from the desk of H. Bowie...

Published a new essay called “Managing Our Identity Stacks,” drawing upon some ideas gleaned from David R. Samson’s new book, Our Tribal Future.

The latest version of Notenik includes a number of cool new features, as well as a number of fixes.

All the details are available in the Knowledge Base.

https://notenik.app/knowledge-base/EPUB/html/version-12.9.0.html

I’ve done a major redesign of my personal site at HBowie.net. This has now become an ongoing central repository for my digital commonplace book and for all of my shorter pieces that I think are still worth reading. Feel free to look around.

Notenik 12.7.0 is out. The biggest change is the sorting out of various controls for navigating through a Collection. There are three different paths a user can traverse, going both backwards and forwards. The first path just travels sequentially through the list, using the currently selected sort sequence. The second path goes back and forth through navigation history within the app. The third path goes forwards and back through search results. These three are all now enabled in both directions, with separate controls for each, and with sensible keyboard shortcuts for all options. Thanks to valuable user input on the Notenik Discourse forum for these suggestions!

This song by Bob Dylan, first recorded by The Band, had been haunting me lately, so I decided to write a little something about it.

Notenik 10 received a nice review in the January issues of both MacLife and MacFormat, and was awared four out of five stars!

Notenik 11.7.0 was released on March 27th.

I keep adding new features to the app, either because I want/need them, or because another current or prospective user has requested them.

This is my newest site, and a spot where I can bring together all of the writings about songs I’ve done over the years. There’s some content from Reason to Rock here, as well as some stuff from The Practical Utopian, plus newer stuff. But since these are the most popular pieces I’ve written over the years (according to Google), I thought it was high time to have a single site dedicated to this material. The title of the site comes from a Bob Dylan quotation (see the “About” page for details).

If execs cannot mandate the same corporate attire for everyone, what makes them think that mandating a certain number of days per week in the office is a good thing? The same flaw lurks in both approaches: every employee is not the same. Every situation is not the same. Every team is not the same.

Read the complete post on:

• Medium
• Substack
• Practopian

Well, it’s been a while since I posted a Notenik update here, but there’s been a lot going on! We’re now all the way up to 8.5.0, with lots of new stuff being added. Here’s a brief recap:

• Support for YAML metadata
• Support for image tags pointing to local files
• A new Notenik 101 video on YouTube
• A New Collection of brief Notenik Tips
• Support for HTML table generation using pipes and dashes within Markdown
• Added a new Include command to include one Note within another
• New features to better support a sort of outlining within Notenik
• Addition of Class templates
• Streamlined Reading improvements
• Addition of backlinks
• AKA (in other words, alias) fields

I’ve had several new writings out over the last few months.

• Getting Back to the Feeling, about Peter Jackson’s Beatles documentary

• The Issues Swirling around Spotify and its Content Providers – In which we discuss Spotify, Neil Young, Joe Rogan and Brené Brown

• Does the US Need a New, More Centrist, Political Party? – Is there any other way to find our way back to something most Americans can feel good about?

• Why Michigan’s 42-27 Victory over Ohio State Gives Me Hope for Humanity – If the Michigan football team can once again trounce the Buckeyes, what else might be possible?

• A Guide to Becoming – Why it’s good that we are never just one thing, and always in a state of becoming.

Website address updated to point to Notenik.app; wiki links now will try to pluralize a reference, if it is not found in singular form; the Merge template Set command now allows a variable to be used as part or all of a global variable name; Markdown quote sharing corrected to respect lookup links; added a Quick Export and Open command.

Redesigned the Notenik website to support dark mode, with added content and a fresh look.

Added some cosmetic improvements, including dark mode on the Display tab, and highlighting of search results within the Display tab; also added a utility function to convert a Note’s title into a link to Wikipedia.

Added a new lookup field type; improved web book generation.

I think there are a few very broad lessons we Americans can learn from the rapid fall of the Afghan government over the last few days.

Added several new options to better support outlining: OPML Import and improved OPML Export, ability to add a new Child to an existing Note, plus ability to drag and drop within a sequenced list; fixed list scrolling so that the Note highlighted and visible on the left will generally match the Note currently selected on the right.

Added Short ID to the list of available field labels and types, to help with URL shortening; added new option to export an entire Collection into a single HTML or Markdown document; fixed a bug affecting automatic links in footnotes.

Conservatism is a respectable human impulse. But now is not a particularly good time for it.

Added support for Mathjax; enhanced Table of Contents generation for a single Note; enhanced Table of Contents generation for an entire Collection.

Perhaps we might come around to thinking that economic kindness, instead of being something indulged in capriciously by bleeding-heart liberals who are occasionally feeling generous, should in fact be a regular practice that is designed into our societies.