I’m holding an assessment that a standard has been violated and I should be punished. The emotion that manifests is Shame and Sieler (2007), Coaching to the Human Soul, Volume II provides a way to look at these linguistically.

Shame lives in the place of violating community standards and that’s important to remember when the situation being replayed is from the past. I have seen many community standards change over my life, almost always for the better, and I can certainly recognise times where I acted in alignment with what my culture taught me was expected. The linguistic breakdown of shame is:

• I assert that I did (or did not do) x.
• I assess that I should not have (or should have) done x.
• I assess that doing (or not doing) x breaks the standards of the community that I live in.
• I assess that this negatively affects my public identity.
• I declare my willingness to face the community’s judgement to repair any damage to my identity.

That second line is the one I want to look at further. It’s an Assessment that I’ve broken a standard. This is a judgement made by me and therefore it’s my responsibility to make sure it’s grounded. The Grounding Assessments process requires I answer 5 questions, with detailed responses to at least the first 4.

1. For the sake of what future action?
2. In which particular domain of action?
3. According to what standards?
4. What true assertions support the assessment?
5. What true assertions are there against the assessment?

Recently my wife and I were travelling. We were one of several busses transferring people from the hotel to the airport checkin, and were aware from the driver of more busses arriving at the same time for a flight later than ours. Normally I’m happy to wait my turn and after all, the plane wasn’t going to leave without us. This day was different. Many people meant fewer available seats in the terminal and it was important I take care of my wife and get her a seat “at all costs”. She was unable to stand for any length of time. In short, I pretty much pushed us to the front of the queue. And I feel guilt about it because I violated my standards. At the time, if I’d been challenged I would have apologised and redressed the situation. I wasn’t asked to and in some ways, there is a loop unclosed.

Coming back to grounding the assessment that I’ve broken a standard, the answer is yes. I don’t dispute that as a fact. When asked to ground the Assessment about shame that is making me feel so bad long after the event, I can’t answer the first question. The response to “For the sake of what future action?” is difficult to answer because there is no valid future action at all. Like Jason said, it’s not possible to apologise to the people hurt or seek atonement. It’s certain nobody in the queue that day is going to come up to me now and demand an apology.

The standard I broke was mine. I’m the person that feels bad about it. The only person I can say sorry to is me and as I finish this exploration of those moments when my mind decides I need to be judged, I feel that saying sorry and moving towards Acceptance is the only way to let go.

Email a comment

A destination reached

I first thought of “Bringing humanity to the workplace” in January 2012 after it surfaced in my mind from some quiet listening. I’d been reading Callings, and was in a place (often visited) of trying to determine the meaning in my life. Early last year I made some public statements at work that this was important to me, and I intended to focus on it. What quickly became clear was, though I know the concept/sentiment is right for me, I couldn’t actually explain what it meant. I had the vision but not the understanding.

That all changed recently as a series of conversations triggered connections, which triggered more conversations and more connections. It’s happened so fast and so deeply that I can’t even be sure I’m remembering correctly.

I recognise there is a difference between practical and conceptual learning. I believe strongly that today’s technology has passed many people by because the conceptual learning necessary to adapt has been missed. I see people suffer because they don’t know what I know and are hampered by Allies and enemies of learning invisible to them.

My first connection was realising I could write about technology through the lens of Allies and enemies of learning; over time listing out the large set with examples and strategies to overcome them. Since all the ways we learn are tied into our Way of Being, I will be able to add considered depth to each.

flowchart TD
	A[Way of Being] --> B[Allies and Enemies of Learning]
	B --> C[Increased Digital Competency]

When I first made this connection, arguably years after I should have, I was close to tears with relief. After all this time I had a way forward. Then a couple of weeks later, I was thinking about training for a client and remembered the 13 Recurrent Domains of Human Concern. Yep, “Literacy” was one of the concerns so I could draw upon that. Except my memory was wrong. It’s not literacy but Education, which is broader. A little research took me from the initial paper I read when doing my Graduate Diploma of Ontological Coaching course back to the source material of Fernando Flores and Flores (2013), Conversations For Action and Collected Essays.¹ My memory of the domains was that competence in each was necessary to be an adult in today’s world. Locking onto this one phrase, meant I’d created a checklist of competencies to develop and that’s why my thoughts returned to that regarding digital literacy. Check it off, and you’re good to go. I’m grateful to now be looking at the domains through fresh eyes.

Now, broadly speaking, I can define Humanity in the workplace² as a combination of Legitimate other, Core concerns and Way of Being.

flowchart TD
	A[Way of Being] --> B[Allies and Enemies of Learning]
	B --> C[Increased Digital Competency]
	D[Legitimate Other] --> A
	E[Domains of Concern] -->A

The title of this section is A destination reached. It’s the first, not the last of my journey.

Reading

I’m currently reading:

• Flores (2013), Conversations For Action and Collected Essays
• Proust (1913), Swann’s Way: more than half way
• Pratchett (1996), Feet of Clay (audiobook):³ continuing my way through the Discworld series
• Bakker (2004), The Warrior Prophet: continuing strongly from the first book in The Prince of Nothing series with a group of complex characters and antoganists.

Recently finished

• Sanderson (2016), Mistborn: Secret History: listened to the audiobook as I’m doing with the whole of The Mistborn Saga. I recommend this close to finishing book 3.
• Le Cunff (2025), Tiny Experiments: the most important idea from this book is the benefit in conducting small learning experimental projects. It’s very close to Second-order learning in that success or failure isn’t the goal, but what’s learned about the goal and yourself along the way.
• Tchaikovsky (2019), Children of Ruin: too long a journey for the destination reached.
• Clarke (2004), Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (audiobook): second reading and I enjoyed it enough but I’m unlikely to revisit this title again.

Gaming

With a bit of Elite: Dangerous, most of my time has been put into Cities Skylines II and Ghost of Yotei. I’m enjoying both and each has a different way to relax me. Cities is creative and Yotei is violent!

