Daily Dose of English 186
Obsidian
Daily Dose of English 186
Intermediate
Hey everyone, my name is Ben and you are listening to A Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day and improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you could make it today. In this episode, we're going to be talking about Obsidian. Not a normal noun a proper noun because obsidian is a thing that's a kind of rock That you can find in lots of different parts of the world. I think it's a relatively simple process of how it's made But like I know that I've seen it in Oregon where I'm from going on hikes and stuff for various parts So I don't think it's that rare of a rock to find Oh No My thingy fell on my desk. But I want to talk about the proper noun. So capital O, Obsidian, which is a program for the computer that I use every single day. It is a note-taking app, and the basic idea behind it is relatively simple, but can be a little bit complicated to fully understand unless you use it. And I'm going to try to explain it a bit, why I really like it, and how I use it. So at its core, Obsidian is an app for making notes, right? For taking notes, writing things down, big notes, small notes, whatever it might be. And the way that it works is actually pretty simple. You just have a bunch of files within a big folder and it helps you keep them organized, access them, that sort of thing. And what I really, really like about Obsidian is that it does this all on your local machine, on your computer. A lot of note apps are in the cloud, for example, and Notion is quite popular. And if you open a Notion account, you're editing files that are not on your computer. You're editing things that are on the internet. If you don't have internet or if Notion goes away at some point, anything like that, you will lose access to your notes and your files because they're not yours. Yes, you made them and you're the only one that might have access to them, but somebody else is holding onto them for you. And the nice thing about Obsidian is that they're all right there on your machine. So if I'm in the middle of nowhere, I can still edit all of my notes because I have those physical digital files on my computer. I'm actually looking right now, I can even see my... The top folder is called your vault and that's just where everything is inside that one big folder and then there's a bunch of subfolders and yada, yada, yada. But my vault folder, it has 1,604 different items in it and it's 450 megabytes. Which might not sound like a lot, it's not really in the grand scheme of things, but for just text files, that's kind of a lot. I use Obsidian quite a good amount. I started using it this year. You collect notes when you're taking notes pretty much every single day. And everything is written in what's called Markdown, which is a pretty simple, it's basically a note-taking language. coding language rather, which can sound complicated, but basically it's just plain text ways to write, for example, headings, lists, numbered lists, things like that. And it's actually quite simple to get used to, but if you were to look at just the raw text of one of my notes, it would look a little bit odd since there's a lot of dashes and weird hashtags and things. but it's still readable, which is nice, right? So here I opened a very random note, and at the top it starts with like some tag stuff, but then it has all the actual notes that I took, and then a couple things at the bottom, right, that are a little bit different. But I can actually just read all my notes normally in a regular text editor that I have. And that's another thing that I personally love about Obsidian is that it's simple in how it takes notes. It is just plain text that has a little bit of formatting on top of it. but that text is just a text file. This file that I opened is 930 bytes, which is a very small file, if you know anything about computers, because it doesn't need to be big. They're notes, it's just words. It's not a video, it's not anything else, it's just some words, so it can be nice and simple and small. This means that editing is very fast, it's very reliable, it's just easy and I really like that. The other thing that's really cool about Obsidian that is not in the notes themselves are what are called back links or even just links between files. Instead of relying on folders, as a lot of people do, and if you have Google Drive, for example, Google Drive relies on folders. And so you go between folders and you go to your different files and that sort of thing. Obsidian is made to be a lot more, to go with the flow, maybe. Instead of making individual folders, you can link files together by referencing them. So in the actual thing, if you type square brackets, square brackets, and then the name of another file, it'll create a link to that file that you can go to very easily just by clicking on it, reading it, that sort of thing. And so I link a lot of my files together depending on like what they're talking about and that sort of thing because that way I can very easily access other files. I can make files that are sort of within another file but are actually their own file on their own if I want to link to it. And it might sound a little complicated but that openness makes it really easy. I don't really have folders to get to my different files. I have links to them or I just search for them, right? I named them logical things. And so if I, for example, this, I have a document that helps me create these podcast episodes and it's called process of creating a comprehensible podcast episode. So if I ever lose this, I can just search for it, but I'm not going to lose it because I know that it's in the main file of Ben's Language Lab and I can just click on it really easily. And so that to me makes it just so versatile and useful for organizing my notes, faster but also better. Because something that I hate about regular file structures is that you have to keep them organized and they will very quickly become disorganized. But with Obsidian, I kind of just throw things into a bucket folder and I know that I'm going to find it by searching or by linking and it's just a lot easier that way. So I stay a lot more organized than if I was just using regular notes, I guess. Obsidian is also really cool because you can get plugins, so community add-ons or whatever, because the basic tool is great, it's very functional, it's got a lot of cool stuff, but what if you wanna add in, I don't know, a calendar or what else do I have? I have a voice note thing where I can record voice memos in here if I want. I don't actually use that, but I could. There's a lot of different community plugins that you can get that improve your thing. Oh yeah, one that I downloaded was for Magic the Gathering Cards, which I don't use anymore either, but it's really cool. You can just... type in the name of a card and it will sort of pull the image out so you can look at it, which is fantastic if you're taking notes on magic things. Or I wanted to add my own emojis, so I did that. I didn't make it, I used somebody else's plugin. There's a lot of really cool plugins so that you can do what you need to do rather than the obsidian saying that they know everything that is best for you. And so I also really like that possibility to find community plugins or other things that you might want to do, right? The most downloaded one, if I look at the top list, is called Excalidraw, which I don't use, but if you use Excalidraw, you can connect it to your Obsidian notes for, I think, for like note-taking, for visual thinking, that sort of thing. I might even try to look into it because it actually looks really cool. Anyways, there's lots of cool stuff about Obsidian that makes it really nice to use. It is a little bit difficult to get used to, but once you do get used to it, it's super handy. Now, I want to go over the ways that I use it because I use it for a lot of different things in my life. The first is for work. There's a lot of notes that I want to take during work that I don't want to do in our, our work system. So I just take them on my computer. If I have like a to do list I want to make, or I want to make a quick reference thing for myself, or I want to add some quick links, right? So I have, uh, my daily note is what it's called. There's a, there's a date every single day I open, it creates a new, new note for that day. and I have some nice links in there for myself to get to notes from some meetings or from a project or whatever. So I have some quick links in my Obsidian. It's open basically all day, always on my computer. So I use it a lot for work, especially if I need to do brainstorming, because there's a cool thing called a canvas where you can create essentially a brain map as well, which are really handy. So I use it a lot for work I also use it for this podcast and anything related to and most things related to Ben's language lab I have processes in here. I have some ideas that sort of thing and So I use it for that as well I also use Google Sheets and I have a lovely spreadsheet that has all my ideas and links and things like that, but I It's all connected to Obsidian. I make sure I have links in there and stuff because Obsidian is the thing that I start from. Um, I also use it for just my journaling and writing in, uh, for personal stuff or even for check practice. Right. So I have a whole, my whole check journal doc, well, which I have open right now and I can see all of the days that I've been, um, writing. I can say, I can see, um, July 26th. It was my first time writing here. Um, and I have all of my writing. It's over, over 5,000 words so far in this document and. I'm building a Czech grammar primer in here. I write all my YouTube videos in here for the main refold channel. I do some personal project notes in here. And the other thing that I really like is it's also my recipe and cooking database thing because I found that I... want to save a lot of recipes, but I don't want to necessarily save a link to one or I don't want to have them in different places. I used to take pictures or screenshots of them and that was difficult. So I started just making all the recipes that I want to save into very simple, very plain obsidian documents. that I can just reference, right? So if I want to go, if I want to make, I don't know, chicken soup, I can search chicken soup and there I have, here are the ingredients, here are the directions, bada bing, bada boom. If I want to make focaccia, I can look up, I have it, this one's in Spanish, like I have my recipes in English and Spanish, but this is focaccia facile. And I have all the recipe here. And this is like a recipe I grabbed offline. So like it's got even images in it too, right? There's just so much cool stuff that I have in here. It's really easy to access. I also pay for Obsidian Sync. And that's the only paid thing that they have is that you can have a synced version of all of your files in the cloud. So even though I am editing all the files on my computer, they are uploaded to some central database so I can access them on my phone, on my laptop or whatever, and have all my files on all those different places. So I do find that really worth it because it's really easy. And that way, whenever I wanted to make a recipe, I can build the recipe on my computer, it's a lot faster and easier, but then I can look at it on my phone, right? Done, boom. I also use it for my like meal prep and shopping list, right? So every, every Saturday I will make a new document and I'll use a template to fill it out. I'll go, okay, what am I going to eat for breakfast? What am I going to eat for lunch? And what am I going to, what am I going to eat for dinner? Um, what, what do I need to buy at the store? I'm going to make my list there on my computer. Again, more comfortable. Then I open my phone. It's already on my phone. So I go into there and I go to the market and I cross things off. Um, and it's really easy. And I am very happy with my switch to Obsidian as my note-taking app of choice. If it sounds interesting to you, I would definitely look into it. There's a lot of content out there, a lot of videos on Obsidian. It can be overwhelming. So I would honestly recommend just trying it out first and see what it's like to take some notes. And then if you find that it's sort of working for you, you like it, it's interesting, that's when you can look into maybe some more advanced setups or whatever it might be. Yeah, that's pretty much everything I have on Obsidian. I really enjoy using it. It's made basically everything that I do a lot more streamlined and I don't even think about it as being like a tool because It is a tool, but I just think of it as being notes. It's how I write. It's how I do notes. It's how I do anything, basically, at this point. So, yeah. Well, thank you very much for listening to this long episode. I hope that you enjoyed and maybe you learned something. If you have a note-taking app or a productivity tool that you really like, let me know down in the comments below. And I will see you again tomorrow for another episode. Bye.
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