vanderwal.net

Halfway Through Blaugust

At the halfway point of Blaugust following my saying I was in on Blaugust and aiming for 31 post in August, it is time for a check-in. On the 16th of August I have 22 posts (counting this post), which is more than I expected. I had two personal goals for the Blaugust endeavor: 1) Get back in the habit of posting and comfortable with the workflow; 2) Make a dent on my long list of blogfodder.

Back Comfortable with My Workflow

Not only am I comfortable with my workflow, but I’ve made tweaks to it. I have a lot of Daily Dump notes with things written out in the sections that could easily turn into a blog post. Now I have a smoother flow taking those notes and quickly extracting them to their own note, immediately having it transcluded back in, add the blog note framings, as well as blogfodder tracking, which makes it very quick to extract, wrap it for a post, and run through the edit and posting steps.

I am not only more comfortable with my process, but I’m feeling like I’m back living in my site again. I am using my blog search as I prep a note to potentially post to see what I have that may be similar or nice to add to a post as a reference. I also have been finding quite a few small UI gaffs that needed fixing and knocking them out. All pages in the blog area should have “Blog Search” in the navigation. There were layout twitches in layout switching between blog main page and individual post pages, which has been there a long time. This twitch isn’t fully gone, but far less noticeable.

Another thing I did was add some categories to accommodate creative and fiction posts, which I have been trying to sort out what to do with them. I may have another option at some point, but for now I have a decent option.

Making a Dent In Blogfodder List?

Uh… On this front I have knocked out a few items on the blogfodder list, cleaned up the list a little, but the list got a bit longer. Many of the posts for Blaugust have been new ideas and not coming out of the blogfodder list. Many of the items on the list are longer pieces and need more work, but they are likely going to be posted on Personal InfoCloud, but I will note here that I’ve posted there (just like the old days).

Some of those longer pieces will cover: “folksonomy and LLMs” (this question comes up a lot and helping quite a few understand the realities and frame their needs); “My working with AI since 2008”; “My AI policy for my sites (in short nothing read was created or edited by AI)”; “AI and Social Computing (particularly around teams and organizations)”; and other topic. I have quite a few others I swore I have posted over the years, but nope, so I’ve queued those up as well.

The Insider and a Focussed Look

One of the weekly wrap-ups I enjoy, which is also sort of a weeknote, is from David Pierce on The Verge in his Installer Newsletter. I always find things I hadn’t seen and when he digs into note taking and productivity I really pay attention.

This week’s The End of Oak Street is the surprise must-see movie of the summer | The Verge (I don’t know if this takes a subscription or not) was quite good (and David’s last before his paternity leave).

What Stood Out

But, there was on gem that really stood out in the list, Ordinary Abundance, which is really enjoyable. It is a great focussed look at an apartment with focus shifting as you scroll and the item in focus put into context.

I really like pieces like this and would enjoy more.

Summer Cinema and Art House Films

This morning on my coffee walk I was thinking I hadn’t seen either the new Spiderman block buster that is out, nor The Odessey. But, big summer block busters are something I do, but my deep enjoyment is the late summer art house films.

Thamara today posted about cinema (Cinema - Thamara Kandabada ) and frames the local cinema really well. Growing up I went to see films with my parents and saw many I was way too young to see. But, there was an art house theater in Portland that we went to a few times and the theater was small and not like the big chain theaters. When we moved to Pacific Palisades we were a few blocks from the Palisades movie theater with two screens and it was just under a dollar to go. The movies were second run or small films, but often going in I’d see a director or actors I knew who were catching an afternoon showing. If there was something of interest I may head their after school (once football season was over) to see one or two movies, and often meet a friend to join along.

Summer Cinema Kicks In

I always enjoyed going to the cinema. But, it wasn’t until I was in college that I really kicked in. I had a great course on Media Criticism and we watched a lot of movies and learned to critique them (many Hitchcock films, The Killing Fields, All the President’s Men, Three Days of Condor and so much more).

The college paper had a regular reviewer who focused on two-sentence reviews of the big movies that were out (which he got reviewed comped tickets to). I knew the editor of the paper and the local small cinema in Lafayette had called and asked if the paper wanted to send someone to review the Spike Lee film She’s Gotta Have It and I was offered the free ticket and some small cash payment. I loved the film and I was hooked not only on Spike Lee, but art house films from then on. I wrote a four to six paragraph review and the local theater liked it and my professors enjoyed it and how I approached the review.

That prior summer I was living in Berkeley and working a couple jobs (one at the college doing odd construction projects around campus (one was reinforcing one of the freshman men’s dorm hallway walls so they wouldn’t try to put their heads through it - ¾ inch plywood and ½ inch sheetrock made it quieter, stronger, and if you slammed a door the walls wouldn’t wobble for 40 to 60 feet) and running room service at the Oakland Airport Hilton). So, I had a little cash for movies and I saw a lot. Ferris Bueller, Top Gun, Aliens, Stand by Me, Ruthless People, Short Circuit, Running Scared, About Last Night, and in a art house retrospective theater A Room with a View (which I would see many times over the next couple years). A Room with a View had me hooked on the small art house theaters with good films that ran in them. This set me up for She’s Gotta Have it.

I regularly kept my eye on the small art house theaters for what was on in Lafayette, Berkeley, and San Francisco. When I moved to Oxford for a term (plus), the Penultimate Picture Palace (PPP) just over the Cowley bridge was a members cinema and would have a nights of double and triple features of films a couple years old or more with a theme for the night. I paid the member ship fee (which I believe included access or discounts at Not the Moulin Rouge up the hill in Headington). One of the first films I caught at the PPP was A Room with a View, but with the audience there it wasn’t a romantic period piece is was a comedy with a lot of hard laughter and many sprinkled in chuckles. A couple months later it played again elsewhere in Oxford and by this point I understood enough of the culture and found it really was a comedy and it made it even more of a wonderful movie for me.

Post College the Small Cinema Enchantment Continues

Post-college, San Francisco had an abundance of small cinemas and retrospective cinema houses with their own quirks. But, summer art house gems with the walking in from a warm sunny day for a treat of a film and walking out to chilly damp fog, which was perfect for conversation, coffee, and shared introspection.

Moving to the DC area, it too had an abundance of small art house cinemas. But, somewhere in the late 1990s or early 2000s, they started to close and get converted to other businesses. Georgetown had three or four, Foggy Bottom had a couple, and DuPont Circle had a couple or more. The summers in grad school were a great time to catch a good film at a small cinema.

Today the Options are Sparce

There are a few places around, but the business models went chasing more money. There is a community cinema a few miles away and a little farther away is the American Film Institute theater, but I haven’t been to that much. Walking distance there is a small multi-screen theater that used to only run art house and independent films on its four screens, but now it is one or two movies of six or seven playing that get a showing here or there on the schedule.

