#taking-notes — Public Fediverse posts

Still chipping away at my note-taking migration from Evernote to Obsidian

More than six months into the biggest switch of productivity apps I’ve undertaken since I stopped using Microsoft Word for everyday writing, I’m relieved to report that moving to a new note-taking app has so far involved much less drama than I expected. Or deserved, considering I staged this cutover right before my busiest workweek of the year.

But my transition from Evernote to Obsidian–spurred by Evernote’s owners at the Italian firm Bending Spoons sticking me with a 92 percent rate increase that was going to land two days before the start of CES–isn’t complete either. Here’s how things have come along to date:

• Import: I had a choice of note-taking apps that could import notes from the app I’d used regularly since 2010 (Microsoft’s OneNote not among them, ruling it out even though I already pay for it with my Microsoft 365 subscription). The biggest hassle with migrating some 15 years worth of notes turned out to be on Evernote’s end–its cap of 100 notes per export. Obsidian imported every batch without complaint but not without formatting glitches that I could not have avoided in an app based on the Markdown formatting system. And then I only realized Thursday morning that I had somehow failed to bring over about two years of notes from one notebook; about 10 minutes later, I had remedied that oversight.
• Filename games: Obsidian’s implementation of the text format that Apple developer and blogger John Gruber released in 2004 (see Anil Dash’s recap of Markdown’s unlikely ascent) saves notes as individual files with names derived from their titles. But since characters like a colon and a slash are illegal filename bits in many of the operating systems Obsidian supports, this clashed with my habit of including dates in mm/dd/yyyy format in the titles of notes from specific events. Obsidian usually took out the slashes, leaving it to me to insert dashes in their place to restore sense to smushed-together date-digit strings like “6122018,” but in a few cases the Mac app gave up and renamed a note “Untitled.”
• Mastering Markdown: I feel like I’ve had to reprogram part of my brain to deal with Markdown’s note-title restrictions, but this is nowhere near the first time I’ve done something like that for the sake of note-taking efficiency (for example, the way I hand-write a capital G remains influenced by Palm OS Graffiti). Markdown also uses a syntax of markup characters to format strings of text, which Obsidian hides in practice with the usual keyboard shortcuts and formatting buttons… except when I edit, select or tap inside a word that’s already been formatted, which surfaces the hidden markup characters around it. I find these compromises a reasonable price for the long-term reward of using a lock-in-resistant format that nobody owns and which any text-editing app can read.
• Writing: Note-taking has always been a text-first experience for me, going back to Palm handheld organizers, and Obsidian has proved pleasantly efficient in that while delivering two unexpected advances over Evernote. One is a tiny bit of input acceleration: When I type a quotation mark or parenthesis, Obsidian automatically adds the closing character in front of the cursor. The other is a feature that’s mandatory in word processors but uncommon in note apps: a word count you can have displayed in the bottom right corner, and which responds to your selection of a block of text by showing the words and characters in that selection.
• Syncing: The part of Evernote I was most reluctant to leave behind was the synchronization that Bending Spoons had immensely improved, to the point where I accepted a steep rate hike at the end of 2023. Obsidian doesn’t match Evernote’s near-real-time sync, which let me see characters I’d typed on one device appear an instant later in another device’s copy of Evernote. But Obsidian’s optional sync service, $48 a year, is damn fast on its own, generally getting edits from device to device in under five seconds. And because every note is a text file, I can get a note from my phone to my laptop even when both are offline: plug the phone into the laptop via USB, open Obsidian’s folder on the phone in Windows Explorer, and open the file in any text-editing app.
• Security: Obsidian Sync features end-to-end encryption between devices by default, a security feature I have come to appreciate more after seeing how the Trump administration is willing to treat certain journalists. The tradeoff of that approach and its device-to-device architecture is not having any Web app for Obsidian–but since I almost never used Evernote’s Web app, I can live with that.
• Plug-ins: Obsidian’s resolutely indie developers tout the ability to extend and augment the app with some of the 5,500-plus plug-ins available. I’m not entirely sold on this tinkering-required approach, since some of these–in particular, the Importer plug-in maintained by Obsidian’s own developers–provide capabilities so essential that they shouldn’t require in-app downloading. In other cases, there are so many plug-ins for a specific task that I’ve postponed picking one. That said, I will put in a plug for the free Notebook Navigator, which lets you switch between notes and folders in a simple tree-style interface like the one I got used to in Evernote.
• Incomplete items: After succumbing to paralysis via analysis when looking at all of the different audio-transcription options, I opted to outsource that task to a third-party app–the Google Recorder app on my Pixel 9 Pro, which does its AI transcription offline. But I have yet to find any plug-in that can match Evernote’s ability to scan and digitize business cards for easy access to people’s contact details. That is why the desk in front of this keyboard now features a stack of recently-collected business cards two inches tall, held together with an elastic band until I can find some other way to save the useful bits from them in a searchable way. Any suggestions?

