I came across this software as a solution to my note taking, something I didn't really do and so didn't really need a solution to.

But I like to try new things and, well, it has certainly taken over large parts of my life.

So it's a note taking program/app. That's it.

OR IS IT?

It's also a LOT of gimmicks. Its most powerful concept is the existence of community plugins, where nerdy people have exceptional power to make it into almost anything in the world.

Currently, I'm using it for a whole number of things I never did before, but now wouldn't want to continue without:

Diary

Sometimes I have a lot to say and nobody to say it to, and I'm not about to start seeking an AI best friend. So I write them down. This is way more powerful than the most basic sounding thing I've just described it as, later.

Music business

Over the last year or so I've been logging my actual music theory classes from my day job onto Obsidian, and creating my own curriculum from Beginner to Advanced. This includes images and audio examples, but also walls of text which, although great for me personally, I can see would not be conducive to actual learning if I were to sell it as teaching materials or something. More on that later too.

A Music Theory Canvas

Here was an idea I've since abandoned (For reasons I'll bring up later) that forms a kind of summary of the concepts in flowcharts which hyperlink to those lessons as needed.

Then, something happened.

It was great that I had all my ideas down somewhere so that I can call back on them forever, never needing a new idea henceforth. But with this background idea of turning into products I could sell, it just wasn't cutting it in terms of quality and design. I mean, it's a note-taking app.

I thought, conceptually, you could sell the entire vault as a complete product for students or teachers to use on Obsidian, which is possible and people do that with various things - a popular thing people do is transform Obsidian into a D&D campaign thing. It's pretty intense.

But you'd have to change the designs, install the plugins and set everything up exactly the same if it's to go smoothly, and I didn't like that.

But then I saw one particular community plugin: Excalidraw

Suddenly, my shitty canvas page and my overly-dull music theory pages could come together as an art.

Now, I could connect my Wacom... drawing pad thingy, and draw my ideas and lessons out. And it works So. Damn. Well.

My handwriting is abysmal, my drawings are worse, but this Excalidraw fixes it all.

Here's the first attempt at making a little poster about the Piano's keyboard, using a screenshot from my Musescore Notation software:

Most of the first round of creations had screenshots from the notation software; scales, notes, clefs, whatever.

I just found it wholly unsatisfying. Then it occurred to me I can just... create my own IP and draw out my own keyboards and notes. This is advantageous in so many ways. Not only have you got your own style, but you can then rapidly edit every individual facet at any time to match the occasion. They're also of infinite quality compared to screenshots. I went with a scruffy hand-drawn approach which matched my terrible handwriting:

Here's another example of screenshots turning into my own style:

Infinitely better!

And, if you zoom in, you'll see I scribbled all the notes and the staff lines have a kind of sketch roughness to them:

What if I want to change the piano to, say, red keys for some reason? Takes 2 seconds. Zoomed in you can really appreciate the sketchy style:

One cool thing I only just realised is that you can add your creations into a library, and just pull them up whenever you want in the future, edit accordingly:

So far I have five lessons, all of which are still in the kind of blueprint stage, since I'm entirely new to this digital drawing stuff. But it's all just ready-made content I'm converting from text pages in Obsidian to images in Obsidian.

Honestly I've almost forgotten about the reason for doing this, to sell a product. I just seem to be doing it because It's fun.

Ok, what else do I have on here...

A recipe book of my favourite home cooked successes

A little digital recreation of my cats

Because why not? You can play with a stick or throw balls, and it's kinda funny because my cats favourite toy above everything else - in fact, nothing else is remotely interesting - is these bright fluffy balls of these exact colours. They get lost under the sofa, so I replace them, and then one day I move the sofa and then 50 of them start getting re-discovered. This picture is pretty much my actual life but with a nicer house I'll never afford.

A representation of my note-taken brain thus far

I'm not sure that has any practical use but it does help you just sit back and see how everything is connected. For example, you can see in the middle there a bunch of the musical lessons are connected with keywords and topics:

and if I show every attachment and beyond, it starts to look like my own brain planet:

AND THEN SOMETHING ELSE HAPPENED

*AI happened. *

Now, I don't trust or like AI, but I do use it. You have to keep up with the times. I mostly use to fact check or google things that are too complicated to actually google like 'You know that song that goes like doo doo doo, but has that section that really kicks ass?' - AI can generally fill that void for me.

But my concern was always that I'm basically selling myself off to these big companies whose agreements tend to say things like they'll keep your data for a minimum of 5 years and have complete and total rights to access it whenever they please.

Obsidian, like PewDiePie, has solved this and created an admittedly slow solution by having an AI that runs entirely locally, no WIFI even needed. Nothing gets out if you don't want it to.

I now have AI implemented into my app, privately, and can use it to discuss, review, suggest and summarise all of my vaults, or whatever else people use AI for, in the context of my own little brain world here.

It's slow and obviously not as polished as some multi-trillion dollar corporate, commercial AI engine, but it does as much as I'd ever need it to. Also, faster computers and different AI models will yield different results. I'm just on a laptop so you can't expect all that much.

Health Tracking

I got annoyed at Samsung's app. It's great I guess, can calorie track and it'll chart progress in weight loss etc. But on a phone it's just a bit lame; you can't see the entire chart over time.

So I got a Chart-making plugin and inputted some of the data from my Smart Ring since January to now, as well as my Bench Press progress and voila:

Scratching the Surface

Like I said, some people use this for TTRPG Campaigning and more. I'll probably start using it for language learning when I get time to set that up, but people use it for writing books & lore, PDF annotation, website building, basically anything. I have barely even delved into the depths that exist. Here's some examples online, and you can see how many different themes exist out there (You can make your own too):

I dunno it just makes me so much more productive with my time. Everyone should give it a go! #Notsponsored)