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Obsidian

I wanted to talk about both Obsidian and third party YT clients, so I just mashed them togehter and hoped it went well lmao.

Back during the COVID days and online classes, I found myself needing a way to do notes during my classes. I needed a way to take notes in a preferably digital format, and then I realized that OneNote was preinstalled. So I tried out OneNote, ended up liked it, and kept using it from that point onwards. And in a short time, 3 semesters worth of typing, writing, drawing and other stuff have already passed and were written inside that notetaking app. I was so committed to the digital notetaking thing in OneNote that I even purchased a graphics tablet, and then later a proper iPad with a pen to take handwritten notes, but quickly realized that the lack of feedback with dragging a plastic pen tip across a glass screen did not make me very happy, and felt pretty strange, and I never really managed to get used to it. The very restrictive and annoying OS on that tablet (iPadOS) did not help at all. Trying to attach a PDF file or other types of files in the iPadOS version of OneNote was a long and convoluted process that sucked every time I had to do it. And then that document wouldn't even print out.(1)

I think the biggest issue is that OneNote expects to be always connected to the internet, a stable connection at that. Trying to use two devices for OneNote (my laptop for typing, the tablet for handwriting notes that sucked to type like math equations) at the same time was very annoying and sucked. And even with the best internet, I was not guaranteed that stuff would sync up properly, so you end up waiting for the changes done on one device to show up in another. It was very annoying. Eventually I stopped bringing my tablet to college, since I ended up typing out 99% of my notes. When it came to anything math related, I decided to stick to pen and paper, since the feeling of a pen dragging across paper just has no substitute.

OneNote was (and still is) fine for typing. You get a really useful WYSIWYG editor that works really similarly to how Word works, which made me feel really at home considering I have been using Microsoft Office since I was a child in the computer lab in elementary school. Your notes are layered in notebooks, which contain sections, which contain pages. It is pretty simple and easy to understand.

While the editor is good, it comes with large drawbacks. You really can’t format text and data on the fly and you'll need to spend some time after each class to properly format that page of notes that you spent two hours hastily writing. Another gripe I had with OneNote was it’s lack of Linux support. This means that for anyone who wanted to keep using OneNote on Linux, they would be stuck on an inferior web app, or one of many random web wrappers that had the intention of making the experience less awful.

Probably the biggest issue for me with OneNote was Microsoft. They have the power to do whatever they want with anything you store inside the app (text, images, files, whatever). This of course made me kinda paranoid, since I have done the mistake of keeping my personal notes inside OneNote: a stupid mistake in hindsight. This, together with the lack of Linux support, convinced me to find a better alternative that was more privacy respecting, and also had Linux support as well. Originally I was searching with something that had a WYSIWYG editor, but eventually decided to ditch that requirement. I also stopped caring about handwritten notes at all. Originally I tried out Joplin, but that goofy twin-panel design made me reconsider my choice. Eventually I would find an alternative with Obsidian. It ticked all the boxes for what I was looking for:

• It is private.
• It is future proof. If Obsidian decides to fuck over their users, they can simply leave to an alternative. All files are stored in simple markdown format, which means any app can read these and edit them too.
• Plugins galore.
• Very themable.
• Easy to sync. While the inbuilt syncing feature requires you to pay, since it all is just files, you can just throw it into Syncthing, in your cloud provider of your choice, it’s just files after all.

Markdown is good and awesome

Originally I had trouble with wrapping my head around the markdown markup language. I found it kinda confusing, but it quickly became easy and I realized I could write faster and not worry about formatting. Obsidian (or whatever note app that uses markdown) does all the heavy lifting. No longer do I needed to fumble around with formatting and that ribbon menu on Onenote, now I can get right to work just writing, denoting where the headings are, and bolding or italizing text wherever I needed it.

Compared to OneNote, inserting links no longer required messing around with the right context menu: instead, you can do it with either the command pallete, or with syntax like [text](website.com) and it would just work. Callouts eventually became so useful to highlight certain text or to clarify a topic in something that I was writing. I can insert snippets of code, with the back-tick character which helped me so much in taking notes related to programming: I can copy some code from Visual Studio Code or whatever IDE I was using, and then describe it inside Obsidian, using callouts when necessary.

