Tag: kindle

A use for Obsidian Unlinked Mentions

Have you had the experience of coming across an application feature and wondering why did a software designer decide to go to the trouble of creating and then shipping that feature? Somewhere I encountered a comment on an Obsidian feature called an Unlinked Mention. It took me some time to find it and then even more time in an effort to understand why it exists. I am still not certain how it is to be used and why there wouldn’t be similar features that would be more useful. I have come up with one way I find it offers some value so I will explain what seems a hack and then hope others can find my description helpful in encouraging similar or additional uses. 

Note: My description and proposed actions are based on Obsidian on a computer. Some of the actions I describe I could not get to work on my iPad. 

So, I think an unlinked mention is supposed to be understood as something like a backlink. In Obsidian when you create a link among two notes (A – B), Obsidian recognizes but does not automatically display the backlink (B-A). For a given note (A), you can get Obsidian to display any backlinks to that note using the backlinks option for the right-hand panel of the Obsidian display. For the note that is active in the middle panel, the right-hand panel should indicate linked mentions and unlinked mentions. You may have to select which you want displayed and it is possible nothing will be displayed for either option. The linked mentions are the backlinks and you can select and display the backlinked notes from this display. 

The unlinked mentions are other notes that contain the same exact phrase as you have used to title Note A. Who knew? Why? Maybe I never quite understood the power of a title or how my notes were supposed to be titled. I have tried to think about this and I still don’t get it.

Here is my hack and I think a way to take advantage of unlinked mentions. Start with a blank note and add a title likely to be used within other content you have stored within other notes. To make the effort, your word or phrase would have to be something you want to investigate. I used the word “metacognition” because this is an important concept in the applied cognitive psychology research I read and attempted to apply to educational uses of technology. I have notes about this concept, but the greatest value I found in this hack was taking advantage of all of the Kindle notes and highlights I had stored in Obsidian via Readwise. In my account, there are more than 200 books worth of notes and highlights and the content for each book is often several pages long.  I create notes myself as I read, but there is all of this additional content that may contain things I might find useful. Certainly, several of these books would contain content, especially highlights, focused on metacognition. 

Once I have my new note with the simple title “metacognition” and for this note look under unlinked mentions in the right-hand column, I now have lots of entries. At this point, my note is still blank, but I now can access many other mentions of metacognition from this list of unlinked mentions. If I select one of these mentions, a “link” button appears and if I select this button Obsidian generates a forward link in the A document and adds the A document to my blank B document as a backlink. The B note is still blank.

Here comes the hack. One of the core plugins for Obsidians is called backlink (use the gear icon from the panel on the left) and it contains a slider that will display backlinks at the bottom of a note (see following image). Now you can display backlinks on your blank note that allow access to the unlinked content you have linked. See the second image below.

The process I have described is a way to generate a collection of links on a topic that would not be available without this hack. It is the process that finds specific mentions of a concept within much larger bodies of content (the highlights from Kindle books) that I find useful. Give it a try.

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What I think is important – what you think is important

I read a lot of Kindle books. My wife and I have written a book available for the Kindle. The “Kindle model” offers some capabilities that are under appreciated and often unknown to many readers.

For example, I am interested in the potential of sharing highlights and annotations. I have taken the time to highlight and annotate our own book and the books I assign for me graduate classes.

I have a new fascination. I was searching our Kindle book for a specific references and discovered that I can now view the most frequently highlighted passages by readers. Do the readers highlight the same content as I highlight? Do they highlight what I think are more applied content or content I would describe as conceptual and likely to be unfamiliar. There must be something here for deeper analysis. I had thought shared highlights was something I could share or readers could share with each other, but now I see value in the annotations as feedback to the author.

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We are from Apple and we are here to help

I am preparing for a presentation that concerns the hidden potential in Kindle services. In preparing to discuss the options for viewing documents uploaded to Kinde (e.g., pdfs of content I might want to read on various devices), I discover that in addition to the “mail to my special Kindle email address” option, there is now a PC or Mac app dedicated to this purpose. This sounded more practical than remembering the weird email address I am supposed to use.

I download the app to my Mac (running the newest and greatest OS) and I see the following:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I admit this confused me and it took some time to figure out why. I interpreted the message to indicate that I could not download the app. This seemed to be what was happening. Actually, I was downloading the app, but the message was generated when the OS then automatically attempted to launch the app after download. I was also confused by the message itself. Somehow I assumed that Apple would be aware of Amazon and Kindle products.

OK – here is what you may find useful.

Should you receive such a message when downloading software from an unknown developer, open security preferences and rest the download option to download from anywhere. This may be a bit deceptive – look in downloads and see if the offending download is not already there and simply needs to be opened. Once, finished reset your security settings. You make your own decision regarding whether from app store or from identified developers means different things,

 

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Read and annotate your docs in your Kindle app

You can now send documents to read on Kindle even if you use the Kindle reader on another device.

