Video: 2022-04-24: Zsolt and Jerry (DocDrop)

00:00:00

thank you i appreciate it um and the better if then you can later on share it with me perfect i love that um so so i am i'm not a neither a philosopher nor an

00:00:16

information theorist nor a logician nor any of those things and i don't even play one of those on television but i think we're walking into these very interesting sort of waters of of

00:00:27

the structure of information right and and i'm trying to sort of distill what i can understand from this so that i can come back and step outside and say okay here's a couple of broad categorical

00:00:42

differences between these sets of tools and these sets of tools but i'm not really looking for the differences the thing i'm aiming for is what does a shared memory look like that allows each participant to use their favorite tool

00:00:54

with its representational quirks and still contribute to the shared memory right yeah um very cool so so now i'm good so so let's go back to what you're trying to do because i'm i'm i'm trying to

00:01:07

absorb that that's a little bit more about my context of of trying to figure out how this works partly because what i think i'm doing in the brain is i'm deconstructing documents a little bit and still relying on documents but when

00:01:20

you said the brain is like one big meta document or one big dot it sort of is and sort of isn't and it's it's really interesting to me i i don't fully understand what i'm doing to things to remember

00:01:32

them and hook them up in the brain but i do know that the we the web of interconnections that i get is pretty phenomenal like it's like it is and the other bit i

00:01:44

so i used the brain since something like 2000 so started two years after you and yeah and about two years ago i reached a

00:01:56

point i'm not not very fast you could say where i i simply got fed up with the the close nature of of the brain

00:02:07

i tried multiple times uh to convince harlan of anything and he's not he's not invincible he's just not no no and and i think i think this is going to be the downfall of the of the

00:02:20

yeah somehow miraculously the company's still alive i don't know why um there was a point like 15 years ago where he showed me i think it was the brain 7 and he had rewritten it and and he we did a webex because i was an advisor to the company

00:02:33

he did a webex and he showed me the next interface and he was basically making it so that every time you created a new thought in your brain it would spawn a new folder in your explorer or finder and five minutes into the demo i'm like

00:02:44

permission to speak freely sir and he he sort of chuckles and says yeah i'm like what are you doing you're going to take this non-directed graph thing and you're going to tie it to the stupidest slowest piece of software on my computer i do

00:02:58

not want the folder for every thought in my brain like period and and and so the day after he sent me a very nice email that said it turns out that half the company was trying to tell me what you told me yesterday but i wasn't listening

00:03:10

and he didn't go that way which means he went back to the old interface that we all kind of know and love right that the original one from 98 but but that's the only time he's actually kind of listened to me that's already an achievement though

00:03:25

it's a small victory exactly yeah but so so so i i find that the brain has the best graph view

00:03:37

ever i mean there are so many refused yeah but they're useless in my view the only one that is usable is parent channel jumps and siblings

00:03:49

and then i i don't actually even use the expanded view in the brain me neither nor the mind nor the outline view nor any other view because they're worthless they're worthless yeah there were so this this simple so

00:04:04

so i think in that harlan has hit on something and you know the amazing thing is that the moment i created this overlay on my obsidian wall

00:04:18

and granted i imported all my where i exported and imported my brain into obsidian and i and as i imported it i i

00:04:31

i retained the directed links as well so in the files i had the the uh structure that i could overlay this uh

00:04:43

display or graph view right but the moment i opened it up in a brain like you suddenly things started to click and and and points that didn't quite make sense or

00:04:55

were disconnected in my mind i could suddenly start to put together and it provided me a a an absolutely different level of experience using obsidian

00:05:08

obsidian so let me rewind for just one second because the sentences that you said out loud there i've never actually said out loud but i've kind of believed them but because i'm not a graph theorist or a topologist

00:05:19

or god knows what i'm i'm almost like i don't want to diss all the other displays etc etc but i look at the other ones look like big circles of text like your eye can't parse big circles of tests three three-dimensional clouds of

00:05:31

text ah the rubber band effect which is the best i knew before i ever saw the brain was like rubber band kind of view where [Music] and that's what i thought i wanted was let's let things be close to things like in the game of go where you place the

00:05:44

stone really matters and it turns out you can throw all these things overboard because this brain organization in its simplicity has this tremendously generative um structure that that really

00:05:56

works for me as well so i i completely agree with your statement that that this this one way to organize for some reason seems seems superior to the rest yeah yeah or whatever

00:06:08

it is crazy indeed and and to the extent it's interesting so in in obsidian someone uh yeah the call name is skeptic mystic but

00:06:20

of course that's not the real name someone created this plugin called breadcrumbs breadcrumbs yeah and and breadcrumbs differentiates

00:06:32

parent child sibling and previous and next so instead of four in the brain which is parent child jump and sibling

00:06:45

it it has the jump so the lateral move has these two directions of of next and previous right um i uh

00:07:01

regardless i i chose to just to do my craft display using the the jump et cetera so the the brain paired i'm probably i'm uh also

00:07:14

too much yeah yeah settled on this being the the the best view but but also i think because you could imagine that looking at or thinking in the brain context you

00:07:30

could actually uh view this that on the left hand side you have to the the previous on the right hand side you have the next and then you have the parent child and you can still

00:07:42

have the siblings and the in the distance that i mean could be but you know if if i want a previous next relationship

00:07:55

um i usually just simply use the parent-child relationship right um and it's sort of it's contextual right i mean i have all the popes in my brain because on wikipedia for every pope page

00:08:08

it says previous you know previous pope successor and so and there's a couple schisms that get really confusing but i had i put all the popes in and i was using down as you know dissent basically parent child for inheritance of the of

00:08:21

the title of the position and that makes and it makes sense in that in that context and then in other cases you go sort of upward uh and and because you're building sort of conceptually and each of us might make a different choice about how to use the relationship but

00:08:34

the relationship you appropriate it to make sense right we're just we're just sense making um and that works fine a different thing about previous next that's really interesting to me is that one i used to use prezi a lot

00:08:48

which is a hungarian company and i used to love prezi and i paid them for you know for the service and all that and then they've re they've redone the prezi interface twice one time they made it look more like powerpoint so it had a slide deck and

00:09:00

all that but they preserved the endless zoom this last makeover like a year and a half ago they seemed to have destroyed what made prezi interesting and my prezi was my favorite storytelling tool

