Intro

After having my Synology volume crash out of the blue I came to some realizations that having a fragmented setup that evolved with me is unwise and creates many different points of failure. It dawned on me that I’ve been running my homelab in a degraded state for 3 weeks now as I’ve been migrating data off Synology and spending an inordinate amount of time trying to figure out how to use Proxmox. That’s because Proxmox has built-in capability to connect different setups together assuming they’re all running Proxmox There is a learning curve though. Proxmox is interesting. It looks easy; it sounds easy; it’s not easy. That’s because Proxmox has their way of doing things and if you don’t like it… tough.

Synology

Prior to the using Synology as my daily driver I had 2 Supermicro servers that were consuming too much power. The real reason I leaned into Synology though is because I was fed up with unRAID and in hindsight I think Synology was a rebound. It’s easy to see why anyone would choose Synology if they had a frustrating NAS experience because of all the raving reviews, the Synology suite of apps and the alluring UI. I was promised an Apple-like experience where things would just work with little oversight and just be a happy pappy camper. I got that some of the time. I will admit it’s possible that my nightmare occurred because I used third-party new ECC RAM (recommended on reddit). If that’s the case then Synology is rather quite fragile and I still can’t recommend it to anyone especially for the premium price tag it demands.

Some gripes I have with using Synology as my daily driver is that the latest and greatest Synology devices use AMD CPUs instead of Intel ones, which don’t have an integrated GPU meaning they have terrible video transcoding performance. One 1080p stream maxed my CPU usage. I decided to splurge and get a cheap Beelink NUC to transcode while the Synology ran the majority of other services. On paper that sounded great. In practice it’s a terrible idea because in hindsight the Synology has a beautiful UI that is superficial at best with an underlying operating system that is not as awesome as I had hoped. This is compounded by the fact that because docker, lxc, and podman have become mainstream (for enthusiasts) there is less and less of a reason to even use the Synology suite when self-hosted apps are as easy to setup and have a dedicated and passionate developer base working on them. Synology apps don’t get updated frequently.

Proxmox

When looking for a new system I wanted something that would be future proof. My options that I was aware of were Proxmox, Synolgoy, QNAP, Unraid, TrueNAS, OpenMediaVault, and stock Debian/Ubuntu. I have dabbled in QNAP and TrueNAS and ran instances of all the others. QNAP shares the Synology issue. TrueNAS sounds great, but is immediately off-putting as a homelab that does incremental spend (I can’t requisition an entirely new array at a moment’s notice) and wants to maximize value. This is especially true when we’re in a storage renaissance where we’re getting bigger and better drives for cheaper and cheaper. With TrueNAS you effectively lock yourself into a moment in time. I’d venture to bet the people buying those used 1TB HDDs off of eBAY are home labbers running TrueNAS setups. It’s also perfectly okay for them to do this because of ZFS’s data integrity feature set. To me it seems like a waste because you can get 3 to 4 times the storage for the same price. Stock Debian/Ubuntu—been there done that and I’ll pass. OMV is great, but it didn’t feel like a full NAS operating system and instead more of a storage manager of sorts (I use it for that purpose inside of Proxmox for that sexy UI). unRAID has some terrible performance issues once you start scaling up and they also use a flavor of Linux that has issues supporting legacy hardware (old supermicro servers) so if I want to not spend days and days troubleshooting I’m stuck on an older version of unRAID. I’ll talk about it in a future post.

That leaves Proxmox and it looks fantastic. It has everything you could want and is futureproofed by design. Having CEPH and High Availability built-in means that Proxmox can grow as you grow. If you only need 1 server that’s fine. If you don’t need distributed storage that’s also fine. However, when you eventually want more there’s a path ready for you to go down. My biggest gripe with Proxmox is how it seems like they intentionally make it difficult for consumers and noobs to get into.

The staff is of course very helpful (even moreso if you buy a support subscription), but it seems like they have a philosophy and methodology that you either follow or you can take a hike. For example, they could easily support DHCP because it’s literally adding one toggle in the UI. However, that would be too easy so you have to go to the command line if you want to use DHCP. If you decide to use DHCP you have also effectively gimped the networking tab because any changes to an interface will disable DHCP and bring you back to square one.

There are also some major differences between Docker and LXC. With docker your containers share an IP with the host and you use different ports. With LXC you get psuedo-virtual machines that are lightweight and have their own IP address. This is where networking is a pain because you’ll want to setup VLANs. It also seems intimidating because there isn’t just a single command-line that you input to get a fully setup container—oh wait there is. Proxmox Helper Scripts is a fantastic resource to quickly setup working containers making LXC arguably easier to setup than Docker. It’s brilliant. You can even run a script to setup a docker inside an LXC container. This is something I used when I migrated by Bitwarden instance over from Synology. I tried to manually set it up and I was having user permission issues. Using docker wasn’t the most efficient method, but it did the trick. The negatives have been negligible.

Did I mention the good folks at Proxmox (or their representatives) hate that it makes your life easier?

The silver-lining is that because it runs on top of Debian there is quite possibly the largest Linux community that has many of your questions already answered. The challenge is there’s alot of noise and so you’ll look through a dozen or so pages just to find the answer that is approximately what you’re looking for, but not quite. Just getting Proxmox’s infrastructure and network setup took me an entire weekend. However, once I got it all setup and figured out the ins and outs running it is like a dream.

Conclusion

As of now I thoroughly enjoy using Proxmox, but boy prepared to be gatekept. I actually recommend practicing your set-up inside of a virtual machine first before you go all in because nothing sucks more than having to pull out a monitor, keyboard, and mouse and physically go repair your server because you screwed up a configuration file (speaking from experience). This has only scratched the service of my “new” and ongoing “adventure”. Stay tuned for more updates and some tips and tricks I learned along the way.

I originally wrote this a few months back and never did anything with it. However, seeing now that the monitor I bought, the Evary for $107.99 is now discounted at 85.99, I thought I'd make a post and share my affiliate link.

Amazon is really good at selling you the same product, but making you think that you made the choice to buy it after considering your options. I mean really good. Throughout Amazon you will find many products that are either functionally identical with cosmetic changes or listings with photos showing exact same product from a different angle or photoshopped. I once purchased an item that was photoshopped a different color so it stood out from the riff raff only for the item to arrive the same color as everyone else's. In a sense it's the evolution of Ebay and the flea market.

