❤️ Obsidian is great! (now)

uh start recording yes it's true I'm using obsidian don't be mad at me don't hate me don't hate me for updating my preferences let me tell you the story I want to make this a short video but you know me it takes a long time and I have to tell you the story how on Earth did Mr anti- obsidian flipping people off Banning people for recommending obsidian become an obsidian fan well let me tell you a story once upon a time I wanted to take notes on my phone the end that's it that you could stop the video right now if you knew nothing more about this video seriously I am not even exaggerating if you knew nothing more about this video than that you have all the answers everything else is kind of wishy-washy long form story okay so the takeaway is very simply I wanted to take notes from my phone not only that I wanted to take notes by doing speech to text because in 2025 speech to text is amazing even on a Samsung it's not as good as a Samsung is a pixel my pixel was way way way way better at doing text text speech to text and I have a feeling ibone would be way better than that so in 2025 if you are typing you're kind of a boomer unless you're writing code seriously unless you're writing code in 2025 if you're taking notes by typing them out I mean you kind of were a boomer at that point and you know no offense to the actual Boomers out there that's just a term that the young people use today why is this relevant because look let me show you all right so I'm going to give you some specific examples I let's turn on the side thing here so today um this entire one here all I need is my phone to right I'm actually going to read it as I said here sipping sipping my coffee from the patio outside with nothing more than my phone and my coffee I realized just how amazing it is to write at the speed of thought they say that writing is good is is is easy to speak aloud and this makes it all that better because because I can hear myself rather than just type it away now there's there's there going to be grammar and spelling problems and you know capitalization all that why because it's notes I'm just note taking and I'm doing speech to texts but I don't care you know why because I did this with my Cofe and my phone while I was sitting out there and it was automatically published to GitHub every five minutes who doesn't want that there literally is nothing simpler there is not a simpler way on planet Earth to take notes remotely there is nothing there is nothing there's nothing better there's nothing there's nothing better the only thing better would be is if you like you hired an assistant to copy the stuff down but you know what they would do they would do what you're doing which is they would like speak into their phone and take the notes and then have the model published to get him so using obsidian to dynamically sync I'm going to get better it's going to get even better and to dynamically sync to GitHub and to to you know do autoc correct and all the other things it would do is is see there we go see that just went through that was an automatic GitHub sync that just happened okay and so we we're going to break all this down for the rest of the video but but uh you know the only downside of is a writing is obvious lack of capitalization punctuation but as long as it it's going to be in my notive city and I don't care second part of the writing process is in this case is having a WordPress blog so I'll do a separate video on this um you know saying the word WordPress makes me vomit a little bit in my mouth but again I can write a blog from my phone separate video on that totally separate video on that um but this all came about because I wanted to get rid of carrying my computer around because I got two new two new bicycles and I'm not into carrying around a bunch of heavy stuff I want to ride my bike I want to enjoy it and I want to be on my mountain bike in the middle of nowhere and take a drink and take some notes about I remind my to do this or do this or I need or I can maybe have an idea I have lots of ideas on the road except for I'm old and my brain is not remembering things so being able to take notes is is good and in the past videos I've said take notes in your zcast and and I I ran I'm sorry in your AI take notes in your AI and I I ran into limitation with that because AI runs out of memory I knew it would I didn't know when it would be and it turns out it's much earlier than I thought so I don't believe that your AI is the best way to take notes I now believe obsidian is the best way to take notes period and talking to a guy who wrote his own Knowledge Management slec and system I took it down as you can't even get to it anymore because you should be using obsidian I am now a paid $4 a month customer of obsidian because the SN is just worth it and quite honestly as proprietary as it is a bunch of good people up in Canada make an obsidian and it rocks I mean it is a solid application and my biggest apologies to anybody that I may have personally roasted I'm thinking of a couple people specifically that I'm downright told him you know you suck ass and the reason that I got so angry is because they were using something called wiky linkx so let's break down how to use obsidian in a way that is indistinguishable from just plain old GitHub flavored markdown and this is important people the reason that all of my anger got erupted with this is because the form of markdown that obsidian uses by default is not compatible with get a flavor markdown it's not even standard markdown it's not even common Mark they use something called media links if the one tweak this I've written up all these tweaks in my publicly accessible z uh sorry knowledge based RBX robn notes on GitHub um you can go see all of these notes in real time you can go search them I'll show you how to do that um as a as a as a way to go about doing this so but the point I'm trying to make here is that if you click um if if you go into your setting this is this really important setting and by the way I've got I've got uh notes I'm trying to call them Z notes instead of zel uh now but I've got note files on all of these and we'll we'll go through this um I turned off auto pairing uh markdown syntaxes that was messing up my bulleted lists um let's see here what's the one I was going to show you um I don't need line numbers fold in Dent properties and documents strict line braks okay make these are all documented