1) Items are sent to yourname@kindle.com
2) You must register the email address FROM which you will be sending documents (as attachments)
3) Enter “convert” (just the word) as the header in your email if you want the document converted to Kindle format – you probable do. Conversion is necessary for changing font size and mark up options
4) Be patient – conversion takes some time
5) Read the Kindle instructions – there was some comment about a cost if you are a heavy user. I am just exploring at this point.

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iPad Kindle to Evernote

I am doing much more of my “professional” reading on the iPad. In most cases, this means reading books using the Kindle app. Perhaps the most difficult thing in transitioning from paper to the iPad was finding a suitable substitute for the margin notes and highlighting I do with the paper version of a book. I am gradually becoming better at the highlight feature within the Kindle app – I seem to have trouble getting the iPad to designate the text I want to highlight.

What I really like about the Kindle is the way in which I can download my notes and highlights. I am not certain how many people do this even if they take notes and highlight. The process works great, but in a little different way than most might expect. The content is actually located online (go to https://kindle.amazon.com/ and login using your Amazon account). Select the “Your Book” link near the top of the page and you should be able to view the highlights associated with each book you have read or are reading. You can copy and paste the notes from this site if you want.

I happened to remember that the Savvy Technologist discussed this process from back in the day when I read books on a Kindle rather than a Kindle app. I did locate his post and discovered that it explained how to export highlights from the Amazon web site to Evernote. Sure enough it works. The digital nature of this content offers possibilities my highlights in a book cannot – I can now conveniently separate, store and search these notes.

 

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Real Reading on the Kindle

I differentiate reading for pleasure and reading for work. As an academic reading is a big part of what I do. I sit around and read stuff – books, journal articles, and some web content.

When I read for work, I am reading to understand, but I am also reading as a way to accumulate information for future use. I was never one who could remember names and date so I must generate an external record of what I have read. I must generate an external record of what I think may be helpful to me in the future. In the old days (and with me that means before the Apple II), I used to highlight everything I read and I used to create note cards. The note card would contain a brief summary and the highlighted original would offer greater detail should the comment on the note card indicate the article might be  useful. At some point, the note cards were replaced with some method for storing content on a computer. I still have digital versions of note cards I initially generated on the Apple II and the found a way to pass forward as word files over the years.

My strategy for journal articles has changed a lot. I do not really read the physical journals anymore. I have some journals dating back to when I was a junior in college (1971). I do not get out of my chair to walk across my office to my shelves anymore. I download anything I read from a journal as a pdf. This is how I use the college library – the library offers this service. I store the pdfs using a program called YEP and I annotate them using a program called Skim. I should probably describe this process – maybe a future blog.

More and more I am reading books on a device. I started to do this to see if I could. So, in exploring issues such as whether college students could actually read their textbooks from a device, I decided I should have the experience myself. Between Cindy and I we own a Kindle, iPod Touches, and iPads. I can say I have read at least one book on each. Both the Kindle and the iPad provide very acceptable reading experiences as far as I am concerned. By that I mean the visual experience of reading from the screen and my ability to read for extended periods of time are fine. What has been missing is the opportunity to take a more active approach involving highlighting, annotating AND externalizing for future use.

I realize that highlighting and annotating can be accomplished, what I was looking for was a way to generate what Skim lets me generate for pdfs – the external record. I knew there was a way to do this with the Kindle. Thanks to a post by Will Richardson I learned that the Kindle was capable of some things I had not discovered. I am describing the use of Kindle software on the iPad in this case. It turns out that the Kindle software uploads your notes and your highlights back to Amazon. I wondered how they did that popular highlights thing. Amazon must know what thousands of people have highlighted within a given book. You can access this content. The system as is does not provide a way to download this content, but you can save the web page as a text file. This is not a perfect system, but it works.

Kindle highlights and notes can be found at http://kindle.amazon.com/your_highlights . You log in and you should see your collection of books and related notes.

It did occur to me that there is some danger here. You may not like Amazon storing this content. Amazon may not like you downloading the content as I have described. I have no idea if I could highlight and download an entire book. I have no interest in doing that, but it did occur to me that Amazon should probably limit the amount of highlighted text that can be stored.

It turns out I prefer the iPad to the Kindle for this form of active reading. I find the process of selecting chunks of text a bit cumbersome, but I am getting better at it. The iPad seems never to know quite what I intend – when I am selecting text and when I want to highlight the text selected seems to be difficult for the device to differentiate.

Clearly what I am describing here may be different from what you think of when considering how you read a book. Perhaps reading as research might be a way to label what I have described here. I expect that we will all be looking for ways to use the advantages of technology in solving our personal information problem solving tasks. More and more I am thinking in terms of work flow and how to take ideas from what I read and make them my own.

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