00:09:12

because i could i could i could craft a path of previous nexts i could craft a path through a prezi that i couldn't really do in the brain and so since prezi sort of lobotomized itself or committed committed software suicide in

00:09:26

my eyes i've gone back to screen recordings on the brain recording stories in in the brain and the problem with doing storytelling in the brain is that i know where the red thread is of previous necks that i'm

00:09:38

going to go through for this particular story i know where that thread lies but when i'm showing it to other people they're seeing everything that i've ever connected to that thought as i've crafted it show up and i can't get rid of a bunch of the

00:09:51

stuff that's distracting right because the brain doesn't do that which brings in a conversation i also want to have but a little bit later about how might one use a brain-like interface for storytelling

00:10:03

which i think is a really important aspect of this and different from because previous next depends on context previous next is not i don't think it's an attribute of the node i think it's an

00:10:15

attribute of the story you're trying to tell at the time and then this node might be a next and a previous and and you might use the same node and tell a very different story from me and that's excellent that's excellent right but the previous

00:10:28

and next is going to depend on on it's another layer it's not i don't think it's inherent to the node and i might be misunderstanding how previous next works here no i i i i i didn't title previous next

00:10:42

because i for me it didn't click i thought or or rather i would say that i think previous next adds a level of complexity which makes

00:10:53

the methodology bulky instead of simple to understand because simple easy to understand lateral already a bit fuzzy what you call a lateral

00:11:08

relationship but but i think i i can still still get the idea that you're jumping from one hierarchy to the other that is sort of a a a

00:11:21

lateral relationship right previous next is just the same as parent child in the given context right now i'm not sure if you've seen my work on excellent wrong a little bit i haven't i

00:11:34

haven't i haven't had the time to actually watch the whole but i'd like to yeah i mean there's plenty to watch and it's not so enjoyable to watch but do you mind do you mind giving me a

00:11:47

little bit of a cook's tour yeah so so so you mentioned prezi yeah and so the biggest gap i felt with the brain

00:12:00

was not being able to make it more visual yeah so for me the brain is great but indeed you can get lost in the structure there's sometimes too much information

00:12:14

if you will text is a bit um dull so i i think picture speaks a thousand words i think it's absolutely true

00:12:26

so so when you want to um quickly digest the information text might be not the right or not the best tool though i also agree with uh yeah

00:12:38

with the notion that if that that writing is thinking so if you're not able to express your thoughts then you actually don't have thoughts uh yeah it's my view that these two things

00:12:51

go hand in hand but what i'm doing with excalibur is i it's fully integrated into this

00:13:02

forward link backlink etc obsidian environment and what you can do is you can of course add links to

00:13:14

drawings so you can link one drawing to a document or to the next drawing you can add links within the drawing so you can jump from one area in the drawing

00:13:26

to another area in the drawing you can embed drawings into one another so you can actually a have reusable pieces of drawing so for

00:13:38

example you have something that is a visual representation of a fault and you reuse it in the drawings

00:13:50

then that becomes uh the same parent-child relationship as in the brain just you so so the whole idea that i'm up to and that is where i think the

00:14:03

obsidian [Music] i now call it x-coli brain uh because technically it is also based on the the the user interface or the graphical

00:14:15

interface of exclude raw is is that so so i can create the same interwoven linked structure with drawings that i can with

00:14:34

the text but there's no but and on the top of it now i can add a brain like maybe i can show you just my microphone

00:14:50

on the pc died a couple of weeks ago i never quite fixed it and now so let me let me just join this call from my desktop as well okay

00:15:04

and then i can show you something which is what i'm working on right now so launch meeting open zoom and right now i i'm on

00:15:25

launch meeting come on so what's going on i've already launched it and join without the video and

00:15:38

now no audio that okay okay so ipad if you plug in earphones will that fix will that bypass your microphone problem

00:15:58

if you put in earbuds like i've got i i don't well well well well so actually it's not only the camera is in an awful position but otherwise the voice i mean you tell me if the voice is good

00:16:11

i hear you're fine i hear you just fine and then hopefully that is all good and let me open my cool yes there's there's also another tangent we

00:16:24

can follow some other time about post literacy and his text you know danny hillis i think somebody like danny hillis famously gave a talk years ago that text and writing is just a temporary hack that humans invented and that we're going to enter some new world

00:16:38

where we communicate more visually or something else and i've never i've never seen a visual language that actually is consistent and communicates properly the way actual words do so i'm

00:16:48

i'm very skeptical of that approach be skeptical on that statement if you ask me i don't buy that yeah so let me know i have this open let me share my screen

00:17:02

share and that said aborigines have a 60 000 year old oral culture that seems to work reasonably well so all right so now what you're seeing here is excellent

00:17:16

draw in obsidian yeah and so i have some links here so sorry when you say excalidraw in obsidian i'm not actually sure what that means so excalibur draw is a web-based

00:17:29

drawing tool [Music] is it open source it's open source yes indeed and so i also started to contribute in the open source project fabulous

00:17:47

it's uh yeah it's actually a very good or i think a very practical simple drawing tool okay now what you see here

00:17:58

is if i switch here to so-called raw mode then you see that these are all links on the drawing but let's see that's not what i wanted to click if i switch back then you can see

00:18:11

that and it was a bit ugly you can also see that these are links yep if i hover a link then you can see that the link opens where it's going to go

00:18:24

where the answer leads to yeah exactly and and this links leads to another drawing in this case uh i can also click the link and then the other drawing opens now these are

00:18:38

actually drawings and lots of images so it's a bit slow and i haven't sorted that but of course it's it's more timely than when you don't have that amount of images but what you could

00:18:51

see here these are all images that are embedded here so these are if i click this i can go on to the next of my drawing and and so

00:19:05

i think this already demonstrates this this for mode of navigation but now if i open my brain view on this and

00:19:17

then you can see that i am i am here on this latch time and i i can actually move from here to maybe back to the

00:19:32

timelines with x call it raw and if i so i'm now on if if i minimize this then you can see that this is now

00:19:44

actually a document that i opened but if in the document i don't know i click on this drawing then you can see in the corner in the meantime i'm navigating my

00:19:57

brain as well and i can go to my visual thinking frameworks drawing or page and fear right wait i mean what did you just do so

00:20:10

i don't see anything attached to the thought in your excalibrane called visual thinking framework so i didn't expect that you were navigating to a document as well or a drawing as well but you were how does that work

