Tag: Notetaking

Gemini’s ASCII Poop Story

LynnLeave a comment

The following is a story generated by AI. I changed not a word of it. It does include some phrases that I wrote in the conversation I was having with it before I requested the story, but for the most part, it’s a creative exercise of the AI, not me. :D

Enjoy, or not! But don’t say you weren’t warned.

Don’t complain to me if you hate it, or hate AI generated images and text, and don’t give me a talking to because you have an anti-AI bias. I don’t care. I will delete your comments.

(I have my own anti-AI bias that’s slowly given way to the fun I keep having with it. I don’t need your complaining, thanks very much.)

But if you want to talk about AI generated writing in a reasonable way that isn’t pooping on my internet home? Yes, please.

Continue reading “Gemini’s ASCII Poop Story” →

Second (and third) thoughts on Obsidian

LynnLeave a comment

I was going to stop using Obsidian today.

But…

Yesterday I discovered how to use the text editing tool in Gboard. It seems to make selections in Obsidian much easier than using my finger. So that solved at least a bit of that problem.

And today, I solved my share to OneNote problem by activating the OneNote floatie. I tested it I’m making some notes, and while making those notes, I decided to use both apps because I still wasn’t feeling 100% ready to abandon Obsidian.

But I discovered while doing all this sharing and copy pasting articles, using the finger press instead of the Gboard clipboard (which is less likely to strip out formatting), that OneNote doesn’t keep links that are in the text, but Obsidian does. Which is quite handy.

And last night I discovered that embedding audio files in Obsidian places a playback tool right in the Obsidian note. OneNote does do something similar with the attachment in the note, but the player is nowhere near as attractive.

That seems like such a small thing but I was looking at that and thinking I really want to keep Obsidian just based on appearances. It’s not a good reason to choose one piece of software over another one. However, even though Obsidian is boring and gray and low contrast in light mode in some ways, at least I can get a white background behind my folder view?) (Custom CSS snippets.)

So here I am tonight seriously considering sticking with Obsidian despite what I consider to be significant drawbacks and only a few true advantages. Admittedly, a couple of those advantages really play right into the things that I like, but those drawbacks are significant.

But I don’t know, I kind of think I’m going to stick with Obsidian after all.

Obsidian is great, but is it for me?

LynnLeave a comment

I want to love Obsidian, but as you can guess, any comment that starts with that kind of phrase is going to be a comment saying but…

I do love writing fiction in it.

I don’t love it for my notes in general.

It’s not nearly as easy to skim as my Writer documents, and it’s not as easy to paste into, copy from, or otherwise capture or organize notes as it is in OneNote. Some of that might be my incomplete set up. It seemed like the best move to make folders and subfolders as I go for organization, and not getting ahead of myself (especially since I wasn’t planning to get in a hurry to port over my notes from OneNote), but that means I’m making a lot of decisions every time I make a new note that doesn’t fit into the current setup. That’s a lot of little choke points.

Also, the interlinking isn’t really as great as I thought it would be. Only the embedding is truly awesome. Embedding other notes’ content in a note is really easy and really cool.

However, I made a new note and embedded some content into it from some other notes, with the plan to copy out the resulting text as a whole, but copying from the Reading View was finicky even on the computer (selecting text is very finicky on my Android phone from the Obsidian app). It did end up working the way I wanted, and I can see it working really well if I design my files in a certain way to make it work better, but for what I used it for, I could have copied and pasted the text from the other files faster, and I’d have ended up with an unchanging copy of what I used. To get that now, I’d have to copy from Reading View and paste it into another new note.

So, no, now that I’m thinking of it, the time spent wasn’t worth it in the set up of the new note at all, and if I change any of the text in the original files (which has huge benefits in some cases), I’ll have no way of confirming what was actually in the second file, because it will update, too (which is a negative in this case). Meaning embed isn’t as big a benefit as it seems on the surface after all.

I really need to decide if I’m ready to give up and go back to OneNote, or if I need to commit to going all in and quickly with Obsidian so I can get over these growing pains and learn to deal with the limitations and make the benefits actually work for me.

