In this video, I cover a few more interesting features of Roam Research that I find helpful for my note-taking. I particularly recommend considering attributes for your page metadata templates – I learned the hard way that I should’ve used them from the beginning. You’ll learn how to create attributes, and how you can use them in queries and attribute tables, as well as some new keyboard shortcuts, how I use emojis, and more!

Sections:

• 00:00 Introduction
• 00:26 Adding new pages over time
• 03:04 Zooming in on blocks to de-clutter
• 04:17 Using block references to refer to subsections
• 06:01 Using the sidebar
• 07:20 Media embeds
• 09:31 Using emojis in page names
• 11:14 Attributes for metadata
• 14:39 Queries with attributes

My past videos on Roam:

• Hacking in the Dark, Episode 3: New Roam Features!
• Live Stream: Taking Notes in Roam Research
• Hacking in the Dark, Episode 2: #RoamCult

Let me know in the comments or on Twitter if you have any questions, or if there are any other features or use cases you’d like me to cover in future videos. Feel free to ping me with any use cases or workflows that you’ve adopted that you find particularly productivity-enhancing. I think I’ve just about exhausted my tips and tricks for using Roam, so let me know if there are any other topics I could cover in this series.

I did a quick livestream today showing some new (and some not-so-new) features in Roam Research, including:

• Improved precision in inline calculator
• New block reference features, especially for using “template” blocks
• The new mysterious Delta (Δ) button for spaced repetition
• Mermaid diagrams
• Code highlighting support for new languages
• Themes and versioning

Hope you enjoy it!

Past Roam videos:

• Hacking in the Dark Episode 2: #RoamCult
• Live Stream: Taking Notes in Roam Research

I’ve done a previous video about some cool features in Roam Research, but this time I decided to show what it actually looks like to take notes on something, live. If you’re wondering if Roam is worth the money, this video should give you an idea of how valuable it is to me. Let me know if you’d like to see more live streams in the future!

I recorded an audio version of my first Intellectual Denial of Service Attacks blog post from March 2019. Let me know what you think!

In this episode, I show how I use Roam Research to take book notes (among other tangents). Hope you enjoy it.

I finally bought a camera for my desktop, so I figured I’d give it a spin with OBS Studio. This was mostly a trial run to see how my mic, camera, video quality, etc. were working. In this short video, I give a quick rundown of how I write Go code, and mention some VIM plugins I find useful.

Let me know what you think! Should I make more videos? If so, what would you like to see?

Anyone who read my post yesterday is probably confused by 1) this domain name and 2) my mention of it being my “first post”. This blog is a reboot of my previous site (where the older posts came from). I’m starting over in hopes that it will incentivize me to take blogging seriously again. This post will explain my plans for this blog, and with any luck, convince you to come along for that ride. I had imagined writing a longer and more thoughtful introduction, but events have conspired to force my hand. When in doubt, start.

… one must never allow disorder to continue so as to escape a war. Anyhow one does not escape; the war is merely postponed to one’s disadvantage.

Machiavelli, The Prince

For several years, I fell out of the habit of writing regularly. I would occasionally post something on Medium, but mostly I just lapsed into silence (except on Twitter, where I’m rather noisy). Inertia took hold, and the habit of not writing eventually replaced my habit of regularly doing so. I regret this mistake.

Writing clarifies thinking. It also preserves a record of unadulterated and imperfect thought. Reading old blog posts of mine, I get a sense of what was in my mind at the time of writing. I can see specific patterns or beliefs that I’ve since outgrown, but also interesting ideas that I had lost and forgotten. To make up for my sloth, I’ll be writing one post a day for a little while. So much thought has gunked up my brain without being released that it’s time for a core dump.

Read More

It’s never a good time to suddenly find yourself jobless. But it’s never a bad time to evaluate your skills, your goals, and where you’re headed.

We all want to be a valued member of a winning team on an inspiring mission

Graham Weston

It’s easy to get complacent after a few years in a good job. You tell yourself, “I’m doing such important work! We’re making so much progress! I love my team!” You’re churning out pull requests, responding to emails and Slack messages, burning through your JIRA backlog.

Then, one day, it all stops.

Read More

I’ve become somewhat obsessed with Pokemon GO since I started playing it, and I’ve been trying to cobble together a mental guide for how to be successful from a hodge-podge of sites, people I’ve met while playing the game, and some of my own experiences. Here’s what I’ve got so far. Items in red are ones I’m less sure of.

