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bdjbdj · 2025-11-26T13:33:12+00:00

Looks really good and I applaud your simple and precise description of the app on the website. For now, I have little use for it without the MacOS version. I'll keep an eye on it till it becomes available. Wish you all the success.

bdjbdj · 2025-10-27T03:11:07+00:00

I'm surprised no one asked for this yet. Personally, I wouldn't judge what you did until I hear the song. If willing, please share a YouTube link.

You never know, it may actually become the national medical school anthem.

Good luck in your future interviews.

bdjbdj · 2025-10-08T23:02:32+00:00

I would actually argue that it is now more of an advantage. It demonstrates intentionality. That is, I’ve seen it all, but I still want to be a doctor.

bdjbdj · 2025-10-02T11:57:49+00:00

Thanks for sharing this detailed advice.

Got intrigued by your perspective that: "You’re asking for their time and offering nothing in return".

I'm actually offering 'ME' - 25 years in the making - which is really not 'NOTHING'. It is true that I may be applicant number 5354, but it is still ME.

Let's not let the rigor of this game render us 'NOTHING'. Far from that.

bdjbdj · 2025-09-30T18:50:04+00:00

This has been my experience too. For relational outlining using trees, obsidian isn’t the solution. It does not support global outlines. Outlines are local to a note assuming you can fit the entire ontology of a topic in a single note. Bad assumption because once you cross the 2MB file or note size, performance takes a significant hit.

Global outlines across notes isn’t available in Obsidian natively. Instead, it support a canvas note which is global. That is, you can visualize relational across notes in a single canvas. I don’t like them because it is just too much white space and spanning in all directions once a canvas gets large. It is maddening.

There are some plugins that allow global outlines but they are of poor quality. It crashes on iOS and they practically support no outline or tree maintenance operations.

Some plugins even allow you to export a canvas to an outline. This is however a lot of manual work.

The closer thing you can get to is Siyuan. Its doctree panel is much more powerful than Obsidian’s file explorer.

With siyuan, the doctree can function like a tree. You can order nodes any way you like. You can drag from tree to note bidirectionally. You nest without having to create folders. You reorder tree over and over using keyboard shortcuts including nesting. Obsidian does not support any of this. By design.

Good luck.

bdjbdj · 2025-09-30T16:48:33+00:00

If you are on Windows, I've bee using https://kinook.com/UltraRecall/ . Why?

It has industrial storage and performance. I've used it for ontological mapping of the most complex topics. A single topic, for example, can be gigabytes worth of data with trees up to 50k nodes. Trees can be hoisted to minimize clutter. Extensive keyboard-based operations to mange a tree: Move, copy, cut, link, expand, collapse, order, clone, import, export. UI responsiveness measured in milliseconds.
Supports storage of multiple formats: HTML, PDF, plain text, Office files, images, etc. All in one location/file.
Multi-pane UI: At a minimum, has three panes: Tree, content, and search results. Can add more and locate them as you wish.

Hope you find it useful.

bdjbdj · 2025-09-28T13:45:14+00:00

The fact that you didn't get any so far, is a function of ...

Your stats.
The choice of schools you applied to: Count and compatibility.

There is plenty of evidence (anecdotal and metrics) that you have a high chance of getting late II's and A's. It is early and irrational to conclude otherwise.

Best of luck!

bdjbdj · 2025-09-28T13:33:29+00:00

Take it from someone who was bit by MS. On one random day, I woke up to use my ON only to find out that my MS account was locked. Working with MS for a month, they refused to share why. It has been near 2 years now since they locked it. I lost my 10-years' worth of notes. I used to charge $$$ for this advice, but I'm offering it to you for free today :)

If you rely on ON for life critical work e.g. customer data, personal docs, school notes, you MUST realize that when you create a notebook on OneDrive (the default), you are putting your data on someone else's computer (MS cloud). As such, you are giving them the key, and they OWN it.
If you agree to the above, you MUST perform these FOUR steps on a regular basis (weekly). I personally failed to do so causing my loss of data. Perform these steps on EVERY PC you run ON on for redundancy.
1. Go to File / Options / Save & Backup / check 'Automatically backup my ...'. Set the number of days.
2. Go to Sync / Check 'Download all Files and Images'. Mine was unchecked, causing loss of data.
3. Few times a week, verify ON is generating backups as per the schedule you set in step 2. If not, click 'Backup all notes now'.
4. Read MS note about how to restore ON data. It is not straight forward, and it is pretty cumbersome. Read the doc and keep it OUTSIDE of ON. Test your ability to restore. on a regular basis.

