Phil Bowell

Sad to see that Prince Philip has died this morning and only 2 months short of his 100th birthday.

Today is Yom HaShoah, or Holocaust Remembrance Day, in Israel. Racism has been in the news a lot of the last year or so, and yet we hear very little of the fact that anti-semitism is on the rise.

I have visited Israel twice. It’s a place that quickly won my heart with it’s beauty and history. Last time I was there was in 2014 and I was able to visit Yad Vashem, The World Holocaust Remembrance Center. To this day when I think about my visit the feelings come flooding back.

The museum which tells of all the events that took place across Europe overwhelmed me to the point that I couldn’t take it anymore. I had to walk to the end and find a place to sit down. After a cup of tea our group then visited the memorial which names all the people who died. It was just as overwhelming. A friend who was part of our party was able to find the names of her family members in the memorial and so the Holocaust became even more of a reality to me. We learn all about the atrocities of World War 2 in our history lessons, but until there is a personal connection with the events it’s hard for it to feel like a reality. My Grandad once wrote me a letter about what he did when he fought in the War, it made the war a reality to me and not just something to learn about. Seeing my friend find her family members in the memorial had a similar effect.

I’m not really sure where I’m going with this post, other than to say I will remember them. I hope you will too, and I hope that together we can all make sure that something like it is never repeated.

There are very few Jews left who survived the Holocaust, so we must find ways to make those connections with history a reality for the generations who cannot hear first hand what it was like. I think the stories of family members will play a crucial role in that. Let’s make sure it never happens again.

One thing that drives me mad with Obsidian is that it doesn’t always show the file name as a title and I can never find the setting to turn it on again. This morning it’s not doing it and for the life of me I can’t find the setting to turn it back on again…

It snowed. In April. This time last week it was 20 degrees and I was wearing shorts…

I keep getting lost reading Andy Matuschak’s notes particularly around his evergreen notes concept. Might need to dedicate a bit of time to understanding exactly how it works over the next week or so.

He is risen!

I’ve been continuing to seek out a notes app that works for me as well as I would like it too. A couple of weeks ago I posted about what I’m looking for and since then I’ve been giving a couple of the contenders a try.

When I wrote that post I had been using Craft for around a week or so. It’s a very good app, I like that it is native on all my devices, has good shortcuts support and is a pleasure to write in. It lacked a couple of the features on my list out of the box, but a quick shortcut was able to fix the lack of a daily note and I was happily on my way giving it a run through it’s paces.

Having been forced into a week off work thanks to some strong side effects from my Covid vaccine, last weekend I started to play with Obsidian to see how it worked. Initially put off by it I found a theme that makes it look and feel a lot more like a native macOS application. So last week I started giving it a run through it’s paces. It’s lacking a first party iOS and iPadOS app at the moment, but one is in beta and seems to be developing quickly and since there’s nowhere to go at the moment it’s not the end of the world.

I intend to give Obsidian a similar amount of time to Craft and then I’ll try to make a decision. There are a few things about Craft which started to really annoy me before I decided to give Obsidian a try, and I’m sure there will be some things about Obsidian that annoy me as well.

So far Craft feels better placed for meeting notes and capturing tasks along the way. It’s ability to easily send something to Things is great. In contrast Obsidian seems to handle referencing and embedding blocks more efficiently. Craft can do this but I ended up having some real difficulties finding blocks I wanted to reference and once I had figured out the syntax that Obsidian uses it made a lot more sense. Both apps have their strengths, I have a feeling it will be about refining how I take notes and which one will handle that.

Realised I hadn’t bought any Easter eggs so went out to buy some. Nope. Everywhere is sold out, never seen that before.

My library has moved over to using Libby for lending of ebooks etc. It offers a download in ePub for use on eReaders like the Kobo, but not the Kindle. I’ve never considered looking into any other eReaders, might be time to explore. 📚

Considering going back to using Instapaper for my read later service instead of Reeders own version. The trouble is I’m trying to reduce the number of subscriptions I have, but the highlighting in Instapaper is really useful.