Victor Wiebe | Creative Solutions

Blog

  • Hello world!

    Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start writing!

  • Why? And why now?

    Or: Why This Site Exists, and Why Now

    I built this site because I got tired of waiting.

    Tired of waiting until I had more time. Tired of waiting until the books were more polished, the coffee brand more established, the podcast more professional, the SaaS offering actually finished. Tired of waiting until I felt like I had permission to take up space on the internet as something other than an IT professional with a LinkedIn profile and carefully managed opinions.

    Here’s the thing nobody tells you about being a certain kind of person — the kind who writes books and makes coffee and hosts a podcast about 78rpm records and self-hosts his own email server and curls on Thursday nights — is that the world keeps asking you to pick one. Pick the thing you are. Put it in a title. Make it your brand. Stop being so much.

    I’ve spent a long time being conservative about all of it. Careful. Professional. Palatable.

    I’m done with that. Mostly.

    There’s a caveat, because there’s always a caveat: I still have a day job. IT, which I’m genuinely good at and genuinely care about, even if it wasn’t supposed to be the whole story. It’s paying the bills while the rest of this figures itself out. So this site has to work hard — it’s part author platform, part professional CV, part evidence that a person can contain multitudes without combusting.

    But within those constraints, this — The Dispatch, the books, the coffee, the podcast, all of it — is me deciding to stop hiding the good stuff.

    There are two books out. More are coming, because apparently I cannot sit still. There’s a newsletter called Shenanigans, which tells you everything you need to know about the tone of this operation. There’s coffee with actual convictions attached to it. There’s a blog about vintage entertainment that I started because someone had to.

    And now there’s this. A dispatch from the uncaring world, written by a misplaced Canadian in Delaware who has too many clocks and not enough hours and has finally, finally decided that’s not a reason to wait anymore.

    Welcome. Pull up a chair. The coffee’s on.

    — Victor

  • Joplin – Daily Journal Plugin

    Automate Your Daily Journal in Joplin

    I’ve been using Joplin as my self-hosted notes app for a while now, and one habit I wanted to build was a daily journal — a note that captures everything I touched that day. Notes I updated, todos I worked on, things I checked off. Joplin is, in fact, my entire GTD system. Notebooks are sorted by project, notes, and todos. I use the awesome Embed Search plugin to build start pages. It’s all linked. I hide the sidebar and notelist, even; the only time I need them is when starting a new project. Otherwise, with a combination of notebook names, tags, and todo’s, I have an entire GTD system.

    What I really wanted was a journal so I could review what I had worked on and when.

    The problem: I never remembered to write it.

    So I built a plugin to do it for me.

    What It Does

    The Daily Journal plugin runs automatically every night at a configurable time (default 11pm). When it fires, it creates a note that looks like this:

    Journal — 2025-03-04

## 📝 Notes Updated
- [Client proposal draft](:/<note-id>)
- [Meeting notes — Tuesday](:/<note-id>)

## ☐ Todos Updated
- [Follow up with accountant](:/<note-id>)

## ✅ Todos Completed
- [Send invoice to client](:/<note-id>)

    Three sections: notes you touched, open todos you worked on, and todos you completed. Everything is a live internal link, so you can click straight through to any note from your journal.

    The note lands in a tidy folder hierarchy: Journal / 2025 / 03 / Journal 2025-03-04. After a few months you end up with a proper archive of your days without any manual effort.

    Setup

    Install the plugin, then configure it under Tools → Options → Daily Journal:

    • Journal notebook path — the existing notebook to put everything under (e.g. Victor Wiebe/Journal) (this is the default, because it’s the notebook path that I use; go ahead and configure it to your own choosing).
    • Daily run time — when to create the note each day (24-hour format)
    • Tags — optional comma-separated tags applied to every journal note
    • Year / Month folder formats — defaults to YYYY and MM

    That’s it. Leave Joplin running and the note will appear each night.

    Manual Commands

    Two commands are available from the Tools menu:

    • Create today’s journal note (Ctrl+Shift+J) — run it any time, doesn’t wait for the scheduled time
    • Create journal note for a specific date (Ctrl+Shift+Alt+J) — for retroactive entries; set the date in Tools → Options → Daily Journal → “Date to create” first, then run the command

    Why Self-Hosted Matters Here

    The plugin uses Joplin’s internal data API directly — it never touches the network, never calls an external service, and stores everything in your own Joplin database. If you’re running Joplin with a self-hosted sync target, your journal data stays entirely under your control. That was a hard requirement for me.

    Get It

    The plugin is available on the Joplin plugin registry. Search for Daily Journal in Tools → Options → Plugins.

    Or grab the code from my self-hosted Gitea: Daily Journal Code

    Built with the Joplin Plugin API. Tested on Joplin v3.6.