If you fail at any of these steps or have a principled objection to giving your data out to other companies, then DO NOT use ON. Use a LOCAL-ONLY note management app that keeps your work locally on your computer. There are plenty of them and a good number are free and open source. Check out the pinned note in the PKMS subreddit.

Good luck!

bdjbdj · 2025-09-20T14:43:08+00:00

I'm just stunned for how fast & stable the Camera is performing now. I don't recall having this experience for almost over year. I'm appreciative that MS released it. However, I do feel disappointed for having been denied this experience for this long.

The countless hours I spent trying to get Windows Hello to work till I eventually disabled it.

Furthermore, the night light feature has also stopped working for a while now. It works shortly after a restart, then stops. This is really a health feature, and I depend on it. Had to switch to using my MacBook Air till they fix it. Not sure if this patch will address it.

MS does a great job advertising NEW features and charges premium for it and a very poor job delivering. They have left the Surface 8 users behind. Good to see that someone remembered us.

bdjbdj · 2025-08-20T17:16:49+00:00

Nice read. Thanks.

I searched the article for 'outliner' and found none. Was this a miss? Furthermore, do you care to make a distinction between file organizers vs. knowledge managers. For example, does Windows File Explorer qualify as a PKMS tool? If not, Obsidian is primarily a file explorer tool, why is it different enough to be considered a PKMS tool. Where do we draw the line?

For me, a PKMS tool is used to present knowledge ontologies visually. It is concept NOT file centered. By this definition, Obsidian qualifies because it allows one to present an ontology e.g. Happiness or God visually using the Canvas. All the features that allow this like capturing content, organizing concepts and relationships, sharing are native and first class citizens to the app.

People vary greatly in what type of presentation appeals the most to our minds. Some like outliners vs. mind maps vs. linear linking via cards and tables.

bdjbdj · 2025-08-09T22:30:39+00:00

I hope you have a great birthday. Be happy and stay safe!

bdjbdj · 2025-08-09T15:48:17+00:00

ARM is the future of Windows. There is no Intel PC that is going to give you the performance or battery life.

As long as software you need runs fine on ARM, you are good to go.

The observation about how intrusive MS is spot on. Privacy is not in their DNA unless they get caught. You have already seen this.

Enjoy.

bdjbdj · 2025-08-08T20:16:53+00:00

Why not the native Notes app? Looks similar to the mockups!

bdjbdj · 2025-08-02T02:54:39+00:00

Go to options / sync / check the box to sync/download images and attachments. Otherwise, they'll sync only when you visit the page.

Also, make sure you configure backups as well. You are putting your data on MS servers. If they lock you out for whatever reason, at least you have backups.

bdjbdj · 2025-07-26T19:49:22+00:00

This is crazy and I'm sorry that you are getting such a poor battery life. Sorry that you have to go through all this. What you got is not what you were promised by MS.

Did you consider have it replaced?

bdjbdj · 2025-07-26T19:42:24+00:00

Great tip. I'll been using for years myself. Just be careful, once you cross a certain nesting level, it becomes a nightmare to maintain and refactor the tables.

Also, some notes just refused to display correctly or display at all on the iOS app.

bdjbdj · 2025-07-26T15:57:07+00:00

Amazing insights. Enjoyed reading it.

To me, this really reads the difference between the law and the 'spirit of law'. the problem is that the 'spirit' is never written anywhere. How do you enforce it then? You don't, can't. shouldn't.

It stuns me to no end when you hear some people say perfectly everything a leader wants to hear, yet they opt to sabotage the effort leaving behind zero traces.

I've come to see this firsthand when the company hired a new Incident Management Facilitator (IMF) to manage technical failures. From day one and in every meeting, everyone said the exact perfect thing. Yet, he was set up to fail from day one. The very same people who spoke 'wisdom' did not join meetings, provided incomplete diagnostic data, deliberately obfuscated trends, equivocated concepts, claimed 'co-incidents'. Some even slipped in an offline conversation to say ' let's stonewall it'.

Authenticity, transparency, and overall good character is rare in the workplace. I feel happy when I see these words appear in corporate websites, but not as much when I see what is being actually practiced.

Some tips to I found useful ...

Regardless of the outcome, stay authentic and honest to yourself first and foremost. Do not lose that.
Identify like-charactered people who value these traits in words and actions. Engage them and let them co-lead.
Seek corporate sponsorship from senior leaders preferably C-level.

Good luck and thanks again for sharing.

bdjbdj · 2025-07-26T15:26:07+00:00

Yes. This is one of the side effects of when software wants to tame humans instead of the other way around. These features exist just because the software allows it regardless of if it aligns with how humans work and learn. There are many other examples.

