Henrik Carlsson's Blog

All things me.

I need your help with finding a system for note taking

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🎧 Listened to: Cortex #33: Cortek

I’ve been taken a lot of notes lately, for my masters studies. I take notes in class and, most importantly, I highlight passages in the books I read and also take notes around the reading. Some of those notes relates directly to the highlighted passages, other notes are more general thoughts as I’m trying to work things out.

As I was reading, highlighting and writing last week I realised that over the course of two years these notes and highlights would grow to a big mess of assorted thoughts that I could never have any hope of organising in my final thesis, or any written exams either for that matter. So I need a better system.

I recalled having heard one or more podcasts where CGP Grey talked about how he handled similar tasks around his research for videos so I googled and found this old episode of Cortex. Around the 44:00 marker he describes his main workflow. Here’s the gist of it

Read ebooks -> Highlight passages -> When done, screen shot the pages with highlights -> import screenshots into Evernote -> Make notes in Evernote

I need to do something similar, but two things

  1. I prefer to read paper books for this. Not a huge problem, but a small change.
  2. Evernote seems like the wrong way to go.

Grey (and Myke) was already upset with Evernote when makes this podcast (in July 2016) and in later episodes that has been mentioned again and again, so it seems like it would be dumb to actually start taking these kind of notes in Evernote today.

So basically what I need is

I’m thinking of maybe some kind of combination of Microsoft OfficeLens for the scan and Apple Notes for everything else, or maybe just Microsoft OneNote for the whole thing. Or maybe save the notes as flat text files (preferably in Dropbox or iCloud Drive) together with PDF scans from something like OfficeLens. In this later case I might not need the OCR on the phone since instead I can use PDFPen on my Mac.

What do you think? Any suggestions?

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Tracking my podcast listening

posted this note on and tagged it with Logging Narrating my work

I’m going to try an experiment. From now and some time ahead I’m going to be tracking my podcast listening (scrobbling, if you prefer) on my blog. Every episode of every show that I listen to will be a blog post in my Listen-of category. Some posts will be nothing but the title of the podcast and episodes, others will contain short comments from me and some might even have really long comments.

The idea behind this is that I, like many other people, listen to a lot of podcasts. I often find food for thought in these and often find myself wanting to have a way of cataloging what I’ve listened to and what was interesting in the episodes. Up until now I haven’t had a good system for that and now, I have a system. Whether it’s a good one or not, time will tell.

For now I’ll let these posts syndicate to Micro.blog but if I feel like they fill my timeline there with noise I might make some tweaks to the backend on my blog to stop them from syndicating.

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Unorganized thoughts and workflows from mixing for VR

posted this note on and tagged it with Ambisonics Narrating my work

This post is much more of a way for me to store my thoughts that to actually communicate anything to anybody else.

Checklist

Other random tidbits

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Surround Sound Apple Compressor 4 i broken. :(

posted this note on and tagged it with Narrating my work Surround sound

One of the sad collateral damages to updating to macOS High Sierra was my beloved1 Apple Compressor 3. Today I bought and installed Compressor 4 instead. I did that for the same reason that I years ago started using Compressor 3; to batch encode surround sound mixes from PCM (wave, most of the time) to Dolby Digital (AC3).

In Compressor 4, this no longer work.

It’s not that it is a deprecated feature, it is that the feature is broken. If I use AIFF files, it does work, if I use WAVE it doesn’t.

I’ve dug around a bit and it seems to be either a problem with Compressor 4.4.1, and it wasn’t a problem in 4.4.0, or it is a problem with High Sierra. The error message says

I’m not a developer but to me that seems like an SDK problem, so maybe it is High Sierra (in my case 10.13.5) that is the problem.

The silver lining is that there is an update to 10.13.6 available, so I guess I’ll do that update and hope for the best. See you on the other side.

  1. Well, maybe not beloved. It actually drove me crazy most of the time but it did get the job done. ↩
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Why I cross-post/syndicate, and why I think it’s a good idea

posted this note on and tagged it with IndieWeb POSSE

For the past few days there’s been a lot of discussion about whether to to cross-post your content to different places or not. I assume much is this discussion bubbles up now because Facebook is heavily restricting its API.

Ben Werdmüller makes a good case for why open source publishing tools such as Known should not spend time developing connections to proprietary APIs that can be shut down on a whim. A lot of people agrees with him and it also seems like many are rethinking whether to syndicate posts to different social networks or not, with most participants arriving at the conclusion that they shouldn’t.

I’m not going to argue against this, but I am going to tell you why I think cross-posting is valuable and something that I plan to keep on doing. Basically, it all boils down to what can be summarized as my mother doesn’t use a feed reader.

