Author: abracadabra19

One File to Rule Them All (UPDATE)

A while back I wrote about my desire to keep everything in one big text file. I kept to the system for a short while until the inherent limitations of notepad became an issue. Notepad served well for iterative journaling and noting down what I did during the day but using it for anything else was painful. What I wanted was a wiki. I started using Tiddlywiki again. I love Tiddlywiki and I was able to host a TW on Tiddlyhost. Nonetheless, I was still worried that one day I would come in to work and not be able to access Tiddlyhost because of the whims of the IT Security Gods and then where would I be? In addition, there was the additional problem that I have to work on multiple systems and I cannot transfer html files between systems like I can with plain text files.

I still wanted a plain text solution. I had Notepad and then there was Notepad++ which the IT immortals had deemed acceptable for mere mortal use. Notepad++ obviously has more features than Notepad but many of those extra features come through plugins and, you guessed it, the IT department has it locked to where I cannot install plugins. Back to square one. If I wanted to use Notepad++ as a plaintext wiki system it would have to be with the native features. Luckily, I was researching the topic for the 100th time and discovered that if you set the language to python you can use identations to fold the text. Actually, I already had tried this before but I couldn’t get it working. I was discussing the problem with a coworker who told me that for whatever reason Notepad++ sometimes could not tell when regular expressions began and ended or something to that effect. I started setting a bracket { before each section I want to fold and Notepad++ now knows to fold that section. Eureka! Now I can keep everything in text file. I have different sections for each topic and I add tags which makes finding everything much easier. Currently, I note down every site I visit and I tag the site if I want to return to it. I continue keeping my daily iterative work journal and I have added a wiki section with the topics arranged alphabetically. So far everything works well and I feel comfortable using it. So far I have not found a way to insert hyperlinks to sections within the document but I can live without that feature. I only use this system – if I haven’t already made it clear – at my job. At the house I use Obsidian.

I will continue to experiment with this set up and will post updates as needed.

Tiddlywiki…Again

Over the weekend I was exploring some of the hundreds of docker applications I could install on my Unraid server. I ran across Tiddlywiki which I have used frequently in the past. I decided to install it and play around a little with it.

I have never run Tiddlywiki on a server before and I found that it made using the application a lot more convenient. If you don’t know, at its simplest, Tiddlywiki is a personal desktop wiki application contained within a single HTML file. It is lightweight, portable and extremely flexible. Unfortunately, it has never been easy to save your work easily since every time you time save the file it saves the file as a new single HTML file. For example, if you make twenty changes to the file you will wind up with twenty different sequential versions of the file. It works but it is clunky and if you weren’t careful it was easy to lose your work. The extensive community that has emerged around Tiddlywiki has come up with several solutions to solve this problem including several plugins that allowed one to save your work like a traditional desktop application.

That’s wonderful. However, at work my browsers are locked down and I cannot install add-ons. So in the past I’ve resorted to the built-in save solution. It worked but I still had the problem of syncing my Tiddlywiki information between the office and home. I used to email my Tiddlywiki file to my house every night and that worked until I got lazy or I forgot to email myself.

Using Tiddlywiki again on my server allowed me to save my work easily and reminded me of how much I enjoyed using the application in the past. I found that it kept me more focused when I used the internet because I discovered that I was using the internet more intentionally. I noticed that using Tiddlywiki helped keep me from mindlessly surfing the internet as much because I now had a system where I could keep track of the web sites and information I was reading and accessing and integrate the material into a usable knowledge base.

Since I enjoyed using Tiddlywiki so much I am glad to think I have found a solution to my syncing problem – Tiddlyhost. Currently, on Tiddlyhost you can host your own Tiddlywiki file and access it anywhere you have an internet connection and since it is on a server version you can easily save your work with the click of a button.

There is a lot more I could add but I plan on writing more on this great application in the future.

For now here are some links to some resources to get you started.