I still try to track down the summer independent small movies, but now mostly watch at home. I do watch the same to movies every summer on disks I own, Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing and Bring on the Night, which is the Michael Apted film about Sting putting together his first band after The Police. Both scream summer to me and the enjoyment of films that to me have a lot of things to consider within them.

Grantchester Comes to a Close

I’m a fan of cozy mystery series, well British Mystery, and Grantchester (TV series) - Wikipedia has been a gem. It is a calm and cozy mystery series set in the 1950s / early 1960s Grantchester, England just outside Cambridge. It has been on PBS as part of PBS Mystery for 11 seasons. This has been a wonderful collaboration of a police detective who befriends the local parish priest (actually, a succession of them) and brings him in to help with the mysteries. The detective is played by Robson Green, who fits the role of small town detective well.

The Cambridge countryside plays a large part as do the small town’s parish members. The series splits its time between the police station and police work and the vicarage and its dealings. The characters in the ensemble were really good. The Anglican priest is always single and their most often is a love interest.

Having the detective and priest has been an interesting mix of bringing the two stereotypical sides of the detective seeing the worst of people (or not surprised by it) and the priest seeing the best in people. But, it didn’t take long in the 11 seasons for this to swap and drift from the norm. There was a lot of this series that felt like it was treading into the footsteps of Foyle’s War.

This has been a good follow on from the decades of the succession of Morse, Lewis, and Endeavour mystery series that have also wrapped.

I’m going to miss this calm and gentle series that pulls at the heart strings of humanity.

A Book Encompasses More than the Pages and What is on Them

Last evening I went down an odd rabbit hole. I’ve been doing two conflicting tasks with my bookshelves: 1) Taking pictures of them and converting that into markdown for titles and author lists of what is on what shelf and capture what I own; 2) Culling books that are vastly out of date, I didn’t find interesting nor helpful, or poorly written (or produced).

In doing this I ran across a book I picked up (or was gifted) in college during one summer. The book is Habits of the Heart - Google Books, which is academics and research writing a popularly approachable version (think of it as the precursor to Bowling Alone - Wikipedia). The book is a mixed social studies and sociology research look at patterns in America as of the 1980s. My paperback copy binding is a little brittle, but still doing alright. I remember reading the first half and then moved through reading what was of interest and new to me as it was covering familiar ground. I don’t remember much of the book, but I remember I did have a few long discussions about it. I thought I’d see what I highlighted and annotated to job my memory, but some of the notes and cues weren’t mine and I remembered two friends borrowed it (one for class and one also out of curiosity). My own highlights and marginalia are a mystery over time to myself, but now having mine combined with two other’s it is really muddled.

I had two “bookmarks”, one from Kepler’s Books in the first third and in the second third a airplane ticket sleeve for AirCal - Wikipedia with the paper ticket in it typed out for a $59 round trip from Oakland to San Diego. The ticket was from the travel agency connected to the college.

This had memories of college fresh in my head and thinking of great conversations with professors, classes that drastically changed and expanded my understanding of the world (in class and the many office hour visits to discuss something for class or say “hey” and then have an amazing couple hour conversation), and conversations with the president of the college, Brother Mel Anderson (there were a lot of these conversations).

The Habits of the Heart was largely calling out a pattern in the US of embracing individualism and going it alone. My college experience and beyond has all been heavily social and personal individual curiosity and drive, but those two have blended. I have long blogged to connect with others with similar curiosities. But, many years of focus on social software and its multiple patterns and scales with the differences as things scale. But in these, folksonomy / folksonomy - category is individuals tagging in their own vocabulary and out of their multiple deep contexts that are unique and this tagging is primarily for their own retrieval. But, in this tagging it is also social (public or semi-private) and others who have one or a few similar contexts and vocabularies using similar terminology sets use the tags to find the resources as well. This individual and social participant interweaving is key and essential. I don’t know how much I would agree with Habits of the Heart today. I may gut it to refresh it for me.

I wasn’t expecting so much to be wrapped in picking the book up off the shelf (it sat behind a stack of other books) and having the cover bring back memories before opening it and having so many more flood out along with a myriad of contexts colliding.

Ross Has a Great HTML Tasting Menu

HTML tasting menu - Yesterday in the Homebrew Website Club - IndieWeb, Ross A. Baker shared a gem, which is an HTML Testing Menu that is a naked (no CSS nor JavaScript) HTML listing of all HTML elements with an example of its use. I have long wanted something like this for two reasons: 1) Seeing HTML with no JavaScript nor CSS and how an element displays natively before anything is added; 2) Have a base HTML to then link to a CSS style sheet to test it to see how it reacts with bare HTML and see what is missed or what isn’t displaying as expected.

In the early 2000s I had a basic HTML file that was similar to this, but I don’t think it had all the elements and mostly used it for the second use case, to test CSS that I or the teams I was working on or with were designing and building out. In the early 2000s it was relatively common to run into sites that were mostly straight up HTML with no or little CSS. Some of these pages used HTML to its fullest extent and did it incredibly well. I have a deep appreciation of others who use <dl>, <dt>, and <dd> properly and well.

I’ve picked up Ross’s page for my use to throw my CSS into to test, I as I haven’t had that in a long while. A tool like this with all the elements is really helpful. The Tasting Menu is also a really good run through to test yourself on some of the newer and more obscure HTML elements.

In the last 10 to 15 years I’ve worked with designers and developers on projects that have been using JavaScript frameworks and a quick fix isn’t available as they don’t quite understand HTML, nor CSS, nor the DOM (document object model) as it is natively and the structures available to make a one line modification aren’t available as they only understand the framework and can’t add proper structure to make the fix that should be quick. Often the change that should be 5 minutes is many hours and rebuilding. The, “my framework doesn’t have a module for that” is really tiresome, but the answer isn’t switching frameworks to get the modules it it is actually understand the digital environment you are working on.

To learn HTML elements, Ross’s Tasting Menu is a great place to start, as he also links out to MDN Web Docs, which is the best resource for HTML and CSS documentation that I know of.

Thinking in Tools has a Category, Sort of

Posting more of what I’ve been only writing as notes for myself, but also things that start as intended posts, I’ve been updating and adding some categories. One category I thought I have had for a long time is Thinking Tools, which is for tools I think in. I have a regular set of tools I write, think, and research in and many have remained the same over many years.

Prior Thinking Tools Posts

Recently I posted about My Browser Family and I definitely think and work in Safari and Zen in different ways, which I outlined. Also in the Podcast Interviews and Presentations the Last Few Years I mention a little bit about my use of OmniGraffle by The Omni Group and OmniOutliner by The Omni Group. I have brought up Obsidian a fair amount since moving to use it as my regular note making app in June 2020, I got to the point of adding a category for it, Obsidian. But, my writing workflow has at least two markdown apps (including Obsidian) as I edit and work on longer writing pieces in iA Writer as it handles all the markdown I regularly use when writing and it is an interface that gets out of the way and lets me focus on words.