00:20:22

yeah so so these are all documents yeah so this is this is leading me to a document i can give types to these and again so this is my p

00:20:34

or c so a it's slow and b there's lots of issues with it but so you can see that this is a file that is a drawing yep and is is that the one that's on the

00:20:46

upper left no so the upper left is the visual thinking framework okay gotcha this is a document and this document has two forward links the two forward links

00:20:59

are actually why why why is this the i'm just trying to figure out what oh because these are not these are internet links so these links are these look like

00:21:15

so this actually has two items two links in the document those are the two children yeah and those are the actual and i think i have the attachments turned off in my settings so

00:21:29

then it's a in this case if it's a png attachment it doesn't show if i turn this on let me just turn it on and show you if i want to show

00:21:42

attachments as well i would like to not hide attachments but i want to show attachments and let just regenerate this i show attachments then you can see that

00:21:56

this file has a couple of attachments so these pasted images three pages and these are the two files in here so that's making more sense to me

00:22:09

now because i'm seeing a mapping between the objects right and then i have backlinks pointing to this document and those backlinks come from so in these

00:22:24

in these files i'm making a reference to the visual frameworks yeah that's beautiful and then now then the calendar event is an appointment so that's that daily note

00:22:36

page that is saying this and in this very moment i don't so so we can we can also do this so this is my daily notes page and let me just

00:22:49

add this that i'm going to make this a jump and now if i navigate back and these are some of the things that

00:23:01

now automatically refresh but for in this version now you can see that as i defined the relation type then i can i can make this a jump instead of a

00:23:16

appearance if if i add the additional context in my document i can i can transform it into the type of relationship i want and i actually

00:23:27

now also have it almost working that also um so i have let me just show you in the settings though this might uh

00:23:39

here at the bottom so i have this this json that explains that my downward direction i'm using the words down children child tomorrow and

00:23:51

see up on using parents parent yesterday up this week p and john can be jump jumps j previous pre pray of next created

00:24:05

all sorts of keywords that i use to in the text depending on the context whichever makes better sense now what i can also do is

00:24:17

though i didn't quite use it very often in the brain but similarly similarly to styling tags based on their styling

00:24:29

thoughts or documents in this sense based on tags because so so the way this is the reason this has this little calendar icon here

00:24:41

is because this page has this tagged daily notes page and in my configuration here i configured that

00:24:56

that's now stuck there but i configured that that the daily notes page should have this prefix yeah so i have i have this definition now similarly i'm thinking that i can do the same for links

00:25:10

by different type of links if i have a jump maybe that's going to be a dashed line if i just have a j then that's going to be whatever else so

00:25:24

that i can i can also play with how these lines will show up yeah but what i wanted to show you is coming back to so if i open up this

00:25:35

and you can see here now this is even even busier so all of those images that you see there which will load in a moment but at this yeah so you see

00:25:50

it loads um these are all other drawings and so this is in a big summary i'm thinking to create something like a visual

00:26:03

personal knowledge management uh course and these are all the topics that i would cover there talking about various learning approaches like image inclusion

00:26:16

and creating books on a page or so big sketch notes or using visual pkm for organizing i love the latch principle by richard salwar worman

00:26:29

i think that is what does he say i don't know i know a woman but i don't know so he has this book information anxiety yeah actually in two versions or two

00:26:41

two releases one in 88 and i think the other is in 2000 and in there he makes this statement that whenever you're in organizing information there's

00:26:54

really only five ways that you organize the information alphabets time categories and hierarchies it's in my goddamn brain and i don't remember that it's in my brain and okay and and

00:27:07

i actually believe that this is absolute and this is one of the areas where the brain isn't that good it is not bad so in the brain i had my

00:27:19

location hierarchy i had my time hierarchy i had of course my categories which are more default types and then i had the normal hierarchy which is the brain itself and

00:27:32

alphabet is the search capability of the brain right but the place where their obsidian shines is let me just open

00:27:44

math view because and then they're digressing a bit but in obsidian i can actually navigate to documents based on location

00:27:57

so i can add a location to a document and you can see that this this uh document will or this uh this file will have

00:28:13

so i um i'm accessing my my data in a different way and now if i open this in my brain view then you can see that this is actually linked to

00:28:25

the slovenian caves i can navigate to my slovenian caves and i can uh yeah this was actually a

00:28:38

i think yeah there's not so this is an imported file from the brain yes and also the brain imports so you can see that the source here

00:28:52

in this case is from my old brain but but so i think that the trick here or or the amazing possibility is

00:29:04

if i look at obsidian is for example how i can link this to a proper map and geocoordinates to my

00:29:19

my documents and then use a map to reference it in the meantime i can still have my old brain children parents jumps

00:29:31

it's just two different ways of looking at the same sets of data oh and then then i can open up the calendar view and then that will give me a uh i'm actually

00:29:44

not [Music] yeah i found that to be less helpful like my calendar link is linking to my daily notes yeah but uh

00:29:59

but you can add a proper calendar view uh if you want so yes i think the idea is you can access your information in multiple ways but then if we look

00:30:11

right at uh we can come maybe oops that's not where i wanted to go yeah i think this is going to be let's close that one

00:30:25

let's close this but but what i wanted to show you is is this the the way that i can link images into other and i navigate based on those images but also

00:30:39

bring them into a brain like view right and to the extent that if i believe that one of the items here shouldn't be a child but

00:30:52

should rather be a jump then i can i can also even in in my drawing i can switch over to my markdown view

00:31:03

and you see i have so this is the same drawing and here's the the here are all the links in the drawings and here's the drawing itself the i mean the drawing in terms of the

00:31:16

json the script yeah but here at the top i again add my uh my explicit references that will then drive my brain

00:31:30

view here but i am actually including all of this in this drawing sort of format and then the links in the drawings you can point

00:31:44

to locations within the drawing from one location to another which i think is also yeah it is your prezi-like experience in when it comes to linking inside the

00:32:00

inside the drawing exactly and are most of these files markdown files just simple markdown um except for the image files and everything else of course the other browser is

00:32:13

is a markdown file in the end but yeah so so you could say this is not your your typical markdown file because it's a bit automatically generated but yeah but i think again

00:32:26

the very interesting thing here is i have these so each of my text elements on the drawing have a block reference

