Highlights

• Joey and Squiggy – 4 days after Buster left us, we went to the SPCA and got Joey and Squiggy, two 4.5 month old kitten brothers. We still miss Buster terribly, but these boys have done a lot to cheer us up. I think that they are very happy here.
• Visiting family – Always nice to see my family. I miss them a lot and it is great to get to see them a couple of times a year and to FaceTime during the rest of the year.
• Dead & Company in Philly – Awesome show with awesome friends!
• Billy Joel and Stevie Nicks – Another awesome show.
• M2 Max Macbook Pro – Having a second computer has definitely brought some peace of mind and it runs almost everything I need it to without RAM warnings. Would definitely recommend the Apple Refurbished Store for good deals on like-new hardware.
• AirPods Pro 2 – Got these for free, along with Apple Care + and a magsafe charger, thanks to an Amazon Business credit card offer when my old earbuds started shorting out. I wear headphones a lot and the noise cancellation is really nice. Also nice that they have adaptive mode for when I am outside so that I can still hear the traffic noises. My favorite thing about them is how easily they switch between my Apple devices. The only thing that they don’t connect to automatically is the TV.
• Mac Power Users is still my favorite podcast this year, with honorable mention to Films to Be Buried With with Brett Goldstein, and the Handsome podcast with Tig Notaro, Fortune Feimster, and Mae Martin.
• Netflix – Watched a bunch of shows that I have been curious about including Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul, Ozark, and The Walking Dead.

I have been using this machine for a month while working on a couple of large projects and, so far, 32GB RAM and/or the super M2 Max processor seems to be the sweet spot for what I need to do. I probably didn’t need the M2 Max, but there was no M2 Pro in stock and the cost of the refurbished M2 Max was less than a new M2 Pro.

If I didn’t have the 13″ Air, I don’t think I would have gotten the 16″ Pro. It is fine for moving around the house and would be fine for a car trip to work somewhere else, but I wouldn’t want to travel with it or carry it around. I still love the Air and it is the perfect size for traveling.

Having 2 computers definitely gives me some peace of mind, and since I store most of my files in iCloud, I can use them both interchangeably without any friction. I am tempted to play Baldur’s Gate 3 on it when the mac version is released on Steam. Usually I am a console gamer (PS5), but it would be fun to have at least one AAA game to play on a mac and the M2 Max should be able play it at max settings.

Hoping these computers will last longer than the leased computers and I won’t have to buy another one for a long time. At least when I do, I can sell these or trade them in instead of having to return them at the end of the lease. I am very lucky to be able to have them and would definitely recommend the M1 or M2 Air to anyone who has basic computer needs, and the any of the M1/M2 Pros, except the 13″ one, to anyone who needs more power.

Update: Spoke too soon again about not having RAM issues. Still having them when working with virtual machines. Next computer will have at least 64GB if at all financially possible. Considered swapping it for an M3 Max with 48GB, but trade-in value for this machine is only 2/3 of what I paid and I don’t use virtual machines all the time. For everything else, this computer is still awesome and/or overkill for my needs.

Highlights of the year:

Visiting friends in Delaware for Xmas.

Being Jewish, Karen and I don’t usually celebrate Christmas beyond the traditional Chinese food and a movie. This year, our friends invited us to their house to spend the weekend, and we had a really great time. We played games, decorated gingerbread people, exchanged presents, ate awesome food, and visited horses. Added bonus was that our car didn’t break down like it did the last time we visited. Thanks Giardina family!

God of War Ragnarök

God of War 2018 is one of my favorite video games of all time, and God of War Ragnarök was just as good. Amazing story, music, and gameplay, plus some really great accessibility features. I am looking forward to playing again when New Game Plus mode is added in the spring. I played through the 2018 game at least 5 times, and will probably do the same with Ragnarök. They are the only 2 games I have ever 100%-ed and gotten platinum trophies for. I usually don’t care much about those things, but for these games, I didn’t want to miss anything.

