apps on Jayeless.net

My First Few Days With Obsidian

Tue, 24 Aug 2021 19:35:47 +1000

I’ve only barely scratched the surface of what it can be made to do with plug-in extensions, but so far I’m really loving the note-taking software Obsidian .

What I had been doing in my old notes app was creating a daily journal entry, adding random thoughts and bits and pieces over the day, and occasionally spinning out a thought into a separate note if it got long enough to justify it. Obsidian works really well for this – it has a “core plugin” for daily notes, and another for templates (so each daily note can be pre-filled with all the fields I want it to have), and there’s a “community plugin” for a calendar view which is the only community plugin I’ve installed so far. So far, so good.

On top of that though, it has the in-built easy linking between notes. Oh man, this is great. As I slowly and manually transfer my old entries to this new app,¹ what this means is that if, for example, I notice I’ve recorded some useful tidbit about Hugo, I can copy it to my clipboard, put double square brackets around the word “Hugo” to make it [[Hugo]], which linkifies it (even if the page doesn’t exist yet), click the link and paste my tidbit easily. “Well duh,” you might think, “that’s how a wiki works.” I know it is, but it’s the integration of that approach into what is otherwise a notes app (with a daily journal attached) that is really clicking for me. I’m thinking that once I’m done with my journal + related notes, I might import a copy of (many of) my blog posts too, because there’d also be bits of knowledge there I’d like integrated with my non-public notes. Because I can put the notes in folders, it’s not like they’ll muddle up everything else. And because Obsidian itself is really just kind of a CMS over the top of a directory of markdown files (subdirectories included, recursively), it’s really simple to import things that are already plain markdown files.

What I also like is how there are so many ways to link notes aside from manually linking. For example, there’s a pane with backlinks, so I can get a quick list of all the notes that link to my current note. If I scroll down, I can also see the notes that mention the name of my current note but are not linked, and with a single click I can turn those mentions into links – making it simple to “backfill” links when I make a new page. There are also tags. In my old notes app, I made extensive use of tags because it was pretty much the only way to group related notes together. In Obsidian I haven’t really had to because it’s so easy to link content in other ways.

I know there are all kinds of complicated things that Obsidian can be made to do, by setting YAML front-matter in notes and querying it using the Dataview plugin for example… but I’m gonna kick that can down the road for now, haha. It’s a cool feature but I’ve got enough to grapple with for the moment.

Another thing that I’m hoping happens is that, with the ease of adding to existing wiki pages in Obsidian, I find it easier to bring some of that content to my personal wiki on my site. It just seems way easier to draft in Obsidian, then convert all the wiki links to markdown links to my webpages for Hugo. At the moment I mostly have isolated pages that don’t make many connections to one another (although to be fair to me, I don’t have that many pages yet either, haha), which is a situation that I want to improve. The nature of a wiki is such that I wouldn’t want to limit it to only highly polished, “finished” pages being pushed to my site… but there are definitely a bunch (stubs, or ones where I’m like “this is my understanding but idk I’m no expert maybe not”) that are better off not being made public yet, too.

And for what it’s worth, I’m finding that I don’t really mind how slow this process is either, because it’s giving me the chance to revisit old notes and link together pieces of knowledge that I recorded over the weeks into unified, coherent pages on those topics. ↩︎

Sat, 21 Aug 2021 13:16:11 +1000

Thanks to the great influence of the Micro.blog community, I’ve now installed and am playing around with Obsidian (yet another note-taking app). I’m seeing a lot of potential in it for how I would use it, as it’d resolve all the bugbears I have with Standard Notes (e.g. no linking between notes; inability to save notes as plain markdown accessible from outside apps; lack of a calendar view to make it easy… or even feasible… to just browse old entries (there is rapid full-text search though, for finding specific things)). However, I still have vivid memories of how much of a pain in the ass it was to move to Standard Notes in the first place. After that, I thought I’d convinced myself for good that the marginal superiority of one note-taking app over another doesn’t actually make up for the gigantic hassle that is the export/import process. And yet…

Fri, 04 Jun 2021 13:27:04 +1000

Ugh, the import-export headache gets me again. Goodlinks only exports in JSON format, while Raindrop.io can import from HTML, CSV, TXT or some special Pinterest export tool but not JSON. It didn’t like the output of a JSON-to-CSV converter either, so because I’m fussy, converting that CSV file manually to HTML now… 🤯

Tue, 04 May 2021 10:33:00 +1000

Last night I got started setting up NextDNS . I run µBlock Origin pretty religiously on all my computers, but I’m looking forward to having more reliable ad blocking on my iPhone, and I’m going to see if I can convince my partner to use it and leave the ad-watching lifestyle behind 😅

One issue I have had is trying to set it up at the router level. I do have IPv6 set up but my router won’t let me set IPv6 addresses for DNS. My IPv4 address is dynamic so I’ve tried to do the “linked IP” approach, but apparently my ISP’s use of CGNAT means that won’t work. Surprisingly it actually is working for the wired connection with my TV, but it doesn’t seem to for anything connected to the wifi networks.¹ I’m not really knowledgeable enough to try to fix this, so I guess I’ll just deal with the minor inelegance of installing apps!

