Notes

Short content: a microblog of status updates or short notes
Wish I had been able to attend the WithKnown Collective meeting this morning. Somehow between the conversation in the chat room last week, the meeting time chooser, and the posting in events.indieweb.org, nothing sent me a notification to know when the actual meeting was finally set. Total user interface fail on so many levels. Hopefully there are some good notes for catching up.
No doubt many have already seen that Springer has released about 500 books for free during the COVID-19 pandemic. According to Springer, these textbooks will be available free of charge until at least the end of July.

A bit of Googling will reveal people who’ve already written some code to quickly download them all in bulk as well. I’m happy with doing things manually as there’s only a handful of the 8GB of textbooks I’m interested in.

Browsing through, I’ll note a few that look interesting and which foodies like my friend Jeremy Cherfas may enjoy. (Though I suspect he’s likely read them already, but just in case…)

In going down rabbit holes relating to wikis for Saturday’s IWC pop up event, I came across Mark Bernstein’s (@eastgate) Storyspace and Tinderbox products from the early 1990’s, and I couldn’t help but thinking that Roam Research (@RoamResearch) is reinventing an old wheel.

It’s all rather similar to TiddlyWiki with TiddlyBlink and TiddlyMaps added as well. While most of these are private note taking tools, I can’t help but wonder if making the data public may actually be the linchpin for adding tremendous value?