERthe interactive part to as plain text as possible.
59:14SPEAKERYou can, in fact, I think it defaults to a rich text editor
59:18SPEAKERwhere the bold looks bold and the italics are italics.
59:20SPEAKER- It's like WYSIWYG, yeah.
59:21SPEAKER- Right, but I switched that to just display
59:23SPEAKERthe raw markdown, 'cause I was like, like I said,
59:25SPEAKERI was like, ah, there's a good chance to just like see
59:27SPEAKERwhat the markdown formatting characters are
59:30SPEAKERand learn to use those.
59:31SPEAKERSo I'm just kind of writing those manually,
59:32SPEAKERbut it's nice 'cause it shows, you know, on one side,
59:36SPEAKERit's got all the asterisks and various bullet lists.
59:40SPEAKERHere's how, you know, you put like a space
59:42SPEAKERand then a hyphen and then a space,
59:43SPEAKERand that turns into bullet list item, for example,
59:45SPEAKERthat kind of thing.
59:46SPEAKERAnd then on the other side, it formats all of that.
59:48SPEAKERSo you can see what the output is like
59:50SPEAKERand interact with the check boxes there
59:52SPEAKERand that kind of thing.
59:53SPEAKER- Well, and you can do things like link to other files
59:57SPEAKERand stuff like that and link out, link internally,
1:00:00SPEAKERall that kind of stuff.
1:00:01SPEAKER- I haven't even looked into that stuff yet.
1:00:03SPEAKER- The linking, it turns out the thing that I like most
1:00:06SPEAKERabout the Notion is the linking to other stuff
1:00:08SPEAKER'cause it means that your structure,
1:00:11SPEAKERlike it makes it really easy to make pages
1:00:13SPEAKERoff of other pages, basically.
1:00:14SPEAKERSo like I have a page for each of my recurring meetings
1:00:18SPEAKERwith one studio, right?
1:00:19SPEAKERAnd then each entry in each meeting
1:00:22SPEAKERthat I'm taking notes for in there
1:00:23SPEAKERgoes into a sub folder, sub file in there.
1:00:27SPEAKERAnd you can do that kind of stuff in Joplin as well,
1:00:28SPEAKERas I recall.
1:00:29SPEAKER- Yeah, is the check box syntax part of Markdown?
1:00:33SPEAKERThat's not a Joplin specific thing, right?
1:00:35SPEAKER- You can make a checklist with Markdown, I believe.
1:00:39SPEAKERMarkdown's also extensible in a weird way.
1:00:42SPEAKER- See, yeah, I fully believe it's the kind of thing
1:00:44SPEAKERwhere it's like, oh, it's a standard,
1:00:46SPEAKERbut actually there's like eight different standards
1:00:48SPEAKERand they're all changing all the time or whatever,
1:00:49SPEAKERkind of like regular expressions or something.
1:00:52SPEAKER- So this is, can we talk about,
1:00:55SPEAKERcan I share the good word about Pandoc now?
1:00:57SPEAKER- Sure.
1:00:58SPEAKERWell, actually, sorry.
1:00:59SPEAKERI'm just gonna answer my own question before we move on
1:01:00SPEAKER'cause I have opened markdownlivepreview.com,
1:01:03SPEAKERwhich is exactly what you think it is.
1:01:05SPEAKER- Okay.
1:01:06SPEAKER- It's just a web-based interactive Markdown thing.
1:01:07SPEAKERAnd I'm putting the check box syntax
1:01:10SPEAKERthat I know from Joplin in here,
1:01:12SPEAKERand it also made a check box,
1:01:14SPEAKERalthough it's not letting me click it.
1:01:16SPEAKERI think that's probably on the view side.
1:01:19SPEAKER- Yeah, well now it's, anyway,
1:01:21SPEAKERit is turning into a check box here
1:01:22SPEAKERin this other non-Joplin Markdown editor.
1:01:26SPEAKERSo I'm gonna say the check boxes are a part of the standard.
1:01:29SPEAKER- Markdown's surprisingly robust.
1:01:30SPEAKERI remember asking, I can't remember if it was Dave or Andy
1:01:33SPEAKERfor Markdown support on the Whiskey Media text editor.
