Monday, 2025-07-28 to Sunday, 2025-08-03
One more week into being off twitter. I continue to read 5am-club - the story surrounding the themes is a bit woo-woo, but the insights are quite interesting, so I continue to work through the book. I also started listening to David Allen’s Making it all Work.
Getting deeper into using the notecard system, aka zettelkasten. I have been making copious amounts of notes, and putting them away. I have start process them on a regular basis.
I continue to hack away at Cardamom, my homegrown solution to make “zettelkasten + knowledge lake + blog ” system. Seeing Are.na, gave me some more ideas, and confirmed my intutition about using small texts to build up to connecting dots. I realize dSridhar Ratnakumar’s Emanote is a very capable zettelkasten. I will definitely consider using Ema for a future standalone website. See Aug 2025 update.
Now that I’m off Twitter/X, I’m digging into my reeder feeds more, and also reading blogs more intently. Found two new blogs - benkuhn.net and the jsomers.net blog; Ben’s blog is built with Django, and James Somer’s blog has some intersting reads - speed matters; I believe in speed-as-a-core-value and The best general advice on earth — One line from William James’s 1890 classic, Principles of Psychology, Chapter IV, “Habit” connects with 5am-club:
The great thing, then, in all education, is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy.
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This website, built using Quartz, is built on cloudflare on push to github. I noticed that build is taking way too long (3m35s!); likely the culprit is the build step compiling Python from source on every build. This seems unnecessary. I enabled the build cache and did not notice any improvement. Next, I should try SKIP_DEPENDENCY_INSTALL
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surge-sh hosted sites have been feeling very slow. I have been putting my css experiments on zettelake.surge.sh, and feel the pages take a long time to load. I prefer cloudflare pages anyway, but the biggest advantage surge has is the muscle memory of just typing surge . in a directory which already has a CNAME file with a single line of the domain name (e.g.: zettelake.surge.sh) and have that upload deploy the site immediately. My hope is that cloudflare must have a similar user experience using the wrangler command line tool.
wrangler pages deploy ..- TBD: set custom name for for cloudflare pages using wrangler cli
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travel someone on X:
the intersection of west WY, east ID, and southwest MT is the most beautiful place [… in Western USA].
To Revisit
- Watch Rethinking RAG from first principles for agents and related lightning sessions from Jason Liu.
- Watch Seeing is retrieving: search chatbots with vision embeddings workshop at The Fifth Elephant.
New pages from the week
- Yakread — If you have declared “Substack bankruptcy” because you subscribe to too many newsletters and never get around to reading them, using RSS readers (I like and use reeder) is one option.
- Who are your draft readers? — At the footer of every Paul Graham Essay, you see him ackowledging his draft readers.
- Obsidan Helper Scripts — I use couple of helper scripts to jump start writing journal entries, and blog posts.
- The Monotyper Manifesto — The Monospace Web is a css web design experiment by Oskar Wickström.
- REPL ∵ love is what makes the world go around — Back in 2012, inspired by Fogus’s “Real Eval Print Love” idea, I designed a t-shirt that said
(love (print (eval (read))))with my own slogan that said “because Love is what makes the world go around”, and wore it to a couple of local meetups. - IUPUI — I got my Masters in Computer Science from Purdue University attending IUPUI from 2008-2016 while I worked at EnthEnergy, and Proofpoint.
- Emanote — Emanote by Sridhar Ratnakumar is a haskell program that helps you build websites (blog, wiki, zettelkasten notebooks) using plain text formats like markdown.
- Linux Mint on Macbook Air — Installed linux Mint on my 2014 era Intel powered Macbook Air.
- Added a boop Script to slugfiy filenames: Slugify.js — useful for generating friendly filenames from web page titles when printing web pages to be saved as PDFs. See example
The above list was created using entries-new.py; Related - obsidian-helper-scripts.