Dan J’s Website

nb is a command line and local web note‑taking, bookmarking, archiving, and knowledge base application

I came across this the other day while researching plaintext/CLI-based workflows, and my eyes bugged out of my head like in those old cartoons where a wolf sees a pretty woman¹—this looks like exactly the tool I’ve been looking for.

I’ve spent the last few days migrating notes from various other apps into plain text files managed by nb, and I’m really enjoying it so far. Will no doubt have more to report here.

In a similar post a couple months ago, I talked about taking an app I've had for a long time (OmniFocus, in that case) and "doubling down" on it—making it a more regular part of my daily life.

It occurred to me today that Instapaper is another such app …

OmniFocus is one of these accessories for my 'aspirational' life. You know, I want to be this disciplined, highly-organized and productive person, and this tool should help me do that.

But really, I've owned a license to this app on both the Mac and iOS for years, and never really …

I have really mixed feelings about this massive article, which I'm bookmarking because I'm only part way through it.

The good: it's full of extremely tactical actions you can take right now, while you're reading it.

The bad: it's on Medium 😛; the writer is, um, rather pretentious and self-satisfied; the constant appeals to personal longevity are, I think, off the mark. If you're going to change a bunch of settings to reclaim your time and attention, a la Digital Minimalism, do it because it improves the quality of your life and your interactions with others and the world around you. The idea that you should set your wallpaper to a picture of your pet because there's some statistical correlation between looking at a dog and having 10% less chance to die of a heart attack (paraphrasing :P) is so... I don't know, it's kind of everything that makes me roll my eyes about the tech-yuppie-utopian-immortality set. Like, sure, do whatever you can to preserve your physical health, but maybe that could be lower on your list of priorities (i.e. choose quality over quantity).

Still. An article I want to refer back to. Probably.

Critical hub for learning about tools and services that respect / protect your online privacy.

Awesome tool for finding special characters (and their related encodings/code points/etc.) or even taking an unfamiliar character and finding out what the heck it is.

Sweet (though non-SSL 😜) utility for easily creating tables in a variety of formats (Markdown being the one I'm interested in).

I used it to create the table in this post, by copying the table off of the website, pasting it into a Numbers document, exporting that to CSV, and loading the CSV into this tool. Worked pretty well.