When I think of eBay I tend to think of a messy user experience with chaos all around and lax listing requirement making it possible to hunt for value because of the asynchronous information that occurs in the muddled landscape. For example, if you sell something on eBay at a price you think is a good price and it sells faster than you can blink then the chances are your listing was way below market value and someone with skill realized this and snatched it up. This is more likely to occur because there can be a hundred unique listings of the same product each with their own description and photographs. If you search for something you'll often find the same item again and again and it can get kind of annoying. You can't do that on Amazon because identical items are grouped together.

Amazon has standardized listings with each product having a unique ID so that the same item is only under one listing--at least if they're identical. That's the where the loophole lies. Amazon allows sellers to simply create a new listing as long as it is an ever so slight difference... such as having a different brand name. Often much of the stuff is white label sourced from the same manufacturer. I will admit that sometimes the products are different--but ever so slightly like the variations between different pieces of lumber. Nothing that actually makes a functional difference whatsoever.

While it's easy to blame the sellers, they are simply taking advantage of Amazon's rules that allow this. Take monitors for example: Amazon has many many many different monitors priced at the $100-200 range and they are all 15.6". I originally had the suspicion that they are white label because there are really only a few major screen manufacturers, so it didn't make sense to have such a competitive landscape. That means they are likely white labeled from one supplier. There may be slight variations in the veneer or the case... but the internals or the guts appear to be identical. I'll include images/links at the end. Be on the lookout for these signatures on either the right or left side:

Here are some of the technical specs:

Aisde from a few outliers and price.. they are identical…

Conclusion

It's formalized drop shipping in a sense in order to follow Amazon's listing requirements. In a sense, Amazon has become Ebay with extra steps and vastly more popular because of the illusion that Amazon provides quality branded products.

That means you have two choices once you’ve identified a mass white-label product. Either buy the cheapest one after all the discounts are applied or buy the one with the most appealing brand name. This is why I suspect there's been a steady increase of people selling courses on how to sell stuff on amazon instead of them selling stuff themselves. They've been crowded out of the low hanging eCommerce fruit (especially when you consider the exchange rate for the vast majority of foreign sellers).

Image + Links:

I was on Discord trying to make a reference to Nina from Full Metal Alchemist, but I had forgotten her name. As I was searching for it I stumbled across something much more disturbing on multiple levels. I use searxng, which is a privacy focused search engine aggregator because I don't need prying eyes wondering why I look up random thoughts that pop into my head. For some odd reason, the privacy focused engines like DuckDuckGo and Brave don’t play nice with searxng… Keep that in mind next time you see one of their advertisements.

Nonetheless, I wanted a brief answer without opinion and exposition. I just wanted a fast fact, so I could add the Nina to my reference and seem smart and witty. I skipped the "mainstream" sites and for reference here is why:

If we measure screen real estate, I’d be willing to bet the advertisements take up more space than the actual content. I just wanted a name. I didn't need to know that our good friends at this fandom are talking about One Piece soon. So I scrolled past the first 5 results and I something caught my eye.

Here we are. Exactly what I'm looking for. The description is a little weird with two dates, but the answer is in the description. However, the web address has nothing to do with anime, which piqued my interest so I clicked.

The moment you click on the link this person's face--Hubert Drew's face--is staring right at you. Something feels off, but I read on. The post's content is weird:

Points 2 and 3 are the exact same and the sidebar is about the "author" who loves dogs and talks about the challenges of dog ownership... Last I checked, transmutation and alchemy is not related to dog ownership.

As I scroll down the answers start to become unrelated to the question and if the red flags weren't already there they certainly where when as I scrolled down to see the other bullet points:

"Should I watch Fullmetal Alchemist before brother hood?"

"That's a hard maybe because of the Portal of Truth."

I decided to poke around the site and my eyebrows raise when I see this blog post and I see that Hubert has a dog named Bella (See if you can spot the eyebrow raising post).

I'll be honest, this thought has never ever crossed my mind until now. I think it'll stay in the back of my mind and now.. it'll stay in the back of your mind too. However, worry not because once I see the pagination I notice that there's something odd. I see that there are ten posts per page and a total of... 7888 pages. That's right, there's roughly 78,880 blog posts spanning from August 17th to September 6th. **That's right**, our boy Hubert has written roughly 3,750 blog posts PER DAY EVERYDAY for 21 days. An herculean feat for any human--but not for an AI.

It's clear now that this blog's content was generated by an AI. What's surprising is it made it on the frontpage of QWANT's search. It dawned on me that the reason why there's two dates on QWANT's description is because it's an attempt to manipulate the SEO and QWANT doesn't differentiate between the metadata and the blog post's content--at least from what I can tell. Granted it's not the first result, but it's on the front page... and QWANT isn't exactly a tiny website. It's relatively small, but according to Wikipedia it's the 1415th most visited website in the world. You probably have fewer Facebook friends than that but in a world with 7 billion people... that's not small at all. From UberSuggest, there's an organic monthly traffic of 1 million.

If AI content can rank that high that easily then it shows that we're only at the cusp of AI's destabilizing effect on society. Small search engines may be doomed. We aren't even talking about AI generated images or anything. Just text.

I like a good deal. Letme preface that I'm sharing this because I think it's a great price and I have bought one. However, I haven't actually tried it myself. I've been eyeing an external battery that has at least 100W for use with a laptop for travel. I originally wanted the Anker 737 with it's awesome screen and the 140W output with 24,000maH of capacity. However, it came at a hefty premium ranging from \$100-\$150, which I couldn't justify since I don't travel enough. (Small tangent, but this is why I got a GoPro over a rando brand because I film enough to justify buying the premium product.) A non-Anker battery with at least 100W sells for about 25-50% cheaper. Either way $150 was too much for me, so I threw it in my Buy-It-Later and went on the deal prowl. Today, I stumbled across this listing with 100W output and a 20,000maH bank. It's specs are certainty less than the 737. However, at under \$50 after a 20% coupon it's a no brainer to purchase since in terms of raw specs I'm getting ~30% less output and ~15% less bank for a ~75% discount. I still hit my 100W requirement.

To tie this into something that sounds educational and interesting, this analogous to why Globalization exists in the first place. There's one battery that in terms of raw specs is absolutely better, but it's premium is so glaringly painful to look at that it's simply out of the question to not shop around first. The other option is definitely rough around the edges, but cheap enough to make an impulse purchase justifiable. It's akin to the domestic jeans that are $200 a pop versus the outsourced one that is on offer for $20.

Both of these batteries have a 24 month warranty (assuming the cheaper one's company still exists) and hey, it's sold on Amazon with their stellar customer service ;). If you are interested in the product, please consider my affiliate link here as it helps me at no additional cost.

