Properties in Obsidian are a game changer
I have been an on-again/off-again user of Obsidian for a couple of years and have lately been shifting a lot of my writing work to it, both blogging and fiction. It’s an incredibly flexible tool which can be customised to meet your needs.
Version 1.4 introduces Properties, a new interface for metadata. You have always been able to add metadata to notes in two ways: tags, which are just a hashtag in the next followed immediately by the tag; and as YAML, front-matter which is delineated in the note by existing between two sets of three hyphens.
But that YAML has always been visible at the top of your note, which felt kind of clunky. Properties builds on this by taking that YAML and hiding it behind a much nicer interface:
The nice part is that the data behind this interface is still just YAML delineated by those three dashes at the start of the file, which means it’s editable in any text editor. There’s no weird database which stores the metadata disconnected from the original file.1
Why is this potentially so useful? Because for writing, it will allow me to stop using Tags for things like statuses. At the moment, I add a tag to define the status of a document. For example, I have tags for “Blog/Ideas”, “Blog/InProgress” and so on. In the future, instead of having to use tags I will be able to create a Property called “Status” and have ones for “Ideas”, “In Progress” etc predefined. This means that tags can become what they should be – a form of topic-based loose categorisation – rather than a mixed bag of topics and statuses and names and so on.
I’m really looking forward to seeing what extension developers do with Properties, in particular what can be built using the Auto Note Mover plugin which basically runs my writing workflow.
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This is one of the things I most love about Obsidian’s design philosophy: everything possible lives in the note, and the note is just a plain text file in a folder on your local drive. If Obsidian ever died, all my notes and articles would still be right there, usable in any other text editor. I would lose the functionality which Obsidian adds over the top, but not the underlying data. ↩︎
Weeknote, Sunday 10th September 2023
I'm writing this slightly later than normal after we got back from a trip down to the Bristol to see our lovely friends. There's a bunch of pictures on both Instagram and Hipstamatic (which is totally great and has encouraged me to start taking more pictures).
Other than that, this has been a fairly quiet week, with only a Society of Authors local meetup of note. It was good fun to catch up with some other local writers.
This week is going to be a bit busier. I'm in Brighton tomorrow, then it's another SOA meeting on Tuesday over in Whitstable, then next Saturday in London for something at the Barbican. And I probably should look for some work at some point…
The three things which most caught my attention
- Everybody's Everywhere, the documentary about Lil Peep, is available on YouTube. I wish he had lived longer: the kid had a way with words, and it would have been interesting to see him apply them to the concerns that come with a longer life.
- I'm poking something about Technocracy with a small sharpened stick, and I'm interested in Michelism and John B Michel. If you have a weird mind, you might want to take a look too.
- Michael Tsai, whose blog you should have in your RSS reader (like it's 1999), wrote a post noting discomfort about the smartphone as single point of failure in our connected lives. He's right: it is, frankly, scary.
Things I have been writing
I resurrected Technovia, and wrote something about the "climbdown" of the UK government over access to end to end encrypted messages was nothing of the sort. Then of course there was Elon Musk sabotaging a Ukrainian attack because he is a naive, gullible idiot. And of course there was the news that Brexit is basically going to give you a worse version of Windows in the UK. Well done, Brexiteers!
I also started working on my next short, more on that next week.
Things I have been reading
I've finished four books in the last week. The first was China Mieville's A Spectre, Haunting, which I have been reading for a while and finally got around to completing. China sometimes sounds like someone who did a PPE degree crossed with a Socialist Worker seller, but it's still a good book and I would definitely recommend it if you're interested in Marx.
Next came Russell Davies' Do interesting. A short book full of sound advice on how to get your mind moving, with little activities. Another recommend.
I finished Tansy Hoskins' The Anti-Capitalist book of fashion, which is yet another recommend. Even if you're not that interested in fashion, it's a good deconstruction of how a lot of modern Capitalism works, from the exploitation of workers in the developing world through the creation of alienation of various kinds in the developed world through media.
And finally -- four books! -- it didn't take me long to read Cory Doctorow's The Internet Con. If you are in any way interested in tech you need to read this book.
No, the UK government did not back down on its plans to spy on encrypted messages
Many places reported that the British government had seen sense and backed down from its plans to require companies like Apple, Meta and Signal to give them back door access to end to end encrypted messages. Unfortunately, these reports were completely wrong.
All that the government did was acknowledge that Ofcom, the body which would issue notices to companies requiring them to scan their networks, could only do so if it was technically possible – in other words, that it would be pointless to attempt to demand companies do something they physically couldn’t. This is clear in the quote from Lord Stephen Parkinson, the minister responsible, in the original FT story:
“A notice can only be issued where technically feasible and where technology has been accredited as meeting minimum standards of accuracy in detecting only child sexual abuse and exploitation content,” he said.