Writing

Two articles I’m very happy with as they reflect the new connections I’ve made above.

• The human side of digital literacy
• The cost of saying no, then doing it anyway

Hobby

It’s winter and cool enough for me to work on my Danish ships cross-stitch. I’d like to be doing some every night, but have found on the days I work I can’t be bothered to in the evening.

Music

• Natalie Imbruglia
• Andreas Vollenweider
• Comfortably Numb Re-Imagined by Roger Waters and Mona Miari - simply amazing

Miscellanous

Too much time is being spent Migrating from Quartz 4 to Quartz 5.

We’ve ordered a new reclining sofa and chair for the house, and replacing some old blinds.

Email a comment

I often rely on my colleagues for technical information. Obtaining it means making a Request of someone, detailing what I need, why and by when. Since others are busy with their own workloads they will sometimes decline, unable to meet my needs. Alternatively, I may assess they cannot, even if they have not said so explicitly.¹ In the latter case I’ll clearly say, “That’s ok. I’ll chase it up with someone else.”

Too frequently the first person I make the request of comes back 10–30 minutes later with an answer. Even with a clearly withdrawn request, people can continue working on gathering information because they genuinely want to help. Positive intention, disruptive impact. I find that frustrating because:

• They found the time. Were they insincere when they said the couldn’t help? Can I trust what they say next time? (I don’t believe this is the case because people genuinely want to help)
• I’ve lost time chasing a second person to assist.
• That second person is creating work I no longer need, requiring me to go back to them and manage a potentially negative impact on their sincerity assessment of my actions for asking them to do something another was working on. Did I really need them to help?
• My assessment of the first person’s reliability may fall, because the do not do what they say (or in this case do what we agreed they wouldn’t)

Whatever help is provided, is negated by the cost of extra Work.

I have a role to play in resolving this pattern to my satisfaction and for the proper care of others. Firstly, I need to be more certain the person has heard me withdraw my Request and that I expect nothing from them. In fact, I require nothing from them. I need to help them understand that’s ok. It’s not a failure of them that they cannot help. Running in the background for me is concern for their welfare as well.

Secondly, I want to acknowledge that my initial mood may impact how people hear “That’s ok. I’ll chase it up with someone else.” If I’m asking from a background mood of frustration (I can’t do my work that I need to do now because I don’t have the information I need), then it’s possible what they hear is resentment-laden assertiveness where my frustration is clearly communicated. It can happen and isn’t directed at the person but the situation. I have to be more careful of that in the future as it’s not my intention to come across that way and when my mood colours what I say, it can create an emotional burden for the other person. And, even if I do that successfully, it may not fully resolve things because people respond emotionally out of their own concerns as well as logically.

Email a comment

Digital literacy is fundamental to a person’s Dignity, and their ability to participate with value in today’s society. Skills training is not the answer. Education that covers the concepts, backed by skills training is.

I’ll first deal with my assessment that learning conceptual knowledge (digital literacy) is more important than learning just technical skills alone (digital competency) and for that I’ll use the EU Digital Competence Framework (DigComp)¹ and files, because it’s a fundamental concept many people have difficulty with. I agree with the intention and categories in DigComp, but believe it assumes knowledge people don’t have. For that I’ll use a couple of related DigComp standards to highlight how easy it is to overlook concepts in favour of technical skills.

• CS1.3.03 (Basic level): “Download, save, retrieve, move and delete digital files”
• CS1.3.07 (Advanced level): “Apply naming convention to digital files and hierarchies to digital folders”

What’s a digital file?

Today’s file based technologies have not yet reached Asimov’s definition of magic, unless we mean they are so difficult to understand they may as well be magic. The two standards above assume you understand what a file actually is because each of the actions apart from “save” which initially creates a file, need you to conceptually understand that a file is a named object that stores information for later retrieval, has a location and can exist as multiple versions over time.² Naming conventions have nothing to do with files. A file called “shopping list” can also be called “asdfp897”. Naming conventions are about search and retrieval by your Future self and to be fair, DigComp does have this in a section on “Information search, evaluation and management”.

With this concept in place, I contend that it’s easier to understand:

• Different file types
• Why coping a file to a USB can be a security problem
• Why malicious actors want access to files that store personal information

Technology continues to outpace education and when we fail as a society to impart conceptual knowledge people lose agency. In a digital world, the loss of agency translates into a loss of Dignity and becomes a barrier to taking care of other fundamental human concerns.³ What we see as a technology problem is actually a human problem. A person who incapable of using the technology in front of them may be unable to take care of the following domains of human concern.

• Dignity: Assess they are worthless because “I’m no good at computers” when they’ve never been educated in what they need to be functional.
• Sociability: Lacking the ability to coordinate action alongside those who are more digitally literate than themselves, risking exclusion through an inability to participate (at all, or at comparable speed). They may be held to an unfair assessment of competency and if I don’t think you are competent to address my concerns, I won’t involve you.
• Work: Unable to do the work required of their job in a way that meets expected standards.
• Career: Feel purposeless and unable to set a direction in life
• Money: Unable to earn enough money to survive
• Education: Build upon what they know and increase their ability to take care of other concerns because basic principles are missing

In other words, a person lacking the training they need will have difficulty working with others, face unnecessary financial pressure (or be seen as a “cost”), underestimate their value and generally have such a shit time they leave.

Ironically we’ve been “trained” to think training is the right answer and missed the human concern concept that underpins its necessity. Never have we been taught to see the humanity we all share. It matters to me that I do what I can to help people recover their missing dignity and make their lives easier.

Email a comment

Progress below

I’m adding Progress notes below.¹ It’s slow going.

What did I change?

The most important change I made was to eliminate links to pages that do not exist. Links between pages are created automatically. However, if a page links to another page that is not published, the link is still created and readers do not know any different until they are shown “Page not found.” In my mind, this is inexcusable and lazy. The system is capable of identifying pages that do not exist, so any internal links should be removed. Within Obsidian such links are valid. Clicking them creates the new page, yet the published website does not offer that functionality.

