Hey folks! I'm coming back to life here after some unintentional time off, but here's what I've got to share with you today.
Livestream: How to Sketch Your Mind in Obsidian and more
Last week, my friend Zsolt Viczián (developer of the Obsidian Excalidraw and ExcaliBrain plugins as well as general visual thinking guru) came onto my channel to talk about how he does visual thinking...
2025-06-23 17:56:36 +0000 UTC
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... I got divorced.
There, I said it.
It went about as well as it could possibly have gone (we're still lovingly in each other's lives and families), but you don't leave a 20-year marriage without some emotional fallout. I've had to prioritise my mental and physical health over pretty much everything else, including content. Funnily enough, 2025-01-08 20:13:43 +0000 UTC
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Hey folks! Here's a video just for Patreons, although Brandon and I may use short clips of this in future videos.
I've been following Brandon Boswell for a while, and I even reached out to him a few months ago just to meet him for a virtual coffee. Fast forward several months, and we were able to do it i...
2024-07-11 16:49:41 +0000 UTC
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I've been on a real visual note taking kick recently, thanks mostly to spending time with the visual PKM extraordinaire himself, Zsolt Viczián. This week's video addresses the problem of connecting visual notes in the same way that we do textual notes. After all, some might say
2024-04-25 23:10:24 +0000 UTC
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I just released a new video about hybrid notes with Excalidraw, and I'm quite eager to share it with you all because it's about the biggest recent change in the way I take notes.
I now use Obsidian Excalidraw to create no...
2024-04-19 04:50:26 +0000 UTC
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Two months ago, I bought a reMarkable 2 on a whim (unboxing video here) and while the onboarding experience wasn't the best, it DID whet my appetite for e-ink tablets in general. After that video and just talking about e-ink tablets a bit more, I unfortunately heard of another e-ink table...
2024-04-13 19:17:38 +0000 UTC
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On March 22nd and 23rd, I went to the PKM Summit, a conference held in Utrecht, the Netherlands. I had never been to an in-person conference just for Personal Knowledge Management and note-taking, and it was amazing.
I did two talks at PKM Summit. In the first one, my friend 2024-04-05 14:25:39 +0000 UTC
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I've long wished for a way to work on notes on Obsidian with other people, and I've tried many different approaches. One of them, Etherpad, I even made a Patreon-only video about last year. But up until now, nothing really scratched that real-time itch. Dropbox was the closest, but that required someone having both Obsidian an...
2024-02-23 15:11:45 +0000 UTC
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I had fun recording the last little audio clip, so I decided to also read out the second issue of my newsletter, Thinking in Public: Optimal quitting . The newsletter itself is free for everyone to sign up to, but I'm experimenting with reading issues out ...
2024-02-18 03:00:09 +0000 UTC
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I planned to write a book last year, but 2023 had other plans for me, and that didn't happen. This week's video is about what happened, and why I decided I'm writing a different book instead. I take you through the current setup of the book, the Obsidian plugins I'm using, and even another tool i'm using in conj...
2024-02-16 11:44:22 +0000 UTC
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I've heard about e-ink tablets for writing for a while, but never really "got" the concept. I'm sure you already know I like digital note-taking, but I actually like analog note-taking too. I'm a huge fountain pen nerd and have quite a collection of pens, paper, and ink from all over the world. I felt like e-ink notebooks was the worst of both worlds: not as tactile as analog, not as easily sha...
2024-02-09 16:44:16 +0000 UTC
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This week's video is about 10 concrete ways that I learn in public, and I'm putting my money where my mouth is by also announcing that I'm starting to write a book in public.
This isn't a marketing ploy. I don't have a book written out yet, I've never written a book before, and I'm just starting. I really am fascinated by the idea of writing a book in public, angst and insecuri...
2024-02-02 12:06:23 +0000 UTC
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More than a year ago, the Obsidian team released Canvas as a new core plugin. Canvas is a way to visually arrange your notes, media, and even embeds of external sites on a wide, infinitely scrolling space. It's supposed to mimic that feeling of spreading your notes out on a kitchen table to work on them.
I've always like...
2024-01-29 08:09:05 +0000 UTC
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Hi everyone!
This week's video is about a free, open-source, self-hostable tool called Quartz that you can use to publish Obsidian (or other Markdown-based) notes. It recently won the Best Tool in the Gems of the Year 2023 awards, voted o...
2024-01-26 12:18:56 +0000 UTC
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So Patreon apparently has a podcasting feature! Of course I wanted to try it out. So here's something that's half me reading out the latest (aka first) issue of my newsletter, Thinking in Public, and then half talking about a few things I didn't get to mention there.
Since this is new, I'm not ent...