00:32:38

and i can take this block reference so if i take this block reference so this is my storyboard visual training and let's open

00:32:50

today's daily note and if i come here i can actually maybe it's going to be faster this way if i don't i'm just going to drop this in here and

00:33:06

i'm going to oops i didn't need that i can add this and i can you see wow so this is now from that drawing right and

00:33:23

and and i can again the the the the boundary between a drawing a mind map that becomes

00:33:43

uh blurred because if now i use them daily right let's just come here and maybe i could change it right here but that's for the sake

00:33:54

of fun let's let's change it here and i'm going to search for it so i used them they were searching inside the drawing

00:34:06

now for that phrase yes exactly and that was not a very uh i need to put that yeah the the words weren't distinct enough yeah let's begin

00:34:18

so and so if i'm just going to put here an exclamation mark just just for the purpose of demonstration and now if i'm back to my daily notes page then obviously the exclamation mark

00:34:37

appeared holy beans i click on this then it will take me uh on the drawing right to the text yeah so if i have a reference it will

00:34:49

drive me immediately to the place on the text and by the way as we talk i can now see that there's an additional thing that i need to add

00:35:01

to my brain and that is to break or to add the option that i can break a so right now

00:35:15

i have this option and then you will understand i'll get to the point so now i have this setting here weather to

00:35:26

i already a bit messy yes so i already selected to not to hide attachments i can set this background yeah attachments or non-markdown files right

00:35:43

and that makes that makes good sense to me thank you yeah and i can also uh on click to infer or not infer non-breadcrumb links actually the

00:35:56

breadcrumbs links are or the explicitly defined hierarchies if you will so if i unclick this and then regenerate this page

00:36:08

then i'll have much fewer items here because now i'm not showing all the links i'm only showing the links if i collapse this i'm only

00:36:20

showing the links that are explicitly defined at the top right so if you don't want the noise you can reduce the noise level now what i'm thinking as we

00:36:32

speak is by the way there's another voice filter that i could add to that the backlinks too is uh i could also pull out all the block preferences right

00:36:45

because if i have something referenced as a blog that's again pulling out information or detail from innova these are also children of the document because for some reason i

00:36:58

highlighted them yep explicitly um so so a couple things and if you can close down the screen here for a second um just so we can so we can talk

00:37:10

um you're doing this for fun by yourself what like like what what's your yes i wish i knew how to install i found

00:37:20

stop sharing oh there we go good good um so because this is something that i was i've been looking for for the last 20 years and i gave up

00:37:35

looking for it so i i decided that this is not gonna happen if i'm not going to build it because if in 20 years it didn't come by then that's not i tried this

00:37:46

and i actually had similar capabilities built or around the brain as well right and this would all be within the brain if that would be an extensible if it had

00:38:03

any sensible architecture yeah yeah um and so so in and i i ended up using obsidian because to me obsidian

00:38:16

is like this operating system for for linked documents interesting it has a programming interface that provides

00:38:28

lots of lots of ways to access and manipulate data and it provides the basic indexing and the environment that then you can use as a

00:38:42

as a platform for building plugins and i think that the whole community is a testament to that i think there's almost there already we are approaching 500 plug-ins so

00:38:55

that's [Music] that's pretty good 545 plugins as of right now that are registered in the for

00:39:07

wow and i just saw that excalibur is doing pretty well the fifth most more most popular plug-in oh interesting among obsidian plug-ins

00:39:24

among the 545 yes interesting is there a um ios or android version of the excalibur well of obsidian and with excalibur yes

00:39:37

okay so then you install obsidian yeah so so if you so so so here's the the the the the additional value of x collector in obsidian

00:39:48

is it works fully offline or without uh so so you have a fully um local

00:40:00

environment if you want which could be interesting for sake of just information security or based on your location or needs to access your data privian has

00:40:12

an awesome sync service which takes care of so i i use obsidian on my phone my ipad my work last night i just found obsidian on my ipad so i'm

00:40:26

going to install that fascinating okay okay so so let me tell you most of the plugins will work without any issues uh on an ipad the

00:40:39

excalibur plugin works quite well i i've done some enhancements too right you support the pencil whatever so so you can even that was another issue i

00:40:52

had with the brain yeah in handwritten notes and attaching it yes you can do it in an app and then import it as an image but then if you want to change it especially on a mobile

00:41:06

on their mobile search inside for the moment for me i have that on the develop on my my my list of to-do's and there is

00:41:20

also a guy who has a ocr plug-in and obsidian and and there and discussion so from a

00:41:33

technical implementation perspective i have everything right right if it says then in about one day i can release the the enhancements required to

00:41:47

um to index all of your expert i mean the handwriting and the pictures on the drawings which which will make it even more accessible so

00:41:59

are you on an open source path with all the stuff you're creating or i think is open source i love that um and do you know pete kaminski so so i i'm pretty sure the reason i know

00:42:13

you is that pete mentioned your work and pointed us to some of your videos um in my community open global line the thing not my community the community i started two years ago that i'm kind of like a motive force for

00:42:27

and pete i've known for a very very very long time he is an uber geek he is the reason i've been using markdown and he was one of the founders of social

00:42:38

text which was a commercial wiki vendor into corporate environments back back a while ago i can look up sort of the years that social text existed but

00:42:51

he and a bunch of sort of friends that connected through retreats that i was holding formed this company social text and they they sold wiki you know wiki services for a while until that didn't really work and social tech got bought up by a

00:43:04

different company and and and pete went off on his own but but pete's been kind of reinventing the wiki on markdown and so we're using we're using github and markdown files in order to do we're using github for the version control

00:43:17

that a wiki would normally do and then funny enough um in some weird way massive and it's called massive because uh it was an acronym originally which was multiple

00:43:29

shared version files m-a-s-v file that's what he was doing right um and so and and so there's kind of no wiki front

00:43:41

end to massive wiki like like you use obsidian or hackmd or whatever whatever will edit you know markdown is what you kind of use as a front end which means you have to train people up you have to link their obsidian over to github you

00:43:54

have to teach them how to push and pull yeah there's a whole bunch of like crusty stuff that anybody who wants to use this wiki needs to to learn up on which is someday hopefully that sort of melts away you know and gets easier but um

00:44:08

there's a whole bunch of interesting experiments we've been doing and uh so we're we've been trying to use massive inside of open global mind to build up websites and stuff uh he created a website he did a a