I (and others) modified the code to remove links that don’t exist and I extended it further to remove all sign of the link having ever existed in the first place. This lets me write public notes referring to people and places of importance to me, with no privacy leak. If my friend’s name is Mary Smith, then I write [[Mary Smith|my friend]], and all readers see, even if they look at the source code of the HTML page is my friend. But for me, in Obsidian the link is still relevant and active.

The next major change was to gain greater control over which pages were included and which were filtered out. I discuss that at length in Merging Public and Private Notes: Three Lines of Defence in Quartz 4.

Following that, the remainder of customisations were navigation or formatting in nature. I added previous and next page links, modified tags on the fly, made headings and fonts consistent across modules, and replaced the explorer tree navigation with a custom crafted list of page links.

Choosing to upgrade

Quartz 5 fundamentally breaks everything I’ve built; in a good way. Thankfully, I don’t need to upgrade all at once and hold off on any website changes until I’ve translated over my code so I can take it slowly.²

The first reason for upgrading to Quartz 5 is to keep up with security. Though my website is static and has very little running code, it’s always good to be on the latest version for security reasons. If I stay on the old version, underlying technologies may change and I’ll be forced to make more changes than I care to understand for the sake of currency. Site creation may even break, as occurred recently when an underlying library change broke some of my filtering. Running the current version reduces this risk greatly.

Secondly, Quartz 5 has some very clever plugins that convert Obsidian Canvas and Obsidian Base formats for web display. As of today I only have one canvas and I can’t convert it so the image is not linked, but I have many bases and displaying them natively cuts directly across several of my customisations making them irrelevant and creating a better experience for me and my readers.

Finally, Quartz 5 introduces a very strong plugin architecture. It allows me to make my changes independently from the core code, lets me easily disable functions I don’t want, and makes it easier for me to tweak code from other developers easily. Disabling some features in the past meant commenting out code I didn’t want to run, at the risk of an update putting it back. That risk has gone.

A staged upgrade

I’ve learned a lot in the last couple of days since the Quartz 5 release; about the architecture of the new version and how I need to best manage it for the way I think. So far,

1. I’ve configured a local clone rather than a fork. With the plugin architecture there is less value in me sharing my changes. I have no intention of pushing changes upstream to the main codebase.
2. I’ve created my first plugin. It replicates what was covered in Merging Public and Private Notes: Three Lines of Defence in Quartz 4. Filtering is critical to my note organisation so this was the obvious first case. The next will be removing links with a transformer plugin. My plugins will be hosted locally meaning I don’t have to worry about any private information leaking out should I need to include it. I’ve yet to decide if changes to public plugins will be a clone or a fork.
3. I added an en-AU localisation in preparation for formatting dates and currency to Australian locales. This is the only change to the base code so far.

Today will be removing links and understanding how styles work. I’ll test bases and decided how best to use the Quartz concept of folder notes, and where bases can replace them. One thing I’m looking forward to is removing the need for the Obsidian Dataview Serializer plugin. It’s been great and solved a very particular Obsidian → website display problem but with the ability to display bases directly from the original file, I won’t need it anymore. I will also likely get dates sorted as I have custom date fields that I may no longer need.

What have I learned

The plugin template has a test harness built in. It was the first time I have ever used one and took great comfort building and running tests for my filter plugin. I am confident it’s working as planned and it greatly reduced the code → build → test cycle.

The content folder is symlinked and indirectly caused my a round of 7+ rebuilds of the whole environment until I understood why my files were disappearing. Eventually I realised that when I added content to .gitignore the files went. It happens that Quartz uses fastglob for generating the list of files and it honours .gitignore so when I added it, the folder’s contents were ignored. The trick was to specify !content instead.

Progress

Outstanding items (unordered)

• RSS feeds
  • Check for guid, if missing abort
  • Create Commander’s Log RSS feed
  • Add comment invitation links
  • Add all RSS header information
  • Filter to class/blog-post
  • Confirm date is creation date, not modified date here
  • Test blog filtering of private pages is in place
  • Test RSS pages do not include links to missing or filtered pages
  • Transcludes
• Transform all class/* tags to remove class/ prefix
• Format folder pages
• Create folder pages for blog, commanders log
• Check dates are Australia/Melbourne time
• Image swipe as seen in Danish ships cross-stitch
• Replace Explorer
• Improve link output of missing articles as Recent Notes is using the filtered set so I may be checking in the wrong place.
• Add Webmentions
• Add tinylytics heart icon
• Styling for self-reference page links
• Test table formatting cssclasses
• Callout boxes: use Test (styles) for display
• Test footnote height display
• Site tagline
• Buy me a coffee
• page meta
  • Add modified and created dates
  • Add link to ratings
  • Add permalink
  • Add prefix for cmdrs-log pages
  • Add series links
  • Add class tag
• Inter page navigation

30 May 2026

Backup, backup, backup

At one point I accidentally replaced 2,000 markdown files with HTML. It took a matter of seconds. Thankfully I had last night’s backup. Well, I say “thankfully” but that’s why I backup every night. The Obsidian Sync was already underway. Had I been relying on that for my “backup” I would have been in very big trouble.

Fixing the date error was easily. I conformed my system to created/modifed instead of datetime/updated. It meant a few template changes were required, yet very easy using the excellent Notebook Navigator plugin.

I am pleased to say I have all filtering and link removal working as required. I’m not pleased that link removal has taken 8 hours. I started with a Transformer, then an Emitter and finally a PageType emitter. I thought plugins ran in the order given, but they are first grouped by transform → filter → emit, so my transformer could not remove links for pages that were filtered out afterwards. My first go at an emitter worked, but no styling, just HTML, and the final PageType version looked great, but also failed with pages that had been filtered. Strangely, when Quartz filters out pages, it does not update the main list of pages it’s generating.

From here on in, the changes are structural and cosmetic.

31 May 2026

Again, what should have been easy wasn’t.