in the in in my notes I have a whole like a bulleted list of every single change that I suggest and we're going to review that document in a second but I'm kind of getting ahead of myself on this first one so um let's see readable line length this is this is kind of fun that makes it readable we were playing with that earlier um yeah I don't I don't know anyway so let's I I actually have links to it I actually put made videos I mean I made made screenshots too which I've always wanted to do I've always wanted to do screenshots easily and and this has gotten around that I I haven't put that in a in a note yet but I will talk about it uh I am using a paid version of obsidian yep I'm using the $4 the $4 a month paid version of obsidian which creates a synchron synchronous synchronous between here and here I want to show you what I mean by that so you see this why why obsidian link let's get started on that right away the reason that I am paying for this because I can automatically publish to get up from my phone if I if I buy the sync you can't do that unless you buy the sync which is totally worth it um the GitHub synchronization is a plugin that you have to add and I'll I'll sort of break all this down I I I I'm not really a to organized right now but you can go find all this stuff in my notes um if you want to see exactly what I'm doing so so here I am I'm looking at my phone and I'm I'm going to the why did I why do I use obsidian link and so here it is um some reason it switched to White it was actually dark mode before so what I'm want to show you here is see here at the bottom right so I can do this I want to show you this so you you right now you can see the screen right so I can do this this is just a a sample to show you how it automatically synchronizes in real time all right that's pretty damn fast right and then every five minutes whatever is here is going to be saved into my GitHub and if I if I delete it from either of them so if I if I copy and paste this if I copy and paste it and I delete it uh whoops I'm not in edit mode I'm in read mode oh I'm also in VI mode you know what I'm G to turn VI mode off of this I I've been I've been super debating about whether to VI mode or not and uh when I use a guy I tend to not use VI mode for lots of reasons because you can't use filter and stuff so anyway that little delete thing doesn't work I I don't know why it would use VI mode in obsidian unless your fingers were really married to it um all right so here we go again let's do this so delete hit delete delete and then it'll do the thing it's just showing right here so about ready about about done with this video Auto sorry for that I just had to make a so did you see how that went away okay so last thing here um so why I us so what I wanted to show you is that it it can be deleted that way just really easily um and honestly the rest of the the rest of the benefits you can kind of just look at on your own what's that you need to get water you're the only thing that's showing is me right now you see right here I can you can look on the screen I didn't really want you to you don't want me you don't want your voice to be in the in the Stream all right well I mean we can like do do do around that oh it's my bad it's my bad so I should not be doing live stream from here but I am on the kitchen table doing this live stream how cool is that right so if I was going to do a live stream like a technical live stream and I had the computer in the car and I took it to the coffee shop or something I could do a live stream having to take all my audio gear and everything so uh this is kind of part of The New Normal would you like to write an nap uh press send 10 seconds of the MP3 the audiobook the lists additional questions um um no we don't need that app to uh have someone on your PC right into a note while you're recycling yeah that's another thing you could do so um the other thing that's really cool about that so that's not actually list that's not one of the the lists uh the listed items um so one of the reasons to use this is as somebody said is because you can actually share it you can actually share the account so you could have somebody else taking notes for you like one of my moderators I could give them access to I could sh synchronize with them and they could make new notes for me and you'd have to trust them obviously but I already trust my moderators so uh if I'm not talking into it they could take notes and stuff and we would have like live real time notes uh of everything that we're writing there so the truth of it is is I all I have to do is give you access to the obsidian syn I don't have to give you access to my GitHub repo right because it only synchronizes automatically from here so and I'm out of battery of course my battery is just about to die um give me one second and I'm let me see if I can pause the video it's I didn't yeah I'm back I guess that's the sign I need to finish up here so this is the main summary of it so let me just going to go down these bullet points really quickly and that'll be the end of this video for any more information you want about that um it will be in the link it'll be in my notes and the notes will be linked from uh from my zcast I mean from my from this video at the bottom my dog is doing yoga over here so the first thing if you wanted to be compatible with GitHub you need to do is keep them in a single in order to keep it the the cost down to $4 a month if you're going to do the sync and you don't need to do that right you can automatically do a get up sync and you can even set up GI up sync from your phone using turmo and some other stuff if you don't want to pay at all you can do that um I don't mind it at $4 at $4 a month that's plenty reasonable for me for that for the amount of of of of stuff that it's giving me I I mean we're talking about I can take a screen capture or a photo with my phone and I can add it to my zcast notes immediately and it'll it'll automatically synchronize up to get them so you know short of blogging dynamically that's the best thing I could probably want to do um and there's Miss obsidian for teams um and I think my biggest complaint about obsidian was that I I wrongly assumed that they didn't have any intention of supporting the markdown standards out there and they absolutely do they I think it was a bad decision to add media uh media links but they immediately resolved that and you can make it so that it makes