Some Tools I Write to Think In

My thinking tools also focus on adaptability so I can bounce between different markdown apps (adding in MarkEdit, Drafts, Marked, and BBEdit), but also can take outlines in OmniOutliner where I’m framing out ideas and export to OPML and import that OPML into a MindMapping app (my favorite is mostly gone (iThoughts), but mostly use MindNode that sort of fits the bill of need, but not as well). With MindMapping I can see the dimensions and gaps more easily and can relatively easily and rearrange the nodes. Sometimes I go back to OmniOutlines with that output, but either way it eventually makes it into markdown as an outline or headings and subheadings (and or export to Keynote as very rough slides).

See It to Think It More Clearly

When I need to see systems and map out flows and interaction points I often turn to OmniGraffle at some point as I know it like the back of my hand I can get it to do many things quickly. With layers and canvases I can turn things off and on to tell stories as needed or get a solid focus of people in a meeting of lawyers and leaders to get actual understanding and focus on decision points to get the best answers to move forward. Early on I’ll use Apple’s Freeform to roughly sketch things and capture rough ideas, as well as use it as a whiteboard or sticky board wall (I really wish there was a better means to bring the pencil and iPad into Vision Pro with Freeform as it is really close with the pencil shadows and bevel tip orientations, but it needs two more essentials). I also use Obsidian Canvas to lay out elements and components of plans and ideas to group them and understand and see flows and interconnections. Obsidian Canvas (Obsidian Canvas) is now its own Open Source offering, JSON Canvas. Canvas is something I’ll often throw on Vision Pro to work through large systems or flows using the Mac Extended monitor mode an ultra wide screen setup and reference materials on the same screen.

I have a couple others I dip into for visual thinking as well. Keynote is always close and often my Master Deck of 600+ slides is open to quickly reference something. I have nearly 600 keynote desks and I’ve been working on getting outlines of them to see what slides I used in which presentation or deck, but also the Master Deck has gaps and doesn’t have the fully fleshed out versions of idea sets. When I had 200 to 300 presentations the Mac search was quite good at finding presentations that would have a phrase in it, but now it finds a lot and I need to map the uses of a slide and the 25 minute version of explaining a concept or the 2 minute version.

More Thinking in Tools Posts to Come

I have many more categories that are regular parts of my thinking tools and framings that let me go broad and deep, as well as pull on my own work from across the years.

I’m thinking I may do deep dive posts on one tool and/or a set of tools / apps. Also layout my app use that map to long standing concepts like the The Elements in the Social Software Stack, which has a build order that helps social tools for use in organizations, but also personal tools that follow the same pattern are vastly more helpful than those that have some things out of order. The “Action” and then “Share” is essential and the Drafts app became a great example of this process order. Action is capturing an idea or writing and framing something out fully. Then figure out what you want to do with what you just created and captured. This allows you to think and capture fully with out thinking about the social context of where it can go. You can push the full content to your working notes and ideas and then create sub-notes from copying paragraphs into new notes and send those as text messages, post to Mastodon (or Twitter), as well as share in Slack and/or a text message and so much more.

Having this category of Thinking Tools gives me a wrapper to post this and some may also cross post to Personal InfoCloud as well.

Did I Leap on Mac Developer Beta Too Soon?

I’ve been following along with this year’s round of Apple Operating System updates (OS 27) and had jumped on the iPad and visionOS developer betas in the first round or two. With iOS and ipadOS 26 with Liquid Glass if I turned it down and turned much of it off it wasn’t horrible, but it didn’t seem like a finished product. Since some of the inspiration came from visionOS for Liquid Glass it was mostly fine. The updates to the OS 27s are solid improvements for the most part, with odd bugs (mostly in YouTube app and some Meta apps). The iPad has been far more performant on the ipadOS 27 than the ipadOS 26 and fewer odd bugs.

On the Mac the OS 26 experience was poor with bugs, performance issues, UI design decisions seemingly made by people who had no understanding of interaction nor digital design. Hot mess would be too kind. My Mac is my core beast and my backup brain. I was tired of bugs and was pestering those I know whom had jumped on the macOS 27 betas if things were fine. The one oddity I didn’t want to run into was the menubar not working with menubar managers.

Yesterday the macOS 27 Developer Beta 5 was released and I ripped through the developer notes and saw the menubar had an update and claims it should work like it did on OS 26. That was enough for me to give it a try. After updating the other two devices I put in harms way, I finished a fresh back-up of my Mac and took the plunge.

First Impressions

The macOS 27 first impressions are it is more responsive and quick like it was prior to OS 26. Also OS 27 seems like it is what should have shipped last year as it has a finish and more design cohesion and relative purpose. Things in settings have been somewhat easier to find. Nothing seems broken.

I did hit an oddity and bug in Apple Music where the sound profile for hi-res lossless tracks was noticeably different when using my usual DAC/Amp and good headphones that are open back and resolve things really well. The sound stage seemed wider and the spatial separation of voices and instruments was much more pronounced, and the resonance of metal sounds (acoustic guitar strings, cymbals, and upper register piano (like an open grand piano)) were all really pronounced and forward. Something in the equalization had changed in the upper registers. I tried the track in other apps as hi-res and they sounded as they did. I also plugged in my DAC/Amp into my iPad and Apple Music like it did the day prior before the update. So I filed a report. I also found trying to edit a playlist in a playlist by clicking “edit” would crash Apple Music, so another report filed. Other than that Apple Music is much improved, but I’m not sure it is fully on par with the iPad Apple Music, which is really well done and has music content with production notes and more, but favoriting a song or album doesn’t beach ball the app.

To Test

One of the reasons I took the leap is I like using Apple Freeform for quite digital whiteboard and quick sketching of idea and there are some features with it that have improved that I want on my Mac and not just iPad (even though I largely use it on iPad and Vision Pro).

I also want to give Keynote a solid run through as that is also one of the tools I think in. I’m doing a few things in Keynote lately around folksonomy, Model of Attraction (as I’m walking new generations of product and engineer folks through it they want to know why they didn’t know about it before as it would save time tying to work through problem sets the model frames more easily to think through) with the four InfoClouds, and various Complexity Lens / Social Lens frameworks for seeing and thinking through problem sets.

The Magical Wonder from Powerful Summer Storms

Moving to the Washington, DC area to start grad school had me arriving with my dad from a cross country drive from San Francisco that took 4 days and arriving in mid-August. We parked the car at my apartment complex and unloaded and went into Georgetown to get something to eat. My dad suggested Houston’s (now gone) and my dad was a foodie and knew places with all types of good food most everywhere, so a suggestion was rarely not taken as a must do meal. As we were walking down the block toward Houston’s, the dark sky became an utter torrential downpour. Raindrops the size of small watermelons (okay, that is what they seemed like, but may have been more like grapes given the surprise of such a storm where it was sunny 15 minutes prior) soaked us and the streets filled with water rushing down toward the Potomac.