M2 MacBook Air

Up until this year, I had been leasing equipment for business. In order to cut down on monthly expenses, I stopped leasing and bought a new computer and iPad to replace the ones that I returned.

My last leased computer was a 15″ MacBook Pro, and it was really awesome. I loved everything about it. When I returned it, I was temporarily using an 13″ M1 MacBook Air that now belongs to Karen. Even though it had half the RAM of the Pro (16GB instead of 32MB), it still did everything I needed with no problems other than RAM warnings. It was hard to get used to the smaller screen, but our very nice neighbor gave me an awesome large screen curved monitor when he had to move and couldn’t take it with him.

When we returned Karen’s computer, I gave her the M1 and got an M2 Air with 24GB of RAM, and have had not had any more problems with RAM warnings. It is a really amazing machine and handles whatever I throw at it very well.

Apple Arcade

The new hardware included a 3 month trial of Apple Arcade. I was going to cancel after 3 months, but after finding several games that I like and learning that I could share the subscription with Karen, I signed up for a year. It is really nice to play mobile games without ads or constant plugs for in-game purchases. Games can be played on macs, iPads, and iPhones, and progress syncs between them. Many of the games also work with game controllers.

Favorite games so far are Simon’s Cat: Story Time, Illustrated, a jigsaw puzzle game, Zen Pinball Party, and Grindstone, which I can’t play anymore because I am stuck at a bugged level.

Obsidian

Obsidian is by far my favorite software of the year. I wrote a whole post about it already, so won’t say much about it here other than that I am still loving it and have switched to Obsidian Sync, which seems to work better than iCloud sync. I mostly signed up for it as a way to support the developers and for the version history and end-to-end encryption.

Setapp

Setapp is an application subscription service for mac. I discovered that it includes a bunch of apps that I was already paying subscriptions or upgrade fees for. I signed up and cancelled my subscriptions to the stand-alone apps, and have also found some other great apps that are included in the subscription.

Apps that I was already using include BusyCal, Bartender, Path Finder, MindNode, Dash, and SQL Pro. Some new apps are BetterTouchTool, SnippetsLab, CleanShot X, and Hookmark.

Podcasts

Favorite podcasts of the year are Mac Power Users and We’re Alive Descendants.

2023 is off to a good start so far, and the highlight of this year will definitely be getting to see my family in March!

My Brief History of Note Taking

When I was younger, computers were too large to carry around and phones were attached to the wall. The only way to take notes on a phone was by writing on it. I always carried around small notepads in my pocket, usually the spiral bound kind, but occasionally the glued spine type. No idea where any of these are now. Probably in never unpacked boxes, landfills, or long ago recycled.

Eventually, I started taking notes on computers. Starting with Notepad and Notepad++ on PC, through many mac apps: TextEdit, VoodooPad, Evernote, Apple Notes, Bear, and finally, my current favorite app and rabbit hole, Obsidian.

The only type of app that I am more picky about than my notes app, is my code editor/IDE. For the past few years, I have been happy with PhpStorm for my IDE and Sublime Text for quick coding and editing. Until recently, my note taking app of choice was Bear. It may have stayed that way had Bear’s development cycle been quicker, but new features have been locked inside a beta app called Panda for several years, and I kept hearing about a new generation of note apps while listening to mac and web development podcasts.

Next Generation Note Apps

The podcasts led me to explore Notion, Craft, Drafts, and Obsidian. Of these, Notion and Craft were too block oriented and opinionated for my tastes, Drafts was too basic, and Obsidian was an amazing surprise. A notes app that you can customize with CSS and JavaScript, and that has its own query language? A match made in geek heaven, or at least web developer heaven. Combine that with the fact that it works on top of a bunch of markdown files in a folder instead of a proprietary database, and that it syncs with iCloud, and I was instantly hooked. And, it’s free! There are several ways to contribute to the developers, and I will definitely be doing that in the near future.

Migrating my notes from Bear was pretty easy. Used these instructions if anyone else is considering the same path.

