Evernote has been sold

 In among all the news about the chaos at Twitter you might have missed the news that Evernote has been sold.

Evernote is, at heart a document management application that lets you organise a large amount of documentation thematically, be they pdf's of tax invoices, or web pages about the use of the long S ( ſ ) in early nineteenth century typography.

For a long time Evernote was the go to application to do this and even now, the only real alternative is OneNote (or else a shoebox full of notecards), so as someone who's been using Evernote extensively for over ten years, I was a little concerned.

However, I was not panicking as Microsoft had quite a nice little tool to import Evernote documents into OneNote.

However I'm saying had advisedly - if you go to Microsoft's web page on moving from Evernote to OneNote there's a disheartening bit of information in a rather small font

which is a trifle unfortunate. 

There is a commercial utility from Bitrecover, but that really only converts Evernote documents to word files or pdf's, meaning that you would then have to manually load in each note into OneNote.

Well, even though I've had a number of severe prunes of my Evernote notebooks over the years, I've still got over 500 notes, and the idea of manually recreating them doesn't immediately appeal ...

Notable and Markdown

 Having conducted a little experiment yesterday to assess the suitability of Notable to handle work in progress notes, I thought I'd better post a little more of a rationale.

Notable is a fairly simple application. Notes are stored in a notes subdirectory of whatever data directory you select. Each note is stored as a Markdown document in flat structure.

On my Linux machine the notes directory is in ~/Documents, on my windows machines I save it to OneDrive to ensure that I have a backup.

Notable will let you attach other files to notes - it's totally agnostic as to what you attach. When I do family history work usually the notes concern someone I'm working on and the attachments are typically jpeg files of old birth, marriage, death or census registers, and perhaps a pdf or two. These end up in the attachments directory which is created in the same directory that your notes directory is located in.

As the files are basically simple markdown files it's possible to use a service such as emailitin or sendtodropbox to email a copy of the note to a filesystem.

My Linux machine is not connected to any service such as OneDrive or Google Drive so that I can use it off line if necessary - typically I use emailitin to send a copy of  a note to OneDrive where I might do some more work on it.

As it's simply a markdown file, you can easily email a note to a colleague or indeed import it into word either by using a third party plugin such as Writeage or a conversion tool such as Pandoc. Cloudconvert will also let you convert Markdown to word.

Markdown

The reasons why I like markdown for taking notes are fourfold

1. It's human readable - you don't need to have a viewer installed to read markdown files
2. You can use just about any editor out there to create a markdown document - I have, admittedly purely as a demo, used vi to create a markdown document 
3. It's platform agnostic, the files are the same be they on Windows, Mac, Linux or Android
4. The syntax is really easy - I've been using it for about ten years now to create notes, including notes of meetings and research notes. Most of the time I've just used a plain text editor, but there are plenty of special tools out there if you're uncomfortable with markup

Because of it's simplicity Markdown is really easy to learn but you don't need to learn every nook and cranny of the syntax. There's plenty of cheatsheets out there but you only really need two tags to create workable notes

# this is a heading
## this is a subheading

### this is a minor heading





Markdown allows three levels of nesting of headings - which is probably more than is required for any simple note. Notable uses the heading at the start of a file to make the note title

so basically the only other tags you need are 

- this is a dot point
     - this is a nested dot point

dot points are nested by prefixing them with blocks of four spaces. I've only had to nest to three levels, if you need more levels of nesting you possibly need to think about breaking your note up into separate notes.

The only other useful thing to know about Notable is that at the head of the markdown document it embeds information about any attached resources as a comment

which can be useful if you have multiple similarly named attachments. Personally, I always try and give attachments meaningful names - machine generated filenames like ScotlandsPeople_OPR282_000_0300Z.jpg and jol-files-2018-05-centaur2.jpg are pretty opaque, especially when you return to them after a few days away ...

Gold coin dating from before European contact found in Newfoundland

Earlier today I tweeted the following

 

Gold coin discovered in Newfoundland could be oldest English coin in Canada | CBC News https://t.co/r2Vd5C7CAG pic.twitter.com/s39xCBJHHr

— doug moncur (@moncur_d) November 10, 2022

The find's particularly interesting not just because of the age of the coin, but because of the value of the coin. 

In the late medieval period high value coins were a form of portable property and wealth. They were like €500 notes - too valuable to be too much use in ordinary purchases, but a supremely simple and lightweight way of transporting wealth. In a world without banks or credit cards, they were the only answer to moving substantial amounts of money. 

Previously some old low value coins have been found in Newfoundland, pennies, groats, that sort of thing - coins that people would use in ordinary transactions and while relative value is an elastic concept, losing a groat, worth 4d, would be like losing a $20 bill.

Annoying, but we've all done it. Losing a Quarter Noble would be more like losing a $100 note.

So the pennies and groats could have fallen out of someone's jerkin. They were loose change, probably left over from the last time they were on shore in England, and possibly forgotten about.

Such coins would probably keep circulating until they were so worn as to be unrecognisable. The other thing is that coins, which were made of silver and gold, had intrinsic value.

This means that if I was a late medieval sailor from England and walked into a bar in Santander in Spain and asked for a glass of wine, and paid for it with an English penny, the bar tender would have taken the coin, looked at it, weighed it in his palm, decided it was worth a couple of maravedis and smiled.

Later on, when he was short of change he may have given it to a Basque cod fisherman who'd paid for a meal with some higher value coins.

The point of this little fable is that coins are evidence of presence, but only that, they could have easily fallen from the jerkin of a Basque fisherman as an English one.