There was a post on Reddit asking for advice if Obsidian was right for them and as I was responding it made me realize just how much Obsidian can do. I thought I would share my response and start to give examples of how I do certain things in Obsidian that might increase the productivity or workflow for you.

First off. I have adhd. That will explain some of the following.

My organization systems tend to start off OK and then blow up and die.

So far I have:

• 7,000+ bookmarks across several profiles

• …

• Hundreds of sort-of-organized notion pages. I don't even bother trying to organize them anymore, I just dump and search.

• Thousands upon thousands of google keep notes.

• 10 trello boards with hundreds of cards (this is the closest to organized I have)

• Many many excel spreadsheets (google sheets) were I tried to add projects and rankings via google forms.

If you like that style Obsidian with daily note and dataview are going to be your best friend. I used to have a million and one asdf.txt files that I jotted things down in and abandoned. With obsidian my homepage is the daily note where I can create a new note and from that note I add a tag and write whatever. Then, I can go to a dataview query and see all of my notes with that tag. I now have an insane number of ways to retrieve notes and I’m only using the Dataview third party plugin [for information retrieval]. I can use: the daily note, the title search, the contents search, the tags sidebar, the dataview query, referenced notes and on occasion block references. This is all in a non-hierarchical fashion so I never need to dig into folders. Not to mention I actually use maybe 40 odd plugins and Obsidian is still blazing fast with over 5000+ files (notes, images, documents, files, etc). So yes, I think Obsidian is right for you if you want to put everyone in the ultimate platform because I haven’t even started talking about how Obsidian can be a bookmark manager

I immediately remember having that same feeling of being bogged down with Notion where I ended up having sort-of-organized pages. I tried to keep a database of tourist locations as well as media that I had consumed and it felt like I needed to spend 5 minutes per entry. It looked great, but it made notetaking unfun. Ali Abdaal (a productivity guru who charges a good amount for a course that clones his style but without his good looks and captivating stare) loves Notion and he recently had a course on Skillshare about it. However, there’s a clear distinction between his use cases and ours. He is using it as a CMS for organizing his team and probably has one of his employees do the paperwork (processing the notes) for him where as we are doing it for PKM and are mostly riding solo. If so, that means he’s perfectly okay having someone spend 5 minutes slogging over a note’s metadata whereas it is unacceptable for us. Obsidian can almost look as good, but it’s a helka lot easier to manage notes. Here’s a list of Obsidian related posts that are on the pipeline:

• Notion is both flexible and inflexible

• Obsidian's flexibility is a key feature over Notion 'notetaking'

• Obsidian is better than a bookmark manager

• Why I’m moving away from Interstitial Journaling (Logseq)

• How my note taking has changed over the years

• Standardized notes ‘notetaking’ - Obsidian+Templater

• Dataview basics and snippets

• I’m only realizing now that snippets are a cheat code

• Dataview with style

• Galleries, cards and more

• Using Obsidian without Obsidian

Preamble

I realize I talk about without saying much because I think there's simply too much to cover and so I wanted to give a general overview of what I'm doing. I will likely start talking about plugins more in-depth and giving specific examples.

Obsidian Plugins mentioned:

• Templater

• Dataview

• Account Linker

• Image Toolkit

Introduction

I've recently felt overwhelmed by the sheer amount of information there is that exists surrounding Stable Diffusion and AI art in part because it's basically trying to understand art history, which is something people spend years dedicating their life to in higher education. Consequently, I have had an immense pressure to optimize and increase my productivity. I was previously spending alot of time doing everything manually and I often had dozens of tabs if not hundreds of tabs that still needed to be processed. There had to be a better way.

AI was the solution or rather more aptly algorithms, automation, and macros. I began to look into various plugins and macros that would increase my workflow. I knew that AutoHotKey is quite powerful and had used it before. However, I often found myself fighting myself trying to use it because I didn't use it often enough to completely memorize all the syntax resulting in my frequently browsing the web for answers. If I stopped using it for a while I would come back and have to learn everything all over again. That's why I decided to use a developed macro program (it's paid and can do everything AutoHotKey can, but is much easier to get going) as well as Obsidian plugins. I'll talk about that app another day, but today I want to give a broad overview of what I'm doing and how automating steps of it will make my data collection much easier.

The state of tools for AICG

Right now, we're in the wild west stage of AI or as a Japanese translation put it, a "Warring States" period between many different developers vying for a piece of the pie. Consequently, there isn't any one application that clearly stands out in terms of managing not only the information surrounding about the AI technology, but also the information that is generated by the AI--Stable Diffusion in this case. There are a number of interesting apps, but because they have a singular focus often with only a few developers if not only one. They are at least now rather limiting. This led me to lean on Obsidian because I've always wanted a holistic solution to information management and to date Obsidian is the closest thing to it.

The tools currently available for managing assets I found are lacking and that's a good thing because it forces me to create a solution instead of simply searching for a solution. What I wanted is a way to keep track what I've generated and in some cases see where those ideas came from. The current iteration of software that exists is either a SaaS or relatively new meaning that the tools available to us are limited. Lexica is arguably one of the more popular services, but they have since stopped logging prompt data and instead are using AI and algorithms (OpenCLIP) to try to reverse-engineer prompts. This results in low resolution data with a lot of fuzziness that can be annoying for people who have a vision, but are unable to describe it to the AI. If you don't believe me, try to use an auto captioning or tagging tool for some of your images for a dataset and see how the output looks. Trash in is trash out is what I've heard and what I've learned when trying to train an embedding. On to Obsidian.

Obsidian is the best solution I’ve found

One challenge with Obsidian is it reminds me of the old days of webdesign before there were frameworks and scripting and everything was mostly done by hand without the ability to create standardized pages that can be filled in by the web engine. The closest thing we have with Obsidian is dataview and templater, but they do have some limitations for all, but the most advanced coders who have a deep understanding of JavaScript. Having said that the notes still must be manually created. Consequently, I resort to macros and python to supplement my note taking and to help me rapidly create new pages and populate them with content in a standardized way. Having the files in plain markdown is such as simple, yet elegant feature of Obsidian as you can interface with your notes directly without the need for a fancy API or duct tape solutions.

Here is an example of some images I took from StylePile to learn more about art history and discover different artists and art styles. Within StylePile that is all you would be able to see--static images. However, with Obsidian I am able to find interesting artists and learn more about them simply by clicking on the image, which will load up their profile note which will provide links to their social media as well as some of their other artworks (This isn't quite working as intended because of some quirks).

