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Since DEVONthink is my primary knowledge-management and repository tool on the macOS desktop, I constantly work with mechanisms for efficiently getting data into and out of it. I previously wrote about using Hazel and DEVONthink together. This post extends those ideas about and looks into options for preprocessing documents in Hazel before importing into DEVONthink as a way of sidestepping some of the limitations of Smart Rules in the latter. I’m going to work from a particular use-case to illustrate some of the options.

Recently I hit an extra digit when setting up a custom new card session and was stuck with hundreds of new cards to review. Desparate to fix this, I started poking around the Anki collection SQLite database, I found the collection data responsible for the extra cards. In the col table, find the newToday key and you’ll find the extra card count expressed as a negative integer. Just change that to zero and you’ll be good.

Following up on my recent article on cleaning up Zettelkasten WikiLinks in DEVONthink, here’s another script to solve the problem of linking notes.

Backing up to the problem. In the Zettelkasten (or archive) - Zettel (or notes) are stored as list of Markdown files. But what happens when I want to add a link to another note into one that I’m writing? Since DEVONthink recognizes WikiLinks, I can just start typing but then I have to remember the exact date so that I can pick the item out of the contextual list that DEVONthink offers as links. Also, if I took that approach I would end up with the same problem of excessive text in the link that I would then have to clean up with the previous script.

Organizing and reorganizing knowledge is one my seemingly endless tasks. For years, I’ve used DEVONthink as my primary knowledge repository. Recently, though I began to lament the fact that while I seemed to be collecting and storing knowledge in a raw form in DEVONthink, that I wasn’t really processing and engaging with it intellectually.¹ In other words, I found myself collecting content but not really synthesizing, personalizing and using it. While researching note-taking systems in the search for a better way to process and absord the information I had been collecting, I discovered the Zettelkasten method. I’m not going to go into it here because it has been exhaustively described elsewhere. But I’ll just say that:

Anki and some other platforms use a particular format to signify cloze deletions in flashcard text. It has a format like any of the following:

• {{c1::dog::}}
• {{c2::dog::domestic canine}}

Here’s a regular expression that matches the content of cloze deletions in an arbitrary string, keeping only the main clozed word (in this case dog.)

{{c\d::(.*?)(::[^:]+)?}}

To see it in action, here it is in action in a Python script:

import re

def stripCloze(searchText):
    return re.sub(r'{{c\d::(.*?)(::[^:]+)?}}', r"\1", searchText)

print(stripCloze("The {{c1::passengers::tourist riders}} spotted a breaching {{c2::whale}}."))

It should return The passengers spotted a breaching whale.

Previously, I wrote about adding syllabic stress marks to Russian text. Here’s a method for doing the opposite - that is, removing such marks (ударение) from Russian text.

Although there may well be a more sophisticated approach, regex is well-suited to this task. The problem is that

def string_replace(dict,text):
   sorted_dict = {k: dict[k] for k in sorted(dict)}
   for n in sorted_dict.keys():
      text = text.replace(n,dict[n])
   return text

dict = { "а́" : "а", "е́" : "е", "о́" : "о", "у́" : "у",
      "я́" : "я", "ю́" : "ю", "ы́" : "ы", "и́" : "и",
      "ё́" : "ё", "А́" : "А", "Е́" : "Е", "О́" : "О",
      "У́" : "У", "Я́" : "Я", "Ю́" : "Ю", "Ы́" : "Ы",
      "И́" : "И", "Э́" : "Э", "э́" : "э"
   } 
   
print(string_replace(dict, "Существи́тельные в шве́дском обычно де́лятся на пять склоне́ний."))

This should print: Существительные в шведском обычно делятся на пять склонений.

Listening to Cal Newport interviewed on a recent podcast, something he said resonated. I’m probably paraphrasing, but a key piece of advice was: “Delete any app that makes money off your attention.”

Seems like really good advice. A smartphone is a collection of tools embedded in a tool. Use it like a tool and not an entertainment device and you’ll be find. For a while, in an effort to pry myself loose from the psychic hold of the smartphone I went back to using some kind of old flip phone. But I realized that I went too far. So much of our communication is via text now, it was really hard to communicate. But now, though I’m back to using a smartphone, I find that I’m much more careful about what I install on it:

The AppleScript Safari API is apparently quite finicky and rejects Russian Cyrillic characters when loading URLs.

For example, the following URL https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/стоять#Russian throws an error in AppleScript. Instead, Safari requires URL’s of the form https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D1%81%D1%82%D0%BE%D1%8F%D1%82%D1%8C#Russian whereas Chrome happily consumes whatever comes along. So, we just need to encode the URL thusly:

use framework "Foundation"

-- encode Cyrillic test as "%D0" type strings
on urlEncode(input)
   tell current application's NSString to set rawUrl to stringWithString_(input)
   -- 4 is NSUTF8StringEncoding
   set theEncodedURL to rawUrl's stringByAddingPercentEscapesUsingEncoding:4 
   return theEncodedURL as Unicode text
end urlEncode

When researching Russian words for vocabulary study, I use the URL encoding handler to load the appropriate words into several reference sites in sequential Safari tabs.

That “reality bubbles” contribute heavily to increasing political polarization is well-known. Customized media diets at scale and social media feeds that are tailored to individual proclivities progressively narrow our understanding of perspectives other than our own. Yet, the cures are difficult and uncertain. Often, though, we’re advised to consume media from the other side of the political divide.

A sentence from a recent piece in The Atlantic encapsulates why I think this is such a fraught idea:

I was puzzled by this sentence on the BBC Russian Service:

Нет свидетельств тому, что на нынешних выборах дело обстоит иначе.

It means “There is no evidence that in the current election things are any different.” but the puzzle isn’t the meaning, it’s the grammatical case in which the author has placed the demonstrative pronoun то , which is dative here тому . The thing is that you see examples where either the genitive or the dative follows свидетельство . So what’s the difference?