Soren Bjornstad

Soren Bjornstad

Software developer, tech thinker, information systems designer. See more.

Sabbatical Update, Week 8: tzk and TiddlyRemember

3 minute read

This has been a whirlwind week and quite productive! I finished up with tzk for now and spent a lot of time working on TiddlyRemember, among other things.

If you're currently on Control-Alt-Backspace, you can read this post on Soren's Zettelkasten.

Published

Around the web:

  • First public version of TiddlyZettelKasten (github, CLI docs). This is a version of my own Zettelkasten that others can clone and work from.
    • I also put together a screencast demoing the tool and showing how to get started (about 1 hour – would love to have more focused videos / textual documentation, but this is still in such an early stage of development that doesn't seem like a good use of my time).
    • I'll be putting up a blog post with more information on Monday.

Reading

Finished:

I have not yet completed summaries for my last three books and hope to finish that this next week.

Lifetime reading for September: 1/3 books (hopefully more coming this week!).

Tasks and projects completed

  • Finished and published tzk.
  • Finished catching up on my German Anki deck, somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000 overdue reviews in from the beginning of sabbatical. Moving on to my hardware and systems design deck, with another 600 or so. I said I would add at least 4,000 of these old, overdue cards back in during my sabbatical, so I'm on track.
  • 24 new commits on my TiddlyRemember add-on to TiddlyWiki and Anki, including a number of bugfixes and error-handling fixes, support for encrypted wikis, support for KaTeX math expressions, support for setting initial scheduling information for cards, a warning message if users do things that might cause data loss if they're confused, better support for braces within cloze questions, support for exporting question text from Anki to a text file (in a format in which it can be imported into a wiki), tools for customizing formatting, and maybe some other things I'm not thinking of. None of it published yet, but hoping for a release of some of this next week.

Miscellaneous thoughts and anecdotes

  • I got some new business cards printed through the Walgreens printing service, and the content isn't centered on the cards. I can't tell if their printer messed up, or if their terrible online design tool let me design my cards so that they weren't centered (I'm inclined to say it's probably the second and the problem is partly between the keyboard and chair!). Either way, I have a bunch of off-center business cards, just enough off-center to be annoying but not enough to make it worth tossing them and getting new ones. Oh well.
  • After my first two months of sabbatical, my assessment is that it's underrated and not all that hard to do. I think I'll be happy to go back to paid employment at some point, but I'm not in a hurry and it hasn't stopped being fun to get up in the morning and work on whatever I feel like working on when I feel like working on it…or go do something else entirely. I was remarking that if I wanted to, I could get up tomorrow morning, decide to go to California for a week, drive to the airport, buy a ticket, and be there in the afternoon – and there wouldn't be any negative consequences at all! There's nobody telling me what to do, nobody depending on me to be at a certain place at a certain time, and enough money in my bank account to pull off something like that. This combination of freedoms might never happen to me again, so I'm trying to appreciate it now.

Looking ahead

Next week, I'll be continuing to work on TiddlyRemember with the goal of getting a new version published. I am also hoping to get in one more outdoors trip before the end of the camping season, so I need to do some research and planning for that.

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