Exiting Evernote
An old standby has a new pricing model.
Thirteen months ago I posted Shall We Play A Game? on my Tumblr account. At the time I had spent the prior three years working on … something. You can think of this as an Alternate Reality Game trailhead, an entry point into something that exists purely in my imagination. Although using some of the methods I described in Confessions Of A Conspiracy Broker, as well as some of the investigative/analytical tradecraft I share here, it was not “malign” in the way CB is, it’s just based on an esoteric interest of mine which I’ve never mentioned in public.
I intended to run it no-attrib, never admitting to what the foundation was, never associating my name. I set a few Talkwalker Alerts in an out of the way place, making sure my chosen keywords were greenfield. Then 2023 got crazy, my limited energy flagged, and it’s sat there ever since, nothing more than a thin trail to something that remains just a possibility.
This June, after a second move to shake off a nuisance actor, I thought I might have another go at it, but when I logged into Evernote I found this:
The 937 notes in the account are safe, but I can do no more without paying. So I am left contemplating what to do next. The sensible thing, if I really needed that stuff, would be to just pay the $130 and get on with it.
Since I don’t think that’s going to happen, this is more a thought exercise on migration that some of you will find worthwhile.
I picked Evernote for this particular problem because I was doing a lot of reading on my tablet, much of it was in Inoreader, and I didn’t have enough ways to structure what I was keeping. The other benefit was that I use Evernote precisely nowhere else - there’s no danger that I’m going to WHOOPS with it.
There are levels of containers, starting with a couple Google profiles in a single Chrome browser, and ending, as far as a lone gun operator goes, on that combination of dedicated burner and old laptop you use for one specific thing. Using a dedicated app like this isn’t as hardened, but what I was doing would never incur civil or criminal liability, if it met its objectives it would just make a lot of people really curious.
So Evernote is no longer workable, what do I do next? I asked ChatGPT about this and it spit out a list of half a dozen alternatives. I asked it for one that would work on Android, iOS, Linux, Mac, and Windows … and missing from the responses was Obsidian.
I knew the name Obsidian from news of another team environment a couple years ago, and I knew it was relentlessly multiplatform. So … ChatGPT 4 is still hallucinating bigly, and should be used for hints, not definitive answers.
So Obsidian fits the bill, but what about those 900+ notes? You can select up to a hundred notes and export them as HTML or PDF, so it won’t take all that long to do ten batches. I started looking around in Obsidian, which is known for its many integrations, and found this:
And very quickly I had this - a graph of almost a hundred exported notes, sans links, because Evernote doesn’t do that.
This is a graph I drew by hand based on the stuff I’ve already created. The overall project is about 20% complete, but it began before ChatGPT was broadly available, and I need to make some adjustments.
Rescuing my hobby horse from a vendor tarpit is what started my down this path, but having gotten back into Obsidian after a couple years, I’m starting to think about what it means for my Maltego work. The transforms, Maltego’s name for third party API services, are a big part of its power, but the MAGA Meltdown graph that I keep is purely a note taking exercise. The only external service I use is IBM’s Watson, which can sometimes do Named Entity Recognition.
The other day I selected that entire graph, chose Copy as GraphML, and I ended up with an enormous XML file. I tinkered a bit and got a really poor Gephi graph, with node unique IDs rather than their names, then I wandered off.
Seeing this graph with links in Obsidian set me to hunting for Python tools to work with it and I’ve found there’s an Obsidian API wrapper, something called obsidiantools, and py-obsidianmd, for batch note modification. If I can automatically handle large volumes of data, I wonder if there’s a way to publish a web accessible wiki … oh, would you just look at that!
So … if I am willing to spend a little time programming, I can make this hornet nest of 1400+ URLs I’ve curated available to EVERYBODY. That means anyone seeking additional information on literally ANYONE in the MAGA universe would simply be able to search on an Obsidian hosted site.
And it’s only $96/year, as opposed to the just me $130/year for Evernote.
I have some Open Semantic Search work to get done for Disinfodrome. I have an OpenLDAP book and a pressing need to get that running. I need to spend some quality time with Datasette. The big picture is that Disinfodrome, which started life as an OSS hosting exercise, is starting to diversify its offerings.
What I thought was a problem at 8:00 PM when I started writing this is now an opportunity at 10:00 PM. It adds more work to my already overflowing queue, but maybe I can coax ChatGPT to write a few Python snippets for me …