Out of the box the site looked horrible. I changed the fonts as per the previous version, and the current instructions without effect. It transpires there was a theme plugin also added that was overriding my expected changes. I’m not the only one to have suffered this and it may just be those coming from Quartz 4.

I thought I’d start with the footer next. Three hours later… it is up and running. Admittedly I’ve made some copy and layout changes but most of the time was trying to work out what was required. Multiple web pages open comparing code that worked, to my code that didn’t. At least an hour lost because I’d typed “footer” instead of “afterBody”, then a bit more time because defaults were not being picked up.

As a whole the system is not as modular as I’d like. I use tinylytics and there is a way to have it registered automatically. What’s not there is any mechanism to add a couple of other flags. That requires direct modification of the site-generation backend. Although I expect such changes to be fewer now with the new plugin system, I’ve already had to make a couple and so will resurrect tracking Customisations of Quartz for The Quantum Garden.

8 June 2026

I’m learning. Backlinks were easy to get working. Although I only changed a title and added a sort. Recent notes took longer, mostly getting the formatting right. At least I’m not fighting the system now and making each change knowing what I’m after. Recent notes are ordering by modified, and not creation date but that’s for another day. I want to make a change so that † indicator for an updated note is shown, just like it is in the notes listings anyway.

10 June 2026

In the past I the display and ordering date of a note was created, with an indicator if it had been modified. Quartz defaults to modified and I’ve decided to stay with that. My rationale is my most recent thinking will float to the top.

I’ve added a † marker against the date for recent notes to indicate when a note has been changed from the original creation date (like this one has). If modified, hovering over the date will show the original, and if any of the displayed note titles are modified, instructions to do this are added; if none are modified the instructions are withheld.

I spent too much time hunting down two spurious warnings that are don’t halt site creation. One appears to come from using --- for a horizontal rule instead of ***. To fix it I have to find/replace all occurrences, but since it’s also a YAML marker, tricky. The second is from my use of KaTex for math and it mis-interpreting dollar amounts as math. I resolved that warning by changing the rendering engine to mathjax.

RSS, via the context-index plugin is another example of poor design. The one plugin emits both a sitemap and RSS feed. It should be two separate plugins. Having options to enable/disable one or the other is insufficient with this new plugin model.

The RSS header information for the base blog RSS feed is complete. Still need to add filtering, and the feed for Commander’s Log.

12 June 2026

Pages and RSS feeds share the same link sanitising so there are not escaping private links. I created a test.xml feed for testing just pages with #class/test-page just pages with #class/test-page and a better Test page to feed into it.

13 June 2026

I have added a transform-tags transformer that takes Obsidian tags of the form class/* and strips the class/ from the front as I don’t need that on the site. Only class tags are ever used. The class/blog-post and class/now-post tags are rewritten as blog and now respectively. I have the list of tags to rewrite as an option so I don’t need to modify code for any future additions.

options:
  remap:
    "blog-post": "blog"
    "now-post": "now"

Based on what I learned about options for transform-tags, I’ve extended the options for content-index so that whole RSS definitions can be passed through from options as well. I don’t imagine much will change here but it’s a development mode I prefer and I learned some new tricks along the way.

20 June 2026

I’m some way towards the metadata display at the top of each page. I have the date, ratings and series links working properly.

Email a comment

Conversations for clarity can be difficult. I frequently find people shy away and feel uncomfortable being asked for clarity because:

• The very act of asking can feel like a challenge to their Sincerity or knowledge
• They are unused to being asked for it
• They don’t know the answer and sitting in the grey is uncomfortable for them or they are afraid of me knowing they don’t. At the moment of answering what is thought to be known is shown to be unknown.¹ It takes Courage to acknowledge this in the moment and I am the person that doesn’t know I am comfortable saying so because I understand the importance of acknowledging the fact so missing knowledge can be sought.
• They feel the clarity I may need is unnecessary
  • Because they don’t have clarity themselves they cannot understand why it’s needed
  • They think enough clarity has been provided but I know from experience critical detail is still missing
• They don’t have the time (“a stitch in time saves nine”)

They same reasons are used by myself from time-to-time.

Sitting in a Conversation for clarity requires Trust, particularly alignment in my assessment of Involvement; that the other is attuned to my concerns. When the clarity is paralleled with a Conversation for coordination of action, my assessment of the other’s Sincerity; that they will do what they say they will do, is also crucial.

Email a comment

I’m going to make a public request for people to converse with about the ontology of the human observer and learning. I crave conversations for speculation and learning with people that have similar interests. My post will be on Mastodon. Please suggest hashtags that might help me narrow down an audience. They are likely also going to be hashtags I subscribe to later on.

My prompt does not provide any indication of subject matter beyond ” ontology of the human observer and learning” and is typical of a prompt when I don’t yet know exactly what it is I’m asking for and I’m relying on a generative AI assistant to help. I was surprised by completeness of the answer.

What follows is Copilot’s response pretty much verbatim with some formatting changes only. I believe it’s more useful that way than me sanitising it to a list only.

I have followed most of the tags and am in the process of getting a feel for the content that is showing up. Those which tend towards meditation and self-reflection are so far showing up as platitudes. I have two options to clean these out. Either unfollow the tag, block the individual, or find some other keyword that can be hidden using Ivory. If it takes more time to manage than I’m getting value, I am better off unfollowing the tag.

I’m just at the start of this process. 20+ years ago, I met people by following their blogs. They are harder to find organically these days and I trust this hashtag approach will close the gap.

Here’s the short, clear takeaway: You’ll reach the right people on Mastodon by combining ontology‑of‑learning hashtags, philosophy‑of-mind hashtags, and small‑community academic hashtags that already have active conversationalists rather than just broadcasters.

Below is a curated set grouped by audience type.

🎓 Philosophical & Ontological Inquiry

These hashtags tend to attract people who enjoy deep conceptual exploration, systems thinking, and reflective dialogue.