Because other than having md files I can move around, they really aren’t yet.

Not so fast, a Joplin versus OneNote update

Lynn

Joplin, as much as I wanted to love it, just isn’t ready for me. I’ve been testing it pretty heavily to look for break points that could be a deal breaker for me, and I’ve had several issues crop up with the program that have made me finally decide I’m going to have to pass on this for a while and maybe check it out again in the future. Maybe.

It’s taken me a while to get to this point, but I’ve learned my lesson more times than I should have about jumping wholesale into something new if it’s not super easy to go back, and while there are things about OneNote that I don’t like, there are also a lot of things I do like.* So there was no reason to jump too fast and I’m glad I didn’t.

I suspected something was going on recently, and had finally committed to copying the notes and web clippings that I’d taken exclusively in Joplin out to OneNote, when I came across the biggest issue to date for me.

Joplin lost images from the web clippings I took. I was able to go back and reclip the pages into OneNote, but yeah, I really can’t have things go missing once I save them. The issue is a known issue that’s since been fixed, but the problem is that all the notes that lost the images can’t really be recovered, since I would have to go through them one by one and figure out which had lost images and then import from the backups. Definitely not worth the trouble, and not necessary, for me.

So there you go. Consider this my update on Joplin. I’m not switching. It’s just not ready for me. I definitely prefer a set it and let it go solution for my notekeeping.

* I like that OneNote can export entire sections to a Word file. I do my backups of OneNote not as OneNote files (I have a backup of that but I don’t consider it my notes backup, if that makes sense) but as Word docs.

Easing away from OneNote to Joplin for notes

Lynn

I went from Evernote to OneNote and now I’m considering a move to Joplin. I’m taking the move slowly, but the more I use Joplin, the more I like it.

1. I’m testing it out still and getting a feel for the program.
2. I need to know it’s reliable.
3. I’m syncing between my laptop, phone, and a tablet, and haven’t come across any issues yet, but that definitely needs thorough testing before I commit.

Joplin has the ability to sync notes from device to device in several ways, and notes are written, edited, and stored in Markdown. It’s more like Evernote than OneNote in how it’s organized. There are notebooks, tags, and notes instead of notebooks, sections, and pages. But that’s not a problem to deal with. Notebooks can be nested, so sub-notebooks feel like sections to me.

The layout is a little busy when all the sidebars are open, but it’s really well proportioned on my desktop and the sidebars can be toggled on and off and you can even choose to show only the editor window or the note window. I didn’t get a screenshot of that layout, but it’s an option.

Joplin’s syncing process sounds more complicated to set up than it actually is, and it turns out Markdown is pretty sweet. I like writing blog posts and notes in text only, because the files are simple and small and go anywhere and can be read and edited on every device I have.

Markdown is easy, and that’s pretty sweet too. Apparently some of the text formatting shortcuts in WordPress’s classic visual editor are based on Markdown.

Joplin doesn’t have an entire domain devoted to it yet, don’t know if it will ever have, to be honest, but it doesn’t need it because all the syncing you do for your notes is through your own accounts or cloud setup. I use the default Dropbox, because my notes repository isn’t huge and probably won’t be even if I add in all the notes I have in OneNote. I don’t attach files often, because I prefer to have them stored independently.

Joplin is open source and the associated forum and project seems to have plenty of development going on. There’s also a decent amount of documentation for the program. It looks and works great on my phone and tablet, too.

All in all, I really like it, and I think this might be the open source alternative to OneNote and Evernote I’ve been hoping for.

ETA: I forgot to mention a very important feature of Joplin and that’s that it will export an entire notebook of notes into individual .md text files (Markdown text files). (A text editor like Notetab or Notepad++ can open them just fine, although Windows Notepad doesn’t recognize the line breaks.) There’s also the option to export individual notes as PDFs.

All Joplin needs for me to be even happier is an option to export entire notebooks to PDF for archiving, and an export option to create HTML, .doc(x) or .odt files and I would be very happy indeed.

Update: Not so fast, a Joplin versus OneNote update