some standard links now um so you need one I think you should have one read me that's what I have here and uh this is a read me on if you go to RBX robn notes uh you can actually see it and let's do that really quick so if you go to gi.com rvx rnotes you'll see uh whoops I'm in the wrong account I'm in the I'm in my I have two accounts now that I stream uh all over the place all right so here we go so this this is what I was doing before so here's the notes and you get your obsidian settings get saved which is nice um and the first thing is you're going to see is there's like a lot bunch of files app spaces and it don't let we're going to come back to that in a second so you click on read me here and you get the same stuff here now the goal of course is so that these the the browsing of your readme repository you know your notes GitHub markdown repository is 100% compatible with GitHub and also works in obsidian and if you are using media links it won't work so that was the thing that made me really angry it really triggered me and I don't remember if they didn't have it before or I just didn't know about it but for whatever reason uh there is a setting you can go in and you can change it so that it any of the media links that you add will be automatically automatically converted into uh standard markdown links and so you can go ahead and use the convenience of the of that format you know two double brackets and then type it out but you get the compatibility of of you know these markdown links that are that work as long as they're all relative and pointing to something at the top level so so let's go back to that um uh let's see I use get a flavor markdown why I use obsidian uh why I don't use Zill Casten um why I'm okay with B names for notes bases my B names so if you go back here um taking notes of obsidian on a phone uh keep obsidian compatible so let's keep going through this um I I suggest you add a legal info to the readme that file just so people know uh and you know you put a disclaimer in there saying hey you know this stuff is is is my live notes right which brings me to the next Point publish content from your notes and into polish books and blogs so some of you know that I have a thing called Perpetual publishing which I still have you know the books that I've been working on that I kind of put on hold for a second while I get back into the outdoors and everything they are coming back but I now what I can do is rather than having to be sure of what I want to put in the book I can have a random thought while I'm on a bike ride and I can you know safely put it into my phone as a part of a z you know sort of I'm not calling it as zast because it's really not um you know into my notes and then I can go back to my notes and see which ones are recent I can tag them I can ke keyword search them or whatever and I can pull that into the book and that's that's the reason lum's approach for zocon was so made him so prolific is because he had these notes already written and one of the really great things about obsidian that I've always wanted to add to any system that I started building was the ability to mind map and you guys anybody who's used it for two seconds knows about this but this is one of the most powerful ways to do any kind of writing it's also the number one reason that you should pick descriptive names and titles that have spaces in them and get over your annoyance with spaces in the file names because that doesn't ever landed anything except for the backup on GitHub right that's it it's not going to become a slug if it were ever going to become a slug it would be something you would export later so you know a lot of people are like well no duh right but this whole mindmapping idea this is probably the one of the single most powerful things uh from obsidian that I've always liked but wasn't willing to give up you know the zle Casten standard or markdown standard to get it well now that I know that you can actually write 100% get a flavored markdown and never have anything you know incorrect or non-standard creep into your notes knowledge base I get a graph for free but then what you can do is you can take these you can take these you know these these nodes and you can convert that node into an outline and you can convert the outline into a book and so it's actually a really great way to write books this is how I wrote all my papers and books in college using a tool called inspiration and mind mapping tool for mac and it would it's very very fast way to create an outline out of just the creative thought process and then boom you you put you put some skin on those bones and you got a book so this I'm super excited about this because this is a big part of it um but again you know that's how so that does that means that my perpet this is I I was starting to have conflicts because I was writing a Blog uh in asid do and I was completely locked to not only doing it in asky dog but you know doing something that I really support I think it's awesome but only for those who want want to publish a book right so I was having a hard time recommending that as a notetaking methodology to other people like should I use asyu instead of markdown I was like I don't know and now I think the solid answer is only if you're going to publish a book um 99% of people are going to be best served by obsidian right now free or paid doesn't matter if they follow the standards okay let's get back to the standards uh follow the one I the one idea principal of zcast in as you saw in graph mode by having one thought per note you win right because if if your node has got like two or three or four major thoughts major ideas they don't show up in the graphic mode so there is still a lot of value in and I think in keeping with the um you know the the old ideas uh you know of of one thought per per note and the the easiest way to do that um is to just make sure you don't put any headings in it if you don't put any headings in it and if you're like reaching for a new heading it's a good chance you need a new note instead of a new heading um and you know if you've got two or three or five I mean you can do that if it seems to make sense but I just don't I don't so I have a couple of other things that I do I only make text paragraphs because I want my raw code to look really good I'm kind of jumping ahead but I I want my raw code to be readable which means that I will put links um down below so this is the one thing