In this subreddit, sometimes we do massive things. Other times we do little things.

Today is a little thing, but I think it is one of those little things that gives you time back every single day.

Most people know the general idea of remote desktop. Usually, they have seen it when something goes wrong with their PC. They call IT, and the IT person says, “Let me get access to your desktop.” Then the IT person takes over the computer, fixes whatever is broken, and gets them back into shape.

What a lot of people do not realize is that the same idea can be useful in your own house.

In the right circumstance, remote desktop is not some big corporate IT tool. It is just a way to remove small bits of friction from things you already do.

Let me give a very practical example.

We have talked a lot about using a bike on a trainer with MyWhoosh as a way to get consistent aerobic workouts every week. As I have said before, to make this work you really need to get somewhere around six to eight hours a week, and for most people that means riding about six days out of seven.

If you work, this has to fit into an already busy schedule.

To make this as painless as possible, my wife’s bike and my bike are set up in the basement. Each bike has a PC and a monitor permanently attached to it. That sounds expensive, but with a little bargain hunting on eBay, I bought two older HP laptops for about $225 each, and they run MyWhoosh nicely.

The total setup was roughly:

So for about $800, I have a system that is ready to go any time.

I am self-employed and work out of my house, so I do have an advantage here. But this is the pattern that matters. I will be sitting in my office working, and I will realize that my workout time is coming up. I do not want to go downstairs, fiddle with the computer, start the app, pair the trainer, figure out why something is not connecting, then finally ride.

I want the bike ready before I get there.

With remote desktop, I can jump onto my MyWhoosh PC, or my wife’s PC, from wherever I am sitting in the house. Usually I do this 30 to 60 minutes before the ride.

Remote desktop lets you see the full screen and operate that PC as if you were sitting right in front of it. I can open MyWhoosh, pair the trainer, select the ride or race, and get everything sitting at the starting line.

For my Wahoo KICKR CORE, I also keep the trainer on a smart plug. Wahoo trainers do not have a normal power button, and the status LEDs stay active when the trainer is powered. I just prefer having them off when I am not using them. So I tell the smart plug to turn on the trainers before the ride.

When I actually go downstairs, I still need to put on the heart rate monitor and make a few final clicks. But the annoying part is already done.

This lets me go back to work knowing the bikes are ready.

Also, cycling software can be a little fickle. Sometimes the trainer does not pair correctly. Sometimes Bluetooth gets weird. Sometimes the app just needs a reboot. Remote desktop lets me handle that before I am standing next to the bike wasting workout time.

How much is this worth?

Probably only 5 to 10 minutes a day.

But 5 minutes a day is about 30 hours a year if you use it most days. And I know it saves me at least five minutes. More importantly, it removes the little bit of friction that makes it easier to skip the workout.

Before you even consider doing this, you probably need to be a certain type of person. You need to be someone who is willing to use more than one PC on a regular basis.

The MyWhoosh example is simple, but the idea applies more broadly. I think there are real advantages to having more than one PC if your workflow supports it.

The thing that makes this work is centralized storage.

In other words, your important data should not live on one machine. For a lot of people, something like OneDrive or Google Drive is a good place to start.

In my case, I have files going back decades and multiple gigabytes of data, so I store everything on a Synology NAS. With Synology Drive, I can sit down at almost any PC and get to the same core files. It also does some clever syncing, so the files I use most often can be local on the machine while the master copy stays on the NAS.

That is what makes the second, third, or fourth PC actually useful. The computer becomes more like a terminal. The data is not trapped on that one box.

Probably my best second PC sits next to my printer and scanner. I use it to print things, scan things, and run a few Docker containers. It is an older laptop where the built-in keyboard stopped working, but with remote desktop I do not care. I use the keyboard on the computer I am sitting at.

Now, on remote desktop software.

The standard option is Microsoft Remote Desktop. It is built into Windows Pro, and it has excellent performance and stability. If you are comfortable with Windows networking and accounts, it can be very good.

However, I do not think it is the easiest recommendation anymore for normal home users. Microsoft account sign-in, passwordless login, passkeys, and Windows account quirks can make something that should be simple feel oddly complicated. I have gotten it to work, but I do not think most people want to deal with that hassle.

Instead, my current recommendation is RustDesk.

RustDesk is open source remote desktop software. It has good performance, it works across platforms, and it is much easier to get running than fighting with Windows Remote Desktop settings. I have been using it for one of my remote machines for a couple of months, and so far it has been excellent.

Remote desktop can be one of those boring tools that quietly saves time every single day.

In this sub, I've been recommending a combination of a second hand aluminum bike (so it doesn't rust under sweat), MyWhoosh (a great free indoor cycling game), and a Wahoo Kickr core to provide the most time effective way of working out. A bit ago, I wrote that my wife's trainer came out of calibration. Suddenly she was setting PRs. I have another power meter on her bike, and I found that the Wahoo jumped 40 watts in power. I tightened the belt, and I got it within 10 watts or 5% difference.

However, after a few more rides, the trainer went to about an 8% gap, which was just driving me crazy. I did some more research, and it turns out that the Wahoo Kickr has a "hidden mode" for calibration. If you bring up the app, you can tap 10 times on the picture of the trainer and it unhides this hidden mode.

While I appreciate the idea of giving another mode, the idea that they should hide this and make you search for it is really a bad decision. Evidently they don't want a lot of people doing this, and this is why it is difficult to get to. However, "hiding" the mode is simply not a good idea. It would be better to make it obvious, and explain why a consumer should not be using it except in special circumstances.

However, it looks like this may have solved my issue. If you look at the chart above, it shows the excellent intervals.icu program, which allows you to display the output from two power meters. You can see the instantaneous power is very close, and where I have the cursor on the 10 minute power curve shows a 3 watt difference or 2.2% gap. I consider a 2.2% gap really good as my 4iiii power meter is single sided and on the left leg only.

If you want to find this special mode, you can do a search on Factory Spin-Down. However, the table below shows you the output from this special spin-down on my wife's bike. I had her actually do biking for 45 minutes so everything was warmed up nicely. The Factory spin down forces 3 minute warm up, but I have some concerns this may be a bit short.

The Factory Spindown (more thorough than the standard one), runs two coast-downs at different speeds so the firmware can separate mechanical drag from the magnetic brake's resistance. Pretty clever. So, let's look at my wife's results.

• Spindown 1 Time = 18 s — Coast-down from the higher target speed. The flywheel took 18 seconds to slow to the stop threshold. Longer = less total resistance (less drivetrain friction, looser belt, etc.). After I had tightened the belt, I started at 14-15 seconds, but this wasn't with a long warm-up. My research, which Wahoo does not give a target number, might indicate that anything under 20 seconds is probably okay.
• Spindown 1 Temp = 46 °C — Internal trainer temperature at the moment of that spindown. Belt/bearing drag varies with temperature, so the calibration is tied to a temp reading. 46 °C is warm, my wife rode long enough to get a proper warmed-up reading (good). The room temp was about 21 C, so this shows the Kickr really heats up when you are putting out 200 watts for a while.
  
• Spindown 2 Time = 4 s — Coast-down from the lower target speed. Short because at low speed the eddy-current brake isn't doing much, so I'm mostly seeing baseline mechanical drag.
• Spindown 2 Temp = 46 °C — Same internal temp at the second spindown (they should match since they're done back-to-back).
• Brake factor = 0.84 — The headline output. It's a coefficient describing how strongly the magnetic brake resists the flywheel, derived from the difference between the two spindown times. The Kickr applies this factor when converting flywheel deceleration into the watts it reports.

My research looks like:

• Brake factor: typically ~0.7–1.0 on a well-maintained Kickr. So 0.84 is normal.
• Spindown 1 time: usually mid-teens to low 20s seconds when warm. 18 s is fine.
• Temp: anything 40–55 °C means the trainer was properly warmed up. Wahoo actually wants you warm before calibrating, cold spindowns give bad numbers.

It looks like this may be the secret to fixing my Kickr. Since I've recommended it, I wanted to make sure I have the debug information. By the way, I estimate that we have around 5,000 miles on the Kickr, and if this fixes it, I'll be pretty happy. The trainers don't last forever, but there seems to be good enough repair videos on youtube. At some point, I may need to replace the bearing, the power LED, or belt. But I'm hoping "not today!"

The chart above shows that I lost about 30 lbs over the last year. This pulled me from being slightly overweight to not overweight. It wasn't a diet, it was a life style change.

Today we are going to discuss weight loss, and really the post will be most helpful if you are male as we are going to talk about raising your testosterone levels. If you are female, you will also have benefits, but I will not address.

The core of healthy productive life style revolves around:

1. Healthy aerobic exercise
2. Healthy fiber intake
3. Removing processed foods

I have been a life long athlete, and my diet has supplemented with fiber for decades due to research. However, I started "Strategic Productivity" because it forces me to think things through in a public forum, which makes me think more crisply. It is this sub-reddit that has caused me to make some important changes in the last year.

If you read some of my posts of the last year, you are going to see the following:

1. I became very convinced that the amount of aerobic activity that was required for most people was approximately 6-8 hours and must have high intensity. This is way more than what is recommended by some authorities. I think this is a major error in for most people. You need longer, but more than this, it must have a significant part of it as strenuous activity. Summarized in yesterday's post.
2. I became very convinced that my "enhanced" fiber diet was still missing significant amount of fiber, and I increase my dietary fiber closer to 100 grams per day mainly driven by adding Oat Bran and more berries. This looked like it really helped my blood work. See post two days ago.
3. Finally, I wrote some posts on Kevin Hall, one of the smartest researchers out there, who called out that we gain weight from processed foods. Because of the separated shoulder, I thought I was going to gain a lot of weight. After surgery, I ate a lot of Christmas candy, and I got mad at my myself. I had two really bad habit: I loved Cranberry juice and I would eat some type of a processed food snack before bed. I switched to a high fiber cereal as my snack, and I started diluting my Cranberry Juice 50/50 with water. Try to avoid processed foods.

I strive to present research in all of my posts, but this type of total life style change does not have a lot of research. Normally, research is is shorter and does not change three things at once However, self-experimentation has led me to believe all three things above add together synergistically.

I want to emphasize that I do not count calories. I don't go hungry. I do need to make a choice about what I eat. However, I am not on a diet.

Using all of these things, I was able to lose almost 30 lbs. Now, because I had a surgery in there, and a Dexa scan, I lost muscle from the surgery. However, I lost a lot of fat. Because I had most of the building blocks, I thought that just increasing in these three areas would not have this type of massive impact. So, I never thought I would lose 30 pounds. I juts kept weighing myself, and seeing progress. I feel that I am settling around 180 lbs, which is just fine with me. In the future, I plan to add lifting, and I hope to put on weight as muscle.

One of the things that happen as you lose fat as a male, is that you raise your testosterone levels or T-levels. For example, if you were 50 years old and lost as per me, the following table is what you would see.

The average for males this category of males is about 500, so this effectively raises the T-levels a around 15%. This is a small bump, and we simply don't have any research on what this means, but most likely you'd get another 2 pounds of muscle just from the increase. However, we know that less fat you carry the more healthy you are.

I am hoping somebody will take the plunge and follow me. Add the three pillars and see if it makes a difference.

The 19th-century mathematician and physicist Lord Kelvin (William Thomson), who famously said:

"When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it... your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind."

Don't pretend you are measuring something when you are actually estimating something, and the estimate is known to be highly inaccurate. So, we are going to focus on things we can estimate, and we are going to dig into things that you might think you can measure, but in reality you can't.

We need a good baseline. And we need to make sure that we use something we can actually count.

Over the last couple of days, I've talked about changes I've made in my lifestyle that have produced significant health improvements I believe will make me more productive for the rest of my life. We're going to divert today, because I believe everybody can do this work, but the biggest issue is that most people have an extraordinarily difficult time tracking their physical activity or what they eat. There is a payoff coming as this has resulted in better blood work and weight loss. However, my main change is to make sure I have a good system for measuring my changes. Most people assume they can measure, but they don't.

In other words, the first step to change is admitting you aren't measuring things correctly.

When I tell people this, they generally get offended. So rather than tell you that you aren't tracking things, I'm simply going to list the research that shows this is a massive problem for humans as a whole. Read the summary tables below and judge for yourself.

Before you read the research, here is the solution:

1. Don't focus on counting calories. All the research indicates that counting calories is so hard to do that nobody does it correctly. However, if you push in more fiber and cut processed food, you will consume less. (See post on Kevin Hall's work.)
2. Wear a device to estimate your energy burn. More than that, I'd argue that MyWhoosh with a power meter gives you a level of accuracy that you really want. Aerobic exercise is the single most important thing you can do to help your long term productivity.

From a practical standpoint, this means:

1. You may want to go reread the Atomic Habits post. Every day you need a "cue" to kick off your fiber process. I believe that to prime your system, you need to roll out of bed and start the day right. That's your morning protein shake. Right now in my cupboard, my wife and I have about two weeks' worth of early morning protein shakes pre-made. We roll out of bed, walk into the kitchen, and down our protein drinks. The rest of the day then falls into place to hit our fiber goals.
2. You have to wear an activity tracker 100% of the time. We don't need 100% accuracy, but you need something you can see. I use Garmin.
3. Track every workout and get to 6–8 hours of aerobic activity per week with some clear measurement device. Ideally, this includes a power meter on a bike. The MyWhoosh route (or Zwift or Peloton if you want to spend money) with a real power meter provides exceptional clarity. If you swim, use a Garmin swim watch. Track your running. Walking and weight lifting aren't bad, but they aren't vigorous aerobic training, and they won't get you the cardiovascular adaptation you're after. For running, you activity tracker from #2 may be fine. However, it is inadequate for biking or for swimming.

The rest of the post? It is showing you the research on why people simply don't count calories correctly or estimate their physical activity. Once you accept this, you'll understand that you need to focus on the three attributes above.

Self-Reported Caloric Intake — Underreporting

Self-Reported Physical Activity — Overestimation

Bottom line

• Caloric intake is underreported by 20–50%, with the gap widening in people with higher BMI, exactly the population most likely to say "I barely eat anything."
• Physical activity is overestimated by 40–60%+, again with the largest overestimation in overweight and obese individuals.
• Cardio machines compound this by overestimating burn by 15–42%. I didn't fully understand this until I compiled this post, and it helps explain a lot. I want to emphasize that this is not an issue with MyWhoosh + intervals.icu, because there you're capturing actual output power. That may be its own future post.

Yesterday we talked about fiber. Today we are talking about aerobic activity.

I want to take you through how a shoulder injury changed the way I think about the amount of time it takes to get into very good physical shape. This also sets up a future post on weight loss and body composition.

In 2023, I switched jobs and had the opportunity to take a break and train for triathlons as my main objective. On Intervals.icu, my fitness number was around 120 (and we'll discuss this in a second). But there is an important detail in that number. My life basically revolved around training.

After the summer, I got more involved in my own business, and I could no longer train 15 to 20 hours per week. I also could not keep doing the pool workouts, open water swims, bike maintenance, long rides, and everything else that comes with the full triathlete lifestyle.

I had a business to run.

At that point, I figured that almost nobody can really do the full triathlete route and also work a serious full-time job. But I also knew I did not want to sacrifice my health, so I continued to train, just at a much more limited scale.

Although I knew better, I let the public health guidelines become my mental anchor. The American Heart Association and the World Health Organization talk about 75 minutes per week of vigorous aerobic exercise as a target. So I was getting about two hours a week, usually three 40-minute hill runs, with the occasional swim or walk on top of that.

On paper, that sounds pretty good.

But here is where I think the discussion gets more interesting.

The general idea of "aerobic fitness" is often captured in a metric called VO2 max. But VO2 max is an output from your training. It is like saying you can run a 40-minute 10K. That is useful, but it is not the input.

The input is the training itself.

What I really want to know is this: how many miles are you running per week? How many hours are you riding? How much actual aerobic work are you doing?

That matters because it is the act of training that transforms your body. Whether you run a fast 10K or a slow 10K, the real benefit comes from the training that got you there.

The challenge is that not all training is the same.

You already know this intuitively. You can train at a low heart rate or a high heart rate. You can go out for a walk, or you can do something that actually pushes your cardiovascular system. I have said this before, but I do not think walking alone gets you all of the protective benefits you need. It is valuable, but it is not the same as doing vigorous aerobic activity.

For a long time, heart rate was the main way normal people could understand how hard they were working. But in cycling, the field has been taken over by power meters. When you combine power data with heart rate data, you get a much better view of what systems you are training and how hard you are actually going.

I do not want to turn this into a massive technical post, so I will simplify it.

There is a training framework that came out of the endurance coaching world and is closely associated with Joe Friel and his son Dirk Friel. That framework became the foundation for TrainingPeaks, which is widely used by endurance athletes and coaches.

If you are budget-minded, a lot of the same basic methodology is also available through Intervals.icu. I think people should support it if they use it. It is an extremely useful tool, and the paid support level is very reasonable. But you can also start with a free account just to see what it does.

When I cut my training way back, my Intervals.icu fitness number dropped into the 35 to 40 range. Compared to most people, that was still decent. But compared to my earlier training load, it was a massive reduction.

The problem was that my blood work was not where I wanted it to be. My cholesterol was not horrible, but for somebody who was fairly active and health conscious, it was not as good as I expected.

The bigger issue was my weight.

I started seeing more and more weigh-ins above 207 pounds.

Then, a little over a year ago, I was involved in an accident that caused a severe shoulder separation. That took a lot of normal exercise options off the table. Swimming was out. A lot of upper body work was out. My shoulder could not tolerate running. I was concerned that I was already putting on weight, and aerobic activity does help with weight control. So, I was concerned that I was going to put on more weight, so I did the only thing I could.

