Indexing is one of my favorite parts of journaling. It’s joyfully tedious. There’s no way to do it quickly, and the slower the better in my opinion. I love going through each page one by one, and copying the gist into the index at the front of the journal. The end result of having a fully indexed journal is satisfying, but even better is the process and getting lost reminiscing in long forgotten memories.
This redesign was long overdue
I have to admit, when I first launched Fed Meetup, I wasn’t very proud of the UX . I pieced it together quickly to meet a need at NASA, and didn’t make the time to go back and clean it up.
But that bad user experience has been a thorn in my side ever since I launched the tool. That’s why I redesigned it from the ground up.
The result is a clean, intuitive, and much more beautiful interface.
I spent this morning writing an outline for a blog post with the draft title: “I spent eight years crafting the ultimate pocket journal setup”. I’ve been wanting to do this post for years, but it feels like it’s going to be a huge undertaking. I care about this a lot, so I really want to do it right and share all the details with more pictures than anyone probably cares to see. I can’t promise it will come soon, but I’m excited to start working on it.
Are you looking in the right places?
This morning I was assembling a Minnie Mouse puzzle with my daughter and all was going well, until we got to the end and realized we were missing Minnie’s phone. “Let’s find phone!” my two year old shouted. And off she went, scouring the house for a little purple phone.
I laughed when I saw the first place she looked.
She walked over beside our couch, lifted up an air vent cover, and peeked inside.
Testing out a new newsletter template. It’s crazy how quickly I can make these changes with Claude’s help.
I found a better way to migrate my Google Photos between accounts. I realized I can use Partner Sharing to automatically “save” the photos to a new account. It makes me a little hesitant, because it says the photos don’t count against my storage quota, so they must still be saved under the original account technically. Apparently, when the photos are deleted on the original account, then they will be saved into the new account that they have been shared with. It smells fishy, but I’m going to try it out. I’m making backups of all photos first before I try it though. I’m really hoping this saves me from all the downloading, unzipping, and uploading 🤞
Thank you to the good people of reddit and UConn for sharing this method. I’m glad I came across this because I was already seeing issues with missing metadata from some of the photos I was exporting from Google Takeout.
Free and unlimited for life...
I got a notification from my old college that I was hoping I would never get. When my wife and I created our Google accounts through Kent State University, they included an awesome promise, free unlimited storage for life. I couldn’t find the old policy for storage, but here is the policy for email.
Kent state university will maintain a students' email account for the life of the student to facilitate communication as an alumnus, or until such time that a former student requests that the account be closed.
I re-inked my Pilot Kakuno with Pilot Iroshizuku fuyu-gaki. I like this orange ink as an accent color for journaling. My main color is a deep blue-black, Sailor Seiboku, in my Lamy Safari.
I love these little rituals that come with analog journaling. I haven’t found a satisfying digital equivalent.
I tried to make a heart but it wanted to be a mushroom instead. Maybe I’ll save all these failed latte art images and use them for Rorschach inkblot tests. Then I could make use of the year that I majored in Psychology before switching to Computer Science.
Sharing all of my book, article, and podcast highlights
I finally got my Readwise Highlights synced into Obsidian in a way that lets me share all my highlights from my digital garden (garden.weidok.al). Take a peek if you want to see the books, articles, and podcasts I’ve highlighted and taken notes on:
Jakes Digital Garden - 400 Readwise Highlights
As I mentioned earlier this week, I’ve been reading a lot more physical books and I haven’t made the effort to save my highlights from those into Readwise.