Deleted Podcast Show

What a weekend! I hope yours was great but even if it was it will not be close to mine. 

My good friend Michael came to visit and we had a nerd day. A few days before he came over a package from santa arrived but it was not opened until we met at the office. Inside there was a 10 Gbps network card for my NAS and two 250GB  nvme:s to be used as read and write cache in the NAS. There was also 3 x 16TB Ironwolf drives - but I will talk more about those another day. 

Michael got the assignment to install the new interface and the nvme:s into the NAS since he had done it before on his own NAS. In the package there was also a few cat7 cables and a few gbic/SFTs for my pfsense. Goal was to get a super fast network. But of course there was something that should not be working as well as I had hoped - the gbics where only 1GB and they didn’t want to work in the pfsense - which totally makes sense when you thing about the $35 each or so I paid for them. Appart from that I now “only” have a 2.5GB network all went well. I can definitely see and feel the speed difference just from going from 1GBs to 2.5GB. I can’t wait until I fix it so it uses all the 10 Gbps it’s designed for. 

After the NAS upgrade we (or I really should say Michael) fixed the cable mess I had on my desk. On the floor I had a paint bucket where my MacStudio was standing - cables hanging down and generally a messy setup. We disconnected everything - fixed some cable holders and double sticky tape and after a few hours I had a super nice setup. Cables hidden, and in nice order. I can once again actually raise and lower my desk. 

Take a look in the show notes and you will se before and after pictures from the desk setup. 

We also did some other things like setting up the backup NAS and breaking Martins home network. No one remembers a coward. But more about that another day!

Before

After

Pictures by Michael Dreves (@dreves on Twitter)

During the weekend i setup whats called a RoadWarrior VPN. The name comes from the early 2000 when remote workers, usually travelling, on the road, sales people needed a way to safely connect back to the office and place orders and handle administration. It is essentially a client to server connection. One specific computer gets access to the network behind the firewall compared to a site-to-site VPN where two networks can be connected through a VPN-tunnel.

I created this so that I can connect home and use my NAS even if I'm not at home. This is a quite interesting setup. I connect to my home through the VPN tunnel and then I'm routed through another VPN-tunnel to the office where my NAS is. The reason for this is that my office doesn't have a fixed IP that I control the firewall for.

It was not straightforward to setup. But after a bit of tinkering it started to work just fine. The pfsense VPN-setup-wizard didn't work for me so I had to do it manually. But it is just a handful of steps.

Step one is to setup a new Certification Authority, a CA, if there already is one, you do not have to do this of course.

Step two is to create a server certificate - this is probably where my problem arose with the wizard. The CN (common name) of the cert should correspond to the adress your clients should connect too.

Step three is to create a client certificate - this you can put what ever you want as the CN.

Step four is to create the OpenVPN server. This is pretty straight forward. I choose to route all traffic through the tunnel - this compared to only send through the traffic that should go to the network behind the VPN. The main reason I choose this approach is that it makes my routing a slight easier. And since I am the only user that is using the setup I am not really concerned about the extra traffic usage.

The fifth and last step is to configure te clients. The clients for me is my two laptops (Mac and Surface), and my iPad and my iPhone. I installed the client export plugin into my pfsense that could create ovnp-files for me simplifying the configuration.

On my iPad, iPhone and Surface i used the OpenVPN client. It was a super simple setup. Install the client and import the ovpn file and it just worked. For my Mac I decided to use tunnelblick an OpenSource VPN client that I have used in the past. This was as easy to get working. I got a few complaints that a few of the features I used in my setup will be obsoleted in an upcomming releas (due to changes in OpenSSL).

Today I was working out side of the office and my home and needed to get hold of a few files on the nas. And this setup up worked really well. I uploaded and downloaded roughly 2GB of data (video/screen recordings) - and it worked so well.

I hope you had a nice weekend! I went to a tradeshow showing and talking about Getting Things Done. Sunny and a lot of people. I also configured a RoadWarrior VPN but more about that another day. 

Today I will start a theme related to how you can do screen recordings or explainer videos. I do them from time to time and learned what you can do and what you shouldn’t do. Sometimes the easy way and sometime the hard way. And I still do learn a lot… 

Today I wanted to talk a bit about a tool called ScreenFlow from Tellestream. It is a paid application ($149) - it is updated often and for every main update a new license needs to be purchased - an upgrade license is cheaper ($49). I have bought a license at least 3 times. ScreenFlow was one of the first video recording applications I used. It is powerful and you can use it from recording, to edit and to export and publishing.