00:44:20

static website builder basically so you can take a directory or a vault out of massive wiki and say turn this into a website that works so if you go if you go to openglobalmind.com

00:44:34

that's that it's a really brutally simple site because we're using that feature uh of massive wiki basically the the static site builder i say all of that because we've been

00:44:46

kind of bouncing along for two years now since lockdown which is when when ogm started um trying to figure some of this stuff out and not making nearly as much progress as you're making and i would love uh i would love to

00:45:00

i would love to connect you to our community i think like the ev so ogm has a couple of standing calls every week on thursdays we have a call um that is our community call so

00:45:11

thursday mornings at 8 a.m pacific the same time we started here um every week we just have a usually like 25 people show up and we alternate formats between check-in which means i

00:45:23

go around the gallery view and just say what what what's happening in your life that's a little bit like ogme and then the other time the other weeks we have a discussion about a topic and you know sometimes we're trying to save the world sometimes it's other

00:45:35

sorts of things but on mondays and we i move these calls later on mondays but maybe we need to make them earlier to bring to make it easier for you to join but on mondays at 1 pm pacific we have the free jerry's brain calls

00:45:48

which is this the geekiest corner of ogm and and everybody who shows up for for the free jerry spring calls would would understand what you're saying and and you would have a peer group of people who are like on the same sort of

00:46:02

quest so so i kind of wanted to i wanted to describe ogm invite you in and see you know if that might fit um i think you're building complain ogm is all about building open source components to feed

00:46:14

the commons to the whole the whole mission of trying to create ways to help humans share what they know right or for hopefully higher higher order reasons like maybe world peace but

00:46:26

hey you're right that's too it's a little ambitious um let me tell you a second story which is years ago when i lived in berkeley a friend of mine had another wiki called seed wiki which you will no longer find

00:46:39

because he had to defecate it he had to go back and just do paid work to make a living not enough people were using seed wiki uh his name is kenneth tyler he's lovely uh he knows uh he builds

00:46:52

model ships and other sorts of things he knows way too much about military history so i've learned a whole bunch from him but he and i were experimenting with seed wiki where

00:47:03

we made seed wiki act like powerpoint and like a weblog and this will probably make complete sense to you but for me presentations like powerpoints are just playlists of pages and so what he did was he programmed a

00:47:16

tiny bit of seed wiki so that there'd be a table of contents page for a presentation on the table of contents page would be a list of all the pages you want displayed in order and then a play button and when you

00:47:27

press play it would go full screen and that so so i have lots of things on my to-do list i i also have a video demonstrating some of this but indeed so

00:47:40

i have this idea that again obsidian x college raw if i have a series of drawings and i have a playlist file

00:47:55

actually transforming it into a presentation is a few minutes of programming to to include it but yeah so it's

00:48:07

always the issue of doing and hopefully i have significantly more ideas than exactly than time and then time okay so um

00:48:20

so kenneth and i did powerpoint which means that look at you know you go left you have left right arrows and full screen and suddenly it looks like powerpoint smells like powerpoint but you and i know about prezi and so that would be an alternate way to use the

00:48:33

same set of tools you could go prezi style instead of powerpoint style and that would mean a couple different things but it's still a path it's still a previous next you know what is what is your playlist of topics then we created

00:48:45

a blog by um he created a page that was the landing page for the blog and all that would do is say look at the wiki namespace look for any hashtag that tells you that that page should be on

00:48:56

this blog take the timestamps sort them in blog order and then put this matter between the different posts so that it looks and smells like a blog except now instead of every page floating off every blog entry floating off into the

00:49:09

bitbucket every blog entry is actually a durable page on the wiki which it always should have been right and and and so and so that kind of blurs the distinction between wikis and blog pages

00:49:23

and presentations in a really productive way because one page could actually exist in lots of different contexts it could be a website page it could be a page in a presentation it could be a page on a blog entry it could be whatever whatever whatever and suddenly

00:49:36

with markdown and some metadata this gets really interesting and really powerful really quickly so um so i had a conversation with i've been trying to figure out how to fund all

00:49:49

this stuff for a really long time and i think i might have found some funding so um i'm trying to figure out what does that what shape does this project have that makes the funder happy and plays out some of the things that you and i

00:50:02

are talking about here so i'm trying to i'm trying to put some shape around that and figure out what it is and it feels like the things that you're building are precisely exactly the kinds of things that i'm interested in folding in and so i'm just sort of

00:50:15

saying is this interesting to you how do we talk about it like that kind of thing yeah so so [Music] it is very interesting what you you've just explained

00:50:27

um yeah so so my primary reason for working on all of this is to build myself the tools i want

00:50:41

because i gave up waiting this means i agree with what you're saying by the way yeah so um having thought about so i i definitely get the idea of big

00:50:56

uh multi-user multiplayer knowledge crafts and yeah like the wiki um to some extent that is not my primary

00:51:08

interest i'm i'm much more interested in in building sort of my personal wiki or for school your your personal tool that does all these different types of things

00:51:21

and also i've so the excluder has lots of settings it is not your dumbed down or not excluder itself is extremely simple and and i think the the

00:51:35

the community or the developers only index college or the package have done an excellent job in keeping things simple

00:51:47

my plugin is not simple it has pages and pages and pages of settings and configurability and

00:51:58

and also some coding involved in in making it work and indeed you mentioned uh pulling and pushing to get etc might be difficult well

00:52:10

in a way my mindset is if you want to be effective you need to learn some of these things and then it's going to work so i'm not a full believer of

00:52:22

of or it's not so much the question of believer but it's a question of uh time and effort required to make something uh that is simple

00:52:35

and intuitive right uh is is difficult by the way i think i'm i'm even on the point that i'm not not fully fan of oversimplification so

00:52:47

ios i at because there's a powerful device and your hands are tied because of all vendor limitations i'm much more

00:53:01

a desktop guy who or say an android one that i have more configurability um but yeah so so overall the thing is

00:53:14

interesting so so um i think if you dive a bit deeper into obsidian that is exactly what you've explained is i think

00:53:25

the amazing power of obsidian so it is operating system for markdown documents right right everything included anything you you name it

00:53:37

there is going to be now a plugin for that you have full uh query uh ability of the the graph so i i didn't go into

