Waiting..
Auto Scroll
Sync
Top
Bottom
Select text to annotate, Click play in YouTube to begin
00:00:01
[Music] hey hey welcome back everyone the light conference continues and very excited for for this one so
00:00:17
yeah i mean where to even begin so max sparky david sparks who who's with me right now is somebody that i've definitely looked up to and was just learning from before it i've been recognized he was an actual real person
00:00:30
that i could interact with um in the real world he's just this figurehead that was sort of out there always disseminating excellent information when it came to everything mac related and in that tech
00:00:44
world kind of as a whole and then last year through mike schmitz youtube had me on the focus podcast and that was just wow such a such a nice feeling and experience talking with you
00:00:57
both really nerding out on pkm what exactly is pkm i don't know it's kind of the stuff that we were talking about and trying to figure out um and now now you're on here david and i think
00:01:11
this is going to be a really good conversation because oftentimes we talk about like the the tool and you're just using this thing maybe it's obsidian but how does it connect elsewhere
00:01:22
and i think that's something that you are in a unique position to be able to show us how something whatever we're using for that tool can connect to other parts of our life operating system of our
00:01:34
productivity world um so yeah anyways i'm really happy to have you here david how are you i'm great nick and i'm thrilled to be here thank you for inviting me it's quite a thing you've put together
00:01:47
and also just for everybody behind the scenes uh nick and dan are running this thing like a swiss watch it is amazing how organized they are you guys should be really impressed yeah well hey thanks for that
00:02:01
and dan dan is quite amazing custom soundtracks for each guest it's a little surprise you know sometimes i listen to lyrics and i go well if it was good enough for the guardians of the galaxy's movies then i shouldn't worry about
00:02:14
them talking about illegal drug usage but it does make me kind of laugh so just so you know our playlists are all from guardians of the galaxy's movies and that's kind of what we're going off of um
00:02:26
but yeah david i i think there's just so much goodness that we're going to get out of your talk and i don't want to hold up everyone from that all right dave yeah the um you know when nick asked me to come on i knew that nick has so many
00:02:39
smart obsidian users out there and and people coming in that are speaking and we actually had lunch together to talk about how we'll do this and something that occurs to me that i don't
00:02:51
think enough people talk about is ways to use obsidian outside of obsidian i mean linking your thinking inherently is about those links inside of obsidian but actually there's links outside of
00:03:04
obsidian too and so i thought today that's what i would talk about so hopefully i can share something with you and i know that we've got folks uh here today with various levels of experience with obsidian some of our super users
00:03:17
and some are just figuring it out um so i'm going to do my best to give something to everybody and i guess we can just get started so let's do it uh so today i want to
00:03:28
talk about obsidian and external linking um that is something that i think is important to learn but before i do i want to just talk about obsidian i know there's an element of this where i'm just preaching to the choir right but
00:03:42
man i love obsidian right i mean you know i make a lot of podcasts and make other content where my audience is people who either love obsidian or are tired of hearing of obsidian so i always
00:03:56
get a degree of negative feedback when i go too crazy about it but isn't this a great app i mean it's so powerful the thing i like about it is it's kind of like this cowboy thing right you know there's new plugins every week all the
00:04:09
like nerd buttons are getting pushed with obsidian it seems like not a week goes by that my workflows aren't challenged because there's some new way to do it and um that's the kind of stuff that just makes me so happy and i love doing
00:04:22
that but also um the the nature of the application it's a folder of markdown files and your data set is not put in a container
00:04:34
it's not proprietary it's just a folder full of markdown files an obsidian granted will add some context and some some language that's not necessarily you know a pure markdown but it's a folder full of markdown files
00:04:47
and that's one of the tricks that allows you to do more with obsidian because you can access the data set from anywhere but you know you put those two things together you know the cowboy nature
00:04:59
and the uh the markdown files and suddenly it really gives you something you can have a lot of fun with so uh i just had to like give my testament first so i'm one of you i get
00:05:11
it uh but the thing about it seemed like i was saying earlier is it's really about internal links and i'm looking forward to to watching a lot of the sessions from this conference because i know a lot of people are doing really interesting things with internal
00:05:24
links they're creating diaries and they're changing the way they think about different materials and like all the great content that nick has in link in your thinking i think all of that is true and the primary reason you should
00:05:36
be using obsidian um and like i said you know that's the rest of this conference you know how do you link inside an obsidian and how do you use that to your advantage but for me
00:05:48
leaking outside of obsidian has some benefits too and uh i've been using that with my use of obsidian since the very beginning and if you look at my obsidian database i am frequently jumping in and out of it
00:06:02
using external links and i'm not sure everybody knows you can do it and i want to share some of my workflows for that so the first one i want to start about here is the idea
00:06:13
the concept of urls that is the gold of obsidian right because everything is reduced to a url where you can go outside the application or inside the application all you need is that magic
00:06:26
link and then suddenly you can glue things together i've talked about on the mac power users and at max sparky over the years this concept of what i call contextual computing and it's really like my
00:06:38
rallying cry of technology um you know when technology first showed up the idea was it was going to make us all way more efficient and productive but you know sooner or later the people in silicon
