🎵 Music: Nirvana - Plateau

Today, I had the desire to make my Obsidian a little more accessible to me when I'm not home.

Up until an hour ago, I was only able to sync between my devices if I was at home and connected to my LAN. I used to backup Obsidian using the Remotely Save plugin connected to my Nextcloud server via WebDAV. Since I'm paranoid, this server is inaccessible from outside of the LAN. This is normally a non-issue for me as I don't usually travel a lot and phone home pretty much daily. Now that I'm travelling between where I live now and (staying at) the new apartment quite often, I needed a better sync solution.

I was fully prepared to fork over some money for a VPS just to be able to have WebDAV. Then I remembered: that same Nextcloud server has been backed up monthly for almost a year now using Duplicati connected to a Storj DCS instance. Storj DCS has an Amazon S3 compatibility layer. Remotely Save has support for S3 compatible services. See where I'm going with this?

Switching everything over in Remotely Save was as easy as 1-2-3. There is even an option to export settings as a QR code. On my iPhone and iPad I scanned the QR with the Camera app, and opened the link in Obsidian. Obsidian gave me a notification that settings were imported and I needed to restart. Restart, sync, done. It was that easy.

Now ya girl can write on the go! I just need to figure out a way to build the journal (...and then we will be ready to take over the world!) Muahahahahahah.

🎵 Music: SAMURAI (Refused) - Never Fade Away

I looked deeper into User Scripts in Templater and now my personal mood tracker is actually usable on mobile.

I used the Buttons plugin to insert a Markdown table row with the cells prompting for input in the Mood, Reason, and Tag cells.

I have a set of emoji and file tags that I use specifically for my mood tracker. I added them to script functions that output arrays to use in Templater's tp.system.suggester.

In the end, my mood tracker looks like this:

I am using tags that start with mood-* so that I can eventually create a charts at the end of each month (or year) that tracks my overall mental health. It's gonna be fuckin' lit. 😃

I think I'm going to treat myself to a bubble bath now 😍

Oh, and apologies to those who follow via RSS. The above table didn't render properly for me on NetNewsWire, and I'm not bothered enough to fix it. I won't use tables in my posts very often, so this is a non-issue for me.

Edit: (2023-02-06 13:29) Notice about the RSS not rendering.

🎵 Music: Nirvana - Stain

I'm feeling pretty peaceful and rather productive at the moment. I cleaned up Obsidian, got some game dev mechanics implemented, browsed the Internet for some time, shaved my face and legs, and learned how to use Mermaid which is a diagramming and charting library that's built into Obsidian. As a result of falling down the Mermaid rabbit hole, I've been writing some UML diagrams for my software projects. My next few diagrams will be state diagrams, and then the flowcharts. I'm looking forward to learning how to use this. Obsidian is far more powerful than I thought. 😁

As an added bonus, I can include the diagrams when I work on the documentation. 😄

I think Obsidian is doing its job! I looked over at the Reminders and took care of some outstanding things (sorry, still no LiveJrnl release) like ordering groceries, hearing aid batteries, and the like. I then got a pretty decent overview of what I had to do today, how much I have accomplished (almost all of it!), seeing that my mood today was overall positive, and that feeling is pretty good. I'm confident that I can make this work and fit in some exercise, house cleaning, and even programming.

Basically, today, I am feeling fulfilled for the first time in a really really REALLY long time.

Fuck. Yes.

Two shifts remain. It is windy as hell outside and I have to leave in an hour for work. That would be leaving early. After today, I'm off for a week. I plan to do some much-needed cleaning, exercising, and recharging of my social battery.

Tonight, we're ordering groceries because its 2023 and most grocery chains here have finally caught up. This should take some of the pressure off of S because I still can't drive. I can answer a door, though!

I did have a file loss situation earlier today with Obsidian due to a user error. The Reminders plugin edits the date and time that a reminder is shown when you dismiss it, updating the last edited file time. If I make a change on my phone, then the reminder comes up on the PC before syncing, and I dismiss the prompt on the PC, the remote sync (correctly) thinks the PC is the latest version. I need to make a mental note to not dismiss any reminders that pop up, but to mute them. I think that doesn't change the last edited time. I will find out later today. 😅 I would rather there not be a popup at all for the reminder since I have the sidebar open at all times.

This post will also be my first one that I'm not publishing in its entirety until later tonight. I want to see how well Obsidian works for journaling on-the-go.

Until later, my lovelies 😻

Since my last post, I've been exploring CookLang and I'm still not completely sold on it. Obsidian has a plugin that renders the recipes and it does work nicely, but it does lack features like notes. I don't want to have to switch between edit and read view when reading cooking instructions. What does get rendered looks really nice and I hope there's a way to show comments in the output sometime in the future.

I did briefly explore Grocery Recipe Format and while it has a good start, I feel that placing ingredient lists in the section that they're used in is not the right way to go about it, since a full ingredient list is the first thing I look at when reading a recipe. There really isn't a good way to go about it in CookLang, either, but there is some discussion on the matter.

I will need to explore this some more. So far it looks like CookLang is in the lead.

But for now, I need sleep. Two shifts remain.

Unlimited POWAAAAA!*~

I found a shell command extension for Obsidian on PC that let me put scripts in the command palette. So naturally, I decided that I wanted to fully generate the journal and build the site from within Obsidian. Sooo...

I manually split up the original journal.txt into their individual journal entry files in the Journal directory because I'm an idiot. I could have written a script to do that, but it was literally faster to just copy and paste the files, and fix the headers.

Ya know what? I'm, pardon my French, really fucking proud of myself for this project. I've got some really cool automation going on through the command palette.

I first generate journal.txt and then I run the shell script to build the journal.

rm /home/holly/.config/jrnl/journal.txt && cat Journal/* >> /home/holly/.config/jrnl/journal.txt && /home/holly/Projects/livejrnl-builder/build.sh

Really excited. 😄

Edit: (2023-01-30 18:16) Snippets for documenting post edits works really well.

This is the first post I'm writing from Obsidian. I love jrnl, but it is so not suitable for longer posts. Or writing from Mobile. Really, this Obsidian compatibility layer is for when I'm writing posts on the go. Or much longer posts. You get the idea.

This whole thing is powered by the Templater plugin. I have a jrnl folder that triggers a template when a file is first created. It sets the date and time stamp, then asks the user for the post title. From there, I am free to write.

To sync my changes, I have another template with a single user script command that runs the following system command:

cat '/home/holly/Obsidian/brain-droppings/Journal/2023-01-30.md' >> /home/holly/.config/jrnl/journal.txt

The only downside to this is I'd have to edit the file manually in Sublime if I wanted to make changes to the post.

OR

I could use the absolute power of Python, and loop through all of the posts in the jrnl folder in the Obsidian vault, and generate an entirely new journal.txt that LiveJrnl can use... Which would effectively scratch the itch that I created in this post. Of course, that would mean I would no longer need jrnl for an editor and would only be using their file format... I'd also have to handle encrypt--I'm sorry, where were we? 😅

Now let's see if my journal takes a huge dump when I save this... 🤞