I might’ve given the wrong impression - the obsidian part is really just a load of files with some metadata (a collection of flat file system databases), exactly for the same portability reasons/tooling reasons you mentioned
I think some people (like myself) just like some order to things, or at least the feeling of it.
Fiddling with my notion calendar of how many gym sessions/runs I made/missed is easier than actually going to the gym of course, but I like to think it helps me stay on track in a “what gets measured gets managed” kind of way.
But maybe when I’m older and more wise I’ll see it for the fallacy it is
I’ve been spending a lot of time recently thinking about a similar home for managing “everything”. I find a tool like notion is just too generalised and I’m missing the UX of purpose made tools though, but I still want some kind of ownership and control over my own data
The dream is to have interop between services, but I control the data and can easily make my own views onto it / tools to manage it. I think this is what the MIT solid project is all about, but I'm a bit lost with the RDF and pods stuff.
I often begin tracking something in a text file, then notion or a spreadsheet, but eventually run into issues with the flow and UX, where custom made apps win out, e.g. Todoist has a better task management UX than notion, my habit tracker sends me timely reminders and has a better UX again, and all the other services which are basically CRUD apps with some extra UI/integrations (bookmarking, Goodreads)
I’m currently trying to make Obsidian my storage layer for all these things, since notion is completely closed source & non extensible. The current set of tools I'm working on are
- A sync engine to pull 3rd party api data into my obsidian vault
- A SQLite vtable/Postgres fdw to expose it as sql so other apps can interop
- A notion/obsidian "quick add" app for on the go, like the "intake" part of the OP
If anyone else has a similar itch to scratch, or experience in the area I'd love to hear more (email in profile)
Worth noting in all of this that Belarus recently closed their land borders to citizens [1], under the guise of COVID, but in reality to stop people leaving. The only way out was flying from Minsk, which is now even less of an option if there are no flights to the EU.
As others have said these sanctions will likely do more to harm the repressed citizens of the regime than Lukashenko
You should read up on the opposition movement in Belarus before making such insensitive suggestions. Dissidents are regularly arrested, beaten and even raped, yet many turn out week after week to protest. Consider if you'd be brave enough to do what they already do first.
The ANT+ protocol is pretty standard in cycling tech, it might be worth seeing if you can reverse engineer anything using that, as it'll likely have more standard data than trying to reverse engineer BLE payloads
I wouldn't be surprised if there was a small political motivation here too - the gov were heavily criticized for their terrible handling of covid in care homes, with an older voter base they might want to be seen to be doing right by the care homes this time around
I run into this a lot travelling in places with bad internet and hiking. I just want to check a route or some place and travel bloggers and their bloated ad-riddled popup-covered sites take forever to load.
I mentioned in another thread an alternative browser I've been prototyping to solve this problem. I'd love if you could tell me more about what you need from something like this. All my prototyping so far has been on desktop but the idea in my head has always been for a mobile app since that's often all I have when travelling, but there's no reason for it not to work on desktop too.
This is almost exactly what I've had in the back of my mind for years now.
I've been trying to prototype a browser with the aim of extracting semantic content from webpages and presenting them in a uniform manner (with the user able to choose/modify the templates). I try to explain it to less technical people as a "permanent safari reader mode for all types of web content - articles, ecommerce pages, recipes etc".
The current model is similar to brow.sh (or opera's vpn etc), the browser makes the request via the server, which extracts the content and serves back the minimal representation. The client then has its own templates saved meaning all layout happens client side and so only the content has to go over the wire.
The user then has control over how they view the content, all images are forced to be lazy loaded (with lqip previews currently) and I'm interested in how to take it further such as extracting the structure of a website navigation and always presenting it in a uniform fashion.
My prototype kinda works for browsing hn/reddit/lobsters and articles and is pretty snappy but content extraction is the hard part that's kept me from starting for a long time.
I've always held off on sharing this because
1) I didn't have a hn account (can't get sucked into an argument about javascript if you can't comment)
2) I was never sure how to present the idea and how exactly to frame it compared to reader mode, adblockers, AMP, Brave, surfing without JS and a ton of different alternatives
If anyones interested I'd love to discuss it and maybe get my prototype live somewhere if there's interest (email address in my about)
I might’ve given the wrong impression - the obsidian part is really just a load of files with some metadata (a collection of flat file system databases), exactly for the same portability reasons/tooling reasons you mentioned