00:53:50

this now but i i in my normal business life i take my meeting notes in obsidian and i just record my tasks and that was

00:54:03

another issue with the brain it was always crappy at managing i mean there were gtv related but it's it's completely useless for gpd i tried it it's it's

00:54:16

so before before pandemic or somewhere in early pandemic three black belt brain users got together on zoom i was one of them and we sort of shared how we were using the brain and it turned out we were using the

00:54:28

brain in dramatically dramatically different ways one of them was a gtd guy who was using every one of the brain's advanced features and some macros and other stuff and i'm like okay i understand gtd i've been to a david

00:54:40

allen training so show me how you use the brain to create it and he did something that made no sense whatsoever to me i didn't at the end of what he did i was like thanks okay i didn't see a gtd setup it

00:54:55

didn't make it like i was like wow is that what you do it's crazy it is so so that was my very first integration

00:55:06

let me just see if but probably i've already destroyed that unfortunately i need to look for bob the builder

00:55:19

but because i want to show you this this is it's just on the power of the builder risky

00:55:31

of the builder here he is yes ah this might actually work so so this was let me share my screen but this is my demo

00:55:43

uh vault that i use for for um videos and stuff all right so this is bottle builder and i think yes so

00:56:04

what you can see here is a meeting minute with bob actually if i come here to the calendar page then you can see that on this day i had the meeting on project b

00:56:19

and uh and the discussion in the discussion there was some side discussion with bolt and whatever

00:56:30

what i want to show you is here within the text i have this action if for whatever other reason i land on box page then

00:56:43

mock the dump truck uh then on his page i will see the different areas from where i have actions right and if i come navigate to

00:56:57

this page and i can see that this action was actually recorded yep right here and so what what this is here this is uh a

00:57:08

plugin called dataview uh-huh and this is all i have so this is the very simple script where i look for the file name of this

00:57:22

page and i call the task list function in data view and i match the task list has includes the name of this page

00:57:35

and so the powerful thing here is that if i go to the project a page then i will see the same action for my but for

00:57:48

project a because here project a is also in the page and and for me this so this is like the the wiki you mentioned so so with data view

00:58:00

i'm able to connect my data in in ways that so so yeah it's exciting i mean i i think this is amazingly powerful and then on top of

00:58:15

this if i put my brain and this one is the new ex colic brain plug in and where the heck is it and why doesn't it open also is a big

00:58:29

question or where did it open [Music] so again maybe it's not going to uh there's there's something broken with it so i'm i'm not going to show you

00:58:43

but um but maybe the old one i can yes just a sec if i i had the plex here yes let's just open it here

00:59:01

it's a little bit cumbersome because this is but you see so and at the same time again i can bring up this this uh this brain view

00:59:13

sort of you for but so back to the point i i this is what i wanted to show you that here i actually use my vault integrated with the topics that i'm

00:59:26

dealing with as my gtd tool because i get the relevant and my gpd is extremely simple all all i want is to connect

00:59:39

actions to people to location to projects to systems i work with etc so i just want to make those connections and my template for all the pages has this task

00:59:54

section at the top which has this simple two-liner script all the course can be configured so you can create your templates like my daily notes pages the template with

01:00:06

all the elements i can create these linked so so here the trick is that you can see that that

01:00:18

these are all when you have this box around it and that's of course just css so you can remove the box in my normal vault not my demo i don't

01:00:31

have it around it but this is a transcluded page from this so from project a this section is transcluded here and

01:00:44

but here i see it as as one piece if i go to saturday then on saturday as well i see the discussions that were relevant to saturday if i you know

01:00:58

the person's page then i see the actions so it to me this is just just amazing and that is oh and so why am i showing you this

01:01:12

apart from me being very excited about it is because i think if i'm not thinking about the multi-player craft

01:01:24

and and the big how do we all collaborate on the globe together but i'm looking at my micro universe of i want access to the things i need to do to the

01:01:37

notes i took to the information i have obsidian has such an integrated environment that just out does the brain by many leagues

01:01:52

it and and this is the final piece by the way this also has a funny bit because if i stop the script just a sec let me just stop this

01:02:06

then this becomes a drawing i can start to rearrange it and

01:02:17

and i can then say this is a drawing and i can also of course start to add stuff to it and i can add images no so wow the the the

01:02:30

wow any moment i can freeze the view if you will right and create my my my other sort of view to explain it to

01:02:41

people and the links will still work yeah so it saved this and and it's like it is a it becomes a drawing it will still

01:02:54

nicely work and i have all my and by the way this is also cool that i can open these up edit the document right right there it is it is just

01:03:05

so integrated and so much so much more than uh what the brain offered and by the by the way obsidian has a publishing

01:03:19

uh service as well unfortunately as of right now that needs a bit more integration for so excludable drawings export

01:03:31

with uh as a png file so then it sort of loses the interactivity but um [Music] but overall

01:03:45

i i think that has the so so obsidian publish with a bit of work could also become this tool that you manage your

01:03:58

again it's not multiplayer that's the so i've seen some some some uh articles about teams using obsidian in a multiplayer mode but yes that includes

01:04:12

uh github in the process and part of the problem is that there's no concurrent editing in obsidian which is why we use markdown a bunch and then we you know overwrite the files and you get

01:04:23

all this you get a whole layer of conflict of consumption management yeah yeah by the way x collider has collaboration mode again it is sort of

01:04:37

um it would take me a couple of days to enable it in obsidian i actually did a proof of concept but in the end i

01:04:51

i had a discussion with the with the developers and it turned out that the way i can because xcalitra on the vamp if you if you open exclamatory it's a

01:05:03

shared whiteboard right and you can simply collaborate on it yeah this after the the their sharings so so they have a

01:05:22

a service in the background somewhere a simple uh application that their host that that supports this

01:05:34

whiteboard sharing and that actually works from the obsidian x call it draw as well but that's because they don't so they they are not checking for

01:05:46

um what is it what's the proper name for it so they don't check the the website or the source from where you're asking the request from they so

01:05:58

you can do this cross domain right is this crdt or um i'm thinking about sort of different protocols that exist to for concurrent editing

01:06:12

um i don't think you're saying that so frankly franklin so so they're so so the way they do the concurrent editing is

01:06:27

yeah frankly i didn't look into it so they're they're that that is i think the the simple truth um yeah no i didn't think i know on the client side what they do so when

