Recently I've been on a bit of a "turn stuff into Markdown files and slap them in an Obsidian Vault" trip. This kicked off a couple of months back when I made a decision unrelated to coding.

On and off, since my teenage years, I've kept journals. Since those teenage years it's been more off than on, but a couple of times in my adult life it's been really helpful to actually write one. The last time this happened was early 2019. It was pretty vital I did that at the time and it was a really sensible and helpful decision, and an approach to the situation I was in that I'd recommend to anyone (and have done on occasion to anyone going through the same thing).

The actual motivation for starting that particular journal is long behind me, but I'd got into the habit of writing it and so, until a couple or so months back, I kept jotting something down every day. But I came to the realisation that I didn't need to and that it had become something of a chore.

I'd been using an application called Journey. It's a great app, does the job well, but was also suffering from the creep of "AI" (I've had a few apps ion my arsenal that don't need it, acquire a useless "AI" feature). This privacy-problematic change of direction, combined with the realisation that I didn't need to write about my day, every day, any more, made me decide it was time to stop and cancel the subscription.

Thankfully Journey has a pretty comprehensive export option so I used it and didn't think too much more about it for a while.

Meanwhile I also had a subscription to Evernote that I didn't really use any more. Within it I had held a handful of years of journal entries from a decade or so ago, along with other "remember this for some point in the future" stuff. For the longest time I was on some really cheap tier that didn't exist any more, one that was low enough that I didn't really notice the cost go out each month so I kept putting off exporting things and closing it all down until "next month".

Then I got an email from them to say they were forcing me onto some new tier that was more expensive. So that was the final straw there. I made an export of what I had in Evernote and closed that account down too.

A wee while went past and then I got to thinking that it might be interesting to try and combine both these sources into one archived journal. I had stuff from around 2010 to 2015, and I also had stuff from 2019 until 2024; the former in the Evernote archive and the latter in the Journey archive. Surely I could write a couple of tools to turn that data into one consolidated Obsidian Vault?

Over the course of a couple of weekends journey2md and evernote2md were born. While both of those tools work differently, they're both designed to populate the same Obsidian Vault. Once I was happy with this I did the mass conversion and I was happy with the result.

Now I have years of journal entries, all converted to Markdown files and made available for reading via an application that lets me rummage through history using dates and tags and all sorts of other searching.

So I was happy with that and didn't give it much more though.

Then last week I got to thinking...

Twitter has turned into the worst place possible and I can't for the life of me think why any right-thinking person who has an ounce of humanity or has anything approaching a humanistic outlook on life would remain an active user. Honestly I stuck it out longer than was sensible, but in June 2023 I finally quit for good.

Back when the new owner was confirmed I, like a lot of people, extracted my archive. It's since been sat in storage doing nothing, yet there's a lot of data in there that could be interesting to work with, or just to go back and look through. So last week's thought was "why don't I also turn this into an Obsidian Vault?".

So I did...

The tool I built to do this is bird2glass. As you'll see in the README it makes a few assumptions about the state of Twitter archive dumps and also what a user wants from this. Personally I'm pleased with the result.

The main aim of the tool is to break the tweets down into a hierarchy of year, month and day...

...and also to connect them with any account that was being replied to or mentioned in some way...

This user view is handy when viewing backlinks, as it gives you a list of all the tweets that mention that user (and, of course, if you're into Obsidian's graph it will make for some interesting connections within there).

I sense there's more I can do with this, and I imagine I will continue to tinker with it. Meanwhile though, if that sounds like something you'd benefit from do feel free to grab it and play with it and hack on it. Keep in mind the notes and assumptions that are in the README, and really be prepared for a lot of files to be created if you did a lot of tweeting like I did (I do think that over 50,000 individual files for an Obsidian Vault is a bit silly, if I'm honest).

Meanwhile... I might need to look at other applications and think about how I can turn the data into useful Markdown collections!

The other day I stumbled on a tip about Evernote. It was a snippet of information in a bigger post on the Evernote blog so I saved it to Evernote (obviously) to take a look at later.

The tip was that Ctrl-Cmd-B in Evernote (on the Mac) will format a body of text as source code. While I'm not in the habit of using Evernote to store code, not even snippets of code (that's something far better served by Gist), it seemed like something worth committing to memory.

This morning, while finally in front of a suitable machine, I took a look. Sure enough, there's the menu option.

Handy! So I created a test note with some code in it so that I could see how it formatted it. I was curious to see if it just did simple fixed text or if it offered options to highlight various languages (I didn't hold out much hope for the latter, but it was worth a look).

That's when it got odd.

After I created a note and went to format some code, the menu option disappeared!

From what I can tell, once it's gone, there's no way to get it back. At least, not until you actually close down Evernote and start it up again.

Frustratingly, none of this is the case in the Windows version. While the key combination is different there, the menu option is available and stays available.

The version of Evernote I have (on my iMac and my Macbook) is 6.9.2. The version number on Windows is 6.4.2 (after checking for updates -- I'm going to guess that the Mac and Windows version numbers don't match on purpose).

Goodness knows what's going on here. All I can imagine is that it has something to do with a thread I found on Evernote's support forum that suggests that code block formatting is some sort of test/beta feature and can only be enabled via a settings option that isn't available via the version downloaded from the Apple App Store.

So, at some point, I guess I'm going to have to uninstall Evernote from the Macbook and the iMac, reinstall from the Evernote website itself, and try this again. All of which seems a bit silly when the menu option is there and visible when I run Evernote up!

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Edit to add: Sure enough, removing the App Store version and installing the version from Evernote's own website, and then going into preferences and enabling the option, sorted it. It's still really odd they'd promote the facility via the blog and not mention it, and also very odd that the option would always show until the first time you're in a position to use it, and then it'd disappear.

By the looks of things, with the recent updates to their desktop applications, Evernote have discovered the joys of pop-ups for advertising purposes. I'm finding it just as annoying as it was back in the days when people thought it was the smart way to make you buy things on the web.

Now, to be fair, the pop-up you see above is the one on my iMac and that at least has the good taste to only pop up within the application itself (although the Evernote icon in the dock at the bottom of the screen kept jumping around like it really wanted attention when this happened). The Windows one, however, is much worse.

I've actually not had a chance to capture a copy yet as it normally has the habit of getting in the way while I'm actually trying to do something; but the Windows version has the bad taste to actually pop up over my desktop. Yes, that's right, over my bloody desktop!

In both cases it's advertising Evernote's paid-for tiers in a way that it never has before. It's seriously annoying.

Now, before anyone pipes up that it's a company that needs money to keep things going... I know. I don't mind that. I don't mind the odd nag here and there. More to the point I actually don't mind paying for software and services. I actually do pay for software and services. There's a handful of different tools and the like that I make good use of every month which I pay for because they're worth paying for.

Evernote is one that I've been considering paying for too. The problem is, what they offer in the paid versions isn't really anything I need. Everything I use Evernote for can be done in the free version; I have no need to pay for it.

There is, of course, a good argument to be made in favour of the idea that if you benefit from a service you should pay for it anyway so that it doesn't go away. Having watched the likes of Catch and Springpad disappear I think that's a very compelling argument and one that has had me, in recent months, thinking I should buy some paid-for Evernote tier.

The problem I face now though is this: this move by Evernote to go with a pop-up nagware model, especially one that's willing to pop up nagging windows on my desktop, gives me the feeling that the company is struggling and getting desperate. While this should have me thinking that now is a really good time to pay for something I appreciate it's actually having the opposite effect. It's having me wonder if, in fact, I should be looking for an alternative that isn't giving this impression.

Yes, even one that I'd need to pay for.