Recently I mentioned that Spotlight wasn't behaving as advertised in my install of MacOS Ventura. (I'm waiting to see when Suggested surfaces that post.) And I wrote about using LaunchBar as my choice of keyboard launcher.

I've been doing some searching and installing various LaunchBar actions, and trying to wrap my brain around many of the more sophisticated features that I haven't been taking the most advantage. There's little progress to report on that front. As it goes with many of these sorts of endeavors, at least for me, there have been numerous digressions, to include installing Homebrew and consulting ChatGPT for assistance in that effort. (It's helpful.) But my interest continues, nevertheless.

So yesterday, during the Tinderbox Zoom meetup, someone mentioned that Dominique Renauld had created an Alfred workflow to take notes in Tinderbox. Someone also posted a link to a video and a forum post (I didn't save the chat, but the tabs are still open.) With LaunchBar not many registers deep in the stack, I clicked through to see what the deal was, thinking I'd try to replicate it with LaunchBar. (Gazing at the Action Editor being another of the aforementioned digressions, though perhaps not too far off the trail.)

The link to the forum post included a link to his blog regarding the Alfred workflow, which turned out to be dead with regard to that particular post, but did get me to his blog. So I poked around to see what Dominique had been sharing of late. I confess, I don't, or rather, haven't read Dominique's blog in the past. He speaks and writes English far better than I read French. Je parle un petite peu. Je suis tres désolé. I happen to believe he reads the Marmot from time to time.

I found this recent post, from November of last year, where I spotted a screenshot of Tinderbox.

(As an aside, sometime in the past few minutes, Tinderbox has posted 10 Suggested posts. The earliest is from November 2021. This suggests there's a limit to the number of related posts Tinderbox displays, as it has been 10 in each of the three (small sample size, I know) notes I've investigated so far.)

I'm not fluent in French, but I do recall making some translation settings in MacOS or Safari, so I suspected there had to be an easily discoverable way to translate the page. Sure enough, in the address bar was an icon that looked like a pair of cartoon speech bubbles that seemed to suggest language. I figured it was either going to read the page aloud, or translate it for me, and fortunately it was the latter!

The topic was Tinderbox in the context of all the relatively recent buzz about PKM. I'm in agreement with his views, but what was also a "surprise and delight" was the link he posted in the context of Tinderbox as a blogging tool. It was the session I did with Michael Becker a couple of years ago!

The Marmot doesn't look or work exactly like that anymore. In fact, as I've been slowly absorbing more knowledge about Tinderbox, chiefly through osmosis, I've been thinking about refactoring it once again. I likely won't undertake a complete redesign, but there are some additional changes I think I can make without breaking too many things.

I don't know if the Suggested notes are ranked by relevance, but the second note is this post from just over a year ago. (First is the preceding post, Serendipity, naturally.) Reading it, and looking over the others, I get the strong impression I do tend to repeat myself! Or at least, struggle with the same issues. When I was writing the Ephemera post, I was trying to recall when I last wrote about deleting photos from the library. I had the impression it was only a few months ago, but it was just over a year. I think this speaks to the subjective experience of the passage of time accelerating as one gets old. An insight that often intrudes on my thoughts these days.

Anyway, all of this perhaps amounts to nothing, but it did make me smile; and that's a noteworthy event in these times.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 06:19 Sunday, 19 February 2023