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Exercising free will
There’s a lot of freedoms and resources available to me nowadays. I consider myself a low-creativity person, which is a long-term thing to work on. At least for the short term, I can continue putting my own spin on things that other people have already done.
Starting with Obsidian
It’s fall 2023. I’m staring at a blank Notion page and poised to make a dashboard for my classes in the upcoming school quarter. At this point in time, Notion AI is here, for everyone, and has been for months, but I try it for the first time and as the words tumble onto the page (literally), I wonder where all this data is coming from. Also, my dashboard template is ugly, and I’m thinking about how I’m going to be saving all my past notes for long-term storage. There must be another way!
Enter obsidian: local, markdown, simple, but lots of possible ways to automate it. Plus, Obsidian is now free for work! So epic. I’ve got a personal vault synced over git, and two website vaults. My favorite features and plugins:
- Graph view: lots of fun
- Dataview by Michael Brenan Complex data views for the data-obsessed.
- Minimal Theme Settings by @kepano ♡ Change the colors, fonts and features of Minimal Theme.
- Commander by jsmorabito & phibr0 ♡ Customize your workspace by adding commands everywhere, create Macros and supercharge your mobile toolbar.
- Mononote by Carlo Zottmann Ensures each note occupies only one tab. If a note is already open, its existing tab will be focussed instead of opening the same file in the current tab.
- Slurp by inhumantsar ♡ Slurps webpages and saves them as clean, uncluttered Markdown.
- Omnisearch by Simon Cambier ♡/♡ A search engine that just works
Search is the best way to navigate, by the way
I do this on my phone too - I used to have lots of folders to organize things, but now I just open the search menu and find what I’m looking for.
Publishing Obsidian notes online with Quartz
Core tutorial: Welcome to Quartz 4
Shameless plug: Eilleen’s (online!) Everything Notebook
I had lots of fun making my own changes! This made me better at typescript, css, js. I also finally understand GitHub workflows, pages publishing, etc. It was also nice to engage with other Quartz users on the Discord. I snooped around a lot to find the coolest features to add.
Cleaning up my web presence and making extra sites
Find things here Live peacefully - Eilleen and Sandbox - I learned even more doing all of this! Vercel publishing, robots.txt, GitHub forking etc, SVGs, API calls (with the spotify things), Flask apps
Getting my own server
Ideas for what one can do with a home server | Eilleen’s e-Notebook
I’ve never had a server before. I think the fact that I finally have one has motivated me to do a bunch of various small projects around setting up the features and flows around this machine. There’s a few tasks which I personally consider a must-do (really they should be trivial) before I’m satisfied with the whole setup. I’m almost done which means I can write up a summary of the setup.
I’ve said it multiple times already: it’s frustrating knowing that these setups have been done by thousands of people around the world, but it’s hard to figure out the exact steps because everyone’s setup is so different. I spent a lot of time skipping through YouTube videos to figure out if it’s even relevant to the system that I already have.
How I like to do things
I like setting goal such as “I want to host my personal Obsidian notes on my own PC, on my own version of GitHub, that I can back up to whenever”. Then I can flesh out exactly what I need out of the system, and then set off into doing whatever it takes to make that goal a reality. Wahoo! It reminds me of when I was in school where we’d scour the textbook for any possible hints that could point us in the right direction. In this scenario, I spend less time being confused because the range of information is a lot wider.
Perplexity and AI
how I use GPTs | Eilleen’s e-Notebook
We live in a wonderful time where web-enabled AI is an easily accessible tool. Doing things the normal way, it’s annoying to sift through Google search results, and you can’t incrementally continue to ask questions about the same setup. I’ve been aggressively using Perplexity to solve these pain points and powering through roadblocks that would have made a past version of me give up.
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