Correction: While it didn’t work on my laptop, actually other devices in my home seem to be going through NextDNS just fine. 🤷🏻‍♀️ ↩︎

Moving My Journal from Notion to Standard Notes

Thu, 10 Dec 2020 20:46:05 +1100

Everyone likes the idea that when you put your data into an app, you’ll be able to get it out again easily. Unfortunately, the reality is that many apps’ import and export functions fall way short of what you’d hope for, leaving you with a ton of manual work to do if you’re determined to switch apps. So today, you get a gnarled tale of me trying to move my archive of journal entries from Notion to Standard Notes .

A bit of background first. I’ve journalled off and on since high school (separate from blogging, which I’ve also done off and on since high school), using an array of different apps. The earliest ones are private posts in an old Dreamwidth account I have. A chunk of uni-era entries are in 750 words . The archive I’m referring to in this post only goes back to 2017. Of that, the first year or so of entries were originally written in RedNotebook , the next 18 months’ worth were written in Journey , and I’ve only actually been journalling with Notion for six months. So you could say I’m familiar with this “but how do I move all my entries?” conundrum.

Your next question might be, “But why do you want to move all your entries?” and this is a good question. The truth is that none of these platforms have been exactly what I wanted from a journalling platform. RedNotebook is close, but it has no iOS app, and while it saves your entries in plain text, it uses some idiosyncratic formatting called txt2tags instead of something more standard like Markdown, so yup, you guessed it, importing those entries anywhere else takes a looooot of manual clean-up. Journey wasn’t too bad, but for me it was expensive and the developers had a kinda snotty attitude towards supporting Linux, like they did but they really resented it. Notion was at least free, but it offered no easy way to go back and browse old entries – the interface got slower and slower the further I scrolled down my list of posts. Standard Notes isn’t optimised for journal-keeping either, but it is faster and does offer full-text search of old entries (or notes), so it’s an improvement.

All that preamble and now I can finally get to the main point of this post (I hope). Basically, today I set myself the goal of exporting all my entries from Notion and importing them into Standard Notes. Notion offers a Markdown export and Standard Notes lets you write entries in Markdown, so it should be easy, right?

Hoo boy.

First, I had problems actually exporting my journal entries from Notion in the first place, because apparently there being 424 of them made the exporter choke. I succeeded the second time, though.

The next problem I had was how to actually import them into Standard Notes. The help section has a page on how to import notes from a bunch of text files , which consists of a brusque one-line answer telling you to use their plaintext import tool . So okay, fine, I can do that.

Then I thought I’d better open up the resulting file to see what it looked like. And I found that… every single entry had been given a creation date of today. Which was a problem, because I knew Standard Notes didn’t let you change creation dates manually once they were already in the app. I was going to have to edit all 424 entries’ creation dates in the import file. Yaaaaay.

So it took me an hour and a half, but I did that. Then, finally, I imported my old entries! And fast encountered one big problem: all the creation dates on all my entries were wrong. It took me scrolling through a few of them before I deduced why they were wrong: the app interpreted all 424 of the creation dates I’d manually set as UTC, then added 11 hours to all of them to display because my actual timezone is UTC+11. Just wonderful. So, I had to use the batch delete tool to remove all my newly imported entries, and go back and change all the dates again.

It was faster this time, because this time I only had to change the hour (subtract 11 for what I wrote during DST, subtract 10 for what I wrote not during DST, subtract 2 for what I wrote in South Africa, and add 8 for that one post I wrote in Los Angeles). Anything posted in the first week of April or October required me to take a detour to the internet to check what date the clocks went back or forward that year. But otherwise, this was maybe only a half-hour job.

Then I could import my entries. I still need to do a lot of clean-up, because the titles all contain garbled UUID strings and I need to tag everything. Some of the timestamps are still a bit off, especially on the entries I wrote while overseas, but that’s not really fixable so eh. Close enough. Once I’ve done the clean-up though (and I do think it’ll take a while…), I should then have everything nicely organised for future use.

Now having read all that, you might wonder: why even use Standard Notes for journalling? Why not a purpose-built journal app? The major reason is that when I say “journalling”, I mean most of my entries are not really the traditional “this is how work was, this is a conversation I had, this is what I had to eat” kind of diary entries. A lot of them are about interesting apps I’ve found, or notes on writing projects, or that kind of thing. The kind of thing that I don’t always post as a journal entry – sometimes I make blog posts out of those thoughts, or type up writing notes actually with my writing project, or whatever. By moving to a more traditional “notes” app, I’m hoping to find it easier to organise and refer to all my notes, whether they begin life as blog posts or journal entries or what. Eliminate that frustration of, “Now, where did I actually put that?” Plus, Standard Notes is more secure than Notion (being end-to-end encrypted), has offline support, and (seemingly at least) an app that’s faster to navigate and more performant.

Of course, I’m now hoping I want to keep them there going forward, so I don’t have to go through the hassle of exporting and importing all my notes again. I do wish there would be more standardisation of import/export files so it would be easier for users to pack up their data and move to what serves them best.