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kepano
@stephango.com
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making @obsidian.md
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kepano @stephango.com · Nov 26
File over app · 2023
stephango.com/file-over-app
File over app is a philosophy: if you want to create digital artifacts that last, they must be files you can control, in formats that are easy to retrieve and read. Use tools that give you this freedom. File over app is an appeal to tool makers: accept that all software is ephemeral, and give people ownership over their data. In the fullness of time, the files you create are more important than the tools you use to create them. Apps are ephemeral, but your files have a chance to last. The ancient temples of Egypt contain hieroglyphs that were chiseled in stone thousands of years ago. The ideas hieroglyphs convey are more important than the type of chisel that was used to carve them. The world is filled with ideas from generations past, transmitted through many mediums, from clay tablets to manuscripts, paintings, sculptures, and tapestries. These artifacts are objects that you can touch, hold, own, store, preserve, and look at. To read something written on paper all you need is eyeballs. Today, we are creating innumerable digital artifacts, but most of these artifacts are out of our control. They are stored on servers, in databases, gated behind an internet connection, and login to a cloud service. Even the files on your hard drive use proprietary formats that make them incompatible with older systems and other tools. Paraphrasing something I wrote recently: "If you want your writing to still be readable on a computer from the 2060s or 2160s, it’s important that your notes can be read on a computer from the 1960s." You should want the files you create to be durable, not only for posterity, but also for your future self. You never know when you might want to go back to something you created years or decades ago. Don’t lock your data into a format you can’t retrieve. These days I write using an app I help make called Obsidian, but it’s a delusion to think it will last forever. The app will eventually become obsolete. It’s the plain text files I create that are designed to last. Who knows if anyone will want to read them besides me, but future me is enough of an audience to make it worthwhile.
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we used offcuts of wood from the kitchen project to make these napkin rings for our wedding guests
November 9, 2025 at 5:21 PM
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The kitchen!
November 8, 2025 at 7:54 PM
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When you email issues to Obsidian Entertainment (the video game company) their AI support hallucinates and tells you to email Obsidian (the note-taking company) instead.

If the reward function is to reduce the number of touches in a support ticket, this is one way to do it.
Thanks so much for reaching out and for the kind words about the game, we're thrilled you're loving Outer Worlds 2! It's great to hear you're even trying to contribute feedback on the issue tracker. You've run right into a common security feature where disabling 2FA also requires a current code to prove you're the account owner making the change. Since your issue is with the Obsidian account system (for the issue tracker) and involves account security, this is something our specialized account security team needs to handle directly. They're the only ones who can verify your ownership and safely disable the authenticator app link without a current code. Please email their dedicated support channel directly right now at support@obsidian.md. - In your email, explain exactly what you told me: you lost access to your authenticator app, you used a backup code to log in, but you can't disable 2FA because it still asks for an authenticator code. - Mention that you can provide any proof of account ownership they need. The support team at that address is equipped to work through the necessary identity verification steps to get that 2FA disabled for you.
November 3, 2025 at 10:16 PM
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somehow @capt.dev revived this Winamp 5 skin I made 21 years ago
October 25, 2025 at 4:18 PM
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Launch time should be noticeably faster if you have a large vault, especially on older Android devices.

For me it's under 200ms on iOS with 17k files.
obsidian.md Obsidian @obsidian.md · 20d
Obsidian 1.10.1 (early access) is now available to Catalyst members for desktop and mobile.

The mobile app now launches significantly faster. You can now edit the last opened file while the rest of the app loads in the background.
October 21, 2025 at 10:51 PM
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Use the saw, fear the saw
stephango.com/saw
Use the saw, fear the saw When I learned to use a table saw, my teacher impressed upon me that the machine wants to cut fingers. Fear the saw! Powerful tools can do powerful things. If you want to make handmade wooden furniture you must cut wood. Your desire to have limbs and your desire to have furniture are not at odds if you learn to use tools safely. There are table saws that will stop at the touch of a finger, but I don’t know of any chainsaw that won’t cut an arm. There is a limit to how safe a tool can be before its function is crippled. We should not stop making powerful tools because they are dangerous. Rather, we should empower people to use powerful tools safely. I use the saw, I fear the saw. I have handmade furniture, and I have all my limbs.
October 20, 2025 at 5:55 PM
stephango.com
my greatest fear came true, turns out those home pizza ovens are amazing and you can have excellent pizza whenever you want

(okay, not the most circular, but this was my first attempt!)
October 7, 2025 at 1:48 AM
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Just updated my vault template to show how I use the new Maps feature for Obsidian Bases. Super useful for travel planning.
Screenshot of Obsidian showing a map of Taipei made with Bases
October 6, 2025 at 7:40 PM
stephango.com
So much good stuff in this update.
obsidian.md Obsidian @obsidian.md · Oct 1
Obsidian 1.10.0 (early access) is now available to Catalyst members with tons of improvements for Bases!