00:06:50
valley figured out that they could make a lot of money by selling our attention and technology has now become a thing where quite often it's not there to help you achieve your
00:07:01
goals but actually to throw a roadblock you know rather than you writing your novel it wants you to check facebook or you know rather than you doing you know spending time with your kids it wants you to go on twitter and
00:07:13
there's all these things that are now thrown up by you um a good example of it is just email like if you get an email let's say you need to write an email for work um or better yet you need to respond to
00:07:26
an email for work uh you you put it in your task list then you go over to your email application well what's the first thing you see you see an inbox that's full of junk email and maybe other things that are very cleverly there to distract you
00:07:38
and before you know it you spend 30 minutes an email and you still haven't got to responding to the email from work another example is browsing like if you need to go on the web to do some research man is that like
00:07:51
an infinity pool right i mean you fall into amazon or youtube or something that grabs your attention and before you know it you're asking yourself why did i even open this browser and with contextual computing the idea is
00:08:04
you draw direct lines from the thing you want to do to the tool that you do it in and that's not by going to the general windows of a browser or an email program but by lasering in to the specific email
00:08:18
or to the specific web page and going straight there keeping yourself on target and kind of resting control back from technology and that's if you follow max sparky that that's the one message i want everybody
00:08:30
to get that we can turn technology into a tool for us so how does that fit with obsidian you know it fits with these urls so early obsidian had hacks for urls in
00:08:43
fact i made one of the first ones i was looking at this i was october 2020 i wrote a keyboard maestro script that would auto generate a url on the mac that allows me to drill to a specific
00:08:55
obsidian file in my obsidian vault because i didn't have that feature then and um so and you used some trickery with the file system on the mac and it worked fine but it was a pain in the neck to implement very soon thereafter the
00:09:09
obsidian developers in fact i mean i'm not going to take credit they were working on this i'm sure before i wrote the script but um they came up with a great system where they put the uh they put this this option in obsidian
00:09:23
copy url right i mean that's what we needed the whole time we just want a url for an obsidian page well that's the beginning of the journey here with external linking you can go to any page in your city and
00:09:35
database and you can copy an external url then you can take that url put it anywhere else on your computer and it'll drive you to that precise page this is super useful it's a super power
00:09:48
and i know some of you already know this but some of you don't and the way i use it uh here's a little screencast is uh i have committed a keyboard shortcut to it so
00:09:59
i'm going to hit command p and then i'm going to just type url you can see copy obsidian urls right there but i made the keyboard shortcut command u and so anytime i'm on any page in obsidian
00:10:12
if i press command u i copy a magic link that can bring me back to that exact page any time i want all right so that's the first step
00:10:23
command u i love that uh so here i am on my uh on my ipad i made a shortcut because i have this thing called sparkyos it's like my foundational page in obsidian it's kind
00:10:37
of where i run my life out of it um and i have created a shortcut it's a choose from menu shortcut and you can see right there at the very top it says sparky os now if i were to open up this shortcut
00:10:49
for you what you would see is a choose from menu shortcut i made a feel good on shortcuts you can go to my website if you're interested in this but all this does is it if i press the spark us button it
00:11:01
opens a url and this happens to be the unique url the obsidian generated for my spark eos page so all i've done is just it's a one step shortcut open a url and i've embedded the url i got by command u
00:11:16
you guys with me so far making sense all right so what i do now if i press the button then it's just going to open obsidian to spark the os and if i open up if i hit those disclosure um arrows there
00:11:29
you're going to see a whole bunch of stuff about my life and but i can get to that now on my iphone or my ipad by clicking one button from the menu bar and that's just using url so that's an example of an external link
00:11:41
going into obsidian the thing is though they go both ways here is when going out of obsidian so i've got a web page open on the left side of the page and then on the right side i've just got
00:11:54
a an obsidian page for this conference and um i'm going to go ahead and start the animation here you see i'm typing and on the right side here's the link to my website and then i go over to the to the left
00:12:07
side there and i just hit command k and then command c which is a copy of the link i'm hitting command k on this side and pasting that link that i just got from the other page so i'll go ahead and close the browser
00:12:20
so that's gone now if i click that button it just opens the url basic stuff i'm sure all of you guys are doing this but stop and think about the power this brings to you anytime you need to work on a project if
00:12:33
you need to pay your electric bill and you put it in obsidian but the electric bill website into a link um i do this with research projects all the time i do a lot of writing and research
00:12:44
related to technology if i go to a page where i'm writing a post or planning a podcast i've got all these links to external web pages and you know what happens is i
00:12:56
never open the browser without knowing where it's going and i never get caught up in that stupid trick where you know you start going to so you don't need to and you forget why you're on the internet so uh the first
00:13:09
step you know uh can obsidian link to the web yes it can solid line out okay it's very easy to get in uh to the website from obsidian i have done some stuff where on pages
00:13:22
i've embedded obsidian url links to get back in that works with mixed results it really there's a whole bunch of stuff involved with making that work websites generally are external links that go out of obsidian and don't don't
00:13:35
