Okay, we are live. What's up, everybody? Welcome to Freedom Tech Weekend. This is Marks. I'm your host every week, week in and week out. Let's make sure that we're live here on the channels. But as you can see, I'm not in my normal location. I am on a trip.
I'm just checking to see if this is live.
There we go.
We are live.
Great.
Got audio.
Yeah, I'm in a remote location.
If I bend over here, you can see the ocean is behind me.
There's the water.
Beautiful water.
Go out, get some sun, touch some grass, get in the sand, go swimming, do something.
Wherever you are, you can get outside and enjoy a little bit of Mother Nature.
Maybe not today, but tomorrow.
If you're in poor weather somewhere, the weather will pass.
Go get some sun.
Okay, we're live everywhere, it looks like.
Let's see if we're even live on ZapStream.
Yeah, all right.
ZapStream is working this time.
That's awesome.
I'm going to mute it.
Sorry about that.
Okay, cool.
Well, today's show is going to be a little short for multiple reasons.
One, I am on a trip, so it's not going to be as long.
And then also, my battery is getting low on my laptop.
So we got that going for us, too.
And I took so long getting this all set up out here that I didn't don't have time to go grab the cable here.
But let's see.
Sure.
Okay, great.
Today, we're going to be talking about taking notes.
Note taking is something that tons of people do.
I'm sure you take notes.
And there are like a million tools out there for taking notes.
And so many of them have different privacy implications underneath the hood.
And so I want to talk about the one that I use every day, which is Obsidian.
And I have tried tons of different tools.
This is the one that I'm using right now.
I am always looking for something better.
I have another one on my radar that I want to start trying.
And so I'm going to give it a try here in a little while and then do a future show about it
and maybe compare my experience between Obsidian and this other one that I want to look at.
It's called AnyType.
So let's dive into Obsidian.
If you have any questions, drop them in the chat.
I got some emoji thumbs up and smiley faces.
All right.
Thanks, Johnny.
Cool.
We got some people on the stream.
So again, if you're just joining us, we got the ocean behind us.
I've got birds all around chirping and I've got ocean sounds.
It's great.
We are going to talk about note taking.
Let's secure our notes.
So I know probably the most popular note taking app is Google Drive and Google Docs.
people take notes in there all the time it's super easy and it synchronizes everywhere that you are
so you just pop open the tab and you start typing and then you can share it with other people and
that's awesome most people in my experience from from when i've i've talked to people and seen what
they're doing the sharing functionality is great but for a ton of people they just use it just to
take their personal notes and they take them in there and that's it so i want to show you
something that could hopefully replace that for you so you're not sharing all of your notes with
and you can get a lot similar experience as Google.
You do miss out on some of the collaboration.
You still get collaboration, but you miss out on some of it.
So I would say if you need that, then you separate your note-taking,
and you make Obsidian your default,
or whatever local privacy one you want to do, you make that your default,
and then you use something like Google only when you need to collaborate with others,
and you're okay with that information being stored on Google servers.
right okay um nice comment uh winsome hacks talking about touch grass and accidentally not
saying grass and saying something else that could make for a good day or it can make for a really
bad day for you depending on how that goes down okay i'm going to share my screen and we're going
to look at obsidian here again uh if you're just joining this is going to be a shorter show because
I'm on a trip and I have low battery. Okay. So you're seeing my Obsidian here. Let me just make
sure you are seeing this. Yes, you are. All right. Cool. This is Obsidian. It has a lot of the
note-taking stuff that you'd expect inside any app. You can create a document. You can create
folders, right? I've got tabs here so I can have multiple documents open at once. So I have,
come on, let's do this. Okay. So this is I'm showing you the ins and outs of kind of how I
prepare my shows here. So I've got this master app list for Freedom Tech Weekend, where I keep
track of apps I don't want to talk about, and then I cross them out after I've talked about them.
So you can see some upcoming episodes, I'd love to do bit chat, I'd love to one of our one of our
viewers the other day brought up the Aura digital frame that they got for their birthday, and they're
wanting to get something more privacy focused. So I want to try and find digital frames that
have a little bit of privacy built into them. I want to talk about ebooks and audiobooks on a
future episode. There's this photo app called Ante Photos that I want to look at. I still want to do
one on Meshtastic. Sparrow is something I'd love to cover. And then Anytype is the one that I
mentioned here at the very beginning that might become my future note-taking. It's so much more
note taking but i want to look into that one more one episode i was looking at doing was vibe coding
your own tools and so that's what i have over here i've come up with some use cases for maybe things
that we could go over covering how to vibe code your own tools if you're not a programmer but you
have little things that you want to do then you can vibe code some little utility for yourself
now obsidian the main thing here is that all of your notes are stored locally you have a vault
right so i've got this vault down here for freedom tech weekend if i click on this um this
also we use it for for work. And so we have a shared vault for
work, which goes into the collaboration stuff right now as
I'm typing here, right if I there's an Oster by type and to
say blah, blah, blah, then this is immediately stored on my
laptop. But then it is also synchronized to the obsidian
cloud, but it's using an encryption key. So the
encryption key is something that I know that obsidian doesn't
know. And so it's privately encrypted here and then sent to
their servers and then sent to all my other devices. So they
have mobile apps for Android and iOS. They have desktop apps, obviously, like I'm using. And then
they have Linux apps. So it's available on every single platform that I want to be on. And then
it is synchronized in the background automatically. The collaboration stuff is pretty simple.