Finding Pokemon

1. The panel at the bottom right tells you what Pokemon are near. 3 feet = far, 2 feet = nearby, 1 foot = close, none = very close
2. The Pokemon in the panel are arranged by closeness. Watching how they re-arrange as you walk in one direction will tell you if you’re hot or cold. Work together with friends to cover a wider area
3. Rustling grass patches aren’t necessarily Pokemon. They may be nearby, though
4. Look for Pokemon GO maps of your city on reddit. You can also use the official Ingress map for a rough guide, but you have to sign up for an account, which I didn’t bother to do.
   1. Bonus! For those lucky enough to live in Austin, here’s a user-created map of the various locations of note
5. Some Pokemon are easiest to get by hatching eggs. Check out this list of Pokemon with the distance required to hatch their egg to get an idea of what each of your eggs might be
6. Incense seems to mostly attract common Pokemon, so it’s useful when you’re trying to catch a few to level up
7. Walking along roadways SEEMS to yield fairly weak results. Try finding parks and other open areas that are high in pedestrian traffic. There also doesn’t seem to be any universal rarity scale – it appears to be dependent on where you are, so look around when you’re far from home!

Once You Find Them

1. Spinning your pokeball with your finger (swiping to the side) before throwing it makes you throw a curveball, which gives you a 10XP bonus. It MIGHT make your throw more effective too, but I’m not sure about this
2. Hitting a Pokemon in the colored circle, when the circle is small, gives you the best chance to capture it. Hit it outside the colored circle, or when the circle is bigger, and it’ll be harder
3. Waiting to evolve your Pokemon until you’re a higher level will improve the boost in CP your Pokemon gets

Getting Items

1. Poke Stops regenerate after a few minutes. If you find a comfortable spot, hit one a few times. If you’re surrounded by them, walk in a circuit so that the first one is recharged by the time you return to it
2. Controlling a gym for 21 hours gives you a small number of Poke-coins that you can spend in the store. Work with teammates to help lock down gyms

Battling Other Players

1. To train your Pokemon, go to a gym owned by your team and tap the boxing glove icon to train against the Pokemon at that gym
2. Leaving a Pokemon at a friendly-controlled gym will help strengthen it against rival teams, since rivals will have to defeat your Pokemon before taking on the gym’s master
3. Here’s Niantic’s guide for attacking a rival-controlled gym, and using attacks in general

Battling the App

1. Carry around a battery pack for your phone. Seriously.
2. Turn on the “battery saver” and turn your phone upside down. It will dim the screen, vibrating when there is a Pokemon nearby
3. Disabling the AR feature saves some battery, and sanity (you won’t have to turn around constantly trying to find your Pokemon)
4. If you want to get really hardcore, you could buy a Pokemon GO wearable for ~$200 on eBay so you don’t have to stare at your phone constantly (they supposedly ship in late July). Caveat emptor. Pre-orders sold out, but Nintendo will probably offer them for sale again in the near future given the game’s popularity
5. Be aware that, on iOS at the moment, you’ll be giving up full access to your Google account if you log in with it. Niantic says they’re working on a fix, but in the meantime, maybe try creating a Trainer account instead
6. All those people you see huddled around popular Poke stops, pacing around while staring at their phones? Go talk to them – they probably know something that you and I don’t!

Good luck out there!

Tonight on the program “Last Week Tonight” on HBO, John Oliver exhorted his audience to go file comments on the FCC website to address their proposed rules that many believe will destroy Net Neutrality. In visiting the page, it is clear that people are interested in commenting on this particular item.

A few more comments than usual. I suspect this didn’t happen in the 5 minutes between when John Oliver made his comments and when I visited the site. What if we look back in time? Did this all happen very quickly and overwhelm their servers?

 

No.

So then why are they down? Try posting a comment right now. You can’t. Try pinging the server it’s on, apps.fcc.gov. You can’t. It’s hard to imagine that they couldn’t have seen that this might be something that needed some load balancing to allow comments from the huge number of people who obviously want to make their voices heard.

Is the FCC using the same tactics the cable companies are – creating artificial “scarcity”? I don’t know, but I’m very curious. A neutral content policy is what has made the Internet great. If bullies like the worst company in America can just congest sites that it doesn’t like, it can control speech. I can’t prove that the FCC is doing this here, but this is A PERFECT EXAMPLE of what would be possible if the cable companies get their way. “Sorry, we couldn’t possibly build more capacity to deliver the stuff you want. That would cost money, and we’re too busy swimming in a pool of ours.”

No thanks.

Edit 6/2 – The site still isn’t allowing comments, and appears to have actually lost a number of them! 1,162 to be exact.

 

If you care about Net Neutrality and want to voice your concerns, first go complain on the FCC bug tracker about not being able to.