The Coefficiencies Newsletter Issue 7
Hey, welcome to the Coefficiencies Newsletter Issue 7! Last week was a busy one due to shuffling two Thanksgiving dinners for Canadian Thanksgiving, so I ended up skipping the newsletter. But I’m determined to keep at this, so I’m back!
This week, I randomly decided to blow up my entire knowledge system by abandoning Obsidian. I’m really conflicted about it. I loved how customizable Obsidian was. I could alter the theme, change the way it worked through plugins, use tabs, show multiple notes at once, whatever I wanted! But it also became kind of a trap. As much fun as it was to tinker, I just started finding the app overwhelming to the point where I was hesitant to open it (especially on my phone where the experience was not great).
I’d been using Obsidian to store pretty much anything I needed to remember, like info about my house and appliances, my insurance info, my car, etc. I’d also started using its Daily Notes plugin as a bit of a journal I could go back to. And I also used it for my collection of bookmarks.
Now, I’ve migrated everything off of Obsidian and I have three core apps for tracking each of those areas:
All of those apps have the following in common:
- They are purpose-built for their particular use case
- They have native apps on every Apple platform I use
- They are well designed and easy to use for their purpose
I spent some time with ChatGPT separating out the stuff in my Obsidian vault into one of those apps, then a bunch of time manually correcting/organizing things after that. So far, I’m loving it. Will I blow everything up again in a year and try something new? Probably, but that’s just who I am.
Okay, onto some links.
A Music Player for Work #
Jason Kottke vibe-coded a web music player this week that’s designed to easily manage and shuffle a collection of music. It supports Spotify, YouTube, SoundCloud, and Apple Music. Basically, you paste a link from one of those services in (playlist or album), and it saves it to your collection. Then you just hit shuffle, and it plays one of those.
Jason built it to maintain his collection of ‘work music’—basically ambient-type music with few lyrics that he puts on to work. He wanted an easy solution to just start playing something without thinking about it too much so he could get to work. I do pretty much the same thing, so this is perfect to me. The app is free to use if you’re a Kottke.org member (which I have been for years) to maintain your own collection, or you can just shuffle Jason’s collection for free.
I’ve only added a few of my go-tos to this so far, but I know this is going to be in regular rotation for me when I’m doing deep work.
A Tactile Video Game Console #
Rubik’s launched this little 8-cube version of a Rubik’s cube where each face of the cube is its own screen. This means you can play different games on it by rotating the cube, just like a Rubik’s cube, with the screens responding to how you move it. There’s also a gyroscope in it, so elements on the screens can adapt to how you move it around. There’s also a game that makes it work just like a simpler version of a Rubik’s cube. I’m really fascinated by the idea of adding this kind of tactility to a game console and definitely want to try it.
A New Daily Puzzle Game #
I’ve been playing Clues By Sam pretty much every day for the past couple of weeks. I’m obsessed, and I’ve made my Wordle text group obsessed as well. It’s a mystery game where you have to identify who on a grid is innocent and who is guilty based on the clues provided. There’s a new one every day, and they get progressively harder from Monday to Sunday, just like the NYT crossword. Definitely recommend this if you’re into puzzle games.