It is nice since it can record your desktop (or parts of it), your camera, your ipad and your audio at once and what to se, when etc. So for example you can start your edit with your camera in full screen. Do an intro presentation, then you can cut in your intro, back to camera, zoom out and show your screen. Easy to change sizes, zoom in - add effects etc. 

It takes a bit to learn but it is not particular difficult. I spent a few hours on YouTube watching tutorials and introductions to it and after that it became my goto video editor for years. I still use it from time to time when I do recordings mainly because it is fast to capture multiple sources fast and it will do most of the necessary edits. 

The part where it is a bit weak is audio threatment. I usually export the sound - bring it into Audition or Audacity where I level and sound threat it.  I can also do noise removal and reverb treatment.  I finally will import it back into ScreenFlow.

One thing that I ran into the other day - also sound related. I did an almost 30min recording on friday. Today I had planned to edit it to be released today as well. But there was something strange with the sound. It sounded strange. It started in sync with the video but quickly  got out of sync. There was also strange pops and miss sounds in the audio. The audio stopped way before the video.

It took me quite some time to understand what was happening. I recorded the sound with my Zoom H8 as an audio device - it does that in 48khz sample rate. That it the most common audio sample rate for video. But ScreenFlow recorded it as it where 44khz. If it is a bug with screenflow or a setting issue in MacOS I am nut sure. But it ended up with me not being able to use the recording. 

Lessons learned. When you do recordings (of any type) - do a test recording first so that you are certain it works as it should

I left my "Good Old" note application Evernote back a year ago. In "Ep 75 - April 20 - All out of Evernote" I talked about my migration from Evernote into DevonThink as an archive of my old notes. Everything new has then been created in Obsidian. I use it for a lot of different notes - but it is not my only note taking application. Let's look at the application and how I use it now when it's been in my workflow for a while.

It is one of the handful of applications I use every day. I may not create new notes every day but I am updating and reading notes every day. The structure I have setup is a three based structure where I link out from a root-page - I call it my INDEX note - yes I am an old web developer! Here I link to other sub-pages - these are project, customer or theme based. And from these I can link out even further. 

All pages are not linked but the majority is. I also have a folder structure where I group sets of notes that are related. One example for that is my scripts or this podcast. I also have other big notes grouped like this. I have a limited use of tags - I prefer to use links as the glue to get themes and categories together and I am afraid to end up in a tag-hell where they become unuseable - like they became for me in Evernote.

I create a ton of notes straight in Obsidian but Drafts, another text-editor, is also being used for text capture. From drafts I can use actions to export the text to other tools. I have multiple actions that is importing text into different places in Obsidian as an example, I have an inbox for notes that should be processed and organised, a quotes note and a note with writing ideas. This way I can quickly and easily capture these and feed them into the right place in obsidian for later use and reference.

I also do more long from writing in Bear - there is just something with that app that makes it easy for me to write. The written texts stay in Bear after I publish them elsewhere.

My Obsidian is not filled up with a ton of addons. I use the built in functionality - dataview, better word count, advanced tables and a few more but these three are the main ones. I am after a year still using the same Cybertron theme - I like it except when I need to export text since parts of the styling comes out with the export.

I started of with multiple vaults but…

I have the Obsidian sync service since I am using obsidian on both my iPhone and iPad. On the phone it is mainly to consume or look up thing but on the iPad I often draft out and work on various notes. It is not ideal but it works.

 Electron app - it works on all platforms, but it doesn't work well anywhere. There are these small things like OS-integrations, Window management and more that is just a little bit different. Different enough to annoy me a bit.

I think I could do something similar to what I have in Obsidian in Evernote. A clean start is always good and it forced me to create a new and fresh system that i useable. Not just a dump of various things that I never get back to. Durning the year I have searched my old Evernote notes a handful of times - and it was never a successful result. Its mainly crap in there. With a clean start where the creation of things where done more carefully a good system could have been created.

I am not committed for life to obsidian - if there is something that shows up that is equally powerful and work better I would change without hesitation.

One year later would I still recommend anyone else starting to use Obsidian. Yes, every day of the week. It is a fantastically powerful application with great price (free), it is hard to beat that ROI calculation.

