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Plugins, Patterns, and Potpourri

November 26, 2023 by Jay Cuthrell

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I’ve taken a few days to catch up on reading and hoped to exhaustively tag 200+ posts. I say hoped because it was way more fun to play with the different tools than to get the results mapped to the actual tagging.

So, I’ll just say I got close to tagging 20+ posts and learned a lot along the way. I also tried fixing some of the artifacts and formatting quirks of going from HTML to markdown back and forth between services.

Plugins

Since last week, I’ve added a few new (to me) plugins to my workflow that will allow me to copy an image or take a screenshot, add that image to my assets path, and insert the markdown for the image. While far from pixel perfect layout, it’s fun to experiment now that I’m expanding my reading of newsletters (again).

Also, I realized that I am probably not the right market for Drafts as an alternative to Obsidian. Even a great product does not mean it will be something I adopt and that seems to be where a plugin to an existing tool like Obsidian is more compelling than an alternative.

Basically, there are so many plugins I want to trial. However, I’m congnizant that I still need to write Fudge Sunday and get it out by Sunday.

Next month I’ll be updating my annual zettelkasten post. Stay tuned.

Patterns

My first selection to share starts with a question:

Is your spider sense for pattern recognition tingling?

Source: You’re Not a Fearmonger. You Have Sentinel Intelligence.

My second selection connects back to the pattern of Sundays…

Source: History buffs, telephone nerds, computer geeks: all are represented at Connections Museum Seattle. Working switches and equipment abound; open every Sunday.

My third selection will likely resonate if you are a knowledge worker that experienced an increase in the use of video conference meetings over the past few decades. If it seems to be a new pattern that is becoming another form of cognitive overhead, you aren’t wrong.

Source: Videoconferencing exhaustion has now been neurologically proven

Potpourri

I noticed in various return to office and business real estate news coverage that one article was being shared as a counterpoint to the “everyone is leaving the city” narrative. The article referenced another article that referenced another study.

Source: Downtowns Are Full of Empty Buildings. Universities Are Moving In.

Rabbit hole mode enabled… 🐰 🕳️

So where did that link to?

Source: What’s Driving US Downtown Revivals

At this point, I’m still clicking and… I’ll avoid any connection of the dots between REIT asset occupancy, city taxes, and market movement bonuses in financial journalist pools. 🤓

However, I do get the sense that this rabbit hole to reach a primary source is most likely a study-rehash-revisit for content (an evergreen thing in content farming) where you take something that is a month or more old then revisit or rehash as something truly new.

The actual study? 🐰 🕳️

Here we go:

Source: Can downtowns in the U.S. rebound and prosper? This fundamental question lingers more than three years after the global pandemic. This report seeks to counter misinformation and provide some of the data that can assist when making decisions and choosing actions that best support a robust and inclusive process of recovery.

The actual study was produced by The Center City District (CCD), Central Philadelphia Development Corporation (CPDC) and Center City District Foundation (CCDF) and they included an appendix section on their methodology. It turns out the data supplied to commercial real estate companies through sources such as the US Census Bureau, and… Placer was also included.

Placer? Who? 🐰 🕳️

These folks:

Sounds familar… 🐰 🕳️

This means learning a bit more about embedded SDK agreement claims and investments over the years. For example, back in 2020, the claim was that there were “20M+ Active Devices and +500 Apps” contributing to this data.

Granted, there are several companies that have become invisible to the user experience for metadata exfiltration, aggregation, and repackaging. However, there are methods for opt-out available as well when supplied with the IDentifier For Advertisers (IDFA) — and you need not be the Mayor. 🤓

That said, you can’t exactly opt-out of satellite imagery and geospatial analytics.

Source: RS Metrics TrafficSignals™ dataset contains parking lot traffic data for 65000+ retail store locations around the United States covering 52 major retail tickers