Newsletter Week 49 | 2021

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Hey there.I hope you've had a great week.

What I've made for you

I just launched my rebuilt website. I think it feels better to use now. What do you think?

Book Notes: The Great Mental Models, Volume 2: Physics, Chemistry and BiologyGreat book on mental models. I didn't find this book as interesting as its predecessor, but I think it's a good read. While that is my overall rating for the book, it still describes some very worthwhile mental models. I've made special note of some of my favorites: reciprocity, friction and viscosity, velocity, leverage, and evolution.

This time, I've also experimented with creating visualizations for the book notes. For example, here's the illustration for Friction and Viscosity.

A tiny discovery

Just this past week, I was checking which new plugins made it to the Obsidian plugin store. As always, there are lots of cool new ones. I saw one that said something along the lines of "Official (...) integration."Integrations are usually cool to explore for your workflows, so I checked it out. Turns out I was lucky: it was Matter.

It's like an online, social media for sharing, discovering, and reading content online. That sounds like a lot — and it kind of is — but they've managed to make it quite simple. I've written about my process for processing content from the internet before. In that article, I mention using Instapaper. While Instapaper is a solid platform that just works, there are many features that I'd like, which it unfortunately doesn't offer. Matter solves many of those issues — and more.

I won't try to replicate their sales pitch: you can go to their website for that. Instead, here are a few things I like about the platform

• Saving Twitter threads! This one is big for me. I actually do take notes on Twitter threads, so this has been sorely missing in my workflows. And now it's here🏆.

• An awesome queue feature. Like, really awesome.

• Social curation. If you curate your curators well, this enables incredible discovery of new writers and articles.

• Integration with Readwise. This makes it much easier for me to import my notes into Obsidian (or anywhere else).

• Works with newsletters. I dislike having them clog up my inbox, so this is an awesome feature. You can integrate with your Gmail account and have it grab newsletters when you get them. Another thing I did was to set up an automated filter for the newsletters that I get, which automatically forwards the newsletters to my Matter account and then archives them on my Gmail. It also adds a tag to them, so I know which ones I've sent over.

I'm still eager to see what the Readwise Reader has to offer, but Matter is awesome so far. You can add me on there to see what I read and highlight.

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To your success. Regards, 

Christian Bager Bach Houmann