This week's video is going to be a livestream! My friend Andy Polaine (whom I met when we did this Obsidian TTRPG showcase together and is now my friend and DM) and I are interviewing Stephan Ango, the newly appointed CEO of Obsidian.
Stephan is a designer and an engineer, an...
2023-03-07 13:49:15 +0000 UTC View Post
Hey everyone! This week's video is about the very beginning of another goal for me: writing a book. It's something I've wanted to do for a while, but never got around to doing. Well, I've decided it's time for that to change. And I'm hoping a public announcement, as well as a commitment to write it in public, will be enough to motivate me. :)
As I mention in the video, I plan to publish what I've got as I write it, and you lovely Patreons will be able to peek in 2023-03-02 13:37:29 +0000 UTC View Post
This one's for the TTRPG players/GMs! I've gotten a few questions about the TTRPG vault, in particular regarding the "Add a new session" button that hasn't been working too well. I tried to work around it, but the Buttons plugin is inconsistent and the developer is busy rewriting it from scratch. So instead, I created a workflow for adding sessions that doesn't include Buttons. In this video, I show that off, as we...
2023-02-02 20:00:15 +0000 UTC View Post
This week's video shows some of the artificial intelligence tools that I've been experimenting with and have impressed me enough to include them in my workflows, specifically:
Hey folks! This week's video is about how I think Obsidian core plugins are overlooked in favour of "shinier" community plugins, when actually they're more futureproof, secure, and plenty flexible enough to support most use cases. I also go over my top 10 core plugins, all of which I use every day. (Especially since I have vaults I don't enable community plugins for.)
Last week, I launched 2023-01-19 23:16:37 +0000 UTC View Post
I made a thing. A really scary thing to start off the new year: I made my first course ever.
Obsidian for Everyone is a true beginners' course: it's everything you needed to get started with Obsidian and more-- all without getting into community plugins. You may be surprised what you can do with Obsidian without them these days...
If that sounds interesting to you, check out ...
2023-01-12 00:59:35 +0000 UTC View Post
Happy 2023, folks!
This week's video is about all the plugins and apps I use to get stuff done and make sure my priorities are aligned. The goal-setting is mostly the same as last year, but I've added more structure to my daily notes through rapid logging.
Note: This video will be unlisted until Friday, when I have to mark it as private shortly before it is published for everyone to see. If you try to watch it and get a "Privat...
2023-01-04 00:11:22 +0000 UTC View Post
This week's video is about different ways to take notes from YouTube videos that I've tried, including a recent release I'm pretty excited by. I am on YouTube A LOT, for learning and for pure entertainment, so you better believe being able to extract ideas from videos as easily as I do from books or webpages is important to me.
I've gotten several comments asking for my current tem...
2022-12-29 19:44:52 +0000 UTC View Post
Visual atomic note taking with Obsidian Excalidraw
This week's video addresses the gap between taking notes textually and taking notes visually. I talk about how to bridge the gap by showing how to link/backlink to images, tag and add metadata to drawings, and embed images or parts of images just like you can embed notes or parts of notes.
This is all using the Obsidian Excalidraw plugin, which I've been using a lot as part of 2022-12-20 17:00:07 +0000 UTC View Post
Hey folks! I love to close out the year with some type of readathon, and this year I'm doing the Reindeer Readathon for some holiday-themed prompts to help me catch up on fiction books. This time of year is the perfect time to cuddl e up with a hot cup of your favourite beverage and a book.
I'm a huge fan of ereaders in general, but Kindles have a special place in my heart-- I've had almost every generation...
2022-12-05 17:59:35 +0000 UTC View Post
I've been a remote worker for years (even before the pandemic), and I've found I work best that way. Here's what I bring with me to coworking spaces or while travelling and working away from home for months at a time. This is a roundup of all the things I actually love and use that could make excellent gifts, for others or for yourself. :D
In other news, we're up to 679 people on pkm.social now! If you haven't yet found...