In a more broad sense it means that different people that I want to be able to see the things I write, and whos posts I want to read (my family and different groups of friends), use different social networks. My mother doesn’t read my blog. Nor does my fiancé. That means that if I post a cute picture of one of the kids my closest family won’t see it, unless I cross-post it to Instagram.

Same goes for a lot of my friends who have stopped using RSS and instead use Twitter.1

Other people use micro.blog, or Medium or any other site and/or network.

And yes I mentioned micro.blog because to some of us, micro.blog is also a cross-post. I don’t post on micro.blog, I post on my own blog and syndicate to micro.blog. Sure, an important distinction between micro.blog och say Twitter or Facebook is that the former does all the heavy lifting for me. All it needs is an RSS feed. It even sends webmentions for replies, which I love.

So I definitely think that the case can be made that it’s not worth the hassle to support all kinds of different proprietary APIs to cross-post to the latest snapstagram, but that’s about time spent, not about cross-posting being something bad.

Someone brought up the idea that cross-posting is anoying for a person who follows someone on multiple places and while I can see that, the solution is really simple. Don’t follow someone in more that one place, if that someone is someone who cross-posts most or all things.

  1. Note that I currently don’t syndicate to Twitter. That’s simply because I want to keep myself away from Twitter because reading things there only makes me angry. ↩
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Which books should I include in my The Dark Tower reading?

posted this note on and tagged it with Reading The Dark Tower

I just finished the first book – The Gunslinger – in Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series and I immediately started reading the second one – The Drawing of the Three. As those of you who have read the series knows, this is quite a long series but it can be even longer depending on which books I would chose to include.

So that is my question to all of you, which books should I read as part of my The Dark Tower reading?

Of course I will read the seven main books, but then there’s the eight ”The Wind Through the Keyhole” that takes place between number four and five. Should I read this one after ”Wizard and Glass” and before ”Wolves of the Calla” or should I consider it more like bonus material after I’ve finished the main books?

How about other King novels that tie into The Dark Tower, like ”The Stand”, should I intersperse it in the reading of the main series or should it also be considered something extra to read afterward?

Two things to note if you have suggestions for me:

  1. The Gunslinger is the first King novel (or short-story) that I’ve ever read.
  2. I’m currently reading the series in Swedish and I will try to keep it that way. While King is a successful writer in Sweden as well, he is less successful here than he is in the English speaking world. That means not all his books are available in Swedish, so it’s possible that I really like your suggestion but still chose not to read it because it’s not available in Swedish.
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The Gunslinger

posted this note on and tagged it with Books The Dark Tower The Gunslinger

Almost a year ago I listened to Episode 374 of The Incomparable podcast where they discussed Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series. I got really intrigued by the discussion, stopped listening before they went into spoilers and instead I purchased the first novel in the series – The Gunslinger.

These days I’m a fairly slow reader and I have very little time for reading so it has taken many weeks but tonight, on a very hot summer night of what I believe is one of the warmest summers in Sweden in recorded history, I finished the book. I can’t say that I loved it but I am definitely intrigued by it, so I will keep on reading the series. I believe that a lot of the things that are still confusing will be less so as I keep on reading. I also think that this will be an interesting way into the works of Stephen King, which I haven’t really explored at all before reading this book.

Because I’ve gotten into purchasing physical copies of books again, and because I buy books much faster than I read then, I already have four books in the series in my bookshelf.

I don’t think I’ll read more tonight and I’m not sure whether I’ll reading something else before starting book two in the series. Time will tell.

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Allowing rewrite of permalinks on WordPress

posted this note on and tagged it with Narrating my work

Turns out the problem I was having with everything except the front page was due to permalink rewrites not working. It seems three things were incorrectly setup.

First, the WordPress folder wasn’t writable by the www-user.

Secondly, this needed to be done:

You have to edit the Apache conf file (in Ubuntu 14.04: /etc/apache2/apache2.conf) and change the AllowOverride setting from None to FileInfo

<Directory /var/www/>
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride FileInfo
Require all granted
</Directory>

You may need to enable the Rewrite module:

sudo a2enmod rewrite

– Brian Milnes on StackOverflow

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Filtering wp-links-opml.php for categories

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Quick note to self, since I will definitely wonder about this again. If I want to view my list of WordPress links as an OPML (i.e. wp-links-opml.php) and filter for a specific category, the way to do that is to add the ?link_cat=[category id] suffix to the URL.

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Sunrise (Draft 01)

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A first draft on an Eno-esque ambient thing.

A JavaScript application randomizes note order from a list of allowed notes and pipes them to the Web MIDI Api They then enter Ableton Live which routes the MIDI to an E-Mu Proteus/2 that does the actual sound generating. The sound from the Proteus is then treated with delay, reverb and Valhalla Shimmer in Live.

This is very much inspired by the article JavaScript Systems Music and by Eno’s Airports 2/1.

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