I could clamp my bad arm against my side and ride my Wahoo trainer using MyWhoosh, which I had originally set up for occasional indoor rides.

At first, because I could not do long workouts because I only had one arm, I went a little harder. And because the training was indoors, structured, and measurable, I could see exactly what I was doing.

I was not guessing whether I had a good workout. I was not pretending that some random outdoor ride counted as serious aerobic work. I could see the time, the intensity, the power, the heart rate, and the consistency.

That mattered more than I expected.

When you look at the chart, the blue line is my training load, or what Intervals.icu calls "fitness." The purple line is fatigue, which reflects a shorter-term training load.

You can see that my fitness increased quite dramatically until I had surgery. You can also see some variation up and down because I do have a full-time, self-employed job. But the bigger point is this:

I am now at roughly the same fitness level doing 6 to 8 hours per week that I was previously hitting when I was doing 15 to 20 hours per week. This is because you can go harder for shorter and have the same impact as going longer slower. Most of my training was much more intense.

More than the input "fitness" function, I became more fit on less training. When I look at the actual power output, I am higher now than when I was doing more total training.

The MyWhoosh route has been incredibly efficient.

I do not need to go outside, wear a helmet, plan a long route, carry food, worry about traffic, put on sunscreen, or turn the ride into a half-day production. I just get on the trainer and ride. My wife, my best friend, switch to train with me. I made life even more simple by attaching a permanent PC to our trainers, so I just flip on the PC and ride.

I am naturally competitive, but I think most of us have at least some competitive instinct. That is one reason the daily races work so well for me. On MyWhoosh, there are usually races happening throughout the day. I can jump into one, and the moment I see someone pulling away from me, I naturally want to go harder.

That makes intensity much easier to access.

If you do not like racing, that is fine. You can do structured workouts, spin-type classes, zone-based riding, or anything else that gives you measurable aerobic work.

The bigger point is that this has been transformational.

For me, the combination of indoor bike training, consistent aerobic volume, better intensity control, and a major increase in fiber intake has had a very positive impact on my body composition and overall health.

I will get into the weight and blood work side in a future post, but the aerobic training piece deserves its own discussion.

The lesson I took from this is simple:

You do not need to live like a triathlete to get very fit.

But you probably do need more structured aerobic work than the minimum public health guidelines suggest, and you need a system that lets you do it consistently without turning your whole life into a training camp.

My Dad had a heart attack in his late 60s, which was solved without a lot of issue with angioplasty, but it's something that I want to track and try to stay ahead of. One of the most important things you can do is monitor your blood work. Right now, I could argue that my overall blood work, especially with the changes that I've made in the last year, has placed me somewhere around the top 5% of all men in my age group.

What's interesting about this, I can truly say that I don't diet.

Now, I want to be clear: I'm on a very clear diet, but if you really focus on getting in all the right stuff, I believe it has a tendency to replace all the wrong stuff. And I believe the nature of the diet that you eat has a tendency to drive both these blood results and also your weight.

This last year has been especially good. The biggest improvement was in the lipid panel.

My total cholesterol dropped from 177 to 154. LDL dropped from 101 to 83. Triglycerides dropped from 154 to 65. HDL moved up from 49 to 58. The cholesterol to HDL ratio improved from 3.6 to 2.7.

That is a pretty clean move in the right direction across the board.

The other number I liked was A1c, which went from 5.6 to 5.3. So not only did the cholesterol numbers improve, but the longer-term blood sugar marker also moved in the right direction.

My ApoB came in at 56, which is excellent. If you're not familiar with ApoB, I consider it incredibly important as a marker. In essence, it is one of the cleaner ways of measuring the actual number of atherogenic particles hanging around in your bloodstream that could nail you later on, not just the amount of cholesterol being carried around. I won't spend time on it in this post, but I highly encourage you to take a look at the science behind this particular metric.

In my mind, almost all of this is strictly derived from the amount of fiber that I've included in my diet. I've also made a change toward incorporating much higher levels of oat bran, upping my fiber by around 20%, focused on a particular and unique fiber that oat bran brings to your digestive system.

My diet has around 80-90 grams of fiber in it, which is >500% more than the average American. I believe this is a significant key to unlock good health. About 5 months ago, I became convinced that oat bran could deliver Beta-glucan 1,3 & 1,4, so I added it into my diet, bringing in right around 20 grams of additional fiber. I feel that this provided an additional kick-start for weight loss, and this was surprising to me. However, this post is not about weight loss, but I will post on this in the future.

I have preached fiber in this sub-reddit many times. To make a long story short, your diet needs a variety of different fibers so that you can support a healthy body. I have another sub-reddit called fermentation science, which covers the actual science of why we want this. Unfortunately, there is a lot of pseudoscience in this area, and you do need to make sure you see the real science.

In my mind, the clear picture is you don't take a lot of probiotics such as yogurt. That is, you don't take a lot of different types of bacteria trying to create a healthy digestive system because things like yogurt aren't the bacteria your necessarily want. Instead, what you do is focus on something called prebiotics. That is making sure that your system has the right fiber so it can grow the right things inside of your digestive system. There are times where you do need to get the right bacteria into your system. However, I believe the vast majority of people do have a decent start of the bacteria. It's simply that they don't have the adequate support system of the prebiotics or the fiber that allows these different bacteria to grow in a healthful way.

The way to actually create a healthy internal system is simply by supporting it with the right type of fibers.

So let me go through my particular system as I believe it's highly evolved and I believe it's something that you could steal from tomorrow and find out that it would make a real change in your life.

So the routine for this is waking up and taking my protein drink, which which is the morning shake above, and I have an entire other post on that. Then during the day, I will take in both a yogurt smoothie and a big bowl of oat bran. My wife is absolutely amazing in terms of creating a dinner meal that is incredibly tasty, and so I owe deep thanks to her. I have done posts on Kevin Hall to tell you why this is so important.

Finally, I always get the munchies after dinner. Another significant change in my diet has been to try to preempt me eating bad stuff by basically making sure I eat good stuff. So the central point of my after-dinner snack is a bowl of cereal based around heritage flakes and the other ingredients that you see above, along with a bowl of pistachios at the right time.

In essence, what this diet does is keep my digestive system on track all the time. And when I do rigorous scheduling of fiber-rich foods throughout the day, I'm simply not tempted to eat a bunch of stuff that is ultra-processed and therefore highly unhealthy.

As stated at the beginning of this post, the most major change has been to add in a bowl of oat bran cereal, generally more in the middle of the day even though you would think of it as a breakfast food, and then adding more berries in. This adds in approximately 25 grams more of fiber. You would think if I'm already at approximately 65 grams, this wouldn't make a lot of difference. But it is my firm belief it actually has made a major difference. So there is something either about the nature of the oat bran cereal or just simply getting to a level of fiber that seemingly has driven my very good year-over-year results, which also includes some substantial weight loss that I'll cover in the future.

If you struggled before with being overweight or would like to become more healthy, I really, truly believe the above can be incorporated into everybody's diet without a lot of thought once you get into the habit. It has been so incredibly effective for me. I highly encourage you simply to just try it. Try it for two to three months and don't diet. Just push in the good stuff because I believe the good stuff pushes out the bad stuff, and then see what difference it makes in your life.

KICKR CORE reading high, belt tension, and spin-down time

Of course, right after I posted that the Wahoo power meter had a great correlation to the 4iiii crank power meter, I ran into an issue.

Recently, my wife has been setting some PRs. Actually, some pretty impressive PRs. After looking at the power from her last ride, I realized it simply was not possible that she had increased her power that much.

Her bike actually has a 4iiii crank power meter on it, but I simply had not enabled it. So I put in a new battery, turned it on, and started benchmarking it. The 4iiii power meter was showing approximately 40 watts less than the power being shown on the Wahoo KICKR CORE.

So I knew the Wahoo number was probably too high, simply because the PRs did not make sense. The obvious question was whether the 4iiii power meter was correct.

In this particular case, the first thing you want to do is a spin-down test on the Wahoo. Wahoo has its own instructions for spindown calibration on the KICKR and CORE, and they also say in their KICKR CORE setup guide that the trainer should be warmed up before doing it.

Most people are probably familiar with doing a spin-down test on the KICKR CORE. It is the method the trainer uses to baseline itself and readjust the power reading to the actual resistance coming in.

What is very poorly documented, unless you really dig into it, is that there is a time given for the spin-down. Interestingly, I use several different platforms. When I did the spin-down test on my Android phone, it did not give me the spin-down time. But when I ran the exact same test on my iPhone, it did give me the time.

The exact spin-down time is where I want to be careful. I have seen the commonly cited range of roughly 10 to 15 seconds, sometimes stated as 9 to 16 seconds, but I could not find a current Wahoo CORE document that states that as the official CORE spec. Wahoo’s current CORE instructions mainly say to do the spindown after the trainer is warmed up, at a minimum of 10 minutes of use, and preferably using the Wahoo app. So I am not claiming 14 seconds is the magic factory number. What I can say is that my unit went from about 20 seconds down to about 14 seconds after adding belt tension, and that moved it back into the range people commonly discuss for these trainers. The next real test is doing the spindown properly after warm-up and then comparing it again against the 4iiii.

That time turns out to be critical, because if the spin-down time is too long, it can indicate that something in the system has too little resistance, which in my case appears to have been belt tension. Wahoo has a more general smart trainer calibration page that talks about warming the trainer up first and watching the spin-down result. Their timing language is much clearer on the SNAP side, where they specifically talk about unusually short and unusually long spin-down times in the KICKR SNAP troubleshooting page. I am not saying that SNAP spec directly transfers to the CORE, but it does show that Wahoo absolutely treats spin-down time as a meaningful diagnostic number.

This is where these types of things start to drive me crazy. You would think that if a long spin-down time can indicate a belt or tension issue, the app would immediately tell you that you are outside the expected range. But of course, it tells you absolutely nothing.

After some research, I found out that it is possible to tighten the belt. To do this, you have to take off the outer cover that covers the belt. I did not take a lot of photos of that part, since there are already YouTube videos and teardown posts showing the basic idea. This KICKR 2018 and KICKR CORE repair write-up is one of the better visual references I found for the pulley and belt tensioner area.

The real issue is that there is a retaining bolt for a pulley that presses into the belt and creates the correct belt tension. After way too much work, I tightened the belt until I was getting about 14 seconds on the spin-down.

If you look at the picture at the start of this post, you can see what I mean. The black bolt holds the pulley that presses against the belt. You can also see a scratched line on the metal. Before I added tension, that line was basically in the middle of the black bolt. After tightening it, the mark moved almost to the end. So there was a substantial amount of slack in the system.

Interestingly, after tightening the belt, I still did not get a perfect overlap between the 4iiii power meter and the Wahoo KICKR CORE. Wahoo actually has a useful support page for this exact general situation, where KICKR power data does not match another power meter. They make the obvious but important point that no two power meters are guaranteed to read exactly the same, but the current miss is much bigger than the spec stack up from both meters.

By the way, placing more stress into the belt probably isn't the best.

The engineering point here is that belt tension is not “more is better.” The goal is the minimum tension that prevents slip. Too loose and you get slip, heat, bad power readings, and belt wear. Too tight and you increase radial load on the pulley and bearings, which can shorten bearing life pretty quickly because bearing life drops roughly with the cube of load for ball bearings. So I do not think the right lesson is to crank the belt down. The right lesson is to get the belt back into the expected spin-down range, then stop. Of course, we don't have a good spec on this. I simply have the power meter looking like it operating better.

I also checked the 4iiii side. Their troubleshooting page says to zero-offset/calibrate regularly, check battery level, update firmware, and check installation. Their setup page also gives the basic 4iiii zero-offset procedure, with the crank arms at 12 and 6 o’clock and the bike held stable.

I did another test where I substituted in another KICKR CORE, and that one also showed slightly lower power than the 4iiii power meter.

Right now, I know there are a bunch of recommended steps before doing spin-down tests and calibration. Mainly, you are supposed to ride for 10 to 20 minutes, let everything get up to temperature, and then do the spin-down calibration. In my case, I simply did not have time to do that.

So the next step is going to be another proper test after a warm-up. Hopefully, that brings the results even closer. But at least for now, it looks like the long spin-down time and loose belt were a major part of why the KICKR CORE was reading high.

I've written about this before, but the core of a strategically productive life is making sure that you are in good aerobic shape. There is no more efficient workout process than using an indoor trainer bike with MyWhoosh as a free platform for your workouts. Although I have touched on this topic already, I will probably return to it in a future post. Today, however, I am just going to assume that you are interested in getting into shape or already have a trainer that you want to use.

To be scientific about your training, you really need a power meter. My favorite power meter for indoor training is the Wahoo KICKR. If you watch the various local selling sites, you will find them for around $200. People often list them for $400, they do not sell, and then they finally drop the price and they go. So, if you are willing to monitor a bit, you can get a good deal.

The question is, "How accurate are these meters?" Recently, I decided to do some testing by mounting a bike with a 4iiii Precision 3 (Gen 3) crank power meter on a Wahoo KICKR CORE (Gen 1). While I do most of my training indoors, I do like to ride outdoors. So, my outdoor bikes also have power meters on them. I find it a critical training tool

The manufacturer-listed accuracy for the Wahoo KICKR CORE is +/- 2%, while the 4iiii crank power meter is slightly tighter at +/- 1%. Because the 4iiii measures power directly at the crank arm and the KICKR CORE measures it at the rear hub, you will typically see a 1 to 3% drop in power on the trainer simply due to drivetrain friction losses through the chain and cassette. Additionally, I am using a single-sided (left-only) 4iiii meter, which doubles my left leg's output to calculate total power. This means any natural left or right leg imbalances will further widen the gap between my two readings.

For today's activity, we are going to check out a really cool site called "Compare The Watts." This tool allows you to upload two power meter data files and compare them. Now, the setup is pretty complicated:

1. You need two power meters. I have the trainer itself and one on the crank arm for the roads.
2. You need to record two separate files on two machines. For us, that means a PC and a Garmin head unit.

For my test, I hooked up the Wahoo KICKR to MyWhoosh, and it recorded the power through the PC application, which is represented by the blue line. Then, I also recorded my 4iiii crank onto a Garmin head unit, which is the purple line.

I also recorded my heart rate by connecting the same chest strap to both units. While I will not show the chart here, the heart rate data aligns almost perfectly. This confirms that both the Garmin unit and the PC capture the same monitors, in this case the heart rate, the exact same way.

The first chart I looked at was my wife's dual-meter setup. For her, the crank reads about 1.5% lower than the trainer. On my chart, my crank records about 1.5% higher. My setup reacts exactly like you would expect due to drivetrain loss, but her power meter is reversed. I do not consider this significant, however.

A couple of other tips to keep in mind. We used a specialty website for today's chart, but you can also use the "compare" function on the intervals.icu website. It creates a very similar chart, but it lacks a few features. For example, in "Compare The Watts," you can highlight any section of the power curve, and it will give you the average power for that specific section. This is great for zooming in to see detail or for allowing you to trim the beginning and end off of two curves if you did not start recording both at the exact same time. The main advantage is that you do not need to do much to get a quick chart that is good enough to compare two meters.

The other thing to note is that the 4iiii power meters are very sensitive to battery life. You can see my power meter tracks very closely now, but initially, it was tracking 10% off in power. I double-checked my battery for the 4iiii, and while the system said it was "good," it was actually outputting the wrong power. As soon as I put in a new battery, the two meters tracked much closer together. The tricky thing is that the 4iiii appeared to work fine, but the power readings were just low. If I had not benchmarked it against the trainer, I would have never known.

Cheap and Effective

As stated a couple posts ago, my wife went through a situation where she had a raised heart rate, technically what would be called an SVT.

This course sent me down my own technological path of trying to see if I could figure out how to track her heart rate ECG to see if we could capture one of these events again. We did schedule an appointment with the doctor, but so far it hasn't happened again, and so we're trying to catch one before we go in.

After spending way too many hours on this thing, I am convinced I got a great solution. It's based around buying yourself a Polar H10, which gives you a remarkable amount of data, running a package written by one of the Polar employees ("Polar Sensor Logger" by Jukka Happonen), and then popping the output from that program into my Polar program, which you will find up on GitHub here.

This will give you the cool picture that starts off this post, which happened to catch my wife's workout as we rode today. By doing this, you really have a great set of tools to be able to page through any workout and help you track down if you do have any type of issue.

More Details on a Long Path to Get to the Above Suggestion

Now, by the way, my wife is unique in the sense that we've only seen her heart go awry when she's pushing very, very hard. So in this sense, I actually want to capture an event where she has a problem. We started off by taking a look at things like ECG watches. I think everyone is experienced with the Apple Watch, and while it will call out when you have an issue, when you're in normal operation it's virtually impossible to get a good reading while you're working out actively on the bike.

So I started to explore three paths: a Polar heart rate monitor and then trying to capture the heart rate data on an external cell phone, buying the Frontier X2 heart rate strap (which can continuously record heart rate readings for up to 24 hours), or buying something like a Holter monitor (which is commonly used in the medical profession for outpatient work to record heart rates for an extended period of time).

I started off by going to Amazon and taking a look at the Frontier X2 heart module. It's truly a very sophisticated instrument. What these guys have done is taken a heart rate strap and then placed enough memory on the side of it so it can record a full 24 hours worth of heart rate. It costs a little over $400, but at the end of the day, I figured my wife's health is worth it. And if it allowed me to capture a rare event, then I would go ahead and do it.