That was my introduction to August summer storms in DC. It was also my introduction to take your breath away humidity. In the many dog years since arriving I’ve grown accustom to both the storms and humidity. I now (don’t repeat this) rather like both of them now.

This afternoon as the skies darkened and the litter of warning notifications for a hazardous storm popped up on all the digital screens that are within an eye’s blink of us now. I opened the balcony door and mixed the abundantly chilly air conditioned inside environment mix with the robustly damp and hot air outside as I peered to the dark quickly moving and growing clouded skies. A quick white flash beyond the corner of a building and a low rumble of approaching thunder built the anticipation of a good romping storm.

Soon the wind would pick-up and you could hear the mutter of “we’re not in Kansas anymore”, not that we ever were. No witches would fly by, but leaves, small plastic bags void of the Gatorade or sandwich it may have held at some point is now making fun of gravity was it floats, twists, and collapses and fills moving up 40 to 80 feet in the air. Soon a flash of lightening blitzes from nowhere and the storm is officially on. The winds increase more and the large raindrops hit anything in their way hard and splash on what was perfectly dry a nanosecond before. In fractions of moments everything is soaked and the lightening and thunder are nearly simultaneous.

The ambient air temperature has dropped. In ten minutes the air is not only much cooler, but the humidity feels less like a warm hug from a sweaty large monster with slobbery skin and more like a puppy’s tummy. In about 10 more minutes the sun is peeking through and the necks of people are turning to find the rainbow and take in the blue sky before the sun fades from day to night.

How could somebody not deeply appreciate this?

My Automations Over the Ages and Today’s View

For a few decades I’ve converted regular manual tasks into automated tasks for many things. I use short code keyboard conversions with TextExpander (TextExpander), Alfred (Alfred), Keyboard Maestro (Keyboard Maestro), Hazel (Hazel by Noodlesoft), Apple Shortcuts, and a couple other small apps and services. But, I also have quite a few scripts in python and Ruby, but a few pure bash scripts. I have a handful of apps that use Claude Cowork (Claude Cowork | Claude by Anthropic) on a schedule and used where the data is not always standard, so it aggregates and structures the data where it often later gets processed by python.

I started building and running automation scripts in the 1990s to handle tedious tasks with multiple steps, or would likely be victims for typos, and which I was handling daily. A task that would take 3 or more minutes (often longer) and had structured stable data I could search made it viable to become a script and automated. I had them to filter email to folders, filter downloads to common folders / directories, and one to turn off audio for the evening which monitored Twitter every 30 minutes for my nightly signoff (“off to read and sleep - zzzz”) and it would mute audio. I’ve had a few for audio that would capture podcasts I was on for a local copy during recording that took just one button click to set Audio Hijack Pro properly and it just worked.

Moving to the Current Adaptive Flows

The last six months (or a little more) I’ve been building aggregators to capture what I’ve done the day before (and the week prior for a manual review). I’ve also automated my morning Obsidian (Obsidian) setup, so that my daily note (or Daily Dump for my notes, in my vocabulary) templates are created for the week ahead with a python script, rather than creating a new note and use a TextExpander snippet to build the structure each morning. But, doing this I realized that I could take my daily task list and the list of potential tasks I keep at the top of my Daily Dump and script the moving uncompleted items to that day’s Daily Dump from the day prior, but also quickly run a calendar scan for the day with Claude and the BusyCal MCP to have my known items at the top of the note written directly in the note. The completed items and checked off were left on the prior day’s Daily Dump in their sections.

In order to run the scheduled python scripts I need my laptop to be awake in the background (but it still the screen remain locked) so to run early morning tasks. I found PMSET as the key to handle the wake-up for the first run and have a python script handle the remaining wake-up processes for that day.

I now have a mix of Claude Cowork Skills (which if I sort out the data is stable enough I convert them to python for consistency, speed, and sustainability) and python scripts that pull my prior day’s files created and worked on list, my items in a feed of the prior day’s additions to Instapaper, Pinboard, and a list of new items in DevonThink as PDF (with links to the PDF as well as a working URL to the source of the item), a list of Readwise articles and video transcripts, and videos I liked and sent to my personal instance of Slack. These lists are in markdown and placed into the directory Obsidian watches over. Most of them a little later in the morning are transcluded into my Daily Dump note for the day where I read through them.

Morning Process

My morning process is to read through what was done the day before and edit them to add links to other resources in Obsidian and write notes. Often I have some entries that will turn into that day’s list of things to do or one of the “potentials” list. I will take items that need to be their own item note or be included into a concept note. This keeps the items fresh on my brain and connecting things to where I can get back to them more easily.

I write this today, as this morning I found my morning automation hadn’t fully run properly, because my Sunday evening script to create the week’s Daily Dump notes didn’t run as it was a cronjob and I was cooking with the laptop asleep so the job didn’t kick off. This morning I converted the cronjob to a launchd task instead and to run on Sunday during another automated wake open window.

Weekly Aggregation

Sunday’s I also run a weekly wrap-up, that pulls everything done for the week. I’m finding this is a bit too much information for a quick review and a manual assessment for the week where I aim to map out things for the upcoming week. It is a bit too much information overload. I don’t know what I’m going to do about it. Now that I have things automated and aggregated I need to rework my human side of things.

The Value of the Automation

The goal of my automations is to give me time back and remove the manual and grunt work so I can do the thinking work. I’ve done this with personal life and work life (and large systems and projects). The current round of automation and aggregation surfaced that I am doing more than I thought I was doing. Another goal is to give more time to do the human thinking and the projects and work needed. I do this so I can do the creative human work and the human thinking work (I find large errors in summarization in nearly all generative AI and creative work so I keep that at bey and use it for grunt work that I check). The scripted automations don’t need the hand holding and I have some occasional test run to check on them to see if they need attention and honing.

Search Pages Brought Up to Our Standards

As I’ve been searching my site a fair amount before starting to blog, the small type (compared to the rest of the page and site) in the search form and search button were bugging me. So thinking of you, well from my perspective, I’ve updated the Search page and Search Results.

I also noticed the navigation for the search related pages the navigation still had “Lab” and it was selected. Fixed that. Now the pages are up to your (well my) standards.

Google Plus Social Model Facepalm

I was watching Vergecast this week, (Google’s AI shake-up: What’s next for Demis Hassabis and DeepMind | The Verge) and in it David Pierce brought up Google+ again. Pierce uses it as a call out when large organizations jump into things they don’t fully understand.