so much come into it although it can be done all right let's look at another category though all right so back here in my obsidian page and
00:13:47
uh i want to talk about um task managers so there's omnifocus let me focus is my task manager of choice one of the reasons why is that allows you to make these external links so there's one i have
00:13:59
right here and you can see i actually have a page for this conference and a project and they've got the same name if i right click on it in omnifocus i can copy that link now i'm going to go over here into
00:14:11
obsidian i'm going to paste the link from omnifocus right below there and i'm just going to show the page you'll see it's the same link you know i already did this on this one but uh this is a laser-like link
00:14:24
into omnifocus so now i can at any time just click that link and i've got it right there and then i'm going to hit comma command u to copy the page out of obsidian so
00:14:36
now i'm going to make it a bilateral link i just i just copied the link to obsidian i'm going to go into my omnifocus project down to the notes and i already have the word obsidian written there that happens with every new project and i paste the obsidian lincoln
00:14:50
so now i've got a way to go both directions i can go from omnifocus to obsidian and obsidian to omnifocus so i've got a really powerful task management system i'm going to click the link here just to show you there it is and i just opened up the
00:15:02
link so i've got a way to go bilaterally between my task system and obsidian at any time and all it create requires is the creation that's linked back and forth one of the reasons
00:15:14
why i'm such a big fan of a bummy focus is because they have fully embraced these unique url links uh and i'm in a lot of task managers i've been testing other ones for the max sparky labs a lot
00:15:26
of them have the ability to make an individual task a url link particularly these web-based task managers but very few of them give you the ability to make a project
00:15:38
a url link and the making a project url link is really the magic here because usually i've got a page in obsidian that relates to a project and i want to link to the project task list in an external
00:15:50
task editor omnifocus doesn't only allow you to do projects they also allow you to do what they call perspectives which are like unique views of your data uh the omnifocus has a folder mechanism where you can group projects together you can
00:16:04
link those so basically anything i can make in omnifocus i can link an obsidian and getting those tasks linked to my obsidian manager is a great way to do it and uh someday maybe next
00:16:16
seminar i'll talk about doing tasks specifically in obsidian i've got thoughts on that but for now at least i am i'm a fan of omnifocus for this and this linking process gives me all the power of omnifocus
00:16:28
with the contextual computing link the ability to go straight from one thing to the next and to me that's the whole whole game man we just want to figure out a way to get from one thing to the next so let's talk about tasks tasks yep
00:16:42
you can go back and forth with those using external links in obsidian all right next is files um there's a bunch of different ways to handle files one of my favorites is an app called
00:16:54
devon think which i have a field guide on i'm sorry i'm not trying to like sell you a bunch of junk but i i do cover that and one of the features of that app is it does a great job at linking so i'm going to start it again here i am in
00:17:08
my obsidian database say hey let's uh add a link to a file here and then once i get that done i'm going to go over to devonthic and in devon think you can right click on it just like i did with
00:17:21
omnifocus so i've got a link in your thinking a group here i'll right click whoops there we go and go down say copy item link there it is
00:17:32
and just like omnifocus i've now got a link so i'm going to hit command k here to insert a link oops i made a mistake there i should have edited that there there we go there's the devin thing click so i've
00:17:47
got a dev and think link in it now and i also copied the url out of um out of uh obsidian and you'll see in devon think i've created a custom field called
00:17:59
obsidian link so now i can go both directions just like with the task manager from here in the task manager i can just go to the custom field and click on that and it's going to bring me to the specific page in
00:18:11
obsidian of course i already had the page open but trust me that works and then from the right side of the screen if i want i can just click the link in devon think and open devonthink
00:18:26
to that page or now it's going to that specific group devon think just like omnifocus lets you link anything so if you've got a pdf page 5 of a pdf that's buried in your library you can go to it if you've got a
00:18:40
folder full of documents you know any object that you can save in devon think works really good now i know there's a lot of folks that put all their files into obsidian i personally find obsidian is great for
00:18:53
text and devoting is great for file system so i kind of keep them separate but using this kind of contextual computing linking external linking system i'm able to glue them together very easily and i
00:19:05
never get distracted all right so files check we can go back and forth with files using obsidian uh next one that a lot of people do is email and i'm not going to get into the full
00:19:18
details of how i do it here but i've got a document an email on the left side i've got some text on the right side of my obsidian library uh i've created a little apple script that allows me an apple mill to
00:19:30
copy an external link to any email so i hit ctrl k that copies the link for me and then i go over to obsidian i select the text i hit command k and just embed that language and then
00:19:44
now i've got a link to that specific email and i'll go ahead and close email and now if i click on that there you go this is something i use all the time in fact if you look at this note at the top
00:19:55
when nick first wrote me about what he needs for me to be here today i save that email with a link at the top under details so anytime i want to go back and read that email i just click that link nick email explaining deliverables and
00:20:08
i'm into the source email on the speaking gig so i use that all the time now if you use gmail you can just copy the link from the url bar a lot of other third-party mail apps use
00:20:20
different ways but most good mail apps give you the ability to create a link to a specific message and if they don't then you shouldn't probably be using that mail app if you're going to do this the way i do but