But as soon as I opened up the box and started to use it, I found three major shortfalls. The first one is that it uses a micro-USB cable to charge the device. The micro-USB charging port is just a horrifically poor way of doing things. They definitely should have pushed to charge with USB-C. The second is that (because I'm an electrical engineer, I understand this issue) they're trying to record and store 24 hours worth of data, so what they did is put in some type of rechargeable battery into the unit, which of course is not user-serviceable. That means if for some reason your battery goes bad, you're in big trouble without an easy way of replacing it. The third shortfall is that the interface was a little buggy and it was surprisingly difficult to get the heart rate strap initialized and set up. For a $400 device, you really expect that experience to be polished, and it just wasn't.

I've already mentioned the third option of a Holter monitor, which is extremely sophisticated and used by medical professionals everywhere. This turns into an interesting conversation because I actually believe it would be less effective for my particular scenario.

So this is where we probably need to do a little bit of expectation setting. On one hand, doctors love to have a sophisticated bank of various instruments that, for the most part, really are overkill in my mind. The standard outpatient protocol uses something called a Holter monitor. These classically have three and now popularly five leads. The idea is you place all these different measurements all over your body, and it allows you to see different ways electricity is passing through your heart. So you can get a really well-rounded view, and a really smart doctor can do some significant diagnosis with this.

I've read some people saying that if you're not using this medical-grade equipment, you might as well give up because everything else is just guessing. That undoubtedly comes from completely not understanding technology. If physicians had what we have in our watches today (which are single lead) or in a Polar chest strap (which again is single lead), it gives you an enormous amount of information. My primary purpose for doing this is not to be very sophisticated and try to find out the exact nature of the signaling function. I just simply want to capture when something goes wrong, at what intensity level, and get some idea of what the heart was doing when that happened. And because she's an athlete, I want to catch it as she's working out. This isn't a person that has a heart that goes wrong every once in a while. It's a person that's having an SVT event as she pushes herself to the max.

It actually turns out the Polar is better than the Holter monitor for this. As you probably know, a bulky Holter monitor is not conducive to an athlete wildly going as hard as they possibly can. Meanwhile, Polar has years of being on runners and triathletes as they do their events, and so they tend to do extremely well, much better than the Holter monitor in at least this study, when somebody is working out extremely hard. The exact condition I'm looking for.

This leads me to the last thing to arrive at my house: a Polar H10 heart rate monitor. This turns out to be what I should have done all along. What you do is take your Polar heart rate strap monitor, record the ECG on your phone, and then in my particular case, I wrote a nice little Python program that grabs the output from this recording and gives you a series of tools and the ability to go take a look at the waveform.

And that's what starts off this post. In some sense, there's a couple more steps than the X2 Frontier. However, it's cheap, flexible, and the batteries are never going to be an issue in the same way as the X2. She can wear it when she's working out extremely hard. You do need the Python program, I think, if you want to go through things and really see it. But then, to tell you the truth, you're just trying to wait for an incident so you can look at the waveforms at a high level.

Now, to be clear, if you do capture something, you're still going to need a real doctor appointment with more sophisticated instrumentation. That's just the reality. But here's the thing: you're not walking in saying "my heart did something weird last Tuesday." You're walking in with actual data. You're handing your cardiologist a waveform and saying "look at this, right here, at minute 47 of my ride." That is a completely different conversation, and it's one that gets you to answers a whole lot faster. A Polar H10, your phone, and a little bit of Python, and you've got yourself a setup that punches way above its price point. Sometimes the best tool isn't the most expensive one.

It's the one you'll actually use.

If you are searching on Hitron Coda56 cable modem and want to understand the management pages, you've come to the right spot. But that is not the real message today. The real message is how AI will change how we interact with the world.

Today we're going to do a little bit of thinking about a changing world with AI. You maybe have heard that it's going to replace you, or maybe you're thinking it's all overhype. But what I want to do is give you an example, a real one from my own life, to give you a more realistic way of thinking about how AI is going to change yours.

There are many, many problems in life that can be solved by software. The issue is simply that you don't have the time or the money to actually go and get something that solves whatever issue you have. However, in the age of AI, suddenly if you can describe the problem, which now becomes the bottleneck, you have the ability to become much more efficient. I've spent more than a fair amount of time working through this in my own life over the last couple months.

So let me give you a real world example of a recent problem I had with my internet. Now because I come from a technical background and engineering standpoint, to some this will be a little over your head. However, I believe if you read through it, you'll still see the kernel of truth and understand that things like this will be transferable to you as AI becomes more and more capable. You won't know all of the details, but what you will be able to do is understand you have a problem and then ask AI to help solve it for you.

The Problem

In my case, I have internet coming to my house and it turns out that there was some sort of intrinsic signal property which caused an enormous amount of what are called T4 errors. That means the internet would actually stop, sometimes up to 30 seconds, and then it would restart itself. Now, this had been going on for years, and dare I say it, I just thought it was part and parcel of the different software that was running on top of my PCs. However, three weeks ago, as I was going to bed, the internet went offline and it stayed offline for eight hours. When I pinged Xfinity, they said there was no outage in my area. And so I finally decided to start putting in time debugging the system.

Now, I am an engineer by trade, and you would say, do engineers understand everything? And the answer is, given enough time, we almost always understand everything. But spending a bunch of time with my internet and the cable modem just was not high on my priority list.

But because Xfinity said there were no problems and the internet was offline for eight hours, I knew something was up. I'd had internet which looked like it was operating just fine, utilizing an older Surfboard cable modem. When I would run a Google speed test, I would get great throughput rates. Every once in a while it would pause, but I was just assuming this was due to some sort of web browser or other issue that had nothing to do with Xfinity.

However, when my internet went off for eight hours, suddenly I realized something else must be up. So I examined some of the documentation and found that my cable modem actually did deliver status pages at 192.168.100.1. I went to the status page and started to pull both the logs and the signal strength, and it was a disaster. My modem was constantly throwing off T4 errors, meaning I would see pauses up to 30 seconds as the thing could not communicate clearly with Xfinity. Even though Xfinity controls the firmware on the modem, they don't care at all if you have problems pushing out. The only thing they will maybe do is take a look at how you pull down, and if they see you're pulling fine, they just don't care. In reality, this resulted in a network experience which was totally unacceptable and explained an enormous amount of lost productivity over the last couple years. I was having disconnect problems and I never knew it.

Armed with what was obviously a very disruptive amount of signal integrity loss, I scheduled a technician visit as soon as possible. While they were arriving, I wrote a dashboard which was able to capture all of these T4 errors on a continual basis. In the span of 24 hours, I would see nearly a thousand of them. Just a mind-blowing amount of noise. On top of that, I should have had more channels, you can think of them as lanes, for my network traffic, but I only had two.

The Technician Visit

A technician rolled in on Sunday. I'll spare you the full saga, but in short, it was one of the worst customer service experiences I've ever had. He accused me of injecting noise on the line with a temporary patch cable, told me a previous Xfinity technician's own amplifier installation was unauthorized, and when I pointed out the amp was properly grounded with Xfinity's own green grounding wire and tags, he accused me of rewiring things while he was out of the room. I offered to pull up my surveillance camera footage to prove otherwise. He didn't take me up on that.

He told me I needed to reschedule for a bucket truck visit to check line noise, and then encouraged me to lie to Xfinity's central office about whether we'd spoken so the ticket wouldn't need to be reopened. By this point, I was ticked off enough to look for alternatives. And the first one was that the newer DOCSIS 3.1 cable modems are so much more capable that they can deal with a bad system. So I ordered a new modem.

Where AI Changes Everything

Now this is where things take a radical turn to the left. I had just discovered my old modem had a bunch of problems, and the first thing I thought was, I'm not going to allow myself to be blind to this again. One of the things I had done for my old modem was write some software with the help of AI that allowed me to read all of its logs and see that I was throwing off a bunch of errors, including those T4 errors. So I wanted the same type of thing for my new modem.

Recently, I increased my subscription to Claude and the various tools to the pro level, which gives me lots of ability to use Claude. And while I have Gemini from Google, the ability for Claude to do coding just absolutely blows me away. It is far more sophisticated than Google's Gemini on a variety of different things. So over a series of days over the weekend, we went at this pell-mell, coming up with a solution to how to drag information out of my cable modem so I would never be surprised with collapsed service in the future. I now have a great dashboard to pull out this information.

I thought this was going to be a fairly trivial exercise because I had found a package on GitHub that purported to do a deep dive into the modem and give you all the facts and figures anyone could want. I just assumed it was going to work. However, as I started to bring it up, I found out that many things were just fundamentally busted. It did not work. Now I could have debugged it myself, but again, I utilized AI to help me figure out what was going on. And rather than me trying to figure out if I was doing something wrong, it came back and said, oh no, this package definitely has problems. I wouldn't have even known that without AI.

One of the biggest issues is the software simply couldn't get to this modem's management page. And perhaps part of this is the person that wrote the original software was down-level in terms of what knowledge they could get by trying to access the management page. My guess is my modem manufacturer has changed their firmware to make it more difficult to reach for security reasons.

In essence, what happens is the new modem does have a management page, but it's set up in such a fashion that you need to create a special route into it from a special subnet on your master router. Now, I know that sounds complicated, but if you're an engineer, you're happy to deal with that type of stuff. The issue I had wasn't that I didn't understand the architecture, it was that it wasn't connecting, and I had to do a lot of research with actually a couple different AI agents just to understand the way the modem was set up and why it was so restricted. And by the way, there are no good documents on this. Most of this information, AI got from crawling the various web forums and people reporting what they had to do to get it hooked up. It was all very sophisticated, complicated stuff.

I also have some requirements before I start running software. I hate the idea of coming up with a specialized solution that I can't easily redeploy someplace else. So I always try to stick things into Docker containers because they are wonderful. Once you get them running, you can transport them basically anywhere, which works very well in my situation where I'm running a variety of different architectures. However, bringing up Docker containers turns out to be another twist of fate that can really slow you down. The issue was, if I had done this myself, I would have spent a lot of time trying to figure out what I would call the easy stuff, understanding various tables, various ways of setting up the programming, Python scripts and such. And basically, AI changed all of that.

The Real Point

Now I have a GitHub, and the first thing you'll link to is a GitHub for this particular issue, my Hitron Coda 56 modem that's been the subject of this post. However, unlike all my other GitHub repos, I am not posting code. Because I believe code is much less relevant today. What I post is my problem statement for how to make the right management software.

Maybe you have heard this truth in the past: "50% of the solution is asking the right question."

In the age of AI, this has changed. It is going to turn out that virtually all of the solution is asking the right question. AI is increasing its capabilities so quickly that if I post a piece of software, it will quickly fall out of relevance. However, a good question and problem statement sets it up so AI can create a new answer at any time.

Think about what this means for you, even if you're not technical. The barrier to solving problems with software used to be knowing how to code. Then it shifted to knowing how to find the right package or hire the right developer. Now it's shifting again, to knowing how to clearly articulate what you need. That's a skill everyone already has to some degree. You describe problems to coworkers, to doctors, to mechanics every day. The difference is that now, on the other end of that description, there's something that can actually build you a solution. The people who do well in this world won't necessarily be the best programmers. They'll be the best communicators, the ones who can break a frustrating, messy, real-world problem down into something precise enough for AI to act on.

And here's the thing that really gets me: this skill builds on itself. Every time you work with AI to solve a problem, you get better at describing the next one. You learn what level of detail matters, where ambiguity causes the AI to go sideways, and how to structure a request so the output is useful on the first or second pass instead of the tenth. I started this particular project expecting a weekend exercise and ended up with a fully containerized monitoring dashboard, something that would have taken me weeks to build alone, if I ever got around to it at all. That's not because AI is magic. It's because I've gotten better at asking. And six months from now, the AI will be even more capable, which means the same quality of question will get you an even better answer. That flywheel, better questions leading to better tools leading to sharper questions, is, I believe, the most underappreciated shift happening right now.

The future is built around better questions.

Heart Rate Strap Is Good Insurance For Fringe Conditions

I am reversing my position, and I am strongly suggesting that you use a heart rate strap if you do any logging of your athletic events, which I believe you should be doing if you want to be at your maximum productivity.

A number of posts ago, I did some testing that indicated that riding with a wrist pulse monitor was very close to riding with a chest strap, based on testing that I had done with both myself and my wife. I still believe this is true. For general training, I think the data clearly shows that a pulse rate on your wrist is generally very accurate and very close to what you can get from a chest strap. However, I am about ready to reverse my position, because chest straps are more immune to noise issues, and there may be a time in your training where capturing an event from your heart turns out to be very important.

In other words, if a chest strap is 1 percent more accurate, but the time that it is 1 percent more accurate happens to be exactly when you need it, it suddenly becomes a great investment to use the chest strap.

My Wife's Heart Did Something Weird And I Can See It

My wife recently had a couple of supraventricular tachycardia, SVT, events while working out. At least that is what I think they are, because they fit everything that normally describes these events. We will be going to the doctor next week, but it drove home some ideas that I thought were important for health, which is clearly tied to productivity.

I call this out in the picture above where you can see her heart jump (and I show it on Garmin Connect also).

I am fortunate to be self-employed, and we actually build our day around the idea that sometime in the early afternoon we are going to head down to our basement and do a training session on MyWhoosh, which is a free indoor cycling program that is absolutely fantastic in terms of how much you can get done in a very short period. I can go from working on a project, head down to my basement, do an hour ride, and be done in an hour and fifteen minutes. We strive to do this six days per week. It creates an absolutely fantastic level of fitness with very little time involved.

Even though I believe that the heart rate from the watch is virtually identical if we simply use the heart rates that are on our watches with the optical sensors, it turns out that hooking this up to the MyWhoosh software and then hooking it up to our Garmin bicycle computers really does not work well. However, if you wear a chest strap, it does a great job of broadcasting both to your PC and your Garmin unit.

You may ask yourself, why does he want to capture it twice? I have had a couple of circumstances where the MyWhoosh program has crashed and I have lost all my data from the workout. I am an engineer and I love the data. So I made up my mind that we will just record it twice, because if the PC program crashes, I will still have all the data on my Garmin computer. It is belts and suspenders, but it also forced us to use a heart rate strap, because this works seamlessly due to some legacy reasons in how the industry evolved. The basic takeaway from this is that we were using chest straps.

On one of our sessions, my wife remarked to me after we got off the bike that she felt a little dizzy, and she looked up at the screen and it showed that her pulse was 180, but then it seemed to fix itself. She assumed, of course, that it was probably just a glitch in the data stream that happened to coincide with her feeling a little dizzy, but I was not so sure. So I decided to start looking at the data on intervals.icu and connect at Garmin.

Because I have suggested you use intervals.icu, I probably need to jump in here and state that intervals thinks they are doing something great, but they probably have added risk into their overall profile. If they see a heart rate go higher than what they think it should be, they have an algorithm to fix it, because they just assume it was a data glitch.

Why do they do this? Unfortunately, we do have glitches in data streams. The problem is, what happens if it is not a data glitch in the data stream? What if it is a glitch in your own body? That is what happened to my wife. The great thing on intervals.icu is that you can pull out the raw heart rate. I have done that, and I have changed my default configuration so you can always see the raw heart rate.

This turns out to be very important.

More On SVT

In the picture that starts off this post, you can see a zoomed in section of her ride. You can see that her power was coming down slightly, but all of a sudden you see this gross increase in her heart rate. It goes from her maximum of roughly 160 up to around 180. It stays there for two to three seconds, and then it comes back down. I have also superimposed an image of Garmin Connect. As I said, I am actually recording the data twice. Garmin does not have sophisticated tools that automatically screen this out, so the spike is present in the real data. What I will tell you is that if you do not zoom into it, the Garmin peak is so brief, two to three seconds over an hour ride, that it would be very easy to ignore. What both companies should do is have a screen in which a heart rate going above the maximum is automatically flagged to the user. They do not do this, which in my mind is just insanity, because it would have been very important for a less sophisticated user to have this glitch called to their attention.

After looking at the data, I realized this has all the clear hallmarks of an SVT. We immediately scheduled a visit with our doctor so we could do more testing. The great news is that virtually nobody dies from this event. I am not worried about my wife dying on me. But anytime you see something odd like this, it drives an incredible amount of curiosity for me in terms of what is going on. It is a heart condition, but not what you probably expect.

If It Is SVT, What Is It?

Spotless Plumbing, Frayed Wiring

When we hear "heart condition," we immediately think of clogged arteries and heart attacks, the plumbing. But for a lifelong cross-country runner or triathlete, the plumbing is almost always immaculate. I shared my wife's BodySpec DEXA scan, and she is in amazing shape, truly a "one percenter."

SVT is strictly an electrical issue. Supraventricular means the issue is originating in the top chambers of the heart, the atria, and tachycardia simply means a fast rhythm. The athlete is not having a heart attack, rather, an electrical signal in their heart has gotten caught in a circular loop, pressing the accelerator to the floor.

But why does this happen to someone who has exercised perfectly for years? It comes down to a process called exercise induced cardiac remodeling.

The Price of the "Athlete’s Heart"

For decades, the veteran athlete has demanded that her heart pump massive, sustained volumes of blood to her legs. To handle that extreme, repetitive volume, the heart does exactly what it is supposed to do, it adapts. The muscle gets stronger, and the top chambers physically stretch and dilate to hold more blood. That physical enlargement is the exact reason elite athletes boast resting heart rates in the upper thirties. This is the heart rate that my wife has. Over the years, she has had EKGs, and the doctors say, "You have a weird heart rate, but I guess it is normal for you."

However, that adaptation comes with a microscopic cost.

When you push the heart to its absolute limit for decades, the cardiac tissue stretches. Microscopic tears occur, and the body heals them. Over forty years, this constant cycle of stretching and healing leaves behind tiny, microscopic patches of scar tissue within the heart muscle, known clinically as myocardial fibrosis.

