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?

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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 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.

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 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.

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 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).

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 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 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.