Mastering Tinderbox: Training Videos (Complete List)

satikusala · December 29, 2020, 9:33pm

A few of my fellow Tinderboxers and I have been toying with creating educational Tinderbox videos.

What is Tinderbox

What is Tinderbox? from Mark Bernstein on Vimeo.

Tinderbox Meetup and Course Calendar

Check out the Calendar for future meetups and courses.

Tinderbox Meetup Calendar (2024, 2025)

Our Training Videos

(Click to watch intro)

I have recorded a number of lessons and put them on YouTube. Here you go:

Meetups

Let’s grow the community: Please be sure to Like the videos and subscribe to Becker’s Tinderbox YouTube channel. Liking the videos and subscribing to the channel will increase the ranking in Google and drive more attention and traffic back to Tinderbox.

Tinderbox Courses

Michael Becker is hosting a series of in-person and recording Tinderbox courses. If you’re interested in joining a future course or watching the recordings from a past course, see the Tinderbox Meetup and Course Calendar and DM Michael at @satikusala.

6 Week Tinderbox 101 Course (9 Lecture Hours): Kickoff Friday, Nov. 1, 2024

Other Notable Videos & Blogs

Complete list of weekly meetup videos: https://vimeo.com/eastgatesystems/videos/page:1/sort:date
http://forum.eastgate.com/t/tinderbox-training-video-working-with-tinderbox/4000 (Mark Bernstein)
http://forum.eastgate.com/t/tinderbox-training-video-planning-with-tinderbox/4001 (Mark Bernstein)
2020 Course Plan Videos, a series of videos (Aug. '20) by @bcrane on teaching a course (inc. grading against a rubric) with Tinderbox
Processing Qualitative Data with Tinderbox (2010), an amazing lesson by @Tom_Webster on using Tinderbox (even though this is done in an older version of TBX the insights are as applicable as ever!). See https://youtu.be/ev_kMTieoC4, which demonstrates a modern take, i.e. executed in TBX 9.2+, on Tom’s process.
Beck Tench @beck offers us a wonderful series on how to turn reading notes into a map in Tinderbox. Watch them all, there are some great insights here, not just on using Tinderbox but on creating knowledge and theory;
– Turning Reading Notes into a Tinderbox Map (Part 1)
– Turning Reading Notes into a Tinderbox Map (Part 2)
–Turning Reading Notes into a Tinderbox Map (Part 3a)
– Turning Reading Notes into a Tinderbox Map (Part 3b)
–Turning Reading Notes into a Tinderbox Map (Part 4)
– Little Styling Tricks in Tinderbox
– Creating a Post-it Note Themed Brainstorming Space in Tinderbox

Beck Tench on Tinderbox

OutDoYou on YouTube has a wonderful video explaining her [academic] workflow “Researching with Hazel, DevonThink, Bookends, and Tinderbox Applications” (OutDoYou, 12/2020). It is inspiring to watch and a suburb process."
Eclecticlight has a useful blog: https://eclecticlight.co/?s=Tinderbox
@danburrow provides a series of videos on how to “Building a Second Brain” (BASB} with Tinderbox, click here
Eastgate Early Tools for Thought (January 26, 2023)
[Researching with Hazel, DevonThink, Bookends, and Tinderbox Applications](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZgI9uq7EQU&t=3s

Brian Crane on Teaching with Tinderbox

The links for the feedback sheets later in the thread are:

Feedback I
Feedback II
Welcome to Sherwood, 9blog on Tinderbox](https://welcometosherwood.wordpress.com/tinderbox/)
Tinderbox videos by Stepan Zeoli
Howared Oakley’s The Electric Light Company on Tinderbox
Dominique Renauld: Tinderbox Personal Assistant
PhD Tools: Think better with Tinderbox
Alex Strick van Linschoten: Note-Taking Jujitsu, Or How I Make Sense Of What I Read

Call for videos, ideas, and interviewees: If you are aware of any other works/lessons that Tinderboxers have done, can you please send them my way (DM me at @satikusala. Also, I’d love to hear from you on your application of Tinderbox. If you have some to share, please send a message along with your ideas. If you’re open to doing a Tinderbox interview with me, please reach out, and lets me schedule one.

I’d like to give a huge thanks to all those that have helped me along my own Tinderbox journey, especially @mwra, @eastgate, @bmgphd, @sylvaticus, @TomD, @PaulWalters. To all, thank you.

If you like this format and have topics that you’d like us to record for you and the community, please email me your questions ee42patx@pocketgeekid.com and we’ll pull something together for you, or better yet you can simply make a comment on this post. Your feedback on how to make this better is welcome. I’ll update this post as we create new videos.

abusch · December 29, 2020, 10:25pm

Thanks Michael - this is a great service to the Tinderbox community! I am confident many will watch these lessons (I write this after having watched one) and be encouraged to experiment with this great piece of software!

mwra · December 29, 2020, 10:31pm

Nice! I’ve watched all 3 and all makes sense. (I’ve a few minor tech observations but I’ll email).

