re: Obsidian.md anyone here using it

Honestly I have forgotten most of the zettelkasten methodology beyond the concept of tagged and linked notes, as Obsidian allows you to do and present in a visual graph form. It boils down to a personal wikipedia basically.

You have listed some broad use-cases above, like note-taking for research and writing and things like that, but I'm not sure how many people can see how a tool like that might fit into their lives. So below I'll give a more specific example of a way to use a tool like Obsidian that I think almost everyone can relate to and may find useful. As is common, though, it will take quite an investment of time that may not pay off until years down the road. Here goes...


Build an Obsidian vault (or a zettelkasten) for household documentation.

A very basic purpose or use-case would be to document your home's contents for insurance purposes. For example, you can make a note for a piece of jewelry which describes it, lists the purchase price and date, attach a photo of the actual piece, and then link to it from another note which represents a room in your house. Do the same for everything of value in each room, then link to all your rooms from a note which represents your entire house. Maybe block an hour of time each weekend to work on this, and I bet in a month you'll have a pretty comprehensive set of documentation that will make your insurance agent proud. And it will save you a lot of time and agony should disaster strike.

Once you get the hang of it, maybe move on to something that might apply to a lot of us here on the Tech Board - document your technology! I'm sure a lot of us repeat the mantra at work "document everything", but maybe we're a little more lax about that at home. Sometimes I think about how my wife and kids would manage if I weren't around, and it might be a bit of a disaster. And it's not that they aren't knowledgeable or capable, or that things are always breaking. It's just that there is a LOT going on around here, and even though it's mostly simple to manage it still requires a background of specific knowledge to even know where to begin troubleshooting.

At this moment there are 52 devices on my network, and scrolling through there are at least a dozen that even I don't know what they are or what they're doing. I can figure it out, though, and in the process I will document model numbers, what purposes they serve, and some basic information that would be enough to at least point a layman in the right direction should it ever need to be repaired or replaced.

I think this will grow more important as some of us move further into smart home territory, where I now have devices hidden inside walls and such that a future owner would definitely need to know about (or that future me will need to remember to remove before selling).

And of course, beyond tech you could also document basic stuff about your house such as paint colors, models of appliances, style of misc hardware/decorations/fixtures/whatever, service history with copies of receipts attached, etc.



And IMO the best feature of Obsidian (and many tools like it) is all of your content is stored in plain text. This is absolutely critical for long-lived documents, because any software tool can open and edit them. You can edit your Obsidian notes with Notepad, and view them with Chrome, for example. You can find (or write yourself if you're so inclined) a tool that searches all your notes for $ amounts and list and/or total them up.