2024-01-23 00:38:55 +0000 UTC
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This week's video is about the process and apps that I use to consume content (books, articles, PDFs, podcasts, and videos) and take notes on them so that I remember the important bits. I also talk about a controversial newsletter issue I read from Oliver Burkeman entitled How to forget what you read
2024-01-18 23:06:32 +0000 UTC
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I first started making videos on YouTube 7 years ago, but it's only in the last two years that I feel I really hit my stride in terms of consistency. Part of that is due to taking a lot (I mean, a LOT) of courses on creating videos for YouTube specifically, and the other part is building a system around processes so that I don't forget to do things.
... and, of course, I use Obsidian to t...
2024-01-12 12:16:43 +0000 UTC
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Happy 2024! I wanted the first video of the year to be about balance.
Last year, and the few years before that, I've made more and more specific objectives for the year. The OKR (Objectives and Key Results) approach is something I'm familiar with in my day job, so it felt natural to extend that to my personal life as well.
What I found out last year, quite dramatically, is that it w...
2024-01-05 11:13:18 +0000 UTC
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Hey folks! It's been a while. Lots of personal things have come up for me in the latter half of the year that have made me particularly glad that 2023 is over. Onwards and upwards!
I'm ramping up on creating more content for you all this year, and I'm brimming with ideas.
Interviewing Jorge Arango on organizing notes in Obsidian
Did you see my livestreamed interview with my ...
2024-01-02 18:20:01 +0000 UTC
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Obsius Publish
Hey, folks! I'm finally back after a bit of a break, and this time with a preview of a video I'm publishing next week about a community plugin called Obsius Publish. Obsius Publish is my current go-to plugin for publishing temporary or one-off notes quickly and for free. I'm still using Ob...
2023-09-23 15:09:28 +0000 UTC
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For this week's video, I did something different: I recorded a conversation between me and my friend Andy Polaine, a leadership coach, about what happens when productivity gets toxic and turns into burnout. Some of you may recognize him from the interview with th...
2023-07-03 21:53:58 +0000 UTC
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Here's a preview of next week's video, in which I trace the path of one book I read throughout my vault, from raw Kindle highlights to the variety of notes, videos, and presentations I made from it as a result. The whole process took five months (so far).
The book in question is Emergence, by Steven Johnson.
Note: T...
2023-05-06 07:32:21 +0000 UTC
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Hey folks! This week's video is going to be about an app I've been trying and using for seven months: Napkin.one. Napkin is an entirely separate app from Obsidian that uses AI to do something I haven't traditionally been a fan of... tagging.
I talked about Napkin in
2023-05-03 15:25:38 +0000 UTC
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This week's video preview is about emergent note taking, which is the idea of taking modular notes and being able to put them together in new ways-- a good idea, but hard to put into practice. In this video, I talk about how that really boils down to two things:
- how to write notes to be found by yourself later
- how to find relevant notes at the right time
Not...
2023-04-22 07:11:16 +0000 UTC
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I'd already done a preview a few weeks ago of the latest v1.2 version of Obsidian just for you lovely patrons, but next week I'm releasing a longer video about it now that it's been released to Insiders. I've had some time to think about how to incorporate it into my Obsidian workflows, and I thought I'd share that here with y...
2023-04-14 15:00:05 +0000 UTC
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Surely I'm not the only one who's struggled with how to organize and make sense of thousands of PDFs? Yeah, thousands. My TTRPG hobby makes it so that I literally have thousands of PDFs that are languishing in my Dropbox folder, and I've really been trying to find a way to actually make use of them. Good news: I've found a solution, and this week's video takes you through my research.
Tha...
2023-04-07 16:00:08 +0000 UTC
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I love people, and my Obsidian vault reflects that. This video is all about why, when, and how I take notes on people in different situations. This isn't for everyone, and I totally understand if my system is a bit overkill for most situations, but I've found it useful for getting to know people and for making sure I stay in contact with those I really connect with and want in my life.
2023-03-31 23:42:25 +0000 UTC
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This week I have two livestreams for you all!
This week's video is a peek into my learning process. I have a history of jumping into new things I know nothing about and somehow ending up on the other side, and I thought I'd share some of my experiences and principles I keep in mind whenever I learn something new. I also show some examples of learning exhaust I've created to document my learning on (what else?) Obsidian.
Note: Thi...
2023-03-20 15:06:41 +0000 UTC
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This week's video is about Obsidian Dice Roller-- but it's not in the context of gaming this time. I've covered Dice Roller a few times in other videos, but always while talking about using Obsidian for TTRPGs. I love playing with the affordances of things and using them for unintended purposes, so here's a video about how I use Dice Roller to spark creativity in other aspects of my life.
2023-03-13 16:00:06 +0000 UTC
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