Still chipping away at my note-taking migration from Evernote to Obsidian

More than six months into the biggest switch of productivity apps I’ve undertaken since I stopped using Microsoft Word for everyday writing, I’m relieved to report that moving to a new note-taking app has so far involved much less drama than I expected. Or deserved, considering I staged this cutover right before my busiest workweek of the year.

But my transition from Evernote to Obsidian–spurred by Evernote’s owners at the Italian firm Bending Spoons sticking me with a 92 percent rate increase that was going to land two days before the start of CES–isn’t complete either. Here’s how things have come along to date:

• Import: I had a choice of note-taking apps that could import notes from the app I’d used regularly since 2010 (Microsoft’s OneNote not among them, ruling it out even though I already pay for it with my Microsoft 365 subscription). The biggest hassle with migrating some 15 years worth of notes turned out to be on Evernote’s end–its cap of 100 notes per export. Obsidian imported every batch without complaint but not without formatting glitches that I could not have avoided in an app based on the Markdown formatting system. And then I only realized Thursday morning that I had somehow failed to bring over about two years of notes from one notebook; about 10 minutes later, I had remedied that oversight.
• Filename games: Obsidian’s implementation of the text format that Apple developer and blogger John Gruber released in 2004 (see Anil Dash’s recap of Markdown’s unlikely ascent) saves notes as individual files with names derived from their titles. But since characters like a colon and a slash are illegal filename bits in many of the operating systems Obsidian supports, this clashed with my habit of including dates in mm/dd/yyyy format in the titles of notes from specific events. Obsidian usually took out the slashes, leaving it to me to insert dashes in their place to restore sense to smushed-together date-digit strings like “6122018,” but in a few cases the Mac app gave up and renamed a note “Untitled.”
• Mastering Markdown: I feel like I’ve had to reprogram part of my brain to deal with Markdown’s note-title restrictions, but this is nowhere near the first time I’ve done something like that for the sake of note-taking efficiency (for example, the way I hand-write a capital G remains influenced by Palm OS Graffiti). Markdown also uses a syntax of markup characters to format strings of text, which Obsidian hides in practice with the usual keyboard shortcuts and formatting buttons… except when I edit, select or tap inside a word that’s already been formatted, which surfaces the hidden markup characters around it. I find these compromises a reasonable price for the long-term reward of using a lock-in-resistant format that nobody owns and which any text-editing app can read.
• Writing: Note-taking has always been a text-first experience for me, going back to Palm handheld organizers, and Obsidian has proved pleasantly efficient in that while delivering two unexpected advances over Evernote. One is a tiny bit of input acceleration: When I type a quotation mark or parenthesis, Obsidian automatically adds the closing character in front of the cursor. The other is a feature that’s mandatory in word processors but uncommon in note apps: a word count you can have displayed in the bottom right corner, and which responds to your selection of a block of text by showing the words and characters in that selection.
• Syncing: The part of Evernote I was most reluctant to leave behind was the synchronization that Bending Spoons had immensely improved, to the point where I accepted a steep rate hike at the end of 2023. Obsidian doesn’t match Evernote’s near-real-time sync, which let me see characters I’d typed on one device appear an instant later in another device’s copy of Evernote. But Obsidian’s optional sync service, $48 a year, is damn fast on its own, generally getting edits from device to device in under five seconds. And because every note is a text file, I can get a note from my phone to my laptop even when both are offline: plug the phone into the laptop via USB, open Obsidian’s folder on the phone in Windows Explorer, and open the file in any text-editing app.
• Security: Obsidian Sync features end-to-end encryption between devices by default, a security feature I have come to appreciate more after seeing how the Trump administration is willing to treat certain journalists. The tradeoff of that approach and its device-to-device architecture is not having any Web app for Obsidian–but since I almost never used Evernote’s Web app, I can live with that.
• Plug-ins: Obsidian’s resolutely indie developers tout the ability to extend and augment the app with some of the 5,500-plus plug-ins available. I’m not entirely sold on this tinkering-required approach, since some of these–in particular, the Importer plug-in maintained by Obsidian’s own developers–provide capabilities so essential that they shouldn’t require in-app downloading. In other cases, there are so many plug-ins for a specific task that I’ve postponed picking one. That said, I will put in a plug for the free Notebook Navigator, which lets you switch between notes and folders in a simple tree-style interface like the one I got used to in Evernote.
• Incomplete items: After succumbing to paralysis via analysis when looking at all of the different audio-transcription options, I opted to outsource that task to a third-party app–the Google Recorder app on my Pixel 9 Pro, which does its AI transcription offline. But I have yet to find any plug-in that can match Evernote’s ability to scan and digitize business cards for easy access to people’s contact details. That is why the desk in front of this keyboard now features a stack of recently-collected business cards two inches tall, held together with an elastic band until I can find some other way to save the useful bits from them in a searchable way. Any suggestions?

