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I’ve been a DEVONthink user for many years; it’s an amazing piece of software. Currently I’m using DEVONthink Pro Office because I use all of the higher level capabilities. Over the years, my database structure and workflow have gone through many changes. In this post I’ll describe my approach to finding things in DEVONthink.

Databases

At first, I dumped everything into a single database. Over time, however, I realized that finding things was difficult because of the number of false positives when searching. I roughly divide my databases between areas of responsibility. For example, I’m a director at two local music organizations; so I have separate databases for each of those groups. However, most of my material goes into a single database. It’s where all of the items of daily living go - bills, receipts, bookmarks, web clips, etc.

One of the great things about shooting with a camera like the Sony A7 that has an advanced sensor is that you can shoot astrophotographs with less noise that ever before. This comes into play with the inevitably long exposures you encounter when shooting the night sky. On a recent trip to view Kilauea volcano as we’ve done many times, I wondered if it might be possible to capture both the volcano and the star-filled sky in the same shot; so I began to research a bit on astrophotography. I’m by no means an expert; but I’ve learned a bit.

I recently shot a recital with my Sony A7. While it’s a wonderful camera for stills and it produces some excellent video too, cameras like this are not meant for continuous video recording. There are limitations that are imposed by compression algorithm licensing requirements. And, it seems, there are limits that are imposed by thermal issues inside the camera.

To make a long story short, my A7 ended up giving me two video files instead of one for this event. What to do?

Spring has finally arrived in Minnesota. So have dandelions.

On one of our walks, my daughter ViolinGirl exclaimed how much she loved the yellow “daisies” that dot some lawns. She wished our lawn could be covered with these beautiful flowers.

What a strange circumstance! We begin life appreciating the random beauty of these “weeds.” But once we reach adulthood, neighborhood peer pressure and cultural expectations have us spraying toxic chemicals - to our own detriment, no less - to eradicate these cherished flowers.

I have always been troubled in some ill-defined way by articles that assert the benefits of music in some tangible way. For example, kids with music training do better at math. (I don’t if that’s true or not; but you get the style of what I’m talking about.) The unwritten inference is something like this: “No one but a fool or the spectacularly talented would regard music as an economically-valid life path; but math might be. So have your kids play music so they will make good grades and get into an Ivy League school.”

Patricia Cohen’s piece “Middle Class, but Feeling Economically Insecure”¹ published yesterday in the New York Times raises several discrepancies between the economics of the middle class and one’s identification with that group. Reading the comments on the article I was struck by how divided Americans’ points of view are when it comes to the middle class and the causes of its distress. Clearly middle class wages have stagnated in the years immediately preceding and following 9/11. As the article points out, the median income in the US has not risen since 2000. Many of the commenters point to this and the feeling of insecurity and dispensability as a source of middle class angst. Others, fewer in number, point to a change in the baseline spending level. One commenter sums it up this way:

Politics is hopeless arena in which to enact individual values. Commercial interest will always win because of the enormous cost of modern politics. As I’ve written before¹ I think that voting is an inefficient way of effecting change in a way that aligns with personal values. Persons can only be elected when they affiliate themselves with a package of values whose source is largely commercial interest. For example, if I placed the highest values on a balanced federal budget, low defense spending, universal health care, and inclusive rights, who would I vote for?

This is how I do it. YMMV.

I’ve used DEVONthink since its early days. If you’re unfamiliar with DEVONthink, it’s a knowledge management tool that allows you to save information, tag it, cross-reference it and classify it. Since I use both a laptop and a desktop Mac Pro, I need to synchronize databases across machines. There are several ways to go about synchronization:

• Direct connection This is not a bad option when both machines are turned on simultaneously and are connected to the same network.
• Dropbox Obviously, you need a Dropbox account for this. Since databases can grow quite large, you may need a paid Dropbox account for it. I don’t like having my personal information in the cloud; so I don’t use this option.
• WebDAV I don’t run a WebDAV server, so that was out.
• Local sync store This was the best option for me, since I use BitTorrent Sync to synchronize certain content between machines using peer-to-peer connections.

Here’s how I do it.

Those darned Republicans just can’t catch a break these days. In the latest cultural eruption, the Indiana legislature passed a bill which its governor signed into law. The bill allows places of business to refuse to serve persons if doing would conflict with their sincerely-held religious beliefs. An avalanche of public outcry has Indiana’s governor making a hasty retreat.

Charles Blow of the New York Times weighs in about how we should deal with the juxtaposition of free exercise of religious beliefs and discrimination:

I use the excellent, dependable Pinboard service for managing my bookmarks. A one-time fee gives you lifetime access to the service; and there is an API that has fostered an ecosystem of desktop and mobile apps that interact with the service. Of course, Safari can synchronize bookmarks among devices; but it doesn’t allow tagging. Since tagging is a major part of my workflow, Safari bookmarks don’t work for me.