If I understand correctly, that wouldn’t change things: hyphens are used in English to link words (e.g., “work-product privilege” — the noun work modifies the noun product, and the two together modify the noun privilege) but two linked nouns of equal importance are a special case.
Fun fact! Where a compound term is formed by joining two nouns of equal importance — such as Sarbanes–Oxley or attorney–client privilege — an en-dash, not a hyphen, should be used.
I’m a dictaphone fan. Even better than the kind shown in the article are the ones with sliding switches. I have an Olympus model.
Mine has both internal memory and SD card capability. And similar to what the author aspires to, I record bits and bobs throughout the day and then use the SD card to transfer them to my Mac. From there, they automatically get added to a MacWhisper watch folder and then automatically transcribed to plain text with the Parakeet v3 model.
I use regex to put each sentence on its own line and then I dump the file’s contents into my ongoing mindmap, where I sort everything out. (From there, ideas make their way to other files/apps: outlines, OmniFocus/TaskPaper, calendar, email, etc.) The text file then gets archived and is easily searchable later (nvALT/Obsidian, ripgrep, etc.). It’s a great system — primarily because it reduces distractions; it keeps me away from the screen and off the phone; it’s ergonomic; and it affords background/subconscious processing time and power. The mind releases ideas out of order, and the system lets me capture them easily and anywhere, and then sort, edit, combine, and act on them later.
My only complaint is that Parakeet doesn’t respect punctuation commands. I can work around that with regex / find-and-replace, but it’s a bit janky.
I’d love having a smaller dictaphone device that would fit on a keychain without any loss in functionality, and perhaps with improvements in recording quality and battery life. Wireless transfer would be nice too.
> I am left handed. … When I was a child, writing at length with pencil, the side of my hand sometimes became gray from graphite picked up as my hand rubbed across the page.
Writing with pencil is fine. I prefer it, and its variations in line weight can be quite attractive. Moreover, it can be done without pressing hard and causing cramps: either accept a lighter line weight or use darker graphite.
I agree with you about the gatekeeping. Handwriting is simple but the Internet has fetishized it. Just write a lot: in a notebook, on index cards, on scraps, wherever. And don't think twice about it: in my experience, most of the time what's written has little if any long-term importance and its greatest virtue is rather to trigger the aware mind to release the idea for the mind's more-mysterious parts to then process, combine, and assimilate effortlessly in the background.
Send the guy (er, one of the many guys) with both national-security knowledge and a weak spot for alcohol into the lion’s den of espionage in the land of vodka. What could go wrong?
While not precisely “plain language”, the homepage’s strange execution of the en-dashes –with a space before them but not after them, like this –is ironically antithetical to the big idea behind the government’s writing requirements.
Instead of "keeping up with the news", consider using your brainpower + LLMs to distinguish signal and noise in the sectors that interest you, and then accordingly wiring up identification of sources, searches, and reading to update yourself only as frequently as necessary.
Pas de publicité, SVP
Unless personally requested, sales outreach and advertisements are unwelcome.