Gold coins are different. Nobody left them in a jerkin pocket. In fact it's unlikely that any ordinary person would have any. A ship's master might have had some locked away securely in a chest in case he was blown off course and needed to pay for new rigging or other supplies, but that's about the only people who would have had a need to have them on the wild coast of Newfoundland.

And of course there were no ship's chandlers in Newfoundland at the time.

At this point I'm going to wave my hands and fantasize. Perhaps sometime in the late medieval period there were two European ships off the coast of Newfoundland, one of which had lost a couple of its fishing nets. 

Because the fishing was good, the ship's master bought a spare net from the second boat rather than return home with a part load. And while counting out the coins on a shingle beach he dropped one and couldn't find it.

As I say, a fantasy, but possibly closer to the truth than you might first think ...

Being on Mastodon

 Well I've been on Mastadon a week or so now.

Mastadon is not twitter. It's more conversational and is more interaction oriented. So far there doesn't seem to be a lot of reposting of links, more original material and content, but perhaps that will change, but at the moment it's more like a bulletin board, or even usenet news.

I've found it a useful, even stimulating experience.

But because the platforms are so culturally different I'm still in a quandary as to what to do about twitter.

For the moment, I'm using twitter as I always have, but posting more original material to Mastadon as @moncur_d@ausglam.space.

I probably don't have the bandwidth to do both for a long period of time, but I'll wait until Mastadon settles down before deciding to jump ship ...

A windows 11 upgrade peeve

I was feeling crochety this morning.

I had planned an early morning bike ride but I woke to light drizzle, so, after I had fed the cats, I went back to bed with my little Lenovo laptop to read my email.

When I powered it up it greeted me with an invitation to upgrade to Windows 11. Fair enough.

I declined gracefully, only to get another nag screen about upgrading.

No, I'd said once I didn't want to run the upgrade, especially while sitting in bed with a cup of tea and two cats attempting to push their way in.

Now, I don't have a problem with upgrading to Windows 11. But not yet.

Both the machine on my desk and my fieldwork machine are stuck on Windows 10, and evermore will be so due to Microsoft's hardware requirements for Windows 11 - basically both predate the current version of the TPM security chip that Microsoft requires.

My fieldwork machine is a refurbished Thinkpad and a little over five years old and my desk laptop is not quite four years old. It still does everything I need it to do so I feel no need to go and buy a new machine.

My project documenting the contents of Dow's pharmacy will come to an end some time during the first quarter of 2023, basically I have a large glass fronted display cabinet and a pile of 1950's cardboard boxes still to do, and I'll be done.

And because of that I'd like to have all my windows machines Windows 10 to ensure compatability, especially as a lot of the documentation is stored in OneNote, and I don't want to risk the Windows 11 version silently changing functionality.

Much the same reason as while I'm totally convinced I could change my fieldwork machine to Kubuntu without problems, I won't. Not yet.

So until I'm done, I'd like to stay on Windows 10.

Microsoft don't seem to have a way of saying 'thank you for your interest, but I'm working on a project just now/I'm on a slow network link, etc'. The nag screens imply 'it's do it now or never' which is a bit of emotional blackmail - you can in fact run the upgrade procedure from Settings anytime you like.

Just like the emotional blackmail about using Edge, which is actually a fine browser and sometimes works better than Chrome, but of course Edge is not multiplatform, which is a problem if you also use a Chromebook/Mac/Chromium on linux.

Getting rid of pinterest

I've been using pinterest to collect images, mostly of the Austro-Hungarian empire and nineteenth century Scotland, plus images of old medical products.

I've used Pinterest for a number of years to collect relevant images to my work .
Suddenly, 7 years after the image went up, they've taken exception to works by Egon Schiele.
I've cancelled my account

— doug moncur (@moncur_d) November 3, 2022

A few days ago I had an email from Pinterest telling me that one of the Egon Schiele images had been disallowed on grounds of fetishism - something which pissed me off royally, given the image had been up there for over seven years, and he's only like, one of greatest artists of the early twentieth century.

Put it this way, the Vienna School of Art let him in the year after they told a certain A. Hitler he wasn't a good enough artist for place in the art school. Equally, while I like Egon Schiele for his command of line,  I'm also the first to admit that a lot of his work has an uncomfortable edgy feel that's not for everyone, so fair enough, their site, their rules. 

(The Wikipedia article on Schiele has a decent gallery of his work, but some of it is NSFW - don't look if you're offended by raw earthiness.)

Now, I havn't used Pinterest seriously for three or four years, so I deleted my account.

I then realised that that was a stupid thing to do as there's material in there I might want in the future. Fortunately Pinterest have a cooling off period, whereby if you log back in within two weeks your account is reactivated..

Now I had a couple of thousand images in Pinterest, so no way was I going to download them manually. Fortunately, there's a Chrome plug in called Pindown that lets you bulk download contents from an individual Pinterest board.

So I ate humble pie, logged back into Pinterest to get my data back, used Pindown to download the collections I wanted, and then re-deleted my account and uninstalled Pindown. (Actually I did this twice as I realised I'd missed some stuff first time around.)

I'd been using Facebook to authenticate to Pinterest, so after I was really sure I'd got everything I wanted, as a final move I went to my Facebook settings and removed access.

Job done!

I've now got an extra quarter of gigabyte on OneDrive but given I've got over a terabyte, that's not a problem, and any extra data will be clipped to OneNote with a bit of cataloguing information ...