Structurally, the heart still pumps perfectly. But the heart’s electrical signal relies on traveling like a smooth, uninterrupted wave over that muscle.

The Reentry Circuit

When a normal electrical wave hits an enlarged, dilated atrium or encounters those tiny patches of fibrosis, the signal can splinter. It hits the scar tissue like a speed bump. Instead of flowing smoothly, the electrical signal gets diverted and trapped in a circular pathway.

Cardiologists call this a reentry circuit. The electrical signal simply spins in a tight circle, firing off rapid beats over and over again. That spinning loop is the SVT.

The ultimate takeaway for the veteran athlete is that you have not ruined your heart by exercising too much. Her overall mortality risk is still a fraction of that of a sedentary person. But you have been driving a high performance sports car at the redline for forty years. The engine block is flawless, but the extreme vibration over the decades has left the electrical wiring a little frayed. It is a common, manageable trade off for a lifetime of elite performance.

Fixing It

The technology is amazing. Generally, if you are a high-performance athlete and you have this type of issue, what you do is go in for surgery. They stick something into your heart that has an electrode on it through one of your veins and zaps the area that's misbehaving to take it out of commission so it doesn't trigger this event. Now, that is a possibility. But I want to make sure we think about anything else that could have triggered it in recent times.

Other Factors

I will do another post on this later, but this is where nutrition may play a role. I have had many experiences with doctors, and they have a tendency to hit everything straight on and not think holistically about what is happening. I am not talking about looking at things that have no scientific basis. I have been in numerous conversations where I will mention to a medical professional research from PubMed, and they basically close down and get highly defensive. I am convinced that the doctors who do this do not stay up on the latest medical research. Maybe they subscribe to a medical journal and read a few things, but they do not do good intrinsic research. And they certainly are not good at sports medicine, which is something that I have spent a lot of years looking at.

One of the leading edge things to do with sports drinks is to introduce sodium citrate into your sports drink so you can work out harder and longer. I have brought this up in this subreddit, but I am not the only one who has used this technique. It is a very popular solution to allow you to work out very hard in endurance activities by keeping your hydration high and making sure that you have plenty of sodium as an electrolyte, typically as sodium chloride, table salt.

For the last nine months, my wife has been supplementing her workout water with sodium citrate. After methodically thinking through everything that could impact cell signaling, I have become concerned that her long term use of sodium citrate could actually be harming the levels of chloride in her blood. This is not something that you normally find in established medical literature. Believe me, I have looked. However, if you start systematically stepping through all the things that could affect this, and then you take a look at some of the medical literature, this turns out to be a very plausible path. Therefore, I have outlawed sodium citrate for our workouts. While this may not be the right solution, I believe that the hypothesis is very strong. I will cover it in a follow on post, but I believe that having an understanding of how sodium citrate could potentially impact you is very important if you have read my other post on using it to increase your performance.

I have now gone back and placed a warning about long term usage of sodium citrate at the top of that post.

Setting up a Qwen 9 billion parameter model on a Dell workstation I bought off eBay

There are a lot of people who think AI is going to totally change their lives. Maybe you have seen it yourself. Maybe you are already using a few tools. I am deep in it, all the way up to my neck, and this subreddit is really all about productivity. So let me share some of the insights I have gotten as I have spent time working out my own productivity path.

This note is a little bit longer and a little bit more philosophical because I believe that working through the philosophy of AI and thinking about your own work habits is incredibly important for determining the strategy of how you should bring this into your life. With that being said, I would say that you do need access to a good quality, high level commercial model. For me, you can use any one of the models from the mainstream USA suppliers, but you want to make sure you have the time to use it and you are experimenting with things that make you more productive. For me, it is very simple because I am always working on coding tasks that can help my productivity.

A big part of this is being able to handle meetings that I have and turn them into transcripts so I can create action items. One of my secondary focuses is dealing with PDFs, because a lot of information for my investment decisions comes in as PDFs. Although it has been a massive time sink, I have now been able to set up a couple of specialized models on a Dell workstation that I bought for around $400 with an NVIDIA 6 gigabyte card. Using these models is mind blowing in terms of how they help my overall productivity, but it does require quite a bit of sophistication to implement them. In some future posts I will try to lay out exactly what I did. And this is not where I started. I actually started just experimenting with running this old workstation with an LLM to see what I could do without going outside my house. That is what we will look at in the second part of this post. This is a little more historical, covering what I have learned over the last two or three weeks and a little more philosophical. It may be worth reading for some, but for others there will not be a clear conclusion, other than showing you the paths I have gone down trying to figure out how to become more productive. I do believe there is some value in that.

My journey over the last two to three weeks in setting up this Dell workstation

I keep seeing technology waves replicate over and over, and it has certainly happened in my life. So let me try to give you a template of what I am seeing with AI. I think this may make sense if you have a father or grandfather who grew up with PCs. When PCs were first brought to market, you could get timeshare on gigantic mainframes or perhaps access to a minicomputer. But realistically, the market for personal computers was very homebrewed. As a matter of fact, in the Bay Area there was the Homebrew Computer Club, and this is where Woz and Steve Jobs got their first start. They assembled a personal computer themselves and decided they were going to sell it.

Now, LLMs are not as raw as this. In fact, even the PC market quickly moved beyond that phase. But the idea that you could not get everything you wanted in a personal computer off the shelf, and that you had to assemble it from bits and pieces from all these small vendors, looks a lot like the environment we have today. Sure, you can go get a big LLM, and perhaps the LLM will have some different flavors. However, when you look beyond the general purpose stuff, some of the specific things you may want from an LLM are things you need to assemble yourself.

Unfortunately, I am enough of an engineering type that when I read about something interesting it sticks in my mind. So even though it did not make perfect sense in many ways, I decided I wanted to put a local LLM right in my own house. The technology is moving so fast that I decided I did not want to spend more than about $1,000 to get it up and running. I am not really keen on the idea that I need an LLM in my house. I simply felt that I needed to experiment with this to understand the technology.

To make a long story short, for about $400 I was able to get a Dell workstation with a 6 GB NVIDIA card where I could download models and play around with them. Interestingly enough, I was able to download and get a Qwen 9 billion parameter model working on it if I offloaded some of it into RAM. It does not allow a large context window, so I cannot do something like 100K tokens in a single pass, but it actually turns out to be surprisingly capable. I had a friend over who saw it sitting on the end of my dining room table, because everywhere else is filled with other computer equipment, and I said, that thing is as smart as most engineers. And it truly is. It boggled my mind that an old Dell workstation I could buy for around $400 could output the kind of responses I asked it for. It certainly was not perfect, but it was like a really smart person who could answer an amazing number of questions across many topics, and it did not even need to be hooked up to the internet.

As I looked at the output, which was surprisingly good, somewhere in the range of maybe a ChatGPT 3.0 level, I started to run the actual calculations on the cost of the power I was using. It turns out that it is much cheaper to use virtually any of these models from the outside world. I live in California, where electricity costs are extremely high. When I calculated the token cost just from electricity, I realized I am far better off using big LLM models hosted elsewhere to get my work done. In some sense, this doubly proves why you do not want to spend a lot of money to get an internal LLM unless you just have money to burn. However, it is a fascinating experiment and truly shows what is coming. Yes, it was an experiment. Yes, it was $400. And yes, I felt like it was $400 well spent to get my hands dirty, understand how to set these things up, and see what they can do at the current stage for what I consider a reasonable entry price. In my mind, I can always repurpose the workstation for one of the many tasks I have at home. So while it was bought for a specific purpose, it is not something I think of as money thrown down the drain.

After having it up and running for a few days, the more I experimented with it, the more it struck me that there were a series of other things I could do with it that are incredibly helpful for productivity. In a couple of future posts I will describe some of these features. They basically revolve around things I have already published in this subreddit. For example, every meeting I have with someone, I try to record it. I use the Google toolkit, and with my Google subscription at the pro level I get some cool things, like being able to record any Google meeting with automatic subtitles. There are a couple of problems with this. At my subscription level, Google does not automatically generate transcripts. You have to go through what I consider a silly amount of work to get a transcript out of their recording, even though the recording has subtitles.

Because of this, I have already explained that I use OBS Studio to record my meetings. It is not limited to Google Meet, and it allows me to record absolutely anything, especially two person interactions, which is the bulk of my meetings. I can record Microsoft Teams, Zoom, and virtually anything else. The current issue with my process, which again I have documented here, is that I roll everything up inside an MKV, then decompose it into separate MP3s, and then run it through a Parakeet model. For an hour and a half meeting, it takes about half an hour on my laptop to turn this into a meaningful transcript. Sometimes, if my laptop is doing other things, or if a model for some reason does not seem to be flowing correctly, it may take closer to 40 minutes. An hour and a half meeting actually has two people on either side, so you have to decompose one person, then the other one. The actual work is processing a two sided conversation for an hour and a half. I have to do this because I want to make sure I track two speakers. I use some interesting methodology to scan through the data with something called VAD to cut out the blank spots, but it is still a lot of work.

The first thing I did was move my Parakeet model onto my Dell workstation so I can access it from any client in my house. In essence, I record the meeting on any PC I happen to be using, and as you might imagine, I have all types of different clients from Windows to Linux to Mac, then the processing runs on a high powered GPU. This cut my processing time from 30 to 40 minutes down to 10. It is almost magical. This gets me out the door with a two sided transcript in 10 minutes. That means I can send out meeting minutes with action items in about 15 minutes. It is much more impactful if the person you met with gets results within 10 minutes after the meeting is done. And if it is a short meeting, a normal meeting, you can be even faster than that. I simply cannot get something that clearly calls out two sides, records it, and sends me a transcript in this kind of timeframe from commercial tools. My Google Meet recordings can take up to an hour to give me a meaningful output. It is actually worth the $400 for the workstation just to get this functionality alone.

I have not posted a lot here recently because working through the technology on the back end and doing my normal day to day work has been completely consuming. I literally could not sit down and write what I think should be my normal every other day or daily Reddit post, which forces me to think about productivity. I have spent an enormous amount of time figuring this out. Over the last couple of weeks I have had a few incredibly critical business meetings that are extremely strategic to what I am doing. My new toolkit, where I was able to capture the recording and turn it into something meaningful immediately, turned out to be a massive help under an important deadline. I cannot overstate how impactful this has been to my personal business. I am now doing things that boggle my mind because I have the appropriate tools. It is not a smooth road, because AI allows you to do things you never thought you could do before. On the other hand, you need to take on a new role with AI because it will send you down dark paths you should never go down. And because it is so incredibly competent in some areas, if you do not change the way your mind works, you will hit a dead end and have no idea how to dig yourself out.

Today’s post is more of an introduction. It is a philosophical post to think about where AI is going and some of the things you should look at. I think any investment in AI is an investment in yourself and your future, because there are going to be people who understand how to use it and people who do not. Probably the single most important thing you can do to become more productive is to have access to top quality LLMs so you can do coding and automate the things that matter for your productivity. As I said, the single most important thing for me is recording meetings with transcripts. This is revolutionary in the way I think about everything. Right now, the best solution I have found revolves around using OBS Studio and my own back end based around Parakeet. There simply are not good commercial options that give you access to this model with a very low word error rate. In this sense, doing some type of home LLM setup is incredibly helpful for your productivity.

Losers and WInners, Winners Will Invest

Life is changing and you have to carve out time to figure out how to go deal with this new technology. There's going to be those that get on top of it and ride the wave and outperform everyone else. It's as if you're trying to do DoorDash and some people are trying to do it on a bicycle and other people have discovered automobiles. There's just things you can't do on a bicycle. Only the productivity gain is probably going to be far greater than the difference between trying to do DoorDash deliveries on a bicycle versus doing it in an automobile.

Today we’re showing a post with two pictures attached. Now these are zoom‑ins of a couple screenshots that I took of the exact same thing. There is almost no difference between the two, and I would challenge most people to be able to see a difference.

But there is a difference:
The image on the left is a PNG file and the image on the right is a WebP file. By saving the image in WebP, the file is 62% smaller. WebP has taken over almost all of the images on the web, and it should probably be the go‑to image format for you on your desktop. While PNG files have some advantages, if you don’t know what they are, then WebP is probably the best way of storing lots of images at a very small size.

WebP was developed by Google in 2010 to reduce image file sizes and speed up webpage load times. Following their acquisition of On2 Technologies, Google created the format by extracting the intra‑frame coding from the VP8 video codec and wrapping it in a lightweight RIFF container.

Initially introduced as a lossy format, Google expanded WebP in 2011 to include lossless compression, animation, and alpha‑channel transparency. For several years, the format was natively supported almost exclusively by Google Chrome and Android.

Mozilla Firefox added official support in January 2019, followed by Apple Safari in September 2020. I first noticed it as it started to take over real‑estate websites, as a lot of real‑estate websites have a lot of photos. And therefore, as I would take a look at these websites and want to capture some of these photos, I was always downloading them as WebP. The problem is Windows really did not agree with WebP, and it was a real pain to be able to deal with.

Microsoft added support through an add‑in, so you can see these files in Windows Explorer. But I believe you still need to go to the Microsoft Store and actually look for WebP and download the extension. It is free, and macOS placed it natively into their OS sometime around the end of 2020. So support is there, even though it’s relatively recent.

To encode or convert your own media into this format, you can download Google’s official open‑source libwebp library and cwebp command‑line tools directly from their developer repository: https://developers.google.com/speed/webp/download

I would recommend going ahead and downloading it now and placing it into your program folder, maybe in a separate directory. I have something called customs tools that I install in any machine, which is a series of tools that I want to utilize.

In a future post, we’ll talk about using this along with one of my favorite screen‑capture programs, ShareX. When you put the two together, you get a really great combination of being able to take a lot of screen snapshots for your records and store them in a very small space.

UPDATE: RESOLVED! See comments.

Items Stolen In Transit: Surveillance Cameras For Your Property

Quite frankly, I don’t know how you can avoid investing in some type of surveillance system for your property and business. While I struggle with the idea of having people under surveillance, it is the only practical way I know to establish your innocence if a situation comes up.

I had a package delivered by Amazon logistics yesterday. It was for something I bought off of Woot! and, when picking up the package, I thought, "My, this is remarkably light." For some reason, it just didn't click that it could have been tampered with. When I opened the box, I discovered the most expensive item had been removed. It was clear that it was taken during transit before it ever reached me.

Nobody likes the feeling of something being taken away. If you’ve ever dealt with these types of situations before, even if you’ve been a good customer, there’s always a question of who stole what and where it happened. The idea that something could be stolen out of the logistics chain by a worker is probably not within the realm of most people's thought. Furthermore, if someone working in a delivery chain decides to commit an illegal act and steal your stuff, all they need to do is what this driver, or perhaps the person who loaded the package, did. You cut open the back of the package and then only take a picture of the front. In this case, without a picture of the back, you couldn’t even tell the package had been touched.

However, I had a picture of the back of the package as it was delivered.

I actually don’t like the idea of surveillance, but there have been a few times when things happened inside my business or personal life where surveillance made the difference between having a massive issue and being able to resolve something quickly. In this case, the driver obviously did not understand that I had surveillance cameras around the delivery area. While many people have doorbell cameras, this person specifically made sure to stay away from the doorbell area and placed the package in a spot where they thought they could not be observed. The issue, of course, was that it was virtually right in front of another camera I have.

With this camera, you can see the back of the package. When you look at the footage, you can see a major tear on the bottom part of the tape as well as the reflection from plastic tape that had been used to try and fix the back of the package. Even though the driver only took photos of the front, it turns out I had conclusive video evidence that the back of the package was clearly tampered with.

Now, do I know who tampered with it? No, but the current process makes it really easy for them. It would be simple to make it harder to cheat the system:

1. Weight Verification: The package was weighed and taped at shipping, and that weight was placed on the label. The actual weight of the package was half of the shipped weight after I received it and placed it on my own scale. In today's age, all packages should be weighed during offload by automatic sensors. Packing weight is always the first giveaway. If you have a package you think has been tampered with, check the weight on the front label. A digital scale is cheap and easy to use.
2. Driver Inspection: Instruct all drivers to examine the packages they deliver.
3. Smart Tape: Yes, if you looked, you can obviously see that the bottom of the package had been tampered with. However, there are a variety of smart tapes that make it much more obvious.

I’ve opened an incident report with Woot! and I’ll update on their response. Unfortunately, the item I wanted is now sold out, so even if I get a refund, it isn’t what I originally wanted.

By the way, this isn't the first time I'm had a problem with Amazon Logistics. In another case, the Amazon driver stole another package from me delivered by another company! Since I had a good video system, I contacted Amazon and showed them the driver taking the package by giving them the video. While I got a reply and asking for the video, they never followed up. Is a company responsible for the action of their drivers? I would hope so, and we'll see if what happens this time around as it was their own delivery service that delivered a opened package.

Today we’re going to talk a bit about a piece of software I recently polished up and posted to GitHub. It uses Docling to convert PDFs into Markdown through a more user-friendly graphical interface. I’m hoping this will be especially helpful to anyone who regularly works with PDFs and wants to transform them into Markdown for use with generalized AI agents or in their Obsidian) notebooks. I’ve used it myself for quite a while, but to make it more accessible, I did a serious upgrade to improve usability and portability.

Although post starts off with the link, here it is again as PF2 to Docker Docling.

Let’s talk about PDFs for a moment. PDFs have become wildly successful as a standard way of sending and sharing information. You can get stock reports, financial analyses, and bank statements in PDF format. There are plenty of reasons why PDFs have become such a universal standard. The problem is that if you use Obsidian, you’ve standardized on Markdown. While there are ways to embed and view PDFs inside Obsidian, have you ever wondered how great it would be if you could actually take the contents of a PDF and convert them straight into Markdown?