00:20:32
my devon thing i mean sorry my obsidian database is just flooded with email links all over the place anytime i work on a project and there's a key email i will link to it
00:20:43
and that's just another feature i use so email check we can do that too um the uh the next piece you know honestly anything that has a url you can link with obsidian and
00:20:56
that's something that i find super powerful i mean i didn't do a demonstration on this but i have a um i have my calendars are the same thing like if i have a calendar entry like
00:21:08
today's calendar entry for for prepping for today had a link to that obsidian document we were just looking at a minute ago um i do them for presentations i do anything that i can
00:21:20
work on i i link and i saw alex and you have your question your hand up i'm going to answer all the questions at the end because i definitely am going to finish early i've got a couple more things to cover here and i'll just take all the questions then but i'm looking forward
00:21:34
to your question so you know the point is you know obsidian external linking is something that can really improve your game and i know there's people that try to do everything in obsidian
00:21:45
but i'm not one of those people and i suspect there's others like me and the ability to laser like focus between your obsidian database and somewhere else on your mac or your computer is very powerful
00:21:58
i guess i should mention that this is a very mac focused presentation because i work on the mac but url linking works on windows 2 it works on android it works everywhere just a question of picking the right
00:22:10
tools that go to the trouble to give you these laser-like links all right there's a couple more things you can do outside of obsidian to affect the inside you know there's so much you can do but there's more
00:22:22
i want to talk about apps that help you work on your obsidian database specifically there's three that stand out to me here and these are all mac focus if you're a windows pc user feel free you know to drink something right
00:22:36
now and uh just you know laugh at the mac people so the first is the keyboard maestro you know with keyboard my show you can create a markdown file um and with the obsidian's database being marked
00:22:49
down files that means you can affect the obsidian database so all you have to do with keyboard maestro to create new documents in your database is create a markdown file save it to the city and vault and there's no step three so this
00:23:02
is something that's really powerful once you start thinking about it i am i'm always coming up with ideas for things i want to cover you know and i'm not sure you know where i'm going to cover it like i have the max sparky labs at max
00:23:15
sparky and sometimes i come up with an idea for something i want to what i call supporter content people who help support me i give them extra content um and when i have an idea rather than
00:23:26
go to the trouble of opening obsidian navigating to the right folder creating a new document applying an obsidian template i decided why don't i just do all of that externally and keyboard maestro is this incredibly
00:23:39
powerful tool that allows you to do interesting things on your mac with automation so what this short what this script does is when i type the command control option command m
00:23:52
which is a contextual thing that gives me a whole list of things i can do one of them is create new supported content and it pops up a screen that says hey new supporter content sparky yes and then i i type in what i think the title
00:24:06
is going to be if it's active i check a box if it's if i want to paste the clipboard i check a box because sometimes i'll like see something on the web or maybe nick drops a cool new video on youtube and i want
00:24:17
to write about it and i'll copy the link to the the video so if i hit paste clipboard it'll paste that link into the note that it's about to create so that's the first step of the shortcut or the script the next thing it does is it runs
00:24:29
a um a conditional and i know this is getting kind of nerdy here but um i do have a keyboard my show field guide i'm sorry nick i keep marketing myself but uh if it doesn't contain pace clipboard
00:24:41
you can see there's just some text here um and this is the text of an obsidian note i mean we've all seen this stuff there's some yaml front matter at the top uh it's using a variable language from keyboard maestro and it's
00:24:54
giving me all the things you know what's my youtube link what's my member full link all that stuff and then i am and then the last thing i do is i save it to the obstacle involved this is the tricky part i think a lot of people
00:25:06
don't think about you can save markdown files to your obsidian vault without being an obsidian so you generate the file you auto save it to the specific folder in your obsidian vault and it shows up
00:25:19
so let's see that run i'm going to hit the magic keyboard combination with m and then you see i'm typing labs here and then supporter content which is a nest and there's the dialog box if you're just looking at i'm going to type
00:25:33
something in there here's an example save to obsidian and when i hit the ok button below i think i toggled the active button too now when i hit the ok button there it is
00:25:52
the script also creates an omnifocus project so that's kind of beside the point but if i go now into my database and you look at the active supporter content folder and just drag over
00:26:03
you can see there it is that's an obsidian note that i just created from a script and keyboard maestro i use this all the time i like templates in obsidian but i even like better just creating them
00:26:16
from outside obsidian and just jamming them into the folder it just gives me a little bit of nerd happiness shortcuts is the same thing and it works the same way create a markdown file save to the sybian vault and there is no step
00:26:29
three here is a shortcut that i generated that does something when i get a new idea it asks me a question you know what is the ideas of an active idea and then it creates the obsidian
00:26:41
markdown text right there and it's inserting variables from above and then it saves the whole thing to the uh to the content ideas folder inside obsidian
00:26:53
and this is something you can do so i can add new notes to my obsidian database right from my that icon that i showed you earlier where i jumped to the sparkyos operating system
00:27:05
