Ever since I started using Tahoe - the glassy latest version of Macos - on one of my Macs, text syncing has felt less reliable. The core of my system is Obsidian pointed to a folder in Icloud, and on the phone I most often use Bebop to quickly add text to the current day's text file. Nice and simple and - most of the time - quite reliable. But in the past few months, I have started catching mistakes. Sometimes the most benign version, where a second daily note with a "2" appended to its name appears. I simply cut and paste the things I want to the main file, delete the second one, and move on. But sometimes, I would open a computer and start typing, then later notice something missing. I was then able to command-z back and rescue text which came in through Icloud. Close call, and quite annoying. Luckily, there is a good part. Yesterday, I discovered a whole long section missing from the previous day's file. A section I had put some thought into and not only was quite happy with but also knew I would want to use in the future. No amount of undo/redo or optimistic checking of other devices helped. Then, I discovered Obsidian's core plugin "File recovery". Enabled by default, it saves the state of your files every five minutes and keeps that history for a whole week! Just go into Settings -> Core plugins -> File recovery and click the "View" button to select a file and see what has been saved. Sure enough, my text was there, and by skipping through the snapshots I could also see where a note from my phone came bumbling in and over-wrote it. I am still not sure what I should do about the actual issue. Apart from watching things like a hawk and hope that future updates help resolve it. Perhaps I should start saving Bebop's notes to a separate file name, just to be on the safe side? In any case: snapshots, what a life saver!

I woke up today to find the world had again taken confident steps along the path clearly labeled "worse". The last few minutes before I turned off the lights last night were the exact opposite. Small, personal, friendly steps on the bright path stretching out next to the "better" sign. What I did? Nothing out of the ordinary, I just picked up A pattern language and The timeless way of building from my bedside table and spent a few blissful minutes reading passages in both. We do not need huge solutions to things. We just need to practice, gather information, and give a damn. (That last part often feels particularly lost, but I suspect many of our problems actually are strongly connected with doing way too little of the first.) It is easy to get swept up into exciting systems thinking reading these books. And so it is always a - yet another - breath of fresh air and ray of sunshine to read the last part of The timeless way of building where it all folds in on itself and disappears because when you have actually internalized things you no longer need the support structures. Both books are simply the training wheels you need to get to where you actually want to be; where you need none of this to be explicit at all. And most likely not applied exactly as written either. So many more instructions should end with a chapter like that.