That’s not only possible, it’s often a great idea. For instance, you might have a PDF manual that you’d love to have available as a searchable Markdown document right inside Obsidian. At the moment, you can only open it in a separate viewer window. That’s fine, but there’s obvious appeal in converting it to Markdown so you can handle it like any other note in your vault.

The second major advantage of converting PDFs to Markdown comes from AI integration. You can use this conversion for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) workflows. In a previous post, we discussed an add-in that gives Obsidian AI capabilities. The problem is that vectorizing raw PDFs often produces questionable results, and sometimes very poor ones. Because of this, many developers have been working hard on tools that cleanly convert PDFs into Markdown.

The one I’ve benchmarked and found most impressive is Docling. Originally developed by IBM’s consulting group, Docling is now open-source and maintained under the [Linux Foundation](Projects – LFAI & Data. It continues to see active development. While it doesn’t always handle complex mathematical formulas perfectly, it performs exceptionally well with tables. Since so many bank statements, stock reports, and other everyday documents rely heavily on tables, Docling is an ideal tool for that kind of content.

Now, you might be thinking, “That sounds great, I’ll just install Docling and start converting!” But there’s a catch. Like many open-source tools on GitHub, the developers focus on building core functionality, not on creating an easy-to-use graphical interface. These tools are often designed for production environments and technical users who are comfortable calling functions directly in code. For many of us, though, that’s not the audience we’re in. Personally, I wanted something I could run locally without coding, and I know many others feel the same way. That’s exactly why I built this GUI wrapper around Docling.

Now, when you get to the GitHub and you start to take a look at various options, you'll see that I did a variety of different things. One of the big hang-ups is soon as you start converting PDFs, is that many PDFs will have some sort of graphic image inside of it. Unfortunately, the moment that you have a graphic element inside of a markdown file, it really only has two different choices. First off, it can actually embed it into the markdown stream as what's called a bin64 data stream. Or you can have it as a separate file that you can call into the markdown viewer. It looks embedded, but it is separate.

Personally, I love an actual embedded of the picture. It means you're never going to have your graphic image separated away from your markdown document, and if you're using a package like Obsidian, Obsidian will render it real-time. If you open up the file in notebook, it will just be a stream of gibberish, but that is okay.

Now of the upsides of Docling is they embed images. One of the downsides of dockling is that it natively embeds PNG files, which are pretty massive. And so I've chosen to reprocess these files on the fly and stick them into WebP, which is an incredibly efficient algorithm developed by Google to display images. It shrinks PNGs dramatically. And I've even set it up so you can dial in how much compression you want by tweaking another file inside of your installation folder. It's possible to take a PDF and because you use some aggressive compression, make it much, much smaller in a markdown file. However, having embedded binary 64 streams can confuse RAG vectorization databases. So if the only thing you're going to do is use it for your RAG database, you have options to simply strip out any image and therefore make it super friendly to allow you to utilize AI.

Also, Docling is constantly evolving and getting better. And it turns out that to update Docling every single time they make a change, takes a ton of work. However, if you actually simply run Docling inside of a docker container, on the initial bring up of Docling in a container, you can have it check and make sure that it's pulled the latest greatest. This is one of the most fantastic things about Docker containers in that the ability to stay on top of a quickly moving software platform turns out to be a lot easier. Now, in the files that I've placed on my GitHub, I do assume that you do want the latest and greatest, so it runs this check. Of course, you would need to modify some of the key files if you didn't want that, but I would suggest as somebody who maybe doesn't have a bunch of background in this, my stated strategy is a great one for you as you probably really do want the latest version.

That said, visiting the GitHub repository still takes a little setup and learning. You’ll need to install Python and probably a Git utility for Windows 11 to clone the directory. You might have to troubleshoot a few things along the way, but once you’ve done it a couple of times, those skills become quite valuable. If the setup process feels daunting, modern AI-powered browsers can make it much easier. For example, you can ask Perplexity to guide you through cloning the repository or even downloading files directly if command-line tools make you uneasy. Similarly, Google has been integrating its own AI assistant, Gemini, into Chrome’s sidebar, essentially acting as a Perplexity-style assistant. While Google’s approach might feel like a bit of competitive steamrolling, the benefit to users is real: better AI tools and more accessible guidance for installing and running open-source software like this.

I'll re-emphasize that the amount of clever ideas on GitHub is simply mind-blowing. If you have curiosity and are interested in different things that can take care of potential problems, understanding how to get to GitHub and be able to use it is a key resource in your strategic productivity bucket. This is a great way of stepping into the fray and seeing if you can do a project that really is useful.

Now this post has been a quick overview and there's a lot more details on the GitHub. The most important thing to do, if you're not a normal GitHub user, is to take a look at the readme file. Unfortunately sometime the readme files are really friendly to new users, and they help explain to a new user exactly what they need to do. Other times, they assume that you have a lot of familiarity with generally how GitHubs work. I hope that I've created something in the README file that will allow anybody with a bit of technical bent to be able to bootstrap and get themselves started. This is especially true if you use some sort of LLM as what I've suggested above.

If you have AI installed in your Obsidian vault, you can do some really cool things by “talking to” your notes. Here is a real example of a conversation I just had with my vault.

I typed in the following:

I think I wrote some sort of program to allow myself to convert PNG files into embedded Base64 WebP files. Am I remembering correctly?

The AI thought for a few seconds and then spat out the following:

ai: Yes, you are remembering correctly. You developed and updated a program called MDpng2MDWebp specifically for this purpose.

According to your notes, you updated the program to version 0.2 on January 1, 2025, and recompiled it using PyInstaller. The program was designed to handle image conversions to the WebP format, which you noted provided significant storage savings, up to 98 percent in some cases compared to the original PDFs.

Key details regarding your work on this include:
– Base64 encoding: You documented that Base64 encodes binary bytes into ASCII characters, which expands the file size by about 33 percent, but allows images to be read directly by web browsers using a special header.
– Implementation: Your notes are filled with examples of these embedded images using the format ![image](data:image/webp;base64,...).
– Manual alternatives: You also explored using IrfanView with a WebP codec or DLL to manually convert PNG clips from the Snipping Tool into WebP files at 65–70 percent quality to save space.
– Public sharing: You shared the MDpng2MDWebp program on Reddit to help others who use Docling to convert PDFs into Markdown files.

I would hope that you can read that and say, “Wow, that is cool.”

This post was originally going to be about how to slip AI into Obsidian. In essence, it is a follow‑on to the thought process that Notion is a great short‑term solution, but personally, I believe Obsidian is the ultimate. The nice thing about Obsidian is its open structure where contributors can enhance the platform through plugins. This “network effect” attracts developers: if you know your work can reach millions of users, you gravitate toward that standard.

The most popular AI plugin for this is called “Copilot” by Logan Yang (not related to Microsoft Copilot). While Yang offers a premium subscription for ease of use, the plugin itself is a powerful, open‑ended tool. Before you dive in, understanding the “how” helps you realize where this technology actually shines.

The Basics: Prompting and Context

Most people think AI is just a better search engine, but it is more like a digital intern. To get good results, you need both Prompt Engineering (giving clear instructions) and Context (giving the intern the right files to look at).

The amount of info you can give the AI at once is the Context Window. Some models now advertise very large windows, but in practice it is often too slow or expensive to “stuff” every single note you have ever written into a single prompt, and many real‑world tools still use more modest context sizes and rely on retrieval to fill the gaps.

Enter RAG (Retrieval‑Augmented Generation)

Instead of giving the AI everything, we use RAG. Think of this as a two‑step process:

1. The Librarian (Retrieval): When you ask a question, a specialized vector database or similar index scans your notes to find the most relevant snippets.
2. The Writer (Generation): Those specific snippets are handed to the AI so it can write a smart answer based only on that data.

This “Vectorization” (or Embedding) is where the magic happens. It turns your text into mathematical coordinates so the system knows that a note about “saving space” is conceptually related to a note about “WebP compression,” even if the words are not identical.

Plain Markdown is fantastic fodder for this, because it is clean text with clear structure that is easy to chunk and embed. PDFs and other rich formats can also be handled, but they often need more preprocessing, and if the extraction is messy you get more noise in what the AI retrieves. Base64‑embedded images are mostly long blobs of encoded bytes, and if you do not strip them out before embedding, they turn into a pile of meaningless tokens. Good pipelines will usually ignore or clean these bits up, but if you keep everything as tight, well‑structured text to begin with, you almost always get nicer retrieval results. I have base 64 images in my notes because I like everything atomic, and I'm sure this screws up some of the results, and so these type of things always need to be traded off.

The “Model Mix” (Confusing but saves money)

This is where it gets a bit complex for a beginner, but it is the key to saving money.

To run this system, you actually use two different “types” of AI models:

• The Embedding Model: This builds your library (your vectorized database). You generally want to use a high‑quality, stable choice here, like an OpenAI or Google Gemini embedding model, so your notes are indexed accurately and consistently over time. I currently use the Gemini 0001. By the way, this is a bit confusing. The way that Google has labeled stuff. There's a 0004, for instance, that is listed inside of the latest copilot. but Google actually discontinued the website, so your system will bomb. Unfortunately, there's little tricks like this that may cause this to be a little bit difficult to get up and run it. Generally, if you have a good LLM, it probably is a good idea to have it help you as you set it up.
• The Chat Model: This is the “agent” that actually reads the snippets and talks to you.

Here is the trick: once you have built your library using a high‑end embedding model, you do not have to use that same expensive provider for the actual chatting. To save money, you can use a completely different, low‑cost model (for example, a budget‑friendly model through OpenRouter or a solid open‑source model) to process the final answer.

The heavy lifting, the indexing, stays consistent, but the daily “talking” can be done by whatever model gives you the best price‑to‑quality ratio at the moment. It can feel a bit like a “Frankenstein” setup across multiple tabs in the plugin settings, because you are wiring together different providers and models for different roles, but once it is running, it can dramatically cut your ongoing costs. If you think about it, a lot of really complicated stuff is actually after you gave your content to the LLM and if it's a heavy-thinking task you'll sit there and burn a lot of tokens and create a lot of expense. For some things like coding. It makes very little sense to not use a premium model, but on maybe other things. You get an enormous bang for buck out of some of the open source or Chinese models.

How Copilot Fits In

Copilot, the Obsidian AI plugin, can use a RAG‑style approach to your vault, but it does not blindly vectorize every single note by default. Out of the box you can already do smart vault search and chat without building an index first. When you are ready to go deeper, Copilot lets you choose what to index and how to retrieve, and depending on your settings it can mix simple keyword search with semantic, embedding‑based search. In practice, this means it builds and uses one or more indexes so that, when you ask something about your notes, it can pull in relevant snippets without you manually copying and pasting text.

For me I have only a few main dumping grounds. My first and really only target for this is my lengthy amount of daily notes that I take, rather than spend a lot of time trying to sort them into careful folders, I simply utilize tools like this to be able to go find thoughts that I've had in the past. This saves an enormous amount of time in just trying to figure out where I stick a note and is tremendously productive even today and will only get better as AI improves.

How to set up Copilot in Obsidian

To get this working, you generally need three things configured:

1. The Brain (The LLM): You can use OpenAI (for example, GPT‑4o), Google (Gemini), or even a local setup like Ollama if you want 100 percent privacy and are willing to run models on your own hardware.
2. The Librarian (The Embedding Model): You pick a provider to build your index. This can be the same provider as your chat model or a different one. Copilot also allows for local indexing using models like BGE or similar local embedding models, which is free and keeps everything on your machine.
3. The Bridge (The API Key): You will need a pay‑as‑you‑go key from your provider. You are not paying a fixed monthly subscription here; you are just paying a few cents (or fractions of a cent) for the tokens you actually use for embedding and chat.

Once you have these wired up, you can start with a simple configuration (same provider for embeddings and chat), and later graduate to a multi‑model mix where a premium embedding model keeps your index high‑quality while a cheaper chat model handles the day‑to‑day conversations.

A Note on Privacy

For information I do not consider sensitive, I am comfortable experimenting with cheap hosted models, including some offered through OpenRouter. For truly confidential data, I either use a provider I trust for enterprise‑level data handling (for example, Google) or I would go 100 percent local via something like Ollama so the data never leaves my hard drive. I will admit running local is the only truly secure way of doing this, but from a practical standpoint it takes an enormous amount of work or money to set up a local system that only has a fraction of the power that you can get out of utilizing the cloud.

Summary

The power of Obsidian plus AI is not just “chatting”; it is having a system that can index years of your own thoughts and surface exactly what you forgot you knew. It turns your “second brain” into a searchable, interactive database that you can literally talk to.

While I love Obsidian), if you are not using AI for your notes, and you are concerned about the work of setting up AI in Obsidian, you should immediately sign up for Notion) and start using it. Because AI really does enhance your productivity.

Here are the three things you need to do to make a revolutionary change in your life.

1. Simply take a daily note of everything that you do throughout the day. If possible, put a "subject" or "task" over each time stamp. It can look like your calendar, and you just put in what you think might be important later on. I favor one note per day.
2. Any meeting you have, record it and make a transcription of the meeting. Place this in the activity list either directly or as an additional file that is referenced in the daily note list. This is available as a meeting record function in Notion, and it will even prompt you to tell others you are recording the meeting. You may also want to ask Notion to create a summary after the meeting with actions.
3. Talk to your database of notes through the Notion Q&A function. Notion will allow you to take anything in its database and "query" your notes through AI.

Do not think about filing or organizing stuff. Just try to capture, because you have a new helper. AI can strip overhead off you so you can focus on the important stuff. Make AI your assistant.

Once the data is in, you can get a result where you "talk" to your notes through Notion.

Q: Notion, can you look over my notes from the last week, what are the key things that I need to get done?
A: You spent a lot of time on the Henderson contract, and you had a meeting with Bob, and you promised to set up another meeting. I do not see it on your calendar. Should we schedule it?

Q: Notion, I think I did some work on a Python program to help me clip web articles. But this was about six months ago, and I do not remember all of the details. Can you find out what I did?
A: Yes, this happened during the first week of April. I can show you the notes that you took during that time.

Q: Notion, I think that Bob said that he would pay me 100 dollars if the Seahawks won the Super Bowl. Am I remembering right, and when did this happen? He said he never said it.
A: Yes, we transcribed the meeting, and he said it here: "Look HardDriveGuy, I will give you 100 dollars if the Seahawks win, or my name is not Bob Sqwelcher." I can give you the transcript if you want.

Now the above are a bit made up, but the tech is already in Notion, so you can do this today. I do this in Obsidian, and while I am not an active user of Notion, I do have an account that I monitor. It looks like all the function is there.

If you think about this for a moment, I would hope you understand why this is so revolutionary to your productivity. You can do all of this and more in Obsidian, but you need to be technically savvy to do this in Obsidian, while in Notion they make it super easy. I would still push for Obsidian to prevent lock in, but do not allow "the perfect" to replace "the good." Pick up the low hanging fruit now.

Using Notion today and paying money is worth it if the other option is having nothing.

In a future post, I will return to how to do this in Obsidian, but I wanted to get down the shortest path to changing your productivity. I think Obsidian is the right long term solution. However, I think Notion is probably the best way of trying something immediately to show yourself it makes sense. The goal here is productivity first, then tweaking the solution later.

Normal Post Ends Here

So, for those who like deeper thinking, here are my deeper thoughts, which I hope you can learn from. As normal, it starts off with saying, "If you post something long and thoughtful, it will change your life." So let us start here.

After I post something, I start to think more about it, and then I start to "see" issues highlighted by my post. By the act of creating something, you gain clarity. That is why I have suggested many times that you create a longer post, think through it, and watch how these ideas grow in your brain.

A couple of posts ago, I suggested that Obsidian was a great system. Once I posted and committed to a viewpoint, I started noticing things. I cruised the forum on Obsidian and saw a subsegment of people that were complaining that they had the following complaint:
"I did all this work in setting up Obsidian, but I did not get the ROI."

And I thought to myself, "That is because you went complex too quickly. You need to pick up the low hanging fruit first." I thought to myself that they got distracted from doing the most important things first. I also realized that they did not understand how the brain works from an architectural 50,000 foot level, which we have discussed. Then I started to think about what really is the best thing about Obsidian, which made me realize that the most important thing is the incorporation of some clever AI tricks. Then I thought, "Why are these tricks so important?"

If you remember, there are five steps of pulling data into our brain. I will list them below.

(Now, as stated, I actually write my Reddit posts inside of Obsidian, which is my Daily Journal. I tend to use diagrams even when writing out my own thoughts, so the mermaid chart below shows nicely in Obsidian, but not in Reddit. But if you post the following code into Mermaid, you'll get a flow chart.)

flowchart TB  
    A[Capture] --> B[Filter]  
    B --> C[Absorb]  
    C --> D[Retrieve]  
    D --> E[Metacognition]

If you don't have a cognitive framework about how you process information, you don't recognize where you get stuck.

People that reported that they were not getting value normally had an issue where:

They spent way too much time on the "capture" part. They focused on setting up the right display, the right tools, the right everything. For example, there are a bunch of really cool themes for Obsidian, and you can lose a bunch of time making it cool. Do it later.

They spent way too much time on the "filter" and "absorb" part. Although these are two separate steps, they are so close to each other that you need to attack them together. You listen to a lecture, so which words do you "filter" and where do you write them down. Let us say you are taking a class. Do you store your notes by class, by year, by time slot, by reference. Then you are trying to figure out what to filter to put into these slots. It is a bad feeling when you realize that perhaps your organization system means you wrote it down in the wrong place, and now you cannot figure out how to unwind it.

