Apps
- Wake time
- Status (work, home, travel)
- Daily weather
- Appointments
- Things I learned
- A chronological record of the day
- Gratitude list
- Notes created that day
- Notes modified that day
- Tasks completed from my task manager (Things 3)
- Company directory
- Outlook email
- Microsoft Admin Center (plus a tab each for Entra, Defender, Intune)
- Asset management app
- CBT Nuggets (for training)
- Student Database
- Six different Excel spreadsheets from Office 365 online
- Lou Plummer (@amerpie@social.lol) - social.lol - my primary Mastodon account
- Lou Plummer (@amerpie@onephoto.club) - One Photo Club - a second Mastodon account for travel photos
- Lou Plummer (@amerpie.lol) — Bluesky (bsky.app)
- Lou Plummer (@CycleLou) / X
- Pxlmo
- Lou Plummer | LinkedIn
- Lou Plummer (@amerpie) on Farcaster (warpcast.com)
- Lou Plummer — Refrakt
- Micro.blog
- Sites | tinylytics
- Explore Posts | Scribbles.
- OMG.LOL
- Gmail (personal email)
- Yahoo mail (used only for newsletters)
- Google Drive
- Raindrop.io bookmarks
- Gemini (google.com)
- Reddit - Dive into anything
- Plus whatever I happen to be interested in at any given moment, usually about a half-dozen tabs
- Dataview Example Vault: A example vault to collect and showcase various dataview queries. Created on behalf of AB1908 (github.com)
- Personal-Wiki: A showcase to help others to organize their notes. (github.com)
- LifeOS for Obsidian (obsidian-life-os.netlify.app)
- Grow Your Mind Garden Starter Kit
- LeanProductivity Starter Vault (sascha-kasper.com)
- Kepano: My personal Obsidian vault template. A bottom-up approach to note-taking and organizing things I am interested in. (github.com)
- Dashboard++ - TfT Hacker
- Bullet Journal and Task Management in Obsidian - Free Vault for download and Folder Structure (travelertechie.com)
- Obsidian Hub Main
- Ideaverse for Obsidian (linkingyourthinking.com)
- Obsidian: Sample Planner Vault from Ellane (gumroad.com)
- PARA Starter Kit - Obsidian Hub - Obsidian Publish
- Obsidian Starter Vault – The Sweet Setup
- ObsidianMD CSS Snippets repository, a collection of CSS code snippets to enhance the user interface elements of ObsidianMD (github.com)
- Starter Vault – Obsidian University
- Unzip any compressed files in my Downloads folder and trash the zip file - This helps keep my downloads folder cleared of the detritus that occurs because I am a compulsive software addict.
- Install apps inside DMGs in my downloads folder via RapiDMG and then trash the DMG - When I download a disk image file with an app in it, I don’t have to do anything else to get the app moved to my Applications folder. It happens in seconds with no intervention from me unless I have to approve replacing an existing file.
- Import any image file I place in an Images folder into the Photos app (in the background) - I’m constantly copying photos from Facebook and various web sites. I have them to a folder I have designated in Hazel and they automatically get imported into my photos library with me even opening the app.
- Change any text file in my Dropbox to a markdown file and move it to my Obsidian vault (useful in sending emails to Obsidian) - I use an IFTTT applet that allows me to forward emails to a specific address. Those emails are save in a specific folder in my Dropbox account that Hazel watches. When a file appears there, Hazel changes the file extension from txt to md and moves the resulting file into my Obsidian vault.
- Sort all files in my documents folder into subfolders based on file extension. - I currently have 42 sub-folders in my documents folder of different file types ranging from the usual suspects like txt and docx to the more esoteric like saved HoudahSpot searched and Etrecheck Reports.
- Purge old screenshots - between my day job and my blogging past time, I generate a lot of screenshots. Hazel moves any screenshots more than three days old into an archive folder to help give a semblance of order.
- Color code any application I haven’t opened in three months - I have 416 apps installed on my mac because, well, I just can’t help myself. Hazel will color an unused app red after not launching it for 90 days to help me decide whether to keep it or remove it with AppCleaner.
- Keep my desktop clean - I do not like to use my desktop as part of my file system. I rarely even see it since I run apps maximized most of the time. This rule moves any file that ends up on my desktop into a folder in my home directory. I exclude aliases from the rule because there are times when I want to make an app shortcut on the desktop, usually temporarily.
