Links
- FreeTube - a YouTube viewer
- Bebop - Quick capture notes for Obsidian
- Clipboard Managers - A comparison of Mac clipboard managers - Raycast won
- Blip - a cross platform file transfer app
- Applite - an app store for Homebrew
- Omnivore - a free read-it-later app
- Apparency - a Quicklook plugin for apps
- My Applications - gives you detailed info on your installed applications
- Zavala - a free universal outliner
- Scrap Paper - a menu bar notes app that syncs with iOS
- Liking or upvoting a URL on a forum or social media that someone else posted.
- Commenting on a URL somebody else posted saying how much you enjoyed the content.
- Posting a URL on social media/discord server yourself, suggesting that others might also like to read it.
- Dropping a quick note of appreciation to the author via email or DM.
- Actually paying money for the content via Patreon, etc.
- 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
This Week's Bookmarks - Recipe finder, Excellent advice, Quitting Google, Mullets!, Miss AI contest, Driving cities, Bookshelf creator
Recipe Search with Typesense - Search 2 Million recipes -
25 Bits Of ‘Excellent Advice For Living’ That Apply To Adventure - Semi-Rad.com
How to Quit Google, According to a Privacy Expert | Lifehacker
The Worlds First AI Creator Awards (miss-ai.webflow.io)
Charted: America’s driving capitals (axios.com)
Bookshelf.so - Create your own beautiful book review page with an interactive 3D bookshelf
The Most Popular Apps I've Reviewed
I’ve been amazed since I started writing app reviews online at AppAddict Some of the reviews have been viewed thousands of times. I’ve had reviews mentioned on Lifehacker and The Verge. If you’re curious as to what’s been the most popular, here’s a list.
The suppression of speech which criticizes Israel or puts forth a Palestinian point of view is antithetical to what are supposed to be the values of higher education in specific and America in general Columbia Law Review taken offline for publishing an article by a Palestinian Law Student
Working on my /slash page homework from @robb@social.lol - Today I’ve updated my /defaults. There have been some additions since I created this is January, but no deletions. I can never have enough software.
This Weeks Bookmarks - Nickelback Hate, Kitchen Tips, Beach Reads, Best Sci-Fi books, Best Cities for Food, Most Expensive Paintings, 25 Era Defining Photos
Why Do People Hate Nickelback So Much? A Statistical Analysis (statsignificant.com)
91 Kitchen Tricks and Tips From Our Expert Cooks (realsimple.com)
51 Beach Reads for a Relaxing Summer 2024 (rd.com)
The 21 best science fiction books of all time – according to New Scientist writers | New Scientist
The World’s 20 Best Cities for Food Right Now (timeout.com)
List of most expensive paintings - Wikipedia
The 25 Photos That Defined the Modern Age - The New York Times (nytimes.com)
Save the web by being nice by Andrew Stephens, my #Junited2024 entry
There are different levels of Niceness but roughly from least to most effort:
This Weeks Bookmarks - 50 things to know, Weird roadside attractions, Summer movies, Toxic reality TV, Recipes, YouTube games, Free money
50 things I know - by Sasha Chapin #1 is 1. I know what makes people grow more reliably than anything else. It is: taking on a difficult project with some amount of public accountability. This can be large or small: a lecture series, a business, a blog, a house, a child, etc.
Weird Roadside Attractions in Every State to Visit on a Road Trip - Thrillist - Thanks to Jarrod Blundy
The 31 Most Anticipated Movies of Summer 2024 | TIME - How may movies will you see at the theater this summer?
Is “Love Is Blind” a Toxic Workplace? | The New Yorker - You really don’t want to be on a reality show.
JustTheRecipe - Paste in a URL and this website will remove all of the fluff from the page and leave you with just the recipe to make it easier to read and cook.
YouTube - Everybody’s getting into gaming these days. YouTube joins the slowly growing list of companies with gaming initiatives, rolling out its Playables program across mobile and desktop. To play, simply visit YouTube’s website or Android / iOS app and look for Playables in the sidebar. YouTube will let players save their progress and keep track of high scores. There are over 75 games to choose from, including chess and crossword games to more popular casual mobile titles like Angry Birds Showdown!, Trivia Crack, and Cut the Rope.
MissingMoney.com | Search for Unclaimed Property MissingMoney.com is the official Unclaimed Property website of the National Association of State Treasurers
US State Governments and several Canadian Provinces, through their partnership with the leading, trusted authority in unclaimed property—the National Association of Unclaimed Property Administrators (NAUPA)—provide this free, safe, and secure site to the public. New properties are added daily, so start your search now and check back often!
10 Random But Helpful #Obsidian Tips
1. Sort All Your Attachments in A Folder That Mirrors Your Vault
With the Attachment Management community plugin, you can have all your attachments renamed to match the note they are attached to and arranged in a sub-folder that matches the folder arrangement of your vault.
2. Add a Web Page to Your Vault on iOS
This one is just an iOS shortcut [that works with any browser, not just Safar](RoutineHub • Clip Entire Web Pages to Obsidian in iOS 17). You’ll need Actions for Obsidian to make it work.