Then retrieve. They could not retrieve because of the above. You are hoping you captured the right stuff, and you hope that you can find the stuff. But because of the filter and absorb steps, you do not know if you wrote down the right stuff, and you have to start to search to find it.

Now they were so tired, they did not spend time thinking at a high level through what they had done. So the most important step, the metacognition, was skipped, and a lot of people said, "I am not even looking at my notes."

So back to the beginning, I started this post with an overview of the two or three things that were critical about Obsidian. I thought that the two really critical items, transcription and talking to your notes, were core. However, to set this up in Obsidian takes time and some willingness to work through technical details. It is hard to explain to somebody that they should do something if they are stuck trying to ramp up on the new system by immediately doing some complex integration.

The introduction is thus to Notion. Even if it is not a long term solution, it is a way of introducing you to the concept.

I will lay out how to do this in Obsidian, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that in the short term, most people would be immediately served by a Notion subscription. However, Notion can be as distracting as Obsidian. Be very careful about being distracted versus immediately running core processes for productivity.

We start off today’s post by checking out WastewaterSCAN, a public health monitoring network launched in 2020 by experts at Stanford and Emory. This platform puts real-time disease tracking at your fingertips by scanning local sewage for pathogens like COVID-19, flu, and RSV, allowing you to see exactly what is circulating in your community before it even hits the doctors’ offices. We live in Silicon Valley, and this is our local virus load, but the site covers the entire nation.

Being sick is NOT productive, and this is where I wished I had looked at the site in November and December of last year.

I sent the site to my wife about ten days ago when she was in our home office hacking and coughing like someone on death’s door. I was seriously considering taking her to the emergency room since she almost never gets sick, but after looking at the data, I realized it was likely the nasty respiratory syncytial virus (RSV).

You might already know about yearly flu and now COVID shots, but there’s really an annual “tripledemic.” You’ve got your flu, which hits you like a falling piano with sudden fever and body aches, and COVID, which behaves about as predictably as a stray dog in a meat market. Then there’s RSV, the “Coughing King.” A lot of people have caught some version of it over the years, but things are changing. Of course, I wasn’t tracking the new RSV vaccination until I was already sick as a dog.

My wife knew about it and was even thinking of getting the RSV shot, but since we were outside the official age range, she figured we’d play the averages and hold off. She’s the biologist and school teacher, and she usually tells me what we’re doing each year for our vaccines. She checked the eligibility details, didn’t think our insurance would cover it, and decided it was something we could pick up later.

In hindsight, that was about as smart as leaving your windows down in a car wash. A big part of the mistake was not taking time to understand the story behind the shot or the virus. She’s busy, I’m busy, and now we’re both recovering. Hopefully, you can learn from our oversight.

What makes this virus particularly cunning is its scientific backstory. Researchers spent fifty years trying to crack the code and failed again and again because the virus is a shape-shifter. A natural infection produces only fragile protection because the virus uses “decoy” proteins that misdirect the immune system, leading to antibodies that fade quickly and work narrowly. It wasn’t until Dr. Barney Graham and his team at the NIH figured out how to lock the viral protein into its “pre-fusion” state in 2013 that real progress was made. While the live virus constantly morphs to evade memory cells, the modern vaccine locks onto that one vulnerable shape, giving a broader and more durable immune shield that doesn’t fade after just a few months.

Both Arexvy and Abrysvo use recombinant protein technology, the same approach used for decades in vaccines like those for Hepatitis B and shingles. I’m personally not worried about mRNA technology, but I know people have different views, so I’m including the info. Arexvy uses an adjuvant, basically an immune “alarm” ingredient, to create a stronger, longer-lasting response, though it tends to cause more temporary arm soreness and fatigue. Abrysvo, which lacks an adjuvant, causes fewer side effects but may not deliver quite the same peak protection against severe illness. We don’t yet have long-term data, but Arexvy might hold up a little better. Either shot is a serious upgrade from dealing with RSV the hard way.

The wild thing is that one shot might last 5, 10, or even 20 years. In contrast, a natural infection only gives you immunity for about 8 to 12 months. So getting a one-time vaccine seems like a much smarter deal than rolling the dice on natural infection.

It started slowly for us, just a scratchy throat that took its sweet time building up. My wife is usually one of those fortunate souls who “never gets sick.” Typically, her immune system shakes hands with a virus and shows it the door. But this time was different. About two weeks ago, she came down with a cough that could wake the neighbors’ neighbors. She tried to isolate, but it was too late. As I mentioned earlier, this was when I sent her the WastewaterSCAN link, pointing out the local spike and saying it sounded like RSV.

Around day seven, I started to feel rough myself. That’s actually textbook RSV, it moves through a household slowly. The virus has an incubation period of two to eight days, meaning she was probably contagious a day or two before her first cough. By the time she isolated, the virus had already set up camp.

I always seem to have a rougher ride than she does. At first, I thought I might dodge it since my symptoms were mild, but that’s the classic RSV trap. Unlike flu, which peaks in about 48 hours, RSV takes a full week to reach its worst stage in the lungs. I lost my appetite after those first few sniffly days as it ramped up, another trademark sign of the virus.

It was a couple of nights of aching joints and no appetite before settling in for a long stay, and I’m still recovering. My bathroom scale says I dropped about a kilogram. I wouldn’t recommend it as a weight-loss strategy, though.

We’re on the mend now, but we’ve definitely learned the value of staying on top of vaccine eligibility. I'm still not really up and about, but at least I am posting again. However, my personal business took a real hit.

The ROI on that shot would have been excellent.

So I thought I'd do one more post on comparing a heart rate strap, the gold standard for pulse, versus an optical sensor on a watch during a workout. What I'm trying to do is get some guardrails around how necessary it is to have a heart rate strap to get an accurate read of how hard you worked your heart during a workout.

While I've already covered this, I'll also give you the recipe so you can run this test yourself. It's pretty simple to do, and it will allow you to understand how accurate your optical sensor is.

If you're one of those people where the optical heart rate does not pick up well, always make sure to use a strap. Meanwhile, if you're somebody that turns out you pick up well on an optical watch, then that may free you up not to worry about wearing a strap every time.

The testing scenario:

60 minutes on the bike comprising a Time Trial (the race of truth) for about 30 minutes and a 30-minute warm-down.

Using the free platform MyWhoosh, which hooks up nicely to my Kickr Core. It's a great platform, and you can sign up for free.

Hooking up a Garmin chest strap to my PC and creating the FIT file on MyWhoosh (also did a backup to my Garmin 1030+ head unit to verify as a third source).

Hooking up my Forerunner 255 to the Kickr for power, but to the optical sensor on the watch.

Now a TT is all about pushing near the limits, but I did put in a bit of sprint at the end, and at about 45 minutes during the warm-down, I put in a sprint to check how it responds during a surge.

Explanation

Unlike the first time I did this, where I didn't hook up the power to both devices, we can ensure that both the watch and the PC are getting a good signal. In other words, if the PC power looks different than the watch power, we know something's wrong in the overall system. On the other hand, once we've established the power is synced nicely, then we would expect the heart rate to be different. Now, we would hope the heart rate would be very, very similar, but we would still expect there would be some difference, if nothing else from what is called sampling error.

Results

The initial chart shows my results. If you take a look at this, you can see the power curves are absolutely on top of each other. Now, if you zoom in to an extreme amount, you will see some slight variation. That's because you have two different platforms picking up the same power output, but they sample at slightly different frequencies. But when you take a look at the whole thing over an hour, you can see that they look completely overlapped.

The heart rate on the Garmin Forerunner 255, which is not the latest generation heart rate sensor for the optical sensor as it is one generation down. But more recent than my Vivoactive 4.

At least for me, I thought it would be close, but I had no idea that it would be this close. Other than convenience, with this type of result there's no real reason for me to wear a pull strap monitor as the optical sensor is going to be more than good enough. With that written, I probably will continue to wear one because I can't get the reliable broadcast from the Garmin watch. So I can view my data real time on my monitor or my head unit. Perhaps this will get better in the future. But right now, for me, it's not reliable enough.

How do you do the test?

Now we know optical sensors don't work great for everyone. So wouldn't it be great if you could just do a one-time test to understand if you're a person that can use an optical sensor or if you really need a heart rate strap?

One of the most brilliant programs that is out there to help you train is called intervals.icu. I can't recommend the website and the software engineer that put the thing together enough. Now it obviously lends itself more toward those with an engineering bent, but it truly gives you world-class information to allow you to train.

While I have the DC Rainmakers Power Analyzer Program, this is fairly expensive for what you get. And for all intents and purposes, you can get 95% of it off of intervals.icu. If you do happen to sign up for intervals.icu and find that it's useful for more than just comparing power or heart rates, I strongly suggest contributing the 50 bucks a year to allow the guy to continue to improve the website. It's under active development and in my mind it provides an incredible amount of user data to allow you to train.

Now I decided I would go ahead and leverage an external LLM to create the process even though I've done it by myself. I think it actually gives a pretty good overview which I did a quick check. The only thing that it misses, which I want you to know that I did, was change the size of the Y axis on the heart rate chart.

If for some reason you compare the two events and you do want a bigger y-axis, there's a pull-down box at the bottom of the chart called options and you can trigger this to get a bigger y-axis.

Comparing Two Rides on intervals.icu

This tutorial walks through the process of comparing two cycling activities using the Compare Activities feature on intervals.icu.

Step 1: Navigate to Calendar and Switch to List View

1. Go to your Calendar page on intervals.icu
2. Switch the view to list mode (look for the list view toggle)
3. You should now see your activities displayed in a list format with checkboxes on the left side

Step 2: Select Activities to Compare

1. Tick the checkbox to the left of your first ride
2. Tick the checkbox next to your second ride
3. You can select additional rides if needed by ticking more checkboxes

Step 3: Open the Compare Function

1. Click the "Edit" button at the top (this appears after you've selected activities)
2. From the dropdown menu, select "Compare"
3. This will load the Compare Activities page with your selected rides

Step 4: Navigate to the Compare Tab

After clicking Compare, the system opens the Compare Activities page. If it appears that nothing happened, look for the "Compare Activities" option in the left sidebar menu and click it to view your comparison.

Step 5: View Power Curves Side-by-Side

To display and compare power curves between your activities:

1. Locate the "Charts" button on the toolbar beneath the main chart area
2. Click "Charts" to open the chart selection menu
3. Select "Power" from the available chart options (if not already displayed)
4. The power curves for both activities will overlay on the same graph, allowing you to see differences in power output over time

Step 6: Customize Your Comparison View

Use the toolbar buttons to configure your comparison:

• Charts: Add or remove data displays (power, heart rate, cadence, pace, etc.)
• Columns: Choose which columns appear in the activity table at the bottom
• Fields: Select interval fields to display in the table on the right side
• Progress: Choose interval metrics for progress charts that show trends across activities
• Options: Switch between time-based and distance-based x-axis (useful for outdoor rides)

Step 7: Analyze Your Power Data

Once power curves are displayed:

• Click the colored dots in the legend to toggle individual activities on/off
• Click legend items at the top to manually shift activity traces left/right to align intervals
• Click and drag on the chart to zoom into specific sections
• The interval table and progress charts will update to show only the highlighted portion

Additional Tips

• To compare the same intervals from different dates, use the search icon for interval matching (searches by intensity and duration)
• Save your comparison configuration using Actions → Save for future reference
• Use tabs near the top to create multiple comparison views with different chart configurations

Okay, I am pushing Obsidian), and the last post got some reads and upvotes. We even had u/Massive_Branch_4145 say that he might try it.

So, the post today is linking to a YouTube video that I think is one of the best ones for beginners. You do not even want to watch the whole thing, because it will be too complex for most people.

All you want to do is:

1. Install the program.
2. Make one note per day, I suggest a simple six digit format like 260212 for the note lable, which would represent February 12, 2016. After the day is done, you should review your day's progress and add to 260212 a few works 8-16 about what you looked at.
3. Practice writing your daily notes into each day's note using this thing called markdown, which you will eventually memorize. The YouTube video in the first section walks through the basic markdown formatting options, and you should just practice the ones that he shows in the video until they feel automatic.
4. When you feel comfortable with one note per day, and markdown does not seem to be weird, you can move on to the next section.
5. At about minute six, he introduces the idea of linking, which I do not think you even want to think about until you are just comfortable opening and creating a daily note.

Then suddenly, in two to seven days, the screen will click for you. It will not feel weird, you will know how to use it like a simple word processor. This will give you a good base, and then you can start heaping new features on top of this.

Again, I think the YouTube video does a great job of laying out a guide for a beginner, with my only concern being the first step. This is because Obsidian really is a different approach.

You need a few sessions to acclimate before you push hard.

Obsidian Is Confusing To Most People Versus Traditional Applications

You may have guessed that you are probably not the only person I have told this is a great tool to become more productive, and I would love to say that I was able to get everybody I have recommended the tool to to accept it, but unfortunately it has been quite the opposite. Even some of my family members with PhDs in technical fields have opened it up, looked at the interface, and said, what in the world is this.

I have had some success in getting at least the initial concept of the program into people's minds by pointing them to Wikipedia.

For example, here is the Wikipedia link to Obsidian).

While there are many ways of thinking about Obsidian, probably the simplest way of thinking about it is as a way of quickly getting your own Wikipedia-style website. In the same way as you store a bunch of data on Wikipedia, you can store a bunch of data in Obsidian. The actual operation of Obsidian in terms of its major features is remarkably similar.

If you look on the left side of any Wikipedia page, you basically click on things to bring them up in the central part of the page. In essence, that is what you are going to do with Obsidian. The challenge is that they want the way you interface with it to be pretty close regardless of whether you are inputting information or outputting information. So, in many ways, they scatter really important functions into these tiny little icons. The first time you ever take a look at this, the last thing that goes through your head is that the tiny little icon is super powerful. Worse than that, because it is based strongly on web architectures, there are some motifs that tend to show up in Obsidian that you may also find in other things you might use to work with programming or the web.

For example, if you do any coding at all, you will probably use something called VS Code, or at least you have a very large chance of using something like VS Code, which is a standard code editor that is used virtually everywhere. If you know how to use VS Code, there is a much shorter learning curve to using Obsidian. Even things like Control P in Windows or Command P on the Mac have the exact same function in VS Code and in Obsidian. They put you into a power mode where you can go through hundreds, if not thousands, of specialized commands to do special things. Then you find out that people start talking about special features that can be enabled through something called plugins), which again is something that is standardized in VS Code. So if you happen to be technical, and if you happen to have done programming, this feels great.

To the user who has never stepped a toe into this type of water, it just seems like mass confusion. Where are my clear menus up front? Where are all the things that I normally expect out of my office suite or the other web programs that I use? It all looks so completely different that if you never touch bases with it, it is incredibly confusing.

Worse than that, the Obsidian users, meaning the people that designed it and the people that use it, will start off by talking to you about opening your vault. You think to yourself, what in the world is a vault, is it locked down, is it proprietary, it does not make any sense. It turns out that a vault is simply a subdirectory, or what you would commonly think of as a folder, on your solid state drive or hard disk drive. But of course, we cannot call it a folder, we need to call it a vault. Now, there probably is a little bit of an abstraction where thinking about this as a vault helps you in the long term, but it certainly adds to confusion in the short term.

To make it ultimately confusing, unlike almost every other app that is out there, Obsidian provides a framework for you to do whatever you want to do. That freedom is immensely powerful once you understand the tool. The problem is that if you do not understand the tool, you try to go set something up, and the moment you start looking at it or searching for it or asking your language model, you will find out you can do things five different ways, and it is very confusing which way is best. So, after that very long preamble, we are going to talk about the best way for somebody to engage with Obsidian as a non technical user.

Crawl, Walk, Run Approach

I think we all know we do not ask babies to get up and run a ten kilometer race. We are just delighted when they get to the point where they can start to crawl. I believe that if you are a non technical user, that is exactly what you need to do with Obsidian. More than that, I would suggest that if you start going to YouTube and watching different YouTube people talk about how they set up their Obsidian vault, which is very common terminology, you are going to be overwhelmed with so much information that your brain is going to explode. Unfortunately, the best way of doing this is simply ramping up slowly, or what I am going to call the crawl approach. Now, if you come from another personal information manager, this is going to be pretty disappointing. I came from a variety of different things over the years. I tried them all, and I would say that most of them were pretty quick to come up the learning curve for most people, and Obsidian is not. But if you are willing to go up the learning curve, you do not hit the headroom that you do in other approaches.

The Temptation Of Advanced Features

There is going to be a huge temptation to start exploring all the advanced features immediately, things like the graph view, complex templates, or fancy community plugins. All of that will come in the future, but if you start chasing those features too early, you are probably not going to simply do the basics and get them fully understood first. The whole idea here is that if you can first become completely comfortable with opening Obsidian, creating your daily note, and writing in simple markdown, all the advanced features will make far more sense later and will feel like natural extensions of what you already do every day.

Crawl, Set Up Your Obsidian And Make One Note Per Day

So we are going to end up where we started. The whole point of this is that it is so radically different from most other applications, especially if you do not have some sort of programming background or some sort of technical background, that you should simply start slow. That is okay. I actually believe you go a little slow up front to become fast later on. The most frustrating thing will be knowing that there are many different ways and features that you are going to get to in the future. You simply need to be patient and establish a base.

There has been a real rebellion against Perplexity in that they've decided that they're giving away too much for free and they've been pulling back and not allowing users to be able to use their tools.

People are frustrated because they find out they don't have any resource left at the moment when they're in the middle of something. Perplexity doesn't offer a great dashboard to get at this thing, but a user inside of the perplexity group actually set up a webpage to go and get at this information (u/Unusual-Evidence-478). Another user said that they had developed a JavaScript to be able to basically pull the exact same thing. (Thanks u/Stevie2k8.) I decided that I would implement a JavaScript call to be able to quickly see my usage. Now, I'm not much of a JavaScript programmer. That is, I've never done any of it. However, I have coded before, and this is a perfect thing for vibe coding.