- Lines starting with “-“ are collected and sent to Day One as a journal entry
- Lines starting with “⁎” are sent to Things inbox
- Lines starting with “@“ are sent to Fantastical
- Inbox
- Today
- This Evening
- Tomorrow
- Pick date
- Work
- House
- Personal
- Pick a Project
- Make a Project
- Selection to things
- Bunch of todos
- Process notes from
- Prompt for new task
- The user is prompted to enter input, which can be pasted from the clipboard or manually entered.
- The input is then sent to the OpenAI API, and the response is inserted into the current draft 3 lines after the cursor.
- If there is no selected text in the draft, the user is asked if they would like to use text from the clipboard. If the prompt is canceled or the input is empty, the action cancels.
- If there is no response from the API, the output is set to “No reply received.”
Using Obsidian as a Life Record
Obsidian is powerful and extensible enough to fill many roles: academic notes, CRM, blogging center etc. One space it fills admirably is as a life record. Using a combination of native and community plugins, you can use Obsidian as a way to record every facet of your life that you want to preserve, from health metrics to media consumption.
Your Daily Note
The hub of a life record is usually the daily note. Using a template, you can record a variety of information. In my own setup, I record the following:
Other metrics that are popular to record are body weight and exercise. The Obsidian Tracker Plugin is useful for generating charts and graphs for any metic you can capture numerically.
Task Management with Things 3 and Obsidian
Media Consumption
Using RSS feeds from popular services like Goodreads (for books), Trakt (for movies and TV) and Last.fm (for music) you can automate recording your media consumption. Additionally you can gather information on video games, board games, and manga using the Media DB plugin.
Automating Obsidian - Generate Notes About Your Media Consumption via RSS - Books, TV, Movies, Music
Web Content
If you are inclined to save content from the web, there are a variety of ways to import pages into your vault. Read-it0later services like Omnivore and Readwise have plugins that automate imports. If you want to import pages on a case by case basis, you can use the browser plugin Mark Download, or community plugins like Slurp, Read It Later or Extract URL Content. There is also a bookmarklet written by Obsidian CEO u/kepano to import web pages or excerpts. On IOS, a shortcut works the best.
The Omnivore to Obsidian Connection Enhanced
All the Ways to Get Web Content Into Obsidian
MarkDownload - The Browser Extension that Works With Obsidian
One of the things people miss when transitioning from Evernote to Obsidian is the custom email address used to send information straight to their notes. Obsidian doesn’t have that feature built in but there are still ways to achieve the end result. Readwise has a “mail to Readwise” feature that will in turn import into Obsidian. My personal choice is an IFTTT applet that creates text files in my Dropbox account that are then converted to markdown and imported into my vault by Hazel, a Mac file management app.
How to Send an Email to Your Obsidian Vault
Other Info
I also keep notes on restaurants where I eat. My template has property fields for location, web site, type of cuisine and rating the body of the note has bullet points for each visit recording the day, who I was with and what I ordered.
For places I visit, I use either the MapView plugin or a Drafts action that captures geolocation.
I have a people template that records basic contact information (email, phone, address) and the body of the note is bullet points recording date and time of interactions with the person and details of the meeting/visit.
My Dataview Use Cases in Obsidian
Today on AppAddict - Omnivore - a free, open source read-it-later universal app that supports highlights and notes, has RSS and newsletter subscriptions, and imports into Obsidian, Logseq and Notion.
Today on AppAddict - Bebop Quick Notes is a new app designed for the quick capture of text notes. Its killer feature is the ability to save notes in Markdown format directly into an Obsidian vault, but it can save in other formats to other locations, like Dropbox, too.
Today on AppAddict - Two recommendations for File Sync Utilities Free File Sync and Sync Folders Pro. They’ll meet all your needs including scheduled syncs and full disk bootable clones.
Today on AppAddict - Velja Browser Picker - a free and open-source app that opens URLS in the correct app (Discord, App Store Teams, Zoom etc.) or in the browser of your choice. Easy to configure and use.
What's Your Browser Setup? Hundreds of Tabs? Multiple Windows? Something in Between?
Recently, I posted on Mastodon, “I do not understand the 100+ tabs open at the time people. Not saying you’re wrong, I just don’t get it. Did you get attacked by a bookmarks.html file as a young child? Is yours the laptop with a petabyte of RAM? What gives?” Surprisingly, I got a lot of feedback from had been no more than a wisecrack. I’m interested in the way people do everything on their computers, from what apps they use, to, yes, how many tabs they work with. Please reach out and describe your browser setup if you’re up to it.
