Writing
- 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
Looking forward, sometimes it’s OK not to live in the moment but instead to revel in what’s coming. For WeblogPoMo2024, the last entry.
I like your blog if… - my criteria for adding blogs to my RSS feed. I’m not too picky. You’re probably in there already. For WeblogPoMo2024
Dont’t worry about it was my grandpa’s solution for anxiety. We know it isn’t quite that simple, but please folks, there’s a difference between a cell phone and cocaine. Today for WeblogPoMo2024.
Do you use the Internet the way you want to? I don’t. In order for me to do that, I’d need an extra few hours every day and i wouldn’t be 7,000 RSS articles behind. How I Internet for WeblogPomo2024
That time in the 90s when I went to a gun show in a Clinton-Gore t-shirt just to screw with the crazies, whose level of insanity I severely underestimated.
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?
My riff on minimalism and how it’s not for me for WeblogPoMO2024. Despite driving a 2005 Camry, wearing basically the same thing every day and not moving house once in 30 years, I am not a minimalist. I don’t go for expensive things but rather the things I like in great cluttered numbers.
Robert Birming is organizing a June blogging activity for folks who enjoyed the April Micro.blog photo challenge and this month’s WeblogPoMO2024 writing and posting exercise. You can contact me or Robert for more info.
I was 14 when the Greensboro Massacre occurred. Despite being recorded on videotape, the KKK and Nazis were able to gun down left-wing labor organizers and escape conviction in multiple trials. As an adult I met and worked with some of the survivors. Today for WeblogPoMo2024 The Greensboro Massacre
My rules for me - A few years back, I wrote my own secular version of the 10 Commandments (actually 12), a set of principals I wanted to try and live by. I’m not batting 1.000 but most days I come pretty close. For WeblogPoMo2024
Brushes With Celebrity - Celebrity culture is weird. Even if we reject it, there is still a certain feeling when a brush with it happens to us. Reflections on the feeling and an invitation to share yours today for WeblogPoMo2024.
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
One of my favorite things about Micro.blog and the IndyWeb in general is the international flavor. Putting the World in the WWW - for WeblogPoMo2024
Reminiscing about The Great Satanic Scare of the 80s, when everything from the rock group KISS to the kid’s TV show The Smurfs was supposedly under the control of the Dark lord.
My obsessive pursuit of 10,000 cycling miles in a calendar year, what it took and what it cost - The 10,000th Mile for WeblogPoMo2024
Just a slice of life, a road trip with Wonder Woman. My WeblogPoMo2024 post for Saturday.
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.
I wrote an old fashioned #FollowFriday post but I gave some reasons why these 10 people from Mastodon are worthy of being added to your list. The Fediverse has been such a positive experience!