I migrated over 1000 notes that have lived in most of the other apps mentioned at some point or other. They were easy to organize in Obsidian. I had everything tagged in Bear because there were no folders. At some point while using Bear, I nested all my tags into a few categories to keep the tab panel neat and foldable and not too overwhelming.

In Obsidian, I sorted my most recent notes into 5 folders (Work, Play, Learn, Random, and Archive). Every file older than a month or not directly linked from my main index file went into the Archive folder. My main index file got cleaned up and moved into Obsidian’s sidebar (see image), and I imported my attachments to a folder called… Attachments. I like to keep the folder structure broad so that I don’t have to think about where things go. Since using Obsidian, I have added a Templates folder, an Inbox for files that need to be processed, and a Timestamp folder for daily notes and other time based files. Each folder has an index file that lists everything in it, which is created with this dataview query:

```dataview
TABLE file.ctime as "Created", file.mtime as "Last modified"
WHERE file.name != this.file.name and contains(file.path, this.file.folder)
SORT file.mtime DESC
```

The query above requires the Dataview plugin.

Obsidian is extensible with themes and plugins and has a very large, active, and helpful community. The small core development team is also very active and responsive.

I have 6 core and 13 community plugins active and am currently using the LYT theme (by Cecilia May on commission from Nick Milo). I also like the Minimal theme (by kepano) with the colored headings turned on. My favorite plugins are Dataview and Templater, with honorable mention for the Auto Link Title plugin, which automatically fetches the webpage title and creates a markdown link when you add a URL.

Also, if you fall down this rabbit hole, here are a few of the very helpful people on the internet who have fallen down the hole first and generously shared their knowledge:

• Nicole van der Hoeven
• Nick Milo
• Stephen Millard

Coolest new things I have been doing with Obsidian

Daily Notes

In Bear, I had an index note that linked to other notes that I frequently referenced. I also used the index note as a scratchpad to write any other note that I did not want to lose track of. Not sure why I didn’t just link these to other notes, but it wasn’t part of my workflow.

When I started down the Obsidian rabbit hole, I learned about the concept of daily notes and have found them to be extremely useful. I have a template that generates the note with a ToDo list at the top and grabs all ToDos that are due that day or are overdue from all other notes via a query. These are all checkbox items with or without due dates and priorities, managed by the Tasks plugin.

Next is a Notes section where I write random notes that I take during that day, followed by a Log that shows all files that were created and modified during the day in a nice table generated by a dataview query. Below that is the list of tasks completed during the day, a random quote from the internet, and links to the previous and next days notes.

When the note is generated for the day, there is a task to review the previous day’s note linked to that note. I have found it very easy to process a single day’s note at one time and usually just go in and move the notes to a place where they will be easy to find, leaving a link to them in the daily note so I can see what notes I worked on that day. Thanks to the Note Refactor plugin, I can do all of that with a single keystroke. This takes less than 5 minutes, and I love not having one giant note where I can never find what I am looking for.

Client Database & Meeting Notes

Obsidian, especially when combined with the Templater and Dataview plugins makes use of YAML front matter data.

I keep all of my client data in AirTable, but have been experimenting with a database in Obsidian with 10 of my current clients. I have a button to generate a new client using a template that will fill in all of the relevant information, or at least leave place holders for me to fill it in. That data can then be pulled into lists and tables throughout my notes, which is very handy.

I have another template for meetings that will take the client ID as a YAML data parameter, which allows me to include a list of all meetings with the client on the client page that populates itself automatically whenever I create a note for a new meeting. This is a thing I never did before because I could never remember to manually make the connection every time. Now, I don’t have to. The meeting list is part of the client template. I am taking the meeting notes and keeping the records in Obsidian, so there is no need to remember to transfer any data. The data and queries are part of the templates, so I don’t need to remember to add them.