another piece of automation from outside obsidian that i think is kind of useful is the ability to move those files not only create them but move them mike schmitz who spoke with you uh
00:27:18
was telling me he was doing this so i thought that was really smart but there's a great app on the mac called hazel and um hazel is an app that allows you to work on files on your mac so if you have an
00:27:31
electric bill and it says electric bill it'll move it to the electric bill folder and it'll you know just kind of manage your files for you but with since obsidian is nothing but a collection of markdown folders
00:27:44
why not go in those folders and start acting on those files the same way what if i want to move a obsidian markdown note to a different location than obsidian and this is something i need sometimes because one
00:27:56
of the ways in fact when we go back up one of the ways i manage my views with dataview is folder-based views so like when i'm working on a blog post i have a folder called active blog posts
00:28:09
well you know once i've written a blog post then i move it to archive and then it re it removes itself from all my data view generated lists so why don't i do that with hazel so here
00:28:22
we go i created a hazel list and this is just an example one this is for my friends of dave folder anything in there that contains the word status colon archive
00:28:33
gets moved to the fod archives and it's a very simple hazel rule but it allows me to have a obsidian move files based on text i write in them so
00:28:46
let's see an example of that so here i am in uh a a uh fod friends of dave sample obsidian file and what i'm going to do is if you look at at the top of the yaml here as i start this animation up
00:28:59
i'm going to just add an additional entry status colon archive and that's going to exactly manage the hazel rule i just showed you and so now hazel's going to be keeping an eye on that folder and then there you can see
00:29:12
it just disappeared the active folder is empty now if i go to archives you'll see there it is there it is so it's moved itself to the archive and i did all that externally
00:29:25
using a hazel rule without any automation inside of obsidian so guys linking outside of obsidian working outside of sitting on your obsidian data
00:29:38
i think it's something everybody should consider um i know there are different levels of this for different folk but uh i find it very powerful and i thought since we've got some time left let's talk about it right what are
00:29:50
you guys doing what are your questions let's get more out of obsidian together that was awesome david thank you so much for sharing and uh instead of clapping in the chat right now
00:30:01
your best claps are takeaways takeaways are the claps so we're just gonna pause for a moment and take a moment to type in the chat something you are taking away from this talk
00:30:14
maybe it's about contextual computing linking to email linking to who knows what be very curious to see okay a couple are flowing in wow mind
00:30:25
blown productivity went up a notch i never once even considered using obsidian urls until now yeah i have to say you know david
00:30:37
i love a good hotkey and i would uh command m to move a note around folders is definitely something you said about obsidian i immediately mapped that and i can see the same with command u
00:30:51
to copy the obsidian url like those are so simple useful and so that's going to be mapped as well the folder-based data view things i love the reminder that i could use shortcuts
00:31:04
to write md file markdown files and then um just so everyone knows you know we start with you did a good job of taking us from like things that anyone can do with obsidian and then those really advanced things um yeah so so
00:31:18
that's that's good so those advanced things that's for not for everyone on this call but it is for a few of you and for those that it is i think that'll really resonate um love to see the chat comments here
00:31:32
yeah there's a lot of folks i see that are using devon think with obsidian and i think those two apps together are like peanut butter and chocolate they work together so well indeed so that mine i i
00:31:46
last year one of the reasons i did that was because i felt like i had to make the devin think field guide before i could make an obsidian one because they they work together so they're so key as a thing together for me i don't think i could explain
00:31:59
obsidian without including the bit of devin thing very cool so with that we're transitioning over to some questions so make sure if you can hover over your zoom window again and you can see where the q a box is go
00:32:13
click on that if you haven't already up vote on some questions that you'd like to see answered you can also type in your own questions there as well so here's here a couple questions and let's
00:32:25
see where this takes us this is from renee are the obsidian links now robust uh when i moved the file inside if somebody wrote uh that they would use evernote instead of devoting because
00:32:38
they're on windows that would make sense evernote has links to yeah i think so sorry i missed that some people said they'd use evernote yeah
00:32:52
yeah i mean i evernote has links as well i remember it's a little bit clunkier but um but you can still grab a url from them yeah or something yeah
00:33:06
um renee's question are the obsidian links robust when i move the file inside obsidian will the link to it in omnifocus be broken and then helmet is saying moving will
00:33:18
not break it renaming the file will okay yeah that was a that was one of the updates they did um originally it would break if you moved it um but i think one of the obsidian updates fixed that along the
00:33:32
way so that's good to know i often rename files so i'd have to be a little careful yeah with that but i mean more the ones i'm renaming are um statements or opinions or claims kind of like the the
00:33:46
idea side of things that probably wouldn't be something you linked in your task manager anyway so exactly yeah excellent here's one oh i didn't mention hook
00:34:00
somebody brought up hook hook is uh the other way i link things in obsidian it's an app for the mac sorry um but any basically any file that's not in your obsidian database you can link with hook and it creates a url link that you can
00:34:13
embed in obsidian so that's that's another way to do it thanks jay for that do you use uh hook right now are you waiting for it to get to a certain point or how is that working for you i'm
00:34:26
using it now it you know it's good i mean the full disclosure i'm on their board of advisors but that's just because we all kind of feel strongly about this idea of contextual computing but um i use devin think and hook i you know