This starts to illustrate the real power of Obsidian and how it has the potential to connect everything, both internal and external sources, and can be integrated with your existing knowledge. As a creative, we have to realize that things unrelated today may become related tomorrow and we are in some ways creating a dividend engine for the future by building a vast network of knowledge that is related to us. This isn't just a wiki filled with lifeless information because I am building layers on top of it and instead it's an engine that I can use to leverage my interests. Here is an example: suppose the AI created a very nice looking tree texture that's pretty neat looking. Someone who isn't keeping track of this might simply discard the image and never think about it again. I see the future potential of this tree texture so I make a record of it. If down the road I am trying to make a forested 3d animation and want to add a bit of zest to my trees I can search through my Obsidian library and find that very tree texture improving my animation.

This is all possible without plugins, but plugins like Dataview really do take this to the next level because I can generate a list of all the assets that I've saved and then filter by tags or folders. I don't need to have alot of overhead like Notion users who have to manually curate and ensure everything is properly done or it might break. I just need to create a new page and toss a tag on it and Dataview will do the rest. That means the more content I properly store inside Obsidian, the more powerful it becomes. Historically, I might've had to navigate to 3 or 4 different applications to leverage this same kind of power. I might have a 3d asset manager, an image manager, a document manager and a project manager. Obsidian does all of this--it can now visually prototype ideas with Canvas in the latest release.

Obsidian Canvas

So what exactly can Obsidian do that other services and something like an image gallery can't? For one, with the new Obsidian Canvas feature I can directly build on top of my images and see the direction that I am actually taking.

I can also use it to work on ideas and then put them on a canvas (heh) to generate new ideas from and see new possibilities, combinations and directions that I didn't previously think of

Conclusion

I have a number of other posts coming up that will describe some of my workflow possibly with video. That's what I'm working on at the moment and am quite pleased with just how Obsidian has been improving my workflow. In fact, this blog is written in Obsidian, which allows me to quickly reference some of the pictures shared here.

Obsidian Canvas has been released and as simplistic as it is it’s quite powerful. This is a quick example of how I use Obsidian to breakdown the components of a website. You can just as easily do this with notepad and then write down the headings with the associated elements, but this gives a complete overview at a glance while also giving you a understanding how all the pieces fit together with the visual in the center. I like this because I can immediately understand what I’m trying to do with a glance whereas with a notepad I might have to cross-reference multiple notes and double check what I’m doing is what I want to be doing. With this, I only need to use this canvas as my one reference.

I started writing this last week and I ended writing too much. After sitting on it for a week I decided to just post something.

A picture being worth a thousand words can mean many things. To some people it's simply a hit of dopamine. To an AI that is trained off of these pictures it can mean everything (see the header image). Here is a picture of my graph with attached file enabled and there's something quite different from previous weeks and I find it visually pleasing about it. The notes have taken shape on their own and instead of a clustered mess like they were in previous weeks there's a blossoming outward--a flowering of notes.

Last week I discussed how I changed my note title formatting and it has started top give me a bit of perspective especially now that I have been focused on one topic--AI and more specifically Stable Diffusion--for a good week or two. I've also been importing some of my old content from TheBrain, which was heavily structured. Both of these together have helped to reveal an interesting contrast between depth and breadth by how they are visualized on the graph. In this case Red notes are old notes that I've imported from TheBrain and Green notes are notes that are new notes related to Stable Diffusion and more broadly txt2img.

What you can see with both of the red and green notes is a blossoming that occurs from where the notes originate from. What is happening is with TheBrain is I have already connections from a previous lifetime and have already formatted the content after it's been written, so importing them creates levels of depth that would normally take a processing to develop. They're also primarily texts. Combined these two together and there is a tight controlled bloom or a nice tight clustering.

This contrasts quite differently with my Stable Diffusion notes where there is a much more intense blossoming because I am adding content quickly without too much thought and there are many more images--they are even quicker to add simultaneously adding much more and much less than words can result in a need for many of them to illustrate a point. In some cases, they are exponentially more useful than text because they immediately provide a frame of reference.

For example, how would you describe the Mona Lisa in writing? Simply stating, "A painted portrait of a female during the Renaissance by Leonardo da Vinci" makes sense to us, but that short description has an infinite number of combinations because of all that "white space" that is left up for interpretation because an AI given that prompt doesn't have the same frame of reference that we humans have. (This reminds me of a speaking event where Elon Musk--back when he was cool--spoke of how an AI could see us as an anthill and steamroll over us--Ultron basically.)

When are using the AI to create art we communicate with it through prompts, which is text we send to the txt2img diffuser to try to explain what we are trying to generate. Since the AI ins't a mind reader and can't see the vision in our eye it tries it's best with permutations only limited by our processing power and it's training. If you go back up and look at the header image that's the difference between two versions of trained data with the saying underlying model. This means that the more precise we are with our language the closer we can get to our results, but we can cause unintended consequences. There's a sweet spot where we give the AI enough guidance to create what we're looking for, but also enough freedom to creating something novel that surprises us.

All this rambling to say that this week's nodes are starting to take on the appearance of neurons that are trying to reach for the unknown as I explore more about AI. I think that we're on the cusp of a revolution here as we move from a consumption age or information age into a creation age. If you've been following the drama you can see many terrified artists who spent decades honing their creative craft only for an AI to generate hundreds of works similar to their likeness in the time it takes for them to produce one piece.

What we're seeing is instead of the truck drivers who we all thought would be jobless and taken over by self-driving cars we're instead seeing creatives who many previously thought were untouchable have a chunk of flesh taken out. On the flip side the amount of productivity growth is insane and you could even say that this is the democratization of artistic talent because now anyone with an imagination can bring that dream into reality... in some small form. What matters now is not how dexterous you are, but how imaginative and fantastical your ideas are. To use analogy: Soon, anyone can create a Rings of Power without a billion dollar budget, but only the select few will still be able to create a House of Dragons even with a billion dollar budget. That's why I'm so excited. Next week (I’m posting this from the future) will show that.

I've recently been in the market for some Hot Wheels tracks and one thing my brother said always stuck with me, "Value perceived is value received". Hot Wheel tracks are simultaneously simple and complex. They are a piece of plastic that uses a unique connector that makes them modular. Consequently, they are difficult for a layman to value. We all know that it's plastic and injection molded by the millions if not billions. However, we don't know the technology behind the connectors and if there's anything special or proprietary about them. So, even if we know the material value is say $.10 we aren't sure if a track is actually worth quarter or a buck. As such, Amazon has overpriced Hot Wheel tracks that appear to be dropshipped from DollarTree and Walmart appears to have Hot Wheel tracks that are dropshipped from Amazon. Ebay has dropships from both Amazon and DollarTree. Here is a rough diagram of the dropshipper's supply chain.