At work, I normally have two or three windows open in Edge, my browser of choice (because it really doesn’t suck). At home, I only run two windows.
Work Setup
Edge has both profiles and workspaces. Profiles have separate settings, bookmarks and extensions. Workspaces have separate bookmarks bars and tabs. At work, I sign into a separate profile to access my university Microsoft 365 account. Group policies don’t allow the installation of any extensions, so it’s pretty bare bones. I normally have the following tabs open:
Total work tabs = 15
Personal Setup
At work, I also run a window logged in to my personal profile with at least one of my personal workspaces. I do this to have access to extensions (like my password manager) and bookmarks. I have two personal workspaces: one for social media and blogging and another general workspace.
My social and blogging workspace has tabs open for:
Total social and blogging tags = 13
My general browsing workspace has tabs for:
Total general browsing tabs = 12
Total Tabs = 40
Other Considerations
I use the great Mac app, Velja, to let me pick what browser or app opens links. I have five browsers installed, Edge, Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Orion and Arc. I prefer to open YouTube links in Freetube. And though I usually use the default web interface for Mastodon, I also use Ivory for its notification center actions. Inoreader is my RSS provider and I use an Edge PWA to access my feed.
Today on AppAddict - Zavala, a free, open source, minimalist outliner with iCloud syncing. It’s a universal app for Mac, iPhone and iPad with some features (like font selection) that even the big boys lack.
Today on AppAddict - MarsEdit which makes writing and publishing to Micro.blog and other platforms a breeze. Not a subscription, thankfully, and also available on Setapp. @danielpunkass
Today on AppAddict - CleanShot X hits the sweet spot for price and features among the many screen shot utilities for macOS, including several new features just released in version 4.7. Thanks to @mattbirchler for his video yesterday introducing them.
Today an AppAddict - Maestral, a free, open-source Dropbox client that lets you keep your files whereever you want, allows selective sync and doesn’t count against your three device limit. Works with paid and free Dropbox accounts.
15 Example #Obsidian Vaults from Around the Internet
I’ve been collecting these for a while and sharing them out of my Google Drive but it would probably be better for you to see the original source so you can discover some of these resources on your own.
Today on AppAddict - Dropzone 4 a pricey but versatile menu bar app (included with Setapp) that can make uploading media to Micro.blog a snap if you pair it with shortcuts from @jarrod
Task Management with Things 3 and #Obsidian
Many people choose to do their task management in Obsidian exclusively using different plugins and workflows. The tasks plugin is #5 in downloads at 1.2 million. As much as I love and use Obsidian, I don’t consider it an everything program. Task management applications like Things 3 from Cultured Code are popular for a reason. Their superior design, shortcut integration and feature set are all ready as soon as you install the app with no fiddling involved.
Things 3 offers projects, areas, repeating tasks, different start and due dates and imports from Apple shortcuts as well as Siri integration and a robust collection of shortcuts. There is a great Raycast extension for it too. There is an active community on Reddit.
I use two plugins to integrate Things with Obsidian.
Things 3 Today Sync
Things 3 Today Sync puts a copy of my today view (the tasks with a due date of today)
in the right sidebar of the Obsidian interface. The tasks come in as hyperlinks, so that clicking on them will take me to the task in Things. Checking the checkbox beside the task closes it and removes it from the list. If I add a task in things on the fly, it also appears in Obsidian. It’s a Mac only plugin, so If you are on a PC, you won’t be able to use it even if you have Things installed on your phone or an a Mac somewhere else. It’s dead simple to set up, requiring no complex configuration. Just enable it after installation.
Things 3 Logbook
Things Logbook will periodically sync your completed tasks with your daily note. You can assign a hotkey and sync on demand if you want to. One feature I really liked was the retroactive syncing. I have been using Things much longer than Obsidian and when I ran the sync for the for first time, it created daily notes stretching back years with my completed tasks which has really proved useful since I can now search of those items with Obsidian. Completed tasks show up in your daily note as hyperlinks and if you are on a Mac, they will open Things to your logbook. This plugin works on Windows machines so that if you check off completed tasks on your phone or on a Mac, they will appear in your daily note on Windows.
