Smart Connections

 Smart Connections is the best combination of Obsidian and ChatGPT so far. 

Integrating Obsidian and Rstudio workflow

This little Obsidian plugin called qmd as md Obsidian plugin. It enables Obsidian to recognize Quarto Markdown source file, which is the new generation of the widely used R Markdown format. As a result, now it is possible to index all the intermediate project source file and visualize their relationship. 

This can fundamentally change my research life. 

Marginalia

 Very nice and comprehensive post on marginal effects. 

Processing the sugar map

 Different implementations of the Sugarscpe agent-based model have different ways to get up the sugar map. SugarscapeCW used a built-in matrix (no space between each number) whereas the NetLogo model library uses an external text file with a blank space between each number. 

The easy way to translate between these two different format is to use the readr R package, something like this:

library(readr)

sugar_map1 <- read_fwf("~/tmp/sugar-map1.txt", fwf_widths(c(1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1), col_names = NULL))

write_delim(sugar_map1, "~/tmp/sugar-map-out.txt", delim = " ", col_names = FALSE)

Using Obsidian as a Markdown editor

 I have been using the open source Typora editor for light editing. It appears to become commercial recently. I was about to purchase a licence when I realized that the recent upgrade of Obsidian (v. 0.13.14) has provided very nice Markdown editor feature and can complete replace a dedicated editor such as Typora. 

I really like Obsidian!

The pandemic is back

 According to this report, despite the vaccination and other efforts, the daily new COVID-19 cases has reached the 200,000 mark on August 17 in the US. It appears that a new wave of the pandemic has begun. 

Obsidian

 I have been searching for a note taking/management tool for some time. From a book, I encountered Roam, which looks exactly what I need. After some research, I realized that is is a proprietary software using proprietary data storage format, and store all data on a remote cloud server. This, along with its not so modest price tag, raises a red flag. 

Then I discovered Obsidian, which is itself proprietary (as opposed to open source) but it works on local, plain text (including Markdown) files, which can be opened and modified by any text editors. For now, it looks really promising!

NetLogo code for Party Competition

 Today I spent some time to manually convert the NetLogo code for Party Competition from version 5 to version 6. 

Fascinating book, by the way. 

Thunderbird conversation mode

 Just discovered Thunderbird conversations extension that displays Thunderbird emails like Gmail. Very cool.