Google had some understanding, but the biggest problem was their going with “Circles”. Circles were akin to groups, but the Circles were largely a construct from a user’s perspective. The individual leaning perspective of “Circles” is really odd and broken as each person has a different idea around who should be or is in a Circle, but also what gets shared in and out of the Circle. There were semi-closed groups / Circles but the boundaries weren’t clear at all. Who was in a Circle? What could be shared out (seemingly most anything) and its lack of clarity was deeply problematic as it was very porous.

A core element of social that is closed or semi-closed groups have very clear boundaries. Knowing how those boundaries work, who is allowed in, and the process to get allowed in. Google+ started at a time when those running social platforms were becoming abundantly aware there were some really toxic people and had learned how to handle them (to some degree). Google+ started with a foundation that made it really difficult to handle this, but also lacked the well known concepts to have clear boundaries for groups and interactions.

When you talked with anybody if they were using Google+, who were in many other platforms that were either fully open (like Twitter), and in closed group environments where the boundaries were clear and methods for dealing with bad actors (intentionally bad or accidentally) in clear means. The lack of comfort with the who and what is done with what is shared in Circle had a lot of people really uncomfortable with the oddly structured Circles.

Google+ didn’t last long and is long enough ago that it doesn’t come up often. Occasionally the Google+ getting woven into the Google applications like Sheets and Docs brought the really odd social structure with it, which made things really odd. Other services have done really well integrating these, but they have really solid and structured boundaries and groups with clarity as the core.

While I am one of the odd ones who really enjoyed Google Wave - Wikipedia and its wild flowing stream of interaction, the odd Google+ is one I don’t miss. Hearing David Pierce bring up Google+ and how always makes me chuckle. I always wish Google had spent time to sort out Google+ properly, but that didn’t quite happen.

Single Page PDF Option for Webpage Capture

Every now and then I get a bee in my bonnet about something. Often it is about something that has been long brewing. A current one, is PDF pagination. It is incredibly rare that I print anything. I regularly store / archive webpages in PDF, using DevonThink / DevonThink and for much more than a decade that PDF has been a “single page, continuous PDF”, which has no page breaks.

There is no reason (for the last 10+ years) to only offer multiple-page pagination for a PDF. It can be an option, but it’s driving need is the printer and rarely do PDFs get printed, as they are consumed on screens that we easily scroll.

A friend, Tantek, pointed me to Firefox (or derivative, a week ago I moved my work and research browser from Arc to Zen Browser to handle my spaces and capability to easily handle an abundance tabs) as it has good PDF capabilities built in. Firefox does have a lot of really good PDF tools (I deal with a lot of academic papers and related texts in PDFs). Firefox also has a full page screen capture, which is insanely helpful, which makes is really strange that there isn’t a similar single page PDF or “Print to PDF” option for one continuous page PDF capture of a web page.

Why Single-Continuous Page PDF?

Why is single page PDF such a need for me? Most of our interfaces around the web, or even our tablet note taking and beyond are one long page. PDF has long been, and still is, a great archive mechanism for holding onto and sharing things of interest that work across time. PDF is better than saving a web interface in its native form, as every 8 to 10 years there is a large enough change accreted that break web view files that are older and assemblages of components that they don’t consistently work in a browser. Having a colleague share their hand written notes from GoodNotes or Notability as a PDF often have pagination breaks in the middle of text, formulas, diagrams, etc. that have no need to be paginated at all. Most digital information and knowledge workflows don’t ever hit paper, nor have a need for multiple-page pagination. Multiple-page pagination as the only option is more than a decade outdate, but it seems only DevonThink offers a modern option by default.

Having the option and setting a preference for continuous single-page pagination printing to PDF (just like DevonThink has been doing for more than a decade) is needed in browsers and most of our digital applications. It is long past time to catch-up to this past decade, if not farther past.

My Browser Family

Browsers come up often in discussion. But, in a recent MacSparky Labs meetup, one of the discussions started going deep on browsers. I mentioned how and how much I abuse my browsers. Also, how I manage the volume of what flows through.

My Browser Use

I have four browsers open on my laptop nearly always. I use Choosy to route links coming in to the browser I want it to go to. I don’t count my RSS feed reader, NetNewsWire as a browser, but see it as a pre-browser. I use Safari, Google Chrome, Zen Browser, and DEVONagent Pro as my core and are always open. I also use regular Firefox, but not as much.

Safari - The Triage Workhorse

Safari is my browser that takes a beating and often where I open a tab for general reading. I use quite a few extensions, which all work well in Safari. The regular extensions are for passwords, Readwise (for local highlighting extraction and full page capture for future lighting and annotations), Instapaper (this is less for reading later, but capturing and sending a link to my personal Slack instance as well as feeds DevonThink RSS aggregation), Choosy (used to push a link to another browser for a focussed task), Obsidian web clipper, screen capture for full page capture, Stop the Madness, and Wayback Machine.

The biggest advantages for Safari are how well ad blocking works from extensions, the Reader view, and having an insane amount of tabs open at once (I’ll often find I have 1,000 tabs open after 60 days, which it is so easy to open the left sidebar, click tabs, command+A to highlight all open tabs, copy, and paste into a markdown document as a good bulleted markdown list of title and link lists - then commit “tab bankruptcy” and close the window and start a new one).

Chrome

I use Google Chrome mostly for things Google, like YouTube, Google Maps, Google apps, some social networks which get JavaScript heavy. Chrome can handle some heavy use, but nothing like Safari can handle. There are a lot of sites that only work properly in Chrome, which feels like poor development practices of the late 90s and early 00s are back again.

Zen Browser

Zen browser is built on Firefox and replaced my use of Arc browser for its Spaces (compartmentalized browsing sections with their own tab collections) and left sidebar tabs. Zen is my browser I work in (other than the first Space, which is more fun regular access). I have 12 Spaces with one with productivity focus for things around Obsidian, note making, my vanderwal.net related resources, Personal InfoCloud site related resources, Apple Developer, techno-social cognition research, O’Reilly Media related research, one for grad student mentoring, and others for focussed related reading and notes.

I really like the Firefox foundation with all the extensions offered, good security, good privacy, and incredibly good PDF resources built-in. There is a lot open at once in the Zen browser as well and it just keeps chugging.

DevonAgent Pro

DevonAgent Pro is one I use mostly for one purpose, capturing pages as single continuous PDFs and directly add them into DevonThink and easily annotate the metadata. When in Safari or Zen I use the Choosy extension to open the page into DevonAgent and click command+option+P to capture the logged-in page easily. There are extensions for DevonThink, but it is a bit buggy at times and often doesn’t capture my logged-in state, so DevonAgent Pro becomes my go to. I will also use it for research as it has nice features to easily capture assets and its direct connection to DevonThink.

Firefox

While I keep the four above always open, I also use Firefox as my Facebook browser when I go there as it does a really good job keeping Facebook’s creepy privacy tendrils at bey along with a plug-in that is a Facebook fence.