• #philosophy— Broad but active; good for visibility among reflective thinkers.
• #phenomenology— Strong overlap with observer‑dependent interpretation.
• #ontology— General ontology discussions; includes both academic and applied.
• #epistemology— People interested in how observers know what they know.
• #philosophyOfMind— Good for conversations about interpretation, perception, and being an observer.

🧠 Learning, Sense‑Making & Cognitive Development

These hashtags help you find people who think about learning as a transformation of the observer, not just skill acquisition.

• #learning— Broad but includes reflective educators and autodidacts.
• #metacognition— People who think about thinking.
• #selfreflection— Often includes practitioners of embodied and linguistic self‑observation.
• #lifelonglearning— Good for people who enjoy speculative, exploratory conversations.
• #transformativeLearning— Smaller but highly aligned with ontological shifts.

🧩 Systems, Complexity & Observer‑Dependent Worlds

These hashtags attract people who naturally resonate with the Ontology of the Human Observer because they already think in relational, systemic, or interpretive terms.

• #systemsthinking— Very active; great for conversations about observers in systems.
• #complexity— People who enjoy speculative, emergent, multi‑perspective inquiry.
• #cybernetics— Strong overlap with second‑order observation and interpretation.
• #constructivism— Directly aligned with “observer creates world of meaning.”

🧘 Embodied, Linguistic & Mood‑Oriented Practices

These hashtags help you find people who think about learning as shifts in mood, body, and language — very close to the ontology you’re working with.

• #embodiment— People exploring body‑based learning and somatic awareness.
• #mindfulness— Broad but includes reflective practitioners.
• #somatics— Useful for conversations about embodied practices.
• #linguistics— For the language-as-action crowd.
• #moods— Small but surprisingly aligned with ontological moods.

🧵 Smaller, niche hashtags that may be perfect for your topic

These are less populated but more likely to attract exactly the kind of people who want to talk, not just post.

• #philosophyDiscussion
• #deepthinking
• #reflectivePractice
• #sensemaking
• #meaningmaking
• #innerwork
• #selfinquiry

These tend to have slower streams but higher‑quality engagement.

Email a comment

In all but the most extreme cases books and movies are banned either because:

• one group wants to retain power over another, or
• one group is fearful of another.

The challenging of social, moral, political or religious norms are the usual “reasons” given to hide the true reasons of power and fear.

Those seeking a ban are acting superior to others, i.e., “they know best” and others are incapable of coming to their own conclusions. Or it’s an acknowledgement they are capable, and the conclusions reached will challenge those who benefit most from the status quo.

Email a comment

I’ve been doing very little thinking at all and that’s nice. What thoughts have crossed my mind have been natural and not demanded by work or Personal knowledge management goals. I haven’t even catalogued our holiday photos beyond organising them by date and time.

I did however spend time sorting out Quantum OS Source Naming Rules and finally removed all the historical note tags that were clogging up my systems. Tags are not knowledge and now all tags are just Quantum OS Class Tags or Quantum OS Journal Tags. Everything is nice and neat (just don’t peek under the carpet).

I though I might get around to a Map of Content for the Expand my Way of Being landscape. I did a small experiment over the previous two weeks of spending 30 mins a day working on maps. It showed me I don’t quite have the concept down, and my high-level maps need work. I did get Productive Laziness sorted to a much better standard. Anyway, Expand my Way of Being, in my relaxed holiday state, hasn’t had a look in beyond me recognising the most likely place to start is a mind map or concept map; visual, not text.

I read the new Mark Lawrence book Daughter of Crows while I was away and it’s up to his usual standard. I’m looking forward to see how the story resolves over the next two books; all his stories are trilogies. Swann’s Way has been put aside for the moment. I’m enjoying it by need a break from 19th Century France. Currently reading Children of Ruin and listening to Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. Alongside my reading I determined that KOReader to iPhone sync is not for me.

My daughter gifted me a Darth Vader LEGO set for Christmas which I saved until now. I build a bag a day to draw out the enjoyment. Not a lot to this one with only 5 bags, nevertheless there is a record of my Building the Darth Vader Helmet in LEGO.

I put the base coat down on the head and arms of Manfred von Carstein. Today’s plans to paint most likely scuppered by the dull light and the draw of Elite: Dangerous as that’s had my attention the last couple of days.

I posted on Monday that: In Bendigo the trees have just woken up to the fact they are 2/3 through Autumn. Perhaps it’s the balmy 26℃ today on 1 May that’s confusing them. It feels like those cartoons where a tree dumps all its leaves in a moment. We’re going to need to blower vac (sue me!) the leaves from the shade sail tomorrow before it rains. Have never had them collect there before.

A walk the next day had dried, crunched leaves all over the footpaths which is itself unusual. The leaves normally stay wetter for a while.

Email a comment

In brief, KOReader is an alternative e-ink device reader that can be loaded onto a Kobo (native) or Kindle (jailbroken). There is no iOS version however which lessens the usefulness for reading on one device and then switching to another. There is now a plugin that will sync between Readest, which does run on all platforms, and KOReader. In theory I could begin reading a book on my Kobo, switch to my iPhone and then even pick up where I left off on Windows.

As I traversed my rabbit hole I also came across NickelMenu for the Kobo and that is staying. It was introduced as a way to start KOReader but also makes accessing dark mode easier, among other things. NickelMenu came out of my subterranean travels and will stay.

Installation troubles

I installed NickelMenu and then KOReader. I then spent time wondering why all the files on my Kobo were being treated as books. In fixing that I broke KOReader and had to reinstall it. I then connected to the sync service in calibre-web; after I realised my firewall rules were blocking access from the Kobo to the server hosting it. Nothing much seemed to be happening or of value over what I already have with the Kobo Utilities plugin in Calibre itself so I canned that. In doing so I somehow broke NickelMenu and had to resintall that again.¹ I then moved to the loungeroom and set up Readest and the plugin. It mostly(?) seemed to work ok. I’m unsure if the position from the Kobo was correct.