Thanks, I hope these will help folk get going.

rkaplan · December 29, 2020, 10:53pm

Yes - that is absolutely outstanding

If by chance you have experience with lookup tables to transfer Devonthink tags into Tinderbox Attributes that would be quite helpful

TomD · December 29, 2020, 10:58pm

Great Job Michael! Well done. I like the quick vignette format covering practical specific topics. For me anyway, it integrates some topics I have been thinking about.
Keep it up.

Tom

satikusala · December 29, 2020, 11:21pm

Hi Richard, I may be able to help with this one. Can you be more specific on the workflow you’re trying to follow?

rkaplan · December 30, 2020, 12:06am

Yes of course - thanks for any help you might suggest

I use Devonthink to curate PDFs and bookmarks for citations to the medical literature. I would like to use custom metadata in DT3 to curate that literature by various criteria, i.e. treatment works, treatment does not work, landmark study, etc. Then I want to take that information and import it to Tinderbox, partly for further analysis and mostly as a “report generator.” In Tinderbox, I would set up Agents and Stamps which would in part act on the custom metadata from DT3 and in part act on $Text from the abstracts in that data.

A well-known and respected participant on the DT3 forums suggested the following though he was limited in how much of his own code/scripting he could share due to his employer’s rules:

If you happen to look into how to use a “watched DEVONthink group” in Tinderbox, note that by default the only user modifiable metadata that Tinderbox imports is “Tags”. In Tinderbox, “Tags” is a “set” type attribute. In a Tinderbox set you can create key:value pairs. In DEVONthink you can create tags of the form “key:value”. So you can pass all manner of custom metadata from DEVONthink to Tinderbox by placing the key:value pairs into DEVONthink tags and retrieving them from the synchronized Tinderbox tags. (Tinderbox calls set attributes that contain key: value pairs “look-up tables”.)

I suspect the ability to transfer custom metadata from DT3 to attributes in Tinderbox would thus help for my workflow but also may be applicable to many other users of both apps as well.

satikusala · December 30, 2020, 12:10am

Got it, yes. I think I have just what you need. Give me a day or two to pull it together.

pmaheshwari · December 30, 2020, 7:14am

HI ,

Great format of the videos keeping them bytesized and small . Please do keep them coming.

You might want to consider dividing the videos into Basics / Intermediate / Advance sections . This will allow newcomers(such as me) to go directly to relevant playlist.

Last Feedback
There’s a massive increase in difficulty ratio from Video 2 to Video 3 for a newbie.
Video 3 when you are typing the query , it’s very difficult to see the same in 480p format(which was the best available option) , it would help if you could “Zoom” that part.

Also SO many icons in your dock ! HOLY MOLY

satikusala · December 30, 2020, 2:04pm

Nice idea, I’ve added a level flag.

Totally agree, I’m going to [slowly] pull these together in between work. So, they’ll come in based on timing and inspiration (ideas from others will help with the prioritization).

Great point. I don’t have a lot of time for editing right now. Would love help with this, if someone is interested. In the meantime, I’ll put the code in the notes or just upload the file with the video.

You should see how many tabs I keep open.

jjvornov · December 30, 2020, 2:04pm

Absolutely wonderful work Michael. Just watched the first video and even though I’ve used Tinderbox for many, many years on and off, I picked up some valuable ideas from just the first video

Tinderbox has added so much capability incrementally over the years that it’s useful to have a step back and see a comprehensive use of the current tools.

One note on the first video- At some point explain how you type the title and start inputting text without mousing around. The DoubleClick-Title-Return-Space-Text reflex has become completely automatic for me but took a while to figure out as the sequence.

satikusala · December 30, 2020, 2:24pm

Just added a video on prototypes. BTW, anyone have some thoughts on the best way to manage this? Should we create individual entries for each video so that they can be individually commented on, or do we maintain this master list? Thoughts?

mwra · December 30, 2020, 3:17pm

I’ve generally generated web pages (that I can access/edit) e.g. this for my Clarify^† tutorials.

I’m not sure forum threads are the place to park the bulk of the detail, better to have a hub-page to link out to that has all the listings. Where that should be I’m less sure.

^†. RIP: 32-bit and sunsetted, sadly.

satikusala · December 30, 2020, 4:21pm

Yes, that is a good idea for a repository, but doing so we lose the community interaction and comments. It is up to the forum leaders (e.g. you and Mark) but maybe I/we create one post per video and maintain one post to aggregate them all. That way people can make comments to the individual training and provide suggestions on how to make them better, but they can also go to the consolidated post, i.e. this one, or they can simply go to the YouTube channel; however, it would be nice to keep the comments and posts in the forum to benefit the community.

mwra · December 30, 2020, 7:00pm

Sure we can make threads per video, I don’t see a problem with that.

mwra · December 31, 2020, 11:35am

New category Training Videos has been created. I’ve moved the per-movie threads there.

rkaplan · December 31, 2020, 12:43pm

These are excellent

If you have the inspiration sometime to consider a video on HTML export templates that would be really helpful

Forrest · December 31, 2020, 4:00pm

+1 would find these useful!

archurhh · January 1, 2021, 11:56pm

Fantastic idea and excellent execution @satikusala!! I’m going through them all, even the concepts I’ve already grokked. Great revision