That is a long way from a government retreat. And as it stands, the clauses requiring companies to endanger their users privacy and security remain in the bill.
The government has now confirmed this, with Michelle Donelan, the technology minister, saying saying:
“We haven’t changed the bill at all… If there was a situation where the mitigations that the social media providers are taking are not enough, and if after further work with the regulator they still can’t demonstrate that they can meet the requirements within the bill, then the conversation about technology around encryption takes place,” she said.
But the government is claiming it’s all technologically feasible:
She said further work to develop the technology was needed, but added that government-funded research had shown it was possible. (My emphasis)
The government is not backing down. It believes it’s possible technically, and will attempt to make companies comply. It will do this in secrecy, and it doesn’t give a damn about the privacy or security of the British people. The fight is not over.
Elon Musk deliberately sabotaged a Ukrainian attack
New Musk biography offers fresh details about the billionaire's Ukraine dilemma | CNN Politics:
Elon Musk secretly ordered his engineers to turn off his company’s Starlink satellite communications network near the Crimean coast last year to disrupt a Ukrainian sneak attack on the Russian naval fleet, according to an excerpt adapted from Walter Isaacson’s new biography of the eccentric billionaire titled “Elon Musk.”
As Ukrainian submarine drones strapped with explosives approached the Russian fleet, they “lost connectivity and washed ashore harmlessly,” Isaacson writes.
How, exactly is this man not in prison? This is also quite telling:
Gwynne Shotwell, Musk’s president at SpaceX, was livid at Musk’s reversal, according to Isaacson.
“The Pentagon had a $145 million check ready to hand to me, literally,” Isaacson quotes Shotwell as saying. “Then Elon succumbed to the bullshit on Twitter and to the haters at the Pentagon who leaked the story.”
Musk, like many stupid men, has been radicalised by Twitter into supporting the far right. That includes supporting Putin, the “white knight” who the far right thinks of as the saviour of western civilisation.
Brexit making Windows worse in the UK
Microsoft will finally stop forcing Windows 11 users in Europe into Edge if they click a link from the Windows Widgets panel or from search results. The software giant has started testing the changes to Windows 11 in recent test builds of the operating system, but the changes are restricted to countries within the European Economic Area (EEA).
“In the European Economic Area (EEA), Windows system components use the default browser to open links,” reads a change note from a Windows 11 test build released to Dev Channel testers last month. I asked Microsoft to comment on the changes and, in particular, why they’re only being applied to EU countries. Microsoft refused to comment.
Of course this isn’t happening in the UK: thanks to Brexit, we’re not an EEA country, and so you’re stuck with Edge opening links from things like widget no matter what browser you choose. Now that’s what I call taking back control.
The anti-capitalist book of fashion
Finished reading: The Anti-Capitalist Book of Fashion by TANSY E. HOSKINS 📚
I’m not exactly someone that knows a lot about fashion, but this is great book about its relationship with capitalism and how the clothes on your back (literally) cost lives and the earth.
Do Interesting
Finished reading: Do Interesting by Russell Davies 📚
I absolutely breezed through this, and enjoyed it greatly.
Resurrecting Technovia
I have no idea where the name came from, but I started writing a blog called Technovia somewhere around the turn of the millennium. It started off as a project on TypePad, then Wordpress, and sort-of died around 2015 when a catastrophic database failure (read: my fuck up) killed it.
Recently I've been writing a few old-fashioned blog posts about technology and politics and using my Micro.blog for it, at ianbetteridge.micro.blog. I also have this blog, but posting content about tech never really sat well with me here.
So as a little project, I have resurrected the Technovia domain and I'm going to use it once again for straightforward blogging. I'm using Micro.blog as the backend for it, as it's much more like the kind of blogging system which you would design today if you were starting that kind of project. It's not a content management system; it generates static HTML rather than being hitched to a database; and it has a bunch of other smart features which I wish Wordpress had (for example, it automatically saves posts to the Internet Archive, and to GitHub).
Anyway, you can now follow it at [technovia.co.uk](https://technovia.co.uk), or via ActivityPub at @ian@microblog.ianbetteridge.com. There's probably RSS in there too if you fancy it.
It's long past time for Apple to stop advertising on Twitter
Over the past 24 hours, the hashtag “BanTheADL” has been trending on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. The trending hashtag refers to the Anti-Defamation League, the Jewish anti-extremism civil rights organization.
Even more concerning is that X owner Elon Musk has signaled support for the attacks against the ADL on the platform.
Within the same time frame, numerous X users have also reported being served an X-approved advertisement on the platform that promotes white supremacy.
At this point advertising on Twitter is directly extending financial support to neo-Nazis. It’s long past time that companies like Apple,1 which resumed advertising on the platform in December 2022, just stopped.