The duplicate book problem

When I purchase a Kobo book I can download to my Kobo Clara, and the app on my iPhone. When the book is on both devices, I can read on one, then pick up where I left off on another. It’s useful when waiting for takeaway to pull out my phone and be better engaged. On the Kindle it worked perfectly (which was it’s only redeeming feature²) but I’ve had problems with timing on the Kobo because I’m expecting it to sync quicker than it does.³ The upshot is that most of my book reading on the Kobo has been with sideloaded books.

I remove the DRM from all books that I purchase. I don’t want books removed or altered with out my consent. For the most part Calibre does this easily with Kobo formatted kepub books, and if that fails Adobe Digital Editions covers the rest. I make corrections in Calibre (mostly to series naming and numbering, and set the cover I like) and then use the Kobo Utilities plugin to help sync metadata and books out, and reading positions/read status, in. It means plugging the Kobo in via a cable, but at most that’s every couple of weeks as I transition books.

I didn’t sideload books on the Kindle and I’m wondering exactly what the chain of events was to do so on the Kobo. When I’m reading a sideloaded book, it’s not the same book on the Kobo or iPhone and so syncing doesn’t occur.

Anyway, the problem with KOReader and Readest means I have to bypass the native Kobo system and load the book in both places. It’s messy and KOReader doesn’t even organise natively on series metadata. I also didn’t like KOReader’s display of text. I couldn’t get the line spacing correct and that’s an important reading consideration.

Not worth it

In the end I dropped everything except for NickelMenu and have gone back to the way things are. I’ll spend some more time this morning identifying differences between native Kobo sync and sideloaded books. Will report back if I find anything useful.

Email a comment

Anecdotally, I would say more than half of our evening meals are eaten out of a bowl. The change is culturally driven as we’ve incorporated foods from other countries into our daily menu. Whether it be Mexican, Indian, Chinese, or Thai, and despite the fact that many dishes are Australianised and not what people eat in their own country, this is a good change. In a simple way it shows that learning from other cultures can enrich our lives without needing anything more drastic than changing out a plate and replacing it with a bowl.

Email a comment

There is a pressure within me to record everything I do, and to create. The recording takes a disproportionate amount of time, and an absurd amount of time compared to the utility. With a website on top, where everything can be easily shared, the problem gets worse.

The state of play

Screen shot of the books index page

Above is the books index page. It looks great, is created automatically from the list of book pages, and auto-sizes covers as needed. When I start reading a new book, I need to:

1. Find the Goodreads page for the book
2. Capture information using the Obsidian Web Clipper (title, author, published, cover, etc.)
3. Use one plugin to convert the cover image URL to a local file
4. Use another plugin to convert the local file to WEBP format
5. Rename to image to match my standard format
6. Replace the image property URL with the local link
7. Move the image to the assets\covers
8. And, if the book is part of a series, set the series and sequence values, optionally creating the book series if needed.

Add to all of this a complex backend for generating the public index page above and you can start to see the utility falls. Who really cares what I rate a book. I don’t in as much as I know which are my ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ and ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ rated items already. A ⭐️⭐️⭐️ item doesn’t need to be tracked.

Poor quality information

Further, I am violating Don’t duplicate public knowledge on everything that is no my rating or my short review. I’m not great at reviews. Even for the higher ratings my review boils down to “because I liked it.” Most of the 88 books hinted to above do not have any commentary at all.

Obsidian isn’t helping

Obsidian compounds the problem by being too damn powerful. It’s super easy to add a new property and build a database of something. There are tools for that. I’m already using Calibre, calibre-web, Plex, and Audiobookshelf as my point of truth databases. Why duplicate information even in my own systems?!

And let’s not even mention Obsidian bases. The newly introduced database tools that can slice and dice pages any way I like. Here is the equivalent book index view native within Obsidian.

Book index in bases “card” view.

I can’t display bases on the website. Instead, for something like a book series page, I have a base (which doesn’t display) and use Obsidian Dataview Serializer plugin to create public version for the website. This means I have the same information displayed in two separate was on a single note, and it’s dubious if I even need it in the first place.

The initial trigger for this whole piece was the noise created by my internal index bases matching external indexes. I had to think of which I was looking at Obsidian’s quick switcher.

Coding effort

The Quantum Garden Website is generated using a substantially modified version of Quartz. I estimate 95% of the time and 80% of the code changes I’ve made have been to present books, movies, etc., on the site so they look pretty. It’s time that I could have spent elsewhere.

The cleanup

Everything is a journey and it’s been a series of small decision steps over the last fortnight which have led me to the conclusion I need a big clean out of media-related pages.¹

• Unless I have a substantial review or notes, the media page and associated cover will go
• Public index pages will be deleted from the vault and the website. My internal Obsidian base copies are more powerful.
• It is nice to have the covers, even in The Quantum Garden Vault so I will likely keep that process described above. I will wait to see what the impact is after deleting the superfluous copies.
• ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ and ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ items of all types will be listed on a series of My favourites pages where I list the item and describe in a paragraph why it is important to me. It achieves the same level of meaning with far less work.

At the end of this note I’m happy with that approach. It feels cleaner and I have a sense of my important notes being seen through the trees.

Email a comment

On Friday night, my wife and I saw Joanne McNally perform Pinotphile at The Melbourne Comedy Festival. It was the first festival show we’d ever seen. We thoroughly enjoyed ourselves but have resolved that any late shows in the future mean a city stay-over. Getting home at 1am was too much and a little too risky.

Burgers for tea pre-comedy show were magnificently surpassed by dinner last night at Ms. Batterhams. As always, amazing food, good wine and welcoming service.

I’m reading Le Cunff (2025), Tiny Experiments and have set myself a small PACT to work on the Map of Content notes in The Quantum Garden Vault. I did a bit of research yesterday and concluded I’ve too many notes that are just lists or indexes and not true maps. My Landscapes are close and will form the basis. They just need more attention. To that end, I’m going to work on improving my maps for 30 minutes each evening for the next fortnight. I want time to explore and see the benefits to me, rather than force something out for a website.

