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Obsidian

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    Automated Daily Notes in Obsidian - Daily News Integration

    For over a year, a draft has been lying in my project folder, in which I wanted to describe all the shortcuts I use to automatically add some information to my Daily Notes in Obsidian at the end of the day. However, the project was far too big, as my setup is quite complex, and so I haven’t really made any real progress in writing so far. That’s why I thought I should break it down into several smaller pieces (posts), as is always advisable with large tasks, and just start. So today I’m starting completely at random with a shortcut that was only recently added. I will deliberately not go into too much detail, but rather outline a rough framework. If anyone is interested in more detailed information, I will of course try help. Just contact me via e-mail or Mastodon.

    But enough of the preamble.

    A series of Apple Shortcut automations runs at the end of each day and push information to my Daily Note in Obsidian. Therefore, a helper shortcut controls approximately 15 different shortcuts that collect data.

    My Daily Notes consist of several sections:

    • Properties (setup via Templater Scripts)
    • Personal Notes (via Drafts)
    • Daily News (via iMessages → Drafts)
    • Weather (via Shortcuts)
    • Bookmarks (via [Mastodon →] Anybox)
    • YouTube videos watched (via Play)
    • Books read (via Book Track)
    • Finished Tasks (via Reminders)
    • Logged Activities, Streaks, etc. (via Chronicles)
    • Personal RSS feeds, esp. Media Consumption (via Rss copist and e.g. trakt.tv feed)
    • List of created Obsidian Notes (Dataview query)
    • Imported Readwise Reader Highlights (via Readwise Official Plugin and Dataview query)
    • Links to Daily Notes from one, three, six, twelve, and 24 month ago (Templater and inline Dataview query)

    Here is a sample screenshot of one of my daily notes (sorry, it’s in German):

    So, let’s dive a little bit deeper into the Daily News integration: Tagesschau delivers three important news items twice daily via iMessage. I have those messages muted but an Apple Automation Shortcut picks them up on my iPhone, saves them into Drafts and applies a tag. At day’s end, another shortcut collects the tagged news from Drafts, archives them there, strips a few things, adds a Dataview prefix to the summarised headline section and inserts them to the Daily News section in my Daily Notes Template. (BTW using that property and Dataview, I can display the most important news per day nicely in my weekly notes. But this is a completely different story I 😎.)

    And, in case you have wondered: The magic link between all the different apps, Apple Shortcuts and Obsidian, that makes all these automations possible in the first place, is Actions for Obsidian. This is such a great tool 🤩.

    Okay, so, that’s it for today. Hopefully, it won’t take me another year to continue this series. 🙋‍♂️

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    ShareMyPlugin: All My Enabled Obsidian Plugins

    Lou wrote about his Obsidian plugins and mentioned the Share My Plugin List plugin. I’ve previously shared my 10 favorite plugins, but this tool makes it so easy to list all my enabled plugins that I couldn’t resist giving it a try:

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    My Top 10 Obsidian Plugins

    I know there are now over two thousand plugins for Obsidian, and everyone uses a different combination. There are also countless lists suggesting various plugins. But that’s the great thing: The individual combination of plugins makes Obsidian exactly the (power) tool that each user wants it to be. So, here are my ten most important plugins1:

    • Dataview: If the Dataview plugin didn’t exist, I might not use Obsidian but something else.
    • Paste URL into Selection: I am always confused when an app does not support this feature.
    • Calendar: It’s a calendar in your sidebar to access daily and weekly notes.
    • Image Converter: Love this plugin; it automatically resizes images that you paste into a note.
    • Templater: A combination of Templater and Dataview brings my new notes to life.
    • Linter: Sometimes I paste something into a note which has a bad MD format; Linter fixes that.
    • Update Modified Date: Does exactly this.
    • Tag Wrangler: A handy plugin for managing large task lists; you can easily rename and join tags.
    • Plugin Update Tracker: Again a plugin that makes things easier. Check for updates, read release notes and update plugins from within a single view.

    1. I actually use a few more. ↩︎

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    Fun stuff with Obsidian and Dataview II - costs per week

    You can do so much fun stuff with Obsidian and Dataview. I added notes for all of my electronic gear and based on properties for purchase date and price an inline dataview calculates the costs per week for each item, every time the note is opened 🤩

    This is the actual inline calculation for cost/week:

    =round(number(replace(this.preis,",",".")) / number(durationformat(dur(date(now) - this.kaufdatum),"w")),2)

    with

    • preis: price property; as I am located in GER I use a textfield with an entry like “42,99 €”; therefore the replacement of “,” by “.” and conversion to a number
    • kaufdatum: purchase date property
    Obsidian dataview with costs per week based on purchase date and price

    Update 2023-12-05

    Here is a slightly improved version of the inline field:

    =replace(string(round(number(replace(this.preis,",",".")) / number(durationformat(dur(default(this.nutzung_bis, date(now)) - this.kaufdatum),"w")),2)),".",",")

    with

    • nutzung_bis: a properties date field that marks the end of usage; the cost is calculated either until this date or if it is missing until today

    and it changes the ENG decimal point back to the GER “,”

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    Fun stuff with Obsidian and Dataview - pico-8 game launcher

    You can do so much fun stuff with Obsidian and Dataview. I added notes for all my pico-8 games, containing the cartridge png itself and added some Templater and Properties magic. With the help of Keyboard Maestro I can now click on the little play button in my Dataview table and the game just launches 🤩

    pico-8 games list in Obsidian with built-in launcher