Another awesome thing is that I can link other markdown files, and Obsidian will show me on the bottom of the page, where was that paged linked.

I know there is far more that I can do with markdown and the command pallete. But the fact Obsidian made writing less annoying for me is awesome.

the not so great things

Obsidian has some downsides. The first one is that the company behind Obsidian is for-profit. That means they can go ahead and make Obsidian into a subscription app whenever they want at any time, but since Obsidian uses markdown files for everything, it kinda cancels out. You can switch to Joplin or QOwnNotes tomorrow while keeping the same files, and you’d probably never notice the difference.

It is also not open source, which means I don’t know what is inside Obsidian, and I am left with trusting the developer that they don’t do anything silly inside the app. For now, however, Obsidian is trusted and no one has found anything suspicious revolving the app, and they seem to be doing fine with commercial licensing.

Another annoyance with Obsidian is syncing with Syncthing. It works, but you need to get used to file conflicts every time anything in the .obsidian folder updates or changes. If I try blacklisting the whole folder, stuff like plugins, settings and themes will start to become unsynchronized. I decided that dealing with occasional file conflicts in Syncthing was easier compared to the work I would need to put in if I wanted to edit some settings across all devices. To add to the list, I wish there was a way to make a new vault with the same plugins, themes and settings. At least there is a workaround for this, which is literally copying the damn .obsidian folder back into the new vault being created. To finish this off, the autocorrect is awful and I wish there was a way to actually improve it. It often tries to autocorrect words that are correct, and since I have two languages set for the autocorrection thing, it often confuses misspelt English words as Spanish and vice versa.

So I think at the end, I really do like Obsidian. It make writing easier and made it feel that less of a chore to do. It is pretty good and I really do recommend people to try it out.

2. On YT clients

YouTube sucks and because of that, I decided to go full in on using third party YT clients like Grayjay and Freetube, maybe even Newpipe. So far, it has been going well. The apps I chose on using were both Freetube and Grayjay, both two good apps that have their pros, and cons.

Grayjay is a so-called media aggregator which can group a bunch of media sources together, like Twitch, YouTube, Soundcloud and more. Meanwhile, Freetube is strictly a YT client. Both clients feature ad blocking, sponsor blocking (however Grayjay will call you out on it, and tells you to not be a “freeloader”), and only Freetube has Dearrow (a title replace to avoid clickbait).

Grayjay has been the best app so far when it comes to best YT client, it can sync and keep my subscriptions updated across three devices at once, but the desktop app is still really early days and often has issues playing video. I also wish it had Dearrow built in, or some plugin that you can install that adds it to the app. I really can’t stand clickbait, since I really find it really annoying. Dearrow does make things much better, to be honest. Also I should add that the experience right now on Grayjay, no matter if it is on the phone or the desktop app, still has that feeling of “oh shit something will break if I do this in a certain way” vibe. However, considering the last time I tried Grayjay, now it has gotten so much better this year. So yea.

Freetube is pretty neat as well, and I can use it with the LibRedirect extension if I needed to redirect the video to the app. The downside is that it has no syncing whatsoever, however there are (albeit kinda hacky) ways to get a sync working with syncthing, according to this blog, but I yet to try it. Maybe if I do get it working, I may talk about if it works fine or not in another post.

I been looking into other full alternatives for Youtube like Peertube, but sadly there isn’t much there at all. And the stuff that is there is often kinda just politics and privacy/tech related stuff. Maybe this YT debacle can convince people to use Peertube and other YouTube alternatives, however most likely what would happen is the moment that the AI age verification bullshit ends, we will just go back to using YT like nothing happened.

Tangent 1: on blog writing

so far blog writing is pretty fun and kinda fulfilling, in a way. I do prefer it to writing anything into the corporate hellscape that is Tumblr, Bluesky or Twitter (still not calling it X). IDK if anyone reads this, but if you are, thank you, you're pretty cool :)

Tangent 2: :3 moment, and Nextcloud's client kinda sucks

I was so fucking tempted to put a ":3" instead of the smiley face LMAO. On unrelated notes, I had a lot of issues with Nextcloud's desktop client that decides to just crash out of nowhere. I never had that happen with Filen and other big tech cloud providers like Google Drive and OneDrive. Not sure what it can be, but it seems to happen if Nextcloud starts receiving too many errors at once.