With now 7 weeks at home, I this weekend fought the feeling I somehow should have been more productive in the past almost two months. To a certain extent that is true. First as now the deadline for a big piece of writing is starting to loom large, and if I don’t get up to speed now it will be prob...
Category: Read
It’s my birthday. I’m 68. I feel like pulling up a rocking chair and dispensing advice to the young ‘uns. Here are 68 pithy bits of unsolicited advice which I offer as my birthday present to all of you.
… is not really a wiki. It doesn’t follow all the wiki principles. It is more of a notepad-meets-website.
Lovely morning for just sitting quietly in the sun waiting for the birds. And what a difference a bit of sun makes, because these were shot at 1/2000, which certainly helps. Blue tit with a bug in its mouth just before entering its nest Blue tit in flight after leaving its nest in a hollow terracott...
People have written some interesting things following on from the pop-up IndieWebCamp that Chris Aldrich organised a couple of weeks ago. The Garden and the Stream set out to compare and contrast wikis and weblogs and how the two might be used. It was a terrific success, and I’m sorry I wasn’t a...
Nevertheless, the very fact that I am going through my notes reflects a new habit I am trying to build, of setting time aside every week, and sometimes more often, deliberately to tend the oldest notes I have and the notes I created or edited in the past week. Old notes take longer, because I have to check old links and decide what to do if they have rotted away. Those notes also need to be reshaped in line with zettelkasten principles. That means deciding on primary tags, considering internal links, splitting the atoms of long notes and so on. At times it frustrates me, but when it goes well I do see structure emerging and with it new thoughts and new directions to follow. ❧
This is reminiscent of the idea that indigenous peoples regularly met at annual feasts to not only celebrate, but to review over their memory palaces and perform their rituals as a means of reviewing and strengthening their memories and ideas.
Annotated on May 09, 2020 at 07:17AM
As a first step, I started by building an aggregator of all my blog and social activity to my "viewfoil". The goal is to have anybody on any social media platform be able to get a good sense of who I am (and that I am indeed a real person and not a bot/Russian troll). I now have most of my personal sources in the stream, and I've made it filterable by source. Letting strangers see everything I do online is a start, but it's not very social if my site only contains content from me. I want my site to be open to input from others.
Quite a few people showed up for last night’s online Homebrew Website Club and there were a few new faces! We have been hosting these weekly now and trying different things to streamline the process. Here are some notes from the discussions. Participants gRegor Morrill David Shanske Joe Crawford S...
The WELL is a cherished destination for conversation and discussion. It is widely known as the primordial ooze where the online community movement was born — where Howard Rheingold first coined the term “virtual community.” Since long before the public Internet was unleashed, it has quietly captivated some accomplished and imaginative people. Over the last three decades, it’s been described as “the world’s most influential online community” in a Wired Magazine cover story, and ” the Park Place of email addresses” by John Perry Barlow. It’s won Dvorak and Webby Awards, inspired songs and novels, and almost invisibly influences modern culture.
Visitors of this blog might have noticed I’ve moved it from Known to Hugo recently. Doing it without losing IndieWeb features was quite a hassle, I admit, so I felt the need to document the process. Hopefully, my experience will be of use to someone, and even if not, bragging is half of the fun ab...
"Mr CL Pelman in his study" - The Review of Reviews , v.25, 1902 Department of Near-Forgotten Fads. Via discussions at Ptak's Science Bo...
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (a.k.a. Lewis Carroll, author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland) practiced memory techniques. His memory system has some similarities with the Major System but seems more complicated in its letter choices: 1. “b” and “c,” the first two consonants in the alphabet. 2. “d” from “duo,” “w” from “two.” 3. “t” from “tres,” the other may wait awhile.
A companion to Mary Carruthers' earlier study of memory in medieval culture, The Book of Memory, this book, The Craft of Thought, examines medieval monastic meditation as a discipline for making thoughts, and discusses its influence on literature, art, and architecture, deriving examples from a variety of late antique and medieval sources, with excursions into modern architectural memorials. The study emphasizes meditation as an act of literary composition or invention, the techniques of which notably involved both words and making mental "pictures" for thinking and composing.