But it won’t, which is finally putting the lie to the idea that the company’s leadership team care one iota about about the impact its actions make on the culture of the country which nurtured it. “You support rampant anti-semitism on your service? No problem! Here’s some money. You explicitly allow transphobic hate speech on the service? That’s fine with us! Here, have some more money.”
Apple is very good at taking a stand when it’s easy. It refused to carry various small right-wing social platforms on its App Store, because the content moderation policies weren’t up to scratch. Meanwhile, Twitter gets a pass despite having no practical control over hate speech and an owner who actively encourages it.
Should we be considering boycotting Apple and other companies that advertise on Twitter? Let’s frame that another way: if you found out that a company was actively funding hate speech, would you want to buy products from them?
I know I wouldn’t.
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Why am I picking on Apple here? First because it’s the world’s biggest company. Second, because unlike, say, Amazon, it makes a great deal of noise about its commitments to societal good, such as privacy and recycling. No one should be surprised if, say, a car company advertised on Twitter. We hold Apple to a higher standard, because at least publicly it holds itself to one. ↩︎
Keanu just can’t be human. No human being can be this nice.
Weeknote, Sunday 3rd September 2023
Time is strangely stretching. When I started writing this post I had to check my calendar to see what I have done this week, and found that events I thought have happened the previous one had, in fact, been within the last seven days.
That's partly down to Kim being away, and partly due to not working. When you don't have the rhythm of work, you lose one of the main things which anchor you in time. There is a pace, a way of being, which is set for you and that you don't have to consider. All of which is a challenge to me: while I am not working, I need to reestablish that pattern.
And yet this week has been pretty full. Monday, of course, was a bank holiday -- and what do you do on a bank holiday other than go to the seaside? Myself and my friend Edward headed down to Margate for a bit of a mooch around. It was surprisingly quiet, much more like a regular Sunday than a Bank Holiday Monday, which is probably not great for the local traders. I have heard that the great post-pandemic British seaside boom was over, but this was the first time I saw it with my own eyes.
On Tuesday I went into London to catch up with an old colleague, deep in the heart of News UK. It's an impressive building -- and it was good to have a chat to someone who was both a big influence and a good mate.
After that I went to the V&A to see the Diva exhibition, which I would absolutely recommend. And it's the first exhibition I have been to where I think there's a benefit to having the proffered headphones: divas definitely need a soundtrack, all the way from Victorians to today.
The V&A is one of my favourite places in London. I became a member there quite a few years ago, and would occasionally sneak off work for an afternoon's "inspiration" there, sitting looking at lovely things, clearing my head and writing stuff in my notebook. It's one of the things I miss about London: there is space like that in Canterbury, and few enough in Kent as a whole.
The rest of the week was taken up with bumbling around, washing, and generally wasting of time. I spent a chunk of time working on setting up Obsidian to make it a better environment for writing, experimenting with plugins which let you do things like post directly to Micro.blog, make your use of Markdown and punctuation more consistent, and so on. It's now pretty plugin-heavy but it's really coming together.
The three things which most caught my attention
- Primary documents in "Making the Macintosh" is a brilliant collation of documents about the early Mac. I could spend a month reading this stuff.
- An absolutely fantastic interview with M John Harrison, who remains my favourite writer. With bonus almost-retelling of the story of how Iain Banks made him write another space opera.
- An interesting report from 2020 on the ownership of shares on the stock market. What's fascinating is how this has changed from (in the UK) largely pension funds to foreign investors, and what that means for the governance of our largest companies. the shift from mostly individual investors to mostly pension funds had a big impact on the way companies saw themselves, and who they saw as the important people to serve, and this change to being owned by people who largely have no particular interest in the health of UK society is also an important one.
Things I have been writing
I'm writing a big blog post on how I have customised Obsidian for writing. It's currently about 1,500 words and I should finish it off in the next day or so. This post was written in Obsidian, as are most of my weeknotes, because one of the best things about it is the ability to create and use templates very easily. That means it's brilliant for articles like this.
Things I have been reading
I've been REALLY enjoying – if that's quite the word – Tansy Hoskins' The Anti-Capitalist Book of Fashion, which I highly recommend to anyone remotely interested not just in clothes, but also anti-capitalism.
Goddamit I’m listening to The Kitchen Cabinet and they are talking about cheese and now all I want is cheese.
On the read later experience in Pocket and Readwise
Om Malik on how the experience in Pocket has declined and his thoughts on Readwise Reader:
To me, Pocket has always been a repository where I save, store, and archive articles I want to read or use for my ongoing research. That’s its value for me. I don’t care much for their “Home Screen” and its recommendations. While it may seem minor, these changes detract from the app’s core purpose, revealing a user-hostile behavior. The changes implemented by Mozilla and Pocket prioritize their interests and haven’t notably improved my user experience.