adding hyperlinks unnecessary to paragraphs makes them impossible to read in Mor markdown form by the way this entire paragraph I spoke it into my phone um to address this I just clean up the text on this the grammar to address the simple uh create those links references in the paragraph in their own bulleted list at the end of the document which is always rather short when following a one L thought principle so this means that my notes end up with the title at the top which has traditionally been a huge problem for markdown do you put a heading at the top or not right so my old systems that title was always the first heading and it was always at the very top well now that these things are being managed by the title itself so the title of the file which really took some arm twisting for me to be okay with but the title right here is exactly the same as the title of the file so that means you can't put fancy things in it which I already was constraining myself to but um you know so you you know you get the title but that gets rid of the problem of like keeping your file names in sync with it and and uh obsidian is really great if you change this it not only changes it in the file name it changes it in every single file that links to it so so the freedom to change these useful names is taken care of and the the the infamous problem of having you know the first line heading of the markdown file match is G now there is a there is a side effect to this that's slightly annoying so that is when you click on a note you don't have a title and there's some people that would really get ban out of shape I would do that I would get ban out of shape that before but the title's right here right the title is right there in the name it's super readable this is just a not taking system so it's not like I'm going to die because it's not there and I can change the title anytime I want and it doesn't corrupt the internal the internal uh content there um you know so some people will still be put off by that I think it's fine um so what did I do here oh that that's an auto highlight I don't even know what's going on right now am I in reader mode it is a goey app so it does kind of get make me what is what the hell is this thing doing here why is that there this is why I don't like graphic apps again why am I using this at all right you're like why is Rob using this I am using this because press Escape what the hell was that thing anyway so there probably a preview of some good uh I do not use Boulders we're going to talk about why I don't use Boulders um that was a very tough decision so we're going to get there in a second so follow the one idea abandon uh other outdated ideas from zcast and so let's talk about this um so the ideas about unique identifiers and being able to do it on paper and all that I think they're old and outdated um and um why I don't let's see actually you know what I can do here so here it is Lum created zcast at a time when computers were not really an option many of the physical limitations system were powerful but and they constrained the system today um the speeds the processes gets gets the medium out of the way obsidian as one of those systems unique identifier that Lumen suggested was unnecessary uh it was it was completely necessary for the time but it's not anymore I used to complain about Universal unique identifiers um because that's what I thought obsidian uses and you can do that but it's actually not what it uses obsidian by default uses the human readable title uh of the note as the unique identifier and I love that I love that because it forces me to create unique titles if I have two titles that are identical then I have a bad title right so I think it's a great idea um and I don't think it was always that way when I first evaluated the only principle from zcast and workflow that I have kept is the one main thought principle which I talked about already um and the one main thought being being up here this ensures I do not repeat myself all over the place okay so um uh the other thing of this is uh okay let's see allow spaces in the file names uh so titles and graphs are readable so this was really really really hard for me to do and there are all kinds of ways you can add a plugin to automatically make your titles into slugs the biggest reason to not do that I already said it is that your graphs become unreadable your graphs have these unreadable slugs in them as opposed to these really pretty um you know look at this really really cetty on line idea right so you have this oneline thesis idea and that becomes in your graph and it makes this graph very useful if you put dashes or something in there you're going to do it it's going to not work so I feel like that's a big you know disadvantage uh of of doing it that way so I I'm okay with spaces uh every modern system allows for spaces um if if and when I'm on the command line messing with it which I am doing right here um so yeah so a um you can use any F you want so here's all of my things right so if I truly wanted to go in here and edit it with bi which I will um you know I can do why I can do uh why I tab tab you know don't use blah and I can just tab it out yeah okay this looks to a Unix person this is like you know just just will not stand but but hear me out there's still there's still another really great reason to do this and that is because you've made an actual title that has um that's you know that's a title it's like one thought in in you know distilled into one sentence is thing is that you get this extremely you know surprising benefit in GitHub so I I made a whole thing about this but um by making these titles over here the file names even though they're all flat and we'll get to that even though they're all flat they can be very quickly searched this was not something I could do using my knowledge base the other way I made unique identifiers for all the file names or folder names and then I had to do an actual content search to get anything out of there but because my titles are now very readable titles which I can do this with my obsidian tool and my GitHub interface are identical and that goes for my phone as well and I I can't overstate how amazing this is even though I encountered it completely by accident let me show you what I mean so let's say um let's say that I have literally 10,000 individual notes in here right okay so the first thing is like oh do we really want to make all of that flat the answer