1:01:38SPEAKERAnd they were like, what the hell do you want that for?
1:01:40SPEAKERThat's weird.
1:01:41SPEAKERNobody wants that.
1:01:42SPEAKERI think people want that.
1:01:43SPEAKERMarkdown's pretty good.
1:01:43SPEAKERIt seems like it's had a life since then.
1:01:46SPEAKERBut anyway, real quick,
1:01:47SPEAKERthat was like an hour long preamble to say
1:01:49SPEAKERthat this to-do list, the centralized to-do list
1:01:51SPEAKERI am now keeping is paying dividends
1:01:53SPEAKER'cause I am like knocking out tasks kind of left and right
1:01:57SPEAKERin a way that is uncharacteristic for me.
1:01:59SPEAKERLike it's been really nice to just,
1:02:02SPEAKERI've always been somebody
1:02:03SPEAKERwho just organizes everything in my head.
1:02:04SPEAKERAnd for-
1:02:06SPEAKER- After you get too much stuff going,
1:02:07SPEAKERyou can't do that anymore.
1:02:08SPEAKER- For reasons of workload or age or personal stuff
1:02:11SPEAKERthat's been going on or all of the above,
1:02:13SPEAKERlike it's just gotten to be too much.
1:02:14SPEAKERLike I'm just like feeling very overwhelmed
1:02:17SPEAKERby all the things I need to do
1:02:18SPEAKERand not being able to keep them all in my head at one time.
1:02:20SPEAKERAnd boy, it turns out writing everything down
1:02:24SPEAKERthat you need to do as you think of it
1:02:25SPEAKERso it's all in one place.
1:02:26SPEAKERAnd then crucially, checking,
1:02:29SPEAKERlike clicking a little box
1:02:30SPEAKERand checking it off when you're done.
1:02:32SPEAKER- Maintaining that list is my favorite part of the day.
1:02:35SPEAKER- It's yeah, clicking the box and seeing it fill in
1:02:38SPEAKERand seeing the texts go dark and knowing,
1:02:41SPEAKERokay, I did that and it's done.
1:02:42SPEAKERAnd now I can move it down to the done column.
1:02:45SPEAKERThere's a psychological reward component to this
1:02:48SPEAKERthat is highly motivating.
1:02:51SPEAKER- When I started the VR company,
1:02:52SPEAKERactually when I was doing testing,
1:02:54SPEAKERI had the same realization like 10 years ago.
1:02:56SPEAKERAnd I thought it was 'cause I was getting old at the time,
1:02:58SPEAKERwhich is funny now in retrospect.
1:03:01SPEAKERBut I think it's like, if you think about our work lives,
1:03:06SPEAKERyou know, in 2003, I was writing 10 articles a month, right?
1:03:10SPEAKERAnd a couple of reviews and some other little bits
1:03:12SPEAKERand pieces, but it was like,
1:03:14SPEAKERI could have had a post-it note with all the tasks
1:03:17SPEAKERthat I needed to do on any given 28 day period
1:03:21SPEAKERand written those down and been pretty good.
1:03:23SPEAKERAnd then we added the website and that added daily tasks
1:03:25SPEAKERon top of the monthly tasks.
1:03:27SPEAKERAnd like, and then we started doing video,
1:03:29SPEAKERwhich meant that I had then editorial review
1:03:31SPEAKERand podcast edits and all the different things
1:03:33SPEAKERI had to look at and review at tested.
1:03:36SPEAKERAnd then we started traveling all the time.
1:03:39SPEAKERAnd that added another level of complexity
1:03:41SPEAKER'cause we had to book the travel
1:03:42SPEAKERand we had to make sure we had confirmation.
1:03:43SPEAKERWe had to book the appointments.
1:03:44SPEAKERWe had to book the shoots and we had, you know,
1:03:45SPEAKERall this other stuff to do.
1:03:47SPEAKERAnd at some point in like 2014 or 2013,
1:03:50SPEAKERI was just like, I can't keep track of this all.
1:03:51SPEAKERAnd that's when I started using Wunderlist.