01:06:39

the [Music] the edits from the other participants arrive then there's a script or there's a logic to to

01:06:50

integrate it into your your own version of that drawing but anyway uh but the point is in terms of multiplayer

01:07:03

if you look at x color draw that is fully multiplayer or can be fully multiplayer if you look at obsidian yes that is i think there uh i think rome especially

01:07:17

is strong in yeah and rome is not that good for multiplayer i think it seems like athens the reason athens research exists is to do multiplayer room like stuff right yes i

01:07:30

used so so rome has these rome book clubs where they had instances where there were several thousand people taking notes on the same

01:07:42

book so i wouldn't dare to say that rome is not good at multiplayer [Music] rome is not very scalable or at least in

01:07:55

the current setup because right now everything is in browser storage and of course they have on firebase they have they they save your

01:08:07

your rom file but um but installing memory it's downloaded and it's all in the end well not in memory in browser storage doesn't mean it's in memory it's cached

01:08:20

disk but still open it on another device it first downloads everything and so that's not very yeah yeah make sense wow okay so

01:08:35

that's the first time you open it but but then if there's a large graph connecting everything then then you are in trouble because you have to hold all of it on your device

01:08:46

indeed and and and so there's there's lots of issues with that but in terms of multiplayer they did i think a good job and if there's one gap

01:08:58

with obsidian that is the multiplayer support but as i explained uh yeah quite long uh a few minutes ago frankly to me that's not an issue because um

01:09:11

that is not the feature that i'm looking for in obsidian looking for all knowledge management cool and couldn't somebody create a plug-in for obsidian that would conquer that or is obsidian does it actually need to be

01:09:23

rewritten to do so so i think i think this is pluggable absolutely so so i i see several approaches how i could solve the

01:09:37

the issue so so i don't think uh multiplayer is a deal stopper deal breaker a deal breaker for obsidian yeah

01:09:48

i i think yeah that that's also so i think that that's that's absolutely possible yes the right plugin anything

01:10:01

yeah it could even be by the way get in the background so if you configure your maybe kit is a bit slow so get is not going to be ideal for this for sure yeah for

01:10:15

concurrent uh editing concurrent editing though it is not going to be good but yeah yeah have you looked at athens research at all only only very briefly okay and i don't i

01:10:30

don't know much about what they're doing i met jeff yang he was on a panel with me and so he's kind of the starter of the project and it's like open source rome okay great sounds great but i just don't know what they think they're doing or

01:10:42

how they're doing or anything like that yeah well toxic is the other yeah but you need to know emacs to do log seat right no oh okay i'm confusing something else

01:10:55

on the surface feels exactly the same as rome only it's it's free and available and as well lookseek is also marked down

01:11:09

file based so let's is in that sense similar to the concept of obsidian being a local graph what would interest you i i actually have

01:11:25

i was invited to just find what was the name of the guy i was approached with a question if i want to

01:11:41

integrate exco into this new uh let me just try to find the name of the the application tunnel

01:11:57

t-a-p-a-n-a dot inc [Music] and tana the developers of i can show you a screenshot not screenshot so i i i can

01:12:11

log in because i have this but it's going to look very similar to how for example

01:12:22

would look like but the thing here and i'm i i didn't quite get anywhere with donna because i in the end concluded that i don't have time to

01:12:36

i barely have time to keep x colitroid and obsidian moving but here the idea is so they're they're basic they're basic design principle is they want to create

01:12:52

the excel of documents in a shared format so here you have all sorts of data objects that you can this looks like airtable you can

01:13:05

view in many different types oh yeah so this is now a table view but i can i can somehow change this view i wish i knew how

01:13:17

but i can change it to the cards view or list you but as well as that is not so much the the interesting bit is all of these nodes can have

01:13:31

attributes and you can inherit those attributes so it's a nice object-oriented environment you can make them optional or mandatory you can

01:13:43

create automations around it and perfect a note-taking tool that you start with wherever my daily notes page was so you can you can type here

01:13:56

whatever you can do your notes but then with some magic you can and i i i saw the demo but i i don't know anymore you

01:14:09

can start to add the the links to other functions all sorts of data fields and and and stuff

01:14:21

into this and so this becomes this mesh of of data which is structured data this is more like when i was looking at the demo

01:14:32

this felt more like lotus notes yeah yeah i think is an amazing product or was at least 20 years ago one time it certainly was back in the day yeah

01:14:46

when i last used it but it's again idea of of having text-based forms that you can you can structure into data but

01:14:58

maybe something that because tana is multiplayer by design and very data-centric and and it's set up so i i can imagine that tana might become and is tana open

01:15:16

source no tana is not open source okay they're proprietary um and they look a lot like notion also notions getting very popular yes

01:15:27

ocean as well yeah and and ever all those people are kind of attacking um air table because air table doesn't have the rest of the fancy document stuff it just does the the the table stuff really well it's this

01:15:41

space is so interesting and so active right now um so i wrote an article a research article in 1989 when lotus notes came out titled lotus is no longer a one product company because they had been just the

01:15:53

spreadsheet company until lotus knows and so i you know that was that was at the debut of lotus notes and they they spent it took them a couple years to figure out how to sell the thing and then it took them way too long to get off it

01:16:05

because once the internet shows up lotus notes is like oops but it's brilliant uh cool okay my head is going to explode um

01:16:22

so i'm so i'm curious how i would like to figure out some way where you can be doing exactly what you want building the tool that you're trying to get maybe we can find some way to

01:16:36

support some of your time doing that as a fellowship or something else like that and i'm also trying to figure out how to define how to take the pieces that you're building and figure out where are the overlaps with functionality that generally we want to

01:16:49

support and build right i call these tiles my my metaphor here is that different projects have like a picture of the future it's sort of like a mosaic right it's a low resolution picture with some

01:17:02

and each little tile is like a piece of functionality and sometimes a couple different projects have overlap on a series of tiles because they need concurrent editing because they need you know some other some other sort of uh

01:17:15

capacity that's attached to markdown i'm making this up but in the in that case you have like from scrabble like a double a triple words a triple letter score tile which is great because you know the community should then fund the

01:17:28

creation of those tiles to get made and shared into the shared code basis earlier as opposed to others and i'm trying to and i'm no software architect so i'm trying to figure out