Tiddlywiki – The Main Page – Start Here

GitHub Saver

Tiddlymemo

Tiddly Wiki 01 Intro (AKA Offline, No Cost, Flexible, Digital Notes) – Youtube Video

Tiddly Wiki 02 Basic Text Formatting – Youtube Video

George Gilder on Google

“Google’s beliefs and objectives regarding knowledge, George Gilder argues, are political to the core:

The Google theory of knowledge and mind are not mere abstract exercises. They dictate Google’s business model, which has progressed from “search” to “satisfy.” Google’s path to riches, for which it can show considerable evidence, is that with enough data and enough processors it can know better than we do what will satisfy our longings… If the path to knowledge is the infinitely fast processing of all data, if the mind—that engine by which we pursue the truth of things—is simply a logic machine, then the combination of algorithm and data can produce one and only one result. Such a vision is not only deterministic but ultimately dictatorial.”

Rectenwald, Michael. Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom. New English Review Press, 2019. pg 75

One File to Rule Them All

Two things I decided this morning whilst taking my morning coffee.


One, I am going down to one text file for my journal – and for my to do list, and for my contacts, and for, whatever else. I am tired of having dozens of ‘journal’ files and to-do lists spread out over several computers. One file should make it easy enough to backup and share across work and home. All I have to do is email it to myself everyday to make a backup and to access it from my home computers. I want to spend as much of my daily computer time on the while I am work and less while I’m at home so it shouldn’t be a large problem.

Two, I also decided to save time and manage all my reading by using bookmarks. Why do I need to keep up with separate files just to list all of my reading? That’s just extra work and it is dumb.
I will have to sync my bookmarks and as much as I hate it I am going to use my Firefox account to sync my bookmarks.


I tried it out today at work and was happy with the results. I used good ole’ notepad and timestamps to track my daily activity and my to-do list. When I was done it took ten seconds to copy the file into an email. For all my browsing, I simply bookmarked all the sites I visited and put them into a folder. If I need to ever go back and find a site I can easily search my bookmarks with Firefox’s built in bookmark tools.

I was also happy to run across a project that does something similar to what I had envisioned.
This is what it looks like in practice. Awesome stuff as you can see.

Is it Worth Trying to Organize My Online Reading?

I have tried to organize my online reading for a long time. I read a lot online both for personal and professional reasons. While a lot of what I read is junk some of what I read is valuable and I would like to be able to go back and access it again and use it for research purposes. The problem is that I read so much the task of trying to organize the 60-70 articles or more I read on a daily basis is tedious and takes a lot of time and I am reluctant to do it on a regular basis. In the past I simply saved all the articles I read as markdown files. Markdown files are small and I have thousands of them on my computers at work and at the house. I have also tried just saving the URLs to my daily plain text journal. Ideally I would like to be able to collect all the links to the articles that I’ve read on certain issues that interest me and then create a new file on the topic complete with all the references. If I want to explore the subject any further I could write what is in essence a wiki article on it and later publish it wherever. I say ideally. Is this just a fool’s errand and would I be better off deciding on the subject beforehand and then doing the research?

Casting About for a New Platform

One of the reasons I procrastinated so long getting back to blogging was that I wanted to blog on a simpler, more minimalist platform. For a couple of years I’ve looked at a few platforms that I really like such as Neocities, Write.as, Substack, and Bear. Unfortunately, none of these platforms allow search which is a critical requirement for what I want to do with a blog. I like to be able to use the blog like a simple wiki which is what Doctorow is using on his blog. Maybe a reader knows of a simple blogging platform that allows you to search the entries. If you do let me know.

New Internet Protocols

Scott Nesbitt’s Plain Text Project is one of my go-to sites I check every day. Nesbitt also has a couple of other places where you can find him on the web. Every Monday he puts out his Monday Kickoff which is a collection of nine interesting articles. That’s where I found this gem of an article about a man who is creating an internet for the post-apocalypse. He calls his system “the Reticulum Network Stack” and it’s “designed to exist alongside or on top of the traditional internet.

The developer Mark Qvist envisions Reticulum to be “a streamlined communications tool that can be quickly deployed in the case of systemic telecom failure, with minimal lift and a heavy focus on encryption and privacy. All of it is built on the back of an entirely new protocol that aims to be more resilient than IP, or Internet Protocol, which is a set of software rules that govern the flow of information on the internet.

I’ve had a passing interest for a while in alternatives to the world wide web. I’ve looked at Gopher and also Gemini which addresses some of the shortcomings in Gopher. I’ve even tracked Cuba’s homegrown internet protocol:

All very interesting. I’ve got a million things going on right now but I would love to try and get Reticulum up and running. I’d like to see if it as simple as Qvist is try to make it.