00:34:39
there are things that work in one and not the other a lot of the max sparky stuff i do for the field guides i don't keep in devon think just because i've never done that and i'm considering it but in the meantime i
00:34:50
can just equally link all that stuff using hooks hook links but that requires you to be on your mac you know i mean so but i do most of my work on my mac gotcha
00:35:05
and here's one i think we have the answers okay gotta ask what presentation tool software is david using for a slick minimalist drawing and animations yeah okay that i did that as an experiment i'm
00:35:16
glad you like it that's not my usual thing usually i do the whole keynote stuff but just for giggles and i've done this a couple times over the years there's a great app on the ipad called
00:35:28
procreate that's a drawing application and what it does is allows you it automatically creates a movie of anything you draw in it so i literally just drew each slide with my apple pencil and then exported the movie
00:35:43
to my mac and uh imported and it made a few slide edits and then and then saved the movie to keynote so keynote was just plain little animations that was pretty cool
00:35:56
it kind of makes it fun right yeah yeah absolutely is he my my drawing isn't very good but you know whatever right no it tells the story i i
00:36:08
was saying this because uh you and i david we we did meet up a couple weeks ago no week and a half i don't i don't know and and it's fun being around you because then i can look at apple products and new
00:36:21
in a new light that maybe i haven't paid attention to i was driving to see you and i got a notification from like find my mac or find my iphone and you were letting me know what your location was just for the hour i was like oh this is
00:36:34
useful i was always worried about privacy but you know if it's just for the hour that that makes sense yeah yeah as long as you don't keep following me home nick we're all good oh yeah at the grocery store eh
00:36:48
okay so here's one in i don't the uj is asking this might be a little too complex but it's got a few votes so i'm going to be asking it can you link to files on a server specifically a synology
00:37:01
nas um i would assume you can i don't own uh synology but synology as i understand they show up in the finder i'm going to answer on the mac i know i
00:37:14
saw some complaints about this but i i i can only answer this but the synology shows up uh in the finder on the mac and there was an app we just mentioned called hook that can link anything that shows up in your finder so my guess
00:37:27
would be that you can if you have a synology you want to try this out as an experiment i would download the hook application i think they have a free trial period of like 30 days create some links to some of your synology files and
00:37:41
then you'll know very quickly if that works or not excellent here's another one from saloni why not directly add files to obsidian's vault
00:37:52
yeah and that that is another way to do it but to me i like obsidian sleek and fast and you know as you start putting some of the stuff i put in this stuff are
00:38:03
like video files and 100 page pdfs and like all of a sudden i start adding all this weight to obsidian so that's one problem the other thing is there are things that devon thing does that obsidian does not i mean devon think
00:38:17
does it has an editor a pdf editor so i can do highlights on the pdf file and devin and think and um you know stuff like that so there's there's a whole bunch more that comes with devon think that really is not in the obsidian
00:38:30
wheelhouse and i think the obsidian gang is doing the right thing they're focusing on you know making these markdown files talk to each other and giving us all the tools that you talk about but uh they're not i don't think it's even on their
00:38:44
whiteboard to do some of the stuff that devon think does so um i i'm a big fan of obsidian but i'm not a big fan of the idea of obsidian as the only app you need to do everything and
00:38:57
i'm very willing to leave obsidian for certain things and you know use obsidian for what it's best at and use the other apps for what they're best at and the condition for me is linking you know
00:39:09
if i'm going to use a two apps together they must support this type of laser-like linking in order for me to use them i'm not going to use a task manager that makes me drill through folders to get to my list you know and
00:39:24
obsidian that's why in the presentation one of the very first things i did as soon as i said okay i'm going all in with obsidian was how do i link to a specific file they didn't have a tool for it so i made one and then very shortly there after they
00:39:36
they added it but but that is a condition for me of any application i'm going to adopt it gives me this ubiquitous computing experience where i can design my ideal stack and it all just works for
00:39:50
me so it and it's not hard you know urls you can embed them you can link them you can do with them in any app you want yeah and i'd have to agree with that there's uh there's something just very nice knowing that
00:40:03
my collection of thousands of notes in obsidian is you know less than i'm not sure where it's at now but less than 100 megabytes you know but if you put in one video it could be over that amount yeah and yeah
00:40:16
so backing it up duplicating it it's so easy to do when it's lightweight and the other thing that's nice about it is um because i use it on my phone and on my ipad um you know i need it's
00:40:29
constantly syncing that i i i'm a big proponent of the obsidian sync system i pay them to have their encrypted sync but every time i turn on the phone or
00:40:42
the mac or any device because of the extent that i use obsidian it always needs to update itself you know because they don't allow background sync on ios so ipad and iphone can't just sync in the background like the mac can and uh
00:40:55
so i have to open up the ipad it needs a minute to sync things whatever i've been doing over the last few days since the last time i opened up the ipad and then when uh when you put a big file in there
00:41:07
then it's like it's gonna you know well there are exceptions you can actually uh accept some of that or it says don't sync those files but the point is you suddenly get in this molasses
00:41:19
and i don't want to deal with it does linking work to email does linking to email work on ios or on ipad yes yeah the um those those message links that apple generates work on iphone and ipad
00:41:35
