A photo of a toy train set from @manton brought back a fond memory: The first time I ever used eBay I was clueless and accidentally won three auctions. The result was enough wooden tracks to cross the whole continent.
My kids were delighted. Now In their mid-twenties, they still have some of that haul.
Old trains.
Currently reading: Wanderlust by Rebecca Solnit 📚
I like walking because it is slow, and I suspect that the mind, like the feet, works at about three miles an hour. If this is so, then modern life is moving faster than the speed of thought, or thoughtfulness.
-Rebecca Solnit; Wanderlust: A History of Walking
Useful Australian software? You’re probably thinking of Canva or Atlassian. And who even knows WiFi is Australian? But my favourite Aussie tool by far is Sublime Text, also made… here in Sydney.
I use it to write my #zettelkasten notes.
James Doyle is a fan too: ohdoylerules.com, and there’s a great discussion on Hacker News.
Torches against pitchforks
There’s a great Dave Coverly cartoon of a worried king looking down from the battlements of his castle at an angry crowd massed just below. His relaxed advisor says, “Oh, you don’t need to fight them - you just need to convince the pitchfork people that the torch people want to take away their pitchforks.”
While the people who always use the correct words in just the right tone use up their wrath on the people who sometimes, in their estimation, don’t quite manage to, the real evil stays focused on growing stronger each day.
PS. a lot of conflict online could be addressed with a simple phone call. Yes, we still have that.
PPS. Did I say torches against pitchforks? Maybe I meant OMG.lol against micro.blog
“Libraries will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no libraries.” - Anne Herbert, The Next Whole Earth Catalog (1980), p 331.
Indeed, what’s more punk than the public library? Flaming Hydra
Create a note system that indexes itself
Niklas Luhmann’s Zettelkasten system exemplifies a self-indexing record-keeping method. It allows efficient organization of notes through associative linking rather than through traditional indexing.
Semantic line breaks are a feature of Markdown, not a bug
The adoption of semantic line breaks in Markdown enhances clarity by encouraging writers to isolate each sentence while allowing for visually appealing paragraph formatting. It’s a superpower I didn’t know I had - until now.
💬 “It was mainly a matter of transcribing and rearranging my notes… My notes were like plans for a bridge. Writing the book was like building that bridge.” - John Gregory Dunne, The Studio, 1968.
Maybe you can create coherent writing from a pile of notes after all. writingslowly.com
💬“Read Montaigne, read him slowly, carefully! He will calm you . . . Read him from one end to the other, and, when you have finished, try again . . . But do not read, as children read, for fun, or as the ambitious read, to instruct you. No. Read to live.” - Gustave Flaubert
Just what is ‘close reading’, anyway? writingslowly.com