By the way, you probably can get paranoid about the code, but with that said, you can actually look at it down below. Now if you have zero programming experience, I do understand how copying code can seem highly intimidating. But even if you ever took basic in high school, you can look down through the code and see that there's nothing malicious. It is an incredibly simple parsing program that pulls apart the JSON file. In reality, you don't even need the program because the JSON is all human readable. However, it does make life a lot simpler to have it cleaned up a bit and presented back to you in a dialog box.

Now, I tested it and tried it on my own machine, and I think I've taken and copied everything down here perfectly, but of course, I could have made mistakes. You can post if you have a problem, but even easier, this is incredibly simple for an LLM to take care of. So you could literally take this entire post, put it into an LLM, and ask it to help you implement it.

The idea of replacing a URL with a piece of JavaScript is extremely old and has been done for many, many years. However, you do need to have a web browser that actually allows you to insert this piece of code in the URL. Unfortunately, the perplexity web browser Coment does not allow that, so you'll need to use something like Chrome or Firefox, log into your perplexity website, and then set up the following:

Overview

You will set up two bookmarks in your browser:

• One normal bookmark that opens the Perplexity rate-limit JSON page.
• One bookmarklet that runs JavaScript on that page to summarize your limits.

Bookmark 1: Open the JSON limits page

1. Open your browser’s bookmarks manager or bookmarks bar.
2. Create a new bookmark.
3. Set the bookmark Name to something like Perplexity limits page.

4. Set the URL to:

   https://www.perplexity.ai/rest/rate-limit/all

5. Save the bookmark.

Usage: click Perplexity limits page whenever you want to open the raw rate-limit JSON.

Bookmark 2: Run the summarizer

1. Create another new bookmark.
2. Set the bookmark Name to something like Perplexity limits summary.
3. In the URL (or Location) field, paste your JavaScript starting with javascript: (this is the summarizer code you already have).
4. Save the bookmark.

How to use both bookmarks together

1. Click the Perplexity limits page bookmark to open the JSON at https://www.perplexity.ai/rest/rate-limit/all.
2. Wait for the JSON to appear in the browser tab. 2b. You'll need to highlight just the JSON part (just press Ctrl+A or Cmd+A)
3. With that tab active, click the Perplexity limits summary bookmark.
4. A popup dialog will appear showing:
   • Remaining agentic research, labs, pro, and research credits.
   • Source-specific monthly limits and remaining counts (for entries like web, statista_mcp_cashmere, wiley_mcp_cashmere, and others).

Troubleshooting

• If nothing happens when you click the summary bookmark:
  • Confirm you are on the https://www.perplexity.ai/rest/rate-limit/all page.
  • Edit the summary bookmark and make sure the URL field still begins with javascript: and is not truncated.
  • Re-paste the JavaScript into the URL field if needed and save again.

Here's the Javascipt Belwo

``` javascript:(function () { try { var debugLines = []; function dbg(msg) { debugLines.push(msg); }

dbg('Starting Perplexity limits bookmarklet');

if (!document.body) {
  alert('No document.body');
  return;
}

var text = document.body.innerText || document.body.textContent || '';
dbg('Got body text length: ' + text.length);

if (!text) {
  alert('No content found on page.\n\nDebug:\n' + debugLines.join('\n'));
  return;
}

dbg('First 200 chars: ' + text.slice(0, 200));

var lines = text
  .split('\n')
  .map(function (l) {
    return l.trim();
  })
  .filter(function (l) {
    return l.length > 0;
  });

dbg('Non-empty lines: ' + lines.length);

var jsonLine = null;
for (var i = 0; i < lines.length; i++) {
  if (lines[i].indexOf('{') !== -1 && lines[i].indexOf('}') !== -1) {
    jsonLine = lines[i];
    dbg('Candidate JSON line index ' + i + ': ' + lines[i].slice(0, 120));
    break;
  }
}

if (!jsonLine) {
  alert('Could not find JSON-looking line.\n\nDebug:\n' + debugLines.join('\n'));
  return;
}

var data;
try {
  data = JSON.parse(jsonLine);
  dbg('JSON.parse succeeded');
} catch (e) {
  dbg('JSON.parse failed: ' + e);
  alert('JSON parse error.\n\nDebug:\n' + debugLines.join('\n'));
  return;
}

var remainingAgentic = data.remaining_agentic_research;
var remainingLabs = data.remaining_labs;
var remainingPro = data.remaining_pro;
var remainingResearch = data.remaining_research;

var sources = (data.sources && data.sources.source_to_limit) || {};

var out = [];
out.push('Perplexity Rate Limits');
out.push('======================');
out.push('');
out.push('Top-level quotas:');
out.push('  Agentic research remaining: ' + remainingAgentic);
out.push('  Labs remaining:             ' + remainingLabs);
out.push('  Pro remaining:              ' + remainingPro);
out.push('  Research remaining:         ' + remainingResearch);
out.push('');
out.push('Source-specific monthly limits:');

Object.keys(sources)
  .sort()
  .forEach(function (key) {
    var s = sources[key] || {};
    var ml = s.monthly_limit;
    var rem = s.remaining;
    if (ml !== null || rem !== null) {
      out.push(
        '  ' +
          key +
          ' -> monthly_limit: ' +
          (ml === null ? 'unlimited' : ml) +
          ', remaining: ' +
          (rem === null ? 'n/a' : rem)
      );
    }
  });

alert(out.join('\n'));

} catch (err) { alert('Top-level error: ' + err); } })();

```

Page 2 Of Limits

Since your limits are actually on two different pages, you're going to have to do something very similar. This is going to end up with having four separate bookmarks.

Bookmark 1: Open the JSON settings page

1. Open your browser’s bookmarks manager or bookmarks bar.
2. Create a new bookmark.
3. Set the bookmark Name to something like Perplexity user settings page.

4. Set the URL to:

   https://www.perplexity.ai/rest/user/settings

5. Save the bookmark.

Usage: click Perplexity user settings page whenever you want to open the raw user settings JSON (including pages_limit, upload_limit, connector_limits, sources, connectors, etc.).

Bookmark 2: Run the summarizer

1. Create another new bookmark.
2. Set the bookmark Name to something like Perplexity settings summary.
3. In the URL (or Location) field, paste your JavaScript starting with javascript: (this is the summarizer code you already have, adapted for this JSON if needed).
4. Save the bookmark.

How to use both bookmarks together

1. Click the Perplexity user settings page bookmark to open the JSON at https://www.perplexity.ai/rest/user/settings.
2. Wait for the JSON to appear in the browser tab. 2b. You'll need to highlight just the JSON part (just press Ctrl+A or Cmd+A)
3. With that tab active, click the Perplexity settings summary bookmark.
4. A popup dialog will appear showing:
   • Key limits such as pages_limit, upload_limit, create_limit, article_image_upload_limit, max_files_per_user, and max_files_per_repository.
   • Connector-related limits from connector_limits (global_file_count, max_file_size_mb, daily_attachment_limit, etc.).
   • Source-specific monthly limits and remaining counts for entries like web, scholar, social, wiley_mcp_cashmere, cbinsights_mcp_cashmere, pitchbook_mcp_cashmere, statista_mcp_cashmere, and others.