I also use Firefox for a handful of Streamlit • A faster way to build and share data apps browser-base data analysis web apps. Firefox does a good job keeping things contained and the interactive data builds in Streamlit won’t impact anything else.

What to do with My Phrases and Snippets

Going back to just after I graduated grad school, when I started writing poetry (as I had time to think a little more freely), I started keeping phases and snippets. Some were in notebooks and some in text notes on my computer. Often these were things that would pop to mind and wouldn’t clear my head until I captured them. Some turned into poems (a sliver of what I wrote is on my Poetry :: vanderwal.net page). Some turned into short stories that picked up a few of the phrases and snippets, some of these were rather micro-short stories or scenes (I enjoy the output of the scenes and dialog).

Over the years I tried to pull the snippets that I hadn’t used into digital notes. Up until around 2010 I had many different note apps and each had a snippets note. In the last two to five years I’ve been pulling them into a handful of notes. But, I have taken a note I stared around 2008 with phrases and snippets and that is my live phrases and snippets note. When something pops into my head I tuck it in there. In Obsidian I keep that note open in a panel so it is easy to slide to and read through or jot something down.

When I read through them I often chuckle or laugh, and some get me thinking more deeply. Some have turned into scenes again and short pieces, which I also haven’t shared.

The phrases and snippets are brain prompts and idea fodder for creativity. Some are turns of phrase, some playful word play, others are snarky, some play with time and reality shifts, and others are just prompts for “tell a story about this”. I have over 200 of these and for a long time I’ve thought of wanting to keep them to myself for my use. But, lately I’m really curious what someone would do with the snippet as most can be taken in many different directions.

I’ve thought about a challenge or carnival a month for a phrase or snippet to see what comes back. Also thought about a postcard subscription service with a phrase or snippet a month (more than a few of the items on a postcard could get a knock at my door), but also thinking of these routing openly through the mail service for anybody to read and get their mind going in a different fun direction.

I have also considered just making them public on a page, or a page each.

What Would You Do?

If given the following snippets, what would you do with them?

“I am going to need to go to an AA meeting, as I need to understand how to develop a drinking problem, as I think that is the only way to get through this.”

Oh, I don’t cook I just make leftovers

The plague of the minor maladies

They had all the traits of being a non-conformist

beige ficus genre

I lost my site’s 404 page, which seems a little more than ironic

candle lit dinners in the McDonalds parking lot

Podcast Interviews and Presentations the Last Few Years

The last few years I’ve been on a handful things that have been shared out, but I’ve not posted about them. I’ve started to add them to my homepage, about page, and an old media pages. Posting things here, sometimes slips my mind.

The first two are for a company I’ve long been a fan of The Omni Group as I’ve used OmniGraffle and OmniOutliner around the time I picked up my first Mac for myself in 2001. The two products may have been included with the purchase of Mac and were great apps that have been a have been a central part of "the tools I think in" and communicate using. They asked if I would be on to talk about my use.

OmniGroup Podcast

In 2023 I had an invite to talk about my over 20 years of use of OmniOutline and OmniGraffle for the Omni Group’s podcast. (I also have used OmniFocus heavily, but haven’t been using it for a while due to work limitations and I got out of the habit and I haven’t restarted the habit). The interview by Andrew J. Mason with me talking about, How Thomas Vander Wal Uses Omni Software. I really enjoyed this interview as I’ve deeply enjoyed and used OmniOutliner and OmniGraffle for a very long time. I have my full set of Complexity Lenses and sub-elements (Complexity Lenses – An Overview – Personal InfoCloud) (there are now over 100 lenses with over 1,500 nodes altogether). I use OmniGraffle a lot for explanations, diagrams of systems and processes, but also quick graphics to put into Keynote presentations.

OmniGroup Podcast 100th Episode and 30 Year Celebration

100th Episode Celebration with Ken Case - In this I have a short snippet to offer thanks and congratulations to the 100th Episode of the podcast, but also to Ken Case for 30 years of OmniGroup. I was deeply honored to be asked to contribute to this and to be included with so many other wonderful people whose work I’ve deeply appreciated as well for many years.

Seeing Clearly Through the Fog of Complexity - on the Complexity Lounge

In February 204 I did a two hour presentation and Q&A with the The Complexity Lounge to present my Seeing Clearly Through the Fog of Complexity talk. This is a good group and having this available to share is a wonderful asset to have. This is a decent intro to the Complexity Lenses and contains around 12 to 14 lenses touched on during this talk.

Sustainable AI That Has Our Backs interviewed by Jane McConnell

Also in February of 2024 I was interviewed by Jane McConnell for his Imaginize World podcast talking about sustainable AI - Sustainable AI That Has Our Backs — Thomas Vander Wal | Full Podcast Episode - YouTube. This touches on the balance of assistance it can offer, but also some of the troubling areas around it. I started working with AI/ML (along with NLP) in mid–2008, and that background comes into this discussion.

MacSparky Members Only - DevonThink Power Use Overview

I did a deep dive on my DEVONthink use, which I’ve used since 2003 and now has roughly 180,000 objects (in one database) with David Sparks for one of his groups in MacSparky Labs. I don’t have access to it, but it is out there as well. Since 2003 I have tucked away anything I think I may have potential future interest to me in into DevonThink. I’ve been amazed that DevonThink’s incredible search on what is in its database is still solid and quick. But, its most amazing feature to me is the “See Also” tab in its insights button, which when looking at a document it will show you other documents related and its strength of confidence on that relationship. This See Also is incredibly good and has not only found things I wasn’t looking for, but it has drawn connections to things that have been massive lightbulb going on moments and started new idea and paths of exploration.

Spokane Fire Loss

I’ve been monitoring the fires in Spokane, Washington the past few days. There is a very good chance my childhood home there, were I lived for about 18 months or so, is gone. But my grandparents former home is fine.

When I was a kid I’d go to my grandparent’s house for a week or two over summer. One summer there was a large fire on Old Trail and up on the southern hill from the Spokane River. We could see the fire from the porch across the river, but could also see the Old Trail fire ignite trees and flames lick up the tops of trees about a mile or so away on our side.

My first thought when I saw there were fires in Spokane was the Old Trail fire when I was a kid.

This now makes two childhood homes gone (or likely gone) in the last two years, with my junior high home in Pacific Palisades destoryed in that huge fire. It is a strange feeling to lose one childhood home, but two is a little more odd.

With Spokane I don’t have the exact address as the address book my mom kept was lost in a move, but I keep expecting to find it. While she was alive I always knew I could ask her or my dad for certain information as they were my Local InfoCloud resources I would query for certain things. I figured they would always be available to answer the queries. It is more of an interest than a need, but still odd not to have it at the ready.