During the week I listened to Dialetic, ep. 42: Celine Nguyen - Nurturing Your Mind in Public , followed up reading no one told me about proust¹ and as a result am now enjoying Swann’s Way.² The way Marcel Proust seems to slow emotional thought to the speed of being capable of capturing it on paper is mesmerising.

Merging Public and Private Notes: Three Lines of Defence in Quartz 4 describes my weekend’s work of combining public and private notes for less friction in The Quantum Garden Vault. So far it’s working well and has allowed me to begin introducing some automation. I’ve also begun using Obsidian Web Clipper extensively and that benefits from having a combined note structure. I’ve linked frequently to The optimisation-procrastination trap yet this is different. I’m pulling down and recreating a structure that is already working for me. When the trap is at play it feels like I’m making changes to chase something. This time around it’s been a natural change.

Email a comment

I’m combining public and private notes into the same folder because it reduces a complexity problem I’m facing by having them split. This post outlines the thinking I’ve done from a software developer point of view in the hope it helps others understand a little better what needs to be considered when documents are public facing.

All weekend I’ve been working on moving all my notes to a single folder. I was likely leaning towards this from last weekend’s investigation into how I can provide my notes to AI for identification of patterns and themes (not to generate content, see my AI policy). At the same time fighting with how best to store sources and my notes on them. Then, during the week the Universe delivered and I came across. Steph Ango’s Obsidian Vault Template where they have a very flat structure of notes and references (items not created by them). My decision made, its no longer atlas/notes and public/notes but just atlas/notes.

Privacy first

For some background on the way I did this in the past see Protecting what’s published.

The separate of private and public notes provided a degree of privacy by default. Notes that were in the public folder would be displayed on The Quantum Garden Website and those outside the public folder would never be candidates. I added an extra level of protection by employing the Quartz ExplicitPublish plugin to only publish pages where the publish property was set to true.

For a page to appear online, it must be in both the public folder and have publish: true.

Even if I were to accidentally move my whole journal folder into public my most private thinking wouldn’t leak because publish was either undefined or false.

Why not two vaults?

If you’re asking why not have two separate vaults and keep everything separate, it’s because I often link from private notes to public notes and vice-versa. I’ve modified the back end of Quartz in such a way that a link from a public to a private note is completely hidden. The default Quartz doesn’t do this which I find poor design.

Improving the publish property

The publish property as a checkbox is a little too simple and prone to error because there is no state representing, “I’ve not made a conscious decision”. I replaced the two-state checkbox it with a three-state text field where the choices are:

• deny: under no circumstances publish this page
• undecided: default state for new pages, forcing me to make a decision to publish or not
• allow: publish this page

There is a hidden fourth-state that occurs when a note does not have the publish property at all, or it is blank. I treat this as an error and abort the site generation process until I’ve fixed it.

The filter rule (take 1)

Every note in atlas will be made public if publish = true. All other notes will remain private.

Class tags: a second line of defence

What happens if I accidentally move a private journal entry to the atlas folder? If a second accident has set publish = true it will be published. It is a case that is unlikely but may have high impact. I accept some level of risk by co-hosting private and public notes in the same vault so what can I do to minimise the likelihood. Software development is more about handling possible exceptions than anything else, so let’s use a second piece of important information I have attached to my notes.

Many of my notes have Quantum OS Class Tags for structural organisation. Just like this is. So I can employ them to double-down on privacy by filtering out those classes which should never be published.

My privacy filter has a list of classes which, not matter what the state of the publish property is, will never be published. It’s effectively saying, “I don’t care that your parents have given you permission to ride this roller-coaster, your head is not above the line so you’re out”.

Quantum OS Restricted Tags lists the tags that are filtered in this way.

The filter rule (take 2)

Every note in atlas will be made public if publish = true AND it is not in a prohibited tag class. All other notes will remain private.

Folder filtering: a third line of defence

To structure The Quantum Garden Website properly under the hood, I need to have not just an atlas/notes folder but other supporting folders like atlas/assets which contains all images, etc. By inference, any folder under atlas might be copied to the web, even if it has nothing to do with the website. That’s the way Quartz operates by default and it makes sense, though is risky if you’re not accustomed to thinking about risks. Someone would have to type the path to get to the files, they are otherwise hidden, but it’s much better to not have them there.

For this we can use the ignorePatterns Configuration. Files and folders which should be ignored are not copied, and anything not ignored is.

deny, allow

There are 2 ways we can go with security. Allow everything and deny exceptions, or deny everything and allow exceptions. Of the two, deny first is the most secure. It requires you to make a decision about what is allowed. In the case of the Quartz ignorePatterns filter, the default is allow, deny which is not great. All it solves is the problem of the developer being hounded by new people not understanding why there are no files showing.

The relevant part of my Quartz quartz.config.ts file looks like this.

const config: QuartzConfig = {
  configuration: {
    ignorePatterns: ["atlas-unchecked","Home Life Index", "JDEX","maps","notes/sources
  plugins: {
    filters: [
      Plugin.Portcullis()
    ],
}

The filter rule (final take)

Every note in atlas will be made public if publish = true AND it is not in a prohibited tag class AND it is not in an ignored folder. All other notes will remain private.

The code

Here is the code for my filter function. I called it Portcullis to represent the serious nature of the filter. The image reminds me nothing gets through without permission.

