Unlocking Handwritten Notes in Obsidian with Excalidraw and Scribble Helper

Obsidian is primarily a text-based tool for me. I only use images occasionally, and I’ve also outsourced my PDFs to DevonThink. I take the approach that it often makes sense to use specialized tools and not do everything with one app, even if that’s potentially possible. Drawings and diagrams are a bit different. I need them relatively rarely anyway because I work very text-based. However, I’m currently trying to get into the habit of using drawings a bit more because I believe that complex topics can be understood much better that way. And that brings us to the topic of …

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Making digital work visible

The Problem One of the biggest problems with digital work for me is that the spatial dimension is not represented, or at least not sufficiently. I have the problem that I can’t think very well in the abstract. I have to see things, arrange them and, above all, write them down in order to achieve insights. And it doesn’t help at all if I have folders upon folders on my hard drive (or in the cloud for that matter), ALL OF WHICH I DON’T SEE. I can’t get a sense of dimensions, relations, relationships. The only thing I can do …

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The Tools I use for Writing

Recently, I wrote about the applications I use for my daily work. Today, I want to follow up with a short post that focuses on the subset of my work: the apps and services I use to write my blog articles. My workbench looks like this: Obsidian, tools to improve style, upload, and publish. What does that mean in detail? Planning and Thinking I write all of my texts in Obsidian, as it is a fantastic tool. However, what might be more interesting is how I collect and manage my article ideas and track articles through to publication. To accomplish …

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State of the Apps 2023

Cortex by Myke Hurley and CGP Grey is one of my favorite podcasts and I eagerly look forward to each episode. Every year, in the penultimate episode of the year, they talk about the most important apps and services they currently use. And then, the always worth reading Mere Civilian also recently wrote an article under that theme. Last year, I actually wanted to do the same, but then didn’t for reasons I don’t remember. This year, however, the time has come. Which apps do I use every day? What has changed in the last year? And where do I …

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How I use Twitter, Readwise, and Obsidian to keep myself updated on the war in Ukraine

I don’t want to say too many words about the terrible things that are going on in Ukraine right now. This is the wrong place for that. But the war there prompted me to inform myself very thoroughly about various topics, such as the history of the war, the situation in Crimea or the Donbass, or military-strategic considerations, so that I can better assess the situation there. As a political scientist, I also have a professional interest in this regard. Twitter has become an enormously important source for me. You can say whatever you want about Twitter, but there are …

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Wie ich mich mit Twitter, Readwise und Obsidian über den Krieg in der Ukraine informiere

Ich will gar nicht viele Worte über die schrecklichen Dinge verlieren, die gerade in der Ukraine vor sich gehen. Dafür ist das hier der falsche Ort. Der Krieg dort war aber Anlass für mich, mich sehr intensiv über verschiedene Themen wie die Vorgeschichte des Krieges, die Situation auf der Krim oder im Donbass oder auch militärisch-strategische Erwägungen zu informieren, damit ich die Lage dort besser einschätzen kann. Als Politikwissenschaftler habe ich ja auch ein fachliches Interesse in dieser Hinsicht. Twitter ist dabei zu einer enorm wichtigen Quelle für mich geworden. Man kann über Twitter ja sagen, was man will, aber …

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Organize notes in Obsidian – my workflow

Organizing notes in Obsidian is certainly possible thanks to folders and hashtags. However, I wanted to take a different approach and rely on a mixture of tables of contents (or maps of content), tag pages, and very classic folders. A detailed overview of my file structure in Obsidian For about a year now, I can’t imagine my daily work without Obsidian. In the beginning, I was just looking for a home for my Zettelkasten, but in the meantime I write everything from quick notes to diary entries to scientific papers in Obsidian. And sometime last year I realized that it …

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