3. Create a Callout with Links to All the Notes You Created Today
This requires the Dataview community plugin
> [!abstract]Today's New Notes
> ```dataview
> LIST WHERE creation-date = this.creation-date
> ```
4. Have New Notes Give You a Popup To Name Them
This requires the Templater community Plugin. This snippet gives you a pop-up when you first create your notes asking you to name it at that point. You type the name into the resulting dialog box and that’s that taken care of. (Note: This snippet goes at the very top of your note at Line 1. It creates the three tick marks that are the beginning of the code block for your properties.)
<%*
let title = tp.file.title
if (title.startsWith("Untitled")) {
title = await tp.system.prompt("Title");
await tp.file.rename(title);
}
tR += "---"
%>
5. Automatically Download Images from Any Web Page You Import
The default behavior is for the web pages you download to link the images the original source, but you can automate having them downloaded so the links don’t get broken. All you have to do to make this happen is install the community plugin Local Images Plus and change the setting to “Automatically Processing”
6. Create a Map of Content Automatically for Any Folder or Subfolder That You Can Copy and Paste as Plain Text
If you use Dataview to create MOCs, good luck exporting or copying them. You need two plugins for to make that happen Folder Note and Waypoint.
7. Use Cool Icons With All of Your Obsidian Folders
If you’d like to visually enhance your folders like shown below, install the Iconize community plugin.
8. Import Entire Articles from Omnivore, Not Just Highlights and Notes
If you want to use the free red-it-later service to import the entire text of web pages instead of the default behavior which just brings in highlights and notes, you can tweak your article template like this.
> # {{{title}}}
> #Omnivore
>
> [Read on Omnivore]({{{omnivoreUrl}}})
> [Read Original]({{{originalUrl}}})
>
> {{#note}}
>
> {{{note}}}
> {{/note}}
>
> {{{ content }}}
9. Customize Your Sidebars
In Obsidian, you can drag and drop elements like notes, links, or files to the sidebars to move or create new links. Simply drag the element you want to move and drop it onto the sidebar where you want it to be placed.
10. To Add a Geotag and Timestamp to a Note on iOS
This one requires Drafts, which all Mac/iOS users should have any way. This action will append the info to your daily note but it is easy to edit to create a note instead of appending it.
This Week's Bookmarks- Learning guides, free transcription, A better Google, income info, YouTube transcripts, communication secrets, Apple's Top 100 albums
The Curricula is a website to help you learn “anything” by generating a guide and resources. I’ve been curious about the history ot the mountain town of [Morganton, NC](the Curricula) and what I was given was a summarized learning path and links to books, articles, and videos for each area of the past: Native Americans, European colonization, Civil War and reconstruction, Industrialization and economic growth, Key figures in its history
Check out notta.ai, which for heavy users is $8.25 per month and offers 1,800 minutes (30 hours) of transcription. Notta’s free plan provides 120 minutes, which should be sufficient for most people. I’ve also noticed that Notta is faster and just as accurate than other services.
You may have noticed that recent changes in Google searches are making things hard and not easier to find. If that’s your experience, this is for you. How I Made Google’s “Web” View My Default Search (tedium.co)
It’s interesting to see where our current family income places us in relation to the other people in our area, and even more interesting to see that played out at different spots nationwide. It makes a good case for people doing remote work..Upper, Middle, Lower Class in Charts: Percentages, Income by State (businessinsider.com)
The future is here. You can read YouTube now. YouTube Transcript - read YouTube videos
Why can some people effortlessly connect with anyone while others struggle to converse? Conversational skills can be learned, practiced, and mastered. The author sits down with Charles Duhigg, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist and author of Supercommunicators.
Watch / Listen Now
While I disagree vehemently with the results, especially the top 10, everyone should take a look at Apple’s version of the Top 100 Albums of All Time just to see where their opinions falls alongside the so-called experts. For the record, Aretha > Beyonce, All Green > Frank Ocean and where are Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin and The Clash?
Apple’s Top 10 Albums are a joke, designed 100% to pander to the demographic their market study said would be most likely to subscribe after seeing it. Aretha > Beyonce. Al Green > Fran Ocean. Where are the Stones, Led Zeppelin, REM, The Clash, Van Morrison, Bob Dylan? GTFO
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
This Week's Bookmarks - Your musical taste, Habits, Reverse Dictionary, Floppy Disks, Random entertainment, No car vacations, Subplots cut from movies
How alternative is your music taste? Find out with this tool. Obscurify Music
30 Small Habits To Lead A More Peaceful Life (lifehack.org)
Reverse Dictionary – Find words that fit your description (virock.org)
Obsolete, but not gone: The people who won’t give up floppy disks (bbc.com)
Project Random (0xbeef.co.uk) - See a random video, listen to a random song, play a random game
10 places where you can ditch your car this summer (nationalgeographic.com)
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.
The phones of normal people do not look like your phone and the needs of normal people do not match the wants of the content generation conglomerate. The masses aren’t outraged, and they really don’t want things to change. For WeblogPoMo2024
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
Did you ever get in trouble in school for reading? I did…frequently. I got negative comments on my report cards for “placing pleasure reading above everything else”. Thankfully, I matured and never lost a job because of an errant paperback. WeblogPoMo2024 My Life Reading
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.
My WeblogPoMo2024 entry for today - On Writing - we all have a “why” to explain our need/desire/want to put ourselves out there for the Internet world to see. This is mine.
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.