In [[Ep 126 - April 12 - Note automation with RocketBook and Devonthink]] I talked about the workflow I setup using my RocketBooks, Keyboard Maestro and DevonThink. I mentioned that I have a Remarkable 2 that I just didn't find a good workflow for. I do not like archiving and keeping my notes on the remarable it self. The goal is to be able to digitize all notes into the same system.

My Rocketbook flow is essentially: 

1. Write in RocketBook

2. Take Photo with app - tag and upload to dropbox

3.  Keyboard Mastro macro will tag files with clarifying tag

4. I manually process the notes and tag it with the right project or theme tag.

5. Another Macro moves the file into DevonThink

6. An automation (smart rule) is triggered on the import and will based on the tags move the file to the correct place.

7. Clean the RocketBooks...

My problem was that I could  export one or a subselection of pages from my Remarkable2 - it was the whole notebook (if I used the dropbox integration). Then I found email-to-dropbox. An experimental feature that gives you a privat email where you can send files and the will be stored to a specific location on the dropbox. There maybe multiple ways of doing this but this was the easiest way for me. 

The Remarkable 2 flow now looks like this:

1. Write in Remarkable

2. Send the page to dropbox

3. Keyboard Maestro will pick up the file in dropbox and inject the file into the right place in the Rocketbook flow. 

The upside here is

1. It is faster to email the note than to use the app and take a photo

2. With Remarkable I don't have to clean any pages

3. Can use both appraches side-by-side

The next step is to find a scanner app that can scan notes from any notebook (or whiteboard) and inject that into my flow. This is comming together nicely!

- What his hosting?

- Store the files (storage)

- Bandwidth

- RSS-feed

- Self hosted 

- On my webhost

- Statistics

- Good for limited sized podcast / starting podcast

- Castos

- Clean and simple

- Wordpress integration

- 19 usd 

- Podbean

- Messy

- Integration to podcast catalogues

- 9 usd

- Stationista

- Clean

- Private

- 12 eur 

- What should you use?

Supposed to talk about podcast hosting -> tomorrow 

I do a lot of meetings, trainings and videos from my workplace - I have used a Viltrox panel light for a few years to light me up. But earlier this year I invested in two Key Lights from Elgato. They have a really nice diffuse light, lots of lumens and you can remote control them from the StreamDeck since they are connected to the Wifi. Or that was the plan. 

When I got the lights in the beginning of Feb (or later Jan) - I was super happy. I mounted them on my desk and wired everything up. They are super easy to configure. There is a light switch on them - press and hold for 15s in one direction to reset them - then press the other direction to start them. You go to the wireless/wifi menu and the lights will show up - click it and everything should be configured. Or so I thought. 

I did as I was supposed to do - but the configuration failed. I tried many times. Also from my phone and iPad. Also from my Windows Surface with Windows 10. Nu luck. Unknown error. 

I googled and did research. Turned of 5GHz wifi. Same issue. Reboot. A lot of reboots and resets. Nothing worked. Tired to Switch to a different Wireless AP. Still nothing worked.  Changed wifi-driver settings on the Windows Surface to force connection in 2.4GHz. Didn't work.

I contacted both the reseller and Elgato. Took more than a week to get a an answer. Got questions suggestions and things to try. Nothing worked. Went and bought a new Wifi router. Didn't help. Upgraded my router. Didn't help. Bonjour scanned. Ping scanned the network. Nothing.

Shipped the lights back to Elgato in the Netherlands. Got two new lights back. Guess what. Same problem. At this point I've spent maybe 40hrs troubleshooting and test without any progress. 

My friend Michael joked - if you just had my wifi routers (that I got and have at home) in the office it would work. I brought a lamp home to test. In 20s it was configuted and worked. Super happy I went online and bought another wifi router - same brand and model as at home. 

That router arrived this Monday. I installed it in the office. And guess what - the lights refuse to be configured. At this point I was ready to open the window and throw the damn light out as far as possible. But after the initial rage settled I packed the lights, my router and went home. Connected the router (with the same config as I used in the office) to my home router. In 5 minutes both lamps where configured and worked. 

Disconnected everything and went back to the office. Connected everything and now my lamps work. I still don't know why the lamps refuse to configure in the office. I have the same hardware in both places and similar setup. The only thing I can think of is that I have a "real ip" at home but in the office I have a "private ip" only. And potentially the lamps by accident use the same network range or something - but that is a long shot. 

I don't really care - and I will not think about lamp configuration for any time soon. Now I will enjoy them and make some good content with them. 

I have a storage problem. One DLink NAS with 500GB of space (10+ years old), one Apple Time Capsule 2G (~5 years), 2TB of dropbox space, 2TB external drives, memory cards, iCloud, google drive and a full hard drive on my laptop. 

Age is a big risk tied to moving disks - the older they are - the higher the risk of failure becomes. 

Bringing my data home - to much risk to have it in the cloud:

• Privacy 
• Security (vendor and me)

Bought a Synology Disk Station 1821+ and 4 x 4TB WD Red Pro disks (5 yrs warranty and fast). After some waiting it finally arrived yesterday and during my lunch break I set it up - and that is actually really easy. Put a disk in a casette. Put the casette into the unit. Connect it to the network and power it on. That's it. 

Software setup went fast. Needed to install Synologys latest software and create a volume. I decided to use SHR - Synology Hybrid Raid. Essentially a software raid - but gives you the advantage that you can use different hard drives in your raid setup and that can be handy later on. The 1821 has 8 bays but I only use 4 of them to start with. I will add additional drives as needed and in a years time bigger and faster driver will be available and I can easily upgrade. 

During the afternoon I started to copy data over to my new nas from my old DLink nas. I mounted (connected) both NASes to my mac and started to copy files. After a while my computer froze - I had to restart to get network connection back. This happened once more during the afternoon (of course in the middle of a call). I don't think this is caused by the Synology - it's is rather my USB3/ethernet card that gets warm or unstable with high load. 

It is pretty inefficient to copy or migrate data in this way. Data has to go on the wire from my old nas to my mac and then back out the wire to the Synology. I did some research and found that it is possible to mount the old nas straight on the nas and then copy the files directly. That is way more efficient and I could clearly see the how little load this caused in my network. 

During the day to day I will migrate remaining data on the old nas and on my Time Capsule. Move my backup from the time capsule to the Synology. Finally I will copy the data from one of my external drives onto the Synology as well. This should get my video and podcast archive in a great state and have it always online when I need it. 

Next steps is to move all files away from dropbox - the plan is to not extend my premium when the subscription ends in June/July. 

So far - happy with the unit. But will need to use it for a longer time and especially with a few of my remote use cases as a road warrior and also with and from my mobile devices such as the iPad and the iPhone. 

I hope you enjoyed to

I produce a lot of notes 

• many of them are handwritten 
• this since it is fast and easy to do 
• it is slow and my thinking can keep up

There are multiple problems with handwritten notes 

• They have a tendency to be in the notebook at home when you are not there
• They easily get out of order and can't be sorted
• They cant be searched when you need to find something specific

I have tried to use digital notes - e.g. writing in an app that I then can store in a repository or a file vault. It works for a few days and then I find my self with a pen in hand again. Inconsistency being a huge problem. 

As the tech geek I am - I bought the Remarkable2 - an e-ink device that you can write on. A special surface giving you a paper like feeling. I have a few problems with it.

• The paper feeling is not really paper feeling. 
• It is black and white only
• It doesn't integrate well enough with other applications and notes get stuck in the device. 
• The battery have a tendency to be out when you need to write. 
• Not compatible with my fountainpens and my favourite green ink from pilot. 

I have tried a lot of tools and lately I have gotten a workflow with RocketBooks and DevonThing to work well. 

RocketBook is the old - half-tech - notebook that you write on with normal pilot friXion pens. You then take a photo of the page and you can upload an OCR:ed pdf to a location of your choice. Then you can wipe the page clean with a moist cloth and reuse the page again. 

In my workflow the pdf lands in an inbox in dropbox. Here I can tag them with special topic tags and when a specific "clarified" tags are added - keyboard maestro picks the file up and drops it into DevonThink. Keyboard Maestro is a tool I bought for it's multiple clipboards but has become one of my automation tools of choice. DevonThink is a document database where you can search and organise reference documentation. 

Did I say that I have programmed buttons on my Stream Deck to tag and untag files? I did. This means I can quickly process and work through my inbox and move things into DevonThink with quick buttons on my Stream Deck. Once the files hit's DevonThink there are rules created to take files tagged in a specific file and move them to the correct space in the document hierarchy. 

I finally found a workflow that brings my handwritten notes into a searchable format in my computer to be portable and come with me where ever I am. And I am super happy with it. 

There are however improvements to it. Right now I'm tied down to rocket books. I would like to expand this to be more general. To work with my remarkable and other non RocketBook notebooks. I have been doing some experimentation and I hope I will be able to update you with additions to this workflow in a bit. 

I hope you...