Here are Amazon tracks that appear to be the exact ones sold at Dollar Tree for a quadruple the price.

I actually went to Dollar Tree to try and find them and there was only one pack left (my header image). Komodo Dragon is right-ish. They are $1.25 for 2 meaning that the 4 pack there costs $5 making the $19.99 a 400% markup or 75% gross margin which is quite good. The rabbit hole goes deeper.

Here are Hot Wheels tracks sold on Walmart that are the exact same ones sold at Amazon (I bought the set), which is an Amazon exclusive meaning that they are getting it directly from the manufacturer. It even has the same image.

Now, because it has a higher base cost the markup can't be as high, but a 100% markup with a 55% gross margin is still a pretty penny. Someone who has deep pockets who happens to have Walmart+ *cough* AMEX holders *cough* who values their time might not cross reference the prices and just purchase it. After all, value perceived is value received and 40 feet looks like an awful lot of track. We're almost at the end. All roads lead to Ebay and what we're seeing here is every piece of Hot Wheels generic being sold here. If one of the big box retailers have a sale you will inevitably see a listing here with the discounted price marked up.

This last listing looks suspiciously like the Amazon exclusive with custom image. Just kidding, it's ripped off Amazon and is simply not the main image on the Amazon listing. And you know $40 for 40 feet of track doesn't actually sound like too bad of a deal. As to why Target is not part of the secondary market. It's simply because they have a restricted marketplace that is tightly controlled much like Apple's appstore. This prevents drop shippers from participating in their marketplace, which allows Target to maintain a curated and premium experience--unlike Walmart's clusterf*. Selling Hot Wheels is the classic arbitrage dropshipping technique that is tried and true. It’s good to know that old tricks still work.

Introduction

9 cents per hour is roughly $65 a month. That's what I learned when I purchased a four pack of the Emporia Energy App to monitor how much power I was using as well as how much power it takes to run stable diffusion. When you use those numbers, purchasing shared use of a GPU from something like Google collab starts to make sense. Nonetheless, there are many good reasons why you don't want to trust big brother with your projects. When I talk about Emporia smart plugs I am talking about it in the context of it’s power monitoring primarily and not just a smart plug. If it were just a smart plug then brand names like TP-Link’s Kasa do quite well and I have a couple of those as well. However, Emporia has much more sophisticated software and it’s perfect except for one big flaw.

“Duct tape” fix

I really like the device because it has so much packed into it and can be accessed on your phone. However, it has a fatal flaw that I like to call "Google Home duct tape" that you have to mitigate or correct before you can really trust this to do anything other than bit of a gimmick to turn off a light or two.

What is Google Home duct tape? Well, I call it that because that's where I discovered this "one neat little trick", but I'm sure it's used all over in many different smart home devices. Essentially, if you stare long and hard enough at your Google Home in the whee hours of the night when you should be asleep you'll see your Google Home reboot itself. I call it the duct tape solution because my best guess is this is done to ensure that if there are any memory leaks or sluggish performance that it'll be fixed with a restart.

It can cause nightmares.

Here is my computer losing power because the Emporia decided it was time to apply the duct tape fix. Thankfully, I wasn't doing anything important, but things could've gotten bad. Despite the shortcoming, this level of granularity for a sub $10 (per unit) device is amazing.

Emporia also applies this duct tape solution. The problem is whereas the Google Home is just a quasi-assistant with a screen, the Emporia smart plug can actually be powering critical infrastructure that you don't want to go down randomly. That is exactly what happened to my PC while I was troubleshooting something else and I was rather surprised because usually when there's a hiccup in the power either it goes down for a few minutes or the power flickers. Never has the power shut off and then turned back on. This was quite troubling so I went to the product listing to search for answers and this is what I came across.

The "cOmPeTiTiOn" for energy monitoring

Unfortunately, Emporia is the only device that plugs into an outlet that I've found at this price point and usability that can provide you this granular level of information. Kasa advertises that they can monitor your power, but their version of energy monitoring is like riding a bicycle versus driving a car with Emporia. That's why I got Emporia smart plug in the first place. It's obvious to me that Kasa just did the minimum to check off a box. If you simply need a smart plug then Kasa is hands down the best. I have a couple myself. However, I wanted something that could monitor power usage and Kasa is far far behind Emporia.

The solution

Don’t get one. That’s the easy solution. However, if you want a cheap affordable smart switch that has the capability to monitor energy usage then there’s no easy solution. There was talk of a firmware update that would improve reliability, but it seems the update did nothing to solve this issue. If you really want to track your usage you either look elsewhere or you have to fork out more money to put an Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS), which is a big battery between your hardware and the Emporia. This works for me because I have an old UPS lying around that I have procrastinated changing the batteries for for a long while, so it's free to be used. For other people I would say you're looking at a minimum of $60, but if you're powering a PC Desktop then you're looking to fork out at least $100. On the plus side, you're essentially forced to purchase an important upgrade for the longevity of your hardware as random power outage could quick literally fry your computer.

If you 1) understand that you can't use this 24/7 for anything beyond a light switch or perhaps a microwave, 2) you want to use it as a testing tool to see the draw, or 3) you are willing or already have a UPS feel free to check out the listing via my affiliate link. If the Emporia smart plug breaks, I'll post an update. For now, I will recommend it... with caveats.

I'm splitting up my lifelog section because after thinking about it for a bit I realized that it lacks purpose. If it's simply a log of what's going on then there's no need to publish it randomly. Am I sharing a keen observation or a lesson? That should go into Wisdom. Am I talking about some world view that I think we should all live by? That's probably something for Philosophy. Perhaps, I'm reorganizing my vault... that should go into productivity. It technically is more properly suited for organization. However, what is the purpose of organizing? Is it organizing for the sake or organizing or is it because it brings you Joy? Perhaps it's not joy, perhaps it's because you want to be more efficient. Well, then what we're really doing is talking about being more productive and not talking about organization. Organizing is simply an means to an end.

This means that the following blog posts will be moved from lifelog:

• [Lifelog 0001] Life is a struggle against entropy → [Philosophy 0001]

• [Lifelog 0002] Migrating Old Content -> [Productivity 0003]

• [Lifelog 0003] Accountability works -> [Productivity 0004]

Introduction

I was testing out the new Readwise Reader, which is pretty slick. My only gripes are that it's pay2play, you aren't able to modify the article to remove unwanted text (sometimes it captures the carousel links on the bottom) and the lack of privacy. However, for reading news articles, books and everything else the app is too slick to ignore. I've tried Instapaper, Wallabag, and Pocket. They are all good, but they aren't special like Readwise Reader.