- New List view
- New Map view an official open source plugin
- Bases API for views
- Group results by property

Many new table view features: keyboard nav, copy/paste, summarize, undo
October 1, 2025 at 10:05 PM
stephango.com
Since the start we've tried to avoid dependencies in Obsidian. It takes a bit longer to add some features, but it reduces the risk of supply chain attacks, and gives us more control over performance.
September 19, 2025 at 5:11 PM
stephango.com
On agents and Obsidian
AI agents built into cloud apps will always be sub-par compared to state of the art agents that you can use with Obsidian. This is because your Obsidian data is in your control, in plain text formats that are ideal for LLMs to process. You can choose to run any of the best-in-class agents and AI tools: Claude, Gemini, OpenAI Codex, etc. You also have the choice to run local models and privacy-preserving options. Or you can use none of these and enjoy not seeing sparkly AI buttons everywhere. Remember that cloud-based note-taking apps are not end-to-end encrypted. This is inherently less secure, open to breaches, and allows companies to make your private thoughts part of their training set. Obsidian is not working on adding agents because we don't have to. We'll let the AI labs focus on that. We're 4 developers and our focus is on making great editing tools for plain text Markdown files that are always in your control.
September 19, 2025 at 3:03 PM
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Today in ransomware, Slack increases pricing by $195k with a week's notice for a non-profit that teaches teenagers how to code.
A few years ago, when Slack transitioned us from their free nonprofit plan to a $5,000/year arrangement, we happily paid. It was reasonable, and we valued the service they provided to our community. However, two days ago, Slack reached out to us and said that if we don’t agree to pay an extra $50k this week and $200k a year, they’ll deactivate our Slack workspace and delete all of our message history. One could argue that Slack is free to stop providing us the nonprofit offer at any time, but in my opinion, a six month grace period is the bare minimum for a massive hike like this, if not more. Essentially, Salesforce (a $230 billion company) is strong-arming a small nonprofit for teens, by providing less than a week to pony up a pretty massive sum of money, or risk cutting off all our communications. That’s absurd.
September 18, 2025 at 2:57 PM
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This should be a fun challenge! I gave it a quick pass and was able to get something basic working in a few minutes using Notion integrations.
obsidian.md Obsidian @obsidian.md · Sep 16
A new bounty is open for Importer:
$2,000 to convert Notion Databases to Obsidian Bases and plain text files
September 16, 2025 at 5:28 PM
stephango.com
One of my favorite use cases for Obsidian Bases is custom sidebar views. Here's one I made for "Related notes".

It finds notes that have overlapping links and tags with the active note. The notes are sorted by a count of overlaps.
Screenshot showing an example of a related notes view with Obsidian Bases
September 10, 2025 at 4:38 PM
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Dropbox is discontinuing the Paper app. Now all your notes will only be available via the web.

It's so strange that a company designed around syncing files created the .paper format which only stores a URL, and no actual content. How did they lose sight of file over app?
In order to focus on delivering a consistent, high-quality experience on paper.dropbox.com, the Dropbox Paper mobile app will be discontinued on October 9, 2025. If you already have the app installed on your device, it will no longer function after this date. You can continue using Paper on Web on any of your devices after this date by logging into paper.dropbox.com using your browser.
September 9, 2025 at 7:55 PM
stephango.com
Is there a word to describe Obsidian's business model? Revenue primarily comes from optional paid services that have free alternatives.

Freemium isn't quite right because freemium apps typically paywall features, or have usage-based pricing. Obsidian's features are free and there's no usage limit.
September 9, 2025 at 4:20 PM
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life update 💞
September 8, 2025 at 4:12 PM
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passion fruit sorbet
September 6, 2025 at 1:46 PM
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The sample Obsidian plugin template now has an AGENTS.md file.

Hopefully this means coding tools better follow Obsidian guidelines, and create plugins that can more quickly pass review.

github.com/obsidianmd/o...
September 5, 2025 at 4:25 PM
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somehow I just learned there's a variety of blackberries called obsidian, and of course it makes the best jam
stephango.com/quality-software
photo of toast with blackberry jam
September 4, 2025 at 7:00 PM
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whatever you think an hour of your time is worth, it's worth at least ten times more
September 3, 2025 at 4:33 PM
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My top ten tips for Obsidian Bases
1. You can drag views in the View menu to reorder them. The first one is the default view. 2. Right-click the View button to skip the view picker and edit the current view. 3. Bases can be embedded as .base files or as code blocks (like Dataview). Both use the same syntax. 4. Use [[BaseName.base#ViewName]] to embed a specific view. 5. Views have layout options. For tables you can set row height. For cards you can set card size and cover image. 6. The Results count is clickable and lets you limit results and export to CSV/clipboard. 7. With the Properties menu open, you can navigate to a property in the list using arrow keys, and hold Opt key (Alt on Windows) to move the property up or down the list. 8. Double-click a column divider to reset the column width. 9. You can place base files in sidebars to create custom views, like a recent files view, or attachments view. 10. When embedded in a note, this.file refers to the current note. In a sidebar, this.file refers to the active note.
August 27, 2025 at 5:25 PM
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not sped up
obsidian.md Obsidian @obsidian.md · Aug 26
Obsidian 1.9.12 (early access) is now available to Catalyst members for desktop and mobile.

Search is now lightning fast.
August 26, 2025 at 12:22 AM
stephango.com
We're considering ways that IT departments can more confidently deploy Obsidian to employees and students. What do you think about this approach?
1. New policy.json file with options for disabling community plugins, themes, Sync, Publish 2. Command line options for --policy-file "path/to/policy.json" 3. Command line options for --policy-json "{json contents}" 4. Environment variable for OBSIDIAN_POLICY_FILE and OBSIDIAN_POLICY_JSON same as the command line options
August 19, 2025 at 10:06 PM
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The keyboard should feel much much smoother on iOS and Android with Obsidian 1.9.

We fixed a dozen tiny issues with positioning text when the keyboard opens and closes. This will probably be totally invisible to most people, but it's one of my favorite QOL improvements.
August 18, 2025 at 11:09 PM