is yes and folders and categories are a failed taxonomy approach to Knowledge Management I will make a case for that in a second but let's just assuming it's all on the top because it's all on the top we can now use the builtin GitHub filter technique to find the stuff that we want to do so I can say give me everything with GitHub in it and it immediately finds every single file in here that's got the word GitHub in it right and if it's in this directory it's even better so like if I do obsidian you can see why obsidian mark down here I actually kind of I wish I could make it so that it it didn't look into obsidian that would be really nice let's let's do something that's not going to be like that let's do I don't know uh how about phone so there all I need is a phone to write taking notes do you see how wonderfully this Auto sorts it gives me a readable thing it auto you know it's that it's a very it's a very common user interface technique to have a filter with a search and you just type it and it autof filters it so that you can see around that um we're not use the terminal though okay so anybody that's recommending fuzzy finders or stff like that you missed the beginning of the video the whole reason for this is because I want to use it from my phone you can't use a fuzzy finder from your phone without a terminal I love the terminal but this is this is a notetaking tool that works in the terminal and works on my phone and auto publishes so that's why I like it so you can go here you can see the different things and it'll actually take you right to I mean that that is pretty damn cool I mean look at that look at at that this is the built-in GitHub interface everybody this is the buil Hub GitHub interface that I'm doing right now and both of these notes by the way were completely taken by speaking into my phone and writing them okay so if if you if you haven't been sold at this point I don't know what else to tell you this is like hands down the best way to take notes on the planet um and so choose unique descriptive titles and title case which we already talked about title case is scientifically proven to be easier to read than title case plus it's it also works really well as a bulleted entry uh you might want to make sure to not put um periods on the end of it on the end of your uh if you avoid putting periods on the end right here you can do this and you can do this and you can say add link and it will go see it will try to find a match it will try to find a matching note that is already there and if there's not one it'll make one so like choose unique descriptive title cases right right so if I do this if I say no match bound it'll either erase it whoops have to command Z that one all right so um and now if I click on it it will open up a new one so so if you make the link to it it automatically creates the file and makes link to it that's all stuff that I had to code into my tool which is built in automatically so um just easier to read them right so and you know I can go back to the last one I this is another thing too as you would see when I was doing this with the terminal I'd have like 15 terminal t-o windows open because I would do this and then I'd open up a new one and I do this they would make rules for my t-o to open up a new window to do to edit the different thing this stuff is all built into obsidian already so so now when I save on that okay now did you see how it was it was a Media Link at first a media Wiki link but if you watch this thing let's let's Commit This I want to show you um so if I commit it to GitHub and I show you it now um let's see here I have to refresh uh and you can actually sort uh based on when the last one was committed and everything if you wanted to you could watch the commit history it's another thing people can still follow you they can follow your GitHub repo and they can see every change you look and they can look at the commit changes and the diffs to get to basically subscribe to you unless you want to force something to go to your RSS on your blog or something so they can actually follow your changes just like they could before um so if we choose descriptive titles just easier to read and it just made that actually put a in the name that's kind of interesting um but did you see how easy it was to make that now let's actually go back to uh keep obsidian compatible what I want to show you here is if I show you the code oh look at that one that one didn't get changed oh that's good to know but that that actually gives you uh the idea here so you see you see how this one didn't get changed I wish we need to figure out how to make that automatically get changed too it looks like that's a remaining Quirk uh I don't know who did it but somebody over there on the obsidian project was listening uh and they actually changed but you see you see this is my I'm glad we this happened because this is this is exactly my complaint about it in the past in the past this was the only way to link and because it stayed that way you can see it doesn't link and these other ones do now another thing I could have done here is I could actually say uh I can actually edit it and change those things and now what I can do is I can if if if if you already have the text there you can rightclick and you can say add link and you can click on it and then for some reason clicking on the link does the right thing um so I think that's probably a leftover um I think that's probably a leftover that I that I don't like um because I really like the the autoc creation of the note for me but it's not that hard to just do this to say to copy and paste this and say you new note paste right and then and then it that immediately becomes a note over here and then I can link to that note you know um you know back in the the the where is it um so which one was that don't worry about slugs right so now when I right click on this and I do add link it will find it it will actually Auto find it in my list of files and it will make the link for me and that's how I've been doing my links in the past the thing that's really great about this is the interoperability of you know a single line bullet point and what will become eventually an idea and so a bullet point in general is already kind of a single main thought so this this ability to instantly take you know notes using bullets if you have a if you have a those are easier to do by the way if you're just typing right so I regularly do bulleted