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TIL that you can install the free KOReader on your PocketBook Era and export your highlights via WLAN to e.g. NextCloud Notes and Readwise Reader. What a game changer! 🤩

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View from a pedestrian bridge showing a road intersection. A red, X-shaped bike lane is marked distinctly, with dashed white lines bordering it. A white bicycle symbol is painted on the bike lane indicating its purpose. Surrounding roads have marked lanes, and green vegetation is visible on a small traffic island. The bridge has a textured, aged appearance with metal railings.
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A black and white photograph of a distant shoreline, featuring a small, faint island with trees barely visible on the horizon. The foreground is dominated by a vast, dark sea with gentle ripples. The sky is overcast and merges smoothly with the water, creating a minimalist and atmospheric scene.
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View from the bottom of a circular metal structure with mesh panels and support beams, looking up at a clear blue sky through an open top. The perspective creates a sense of depth and symmetry.
Car Park
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A modern, two-story house with blue siding and white trim. The roof is peaked, and the facade has several large windows. There are two visible exterior staircases on either side of the building. The sky is clear and blue, suggesting a calm weather setting.
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BarCuts

A Surprisingly Useful macOS Shortcuts Launcher.

"A macOS menu bar app that surfaces your relevant Shortcuts workflows when you need them. "Tag" workflows to an application, and when that app is in front, BarCuts will show its tagged workflows in a menu, ready for you to access." - nothing to add. One thing done right. Very useful, as Carlo's other apps. (I heavily rely on Actions For Obsidian for my Daily Notes in Obsidian.)

Screenshot Homepage BarCuts (10.04.2025)
Screenshot Homepage BarCuts (10.04.2025)

actions.work/barcuts/

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Zero Duplicates

Find and Remove Duplicate Files with Confidence

I was looking for an app that can easily remove duplicates from my hard drives. There is a fair number of apps available, but lots of them look shady to me. Not this one. The best thing is that it is free to use and has a very friendly and responsive developer.

Screenshot Zero Duplicates Homepage (2025-04-09)
Screenshot Zero Duplicates Homepage (2025-04-09)

zeroduplicates.com/

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Moving (my Data) to Europe

In recent weeks, like many others, I’ve been contemplating where my digital data and the services I use are actually located. Predominantly, they reside on servers located in the United States, owned by American tech companies. Given the current political climate, I’ve made an effort to migrate much of my digital life to services within the European Union. To begin this digital relocation, I’ve gone through my current services. My encrypted online backup is hosted on Microsoft’s OneDrive. I use iCloud for emails, calendars, contacts, photo storage, passwords, music, and video streaming. I also rely on iCloud for file storage. Apple services are exceptionally well-integrated into the operating systems I use. The Family Sharing features they offer are awesome, and the stability is now commendably robust. Allegedly, most of these services are end-to-end encrypted. All seems fine, except for recent developments involving Trump, Tim Cook’s support of him and the general attitude of Apple towards the European government. But I don’t want to get too political at this point 😎. Anyhow, I made a table in my BuJo1 and started looking around and testing stuff. Here are the results, including not only servers and services but also related stuff:

A few things were quite simple, at least after I made a decision. Based on very helpful feedback on Mastodon, I found out that NextCloud can be quite well used as a managed service at Hetzner for a reasonable amount of money. I then set up an instance there and moved all my calendars, address book2, tasks3, and a few files and pictures. I still need to spend some time researching encryption on NextCloud and understanding its implications, but overall, it was very easy to set everything up and configure it for the whole family, including calendar sharing, and so on. What I’ve seen so far, I like very much. Even the macOS and especially iOS apps are quite good and you can use passkeys and add two-factor for web authentication. Files that are too sensitive to be stored in the cloud without E2EE, I have saved in a koofr.eu vault. Unfortunately, that’s not quite as simple; you have to use rclone, which is a CLI program, but it’s generally doable. For now, I’ve moved a few backups of my most important data there, which have so far been backed up on OneDrive with Arq4. I exported all the individual photos from my Apple Photo.app library and copied them to an encrypted koofr vault. This went extremely well with the PhotoSync app, which not only supports WebDAV but also encrypted rclone targets.5 How and where I will store my photo roll un the future, I do not know yet; it’s still the biggest challenge. But, I was very pleased to see that a few weeks ago Micro.blog, which is still my blogging platform of choice, offered its users the option to move their blog’s data to European servers, which I did right away. My Obsidian data has felt like it’s been on European servers for years now, and I was thrilled to see that the instance of my only remaining actively used social network, Mastodon, was moved to European servers as well. Regarding maps and route planning, I am now trying to rely solely on OpenStreetMap-based services and apps like OsmAnd, or perhaps Guru Maps. Furthermore, due to the sale of Komoot, which, while still a European company, no longer earns my trust for other reasons, I’ve started switching to bikerouter.de. I already knew that it’s fantastic, but it has a considerably steeper learning curve. I moved my passwords back from Apple’s password app to 1Password. I’m not entirely happy with it6 but after all, it seems to be mainly a Canadian-based company. For email, I’ve been using Posteo, a German provider, and I am very satisfied with it. Regarding search, I haven’t found a European provider yet that I want to use, but I’ve been using Kagi for a few months and hope that their privacy statement holds up. Searching remains an open issue. Additionally, I’ve canceled my YouTube Premium subscription and am trying not to buy anything from Amazon anymore. Maybe I’ll just have to delete my account there to keep this up. We’ll see. To sum it up, I find it very unfortunate that it had to come to this and hope that despite the lack of integration, the various apps and services will still work as reliably as they have. Time will tell for sure.

  1. This might become another post someday. ↩︎

  2. Unfortunately, it appears that contact groups are not supported under macOS when synced via CardDAV; you can only use one address book. It seems to work under iOS, though. I guess only Apple knows why. ↩︎

  3. There seems to be no way to export my reminders and tasks properly; I had to transfer them all by hand, except for those that are already managed in my bullet journal, which fortunately were not many. ↩︎

  4. I am still searching for a service where I can use Arq again; however, that hasn’t worked out yet. I would really like to have an incremental backup of all my data in the cloud. ↩︎

  5.  Filen might be something to look into as well. ↩︎

  6. With all the back-and-forth of moving data, it is not about having fun, but about having a better feeling afterward, I guess. ↩︎

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A person wearing a red jacket walks across a modern, arched pedestrian bridge. In the background, a tall telecommunications tower with multiple circular dishes is visible against a cloudy sky. Several street lamps line the bridge, and a glass railing runs along the sides.
Vienna
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A small, colorful toy basket with a yellow top and pink sides featuring star patterns sits on a ledge. The background shows a blurred view of a street with an ornate building, featuring arched windows. Sunlight creates a bright highlight on the toy and casts its shadow onto the ledge.
SOOC
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Black and white image of a pedestrian crosswalk, featuring alternating light and dark textured stripes. The surface appears rough, typical of outdoor pavement, with a curved edge of a sidewalk visible at the bottom.
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A dimly lit black and white image of a city street at night. The primary focus is on an illuminated sign reading "Tricker's Bench Made, Finest English Shoes." The surrounding area is dark, with faint outlines of buildings and streetlights visible in the background.
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A clear, detailed photograph of the full moon against a black night sky. The lunar surface shows visible craters and dark maria, highlighting the moon's texture and features.
Moon
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Nitrogen
Nitrogen
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A tall streetlight illuminates a small area in an otherwise dark setting. Below, a tree is partially visible, outlined by the light. The rest of the scene is shrouded in darkness, creating a stark contrast between the illuminated objects and the surrounding night.
A Lantern and a Tree
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Black and white image of a streetlight pole with a single lamp attached near the top. Power lines extend from the top of the pole, set against a clear sky.
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Making your own bread is awesome

Baking bread is really a great thing. Yesterday we had “Wurzelbrot” (similar to baguette) made with sourdough for breakfast. Then in the afternoon, homemade pizza in the Ooni oven with our own yeast dough, and in the evening, lard bread (with vegan lard and soy yogurt), also made with sourdough 🤩.

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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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I love how easy it is to vote in Germany

You automatically receive your election documents without having to request them. On election day, you simply walk a few hundred meters to your nearest polling station—ideally in perfect weather—where friendly volunteers are ready to hand you your ballot.

There are usually no long lines, no waiting times.

The entire process takes just a couple of minutes, plus the short walk there and back.