Other Tools



Digital Note & Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) Tools


Overview & Thoughts:

I think it was way back in 2006/07 that I first discovered Evernote. At the time I thought it was not only an amazing way to create notes and document things, but also a great way share project information by using its sync feature. I personally used it for a few years but eventually migrated everything over to Microsoft OneNote, mainly because it didn’t need to be online and it was more flexible than EverNote (…and we were using Confluence for team documentation and collaboration). I put everything into OneNote for a long time, but the product never really seemed to progress much beyond the feature set it had when I started using it. Microsoft seemed more interested in converting it to a cloud product, which quickly produced a “thanks, but no thanks” reaction with an head shake and an eye roll … the same to for OneDrive!!! Anyway, I tried Joplin for a while before finally settling on Obsidian when it was still a beta product. The last few years with Obsidian have been great and I certainly underappreciated how good these PKM type tools can be.


Obsidian

Frequently used plugins:

Operating in a networked environment:

  • All of my daily working files are kept on an NAS, including my obsidian vault.
    • As far as I can tell, Obsidian doesn’t like to operate this way => starting the app with the primary vault stored remotely was/is painfully slow (3-4+ minutes).
    • Solution: keep the vault on the local hard drive and use Syncthing to sync files across devices & network.
      • Startup dropped to under ~10 seconds.

How to link to other files:

  • Network Share => [Pitch Deck](<file:///\\Ares-II\Content\Mark\Sync\Reading\Venture\Pitch Deck.pdf>)
    • Here, “Ares-II” is the server name (using SMB share between Windows & NAS)
    • Encapsulating the path between <> allows for spaces in the path without having to insert “%20” between blank spaces
    • A fall 2023 release stopped respecting the double “\” in the network share example above. Solution: replace “\” with “%5c%5c”
  • Locally => [Pitch Deck](<file:///D:/Storage/Reading/Venture/Pitch Deck.pdf>)
  • Can also open folder locations in windows by this method => [Folder Name](<file:///%5C%5CAres-II\Folder Location>)