However, due to the lack of privacy I would only use it for highlighting or making references and prep it for transfer into something private and personal like an Obsidian vault. I don't use the archive either. Once it's in the vault the article gets deleted. I have my own process for archiving webpages and don't need to utilize theirs.

Spark of realization

Back on topic, I was poking my head around and looking at the library options, something caught my eye. It was the workflow options that got me thinking about how I am managing my own notes.

I am something of a hoarder myself I am constantly finding interesting topics and bits of information that I find neat, but not something I necessarily am focused on at the moment. What happens is I create a space for it... but I may never end up actually getting to it until years down the road if ever. However, with the Readwise app has almost read my mind and provided an option that I never thought of. By putting everything in Later by default and then placing important things in the Shortlist it's the opposite of how we traditionally connect information. Instead it assumes that by default we are choosing to keep random crap--like a true datahoader should think... it's in the name--everything is unimportant and instead marking down what is important you can get to it later it actually keeps your attention focused on what you need to get down...which is the shortlist. Because I am interested in so many things and I lack both time and the energy to constantly be juggling 20 different topics I often have a piles and piles and piles and piles of things that are sitting randomly everywhere. Somethings are organized, others are jumbled together and still here are things from the same topic that are located in multiple places.

Peeking into my vault

The easiest example I can give is to take a peek at my Obsidian Vault. My inbox right now has 155 items when it should at most I think have only up to 10 things at any given time. However, because that's where all the default notes get created and I'm constantly bouncing from one thing to another often things go into limbo where it's not ready for the slipbox, but I don't want to do anything with it at the moment. Keeping the inbox and creating another shortlist folder where there's only 10 things that I'm focusing on the moment could help drive the engine of productivity.

A second glance into my vault

Here's another example where I think this could be utilized. This is the Kanban for everything that I'm writing here courtesy of the Projects Plugin. As you can see I actually have a bunch of blog posts written that haven't gotten around to publishing because I haven't done a final proofread. I could improve my workflow by creating something of a funnel a bit like an hourglass where the closer I get to finishing a post the fewer I allow myself to have until it's published.

For example, by adding a shortlist section between Done and Substack and then limiting my shortlist board to 3 cards and then my done board to 5 cards I give myself the flexibility to choose to work on something, but direct my energy into content creating instead of simply writing for the sake of writing

Conclusion

Having many different interests and the same time is a bit like having a low attention span because everything demands your attention equally and it's consequently granted. It's not that I'm unproductive by nature. Rather, it's that my energy is undirected so much so that instead of creating a flowing stream which turns into a river and then a flooding torrent I am instead creating a pond that's turning into a lake and then an ocean that goes nowhere. We never ask where the ocean is headed...

Introduction

Every model comes with it's own Variational Autoencoder (VAE). However, there are sometimes oversights or places where the model wasn't tuned well and that is where custom VAEs come into play. Different VAEs do different things. Some can improve certain features such as the mouth or eyes and others can improve the color. In my example if you look at the above notice how they are the same image, but one of them looks washed out? Take a guess, which one do you think has the VAE applied and which one doesn't? If you guessed the left one then you are correct. When I was starting out with this model I realized that something was wrong with my images, but I couldn't put my finger on it. It wasn't until someone mentioned that my images look bad that I thought maybe I downloaded a bad model and went to do some research only to find out that I didn't apply the custom VAE that was tuned for this model.

What are VAEs?

They area family of probabilistic graph models and variational Bayesian metho---blah blah blah. Speak English!

Simply put, VAEs are middlemen that take little squiggly what-cha-ma-call-it thingy-ma-bobs called latent vectors and translates late them into pixels—the oh so pretty pixels—that we dare to place our gaze upon.

How to use Custom VAEs

There are two ways to use VAEs. You can tailor it to a model specifically or you set it up for general use:

To make it usable for a specific model:

• You want to copy the VAE in to your models folder and change the name so it matches the model and then add a .vae.pt as the extension.

• For example, if I have a model appleSauce.ckpt and I wanted to apply a VAE to that model specifically I would copy myCustomVae.vae.pt into the model folder with appleSauce.ckpt and then I would rename myCustomVae.vae.pt to appleSauce.vae.pt.

• That’s all you need to do and after restarting A1111-webui the VAE will automatically be applied.

To make it usable for all models:

• The other way to use VAE is to put the into the ./models/VAE folder and then go into A1111-webui's settings and select the VAE. This will allow the VAE to be usable for any model. However, if you use many different models you may have unexpected results as the VAE is blanket applied on all your models. (Wonder why there isn’t a quick switch)

• The one challenge with this is if for example you use generate both realistic and drawn characters then using a cookie cutter approach can yield unintended results and could cause issues on it’s own. That’s why I like to use the first method where I leave the built-in setting to auto and I create a new VAE for each model. It takes up more space, but I can ensure that I always know what I’m dealing with.

Conclusion

Just like that your creations have the potentially to magically improve. In my case, my images now have more depth and color to them—at least for drawn characters. However, neon hair now looks completely wild. As you can see on the left the green hair is now light saber green as opposed to a soft sea green. This is why I suggest that you tailor fit the VAE for the model you are using.

If you want the premium experience just accept that big biz has got you by the gonads. Lets start by saying that DisplayPort is the unwanted child that does everything important except that it exists. It's great and the gaming oriented tech folks wants to sell it to you, but it came late to the party and lacks the networking effects that HDMI has. So it's widely unsupported. Great, except HDMI is a POS because of how convoluted and messy the specification itself is particularly when there's no consistent labeling. At least with USB 3.0 if you saw the blue plasticy bit you knew it was 3.0. HDMI has colors that are all over the place that companies pay extra to color code hoping that it'll be good marketing. I'm sure to a professional who spends their entire lives doing this understands it perfectly. I am a simpleton when it comes to this and all I know is a cable male and a cable female come together with an electrifying chemistry, or in this case a working monitor.

My journey begins when I foolishly thought I was being smart buying Dell's Cyber Monday deal on a monitor. I snagged the 24" for $70 and it has a sort of archaic look to it that screams boring business. The issue however is that it only has an HDMI and a VGA port. I couldn't get it to work on my AMD graphics card despite there being enough ports on it because I already had 3 monitors. I was being cheeky trying to get a fourth monitor and I paid the price--[[Hardware XXXX] 4 monitors is the perfect number]]. The trouble is I am using an R9 380, which is an older graphics card along with older monitors that all have been serving me faithfully since at least 2016. That's right, these bad boys have been with me through the thick and thin and have been performing wonderfully. I thought I was being smart by future proofing my setup and getting a 144hz 1080p one. I don't think 4K is really necessary for a monitor, but higher hz is absolutely noticeable and is a game changer. Even today the monitor is working fantastic except for one problem: it's using legacy hardware.