Readwise initially offered a service for saving highlights from various sources — Apple Books, Pocket, Amazon Kindle, Twitter, and even Discord. I appreciated their approach. Then they launched Reader, their own “read-it-later” app. It lets me save articles, highlight text, add notes, enable public links, save YouTube videos (with text captions), and offers other features. Both Readwise and its competitor, Matter, prioritize enhancing the online reading experience. Meanwhile, Pocket seems to be deciding for me what I need.
I switched from Pocket to Readwise Reader when it was in early beta and I couldn’t agree more with Om’s assessment. Reader feels like it is built from the ground up to just give me a better experience for getting articles into my inbox, working with them, and getting useful information out of them into other tools. Pocket feels more like it wants to keep me within Pocket.
Apple explains why it abandoned iPhone CSAM detection
Apple explains why it abandoned iPhone CSAM detection:
“Scanning every user’s privately stored iCloud data would create new threat vectors for data thieves to find and exploit,” Neuenschwander continued. “It would also inject the potential for a slippery slope of unintended consequences. Scanning for one type of content, for instance, opens the door for bulk surveillance and could create a desire to search other encrypted messaging systems across content types.”
“We decided to not proceed with the proposal for a hybrid client-server approach to CSAM detection for iCloud Photos from a few years ago,” he finished. “We concluded it was not practically possible to implement without ultimately imperiling the security and privacy of our users.”
One of the things which is interesting about this is that these are the exact arguments which campaigners against Apple’s scanning proposal used at the time – and the company seems to have listened.
And that Apple has made its reasoning public gives a strong imperative to it not to try the same thing again, which is a good sign for the future.
Ha ha ha ha nope
X, Formerly Twitter, Plans to Collect User Biometric Data, Job, Education - Bloomberg:
“Based on your consent, we may collect and use your biometric information for safety, security, and identification purposes,” the company said in its new policy. X doesn’t define what it considers biometric, though other companies have used the term to describe data gleaned from a person’s face, eyes and fingerprints.
Of the many, many companies on this planet that I would not trust with biometric data, “X” comes pretty much top of the pile.
The Real Story of Elon Musk’s Twitter Takeover
The Real Story of Elon Musk’s Twitter Takeover - WSJ:
The way that Musk blustered into buying Twitter and renaming it X was a harbinger of the way he now runs it: impulsively and irreverently. It is an addictive playground for him. It has many of the attributes of a school yard, including taunting and bullying. But in the case of Twitter, the clever kids win followers; they don’t get pushed down the steps and beaten, like Musk was as a kid. Owning it would allow him to become king of the school yard.
The whole of this annoyingly paywalled article1 is full of absolute zingers which demonstrate quite how unsuited Musk is to owning something like Twitter.
By then, a new ingredient had been added to this cauldron: Musk’s swelling concern with the dangers of what he called the “woke mind virus” that he believed was infecting America. “Unless the woke mind virus, which is fundamentally anti-science, anti-merit, and anti-human in general, is stopped, civilization will never become multiplanetary,” he told me gravely.
This use of “multiplanetary” isn’t a mistake or a metaphor. Musk has bought into the idea that we can wreck this planet and move on to the next, one that’s common amongst the Silicon Valley idiocracy.
And always remember, the personal is political:
Musk’s anti-woke sentiments were partly triggered by the decision of his oldest child, Xavier, then 16, to transition. “Hey, I’m transgender, and my name is now Jenna,” she texted the wife of Elon’s brother. “Don’t tell my dad.” When Musk found out, he was generally sanguine, but then Jenna became a fervent Marxist and broke off all relations with him. “She went beyond socialism to being a full communist and thinking that anyone rich is evil,” he says… He blamed it partly on the ideology he felt that Jenna imbibed at Crossroads, the progressive school she attended in Los Angeles. Twitter, he felt, had become infected by a similar mindset that suppressed right-wing and anti-establishment voices.
It’s been rumoured for a long time that having a trans child had been an influence on Musk’s blatantly transphobic behaviour. This confirms it.
I am very glad that I no longer have a presence on Twitter.
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I’m assuming you don’t need me to tell you how to get around paywalls. ↩︎
Microsoft seems really determined to give more people more reasons to avoid Windows like the plague.
BTW, if you notice that I’m posting a bunch of little links, it’s because I’m going through the backlog of stuff I’ve saved into Raindrop.io which I TOTALLY recommend over Pinboard.
A rare Betteridge’s Law-breaking headline. Yes. Yes he was.
(Because of the nature of the content, Snopes has a pass)
This is great: a bunch of primary sources about the early Macintosh. Much reading!