1:03:53SPEAKER- And then I would add to that,
1:03:54SPEAKERlike being now being self-employed
1:03:55SPEAKERhas just amplified this effect exponentially
1:03:58SPEAKERbecause now we are also juggling things
1:04:00SPEAKERthat other people at large companies used to do,
1:04:02SPEAKERlike payroll and taxes and IT and you name it,
1:04:06SPEAKERAV production stuff.
1:04:08SPEAKERIt's a lot of different plates to spin.
1:04:11SPEAKERAnd you're getting like, you know,
1:04:13SPEAKERI work with four or five different companies
1:04:14SPEAKERat any given time and then also do this podcast
1:04:16SPEAKERand also do stuff with you and Vinny at Nexlander.
1:04:18SPEAKERAnd like, it's just, it is incredibly helpful
1:04:22SPEAKERboth to have a really clean calendar
1:04:23SPEAKERthat I update the moment something changes
1:04:25SPEAKERso that my free busy time is always valid.
1:04:28SPEAKERAnd then having that task list that's constantly updated
1:04:31SPEAKERmeans that I don't forget.
1:04:33SPEAKERIf somebody asks me to do something
1:04:34SPEAKERin an offhand manner in a Slack,
1:04:36SPEAKERif I don't write that down,
1:04:37SPEAKERI will never remember that I'm supposed to do it.
1:04:39SPEAKEROr in my, the way it happens for me
1:04:41SPEAKERis I'll be like doing the dishes or in the shower
1:04:43SPEAKERor some place where I can't do the thing
1:04:45SPEAKERand it'll pop back into my head in an anxious way
1:04:47SPEAKERand go like, oh God, I forgot I needed to do that.
1:04:49SPEAKERAnd it's been a week, oh crap.
1:04:51SPEAKERAnd then I still don't get it done
1:04:53SPEAKER'cause I am never in front of the thing I need to do
1:04:56SPEAKERwhen I think of it.
1:04:57SPEAKERBut I guess to further advocate for this
1:05:00SPEAKERas a lifestyle change,
1:05:01SPEAKERlike I was always kind of defiant about this.
1:05:03SPEAKERI was like, I don't need to write that stuff down.
1:05:05SPEAKERI can do it myself.
1:05:06SPEAKERI can do it in my head.
1:05:07SPEAKERI can remember all this stuff.
1:05:08SPEAKERLike there was a certain-
1:05:10SPEAKER- You're freeing yourself, man.
1:05:11SPEAKER- Yeah, there was a certain contrarian kind of impulse
1:05:14SPEAKERthat I had about like, I don't want to do more work
1:05:17SPEAKERso I can do work.
1:05:18SPEAKERYou know, that's what it was.
1:05:19SPEAKERIt was like, I don't wanna maintain another app
1:05:20SPEAKERand have to write stuff down to do it.
1:05:22SPEAKERWhat if I just did it
1:05:23SPEAKERand skipped all those intermediate steps?
1:05:24SPEAKERBut I am here to say that at a certain point
1:05:28SPEAKERthat doesn't work anymore.
1:05:29SPEAKERAnd if you're trying to keep up a lot of stuff,
1:05:33SPEAKERyou owe it to yourself to maybe get a little more organized,
1:05:35SPEAKERyou will thank yourself.
1:05:36SPEAKER- So I will tell you,
1:05:38SPEAKERwhen they made me the editor of Maximum PC,
1:05:41SPEAKERJohn Phillips was like,
1:05:42SPEAKERhey, you gotta go to an organizational class.
1:05:44SPEAKERYou gotta learn how to manage time.
1:05:46SPEAKERAnd I thought it was stupid.
1:05:48SPEAKERAnd they sent me to one of those Franklin
1:05:50SPEAKERseven habits of highly effective people classes
1:05:53SPEAKERwhere everybody they're trying to sell like paper binders
1:05:55SPEAKERwith your to-do list and your calendar and stuff in it.
1:05:59SPEAKERAnd it was stupid.
1:06:00SPEAKERAnd then in the early 2010s,
1:06:04SPEAKERlife hackers started writing about,
1:06:05SPEAKERI wanna say it was like 43 folders or something like that.
1:06:08SPEAKEROne of those kind of getting things done mechanisms
1:06:11SPEAKERthat's like today,
1:06:12SPEAKERlike the idea is it's today's tasks, this week's tasks,
1:06:15SPEAKERthis month's tasks, and then next month's tasks.