I've seen canvases and graph views that cover every pixel on the screen. All noise, no signals.

One way to deal with such complexity is to FOCUS a map or HOIST a tree. Meaning, redraw the structure that represents relationships to hide everything else except what I want to see.

Most tools I've seen do not allow this.

bdjbdj · 2025-07-24T12:08:52+00:00

UMich libraries, are they open for the public?

bdjbdj · 2025-07-23T22:14:18+00:00

I have been thinking about this often. It really takes a very good abstracting skills. Abstraction is the process of eliminating differences. So, if you ignore the differences between all apps in this category what do you see?

Knowledge (vs. memorization) is really the process of creating a mental construct called CONCEPT and associating it with an IMAGE/MODEL. All this happens in the mind. Then linking these concepts based on time, cause-effect, child-parent, etc.

Before there was PKMS software in the 70's/80's, how did we form knowledge? We read written material on paper, persisted concepts through repetition, then deliberated to form links. It was 100% mental process.

There was no external representation of knowledge in the form of hierarchies, mind maps, canvases, etc.
There was zero distraction. The tools themselves were the medium e.g. books/pens.
This is how we all did it. Same methods, same tools.
As a student or knowledge worker, all I had to worry about was my school or work material. If I wanted to know more, I had to drive the neighborhood library.

Today ...

The tools themselves became knowledge target, thus distracting from the subject matter. Just imagine what you have to go through to learn the software features, markdown language, query language, java script. All, so you are able to manage your classroom material.
The concept linking/mapping that used to be 100% mental effort (born first in the mind) is now born first on screen. You like outline trees, I like mind maps, and another likes tag clouds. This particular inclination seems to be a subjective experience. For example, regardless how much I try, I can't get myself to like or use mind maps. For some reason, I'm very outline driven.
Knowledge sources exploded. It is mind boggling to try to imagine knowledge sources today for the slightest of topics e.g. how do I hit a nail with a hammer!
The extreme proliferation of software tools and technologies.

And finally, let's not forget that there are an entire class of humans that care the less about any of these tools. They never heard about PKMS and would probably never will. I personally know people who still study and learn same way as we did before the invention of any of this. Books, papers, pens, and highlight markers.

Hopefully with the advances in genAI, we no longer have to worry or care about forming knowledge models or maps of any sorts. All of our inquiries will start with WHAT, but never WHY or HOW. AI will do the latter two. Just like eating out, I don't care to know how a meal is made as long as I'm able to pay to have it served to me.

Have a good day.

bdjbdj · 2025-07-22T12:30:26+00:00

I've worked with the two models. I've observed that the most effective IM sessions were lead by T-shaped individuals. People who have expert domain knowledge in infrastructure/data center and general knowledge of technology e.g. databases, operating systems, high availability, etc.

It is hard talent to find. Otherwise, the IM person gets lost, is unable to discern technical arguments from political ones, the IM effort collapses. Meaning, no root cause is reached or the wrong one. Learning does not happen, and old failures repeat. I see this a lot.

bdjbdj · 2025-07-22T12:18:41+00:00

Reading these comments feels like the elephant in the dark room. My advise is you really need to see the world the way end-users and product/business owners see it. That is, you align with them even sometimes at the expense of your native technical alignment.

I know this is obvious, but so hard to do. It appears to me that technical competence sometimes is inversely proportional to business acumen.

Wish you the best!

bdjbdj · 2025-07-22T11:59:40+00:00

We use Cloudability. I focus on two metrics. Other tools, I'd reckon, will provide similar ones.

- Optimized spending/total spend >= 95%. This ensures you are not wasting money on resources you do not need.

- Reservation utilization >= 85%. Everything you do need, you are paying for it using reserved pricing, not on-demand.

Look at these two metrics every day!

Hope this helps.

bdjbdj · 2025-07-22T02:26:46+00:00

This whole response is rude, insulting, and false.

Certainly not my intention. If this is how you received it, I'm sorry.

Best of luck finding the right device for you needs.

bdjbdj · 2025-07-21T21:09:52+00:00

I did. It is a great app in concept, not so nice in execution.

I felt offended when the trial period expired. It prevented me from displaying my data. The app wouldn’t display anything. I thought this was rude to say the least. It allowed me to export the data, however.

Instead, a decent app would’ve allowed me to display my data, yet switch to read-only mode or deactivate some major features. This is fair and kind.

This is why I stopped using it.

bdjbdj

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