My thoughts are those who are victims in the Spokane and other Oregon and Washington fires.

The Guideline of Two Things Not to Discuss Is Now Three

The rough guideline for what not to discuss in polite company are (well were) two things: Politics and Religion. This is to avoid arguments and rabbit hole to hell conversations.

It seems there now is a third on this list, AI. I’ve seen a good gathering utterly devolve after AI start coming up. Much of the conversation isn’t well informed (or even partially informed), but there is a lot to know and a lot of different sides / dimensions. Even being well informed on all sides one can still be deeply conflicting for an individual.

AI, as a whole has been around a long time. I started into AI/ML (along with NLP) in 2008 and found it helpful, but found it resource intensive and you had to know quite a bit to use it. In 2008 I figured I was behind. Today it is easier to use, but you still have to know a decent amount around what it is you are doing in what you are wanting to do and know know AI well, to get something decent out.

The current efforts aren’t all they are cracked up to be, vastly over-hyped, and the “creative” outputs are tilting toward meh at best and often best skipped. Many people think the intelligence portion is smart in domains they themself don’t understand well, but not so great in areas they do understand well.

Quite a few times I’ve started to have, what I hope to be a good discussion about all the dimensions of AI (it is vastly more than GenAI) and learned those discussion I need to keep to a few people whom know well, all the sides or many of them.

Hiding Music in Plain Sight

As I was working on something today and had music going in the background I went to switch gears and I swore Apple Music had experienced a stroke and when I clicked to this song:

I clicked play and it fit the EDM style of music I appreciate and it sounded like an artist / DJ I liked, but couldn’t place it. But, I was deeply thrown by the type as it was well outside a Latin character set. Not only was the song and album in this outside the usual character set, but the artist name and label were too. I used the UI and clicked where I should be able to get the artists page in Apple Music and it was the same. But… the information about the artist unlocked it is Four Tet - Four Tet.

The downside is I don’t know how this is searchable, but a friend found a link to another Four Tet album that has used the same character set on the web. But, once I searched for Four Tet I found this Pitchfork review that explained much of of the “why” behind the characters - Pitchfork - Four Tet - Wingding - review. That led to finding it on Wikipedia Wingdings (album) - Wikipedia (James found it about the same time).

I loved the backstory and the reviews, but I still can’t freaking understand how to search for it easily. I have thrown it on a couple playlists, even started a new one with (so far) just it on the list.

Weeknote Considerations

One of the things I deeply enjoy reading each week is other people’s weeknotes. Well, not everybodies weeknotes. I have 4 to 8 different people who share weeknotes that I check in on. It is like getting the weekly catch-up and it is calm and quaint (in the good way). I really like them and I get concerned if they miss a week.

For a while I was posting weeknotes (found with the tag: Weeknote :: Off the Top :: vanderwal.net). I posted 25 of them. They were recaps of things I found of interest and wanted to share in that prior week (or so). I stopped posting them as the timing was tough at the end of the week, but the creation was getting easier as they just were things I’d pull out of my daily notes to myself in roughly the same categories.

Not Sure If I’ll Return to Posting Weeknotes Again

I am really not sure that I will return to posting weeknotes again, but it is a rather Ouroboros-shaped reason. In the past year or so I set up local (on my laptop) search of my own blog, which moved to the Lab - vanderwal.net, and then on to my blog portion of my site.

In searching my own content to see if I’ve posted on a subject before, I would find what I was looking for in a weeknote post. But, going to the post it was buried in the muddle with other things. I also was finding using categories to find related content when it was surfacing weeknotes and I’d have to dig in the weeknote to find the relevance it was connecting to. Both of these bothered me and from a finding, pointing to, and sharing with others perspective. I really think it is a less than good experience.

The weeknote for me was a means to get back to posting to my blog more regularly. I joked that Twitter ate my blog in 2006 (I’ve seen my data and it sure did). Then moving to a better note tool and note making daily that had me writing again in pretty much my old manner like blogging, but I just wasn’t posting. I didn’t complete the workflow for it to be a blog post. I would write and reuse locally, but the next steps in a blogging / sharing workflow did’t happen. A little over a year ago when I updated my blog management tool, that was part of the backend update, that made posting easier and I was posting a little more. But, when I’d look it was a week or more stretches between posts and I’d been writing like I was blogging, but I was my own reader.

Using Blaugust (Going in on Blaugust :: Off the Top :: vanderwal.net) as impetus to get the workflow back part of my habit of finishing the steps is a good thing for posting, I think.

My Notes to Post Workflow

I’ve kept notes in text in a directory since 2003. It started as plain text along with dash or asterisk bullets. That turned into using Notional and then NVAlt at some point. When NVAlt stopped opening I set Obsidian to watch over the directory in June 2020 and I’ve not looked back. I did a quick modification and the notes that weren’t in markdown (I fully shifted my writing to markdown in 2011 when I had a hard drive crash and access to application that wrapped notes made my notes something I couldn’t open for a few days and with my parents passing and needing notes, a proprietary container was no longer an option – actually it is a bad idea from the start).

I keep a Daily Dump markdown note that is structured with sub-headings as prompts and keep notes in there. One of the things I love about Obsidian is the ability to have transclusions, so when I am writing in my daily note, but it makes sense to have it as a stand alone note to reference, or to become a blog post, I just highlight the segment and right click to export that to a new note and it links to with a backlink (think wiki link), but putting an exclamation mark in front of it brings that note into the daily note to show it.

This means I can create a note that has a “blog-shape” to it that started in my daily note. It is in markdown and I have a title on it and other metadata. It lives in my note directory. I click the ellipses in Obsidian’s right corner of the panel to “Show in Finder”. The finder window for Mac opens with the markdown note highlighted. I right click on it (I don’t use a mouse, so double finger tap is actually what I do) and select to open the file in iA Writer. iA Writer is my longer writing app, but also what I review and edit something that I will post (or transform to a more formal document). When that is done I drag the proxy icon for the file in the titlebar of iA Writer to the icon for the Marked app (Marked 3) in my Dock and it opens and I select “preview toggle” and it shows me very well structured HTML (it matches the scripting I did years ago to do much the same, but is much less hassle) then I highlight and copy and paste into my site’s blog management tool, add the title and select categories and it is posted.

The multiple apps all are working with regular markdown all in the same file. I modify something in one and it changes in all the other interfaces. I own the files and they can be opened in any text app or any markdown focussed app. IA Writer I really like for calm focussed writing, reading what I’ve written, and editing. Marked (now Marked 3) just does a nice markdown conversion to very good standards compliant HTML, plus adds the sub-header IDs for anchor links, which I used to do mostly by hand when I ran my own convert to HTML scripts. Marked also can transform markdown to structured Word, well designed PDF, and more, yet I use it for the one simple task.