1:06:18SPEAKERAnd like a lot of that stuff is full of like business,
1:06:22SPEAKERlike it's the business equivalent of like new age crystals.
1:06:24SPEAKER- Oh yeah. - Right?
1:06:25SPEAKER- Oh yeah.
1:06:26SPEAKER- But finding a system that lets you record
1:06:30SPEAKERwhat you need to do and track your time
1:06:34SPEAKERis incredibly worth investing in.
1:06:36SPEAKEREspecially like even if you're not busy enough
1:06:38SPEAKERto need that right now at some point in your future,
1:06:41SPEAKERyou will be busy enough
1:06:42SPEAKERand it will keep you from going crazy.
1:06:43SPEAKERIt'll keep you from burning out.
1:06:45SPEAKERIt'll keep you from torturing your stuff.
1:06:46SPEAKERAnd like the answer for some people is agile
1:06:49SPEAKERand JIRA and waterfall charts and Gantt charts
1:06:51SPEAKERand all that stuff.
1:06:52SPEAKERAnd for other people it's,
1:06:54SPEAKERI don't think a Gantt chart is actually that
1:06:55SPEAKERwhen I think about it.
1:06:56SPEAKERBut anyway, for other people it's,
1:07:00SPEAKERhey, I have a piece of paper
1:07:01SPEAKERtyped on the side of my monitor
1:07:02SPEAKERthat I put up a new one every day
1:07:03SPEAKERand it tells me what I need to get done that day.
1:07:05SPEAKERBoth of those are equally valid.
1:07:06SPEAKERLike there's no wrong way to do this.
1:07:09SPEAKERCan I make a pitch for you, Brad?
1:07:11SPEAKER- Sure.
1:07:12SPEAKER- I think you should keep your secure stuff
1:07:13SPEAKERin your password manager,
1:07:14SPEAKERlike your Windows keys and your,
1:07:17SPEAKERlike I have all my account recovery keys
1:07:19SPEAKERexcept for obviously 1Password,
1:07:21SPEAKERlive in a 1Password notes section.
1:07:26SPEAKER- So I basically do that.
1:07:28SPEAKERLike the stuff I'm putting into this Joplin database
1:07:30SPEAKERis lower impact.
1:07:32SPEAKERThat's why I was harping on Windows keys, for example,
1:07:35SPEAKERbecause things that are more sensitive than that
1:07:37SPEAKERare definitely going into the password manager,
1:07:39SPEAKEReven when they're not logins.
1:07:40SPEAKERLike you said, I assume you're talking about
1:07:43SPEAKERjust like some kind of secure note thing
1:07:44SPEAKERfor jotting stuff down in your.
1:07:46SPEAKER- Yeah, 1Password has a notes,
1:07:48SPEAKERhas like multiple data types of logins
1:07:50SPEAKERand passwords and server console passwords
1:07:52SPEAKERand stuff like that.
1:07:53SPEAKERBut data is just one of them.
1:07:55SPEAKER- I always feel a little weird about talking publicly
1:07:57SPEAKERabout which secrets I put where,
1:07:59SPEAKERbut maybe I'm having delusions of grandeur
1:08:01SPEAKERand nobody cares that much about my data.
1:08:04SPEAKER- I mean, if somebody gets into my password manager,
1:08:05SPEAKERI've got larger problems, I guess.
1:08:07SPEAKER- That's kind of how I feel, I guess,
1:08:09SPEAKERis that like the decryption phrases for various,
1:08:12SPEAKERlike SSH keys are maybe not my biggest concern.
1:08:15SPEAKERIf the thing that also has my like financial passwords
1:08:19SPEAKERand it gets breached, that's a bigger concern.
1:08:22SPEAKER- That would be bad.
1:08:22SPEAKER- But you're right, yes.
1:08:24SPEAKERSo anything that is like kind of more sensitive
1:08:26SPEAKERthan something like a product key
1:08:27SPEAKERor a doctor's appointment thing
1:08:29SPEAKERis going in the password manager.
1:08:31SPEAKER- Can we talk about Pandoc for a sec?
1:08:33SPEAKER'Cause it is dope.