It's if somebody else was sharing this with me, as they start typing, stuff starts moving around
on my screen, very similar to Google Docs. They also have a robust, obviously, you can see here
on the left you've got your file picker where you can have folders for files and things um this is
when i was trying to figure out if i could do some kind of post about like what are the macronutrients
of a beef patty a beyond meat patty and a snickers bar which is kind of a funny little thing i was
working on uh let's see you have all these other things over here that i don't really use that much
but they've got like a canvas thing so you can drag and drop and do some kind of more free form
layout. Let's see. Start a note for today. Maybe more journaling. My graph view. Let's not look at
that. All right. How do I get back to what I was doing? Okay. The other thing I want to show you
is they have this whole community thing of plugins. Now, I'm only sharing Obsidian, so I'm
not going to go, but we always go and look at GitHub here on Freedom Tech Weekend or wherever
source code is hosted. One caveat about Obsidian is that the core code for Obsidian is not open
source. But a ton of their other stuff is. So they have like a whole ecosystem of open source stuff
around Obsidian, but the core itself is not. So you are trusting that the encryption that is done
on your laptop locally is done correctly and that it is encrypted through to their servers when it's
synchronized. So there is a trust level there. That's one reason why I want to look at AnyType
because any type is fully open source. So that I want to be open and transparent there with that.
Maybe something has changed. But when I went looking this morning, I couldn't find the open
source code for the core. Okay, I want to open up preferences settings and show you a little bit in
here. So obviously, you can do auto updates for your app if you want to. Now I have purchased
an account where I get like elevated syncing access to their servers and I can add people
I can't remember. There's a commercial license here. I hope I didn't just dock something there.
My bad. So what I wanted to show you here is community plugins. Now with community plugins,
you can click on browse. And they have tons of stuff in here. So for one, I've played around
this Kanban board here. So if you're doing project management or managing your own stuff,
like you can click on Kanban. And then it creates a nice little like column area where you can drag
similar to Trello. They have calendars, so you can build a whole calendar here with an Obsidian.
It's really powerful. Tables, Excalibur, edit and draw Excalibur. Files, Data View,
Task Manager. So you can have a whole Task Manager inside here. Now the underlying thing with
obsidian is that it uses markdown files and this is actually really awesome so you can use markdown
in here and then you can copy and paste it in github or any other tool that uses markdown
ghost blog accepts it really well so it's nice to go from here to ghost i do a lot of that and then
something else that's good is um the files are just markdown files on your laptop so i said
they're stored locally you can just grab them and open it's not some it's not some proprietary
format that is only known to obsidian and that's great all right we've got some comments here
features i need and will not use without have to have encryption number two obsidian not knowing
the keys in case of hacks three availability on linux and mobile sounds like it covers
to my knowledge it covers all of those um again the core is not open source another promethean
is saying log sec is just as good and it's open source i did see that in my in my research so
So I'll look at log set and then you also like any type.
That's awesome because any type has like a ton of amazing promises on their page of what they can accomplish.
And so I'm definitely going to try that out and give you guys give you guys a view.
But if you want to look at log sec, then you can go check that out.
And then any type is one I'm going to be looking at next after after this.
OK, like I promised, this is a short show today.
Note taking. Some people might have needed to hear this just to know there are other options than Google Notes out there or Microsoft OneNote or Evernote.
These are systems that helped get collaboration within notes and kind of opened up the space.
But there is so much more now that you can do that is more secure, more private, more open source.
And that's what we're all about here. We're trying to bring more freedom and sovereignty to any tool that you use.
So this weekend, go grab a tool, whether it's Obsidian or GrowGrab, LogSec, which we haven't looked through here but is recommended.
Or you can grab any type and go check them out.
You don't need my permission.
Just go look into these tools yourselves.
We're trying to empower you with the skills you need to go suss out what is a good project and maybe what is not.
So go take a look at one of these note-taking apps.
Start taking some notes there.
And then I hope you have a great weekend.
So let's go ahead and end this share here.
Get back to my stream studio.
We got 600 people on there.
I think we have some.
Oh, let me check the Zap stream.
We got some over on Zap stream as well, but no comments.
So thank you for joining me.
Go out, have a great weekend, touch grass, feel the sun,
do all that great stuff.
Find some family and friends.
If you can find some to be around in person,
if that's possible,
it'll bring a lot of joy and happiness in your life.
All right.
Have a great weekend.
We'll see you next time.
Later.
Thank you.