I can see why some people refer to these systems as second brains, but for this type of organization, almost any system works better than my actual brain, and the more automation, the better! I have more automations going on than I care to mention in this post, but I will say that combining notes, todos, and client/project information into a single app has done wonders for my organizational problems, especially since my notes app is the only one of those things that I always keep open and never forget to look at because I am always using it.

Main gripe with Obsidian

The mobile experience on Obsidian is not great. I am using it on my phone and iPad. It takes a while to open and sync (under a minute, but Bear was almost instant), and occasionally re-syncs while I still have it open. For this reason, I have been mostly adding new notes in Drafts and transferring them later when I am on my computer, and only opening Obsidian on mobile for reading notes, and occasionally writing them if it is already open. This is not ideal, but not a difficult tradeoff so far. Hoping for improvement in the mobile app experience and wondering if Obsidian Sync works any better than iCloud sync.

Geekiest thing I have done with Obsidian

Other than taking notes about taking notes and writing this post, the geekiest thing I have done with Obsidian is to create an index of my index files. All of my index files are tagged with #index, and the Index of my other index files is a handy meta item to have around.

Final Review: 4 Stars

If it wasn’t for the mobile app, I would easily give Obsidian 5 stars, but for now, it gets 4. Overall, it has been a great experience to discover and use Obsidian and I would recommend it to anyone who takes a lot of notes and likes to automate and customize things. It is especially recommended for people who think that CSS, JS, and SQL are fun For simple note taking, Bear (if you like using Markdown), or something like Apple Notes is probably better.

I have been overwhelmed with the amount of horrible things going on in the world and in our country, and the day to day challenges of living in that world with a brain that does not really know how to process it all. I see that even people who are generally good at that type of thing are also having trouble processing it all. I am trying to have hope for a better future for everyone, but it is not always easy.

I miss writing. It is a thing I do to organize my thoughts, but lately, there are too many to organize. There are a few things that stop the chaos in my head, and I am very thankful for them, so I will write about those things.

My favorite part of the ‘new world’ is that Karen is working from home. I know that it is not all good for her because she misses her work people and going to work in her office, but the cats and I love getting to spend so much time with her. I know she is happy to get to spend so much time with us too. Working from home is much less lonely than it used to be.

I like the way people have quickly adapted to virtual meetings and socializing. Zoom, and similar video conferencing apps, can be overwhelming, but it is a nice way to get to see people when you can’t see them in person. A favorite pandemic thing has been getting together with some friends for Zoom movie nights. We meet on Zoom and all press play on the movie DVD at (approximately) the same time, then hang out together and watch the movie, have drinks, and have a good time together. I am not so good at socializing in the actual world, and this has been a nice new way to socialize. Thanks to Paul and Lisa and Terry and families

I miss my family terribly. Facetime is nice, but not the same as seeing them in person. I am not so good at traveling, but since I’ve been back on the same coast as them it has been easier and I wish I could see them more. Instead, I call them a lot. It makes me happy to hear their voices and to know how they are spending their days during this crazy time. It breaks my heart that Karen has to visit her mom through a window in the parking lot and that so many families are separated in so many ways.

I have come to appreciate distractions even more than I already did. At some point every morning I get very agitated and can’t think, or work, or sit still. Going outside until I can think again is a nice distraction. My brain goes on auto-pilot and almost always takes me to the train station.

Karate was a nice distraction, even on Zoom, but I have to take a break for a few reasons, including a very annoying hurt shoulder. Hopefully I can do that again soon. It is helpful to kick stuff, even if it is just the air.

Video games are always a good distraction. Favorite game of the year has definitely been Fallout 76, even though it has so many bugs and annoyances.

Podcasts are another favorite distraction. I like a lot of audio dramas and listen to a bunch of work related podcasts. I started a post about favorite podcasts a while back. Maybe I will finish and post it sometime.