1:08:34SPEAKERSo Pandoc is a tool that lets you convert
1:08:37SPEAKERbetween Markdown and a bazillion other formats,
1:08:39SPEAKERincluding like BB code and the Steam Markdown
1:08:43SPEAKERthat they've used for 20 years now, 25 years.
1:08:45SPEAKER- Jeez, there's several dozen of these on here.
1:08:48SPEAKER- Oh, and there's more.
1:08:51SPEAKER'Cause the way you build new formats
1:08:54SPEAKERis with just a really simple Lua plugin.
1:08:56SPEAKERAnd there are a literal bazillion of them if you search.
1:09:00SPEAKER- Oh, wait, is this a command line tool?
1:09:01SPEAKER- It's both, you can do a command line.
1:09:03SPEAKERThere was also some desktop clients,
1:09:04SPEAKERdepending on what OS you're on.
1:09:06SPEAKER- I'm looking at pandoc.org to be clear
1:09:08SPEAKERfor people who want to follow along.
1:09:09SPEAKERBut there are a lot of things on here.
1:09:11SPEAKER- P-A-N-D-O-C, it is, I spent a really long time
1:09:16SPEAKERwhen I was working on "The Anacrusis"
1:09:17SPEAKERand doing patch notes twice a week sometimes,
1:09:20SPEAKERtrying to find something that would let me write
1:09:22SPEAKERmy patch notes in a normal human text editor
1:09:25SPEAKERand then export them to Steam's janky BB code based format.
1:09:29SPEAKERAnd this, it turns out, was the tool.
1:09:31SPEAKER- Oh, this is crazy.
1:09:32SPEAKERI definitely have got to get this.
1:09:34SPEAKERFirst of all, under lightweight markup formats,
1:09:37SPEAKERnot only are there a bunch besides markdown,
1:09:39SPEAKERlike re-structured text, ASCII doc, textile,
1:09:42SPEAKERtext to tags, mark you a deejot, deejot?
1:09:46SPEAKER- I don't know what that one is.
1:09:47SPEAKER- Anyway, but there are also multiple types of markdown,
1:09:50SPEAKERjust like I guessed.
1:09:51SPEAKERThis says markdown including common mark
1:09:53SPEAKERand GitHub flavored markdown.
1:09:56SPEAKERBut there is-
1:09:57SPEAKER- You can also do media wiki formats.
1:09:59SPEAKER- Yeah, there's wiki markup formats.
1:10:01SPEAKERThere's word, you can do word processor formats
1:10:04SPEAKERlike doc X and rich text, RTF.
1:10:06SPEAKERYou can do EPUB, the ebook format,
1:10:08SPEAKERdifferent types of HTML.
1:10:09SPEAKERRoth, I had occasion to learn what Roth is.
1:10:13SPEAKER- I don't know what that is.
1:10:15SPEAKER- It's like terminal text formatting stuff.
1:10:18SPEAKERXML form, wow, this is like a crazy Swiss army knife of,
1:10:22SPEAKERI mean, that's kind of what their little mascot
1:10:25SPEAKERgadget logo character is here is a little gadget
1:10:28SPEAKERwith like eight different arms coming out of it.
1:10:30SPEAKER- It is, so the thing you might not have noticed
1:10:32SPEAKERon this page, but they have to and froms.
1:10:34SPEAKERSo those arrows are from this to this.
1:10:37SPEAKER- Yes, arrows show like which directions
1:10:39SPEAKERcan be converted to and from,
1:10:40SPEAKERwhich is also handy for sure.
1:10:42SPEAKER- Yeah, it is an incredible, like if you have,
1:10:45SPEAKERlike a lot of times in games,
1:10:47SPEAKERyou end up with somebody putting a bunch of data
1:10:49SPEAKERinto a spreadsheet that you need,
1:10:50SPEAKERthen you need to get into another format.
1:10:52SPEAKERIt's incredible for that stuff, right?
1:10:53SPEAKER- Okay, hang on, I'm just gonna run an experiment here.
1:10:56SPEAKER- Okay.
1:10:57SPEAKER- Apt search pandoc.
1:10:59SPEAKER- Oh yeah, it's in there.
1:11:00SPEAKER- Oh wow, that's a lot of stuff that came back actually.