2022-11-28 16:00:12 +0000 UTC View Post
This week's video is about my process for turning a raw note into something that enriches my day-to-day life and career. I also talk about some other plugins I've been using but haven't talked about before: Note Refactor and Strange New Worlds.
Note: This video will be unlisted until Friday, when I have to mark it as private shortly before it is published for everyone to see. If you try to watch it and get a "Private video" error, you've probably caught it in that small window. Wait...
2022-11-22 16:00:08 +0000 UTC View Post
Hey folks! This week's video is about the Obsidian Projects plugin. I had a chat with the developer of this plugin last week, and this is a summary of what the plugin is and how it works. In short, it's a way to create multiple views for the same set of data. I know this is something I missed from Notion!
Note: If you try to watch this video and can't access it, that's probably because a few hours before I publish ...
2022-11-16 17:21:40 +0000 UTC View Post
How many Obsidian vaults should you have? The short answer is that you should do what makes sense for you. I don't like to state definitively how things should be done, so instead, in this video, I'm talking about different reasons to have single vaults and different reasons to have multiple vaults.
Personally, I would have a single vault if I could, but I use Obsidian for so many different purposes that I do now use dozens of vaults.
Also today: Interview with the develop...
2022-11-07 12:51:11 +0000 UTC View Post
In this video (out later this week for non-Patreons), I tackle one of my most frequently asked questions: How should you organize my notes in Obsidian?
I think this is a personal question, so instead of saying how someone should organize their notes, I'm instead talking about different methods to do it in Obsidian. I'm also sharing which methods I've chosen for which situations, using the excellent LATCH framework for deciding what type of metadata to keep on your notes.
...
2022-10-31 14:00:12 +0000 UTC View PostHey folks! Some of you have noted that Patreon isn't great for two-way communication: only I can create posts to address the community, and everyone else has to comment on existing posts or message me directly.
Feedback received! I've just opened up a Discord server that will be accessible by all Patreons. Discord is a platform for chatting to each other and to me, and it's invite-only. If you've used Slack, it's very similar. This is my first time running my own Discor...
2022-10-31 09:38:04 +0000 UTC View Post
Hey friends! Here's a preview of the video I'm releasing this week-- it's about a platform called Shortform that I use for:
- pre-screening books to figure out if I want to buy them/read them
- testing my memory of a chapter by reading summaries
- connecting ideas in the book to other ideas by other authors
Shortform did not sponsor this video-- I just wanted to talk about it, though I did reach out to them and ask for an affiliate link to try to get everyone a discount. I d...
2022-10-24 15:00:11 +0000 UTC View Post
Hey folks! You might have seen my video preview earlier this week, about Obsidian for non-coders. Here's a part of the video that I ended up cutting from the public version. I thought it made the video too long, but just in case it's useful for some of you, here it is!
From time to time I will be releasing some videos that are Patreon-only, and I'll be putting them in a playlist only you can watch. Check 2022-10-19 15:00:09 +0000 UTC View Post
This week's video is going to be one for non-coders or developers who have found Obsidian's Markdown syntax a little confusing. This is the companion video to the Formatting Notes for Obsidian Cheat Sheet that you can get as a Patreon.
Speaking of the Cheat Sheet-- a few of you were asking me if you could get a Markdown format of that PDF so you can put it into your Obsidian vault. I've created and added that...
2022-10-17 15:00:09 +0000 UTC View PostI've been meaning to make an Obsidian for beginners course for a while, but I'm finally at a point where I feel like I've got enough of a handle on doing YouTube part-time to tackle something new!
The course will be for complete beginners to Obsidian and will cover no community plugins. Think of it as an introduction to most of my YouTube videos, which cover community plugins and more advanced workflows all the time.
I'm going to be sharing the progress and contents of the course ...
2022-10-14 09:51:58 +0000 UTC View PostHey folks! I'm trying something new and tentatively adding a new vault to the list of perks you get from this Patreon, one that is online and password-protected.