Three monitors works great. Nice Job AMD. However, the moment you add a 4th monitor AMD starts pouting and sulking and only three monitors will work. Technically, it's supposed to work but you need to have 3 monitors being the exact same model.. or was it 2? The answer will surprise you because nobody knows. I didn't know that either, so I went on down to my local overpriced Bestbuy to pick up the cheapest adapter I could and it still cost me about the same as a 6' cable on Amazon...which is absurd. Ironic that we say the Amazon premium is the price of convenience when going down to the local tech store is also paying for the price of convenience. That's another story for another day.

Anyway, it didn't work. So, now I had this black screen looking down on me everyday and I can't handle it,so I began researching how to solve it. "Get an MST adapter. It's plug-and-play", they said and so I did. I spent $80 to get a $70 monitor working with my setup. Except it didn't. It turns out that for some reason the MST I bought isn't compatible with my graphics card and none of my screens connected to it were working. So now I have 3 black screens staring down me and I have to creen my neck to view the side monitor because well that was just how the wiring ended up.

So I tell myself that maybe MST isn't the way to go. Okay, so then I heard some people mention about a DisplayPort to HDMI active adapter that would do the trick. I bought one of those. Then I read the fine print and realized that they come in different flavors and a unidirectional. For example, I accidentally bought the wrong one which is a DisplayPort to HDMI only meaning that you have a DisplayPort monitor and an HDMI signal... which is the exact opposite of what I needed. That was a dead end.

Then I got the idea of upgrading my GPU especially since it'll last me a good 3-6 years and despite AMD has all the power levels, but is painfully lacking in the software support. It's a horse without a saddle. You can ride it if you want to spent too much time figuring out how to ride bareback, but it's going to painful. On the other hand NVDIA is all sunshine and sugar cubes. This is also the time when I discovered Stable Diffusion and the text2image rage that was going on. So I got an NVDIA. Suddenly the 4th monitor works. Fantastic, but NVIDIA doesn't have a DVI+ whatever port so now my 144hz monitor is stuck at 60hz.

Simple solution I thought, I saw that there are HDMI cables with 144hz support, so I whip up the ol' Amazon to find a 144hz HDMI cable, so that I can overnight the cable because I'm not paying the BestBuy premium again. ANNNND it turns out that in order for HDMI 1.4 or 2.0 or any of these specifications to actually work not only does your graphics card and the cable need to support it, but also your monitor needs to support it.

In the end, the obvious answer was staring me right in the face. Throw away the old perfectly good monitor and buy a new expensive one so I can enjoy that quality experience I expected. That is exactly not what I did. I'll settle for 60hz until after the hole in my pocket recovers and/or one of my monitors starts to fail. On the other hand, the crippled 3060 I got works beautifully for Stable Diffusion and I can render a standard image in 4-8 seconds. If you are interested in checking it out here is my affiliate link. I got it for $389 and the price to value is off the charts. Obviously the 3080 or the 3090 have much better raw performance, but they are much less value and you could literally buy a used car with how much they cost.

Previously, I have been using the tried and true method of creating notes in the Zettelkasten format [22093011111] Note title. However, I also recently started using the projects plugin to manage my blog and I found that the ID while useful for understanding a chronology they get in the way when looking at data since using the title to sort loses value with the date prefixed in front of it..

However, I still definitely want to keep the ID because it allows me to have notes that share the same title. I don't immediately have to either come up with a new title or decide if they fit in the same note--they can co-exist until it’s maintenance time.

The solution I came up with is to move the ID in the end and as an unexpected bonus I can now add an emoji in front of the note title without making it seem like a clustermuck. Not all notes are created equal and it's important to differentiate between note types. and the more I thought about it the more I liked the idea of adding an emoji in front of the note. I originally was only using emojis for my folder names.

I've also realized that note chronology isn't as important as it seems when you have a bajillion and one notes. It's good to know when the note was created, but it's not essentially to have them ordered by creation date making the need for the date-id in front unimportant. This supports my idea of moving the id to the end of the note and allowing me to prepend emojis in front to allow me to quickly identify them. I have started using emojis for reoccurring note types such as my scaffolding note type, which I talked about in this week’s vault snapshot. This is the format for my new scaffolding notes: ⚛️ Scaffolding (22093011111).

I stumbled across the plugin Pipe Tricks. which would've enhanced the aesthetic of putting the Zettelkasten ID (ZKID) in the back of the note, but it's no longer working as of the Obsidian v1.0.3. One of the functions was it allowed you to short hand hiding the parentheses () at the back so it would be hidden during normal viewing.

I’ll update old note titles as I come across them, but I don't think it's necessary to go out of my way to rename them especially since they already have the proper metadata to allow dataview to query them. This is more for visual appeal and less for functionality.

Music is DIANA by Aim to Head

I mentioned how I recently stumbled across ai generated images in my latest vault snapshot and I was asking myself how I could showcase how awesome it is in a pleasing way that wasn't to intense and I also realized that I didn't have a good profile picture. So, I decided to try an create a profile picture for my content and after seeing what I created I thought it would be neat to combine it into a video and then I got the idea of spicing it up. Let me know what you think of the AI generated content as well as my profile picture. There are free options, but since I wanted to have a good experience I thought I would dabble in the premium side of things and then if I enjoyed it would venture into the headache inducing self-hosting aspects. So, I am currently using NovelAI. I'm pleased enough to say that I going through the motions to setup the AI on my own machine so that I don't need to stick another cord up my... wallet.

I've been thinking about the presentation of my vault and I have some ideas that I think will help to create a graph that is easier to understand especially when it comes to my knowledge growth. Currently, I dabbled in some color coding, but I've come up with a system that I think helps to illustrate the actual changes to my vault as well as the direction that my vault is going as opposed to simply having a big ball of notes. You could import all of Wikipedia and your graph would look impressive, but it would context and nuance to it that I think this system provides. Here are the new color coding:

• Dark red nodes represent useful information that I want to have, but I have done little to expand on develop the information

• Light brown nodes is information that I have imported from rotting trees of knowledge--knowledge from software I no longer use like TheBrain, Evernote, Joplin, Logseq, or Apple Notes

• Light pink nodes are bookmarks. They reference outside information that I may import in the future, may be too dense to import, or are sources of dynamically changing information.