1:11:02SPEAKER- Yeah, there's a bazillion, so there's,
1:11:04SPEAKERif it's like the arch user repository,
1:11:07SPEAKERthere'll be like a core pandoc in the main repo
1:11:09SPEAKERand then a bazillion plugins or filters, sorry.
1:11:12SPEAKER- The main tool, but anyway, yes,
1:11:14SPEAKERthis is absolutely something I'm going to install and use.
1:11:16SPEAKERThere's like, man, ANSI formatted text, CSVs, this is crazy.
1:11:21SPEAKER- It is, and like I said, the stuff that's on their homepage
1:11:24SPEAKERis just the stuff they natively support.
1:11:26SPEAKER- Okay, that's really useful.
1:11:28SPEAKER- There's a bunch of people
1:11:29SPEAKERthat have written Haskell plugins for this
1:11:31SPEAKERthat will do anything that Haskell knows how to deal with.
1:11:35SPEAKERLike it's wild, it is an, like I said,
1:11:38SPEAKERwhen I was writing patch notes
1:11:39SPEAKERand I had to post them on five different places,
1:11:42SPEAKERthis would let me write it once in markdown
1:11:44SPEAKERand then export it to the five different versions,
1:11:47SPEAKERopen that up, copy and paste.
1:11:48SPEAKERAnd what had been like two hours of copying and formatting
1:11:52SPEAKERand adjusting text became five minutes of pasting
1:11:55SPEAKERin different places.
1:11:56SPEAKER- Doing some worm work over there,
1:11:57SPEAKERsome write once, read many.
1:11:59SPEAKER- Yes, yes, I love writing once and reading many.
1:12:02SPEAKER- Love to worm.
1:12:03SPEAKER- Love, love, live to worm.
1:12:05SPEAKERSo yeah, that's it, that's our adventure
1:12:07SPEAKERthrough text editor, note-taking apps, I guess.
1:12:09SPEAKER- I'm reminding myself that's not at all what worm means
1:12:12SPEAKERin the classical sense.
1:12:15SPEAKER- What does worm mean in the classical, write once, really?
1:12:18SPEAKERIt's not write once, read many?
1:12:20SPEAKER- No, that is what it, sorry, that is what it stands for.
1:12:21SPEAKERWhat I mean is that it's a completely different context
1:12:24SPEAKERthat that worm is used in.
1:12:26SPEAKERCan I remind you of the existence of a worm drive?
1:12:29SPEAKER- Oh yeah, of course.
1:12:30SPEAKER- This is more of like a physical storage device,
1:12:34SPEAKERlike magneto-optical kind of situation.
1:12:37SPEAKER- So you could do backups and stuff like that.
1:12:40SPEAKER- This is like an early post floppy disk term
1:12:42SPEAKERfor like pre-CDR post floppy disk,
1:12:46SPEAKERkind of weird magneto-optical stuff,
1:12:49SPEAKERlike our Iomega devices worm drives maybe, I don't know.
1:12:52SPEAKERThis is-
1:12:53SPEAKER- No, they're write once, write many.
1:12:55SPEAKER- Yeah, of course, yes.
1:12:56SPEAKERSo that's, anyway, whatever this podcast needs to end.
1:12:59SPEAKERMaybe we'll do an episode on worm drives or something, but.
1:13:02SPEAKER- Yeah, let's get our worm drive on.
1:13:04SPEAKERIt's the whole part, one thing I've realized
1:13:08SPEAKERwe didn't talk about at all here is Apple Notes,
1:13:10SPEAKERwhich has gotten kind of robust and kind of splits the gap
1:13:13SPEAKERbetween things you can share and things you can keep locally.
1:13:16SPEAKER- I actually had this conversation with my mom
1:13:17SPEAKERwhen I was telling her like, "Oh, set up this Notes app."
1:13:19SPEAKERAnd it's like really helping me get organized,
1:13:21SPEAKERbut she's only on Apple devices.
1:13:23SPEAKERSo when she was asking about it, I was like,
1:13:24SPEAKER"Oh, you should probably just use Apple Notes
1:13:26SPEAKERbecause you're just on a MacBook and an iPhone."