different apps do it differently like i did an experiment with hey for a while excuse me yeah sure hey the email service okay and they have all you do is copy the url link for the
00:41:47
specific email gmail works the same way applemail has that slash message format which i briefly referred to in the presentation apps like spark make their own url and
00:42:00
they have a special link format for uh url linking and then it'll work on spark on the phone or spark on the mac so you kind of want to stick with the same platform across um you know when you're looking at email
00:42:14
apps you just got to see well how do you create a link there's a few that don't like i said the presentation and if you're interested in doing the things the way i explained those are non-starters for you
00:42:25
okay here's one that's um a good one um from jonathan max sparky you're a legend for cooking ideas how is obsidian integrating or not
00:42:39
into your cooking ideas workflow yeah okay so that's the the brief version of that is i feel like that the best way to work on something is in small bites so when i have a new project i work on it over a
00:42:52
course of weeks or months and i just go and look at it for five or ten minutes at a time but i feel like my subconscious brain does a lot of the work for me that way and my workflow for that for a long time has been an app
00:43:04
called my note my node is a mind mapping program it's on iphone ipad and mac it's just a great app and i have looked many times at ways to do that in obsidian
00:43:17
i have learned how to program in dolphin markdown you know you guys i don't know if that just pegged the nerd meter or not but it's a um i'm sorry it's a mermaid or dolph i think it's mermaid now oh mermaid
00:43:30
mermaid mermaid yeah mermaid so i figured out how to do that all that stuff is super fiddly and i still use obsidian i'm sorry excuse still use my node but guess what
00:43:41
i do i link those to obsidian with url links so i i still use it i haven't really found a good solution for it um if i want to cook ideas i still do it in either my
00:43:54
node or just with pencil and paper and or a pencil in an app on my ipad but i haven't really got that one into obsidian yet in fact i know you have a session
00:44:06
on drawing with obsidian and i i'm looking forward to watching that because i i'm not sure how that works i want to see what people are doing yeah that'll be interesting on friday with laura evans hill who's kind of
00:44:18
catching lightning in a bottle right now with how to make atomic visuals yeah um so i'll be interested too to see how making that i'm not sure where that tools may i think laura uses procreate
00:44:31
as well but then i'm curious how it's going to be integrated into something yeah yeah as a quick gap recommendation procreate's awesome for the kind of stuff i did today if when i'm like cooking an idea with a
00:44:44
pencil i use an app called concepts because it has an infinite canvas so i can just grow the image to wherever my mind takes me whereas procreate is more of a limited
00:44:56
canvas so like for making slides it's perfect and it does that really good thing of allowing you to export the drawing as a video interesting but concepts is another you said for ipad
00:45:10
yeah it's really powerful i like it it's like a few people like it no room too it looks like it it's got a good name yeah um is there anything missing in your
00:45:21
workflow that you wish existed dan is asking um the i'm always you know workflows are never done right i mean especially for nerds like me who just
00:45:33
enjoy the process but like one of the things i want to do is i want to automate the process of link creation when i create like that one script i ran where it created a supporter labs video
00:45:46
but it also created a omnifocus project i'm trying to apple script my way around creating the omnifocus project then grabbing the url link for the project and then embedding it in the obsidian
00:45:59
without me having to do it manually like i showed you in the video i think that would be cool if it just happened um but the the scripts i've written so far in it are not um reliable so i'm working on it but they you know it's
00:46:12
always growing i i really as much as i'm known for like all my nerdiness i like to get work done you know so the the point of all this really is to find a way to
00:46:24
reduce as much friction as possible and when i find a good workflow i will stick with a long time i mean i keep people think i'm in the bag for omnifocus and keep talking about it but i keep trying other apps but none of
00:46:36
them have that feature set and so once you find an app that works you keep doing it i feel like i'm going to be the same with way with obsidian i mean as obsidian enthusiasts we're all we're all that or we wouldn't be here
00:46:48
um you have to wonder about the future right because um there's a lot of competition growing up now around obsidian um there's some great apps that are being developed there's some great apps
00:47:01
we haven't seen yet that are going to do a lot of the same things and um you know i was just talking yesterday to somebody who is speculating that um you know he thinks that maybe apple will
00:47:14
buy craft and fold it into the operating system and that would be very tempting craft is a great app and if it was part of the operating system it makes it even easier to use um but i think the thing that makes
00:47:26
obsidian so great is the ubiquity of markdown files and the enthusiastic community around it i mean it's just like i said in the presentation i can't get over how fast new plugins are showing up that solve very particular
00:47:39
problems but so often i find them useful i don't know that i would be tempted by a a craft version embedded in the operating system because of all the things that i can do with obsidian
00:47:51
and because at the end of the day i could put all of my thoughts into a little thumb drive and it's a bunch of markdown folders that i can read in a hundred years or somebody could read 100 years not me
00:48:05
yes yeah that's that's uh because because i'm excited about a couple apps i don't even want to say names because i know how it is it's like catnip to this audience that if you just say the name then they'll
00:48:17
that's exactly what we'll spend the next hour researching but i think there's some visual ones that are exciting but you know it's always with the web-based and that concern about interoperability or
00:48:28
you know the the the non-markdown nature that has me always kind of hesitate to get invested in anything yeah i mean for almost 30 years i was a lawyer very recently i retired from that
