Tag: productivity

Effective content curation

Posted on by Morgan

I went up with this workflow that seem to pass the test of time and I'm sharing it with you :

  • I'm using ChatGPT Β» Summarize & Chat extension for Brave/Chromium (browsers) in order to save time at scrolling long articles in my inbox but yet it's important to note it's shrinking content more than summarizing it.
  • I'm not subscribing to any newsletter, everything is read through MiniFlux (RSS curator. If you don't know about that, read -> what is RSS?), combined with RSS-Bridge and ChangeDetection and some tips, all self-hosted. For any newsletter that cannot be replaced with RSS feed, I rely on my hero https://kill-the-newsletter.com/. And if email has your preference over RSS, I recommend you BlogToTrottr to follow RSS/Atom in real-time by email.
  • I edit my Feed titles with emojis expressing how I feel about their interest : πŸ˜• (Boring?) πŸ˜ƒ (Joyful read) etc.
  • I categorize feeds and label them also with emojis and sort them from the best to the worst. Those visuals clues really help. When I see nothing interesting for a while in any RSS I've subscribed to, I remove it from Miniflux.
  • I'm customizing my RSS curation in Miniflux through some hacks.
  • I manage to keep a maximum of 20/30 RSS feeds of interest. Among those, I find maybe a dozen to be absolutely fantastic and I'm even sharing them in my /links section.
  • I've configured Tampermonkey browser extension to take control of the rendering of my RSS feeds list and replace the whole page with "FOCUS", at least 80% of time.
  • Something too long to read but that looks interesting is immediately dropped from Miniflux and shared/saved into Wallabag (bookmark management) for later read or in Shaarli. The goal is to declutter my subscriptions inbox.
  • Articles I browser randomly and are already saved in Wallabag are saved with tags like "x2" if it's second time I save them, "x3" if it's the third save I save them, etc.
  • If I find any image or PDF of interest, I save them locally to my Dropbox folder of interest. I have a folder for Books, which is subject to automatic triage with some scripting, also my ePubs are automatically converted to PDF. Duplicate files are moved to subfolders like "x2" if it's second time I save the same book, "x3" if it's third time, etc.
  • Everything in Wallabag is automatically labelled based on keywords. I don't waste anytime adding manual labels. If a label is missing, it means an automation is missing in my Wallabag auto-tagging rules.
  • I keep a maximum of 10 5 podcasts I'm subscribed to in Spotify. In the end I dream to only subscribe to a dozen of RSS feeds but that's probably very optimistic.
  • I want to take time for whatever is worth reading, and skip the rest fast.
  • Whatever is not worth is submitted to shrinking.

What it breaks and what it brings

Posted on by Morgan

Changes are not good or bad and not every success means perfection.

Some will revolutionize your habits, your workflow. The good or bad perception of the change depends surely on your own experience, your functioning.

Since recently I've turned my smartphone and laptop screens to grayscale.

Is it any good or better ? Sure, for making everything more boring and fight screen addiction, it helps (archived). I also turned Dark mode on in every app and websites that support it. And even this blog now is turned black & white, for the best I hope.

Changes can break compatibility, readability, harm productivity for instance I had to restore colors just for when my little one watches videos or when I edit some colorful documents we share with my partner. Using Grayscale the web extension on my Brave instance also caused my screen to blink a lot and I had to find an alternative. After a few days of experimenting with grayscale on all my devices, I really enjoy the experience especially in public areas, and I tend to find colorful screens more painful to watch.

Another example is that I use SyncThing with success for keeping my Obsidian in sync between my mobile and my laptops. It worked great at first, but then things mixed up between Obsidian Git based Sync and SyncThing, and I almost lost weeks of work. As a result I limit Git based sync solely to one instance of Obsidian, and also had to tune SyncThing to ignore some changes (similar to .gitignore).

Speaking of Obsidian, I'm recently starting to use Dataview a lot for generating dynamic content in notes with content extracted from other notes. It works super great but cumulating multiple dataviews in a document makes everything quite slow. Yet I'm not giving up on them, with time I'll find solutions.

In the end, it's a matter of tradeoffs, and be able to try, evaluate and adjust to your needs.

Nerds Against Clutter: My Digital Downsizing Diary

Posted on by Morgan

Declutter and letting go.