1:13:29SPEAKER- Well, and it's really nice 'cause like Apple Notes
1:13:32SPEAKERand Reminders both now will sync across other Apple,
1:13:35SPEAKERto other Apple users.
1:13:37SPEAKERThe problem I have with them is that they really don't live
1:13:39SPEAKERoutside of the Apple ecosystem.
1:13:41SPEAKERSo if I want to access that stuff on Linux or Windows,
1:13:43SPEAKERit's using the web app, which sucks.
1:13:44SPEAKER- Yeah, but if you're all Apple all the time,
1:13:46SPEAKERthat seems like probably a good option or maybe the option.
1:13:50SPEAKER- Look, my wife and I have shared dog notes
1:13:53SPEAKERand shared dog task lists that are like,
1:13:56SPEAKER"Give the flea medicine,
1:13:57SPEAKERand here's when the next dog appointment is,"
1:14:00SPEAKERand stuff like that, which is really handy.
1:14:01SPEAKERSo anyway, that's the end of our Notes.
1:14:04SPEAKERI would love to know what you all use for your Notes apps.
1:14:07SPEAKERWhat do we miss stuff?
1:14:08SPEAKERIs there stuff out there that is compelling and interesting?
1:14:11SPEAKERI'm also wildly curious what people use Notion for
1:14:14SPEAKER'cause there's a bunch of really wild use cases
1:14:17SPEAKERfor Notion these days.
1:14:18SPEAKER- Yes, give us notes about Notes apps.
1:14:21SPEAKERGive us notes about our notes about Note apps.
1:14:23SPEAKER- Are those Notes notes?
1:14:24SPEAKER- Sure, probably.
1:14:25SPEAKERYeah, I'm sure people have other suggestions on use cases
1:14:28SPEAKER'cause this does seem like a pretty broad field.
1:14:32SPEAKER- Yeah, the email address is techpod@content.town,
1:14:35SPEAKERor you can post in the thread in the Discord.
1:14:38SPEAKERAnd if you're not in the Discord,
1:14:39SPEAKERwhat the hell are you doing?
1:14:39SPEAKERGet in the Discord.
1:14:40SPEAKERYou can go to patreon.com/techpod where for $5 a month,
1:14:45SPEAKERyou get access to the Discord.
1:14:46SPEAKERYou get access to our monthly Patreon exclusive episode
1:14:49SPEAKERwhere we're gonna build our own Lua filter for Joplin
1:14:52SPEAKERand for Pandoc.
1:14:54SPEAKERWe're not gonna actually do that, but maybe.
1:14:55SPEAKERActually, I had an idea the other day.
1:14:58SPEAKERBut yeah, we're gonna do all that
1:15:00SPEAKERand you can get in there too.
1:15:02SPEAKERAgain, it's patreon.com/techpod.
1:15:04SPEAKERThere's always interesting conversations going on.
1:15:07SPEAKERYesterday, people were talking about American fast food
1:15:11SPEAKERand like the rise of the quesarito in Texas,
1:15:16SPEAKERin Texas taquerias, where they're just,
1:15:20SPEAKERpeople will, you can take a burrito at this place in Texas
1:15:24SPEAKERand if you pay them an extra few bucks,
1:15:26SPEAKERthey'll quesarito it by wrapping a quesadilla
1:15:28SPEAKERaround the outside of the burrito.
1:15:30SPEAKERAnd let me go and tell you,
1:15:31SPEAKERthat's the kind of food science I'm here for.
1:15:33SPEAKER- So was that, which restaurant?
1:15:36SPEAKER- Oh, that was Freebirds, yeah.
1:15:38SPEAKER- It's Freebirds, yeah.
1:15:39SPEAKER- I've heard of Freebirds.
1:15:40SPEAKERI don't know how widespread they are though.
1:15:42SPEAKER- I've never been to Freebirds,
1:15:43SPEAKERbut I assume that when you go in,
1:15:44SPEAKERthey're just always playing Freebird.
1:15:46SPEAKER- Problem I have. - Just 24/7 loop.
1:15:48SPEAKERThat would be hell.
1:15:49SPEAKER- I don't know about that.
1:15:50SPEAKERAre they Austin based?
1:15:52SPEAKERI think, I feel like they came out of Austin, Texas,
1:15:55SPEAKERprimarily, is that correct?