• Black nodes represents the scaffolding of my vault. These are the daily journal notes where new notes are born from and where information is collected and pooled. This includes notes like content maps or table of contents for regular non-obsidian people. These notes help to organize and consolidate information. However, they don't necessarily add anything new on their own. To use the actual brain as an analogy, my information notes are the gray matter that form bodies of knowledge. The black notes is akin to the white matter in the brain that helps to transmit and disseminate knowledge as needed and actually helps to organize the information into knowledge. Without these important highs to access my information I believe that I would have to limit my scope of knowledge and couldn't allow my interests to wander about while staying organized.

So this past week there have been some interesting develops, which should be apparent by the giganti-norma-saurous of a scaffolding node with a bunch of links. That is because I stumbled across AI generated art and I fell into a daze as I was exploring the myriad of possibilities with it. I truly believe that with the introduction of this technology to the consumers we've quickly approaching the end of the Information Age and we are entering into the Creation Age because anyone can turn their thoughts into a half-decent looking reality. This is the technology that will transform daydreamers into content creators. Previously the barriers to their creativity were too high, but with the ability for (basically) anyone to create content simply describing their thoughts.. that's a game changer if I ever saw one. I was talking to my brother about this and he didn't seem that impressed. My only thought was that I guess he isn't as creative as I thought he was if he was dismissive of this technology. This bit is short because I want to make a post on it, but I have been so bedazzled by this technology that if my jaw could drop on to the floor it would. This is also the reason why my vault jumped in size by 47gb, because I have been saving the checkpoints or the trained models into my vault so that I can start to create something of a database for this information. I’ve actually seen some people selling prompt packs or some sh*t like that and it doesn’t really make any sense to me, but I guess people want guidance in a world of limitless possibilities as they are selling pretty decently all thinks considered.

I've also started to try to operationalize my PKM setup as well as the front acing part that I'm publishing because I have oh.. about 20 or so notes that I want to publish, but there's inertia that is holding me back from publishing them and I don't have a good way of getting myself out of that rut currently. The simplest way to put it is I can stir myself into action, but I'm not action-oriented regularly. This means that it takes conscious effort to actually produce content instead of it being I suppose a habit and something that comes naturally to me. I honestly think it was just how I was raised to not be an open book like the people we see on social media who share their entire life story and more because it feels natural to them. Sure, it creates an emotional connection... but at the same time it's a one-sided mirror. I forgot what the term is called, but there's something where the audience thinks that they have a personal relationship with the public figure, but the public figure is entirely unaware of them and so it's a one-sided relationship. Why isn't it in my vault...haha..

I bought one at $49.99 and I’m buying another now that it’s $39.99. I was previously using an older version G502, so I think this would be a nice little upgrade. If you would be so kind and use my affiliate link, you can jump directly to the deal.

I have alot of stuff that I have been meaning to share, but haven't gotten around to it because I always find one hurdle or another to stall and then procrastinate. The problem is that I never know where to start and when I try to start I find that there's a lot of inertia keeping me from starting and—oh look there's a new video from one of my YouTube subscriptions. My goal for the weekend is to publish 10,000 words. Here is the first 879 words.

The solution that I've used to some effect (not great effect because I'm lacking on the consistency of doing it) is to create playbooks. This is similar to a sports coach's playbook, but is more generalized to anything. I originally found this concept when I was using Evernote from Jamie Rubin’s blog. The key difference and my personal spin on it is I have split my guides into HOW-TOs and Playbooks. HOW-TOs are quite self-explanatory and describes simply how to do something such as how to change your car oil. It's fascinating to know, but not something I want to do. Maybe when it's holiday season I'll whip it out and don my know-it-all cape and drop some knowledge bombs. It's nice to know trivia.

Playbooks on the other hand are the operationalized steps needed to complete something that is relevant in my everyday life. For example, one of the playbooks I (should) reference frequently is my playbook on processing photos. I've switched away from bloated pay2play software like Lightroom and am now using DigiKam after trying a number of them and found that it's incredibly lightweight and just as incredibly powerful. It's certainly not a holistic photo application. However, for managing photos I haven't found anything that can match it despite it's quirks and lack of support. Here are three tips that I use when thinking about playbooks:

Treat yourself like an intern

• Every person has a million and one things that they are doing. However, they can only truly focus on one thing at a time. That's alright if you frequently rotate between a set number of things. Often we have many things that we pick up and put down only to let it collect dust and come back to it at a much later time and we've forgotten the progress that we've made and now have to start all the back from the beginning. That makes you back to the stage of an intern trying to figure it all out again.

• This is where Playbooks can be beneficial in helping you not only refresh your memory, but skip the growing pains that first challenged you when you started on the activity in the first place. The playbook helps to narrow your focus and focus on what's important.

Stop adding complexity by listening to yourself

• Treat the Playbook like a read-only document that you go out of your way to modify instead of adding or changing to it on the fly. When you need to execute a playbook it should be mindless, such that you don't create unnecessary friction in your execution of the task at hand. If you need to make a change feel free to make a note and comeback to it. However, if you are executing a playbook then you are trying to complete something. Don't distract yourself. Stay focused and execute. Execute, execute execute--just don't execute me.

When in doubt, trust the Pareto Principle

• Completing a task often necessitates doing what is important and not necessarily doing it perfectly. It the conscious decision to cut corners on things that don't move the needle on a cost-benefit analysis. The Pareto Principle is a good rule of thumb for what can be skipped in that 20% of additional work needed to create the perfect outcome will require 80% more effort than was needed to complete the first 80% that only took 20% of the effort. Your time is valuable. Of course value is in the eye of the beholder and there are times when putting in the extra effort will pay additional dividends. However, I've found time and time again for most things (perhaps 80%) following the Pareto Principle leads to net greater total productivity and thus benefit.

I've used playbooks for along time and it's been a slow going evolution that started out as an alias for HOW-TOs that branched off into a personalized HOW-TO that is relevant to me specifically. Everyone can use the same HOW-TO, but playbooks are different in that they focus on your own personal processes and not something generic. Everyone knows how-to slow down when they see a cop to avoid getting a traffic ticket. However, not everyone needs to know that on a particular local street that is somewhat parallel to The King's Highway and thus bypasses the congestion there is a crosswalk adjacent to a school with a speed bump that has a blind corner where motorcycle cops frequently lie in ambush for the unsuspecting commuter. Now, I don't personally need to make a playbook of it because I frequent the road so much. However, if this was a road less traveled then this would be a good playbook to make.