• Lines 1–2: Hook the filter into the Quartz system and include chalk for coloured log output
• Lines 4–10: Create the list of Quantum OS Restricted Tags to be check against later
• Lines 12 onwards are the main function. Each file is checked in turn, and if it should be published return true otherwise return false.
  • Lines 16–21: Check for the existence of the publish property. If it is missing or not set, abort site generation with an error message.
  • Lines 24–26: Return false if the value of publish is deny. This version of the code outputs a notification to help debugging. Over more than a few deny files this should be removed because it’s too much noise. I’m using it for testing. Proceed to the next note.
  • Lines 27–29: Return false if the value of publish is undecided. Here we are defaulting to a deny behaviour if no decision has been made. Proceed to the next note.
  • Lines 30–50: Handle an allow. Further checks are required.
    • Lines 31–41: Check for the presence of illegal tags. If even one is found, deny publishing.
    • Lines 43-49: I sometimes write blog posts with a future date. If a post is future dated, don’t publish it yet.
    • Line 50: All checks are passed, this file is ok to publish. Proceed to the next note.
  • Lines 51–54: Remember I said that software development was dealing with exceptions. Since the value of publish has to be typed it could be something other than “deny”, “undecided”, or “allow”. These lines capture that occurrence and abort with an error.

One final caution

My code is an extension of the base Quartz code. Upstream changes automatically incorporated into my own could overwrite or bypass my changes, thereby creating a security leak I wasn’t ready for.

This dependence. is problem with the software development industry as a whole and means I have to check each change before accepting it. That’s the price I pay for modifying code to do what I want where that differs from the original developer’s needs or intentions.

Email a comment

I love being reminded of how important it is to listen to my emotions and they change during the day based on the activities I undertake. The small moments can be enlightening.

Email a comment

At work I’m redefining my role to move away from the drudgery of certain types of project work to more engaging conversations with my clients where we can create something instead of just going through the corporate motions.

I spent too much time over the past week and a half learning about Retrieval Augmented Generation and how I can apply it privately to my own notes. Not to create content, but to assist me in finding hidden patterns across my public and private writing.

I’m reading Le Cunff (2025), Tiny Experiments by Anne-Laure Le Cunff and am trying a new note-taking method. There has always been a friction between taking notes, matching them to a source and sharing them online. I want to keep certain articles I read for reference, yet it’s inappropriate for me to reshare that article. Sharing my notes is fine. Until now notes and sources have been in the same document. I’m now running with “Source” and “Source (notes)”.

My memory of Project Hail Mary the book wasn’t great. I remember listening to the audiobook and enjoying it, but time has ranked it behind The Martian. Today, after seeing the movie in the cinema with my daughter has reset that. It’s an uplifting and humorous story about working together for the benefit of all. Something the world needs. My other reading is a return to Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. Book and tv-show in the past, now the audiobook. I will recommend to you During the Dance by Mark Lawrence as a sweet very short story.¹

Email a comment

The problem with this assault of titles is a lack of connection. The recommender is pushing their preferences on the assumption mine are identical. I try to keep to an approach of:

• Asking what podcasts they like and why
• Asking if they would like any similar recommendations
• Offering something different with a why I think they would like it

The same goes for books, movies, music, tv shows and video-games. Always make recommendations with a contextual why.

On the flip-side people are often swamped with indiscriminate recommendations because their request is too broad. Reddit and other forums are filled with people asking “What game should I play?”, “What computer should I buy?” etc. Most people take the podcast path above, try to be helpful, and give a direct answer. A few will ask what type of games they like, what is the computer for, and make a more useful recommendation from there. It’s not always the fault of the person asking. Sometimes they don’t know where to start so their question has to be high-level.

On a related note, remember that Should is a very dangerous word. I know someone who makes every suggestion a commitment. “You should listen to …” is answered with, “Yes, I must listen to that”. Don’t let your lack of seeking a why for your answer burden someone who can’t say no.

Email a comment

The premise is this: as I age, what I over-easily tolerated without question when I was younger is butting up against the realities that I’m facing up to in my middle-age. The irritability is not a sign of something wrong now, but the reality of a correction to something that has been wrongly set in my past.

In the last couple of weeks I’ve been thinking about the nature of work I do in my job. Yesterday I was struck by incoherence in how I feel when I explain my role verses how I feel when undertaking my role. How can I explain it with genuine passion and at the same time feel loathing at some of the work? I was able to separate this into a Great work passion for solving problems and advising clients and a Bad work component of chasing clients for information and doing their thinking for them (aside: I am struggling to get the wording of this Bad work component right).

My irritability has reached the level where I’m forced into this kind of thinking simply to relieve the pressure. I see now that’s an understatement. I’m actually getting closer to who I want to be in my remaining work years.

Whether it was the YouTube algorithm or the Universe helping me along, and whether this is science or just resonates with me, I now have a new perspective which gives me the power to make change.

Email a comment

I understand a Daily note provides context for when something occurred, yet I treat my journal entries in the main as exploratory and reflective. True, there are many with a record of the day’s happenings, but they are important happenings.

Perhaps I don’t yet see the benefit in tracking everything. It feels very messy to me. I suspect I never will.

I name each Journal entry with the current date and I do not want each journal entry to reflect the whole day. Two notes with the same name format would be confusing.

Email a comment

Each pattern describes a problem which occurs over and over again in our environment, and then describes the core of the solution to that problem, in such a way that you can use this solution a million times over, without ever doing it the same way twice.

Christopher Alexander

The Pattern Library contains patterns for the use of Personal knowledge management software that remembers for you. These tools facilitate knowledge and learning through easy linking of topics to real world occurrences and forms the core of any Personal knowledge management strategy.

As with any piece of software there is great benefit in knowing how to use it for best advantage. Once way to do this is to become familiar with the patterns of use as described here. Patterns provide generalised methods which are applicable to a variety of situations. Understanding them saves both time and complexity.

The patterns are organised into three groups. Thinking, Connecting and Remembering.

• Thinking patterns — describe methods for quickly bringing information into a Second brain. They cover targeted research and informal browsing.
  • Brainstorm pattern
  • Thinktank pattern
• Connecting patterns — explain how to build upon the power of knowledge already in a brain and connect it to existing ideas or generate new ones.
  • Happiness pattern
  • Occurrence pattern
• Remembering patterns — Once a thought is in the Second brain and connected to others, how do you recall it. The Remembering Patterns help with navigation through a brain.
  • I Want pattern

Email a comment