I've been wanting to add written tutorials or "cheat sheets" for different plugins, but that sort of thing is bound to change quite regularly. I could put it in the existing Patreon sample vault, but I didn't want people to have to redownload the entire vault just to see recent changes.
So I created a new vault that I'm c...
2022-10-10 15:00:12 +0000 UTC View Post
Hey folks, I was going to release the Tabs video this week (it's one I've already previewed on Patreon), but that one is about new Obsidian features that haven't been released yet. So instead, I'm going to release this video about creating a database in Obsidian, using a bunch of different plugins.
For you lovely patreons, I have added related templates that I demonstrated in the video to 2022-10-07 09:04:09 +0000 UTC View Post
Hey everyone! I've gotten a lot of questions about formatting notes in Obsidian, so I thought I'd make up a quick one-pager with the most common things one might want to do in Markdown, along with some things that are specific to Obsidian, like linking and embedding notes and sections of notes.
What do you all think? Anything you'd change/add/remove?
2022-10-02 22:36:07 +0000 UTC View Post
Time for something different! I LOVE these "what's in my EDC" type videos and I am an absolute gearhead, so I wanted to show you some of the stuff I carry around every day. It's a small package, but it's enough to entertain me and to be my little portable workstation if inspiration strikes.
It's also what I bring with me when I'm travelling. Having my essentials in a sling makes all the difference during a flight.
Hope you all enjoy it!
2022-09-26 21:41:24 +0000 UTC View Post
This week's video is going to be about how I studied Swedish for 30 days using a variety of tools, including Obsidian. But those of you here get it first!
I've gotten a lot of questions about how I learn languages, and I've been a bit hesitant to talk about it because I don't people to think I'm a language learning expert-- I'm not! I'm just very stubborn. :) Still, I do consider myself a polyglot, so I'm sharing my system here in case it helps others.
Thanks for watching and for ...
2022-09-19 15:59:01 +0000 UTC View Post
Here's what you can look forward to in the next release of Obsidian, v0.16. I've been testing it for a few weeks now, and particularly love the new tabs feature. However, this release DID initially break a few things for me, so I wanted to explain what it involves. In particular, you may be affected by this release if:
- you use a lot of keyboard shortcuts, including the ones for opening notes in new panes
- you use the Sliding Panes theme
- you use a theme whose developer hasn't ...
I WAS going to post the ExcaliBrain video this week, BUT! Last night I got an email from the Readwise team about their product Reader, which I've been privately beta testing for over a year. The email said that they were ready to bring Reader into public beta, which got me so excited I had to quickly get this video out to tell you about it!
I've been bugging the Readwise team to let me share video footage of Reader, because it's been such an essential part of my workflows in Obsidian. 2022-09-07 15:26:17 +0000 UTC View Post
I've been wanting to create a video of ExcaliBrain every since I made a video about its sister plugin, Excalidraw. However, the more I delved into it, the more I realised that ExcaliBrain is a lot more like Dataview in that learning how to use it is one thing, but learning how to use it WELL is entirely another. After I interviewed its developer Zsolt Viczi...
2022-09-06 08:04:22 +0000 UTC View PostHey everyone! I didn't do Q&A last month due to some commitments, but you can always message me-- I always answer Patreon questions. :)
This month, though, I want to start this up again! Got any questions about Obsidian, PKM, or anything else that you'd like me to answer? Post your questions here until September 30th, and I'll make sure I answer them!
I may also be making a public YouTube video of these questions and answers at the end of the month, especially for those that w...
2022-09-05 21:47:33 +0000 UTC View Post
Last week was a blur! I spent the full week with my work colleagues in Sweden, getting to know each other in person after years of working together online. It was fantastic but exhausting, and I'm still struggling to get things back on track now that I'm in my home in the Netherlands.
So this video's a little late this week, but I hope you'll enjoy it anyway. It's a workflow walkthrough of how I process nonfiction book notes. Just like I always do when I learn something, I also created ...
2022-09-02 09:35:51 +0000 UTC View Post