While the human brain excells at establishing connections between different ideas, it is not very good at remembering specifics (especially my brain) — quite the inverse of the capabilities of computers. I had to find ways to cope with this while writing my second Bachelor Thesis about Donald Davidson’s philosophy of language and his critique of the Turing Test. Research in Philosophy, especially, requires a lot of reading, doesn’t have an inherent structure, and the goal is often not very clear from the beginning. So a system to capture the read information is crucial to make use of this information effectively. But really in any longer research project or career, knowledge management certainly is essential. Furthermore, before you have written something down, thoughts are rarely ever as structured as they need to be to really understand something. I have long been a fan of the Zettelkasten (file-card box) method as developed by German sociologist and system theoretician Niklas Luhmann. The main idea of this method is to capture all information in notes which are organized primarily through links between them — giving rise to a system which enables you to communicate with your former thoughts. Luhmann describes it as follows:

A Zettelkasten can be recommended as a partner for communication because of the technical-economical problems of scientific work. Without writing, one cannot think — at least not in a sophisticated and connected manner. …But if one has to write anyway, it is prudent to also use this activity to create a competent partner for communication through a system of notes. Niklas Luhmann Communication with Zettelkästen, original quote in German

In this post I want to give you some insights into how this idea has inspired my research and writing workflow using Evernote and gingko. ...

I have to admit that I am a Safari user. Mainly because of battery life and because I don’t like Firefox’s design. I have also never experienced any of the Safari is the new IE issues everyone seems to be complaining about these days in any Development work I’ve done. But while I am usually quite happy with Safari, there is one big annoyance: the new window/tabs page. You can either use topsites, or favorites, but both look very unclean and certainly don’t make it easy to recognize websites. Favorites only displays icons for a few sites and they are not visually coherent. Topsites displays a preview of the site, which end up as login screen for most sites — there are some workarounds for that at least. None of this is really any good. ...

Hossein Derakhshan, an Iranian blogger who was just released from prison after 6 years, wrote a brilliant peace about the state of the web. His unique perspective in comparing the web from 6 years ago to the one today is very insightful. The web is not a decentralized space anymore where people freely interchange opinions and the hyperlink is the main connection, but it is dictated by SEO and Social Media algorithms that lead to masses of click bait articles and premature reviews which don’t contain the content they promise. Hossein writes:

The web was not envisioned as a form of television when it was invented. But, like it or not, it is rapidly resembling TV: linear, passive, programmed and inward-looking. Hossein Derakhshan

This is a must read!

If there has been one constant in social media marketing in the last years, it’s that images rule. So instead of sharing text content it is often a good idea to typeset the text as an overlay inside an image and share that to draw attention. But creating text image overlays in accordance with your corporate design if you don’t have photoshop installed can be a bit of a hassle. But it is relatively easy to style images on the web using SVG filters and to create text overlays. Only how to transform those into JPG files that can be used on social media sites and mailinglists? It’s actually pretty easy with PhantomJS and can be done on basically any shared hosting, with a little coding in PHP and SVG. ...

Static sites are pretty cool. Not just, because they’re so fast, but also because they are pretty intuitive. After all it’s just a bunch of files in a folder structure — just like you know it from your local filesystem. But while they are cool, they also have some drawbacks when compared to database driven sites. One is that it’s hard(er) to generate query driven sites like archive pages by month, year and day or by things like tags and categories. There are a bunch of plugins for that task, but those don’t work well with GitHub Pages. But there are other ways to solve the issue, after all we just need to generate some files. ...

Lance Ulanoff on Mashable pretty much expressed my thoughts on the WWDC 2015 Apple Keynote yesterday:

There was a lot of detail, but when I took some time to consider all that I had seen and learned, I realized that it was hard to pick out the really major stuff. […] Am I disappointed? Mostly, no. I want better working, more efficient platforms. I see the potential in Apple Watch; I want Apple and its third-party app partners to tap into it. I want transit directions in Apple Maps, which we’ll soon have. This was the story of the keynote. Lot of products and territory covered, lots of feature and performance updates across the board — but no breakout hit. Lance Ulanoff on Mashable

Everything was expected. I’m a little disappointed with watchOS2, which brings only overdue features and more useless watch faces without complications — why can’t I get my activity rings together with jellyfish or photos. Swift2 and Transit directions will most likely bring the most change to my life and $15 for a family Apple Music subscription is cheaper than the competition, so maybe it’ll have a chance.

If you are running a Jekyll blog, you might find that simply running jekyll serve to generate all your files is not enough. I for example want to minify/uglify my CSS and JavaScript files and I totaly depend on Autoprefixer. So if you have done some serious front-end Web Development before you probably have used Grunt for things like that — if you haven’t heard of it, go check it out now. But running grunt watch and jekyll serve parallel is really slow, since a change in any grunt-processed file (e.g. your main.scss) will trigger several Jekyll builds, because Grunt will most likely creates several new files which will each trigger a Jekyll build. That’s no good! To solve the problem we will instead handle the compiling for any CSS/Sass and JavaScript/CoffeeScript ourselves with Grunt and only trigger Jekyll builds — also with grunt — if other files change and serve the whole thing with Grunt as well. The basic idea is described here, but I’ll describe a little more complete setup. ...

If you are using Jekyll you probably love writing in Markdown. So do I and over time I’ve really gotten used to so called GitHub flavored markdown (GFM). This adds some nice features to Markdown, most notably: strike-through, checkmarks, tables, and fenced code blocks ¹. One might think that when using Jekyll on GitHub Pages it would be standard to have GFM, but it’s not that simple. ...

This is my new blog. I’ll write here about ideas, work, and experiences. Some of it might be reviews of technology and camera equipment, some of it might be philosophical, some might be about communication and productivity, and most of it will probably be about coding. ...