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Obsidian is a note-taking software and knowledge base software, where the notes/files are written in Markdown. For quite a while I'm using it in my daily work.

One of the cool features it has is named "Daily Notes". As the name implies, there is a new note generated for every day. For me, this is used for writing down notes which do not deserve their own note. But also this is rather heavily used to share all kind of content from my mobile devides into the daily note in the first place. Content doesn't have to stay there, in fact most of it is either handled one way or another, or is moved to a different place. But it is a very nice collection point in the first place.

By default they are created in the main folder of the Obsidian vault - over time, these are hundreds of files, and no real structure. Which deserves to organize the Daily Notes in a better way.

 

Continue reading "Daily Notes in Obsidian"

On my Mac, one of the annoying "features" is when the Mac screensaver comes on, the device eventually goes to sleep, and it disconnects the network. Which in turn timeouts services like Slack or Google, because these services keep a network connection open at all times. When waking up the device, I often have to login again into all the services, even though the device is just sitting in my working room on the desk all day and night. Very annoying.
I suppose it's one of these things where Apple thinks they know better how users want their device to behave.

KeepingYouAwake is a nice little tool which prevents all of this.

When it is running and activated, it prevents the Mac from going to sleep. Which in turn never deactivates the network. And never timeouts the online services.

What's not to love about it?

Picture made by Anton Atanasov

Sometimes I have to extract Exif information from images, mostly the GPS coordinates. The coordinates coming raw from the images are not very helpful. Let's look at a picture I took today:

Bowl of ice cream

darktable shows the following coordinates:

latitude: N 52° 40,198'
longitude: E 013° 16,852'
elevation: 93,90 m above sea level

Now that is not very helpful, because neither OpenStreetMap nor Google recognize this format out of the box:

N 52° 40,198' E 013° 16,852'

Coordinates not working in OpenStreetMap

Coordinates not working in Google

Bummer. And I don't have the time or energy to fix that every time I need the coordinates. Luckily exiftool can output the coordinates in different formats, which is super helpful. For my use cases I choose the Degrees.MinutesSeconds format, also named "Decimal degrees", or DD. This format shows latitude and longitude geographic coordinates as decimal fractions of a degree.

exiftool -time:all -location:all -G -a -s -c "%.6f"

The explanation for the options used here:

• -G: Print group name for each tag
• -a: Allow duplicate tags to be extracted
• -s: Short output format
• -v: Print verbose messages
• -q: Quiet processing
• -c "%.6f": Set format for GPS coordinates

Using these settings, I get the following coordinates:

[Composite]     GPSAltitude                     : 93.9 m Above Sea Level
[Composite]     GPSLatitude                     : 52.669959 N
[Composite]     GPSLongitude                    : 13.280862 E
[Composite]     GPSPosition                     : 52.669959 N, 13.280862 E

Which sure enough brings me right to the ice cream place "Il Pistacchio" in Hohen Neuendorf, which I visited earlier today.

Il Pistacchio on OpenStreetMap

For syncing files between my devices I'm using SyncThing. This tool is reliable, available on Linux, Android, Mac and iOS. And it encrypts the communication.

But sometimes I want to know when files in certain directories have changed - as example in my Obsidian vault. This allows me to post-process the files.

Some of the use cases I have in Obsidian:

• Resolve links in Daily Notes: when I share a URL from my RSS reader or from other sources into Obsidian, the URL sometimes is just a link to a URL shortener. I then later need to resolve the link - or let a script do it right away for known shortlinks, and update the daily note.
• Remove tracking information from URLs: many shared links include campaign and tracking information, and this can be removed straight away.
• Extract content from certain Toots: I follow a couple interesting accounts on Mastodon, and when I share the Toot link into Obsidian, the script extracts the Toot content and adds it, along with the original link, to a pre-defined note.
• Extract links from Toots: many news websites include a link (sometimes again with tracking information) in their Toots. When I share such a Toot into Obsidian, a script picks up the link, extract the target link and updates the daily note.

All of this is not very complicated, and a couple of lines in Python do the job. The main parts for the script are:

• extract the API key from the SyncThing configuration
• Open a connection to the local SyncThing instance
• Watch for certain events

 

Continue reading "Watch for changed files in SyncThing"

The topic for this month's PGSQL Phriday blogging challenge is: pg_stat_statement. And Michael Christofides gave me a perfect opener in his invitation.

For anyone who doesn't know, I'm running a weekly interview series with people from the PostgreSQL community. It's called "PostgreSQL Person of the Week". One of the questions in the default set I give everyone is:

What is your favorite PostgreSQL extension?

And guess what the answer is: by far everyone's favorite is pg_stat_statements!

What does this extension do? It tracks statistics for planning and execution for queries run by users. This can be used to find long-running queries, users who run too many or too heavy queries, or just generate statistics about the workload. In short: very useful data. And the extension itself does not need a lot of resources. Even better.

This extension is so popular that it has double the interview mentions than the next one (which is PostGIS - by itself also a very popular extension). From the slides I occasionally present at conferences or meetups:

PostgreSQL has a lot of extensions, head over to the PostgreSQL Extension network (PGXN) which is operated by David E. Wheeler to find out about around 360 extensions. Currently in my interviews I have 51 different extensions mentioned.

This extension is so useful that people say:

• Julia Gugel: "I like pg_stat_statements as it helps a lot with performance troubleshooting."
• Daniel Westermann: "pg_stat_statements, because it is just required if you want to troubleshoot performance related issues. I still wonder why it comes as an extension and is not there by default."
• Lætitia Avrot: "Of course, I advise my customers to use pg_stat_statements to monitor their performance"
• Alexander Kukushkin: "The pg_stat_statements extension is something that everyone must enable for performance monitoring and troubleshooting."
• Flavio Gurgel: "I cannot live without pg_stat_statements, I think it’s mandatory for server optimisation."
• Anthony Nowocien: "pg_stat_statements and I will be glad to see it in core."

This is just a small selection of quotes, but this shows that everyone loves pg_stat_statements. I encourage you to head over and read more interviews. There's plenty of insight from community members.