In my blog management screen, I manually trigger the build of my RSS and then trigger syndication notifications after I have run a manual visual check and test all the links. Once I’ve finished writing it is 2 to 5 minutes to edit in iA Writer and post.

BBC Global Focus on Lina Ghotmeh and Her Architecture

This morning I woke too early to head to the farmer’s market so I hit YouTube (as one does) and found this gem from BBC Global, Lina Ghotmeh: How to design buildings that remember the past. It is about Lina Ghotmeh, whom I didn’t know about before.

The video is wonderful, but the work of Ghotmeh is stunning. It has been a while since I’ve run into a new (to me) architect who is refreshing to hear discuss their work and perspectives, but also sees things differently and that difference make a fantastic outcome. The beauty of flow and space in her work, but also deeply considered understanding of history and cultural context is magnificent.

It has been a while since I’ve heard good architecture discussions, from basics to really good quotable insights.

Architecture has to talk about the environment, it has to talk about context, and to do that, we have to understand that environment in the large sense of what an environment is.

There was a great quote regarding her winning the work to be the architect for the Estonian museum - Lina Ghotmeh — Architecture | Estonian National Museum - and she said the blind review panel thought they were Estonian with how well they understood the culture, history, and environment. That is the sign of good design and development, where the needs and concerns are understood and perceived as those doing the work are “one of us”.

The competition itself was opened in 2005. It was an anonymous competition, so they didn’t know that we were foreigners — they thought we were Estonians.

The discussion of the Stone Garden work in Beirut, Lebanon provided really good insight and creativity to embrace the pained history while easing a means for inspiration for growth and recovery. (Lina Ghotmeh — Architecture | Stone Garden Housing - Beirut)

In 2020, August 4th, there was a huge explosion in the port of Beirut. Stone Garden was one of the first buildings that was hit. It actually resisted the explosion. It was designed to endure earthquakes because Lina did look back at the site, at history, at what was happening in Beirut. In itself, the building embodies resilience.

A term that Ghotmeh’s firm uses is, “archaeology of the future”, which I find to be a really good reflexive perspective while researching, designing, and building something informed for the near now and the future.

It’s about always digging in the place, understanding the context, understanding the client — that takes the form of different research elements, images. Every time you build something, you’re actually projecting into the future. And that’s why it’s an archaeology of the future.

The video wraps with her presentation to the British Museum for the redevelopment of the Western Range - Lina Ghotmeh — Architecture | Stone Garden Housing - Beirut and the outcome of that pitch and review process.

Looking at the Corpus of Work for Lina Ghotmeh

This video has had me digging into the architecture firm, Lina Ghotmeh — Architecture | Paris and going through the volume of work she and her firm have already done. There is so much wonderful work and many insights, that I know I will be returning to it.

Great Art and History Pairing

A week or two back while reading the Financial Times I stumbled upon a piece about The Metropolitan Museum of Art having added Alberto Giacommetti sculptures to the Temple of Dendur room - Giacometti’s fragile figures mingle with the gods at the Met.

I have a strong appreciation for The Temple of Dendur in The Metropolitan Museum of Art room. I think nearly every trip I’ve made to New York City / Manhattan and stayed, I have made a stop to visit this room. My first trip to The City in 1991 I stopped in to see The Met and gave myself around 45 minutes to an hour (yeh, I know) and I wondered through the galleries on a speed run looking for something that would match my (then) art appreciation. After about 15 minutes I went down and wandered into the Temple of Dendur room and was instantly amazed.

There are a few galleries and museums that bring the outside world and inside world into the same space. The Uffizi in Florence has a spot leaving the upper level of the gallery to exit where you look out a window and the Duomo is perfectly framed by the window. My thought was, of course this is included in the gallery, but yet it isn’t. The Temple of Dendur room to me is much the same, but at a much grander scale.

The temple room not only has the temple assembled in it with a water feature around the temple as an echo to the Nile, but the room with its floor to ceiling angled glass wall not only bring in natural light, but provide an amazing view of Central Park. I’ve been in the summer, but the fall and winter views out are amazing. In fall the changing colors come in and are a background blanket of colors and textures that add a wonderful glow to the pace. In winter, when the trees are barren the site is more stunning as the room pulls in the stark nature sketched remnants of trees as a backdrop and part of the exhibit with a bit more of a view of the architecture of The City and its artful glory.

From my first trip to each that followed, I’ve entered the room and been absorbed and it takes a while to get out. The room brings focus and often calm. But, it takes me in different directions with bring drawn in by the inside out gallery view, where the park and The City are fittingly part of the exhibit (as they should be). But other times it is the interplay of now and then across history and time, were I to blink (maybe really hard) would I open my eyes to an other time?

Now with More Elongated Forms

I have long been a fan of Giacometti’s works as the elongated forms seem fragile yet elegant, as well as whimsical as a giraffe. I’ve never sorted the how nor why they pull me in. They feel a little like alien form, but comfortably familiar like your long shadow from a low sun has taken more than a flat form and you can see it from many sides as you walk around it.

But the addition of Giacometti’s sculptures to the temple room seem like a magical fit - Giacometti in the Temple of Dendur - The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The pairing of the elongated forms and the tall elongated passage entrances to the temple and the gates seems like it would add to the magic of the room and space as a natural fit.

I’m really hoping to get to New York to catch the exhibit before it is gone. The bringing the now, to the nearly now, to the ancient versions of now into one magical space.

Going in on Blaugust

The other day on one of the IndieWeb Homebrew Website Club online gatherings someone mentioned Blaugust, which I looked up (Blaugust 2026 is Coming!) and I really like the idea. I’ve been wanting to get my blog writing and posting habit back.

I’m aiming for 31 posts between here and Personal InfoCloud.

You ask if I have content? Hah! It isn’t that I stopped writing it is that my workflow to finish the writing and post is broken. I have more than 31 drafts that just need editing in my blogfodder queue. There are over 100 that have starts as stubs. I also want to get back to working out loud and thinking outloud. I also have lists of ideas for posts from other challenges (IndieWeb Carnival March 2026: Museum memories - with words, wonder trigged a lot of ideas, stubs, and drafts).

The last few months digging into not only my blogs posts over the last 25 years, but my Personal InfoCloud posts, and various social media posts (often looking for something I know I posted, somewhere), I found I like what I posted and shared. My MO for posting is to find others with similar thought and converse, but also to get ideas out. I’ve never chased clicks nor anything else, but I have serious things I have deep interest in and deep curiosity and post that. I also post things that I found helpful and may be helpful to others.

Things posted outside of these two blogs won’t count toward the 31. This post doesn’t count (for clarity sake).

If this sounds interesting and you want to either start blogging, get back to blogging, or dabble Blaugust doesn’t have any number of minimum posts, it is there to just get going, or back going. Check out Blaugust, but also look at the IndieWeb as there are a ton of resources there.