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Ditching Obsidian and building my own

amberwilliams.io

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Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#531

Post by Grimblewald »

billfruit wrote: post #366
yathaid wrote: post #356

> Obsidian charges $8 a month to access the same notes across multiple devices. While not a huge amount for such a useful app, it adds up to an eye-watering amount - almost $1,000 if I planned to use Obsidian for a decade. This highlights one of my personal bugbears. People have a mental barrier when it comes to recurring, low-cost payments; even though the net sum is small in comparison to other things that they wou…

Also Obsidian asks for permissions to read files in all of the device on Android. They don't explain clearly why that is necessary. I don't see it being discussed that widely. Also another aspect is that many people seems to think Obsidian is open source, while it is not so.

Well, the file reading/writing makes sense if you wish to store vaults in your filesystem, an ability which is one of obsidian's main and most attractive traits over alternatives.

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#532

Post by Daril »

williamsss wrote: post #496
Daril wrote: post #430

I think an PKMS is strictly related to how each of us thinks. It's similar to project management/organizer tools. I also created my own ( https://brainminder.it/ ) based on how I think: I prefer to organize items by type with different fields that I can add and search. Instead of simply collecting ideas and thoughts, I'm trying to build a system that can help me evaluate leveraging what I've entered.

Reminds me of the Zettelkasten note-taking method. I'm not confident I understand how it works from the site though. A video of how it works would be helpful.

Hi, I know I didn't have time to describe it properly. Currently, I am focusing more on adding features and making it more usable. In simple terms:

1. It is possible to create different types of items: books, ideas, projects, tasks, etc.

2. Every item can have its own custom fields, such as author for a book or priority for a task.

3. All items are stored in a single SQLite table, so you can search through all items and edit them if necessary.

4. Fourth, it is possible to establish relations between items: parent, child, or simple link.

5. There is a space called "Quickbox" where you can quickly register a link or a note to read later and transform it into an item.

6. Items can be part of one or more notebooks, such as Personal, Work, or Family.

I have many ideas to make it more useful, but some basic features are still missing, such as:

1. Attach images or documents to each item and access all the attachments as a separate library.

2. Multi-user support

3. Multilingual support

4. Kanban support for tasks.

The most interesting part for me is adding systems/structures that can help me analyze problems and find proper solutions.

This idea is still vague, but I'd like to implement workflows that can help me become a better thinker, improve my creativity, and enhance my ability to make rational decisions. I'd like to integrate also logic programming in the process, probabily using Prolog.

I don't want to lose the manual aspect of thinking, so I'm considering creating prefilled documents to help study problems and find solutions.

I have used Golang and SQlite on backend and PWA and HTMX on frontend.

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#533

Post by throw10920 »

_345 wrote: post #527
microtonal wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, a little bit odd considering that the author is technically savvy enough to write an entire PKMS but didn't seem to consider that you can just check your markdown notes into a git repository and sync with the native android/iOS Obsidian app on a mobile device. Also, Obsidian supports free iCloud sync if you are a Mac and iOS user. I know that's only a subset of users, but a nice option to get Obsidian to sync…

Yeah the article was painful to read. $1000 in a decade? Its a decade, who cares. If you make 100k a year its 0.01% of your salary towards something you found worthwhile enough to use for ten years straight the cheap sync plan is a scam though, it doesn't do enough to be even worth bothering with iirc

To add to your point, the phrasing of "$1K in a decade" seems convoluted to intentionally try to over-emphasize the cost. A much more fair/normal way of phrasing that cost would be $100/year, or $9/month, which is very little for someone who has the time and energy to write their own and gets enough value out of it that they find that worthwhile.

The tradeoff doesn't make sense otherwise. If you're poor, then you wouldn't have the luxury of the available time to write your own PKM - the opportunity cost is huge, it's massively preferential to use an existing free solution that is "good enough" (Obsidian without sync or using your own sync solution, Dendron, Roam, Org). If you're not poor, then $9/month is a rounding error, especially compared to the value provided.

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#534

Post by kcsarath »

iLemming wrote: post #161
appleaday1 wrote: post #49

Emacs chads just keep winning.