Things Sync
Things Sync is a third plugin for Things and Obsidian. I don’t use it because I’ve never found a way to fit it into my workflow, but it allows you to create tasks in Obsidian that get synced with Things.
Today on AppAddict - Bean a free lightweight word processor that’s kind of like WordPad on Windows, only better. Weighing in at only 8MB, it runs great, even on old hardware. For when you need rich text, tables and images in a document.
It’s Saturday and I’ve updated my /now page with links to a full week or app reviews on AppAddict and my WeblogPoMo2024 posts, as well good TV from the BBC, my browsing finds and a new coffee maker for the masses.
Today on AppAddict - FreeTube may be the most underrated app in the Mac ecosystem. It’s a privacy first, ad free player for YouTube that offers playlists, favorites and subscriptions - all without an account. It even downloads videos. Totally free and open source.
My Favorite Actions for Hazel, the Preeminent File Management Software for the Mac
Hazel, by Noodlesoft Software is a Mac utility for automating file management. You select a folder and provide criteria about what you want to happen to the files and folders in that folder and Hazel periodically checks it and runs the rules. Hazel can move, copy, rename and convert files. Criteria you can use include all of a file’s native attributes and even file contents. A lot of folks use it to scan PDFs of their bills for a specific account number and automatically move the file to a folder in their paperless record management system.
These are my favorite Hazel Actions
Today on AppAddict - Music Harbor helps you stay on top of new releases and videos from the artists you listen to. It’s so good it told me about the new Johnny Cash album and The Man in Black has been gone for more than 20 years.
8 Use cases for Drafts - The First Automation App I Ever Installed, Still on my Dock 10 Years Later
Drafts was the first app I installed when I became interested in iOS and Mac automation. The power users of the world explained it to me as the universal quick capture app for my phone. I was advised to always enter text into Drafts no matter where I eventually wanted it to end up. I dutifully put it into my dock and it’s been there ever since. In this post I’m going to go over eight different ways I use Drafts. It’s important to note that it pays off to give it a prominent place in your iOS sharing setting for ease of use. On macOS it should show up in the share settings by default.
1. Copy to Obsidian Inbox
I am all in on Obsidian the massively popular note’s app with a robust 1600+ plugin architecture. It does a lot of things amazing well but mobile quick capture is not one of them. To solve that, I use [this Drafts action](Send to Obsidian | Drafts Directory (getdrafts.com)) which saves the text to the default save location in my vault and uses the first line of the text as the note title/file name. I use a couple of other Drafts to Obsidian actions including Add to Obsidian Daily Note and Add to Daily Note Plus which add text to my daily note in different ways using a time stamp and a geolocation.
2. The Things 3, Fantastical, Day One Combo
The Quick Journaling Action Group lets me keep one running note that I can process at day’s end to send the individual lines as entries into Fantastical, Things 3 and Day One.
3. Things Parser
Using Task Paper syntax I can create a note in Drafts complete with due dates, areas, projects and tags that get correctly imported into the Things 3 task manager using the Things Parser. I use this with a Drafts template to create daily and weekly checklists for reoccurring tasks. I also use the action group, Things for Things which includes actions for:
4. Mail to Evernote
Yep, I still use Evernote for some tasks. Old habits die hard. Evernote eliminated AppleScript a while back and their API has become more and more problematic , but one feature they still support and that works equally well on iOS and macOS is the mail to Evernote feature and this Drafts action accomplishes that without you ever having to use your mail client.
5. Micro.blogging
This blog is hosted by Micro.blog and I can create entries in Drafts and have them posted online by running an action. I use the action Post to Micro.blog with Title by the great blogger Matt Birchler.
6. OMG.LOL Status
I am a big fan of the almost indescribable web community at OMG.LOL. One of the fun features there is a status board you can share with other members, post on your website and cross-post to Mastodon (where all the cool kids hang out). The OMG.LOL Status action does it all.
7. Run Shortcut to Save to Thoughts Inspiration Manager
One of my favorite things to do online is to collect quotes from various sources, I save my quotes in an app called Thoughts Inspiration Manager. I don’t have a Drafts action to write directly to Thoughts but it doesn’t matter because I have a Shortcut that does. I just need to run the Drafts shortcut action explained in the user guide.
8. Personal Assistant
Drafts can serve as an interface with OpenAI by using the Personal Assistant action. (using your own API key) It’s a helpful action to run when you know you are going to use the AI generated text in another app. This action allows the user to get an AI-assisted response to a prompt:
