(354, procrastination, geek)

[elainegrey]

I need to figure out how to hold my to-do list lightly.

--== ∞ ==--

Once upon a time i bought a crypto token in an early offering. I don't technically have an allowance, but it was kinda like spending my allowance on it. It was before Christine got fed up with crypto herself. Time passed. The tokens are now worth ten times as much as i paid for them. I kinda want to get my investment in dollars back out. And maybe convert some to ₿itcoin. So far it seems the one exchange i as an American can play in that also has the token i own has no straightforward way to handle getting dollars into my bank account. I guess this is why people invented so called stable coins, crypto currencies tied to fiat currencies. Meanwhile, i've already evaporated some ₿itcoin in "gas" fees, the fees for committing a transaction on the blockchain ledger.

I remember sitting in a conference room years ago listening to tech dudes rhapsodize about putting your twitter handle on the blockchain. "Yeah, it's only a few cents for the transaction now, what are you going to do when the financial incentives switch from mining to the fees to commit the transactions?*" Today i spent roughly $25 to transfer ₿itcoin out of a dead end account. Presumably we spent something similar getting it into the dead end account.

However, the answer to my question is, "We create our own blockchain with different financial incentives that uses our own tokens to pay for transactions." Those are the tokens i bought.

Anyhow, years of theoretical understanding of distributed ledgers (aka blockchain technology) are now slightly less theoretical. I am happy to answer questions about blockchain tech (although i am no expert). I am a noob when it comes to cryptofinance, and my ₿itcoin blunder is not likely one anyone will make but here's the lesson.

If you have a Stacks Wallet with STX in it, and have just decided maybe you want some of your STX to exchange elsewhere, upgrade to the latest version (4.0+) before attempting a transaction. Do not deposit bitcoin in your Stacks wallet for gas. Even though the transaction initially fails because you do not have enough gas, that's not why the transaction is failing!

--== ∞ ==--

Evernote fury number i can't even: I quote from the documentation:

You can encrypt text in a note to add an extra level of protection to private information, such as: account information, travel details, and personal letters. While you can encrypt the text content in a note, you cannot encrypt an entire note or notebook.
Note: This feature is not yet available in the new Evernote for Mac or new Evernote for Windows.

Unmentioned is that it's not supported on the web or mobile either. (Admittedly never was supported there either). Encryption, along with a few other things that Evernote is not deigning to support, were functions i identified when moving to Evernote. If Airtable had offline access the temptation to quit paying Evernote and pay Airtable would be huge.

Comments

[annie_r]

I cancelled my evernote subscription. I have been spending countless hours looking into other note taking/brain storage apps. None of them do what I want and do it reliably. I don't want to have a steep learning curve to store things, but I do want cross-linking and other wiki-like stuff. And I'm stuck on wanting to choose any font and color and rainbow highlight, but maybe I should just give up and focus on function, and use markup. Right now I'm using apple notes for anything that needs to be mobile and changing, lists etc. the sync is fast and reliable and it's free, but it doesn't have tags, and you can't change the ugly link color. Still have my brain-dump stuff in KeepIt on mac, but at least those are all rtf or pdf files. Waiting for the developer of that to fix the ios sync is probably not something to hope for.
Obsidian continues to intrigue, and has plans for ios 'soon'.

It doesn't help when I don't look at my to-do list.

[yourlibrarian]

Obsidian certainly seems to be on the right track. No kidding about relying on cloud only given the companies behind them are the key. It's the same problem as with life insurance and annuities -- they're only as good as the stability of the company.

[annie_r]

I spent a big chunk of today with Obsidian, and I am liking it more and more. It doesn't solve everything, but it does a lot. I'm ok with storing the files on icloud drive and can access them on mobile with a text editor. Anything that needs more security I have in 1Password, and that's proprietary, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[elainegrey]

"With Obsidian, your data sits in a local folder. Never leave your life's work held hostage in the cloud again." Gah, this makes me bitter because Evernote's local storage was part of my early decision process. At least cloud file storage isn't so subject to whim, she says thinking about iCloud drive images she still has from several Apple cloud strategies ago.

[annie_r]

I think the lack of offline storage has pissed off a lot of Evernote users. I think when I got the laptop prior to the current one (or maybe the current one?) it defaulted (or I neglected to prevent) using icloud for photos, and from there I started paying for more cloud storage, but I'm ok with it and don't worry about running out of space. There's still a lot of old cruft around, though. I'm lazy about plugging in the time machine backup drive (ok did that.) I do like being able to see the individual note files in a readable format, knowing I don't have to worry about export format nonsense. Most note-taking apps don't have that. Apple notes doesn't export to anything other than pdf, although the share menu does help. I really wish there was one solution that worked across platforms, but I don't think it will happen.

[gurdonark]

Though I am not a skeptic about the ideas of crypto-currency, I find myself remaining a skeptic of their execution thus far. I do not know how well-reasoned my skepticism may or may not be, because I know that I do not know all that I should to form this opinion. At the same time, for anyone who owns crypto currency, I always wish to Publisher's Clearinghouse amounts of profit for those who hold a few Coolnewcoin or what-have-you.

I remember when a law partner in California, years ago, left our firm to become one of the top two executives as a dot com. I forget what the dot com's macguffin was, some concept of a cool business that was not quite actually a cool business. On paper, he was a multi-millionaire for the better part of a year. Eventually, he was not a millionaire at all, at least not from his dot com.

I don't think I've ever tried Evernote.

[elainegrey]

I am not particularly impressed by cryptocurrency, but the value of a decentralized ledger fascinates me. Indeed, there's something about the other part of my post -- Evernote and their changes -- that makes the decentralized aspect valuable. Evernote started as decentralized - -with primary storage of files on your own machine -- and then moved to a more and more centralized system, and now the centralization means the application changes now get in the way of me getting to my notes. Pout.

Anyhow, the tokens i bought are the incentives for people to run instances of a decentralized ledger. In theory it is a technology where my doctor could attest i have received a vaccine, and the data would be encrypted but publicly available. I could then provide a ledger address and a code to, say, an airline and they could verify the vaccine -- even if my doctor retired and their office closed.

In practice it's being used for strange Banksy stunts.https://www.coindesk.com/burnt-banksy-nft-sells-for-380k-in-eth I don't even.