Younger folk and beginners keep ignoring Emacs (and Lisp in general), without the slightest attempt to even understand what kind of philosophy makes it appealing. The profound difference lies in ontological fungibility – Emacs isn’t software you use, but cognitive clay that becomes an extension of your mind’s operating system. Where any specialized app is inevitably doomed to constrain you to some kind of constructed…

Love this ! But I disagree to the thought that youngsters don't use emacs. It is amazing to actually see a number of people who are very young learning about emacs and loving it. The community behind emacs was always niche but it is amazing that in every generation there are people who resonate with its ethos and mental models.

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#536

Post by wltr »

supermatt wrote: post #303
nine_k wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes Tailscale more secure, or more reliable, than just a direct Wireguard tunnel? Tailscale's complexity and features make sense when you have 200 nodes, or maybe 20 nodes at least. When you have 3-5 nodes, I think it's overkill, and a bunch of extra dependencies which may fail, and lock you out of your private nodes when you need it most.

The benefit of Tailscale is that it gives you “lots” of wireguard tunnels that work through NAT with near zero configuration and a central admin interface. I use a personal plan and have multiple nodes. Desktop, laptop, tablet, phones, docker containers just for me and a couple of raspberry Pis on my families home networks. Only once have I been “locked out” of a node and that was due to an expired key. Sure, for jus…

I second this, and want to highlight that only recently I learned about this similar project called netbird. I tried it, and it looks and works very similarly from the first glance. However, Magic DNS like feature did not work for me, for some reason. Maybe I need to do something, e.g. to enable it. More likely there are others, similar projects, but I’m not aware of them. By this point I stayed with Tailscale, but in any case, I see such project as of tremendous help for a self-hoster.

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#537

Post by Snow_Falls »

ezst wrote: post #121

I went deep into to the PKMS rabbit hole a year and a half ago, benchmarked Obsidian and many many others, and settled with Trilium¹ which I can only highly recommend. It addresses all the hosting/deployment requirements of OP² without the quirky workarounds mentioned here (syncthing & al), and makes the kind of "lifestyle scripting" this article about very simple and straightforward. In my mind and experience, Trili…

Trilium is fantastic, I can not recommend it enough. The fact that another enterprising programmer has made an android app, "TriliumDroid", has just made it that much more useful. Even if that app is still in beta.

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#538

Post by Snow_Falls »

JonChesterfield wrote: post #344
ezst wrote: post #121

I went deep into to the PKMS rabbit hole a year and a half ago, benchmarked Obsidian and many many others, and settled with Trilium¹ which I can only highly recommend. It addresses all the hosting/deployment requirements of OP² without the quirky workarounds mentioned here (syncthing & al), and makes the kind of "lifestyle scripting" this article about very simple and straightforward. In my mind and experience, Trili…

I think trillium is stashing the notes in a database. Certainly it thinks there is a migration step needed to move files around. The everything markdown feature of obsidian is the dominant one. I can edit the files in emacs when I want to and the sync sorts it out just fine. They're stashed in a fossil repo by one of the machines as a backup because I'm paranoid and that also works fine because it's all ascii files.

There is the option to export the whole thing to HTML, Markdown and OPML (v1 or v2). Plus there is an included script in the trilium folder that dumps the contents of the database, so you can do it even if the trilium software itself doesn't work for some reason.

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#539

Post by rolandpeelen »

I started doing some stuff myself as well. Still very much in-progress, but I felt that obsidian was a way bigger hammer than I needed, yet still I found edges that didn't cover my workflow

Ended up building: https://crom.ai/

Here is a little write-up / more details on how it's built: https://notes.rolandpeelen.com/notes-on-building-crom

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#540

Post by dhogan »

achierius wrote: post #88
JonChesterfield wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Git is decentralised. You can sync between laptop and phone directly, no third party server required.

To be clear, GitHub is centralized, but Git is not. You can sync between laptop and phone directly with Git -- no third party server required.

How do you use git on a phone? I haven't found an easy way to pull to my phone and open Obsidian files.
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