Weekly Notes 2025.23

I haven’t done this often, but I’m going to include a few photos in this update, because… why not? It’s all just food from my trip (which you’ll be reading about shortly). Anyhow… on to the update!

• Monday morning I headed to ORD with some coworkers to fly to Fargo, ND for work. We were originally going to fly out of PIA, but the United flight was delayed enough by early in the morning that we decided to drive instead.
• This was my first time parking at and navigating the external portion of ORD. Overall it went well, but I definitely prefer to fly into O’Hare, not drive…
• Monday evening after we arrived we met our Fargo-based coworkers at Lucky’s 13 Pub, and had an enjoyable few hours catching up.

Rethinking My Note-Taking App Decisions

Intro

Over the past 48 hours I’ve once again been on a journey to rethink how I take notes. Why? I’ve actually been struggling to answer that question for myself, and I’ve boiled it down into a few potential reasons:

• I’ve never felt fully at home in Obsidian ever since moving to it, even though I’ve been using it for over 2 years now.
• I miss the seamlessness in my life of old Evernote, and constantly wish that there was an alternate that filled the same role in the same way.
• I have liked Bear from the time I first saw it, and wish that I could convince myself that it fills all of my use cases.

What Do I Miss From Evernote?

I started using Evernote back in the early 2010s (I think 2014; I’ve not checked the exact date while writing this post), both as a way to store personal notes and documents, and for some work-related project notes.

Weekly Notes 2025.22

• The first part of this week I spent working remotely while visiting family (meetings during the main part of the day, helping on the farm in the morning and afternoon/evenings).
• Monday was my sister’s birthday (Happy Birthday Hannah!, and so in the evening I spent some time after farming celebrating with family and friends.
• Tuesday was largely a repeat of Monday from a work + farming perspective.
• Wednesday morning I started out the day helping do a final fill on the air seeder, and then preparing to travel home, along with a few meetings. For lunch my sister made cocktail meatballs (delicious!), and then all to soon it was time to get in my truck and start driving.
• I drove into rain on the way home, and ended up spending about half of the trip with some level of downpour occurring. Thankfully it didn’t slow me down too much, and the fields definitely needed the water!
• Thursday and Friday I was back in the office. Both days were spent catching up on some meetings and email from being gone, and then for lunch on Friday we went to a local town festival for some turkey sandwiches.
• Saturday and Sunday were largely spent working around the house, catching up from being gone for nearly a week. I also ran into an issue with one of my photo backup solutions, and so I spent a non-trivial amount of time putting a workaround in place.

Weekly Notes 2025.21

• Monday was Memorial Day for the US, and I mostly spent the day relaxing at home, not really working on anything in particular.
• Tuesday through Thursday noon I was in office, with largely a normal schedule/workload. However…
• On Thursday afternoon I headed to Ohio to visit family, and work remote for a few days while also helping out on the farm. Northwest Ohio was running slightly slower on getting crops in due to weather delays than is normally preferable, and the timing worked for me to be in the area for planting.
• Friday and Saturday were spent mostly helping prepare the planter and seeder to run, and starting a few fields that had already dried to an acceptable level.
• On Sunday I went to Divine Service with family, and then visited a local Mexican restaurant for lunch, after which it was (you guessed it) back to farming!

Weekly Notes 2025.20

• I was once again in-office the entirety of this week, and it was a pretty standard schedule for me. Over the summer I’ll probably move back to remote on Fridays, but it hasn’t worked out yet.
• Friday I started out the day with breakfast with coworkers at a local diner. The food was good, but honestly… I think my homemade breakfasts might be tastier!
• I spent a large portion of the weekend rethinking my personal document management system. I’ve been scanning and storing digital copies of most paper documents in my life for over a decade now, but have not been completely happy with my setup for over a year.
  • Initially I used Evernote for this purpose, and was fairly happy with the system, until I decided to migrate away from Evernote.
  • I experimented with multiple options for the next couple of years, but never found one I liked, including Joplin (which worked ok, but felt like the wrong approach), DEVONthink (which was nice, but was iOS/macOS only, and rather expensive), and just the file system (which was not as searchable and ubiquitous as I wanted).
  • Finally this weekend I settled on Paperless-ngx, running on my own server, accessed via Tailscale. I wish there was an offline/native app option, but for now it meets the easy search, ubiquitous, and easy maintenance requirements, so I’ll give it a shot.
• When not migrating and filing documents, I also spent some time working on editing and restoring some older family photos. My current workflow is VueScan for scanning/ingest, a markdown file for keeping notes about each image, Affinity Photo for cropping + setting the created date, and Photoshop for final edits, and cleaning up the image. I’m not entirely happy with all of the tools, and have been looking for an alternate to Photoshop (including GIMP, which is how I normally process slide & negative scans), but I haven’t yet found anything that I like better.

Weekly Notes 2025.19

• This week, I was in the office all five days, though I headed home after lunch on Friday to work remotely in the afternoon. I was fairly busy all week, but nothing specific stands out as something to write about…
• …Until Friday, that is! I was slightly surprised (and then both humbled and grateful) to get mentioned by Shellsharks on Mastodon, in the announcement of Volume Sixteen of the weekly IndieWeb, Fediverse, and Cybersecurity Scroll! I’ve been following Shellsharks’ blog ever since I first found it a few months ago, and I’m honored to have been one of the posts linked to this week!
• Also, Friday for lunch, in a first for me, I tried Chicken & Waffles at Dac’s Smokehouse. I’ve been to Dac’s many times, but as I’ve never had Chicken & Waffles before, I always ignored it and selected a burger or meat plate. However, for whatever reason it sounded interesting this week, and I must say, I’m glad I tried it! It’s not a dish I’ll probably order often, as it’s a little heavy, but the flavor was fantastic!
• Saturday morning was spent doing yard work, followed mostly by relaxing in the afternoon/evening.
• One way I spent some of my time was playing Voxel Tycoon again. It’s been almost a year since I really spent much time playing it, and I had fun starting a new game from scratch, and then slowly expanding tech trees, into new zones, and improving delivery throughput.
• I also spent time Saturday working on scanning and editing some old photographs. I’m still not entirely happy with my workflow - it seems to me that it takes me more time to edit the photos than I’d like, but I’m too picky to just upload the scans directly to my server.
• And on top of photographs, I also worked on some more of my genealogy on Saturday afternoon. Every couple of weeks I try to either add some new data that I haven’t gotten around to yet, or do general maintenance (add supporting documents, clean up locations, etc).
• This weekend I also took a hard look at some of the projects in my Todoist lists, and spent time cleaning up tasks that were completed but that I’d missed checking off, adding plans where needed to move other projects forward, etc.
• On Sunday, my pastor made a reference to Touchstone Magazine in his sermon, which caught my attention, as I’m always on the lookout for interesting articles and magazines. I haven’t chosen to subscribe yet, but I’ll probably pull the trigger soon.
• Sunday has also been a day to do some laundry, and to do some cooking for the week ahead, including a tasty stir-fry that should last me until mid-week.