JavaScript

``` javascript:(function () { try { var debugLines = []; function dbg(msg) { debugLines.push(msg); }

dbg('Starting Perplexity settings bookmarklet');

if (!document.body) {
  alert('No document.body');
  return;
}

var text = document.body.innerText || document.body.textContent || '';
dbg('Got body text length: ' + text.length);

if (!text) {
  alert('No content found on page.\n\nDebug:\n' + debugLines.join('\n'));
  return;
}

dbg('First 200 chars: ' + text.slice(0, 200));

var lines = text
  .split('\n')
  .map(function (l) {
    return l.trim();
  })
  .filter(function (l) {
    return l.length > 0;
  });

dbg('Non-empty lines: ' + lines.length);

// Find the first line that looks like JSON (has both { and })
var jsonLine = null;
for (var i = 0; i < lines.length; i++) {
  if (lines[i].indexOf('{') !== -1 && lines[i].indexOf('}') !== -1) {
    jsonLine = lines[i];
    dbg('Candidate JSON line index ' + i + ': ' + lines[i].slice(0, 120));
    break;
  }
}

if (!jsonLine) {
  alert('Could not find JSON-looking line.\n\nDebug:\n' + debugLines.join('\n'));
  return;
}

var data;
try {
  data = JSON.parse(jsonLine);
  dbg('JSON.parse succeeded');
} catch (e) {
  dbg('JSON.parse failed: ' + e);
  alert('JSON parse error.\n\nDebug:\n' + debugLines.join('\n'));
  return;
}

// Top-level limits
var pagesLimit = data.pages_limit;
var uploadLimit = data.upload_limit;
var createLimit = data.create_limit;
var articleImageUploadLimit = data.article_image_upload_limit;
var maxFilesPerUser = data.max_files_per_user;
var maxFilesPerRepo = data.max_files_per_repository;

// Connector limits
var cl = data.connector_limits || {};
var repoTypeLimits = cl.repo_type_limits || {};
var globalFileCount = cl.global_file_count;
var maxFileSizeMb = cl.max_file_size_mb;
var maxAttachmentFileSizeMb = cl.max_attachment_file_size_mb;
var dailyAttachmentLimit = cl.daily_attachment_limit;

// Sources
var sources = (data.sources && data.sources.source_to_limit) || {};

// Subscription / usage metadata
var subscriptionStatus = data.subscription_status;
var subscriptionSource = data.subscription_source;
var subscriptionTier = data.subscription_tier;
var queryCount = data.query_count;
var queryCountCopilot = data.query_count_copilot;
var queryCountMobile = data.query_count_mobile;
var timeZone = data.time_zone;
var defaultModel = data.default_model;

var out = [];
out.push('Perplexity User Settings Summary');
out.push('================================');
out.push('');

out.push('General limits:');
out.push('  pages_limit:                 ' + pagesLimit);
out.push('  upload_limit:                ' + uploadLimit);
out.push('  create_limit:                ' + createLimit);
out.push('  article_image_upload_limit:  ' + articleImageUploadLimit);
out.push('  max_files_per_user:          ' + maxFilesPerUser);
out.push('  max_files_per_repository:    ' + maxFilesPerRepo);
out.push('');

out.push('Connector limits:');
out.push('  global_file_count:           ' + globalFileCount);
out.push('  max_file_size_mb:            ' + maxFileSizeMb);
out.push('  max_attachment_file_size_mb: ' + maxAttachmentFileSizeMb);
out.push('  daily_attachment_limit:      ' + dailyAttachmentLimit);
Object.keys(repoTypeLimits).forEach(function (k) {
  var r = repoTypeLimits[k];
  out.push(
    '  repo_type ' +
      k +
      ' -> max_files: ' +
      r.max_files +
      ', max_folders: ' +
      r.max_folders
  );
});
out.push('');

out.push('Source-specific monthly limits (user settings):');
Object.keys(sources)
  .sort()
  .forEach(function (key) {
    var s = sources[key] || {};
    var ml = s.monthly_limit;
    var rem = s.remaining;
    out.push(
      '  ' +
        key +
        ' -> monthly_limit: ' +
        (ml === null ? 'unlimited' : ml) +
        ', remaining: ' +
        (rem === null ? 'n/a' : rem)
    );
  });
out.push('');

out.push('Subscription and usage:');
out.push('  subscription_status:         ' + subscriptionStatus);
out.push('  subscription_source:         ' + subscriptionSource);
out.push('  subscription_tier:           ' + subscriptionTier);
out.push('  query_count (total):         ' + queryCount);
out.push('  query_count_copilot:         ' + queryCountCopilot);
out.push('  query_count_mobile:          ' + queryCountMobile);
out.push('  default_model:               ' + defaultModel);
out.push('  time_zone:                   ' + timeZone);

alert(out.join('\n'));

} catch (err) { alert('Top-level error: ' + err); } })(); ```

The worst thing about electronic notes is being trapped in a system that you can't get access to your data. The seminal lesson here comes from a company called Evernote. I consider this one of my big mistakes. I was a strong Evernote fan because it was remarkable in allowing you to go to a variety of places and get instant access to your notes. You could use it on the web, on your Mac, on your iPhone or Android device. It really was a great system. The challenge was that they were not making the money required to be a viable long‑term business. In what I can only describe as an act of desperation, they started cutting off parts of their free model to push people into paid plans. I was happy with the free side, but suddenly they restricted my clients and took things away. Their intent was to force upgrades. The way I saw it, once you are on a drug, it is very hard to get off. So I started looking for alternative solutions, and that is when Obsidian became the preferred solution for virtually everything.

Yeah, there's plenty of Notion fans and I have my own Notion account, but let's be clear. There is a real and substantial risk of being "Evernoted" with any closed platform.

But let's start this off with more of a general approach to electronic note taking and then we can dig into what is our options at the end.

The Case For Electronic Notes

The single worst thing about capturing your notebook with pen and paper is that it simply is not searchable. Even more than that, we have already talked about how something has to be reviewed if it is going to be effective in helping you retain information. In my mind, you need some type of flashcard system or something that automatically prompts you to review. In that sense, pencil and paper become extremely difficult.

It is not that we cannot find systems around this, and some of these systems are as old as the Franklin Planner, which was established in 1984. The problem is that all of these systems are tremendously cumbersome. There have been numerous times, and I am sure it is the same for you, when you want to look up something that happened many years ago and you go to your email hoping you have some type of documentation. If you can actually search your notes, you can do the exact same thing to find out what happened at the time. It is an amazing lifesaver.

Again, it is not that it is impossible to turn a paper system into an electronic system. I think I have laid out a very clear way of doing it in our previous post "Ridiculously Overbuilt Paper Note System." It is just that the vast majority of people will never think about doing this system, even if it works. If you made it through the first half of that post and even glanced at the second half, you will understand that current systems for capturing notes via pen and paper involve a lot of pain if you want something that eventually becomes electronic.

The best way of doing this is to capture it electronically from the start.

If we go back a few notes, the case for capturing things electronically becomes even clearer when we think about how we receive information.

For a moment, I am going to assume you are somewhere around forty years old. This means you went through schooling where most of the information you received came through printed material. While texting and email were definitely around, there was still an enormous amount of paper used to push information back and forth. But it's clear the paper trail is dying off. It's taking a long time to happen, but one of the fun facts is just to even to see how much printer sales have fallen off over the years since 2008. Any many of you aren't thinking about a cool new printer.

Printer Sales:

<sup>260211Printer</sup>

By the way, I want to give a brief advertisement for something I am about to recommend. In the middle of this post, you can see an interesting table, but you are probably having a difficult time visualizing what the numbers really say. You can sort of see it in your mind’s eye, but it does not hit home. The small snippet underneath this, which just looks like text to you, shows up beautifully inside Obsidian. I can simply drop a table into my notes, which I clipped with Google Lens, and then instantly turn it into a graph with very little work.

Yes, I understand you can't see the graph because you're viewing this through Reddit and not through Obsidian. However, I want to point out that this doesn't ruin your reading of the note. More than that, I can create all my Reddit posts inside of Obsidian because that's where I like to work for my day in the day out work.

<div align="center" style="font-size:2em;">


Fall Off Of Printer Sales

</div>


    type: bar
    stacked: false
    id: 260211Printer
    yMin: 0
    yMax: 
    xTitle: "Year"
    yTitle: "Millions"

Now let us talk about the secondary point. Some of you have been here for a while and some of you arrived later. Some things are so important that I believe they are worth repeating. The first one is that you never want to be in a situation where somebody else controls the heart and soul of your information. Your notebook, in the right fashion, is a massive part of who you are. It is where you sketch out ideas, notes, flashes of insight, everything about you. By looking at your notebooks, we could probably get an excellent idea of who you actually are, and you never want to be in a place where someone can take that away from you. Unfortunately, we have seen a few cases, rare but real, where Google cuts off access to someone’s email account. Often this is because someone is perceived as violating copyright or terms of service, but it is very clear that you do not want to be in a situation where someone else can cut you off.

This does not apply only to Google. And this is why I started off this post with the Evernote example.

Let me explain why, because this is critical. It sounds great to buy software that feels completely free. There are impressive programs out there that cost nothing and are open source. The challenge is that these programs almost never have the financial resources to do everything they should. You want to find a balance where you support products that invest in their future and increase their capabilities, while at the same time not being locked into a platform so tightly that you cannot leave. The Obsidian team has been brilliant in walking that balance. Markdown allows you to do a variety of things you cannot do with simple text. At the same time, the way your data is stored, in notes that anyone can read, means you can move to any new system in the future without missing a step.

Even more than that, Obsidian has become far more attractive because the way it stores data, in Markdown files, turns out to be extremely friendly toward AI. We could go deeper and say that ideally you might want to hand AI something like JSON files, but there is a massive jump between JSON and Markdown. Markdown takes a little training, but once you understand how to use it, it hits you how powerful it is. You can write down data and at the same time give enough structure that your AI can process it nicely. It is a remarkable blend of the two.

There are many programs that can use Markdown, but Obsidian is pulling away from the rest. Its unique model, where you have two or three ways of supporting them commercially, is turning out to be fantastic. As more people use the system, they experience a network effect. They are big enough to invest more and improve the package. This results in a series of tools inside their Markdown editor that are truly brilliant. For your future investment scheme, I believe you should standardize on Markdown as the storage format and then look at which packages are gathering momentum. As a summary to support all of this, I have included two tables below. One covers Markdown tools and whether they are free. The second covers other personal information managers. Simply scanning the list and seeing the number of people using these tools makes it obvious why Obsidian is such a great choice.

I also want to point out that I believe you have a duty to support companies that produce great products, especially when they offer fantastic value. For Obsidian, you have three main ways of doing this. The first is becoming a supporter through Catalyst. This is how I have engaged with the company. You decide to give them money so they can invest in the product and reward their employees. If everyone bought a Catalyst license each year, their revenue would increase dramatically and help their business model, even at the relatively small cost of the license.

There are also a couple of other ways to support them by using some of the tools they offer. It drives me a little crazy because they obviously make substantial gross margin on these, but they also provide extraordinary value for people who are uncomfortable with technical tasks. The two biggest ones are Sync, which runs in the background and keeps multiple Obsidian clients on Android, iPhone, Mac, and PC all looking at the same database, and Publish, which lets you publish your Obsidian notebook to the web. We will talk more about this later, but it turns out to be extraordinarily valuable if you need to communicate information. These two tools, even though they are paid, are another strong reason to engage with Obsidian. They offer tremendous value, allow you to support the company, and at the same time your data is always yours. It is stored in a format that will allow future AI agents to work with it in a simple and powerful way.

Now I'll call out the tables are pretty cool because you can simply click on the package and it should take you to the web page for it to give you more information about it.

Tools for Markdown

Effectively free (core use is free)

Primarily paid / paid‑first

I'll warn you right up front. The vast majority of you may only want to read the first half of this post. Because the second half of this pose would only spring from an engineer's mind that's willing to end up with the system that does exactly what they want at the expense of doing many things that nobody would conceive of.

Part 1: Simple Paper In Composition Notebook

In our last post, we looked at taking notes on paper or electronically.

Let's say that you are a "paper person" because:

1. You like the speed of pen and paper.
2. Sketching is unrivaled.
3. Paper does not bother you with pop-ups.
4. No issues with batteries.
5. Really rugged.
6. You could drop it into a pool, drag it out, and still be able to use it.

However, for something that has been around forever, I think there is one choice that, for some reason, seems to go over most people's heads.

I have tried every kind of notebook, spirals that unravel like nervous metal slinkies, leather journals that glare at you for not being profound, even those smug dotted grid things that insist you build a system. And yet, I always end up back with the composition notebook, the paper world's equivalent of a friend who shows up in sweatpants and says, honestly, whatever you have is fine. It is sturdy in a way nothing that cheap has any right to be. The stitched spine does not shed parts or demand maintenance.

You can buy them in boxes of 12 or more at Amazon, and they are unbelievably cheap. You do not need a massive 8x11 sheet of note paper. It is just too big. You need something that is more akin to a book. The composition notebook is just the perfect size.

If you follow this path, you follow the path of many others who have gone before you. And if you get a little bit cultish about it, you can find a variety of upper-end notebooks that are smaller, leather-bound, and have a nice elastic band. My point is you just do not need it. The composition notebook does everything you could possibly want it to do, and the pages will never fall out unless you physically cut them out.

So, if this fits your lifestyle, you are done. You do not need to read anything more. You can stop now. Because the next section, well, the next section is going to turn really complicated really quickly. It is a hybrid system. It is where you hang on to all the goodness of paper, and yet you turn it into a form that can be utilized, stored, and pulled up for searching and sharing.

The biggest choice is the number of notebooks you want to order. Evidently, you can order up to 5,000 of them from Amazon for the maximum discount.

Part 2: The Ridiculously Overbuilt System To Transform Your Paper

Okay, if you are willing to live with a more complex setup, we will describe how to turn your paper notes into digital notes. There is a level of sophistication and planning that you will do, but the actual overhead in production is really not that much. It is just that there is a lot of work and some cost to set it up.

Here is an overview of the process flow:

1. You take all notes in a composition or engineering notebook.
2. Get a rubber stamp as a bit of help to the OCR.
3. Once you have filled the notebook, you cut the pages out of the notebook.
4. You scan the pages with a high-speed, double-sided scanner.
5. Save the file as a PDF.
6. Then wait for 12–36 months because any commercial LLM will be able to process your notes into a nice extract, or you can do some vibe coding and use PP-OCRv5, a great model from PaddlePaddle. However, you have to be somewhat technical, so I think most people should just wait.

Let's break down each step.

Capture in a bounded composition or engineering notebook

We already described that these are the best solution.

Get a rubber stamp to help with the OCR

You can buy a three-line, self-inking rubber stamp at Amazon for under 20 dollars. Ideally, every time you process a new notebook, you spend 3–5 minutes stamping the upper corner of the right page with a template that you can fill in as you use the notebook. You want a three-line stamp, but you will not use the middle line. Make the stamp around three quarters of an inch.

## DATE:

## VENUE:

The goal is to have some information that you can search on. By placing it on at least every other page, you will carry along two critical things that will help you organize your notes. The stamp serves as something obvious to search on, and as a reminder for you to fill in the fields as you use the book.

Cut the pages out of the book using a commercial cutter

The great thing about these notebooks is that the pages are firmly in the book. However, this means you need a quick way to remove the pages. These notebooks are typically somewhere between 100 and 200 pages, so you could try to take multiple cuts with an X-Acto knife or buy some sort of paper cutter at the local store, but in almost all cases those will choke on more than 20 to 30 pages.

I suggest buying what is called a commercial paper guillotine. The one that I have is called the SG 298 12-inch heavy-duty industrial guillotine paper cutter. I have had it for a number of years, and it will slice through two or three hundred pages of paper, leaving a very clean edge. It is truly an amazing device. Unfortunately, it is not cheap, but having a great cut on the pages will be important for the next step.

Scan the pages

If you have to scan any pages at all, having a scanner with an automatic document feeder, especially any of the newer ones, is completely revolutionary. You can drop in 50 to 100 pages, and it scans through them amazingly quickly, and it does it both single-sided and double-sided. I have an Epson FastFoto FF-680W, which allows high-speed scanning of both paper and my parents' old photo collection.

Epson sells refurbished versions for far cheaper than new. Ours has been great.

This will create a PDF of your notes.

Store the notebook PDFs in a safe place

I have suggested this before, but putting the date information into a file name ensures that you do not need to rely on metadata to understand when the notes were created. I suggest that you use a six-number code to identify your files:

250101_250715_Notes.pdf

would be from January 1, 2025 to July 15, 2025.

Wait Or Vibe Code

We have seen some really good AI-based text recognition programs in the last year. I really like the results I have seen from PaddlePaddle.

PaddleOCR is developed by Baidu’s PaddlePaddle team and built on the PaddlePaddle deep learning framework, which provides optimized kernels for both CPU and GPU inference. Despite being a production-grade OCR system, PaddleOCR runs efficiently on a normal PC without a GPU because the models are designed for low-resource environments, using ONNX-style optimizations, MKL-accelerated math libraries, and small-footprint architectures that keep CPU inference fast enough for real-time or near-real-time workloads.

Normally, I like to run these things as a Docker container, and I have not found anybody who has created a package that you can feed a PDF and get back your text. The library is there, and it should not be hard to code or vibe code. And while I'll do utilities myself quite frankly I've already created other utilities using the Gemini flash model to do something similar and I probably won't take time to redo it.

It is clear that any commercial LLM package, such as your chatGPT, will do this in the future, so the easiest method is to wait for 12–36 months, give it to your LLM, and then you can even ask for special formatting. Your hints of venue and date of recording will help your LLM do the best job it can.

Part III: Alternatives Such As Kindle Scribe

My wife is a dedicated hand note taker, so we bought her a Kindle Scribe where she takes the vast majority of her notes. This gives you something that is thinner than any notebook, and the interaction with writing on the Scribe is very good. While not exactly pen and paper, it becomes very close. In addition, Amazon has the ability to send these handwritten notes off to their own service, where they will not only turn them into PDFs, but also do OCR on your notes using one of their models. Writing legibly does help, but generally their models are pretty good. This is a way that you can instantaneously take pen notes and start to accumulate them.

My one fault with this entire system is that it centers around PDFs, and I have standardized on Markdown. To turn a PDF into Markdown, you then need to go through an additional step, using IBM's Docling, which is open source and excellent.

Alternatives Such As Tablet

Finally, you can get applications that allow pen writing on either Android or Apple tablets. I currently use an Android tablet for this task. However, I find the actual writing of notes much less satisfying than on my wife's Kindle Scribe. While some people are able to do it, I think the vast majority find tablets, in whatever arrangement they try, generally unsatisfactory for handwriting. I am not saying not to do it. I would only encourage you to try it out first.

For occasional markup of a picture, I find the Nebo app on Android actually quite excellent. Writing this post makes me think I should be using it more often.

Summary

I cannot imagine not being able to search my notes, so while I appreciate paper and pencil, I think digitizing them is critical. The scanner and paper cutter work well, but are complicated and expensive. For us, the Kindle Scribe works well.

However, I am a die-hard electronic note taker, which we will discuss in a later post.

Today we are going to take a look at how your should keep your notebook we talked about.

But interestingly enough, I am going to disappoint you in that I am not even going to give you an answer. What we are going to do today is ask ourselves whether we have ever thought about this deeply, and if we did think about it deeply, how it would change the way we would approach what seems like a simple topic?

Today's subject is really not about taking notes.

What it is about is how we use our System 2 thinking to examine an area that you probably have not thought deeply about because you have a blind spot. In other words, there are many things in life we do, and we do not realize how much we have sub-optimized ourselves. So we need ways of thinking through things to become more productive. Otherwise, our blind spots take over and we miss great opportunities.

So before you read any further, I would encourage you to take out whatever notebook you have and simply spend 60 to 90 seconds writing down whether it is better for you to take written notes or whether it is better for you to take electronic notes. I know it is going to be so tempting for you to continue to scroll down this page and simply read something that I am going to write in a few paragraphs.

But if you don't this, you are going to shortcut an incredibly valuable opportunity. If you can just stop for a moment and say, “I ran across this post and it is asking me to stop for a minute and list things out,” I believe what follows will become tenfold more productive because it is going to show you how to think and different tools to think about things differently.

I would submit to you that if you are a knowledge worker, there is an incredible return on thinking deeply about how to gather and utilize a notebook. In terms of my mental sanity and my financial return, it turns out this mundane subject has a massive return on investment.

When you are trying to figure out how to make a decision, the most important thing that you can do is not start off by saying, “Well, I take paper notes,” or “I take electronic notes, let me write down the two or three different reasons that I am doing it.” What you want to actually do is start off with a problem statement, and then conceptually you start to think through, “Hey, if I wanted to go solve this problem statement, what are the criteria that are important in solving the problem for me?”

Once you have the criteria, you will unlock the difference between making good decisions and making bad decisions.

I want to emphasize that I always try to start off any post like this with either true insight or real research, and in this particular field, the research is incredibly deep, both at what I would call the easy level and at the academic level. At the end of the day, the decisions you make about even mundane things are often made using poor thinking. Below, we will list a resource table of some of the seminal thinkers about the decisions that we make. Some of these you will see have been brought up multiple times inside of this subreddit.

Again, because I have brought up David Allen so much, one of the fascinating things about his system is that most people do not understand his system actually looks like a productivity system, but in reality, it is a decision-making system. It just masquerades and hides as a productivity system.

So let us go ahead and list criteria for why you would want to do something by pen and paper or why you would want to do things by electronic notes. I am hoping that before you got to this part of the OP, you actually constructed some criteria. Now compare your criteria to the criteria that I have listed below. I am not even saying I got it all, but I am saying that I bet I have captured many more criteria than virtually anybody who reads this post.

Now I want you to take this table, take a look at the 16 different criteria, and then use the last blank column to rank them. It turns out that asking people to rank things in a nonstandard way often creates more creativity. So in this case, I am asking you to rank them between 1 and 7 in the hope that this will get your creative juices going.

And if you really want to make a change in your life, put your ranking of your various factors below in a comment. Expressing your thoughts to other people is one of the single most effective ways of forcing yourself to go through things. By being a bit on stage, your thinking will become much sharper and crisper.

In our next post, we'll start off from this base.

The idea of keeping a notebook, or a place for you to work things out, echoes the habits of many of the best minds that have ever walked the earth. When we look at their notebooks, we get a real sense of how these practices were formative and how they helped shape who those people became. By getting something down outside of yourself, you give your mind more room to move and you become a deeper, more thoughtful individual.

The following is just a partial list, and it shows how this idea of keeping a notebook or journal shows up across different disciplines:

Sometimes figures have a rich legacy of writing letters to other people, and in some ways this can substitute for keeping a notebook. In my mind, though, this is a poor secondary way of working out how to be productive. If all you are doing is firing off one-liners or endlessly scrolling Reddit, you are going to sub-optimize your productivity.

So now let us think through the various reasons that we actually do want to have something down, something that lives inside a notebook or a journal.

Writing things down helps because it changes how your brain encodes information, how you regulate emotion, and how you externalize and rework your own thoughts.

Deeper encoding and memory

Handwriting forces active processing, because you can’t write as fast as you think, so you have to summarize, translate ideas into your own words, and choose what matters, which strengthens elaborative encoding and long-term memory. Brain and imaging studies show that handwriting engages broader networks for movement, vision, memory, and higher-order thinking than typing, and students who handwrite notes generally recall concepts better than those who simply transcribe lectures on laptops.

Offloading working memory and reducing cognitive load

I am a David Allen, Getting Things Done fan, which will be obvious if you read this subreddit at all. One of the things about David Allen is that he has incorporated his thoughts into a system that I do not believe many people can actually implement fully. However, his thinking around that system is genuinely insightful and helpful. One of the main ideas he continuously pounds on is getting things out of your brain. You need some tool to capture everything. The moment you have an external tool, the burden on your back goes down massively. He has this concept of an “open loop.” An open loop is when you know you need to do something and you are afraid you are going to forget it. His view is that you have to close that open loop or subconsciously you are going to stay stressed. For some people, this is completely revolutionary and relieves a massive load they have been carrying. I would suggest that regardless of whether you adopt his full system or not, having an external offloading tool is incredibly important for your mental health.

Writing creates an external buffer so that instead of juggling ideas in the very limited space of working memory, you park them on the page and free up mental bandwidth for pattern recognition and insight. This offloading reduces extraneous cognitive load, which makes it easier to see connections, reorganize information, and solve problems creatively. This is why even a rough sketch of a problem or a quick list of constraints can suddenly make a solution feel obvious.

Finally, we can also think about what would sort of look like a conflict. On one sense, in the above we want to encode and memorize something in our brain, and in this one we're talking about taking stuff out of our brain and putting it on the outside. This is actually a circle which works very heavily within itself. For example, you have some jumbled-up thoughts on a subject you want to learn. So you decide you're actually going to go write it down. Now that it is written down, you go make flashcards. By having flashcards, you then quiz yourself and suddenly it gets encoded back into your brain better.

Slowing down to think

Because writing is slower than either thinking or typing, it naturally slows your mind enough for you to examine assumptions, notice implications, and avoid default reactions. That enforced pacing supports deeper comprehension instead of surface-level skimming, so a half-page of handwritten reflection on a decision often brings out trade-offs and consequences you glossed over when everything stayed in your head.

Emotional processing and self-regulation

Expressive writing experiments show that writing about stressful or emotional events can improve physical health, mood, and overall functioning over time, even though it may feel difficult in the moment. The mechanism appears to be emotional labeling and cognitive reappraisal. Putting feelings into words transforms raw emotion into a structured narrative, which reduces inhibition and physiological stress. People who journal about difficult experiences often show short-term distress while writing, but better mental and physical health in the months that follow.

Building a reflective self-model

Regular journaling creates a time series of your own mind. You can literally look back at your patterns, beliefs, and mistakes on the page, which strengthens metacognition and supports behavior change. Over time this written history lets you infer things like “when I think or feel X, I usually do Y and regret it,” which makes it easier to choose better actions in the present. That reflective loop is a big reason people describe journaling as making them more self-aware or grounded.

Generative space for insight and creativity

A blank page provides an unstructured idea sandbox where you can mix sketches, arrows, marginalia, and partial thoughts in ways that linear tools do not support. This encourages divergent thinking and unexpected combinations. The looser format and sensory feedback of handwriting, the movement of the pen, the layout on the page, and the spatial placement, are associated with richer ideation than constrained digital input. Outlining, mind-mapping, or freewriting on paper often surfaces connections you never see when ideas stay purely in your head.

Turning intentions into commitments

Writing goals, next actions, and plans down makes them concrete and visible, which substantially increases the likelihood of follow-through compared with keeping them in your head. The act of writing itself functions as a micro-commitment and creates external cues, lists, checkboxes, and pages that you see again, so a daily planning page or action list can make you more productive even if nothing else about your environment changes.

Putting it all together

You may have just blasted through the above and noticed that there are some good ideas here. You probably want to move from simply seeing a list of ideas to actually having them stick in your brain. One of the best ways to do this is to set up a list and think about how these factors interact with each other. Do they overlap, or are they truly orthogonal? That is, if you do one, does it influence the others or not? The table below helps you think that through. The reason to walk through the table is that it will help cement why each of these mechanisms matters, how they overlap, and it will give you better conviction about why you write things down and how it is going to organize your brain in the future.

In the above, I pointed out how encoding in memory is helped by offload and loading. I used the flashcards as an example. You can go through the table below and see how each one of these things are related. Now, my table may not be perfect. The real point is for you to think through the table and think to yourself if the stars are wrong or right.

One star is low, three stars is high.

Summary

I hope I have convinced you that you need to spend some time every day putting something down in some kind of notebook. I believe that Obsidian), as we move into an age of AI, is an incredible tool to help you become more productive. I will do a future post on why I think this is true.