lists of of ideas but if the more free form ideas I can also do that it's just you those are much harder to do on the phone you know teach speech to texts but if I have a you know I regularly will like do a whole bunch of bullet pointy things and then I want to go back and flesh those things out it's actually a pretty common way to to do this and then I can I can go in there and just make each one of them into its main thought and I can expand on it um it's not milk my friend it's not it's not it's not milk it's not it's because my stash is uneven somebody's making fun of my w stash but good good call though no this one right here yeah all right I enough back to the thing so uh so is that a joke my my tiny little mustache yeah my blonde mustache anyway so so let's go back to what we were talking about so allow spaces file names choose unique uh descriptive titles don't worry about slugs slugs are the things with dashes if you don't know that you know you see in WordPress or whatever those things are only important once it becomes a web page right uh or if you're going to be doing a lot of file system kind of terminal interaction with the thing if you are interacting with it in these ways you don't care about that um set up automatic sync using get a get up on all devices so that is a plugin I'm going to show it to you it's called get up Sync It's a plugin you turn it on you point it to your remote URL that is it if your system already has git access to that repo it uses git from the system so it's exactly the same name is typing a get sync and it it puts the device and then the timestamp in the comment so it's the same as my save command except for it's got a better comment um and and that's it that's all it takes to get get up sync to work you can set it up to go automatically minees that five minutes and and then it auto SNS when you start up so um and something else I want to talk about really quickly here um let's see here okay so I I didn't talk about it so if you have your laptop on or whatever has got obsidian and obsidian is running with its get up sync on you can leave that on plugged into the wall of course and you can be on your phone and I just showed you this and you can live in in real time you can make a note even you know while you're writing you can make a note doing speech DET text and that note will be Auto synced into the obsidian running on your laptop or wherever and then that every five minutes in my case will be automatically published to get him that's pretty damn cool because that means that people that are following let's say let's say that I would and and by the way that whole entire process is completely internet agnostic that means that if I'm on my bike let's say I'm out on my gravel bike and I am riding in middle of nowhere and and I want to make a note about something but I want to I want somebody else to see it right or I want to give kind of a live blogging note taking system but I don't want to make a full-blown blog right now I could make a a ton of Instagram posts that always require to have a picture which is annoying you can't do that live but you could literally be biking along and you could take a note you can even take a picture with your phone and you can put it in the note while you're biking and and it will automatically synchronize to your GitHub on your next internet accessibility so it will store on your local phone and then when your phone has internet access the internal synchronization mechanism of the obsidian app will automatically detect that push it up to obsidian on your laptop and that will get automatically pushed to GitHub so that means if you have people that are following you you know like the dot Watcher kind of people you can actually automatically have people follow what notes you're taking as you go you can make little teeny tiny videos and post them YouTube every once in a while but this keeps you I mean if you're God if you're if you're a tury competitor or something like that I think I would think this would be an amazing resource because you can actually do realtime notes with minimal internet activity and since I'm going to have a starlink mini running off a USB battery you know phone charger on my road gravel bike and on my mountain bike um you know I should say you know when I'm doing like not trail riding but when I when I have that around that means I have permanent access to publish live notes of what's going on in real time I like in real time we're not talking about waiting till you get to the next Library we're talking about you know real time note taking real-time pictures without Instagram right so and so if you're I love that because it's for a live streamer like me there's going to be moments where there's not going to be any live streaming capability we're going to have lots of leaves and there's no starlink and there's no mobile so during those times I can still do the same process I don't have to change anything I can change the act of I can still take you know pictures and I can put those in my Ride with GPS so it automatically publishes the picture at that spot plus I can also include it in my notes if I want to on my Z while I'm writing assuming I'm not in a safe place and I can have that all be happening at the same time and then when I when I get to the internet when I when I have you know mobile when I'm in Mobile range or satellite range that stuff will automatically be published and synchronized I gotta tell you that is amazing as a as an outdoor Enthusiast and somebody who likes to do um a lot of writing and not taking stuff I I cannot imagine life without this having now discovered this so um I had to share it um let's just knock out the last view here setting up automatic sync to get up I just talked about change uh the default to use standard markdown relativ L internally I already talked about that don't use Wiki links or the media links that are not compatible as you saw uh don't use anything that isn't get a play markdown this is super important so if you need math notation you can do that right um that's the kind of thing you would only do from your laptop obviously but if you need to take really intense math uh notes you can uh both GitHub and obsidian fully support math in fact there are plugins um to make the creation of math notation much easier uh you know you don't have to actually know kex or whatever it is which is by the way fully supported by get a fli markdown it's been