I wish I’d stop writing about the tools I use to write about the tools I use.

At the beginning of 2024, I had grand plans to Reduce & Simplify. I was also determined to use what I have. I’ve done neither of those things. It’s November.

I tried for a while. Or rather, I tried a bunch of different times, which had the effect of making everything less simple. Instead of limiting the number of tools I use, I switched from one to another (in an honest but misguided effort to make things simpler). The result has not been the nice, clean, simple set of tools I had hoped for. Instead of having few dependencies and requiring little maintenance, my stuff is spread everywhere and littered with neediness.

I may have solved at least some of my problems caused by taking notes too many different apps. I moved all of them into ~/Documents/Notes, with subfolders per app. So…

├── Denote
├── Howm
├── Obsidian
└── SilverBullet

You’ll notice SilverBullet in there, my newest infatuation. But here’s the trick, I just point the default target for HoudahSpot searches at the enclosing Notes/ folder, and I can find most anything right away.

You’ll note that this means I am restricted to apps that allow me to configure where notes are kept and that they’re kept in some form of plain text. That covers most of my tools. I had been using DEVONthink for this, but it’s been giving me trouble lately so I’m looking at simpler options. I’m digging it.

Derek Sivers posted about how he handles backups and it got me thinking about how I handle backups.

I feel like I’m mostly covered. I use Backblaze on my MacBook Pro for continuous, off-site backups of both the internal SSD and the attached “Media” drive containing my photos, videos, etc. I clone “Media” to a separate external drive once a week. iCloud syncs my ~/Documents and ~/Desktop folders, so that should be covered. The headless Mac Mini is also using Backblaze. The Synology is synced nightly to Backblaze B2 storage.

I’m just coming off a week using Obsidian. Obsidian is really good and powerful and easy to use and extensible and probably the correct answer to the question, “Where should I keep my notes?”.

I love Obsidian for a minute because of what it does and the fact that it’s not whatever I’d been using previously. It’s refreshing and finding new plugins to play with is good fun. But it’s janky. Why don’t more people complain about it being janky? It’s just blech to actually live in. It feels weird and loose and sloppy to me.