1:15:57SPEAKER- That I don't know.
1:15:59SPEAKER- Do you wanna see?
1:16:00SPEAKEROkay, this is the last thing
1:16:01SPEAKERand then we have to end this podcast,
1:16:03SPEAKERbut I'm gonna send you a picture.
1:16:05SPEAKER- Oh, okay.
1:16:06SPEAKER- It has to be AI generated, right?
1:16:09SPEAKER- Man.
1:16:10SPEAKEROh yeah, I saw that this morning, it's a nightmare.
1:16:12SPEAKERThat is the Maggot Burrito, yes, 100% AI generated.
1:16:15SPEAKER- The Xenomorph Breakfast Burrito
1:16:17SPEAKERthat some restaurant seems to have put up,
1:16:19SPEAKERlike nobody in the chain of getting this printed
1:16:21SPEAKERand put on the restaurant window thought,
1:16:23SPEAKERmaybe we shouldn't post this Nightmare Hive Burrito.
1:16:28SPEAKER- The problem, a big problem with the AI stuff
1:16:30SPEAKERis that one person who has the worst ideas
1:16:32SPEAKERin your organization can post any picture
1:16:35SPEAKERthey want without having to talk to somebody
1:16:36SPEAKERwho has actual skills.
1:16:38SPEAKERAnd this is emblematic of that.
1:16:40SPEAKERSomebody posted, I think it was in the Discord,
1:16:43SPEAKERactually, the other day, they posted a picture
1:16:44SPEAKERof one of those old letter boards with the push pins
1:16:47SPEAKERthat you kind of like, you have the plastic letters
1:16:50SPEAKERand you stick 'em in and there was usually a Coca-Cola
1:16:52SPEAKERor a Pepsi or something on the top of it and it was like,
1:16:53SPEAKERhey, here's the menu for today
1:16:54SPEAKERand it's like hot dog, hamburger.
1:16:57SPEAKERAnd they said, hey, I like this infinitely better
1:16:59SPEAKERthan any one of these AI generated slop menu images.
1:17:05SPEAKERA, because it looks like something and you can read it,
1:17:08SPEAKERbut B, all of, when you, I don't know if you've gone
1:17:11SPEAKERto Oakland lately, when you're driving through the corridor
1:17:13SPEAKERon 80 where all the billboards are, they all look the same
1:17:17SPEAKERbecause everybody's typing the same shit into chat GPT.
1:17:20SPEAKER- It's, yes, the AI generated billboards about AI
1:17:24SPEAKERup and down freeways around San Francisco
1:17:26SPEAKERare a nightmare right now.
1:17:27SPEAKER- Yeah, it's bad.
1:17:29SPEAKERAnyway, patreon.com/checkpod.
1:17:31SPEAKERYou too can bitch about AI images in there.
1:17:33SPEAKERIt's one of our favorite things to complain about.
1:17:36SPEAKERAnd you get access to the monthly patron exclusive episode,
1:17:38SPEAKERwhich will go up next week.
1:17:40SPEAKERIt's questions next month.
1:17:41SPEAKERSo send your questions in.
1:17:42SPEAKERThere's a question seeking answers channel in the discord.
1:17:44SPEAKERYou can send them to techpod@content.town.
1:17:47SPEAKERAnd this is the part where we thank our patrons.
1:17:49SPEAKERSo thank you everybody who supports the show,
1:17:52SPEAKERbut an extra special thank you goes out
1:17:54SPEAKERto our executive producer, to your patrons,
1:17:56SPEAKERincluding Infelicitous Rips, Jordan Lippett.
1:17:59SPEAKERYou're part of the Bunny Crime Cinematic Universe
1:18:03SPEAKERand James Kamik.
1:18:03SPEAKERThank you all so, so much.
1:18:04SPEAKER- Yeah, thank you. - Have a good year.
1:18:05SPEAKER- Yeah, we appreciate everybody's support.
1:18:07SPEAKERAnd we will be back next week
1:18:09SPEAKERwith another edition of the TechPod.
1:18:10SPEAKERUntil then, please consider the environment
1:18:13SPEAKERbefore printing this podcast.
1:18:14SPEAKER(upbeat music)