supported for now three years or so it's a subset of latch if you know what that is um you know most people these days are not writing books in lwtech they're writing them in markdown with lwtech boards and then they're it's easier to write markdown and then they they move it from there um that does kind of remind me of one of the downsides of this is that and quite honestly one of the reasons to not put a bunch of markdown in your paragraphs which we'll get to because when it comes time to write the book The book's probably going to be written in asid do and you're going to be copying and pasting Snippets out of your zcast I'm sorry out of your notes into your book right and when you do that if you got a lot of internal markdown linking inside your paragraph you'll have to run that through a converter because asid do doesn't do linking in that way another alternative would be to use some form of markdown book generator there's many many many of those um I just prefer asky do uh to this day I still prepare it so you know it's it's yet to be said how difficult it's going to be to take my notes and put them into a book uh I made a pretty strong argument in the past that you if you're doing a book you should stick with bookwriting and keep all of your content in the book but you know I'm on the road I'm not going to be able to do any of that so that kind of thing I want to be able to do from my phone and then I want to be able to take those notes and incorporate them into my perpetually published book in some fashion and and make it change there there this entire process is actually because I can make it so public while I'm having these ideas and thoughts um this entire process has gotten so easy to read and so easy to do that I'm now back to a position of kind of waiting to do a book until it's entirely finished before I publish it because I've I've reformatted books so many times at least five times in the last year um that I'm more inclined to wait until the entire book is finished and focus on creating content in many note forms um and then you know and then bringing pulling it together it's a little bit harder than coding book because there's a bunch of coding examples in there and stuff that obviously I can't do from the road very easily without a computer um but you know the more like the novel like or the the travel blog articles and those kind of things those are all super easy to do um from you know on from the road so so that's the kind of thing well probably be a distinction there um but I think probably what it'll be is that my blog articles will be written in story form and then the collection of those stories will sometime somehow eventually go into some sort of book or travel blog if I ever do that so um change the default to use the standard relative markdown we did don't use anything that isn't get a flavor disable default automatic hardlink brakes which is really important because you want you want the paragraphs to automatically wrap I've talked about this before uh only published raw bolt on GI so um you know I think people have told me many times that obsidian has the ability to export to all kinds of different cool things and quite honestly I think you shouldn't do that and let me tell you why um I've already showed you how easy it is is for someone to browse your repo uh by just clicking around on the repos and then finding the things they want just using GitHub right and they don't even have to have a GI up account for that they can do that just just you know just send them there I think that's much better than managing yet another thing right because if you set up export you'd have to set up automatic exporting um I mean one thing you could do is you could activate the builtin uh web browser that comes with uh any any git repo by default uh the only problem with that is that it does not see things at the top level you'd have to put it under docks or you'd have to put under a different branch or something um and I don't but you know I don't I don't see how it's a problem to just send them to the readme uh plus you're going to get people more inclined to follow to subscribe and like and star your repo by sending them directly to the repo than you would if you're you know you you've got people going someplace else um if you change the default to use um so if you're only publishing that raw Waltz markdown to get a you'll and you've done get a flavor compatible markdown you're good that includes something I'm getting to here which is keeping everything flat it's probably one of the most controversial things but when you really think about it it's no different than what I was already doing before I had you know a uniquely identified file for every zeld cast an entry and I had thousands of them three four five thousand of them and to the point where you couldn't list the directory um and you lost the ability to see the titles because the titles in my case were in GitHub git commits and I think that and now looking back compared to this I think that is a bad idea I think I think it's better to keep the name unique because if you have a unique name you just grep that directory if you're on the terminal otherwise you effectively grep it during using the guey like I just demonstrated and by having it all in a single top level file you're never afraid that there's something living down below right but more importantly than that categorization by category as opposed to tagging which is you know still a thing which I'm considering um is always a fail because just like this video this video is a good example right this video is both a technical video and an IRL you know streaming video so it's relevant to people who want to be cyclists and it's relevant to people who want to take notes for technology and you know it's it's got multiple categories and if I had to pick a folder to put it in do I put this in my IRL category folder or do I put it in something else it wouldn't work and let me give you an example of this I am dual streaming three triple streaming this video right now so this video is going to my YouTube rdbx Rob fun Channel which I'm going to put a plugin for that not very many followers on there that's just me having fun on the bike and everything which I'm looking forward to doing it's a great day for mountain biking out there today and it's also getting pushed to my um RX Rob fun twitch Channel which is live streaming same thing basically the same thing as YouTube but