  • Dropping Discord, Diaspora, Daily.dev, maybe Pixelfed and Mastodon next (done, by March 2024). Too buggy, too noisy.
  • Kissed Google Keep goodbye and embraced Obsidian even more, thanks to the Importer plugin.
  • Trying to escape the WhatsApp surveillance state. I'm axing useless groups left and right.
  • Scrubbing my old web presence. It's like digital housekeeping.
  • Using Syncthing now. Real-time sync across devices without cloud middlemen. Dropbox, you're on notice.
  • Deploying FDUPES for disk decluttering – it's a duplicate file slaughterhouse. Throwing inotifywait into the mix for smart folder monitoring, because who likes manual mess management?
  • Cut down on RSS. Using Wallabag, Miniflux. and Shaarli more. Bookmarking tools still suck somehow and I can't see a better alternative (yet) for my needs... yuck. Looking at the market for knowledge and bookmarks management tools, there is room for improvement in how we manage and consume information. Most of the hard work is on you for years with tools that connect to information.
  • Harnessing RSS-Bridge and Miniflux for streamlined info feeds. Using Changedetection for the unRSS-able stuff, i.e to monitor some indexes, lists, legal terms, release pages.
  • My tab hoarding was legendary, now capped at 18 with Tab Limiter. Browser zen achieved.
  • I have been known by my colleagues and partner to keep too many tabs open. My nerves cracked at reading other folks suffering same issue. So I decided to close a number of them, and limit each Window to 18 tabs with Tab Limiter.

Exploring and creating.

  • Blogging's up, but it's a discipline game. Need to turn Obsidian hoarding into public wisdom. Notebooks over phones, knowledge over scrolling.
  • Taming my Brave extension zoo with Context. It's like a digital bouncer for my browser. Funny, now I've more UX/Privacy oriented extensions than tabs.
  • Eyeing Geeqie to outsmart duplicate photos. Even my pixels need to be minimal.
  • n8n (Zapier/IFTTT alternative) is my new digital butler, still a bit rough around the edges. Coding my own automation magic because their recipes are just appetizers for my needs. For the record I'm now using it to automate RSS feeds triage and automate the web archiving of some bookmarks as I feel archiving beats bookmarking.
  • Diving back into Rust. Cooking up something for productivity and knowledge management. Stay tuned.
  • And of course, some snowballs and video gaming to keep things balanced and fun.

To be continued.

Level your productivity up with your shell’s history and aliases

Posted on by Morgan

Days ago I came across a blog post teaching about using your shell's history more intensively to boost productivity. I wanted to reflect on my own usage, and share some of my tips and tricks.

Over the time, I created a lot of aliases useful to me, and I also reused some from the community. In the end I accumulate so much aliases that I can't remember them all πŸ™‚

I would spare keystrokes each time I use my favorite commands if I could remember the relevant aliases that would help me boosting my productivity :-), aliases which already exist on my local profile. Disclaimer: I'm bad a remembering them, my memory is full of other useless crap like passwords and movie quotes from pop culture.

Hence, I decided to develop a function to help identifying every possible undervalued aliases, based on my shell history. This function looks for the top commands I have used lastly and it lists aliases I could use to replace my commands and thus boost my productivity.

In my dotfiles, I named this function suggest_aliases.

Why is such function useful to me ? Let me explain with a concrete example:

In the past days or weeks, I frequently used some commands like git stash or ls -latr. Of course I have aliases for those commands, for instance the git plugin for Oh My Zsh provides useful aliases for git stash.

In this situation, my tool lists all the aliases matching to the commands I've given in my example above.

Here is a demo of the result it produces:

❯ suggest_aliases 30
==========  alias recommendations  ==========
 βœ” there is an alias for ls -latr :
 ➜ ltr='ls -latr'
 βœ” there is an alias for git stash :
 ➜ gsta='git stash push'
 ➜ gstaa='git stash apply'
 ➜ gstall='git stash --all'
 ➜ gstc='git stash clear'
 ➜ gstd='git stash drop'
 ➜ gstl='git stash list'
 ➜ gstp='git stash pop'
 ➜ gsts='git stash show --text'

This utility function returns several candidate aliases based on my recent commands usage. The parameter it takes is the size of the input data that is be used by the tool. The bigger the number, the more results are returned.

On a complementary note, Oh My Zsh includes the plugin alias-finder, which makes learning new aliases easier.

Example: 

$ alias-finder "git pull"
gl='git pull'
g=git

For my taste, I've a different workflow to find such aliases, which returns more results:

Example:

❯ ag "git pull"
ggpull='git pull origin "$(git_current_branch)"'
gl='git pull'
glum='git pull upstream master'
gup='git pull --rebase'
gupa='git pull --rebase --autostash'
gupav='git pull --rebase --autostash -v'
gupv='git pull --rebase -v'

where ag is an alias for 

alias | grep -i

In this case it returns the aliases provided by the git plugin for Oh My Zsh because that's what I get on my system. If I had created custom aliases for git pull, it would have listed them as well.

Finally, here is a demo of all the commands used previously πŸ˜‰

That's all, folks. I hope this was helpful πŸ˜‰ ! I would love to know if you get similar tips & tricks, if you do please share them πŸ™‚ .

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