01:17:40

how to set up an environment like this where existing open source communities that are already doing a whole bunch of work and us and a bunch of people who are passionate as you are about solving different pieces of the problem so we can work closer with each other and

01:17:52

integrate these tools faster and so that you could say hey here's my here's my wish list these items on the wish list are important but i'm not going to get to them in the next couple of years maybe someone else can get to them and put them into the the

01:18:05

code base right um and and how to paint that picture how to draw that mosaic so that we understand it together and then help these communities connect and build

01:18:17

this with this tool would love to participate sounds absolutely amazing that'd be great who is the i i'm i'm i've got a few people i need

01:18:28

to go ping about but i'm kind of looking for two different people one of them is a project planner like how do you shape a project and the other one is a software architect how do you think about these elements of software

01:18:40

architecture if you know anybody in either of those camps that i should that i could go talk to and just you know ask them um how to structure this i'd love that because i mean this is all

01:18:52

more complicated than i've ever done but so i know i need to find somebody who's like oh yeah try this and then this and then so the guy you might enjoy talking to is

01:19:05

his alias on twitter is dft hacker tools for thought hacker chris in real life cool

01:19:20

so chris is um i think some in in real frankly i don't know what he's doing exactly but but

01:19:35

he's some sort of a software engineer i've stolen uh lots of stuff from him uh earlier but also he's he's a tools for thought pkm tool yep

01:19:50

in every possible sense and he's also he was the one who built that then rome started he built the first plug-in set

01:20:02

which is really the the core plug-in if you want to use rom now he moved also over to obsidian for the same i did which was just simple information

01:20:16

security concerns that are wrong but i think if you're looking for some software developers or or architect

01:20:26

skills in all of this i can imagine that he will have some some ideas there too that sounds awesome um the free jerry's brain call is at 1 p.m

01:20:41

pacific which is your central european time so it's 10 pm of your time yeah and and also i'm i mean i'm i'm happy to connect from time to time yeah i

01:20:53

have very limited free time and therefore i i tried to minimize to i'd say zero any

01:21:06

regular uh uh regular standing calls yeah expanding calls i i just i just don't or if i do standing calls and and community etc

01:21:18

then i have no time to go to code or to to record my videos and stuff so it's a bit of um a sort of

01:21:31

interact on twitter to to some extent but that is also fairly limited because time time is the the yes so if you're if you're interested in

01:21:46

interacting asynchronously at your own choice if you would create a uh create a free account on our manamost server i just put that link in the chat um we have uh the free jury's brain channel

01:21:58

on matter most second so create an account there tell me what your user id what your handle is on the server and i will invite you into the free jury's brain channel so you can just we can say hi and you can participate when you feel

01:22:12

like it and we can uh you know loop you in that way and i think that might work looking for the chat here founded yep the ipad i wasn't able to yeah it wasn't coming up

01:22:27

yeah i didn't all right matter most email or username but i need to create one now right create an id um and matter most is an open source slack like

01:22:43

platform so we have a bunch of channels running on matter most and and my handle pretty much everywhere is zs

01:22:56

if it's vixen oh okay okay that's that's the one i'm going to look for here as well sounds great and i will look for that uh when you when

01:23:08

you're done setting it up and add you to the free jerry's brain so um free jerry's brain is one of the few private channels on the mattermost server just because the geeks want to keep it more geeky and not have

01:23:24

muggles in the crowd too often yeah yeah i can i can understand right uh and at the the url's chat collective sense commons

01:23:52

chat.collectivesensecommons.org because collective sense commons is the server that pete kaminsky put up for us so he's hosting this instance of mattermost created

01:24:20

administration is the key to [Laughter] if you don't find happiness later on that's yeah all right i registered and verified my

01:24:36

email awesome and i'm going to see if i can't find you now on the server so this is how you'll find me i think the server doesn't know you yet

01:24:56

so i will wait a little bit and look for you and i do again yes but let's sign in signing in i'm in yeah

01:25:07

so you can join oh i clicked on agora but that's not cs okay you're uh now now it found you so i've just added you to the free jerry's brain channel we're all set

01:25:22

so let me just see can i refresh and then [Music] should see or i need to go to the agora and there i will find um if you go

01:25:41

to the agora yes csc agora in there you'll find a channel that i've just added that i've just added you to called free jerry's brain oh gm free jerry's brain yeah so

01:25:53

i think i found you here or maybe not you oh that is you i i said hi hopefully okay hopefully do you if not then i'm already making friends

01:26:17

i think you you did that properly it works great yeah that's good but i'm not yet finding this off topic town square there's all sorts of stuff oh because

01:26:30

i'm still being um so have you found the channel uh creaturespring i haven't yet oh create and join channels oh i should have read how

01:26:43

yes browse channels oh okay and public channels now i want to um yeah you should have been invited already directly into it so it should be in your channels list on the left i think

01:27:00

it is not yet that's weird it should be on the left you know leaf team invite people members but that's all direct messages

01:27:16

interesting browse chat create new channel creator i think browse channels that sounds good yeah try browse it's free let me try let me try this a different

01:27:29

way let me paste into our zoom chat the link directly to the free jerry's brand channel and if you do that from the chat on your laptop that should get you into the channel something

01:27:42

channel not found so i will take a bit of time for this too oh that's weird something's not clicking huh because i see you i just added you to the channel

01:27:54

and it looks like it's your id so you are properly registered on the server now but somehow you're not able to see the channel that's weird complete your profile

01:28:09

that's weird space to profile did you get a confirmation email that you need to click on or something yes i click the confirmation email okay so that's done so it's not that maybe it's just

01:28:25

well anyway i think let's give it time and yeah it'll work fine sort themselves out so but i'm i'm thrilled to have this conversation thank you this is um this is awesome

01:28:38

yeah indeed and and um and we see the world very similarly in many ways i love the folding in of graphics with the rest i particularly

01:28:50

love the continuity and flow of data elements i mean just the ability to to change something in a graphic and have it mirrored and reflected on a page and back and forth is just brilliant um there's just a whole lot of

01:29:02

interesting elements here that that um that you're solving that are that are necessary to solve so so thank you um now i want to figure out how to how to fold what you've what you've done into

01:29:15

where we're trying to go and how to help you do more of it so all right so jerry thanks for reaching out good to get connected and

01:29:28

i think we'll stay in touch there is no common ground here i agree exactly thank you awesome hey thank you bye for now