00:48:42
and one of the very big benefits of obsidian was that the encrypted nature of the files and the fact that everything's stored on my mac not on somebody else's cloud server and um
00:48:54
you know that's a whole other reason to be a fan of this application but yeah i am spending a lot of time in it yeah uh we have a few more questions but i just want to make sure
00:49:07
let's just cover this one now and then i want to kind of see again there are two things to share where can people learn more um and i'm sure dan you've probably shared the links but maybe we could hit them up
00:49:19
in the in the chat too oh there they are do you have a preference between the two links learn or yeah i mentioned some of the field guides i i'm sorry gang i usually don't like hawk my stuff during that talk but it's just like i just keep talking about
00:49:34
these tools that we made field guides about but the um the field guides i was talking about are all at learn.max sparky the main site is maxsparky.com and there's links to the field guides there too so i guess just go to
00:49:45
macsparky.com and check it out let me know if anything is of interest the um i i am just want to take a minute to thank you nick for taking the lead on this i feel like there's a group of us out
00:49:59
there that really understand how what a change we're going through with computing i feel like um because i was there at the beginning i'm old enough to remember you know
00:50:11
my 4k radio shack colored computer and um i feel like we are hitting another revolution right now with this linked thinking and uh the more people that bang this drum the better it is and i i realize
00:50:25
this is something that only probably power users are going to be able to embrace a lot of people aren't going to want to but it for the people that do embrace it they are getting a leg up on the world and uh
00:50:37
and i i hope everybody takes this seriously because it's exciting the tools are evolving and i think the way we think as humans is going to change for those of us that
00:50:49
are willing to figure it out yeah i mean just building on off that a little bit is is truly i mean the internet and you know having fast access to the internet is it unfair advantage
00:51:02
depending on like where you live and here's another one that's like developing before our eyes is the ability to link information together for whatever we're trying to accomplish be more
00:51:13
productive get this project done generate insights and ideas and uh you know yeah i mean it's it's really uh we're just on the
00:51:25
frontier the edge of what's what's possible with it so i i hope this conference is helping people have like some sort of entry point into understanding it better and then they can take it where they need to
00:51:38
yeah yeah me too and the exciting thing is this is not a one-size-fits-all concept everybody who picks up these tools is going to implement it differently i mean some people are going to go
00:51:51
all in with um linked thinking about you know high-minded things and i do some of that but i also link to my veterinary visits with my dog so you know we're going to find our own mix of
00:52:03
this for everyone and that's just as exciting because the more people that bring their unique take to it and share that the better it makes it for all of us yeah
00:52:15
there's something from tony fascinating that hypertext and linking has been around for so long and it's a new revolution in computing so many ideas come from things that are much older
00:52:28
now i agree tony and i i'm not trying to imply that they didn't figure this out a long time ago but i feel like now the tools are at a point and it's like the existence of mobile
00:52:39
devices uh the speed of computers now um makes an old idea a lot better now and i guess that would be the way i would phrase it but um yeah but it does still feel like a revolution to me
00:52:52
because i feel like everybody you see app developers are getting on board i mean for some reason this stuff never landed until recently and now it is and i think it's that the technology has caught up with the idea
00:53:05
yeah absolutely it really feels like it was a i mean there are many factors but uh very i mean there's a really a trail here but i do think rome did a lot to draw a lot of enthusiasm
00:53:17
and interest into the space and then with obsidian um coming along to give give a lot of um various factions groups of damon know
00:53:29
that they were groups a place to come together and recognize like hey i like private data hey i like markdown i like to be able to work fast and link ideas you know remotely or whatever and then all these forces sort of came together
00:53:42
and um has provided i mean there are a lot of really amazing online communities springing up like in this side of the internet and it's really nice to see
00:53:53
well it's exciting and uh and i really enjoyed it i hope you guys got something out of it i feel like i didn't go very deep down the stack for you today but uh this linking thing as simple as it is is
00:54:06
very important to me and i hope it helps some of you as well it totally did and you you went deep enough like we i know immediately i'm going to try ways to connect
00:54:18
em email links a little bit more for me personally and also for like the team stuff we're doing with linking your thinking we're using notion a little bit because of its permissions and sharing capability yeah and then just try to
00:54:31
drop pull in a few more of those um like core links into obsidian is something i've been meaning to do so you've definitely inspired me to just get it done i mean if you've got team tools on notion
00:54:45
notion is a great source of external links so why not right just embed all that stuff in your map of content page and you're off to the races oh it's gonna be beautiful okay so hey i know there are more
00:54:59
questions everyone um between dan and myself we're gonna do our best to capture the questions and then we're going to you know send them privately to david david hopefully you know you can work with those however you see fit
00:55:13
it'll be hard to kind of connect people but maybe you share an answer or something on twitter yeah and then yeah we'll take it from there all right thanks nick and enjoy the conference everyone i'm looking forward to watching it myself
00:55:26
all right thank you so much david thank you for coming on this was a real treat a real joy pleasure all right so i'm gonna we're gonna have our outro music and uh until next time stay connected
00:55:36
everyone take care everybody [Music] [Music] you
End of transcript