Teddy Bear Therapist

#draw #drawing #draweveryday #dailydrawing #dailysketch #sketch #sketchbook #art #mastoart #FediArt #artwork #comic #cartoon #teddybear #therapist #listener #TakingNotes #psychology #psychotherapy #silly #digitalink #digitalinkillustration #makeartnotwar #drawingaddict #whimsicalart #noai #charactersketch #characterart #characterconcept #characterdesign #conceptart #conceptillustration #illustration #illustrate #illustrator

Teddy Bear Therapist

#draw #drawing #draweveryday #dailydrawing #dailysketch #sketch #sketchbook #art #mastoart #FediArt #artwork #comic #cartoon #teddybear #therapist #listener #TakingNotes #psychology #psychotherapy #silly #digitalink #digitalinkillustration #makeartnotwar #drawingaddict #whimsicalart #noai #charactersketch #characterart #characterconcept #characterdesign #conceptart #conceptillustration #illustration #illustrate #illustrator

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3S8kWgzlxyg&list=RD3S8kWgzlxyg #takingNotes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3S8kWgzlxyg&list=RD3S8kWgzlxyg #takingNotes

"The act of #takingnotes in public [#blogging] is a powerful #discipline: rather than jotting cryptic notes to myself in a commonplace book, I publish those notes for strangers. This imposes a #rigor on the #notetaking that makes those notes far more useful to me in #yearstocome."
@pluralistic
#digitalmemory #linkrot #Essential
https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/21/noway-back-machine/

"The act of #takingnotes in public [#blogging] is a powerful #discipline: rather than jotting cryptic notes to myself in a commonplace book, I publish those notes for strangers. This imposes a #rigor on the #notetaking that makes those notes far more useful to me in #yearstocome."
@pluralistic
#digitalmemory #linkrot #Essential
https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/21/noway-back-machine/

I started documenting my customizations and workflows with #Obsidian at https://hamatti.org/uses/obsidian/

#Notes #Notetaking #TakingNotes

I started documenting my customizations and workflows with #Obsidian at https://hamatti.org/uses/obsidian/

#Notes #Notetaking #TakingNotes

Two months ago I started an experiment: I switched my note-taking from #Notion to #Obsidian.

Now some time has passed and it's time to reflect and evaluate: was this a good experiment and will I continue?

Short answer: yes and yes. At least until Notion figures out offline usage.

Long answer in the blog:

https://hamatti.org/posts/two-months-with-obsidian/

#note #notes #TakingNotes #journaling

Two months ago I started an experiment: I switched my note-taking from #Notion to #Obsidian.

Now some time has passed and it's time to reflect and evaluate: was this a good experiment and will I continue?

Short answer: yes and yes. At least until Notion figures out offline usage.

Long answer in the blog:

https://hamatti.org/posts/two-months-with-obsidian/

#note #notes #TakingNotes #journaling

Davvero comodo usare il tablet e-ink (un #boox #NoteAir ) come blocco appunti condiviso nelle call usando #scrcpy https://github.com/Genymobile/scrcpy
Occhio: su Ubuntu a seconda della realease installata meglio usare la versione di scrcpy via snap o quella da sorgente, via APT è troppo datata e non funziona (si veda https://www.reddit.com/r/Onyx_Boox/comments/rbmy9f/comment/hnpft8h/).
#tablet #e-ink #takingnotes

The trade-free app of the day:

Nota

https://www.tromjaro.com/nota/

The Nota text editor features a simple interface by default.

Joplin, en öppen lösning för anteckningar och att-göra-listor 🗒️ 🤟 😊

https://oppetmoln.se/20220303/joplin-en-oppen-losning-for-anteckningar-och-att-gora-listor

#opensource #foss #oss #notepad #notes #takingnotes