Last, but definitely not least, favorite distraction of the pandemic: Whiskey. I am thankful to whiskey for making things more bearable. Before the pandemic, I mostly liked to drink it straight up or with ice. That is still my favorite, but Karen and I have taken advantage of this form of stress relief during the pandemic to learn a few cocktail recipes (Old Fashioned and Whiskey Sour) and to try some new kinds of whiskey.

I hope you are all doing okay and getting by as best you can and I hope we can all fix the world and get to a better place soon.

When I got to the water, my brain came back to me. It was all over the place, but not in a bad way like it was when I was still trying (and failing) to work. I was having flashbacks to before we moved to Baltimore and I lost my SSI. I used to go to the water all the time. It always makes me feel better. It made me remember that there was a time when things weren’t so hard all the time. It gave me a hope that there can be a time like that again.

I am not sure how to swing that reality, but have a few ideas that might help. Karen has been helping me figure out the process of getting SSDI. Not sure if I will be able to get it, and if I can, it seems like it will take a very long time — like a couple of years. The whole process confuses me terribly and there is no way I could even be trying without K’s help.

I am also still trying to change my business into more of a recurring revenue model so I will be less dependent on project work. Long projects are the things that often end up driving me crazy and making my life miserable. It is almost always due to things that are out of my control, like waiting on other people for content, outsourced work, etc. Even when things are timelined in my contract, I have no real way to enforce it when people do not meet their deadlines. If the person not meeting the deadline is someone that I have outsourced work to, then I end up not meeting my deadline with my client. That rarely happens, but it stresses me out more than just about any other work related thing.

I pride myself on my customer service. I like to explain technical things to non-technical people, and to go the extra mile to give my customers more than they expected because I know it will make them happy. I have customers that have been with me for many years for those reasons, and I would like to structure my business to do more of that type of work, along with offering new services to bring in more customers with monthly or annual service plans, as opposed to one-time project fees.

It appears as though my forever wish of having a business partner might come true. I don’t want to speak too soon, or name any names before I am sure that it is ok to speak about it publicly, but I am very excited to finally have help figuring these things out. Gives me hope that this could actually work, and that someday I will be able to make enough money to not always have to be worrying about money. Enough to be able to go to the water if I need to before my brain stops working instead of after, or to take some time off, or any of the other comforts that having enough money to not have to worry about money brings.

It is nice to have hope again. For a while, I was losing it. Not enough to make me stop trying, but enough to make me think about giving up. If I had any sort of alternative to giving up, maybe I would have, but I do not. Trying is what I do. Maybe it is what everybody does. Still, it would be nice to have a break from trying so hard all the time. A break to go somewhere nice with Karen for a few days. A break to go to the water and see some ducks or to go to Florida to see my family. It was nice to have a break like that last week. Next month I will see my family

The other day, Sharon and I were rebuilding the AWN website, and noticed that a custom metabox that we use for entering article authors was missing.

Luckily, it was easy to figure out that the missing metabox was caused by the update to Gutenberg and not by the site redesign because all of the metaboxes on custom content types that are not using Gutenberg were working, and they were added by the same plugin that handles all of the custom content functions for the site.

The problem was caused by Gutenberg not being compatible with metaboxes that rely on selectors that target the post title, and the author field was below the post title field. I moved the author field below the post editor to fix the issue, but not without grumbling a little bit about having to place it there instead of where it makes more sense, below the article title in the same place that it appears on the article.

Common Compatibility Issues

Most PHP meta boxes should continue to work in Gutenberg, but some meta boxes that include advanced functionality could break. Here are some common reasons why meta boxes might not work as expected in Gutenberg:

• Plugins relying on selectors that target the post title, post content fields, and other metaboxes (of the old editor).
• Plugins relying on TinyMCE’s API because there’s no longer a single TinyMCE instance to talk to in Gutenberg.
• Plugins making updates to their DOM on “submit” or on “save”.

Gutenberg Handbook – Common Compatibility Issues

Thank you to the authors of the Gutenberg Handbook for helping me to troubleshoot the issue so quickly!

A very exciting history of personal and BeeDragon gravatars from 2008-2018.