In a previous post I mentioned my quest for an interoperable successor to OneNote, and how I ended up settling with Obsidian. I often braindump in bed, before picking up the ideas and fleshing them out on a computer the next day. This means I need to synchronise Obsidian between my computers and phone.

I have an iPhone, a GNOME personal laptop and a work MacbookPro. I need a solution to synchronise Obsidian between all those devices, that doesn’t store data unencrypted on a machine I don’t own, and that is sustainable. Let’s cover the most popular solutions and why I decided to go with Obsidian Sync.

I don’t want to self-host, and even worse: I think most individuals shouldn’t host services for others. Yet, I am self-hosting services and I even teach people how to do it.

Have I turned cynical, or is there a rationale behind it? Let’s cover what hosting services really means and why it makes sense to do it nonetheless.

Blinkist is a paid service that gives you access to their summaries of popular books. Pick a book from their collection, and 15 to 30 minutes later you should know the key ideas behind the book.

After several months of trying to use it, I uninstalled the app before the end of my subscription. Let’s cover what worked and didn’t work for me with this app. I’m going to cover the iOS app and not the website, since I’m mostly using it on the go.

When I worked as a consultant, I loved OneNote on the Windows 7 machine I had to use. When moving to Windows 10 OneNote had become a version mess between the free and paid one… and then work allowed me to move to another operating system. Needless to say non-Windows versions of OneNote are not as feature rich nor usable as the one I was used to.

I’ve spent some time looking up for solutions that were secure (according to my threat model), interoperable, sustainable and user friendly. I also need the solution to work well on GNOME, macOS, and iOS. I’ve covered Nextcloud, Joplin, Logseq and Obsidian. Here is why I decided to settle on Obsidian.