twitch got a lot more fun plugins like like bellum's Airline bot that tells you the airline that's flying overhead and bunch of other really cool things that are outdoorsy related uh and it's of course that is under the um I believe we're in the IRL streaming category on Twitch right but I also have this streaming to another to another one RBX Rob which is now it wasn't it before but it's now 100% Tech content content and only Tech content so but this is Tech content right so so and that category I believe is science and technology doesn't really fall under software so you see my point so if I were to try to take this recording and organize it in my you know notes or even in my file system where do I put it right where do I put it do I put it do I put it under IRL do I put it folders and categories never work just like just like just like um you know the species the phm class thing that has never work there's always the platypus that's going to break all the categorizations it's better to describe data information and things in terms of what they what makes them a thing and and this goes for software development as well this is why composition and interface declaration telling you about a thing and how it how it does how can it walk can it write can it you know how does it what can the thing do is better and what its properties are what colors are it is always better than trying to categorize something that has all those properties into a specific thing and inevitably uh because you can take those grandular or properties and mix them together in this case tags you know three or four tags and say okay I want everything that's got these three tags so the the the the idea of Knowledge Management by category is largely a fail now I still do it on my blog I my blog I have thoughts right but what ends up happening is I end up getting these like really monstrously huge categories because you know they don't have another gear right well well what happens when I have a story that is about how my gear failed me and I'm telling you know I I I lost the rest of my teeth or something you know it's like is that a story does it go under the story or does it go under thoughts or does it go under gear it goes under all of them but now I can't put it under all of them because because I have to have CAT pack I just talk myself into removing my categories I I only recently relaunched my blog on arbx rob. blog and uh I and I was just messing with the templates I'm going to get rid of the categories there completely because tags tags tags are always better tags tags allow you to have like multiple tags on the thing and you can say everything with this tag just use tags um never end bullet items with a period I talked about that so that it's comes a link really easily um and keep paragraphs free from hyperlinks and I talked about that because again if you're going to be moving to another thing you want all the hyperlink hyperlinks to be in this stuff at the bottom and you can get a sense of this just by scrolling through this by the way that's a that's a a screenshot so there's another screenshot so I always put what I do is I I'll end up if I I don't put the links in the paragraph but if I have I if I referred to another thing then I put the Links at the bottom of the page and this is this is all this is very very compatible with bibliographic kind of things uh I don't need it to have related I'm going to get I used to put related after that I'm not doing that anymore so um you know I think that's a good way to do it is to just put all the links that might possibly be available down at the bottom and then that will create the graph that you're seeking so that stuffs tends to coneal you that doesn't happen automatically I think you can make it do that automatically but I haven't played with that yet so a bunch of really great ideas about how to how to do this stuff hopefully this will need a rant tag we absolutely need a rant tag and um I I I don't know how T I haven't started using tags yet but when I do use tags I will use them as um I think that it already has marked down yaml tags supported but I I haven't added any tags yet but I usually in the past I've been kind of anti-ag um but they're a widely widely widely accepted um uh you know extension to markdown so I feel like it that's probably going to be the way to go um I still am not a big fan of even tagging because I feel like the content itself is better so if I have picked a good title and I don't mind the title being really long I was limited before I was I was limited to 50 or 60 characters and now I'm not if if the title uh has every keyword that's really main you know really relevant I don't really need tags because I can go I can do the filter and I can say you know I can do the whole thing here and and I can actually filter it here I can filter it in GitHub what the point is that you know I don't need any extra tags from what's already in the title and so you know I may still add them back from my blog they definitely apply from my blog they definitely apply because then you can click gear and get all the blogs with clear with gear in them um and I believe you can do that here with Z with uh obsidian as well but I haven't done that yet so that's a pretty long video but I feel like I owe it to all the people that have been telling me to use obsidian over the years and they're like I told you I told you and my my response to those people is yes you were right on a lot of things yes I'm sorry I love you I'm going to I thank you for harping on me but also it didn't have half this stuff when I first evaluated it okay and I don't know if they added it because I ranted about it that would be really funny or if they you know if if eventually they kind of the consensus of a lot of people started to push them in the right direction so I fully support obsidian I actually want them to keep making money and stay in business I think they're doing good things and I am not I am not afraid of my content being incompatible with the civilization in 100 years in the future being able to read my content because I am now using standard markdown on GitHub that that is browsable on GitHub and is also something I can compose from my phone so here's to you obsidian you've done a great job you've done a great job I appreciate it and that's all for this video thank you I'm G to go ride my mountain bike now

I meant "sentence case" and not "title case". #obsidian #notes #markdown