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nicolevdh

nicolevdh

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nicolevdh activity

Visual thinking, practical Zettelkasten, and a new Patreon perk

Hey folks! I'm coming back to life here after some unintentional time off, but here's what I've got to share with you today.

Livestream: How to Sketch Your Mind in Obsidian and more

Last week, my friend Zsolt Viczián (developer of the Obsidian Excalidraw and ExcaliBrain plugins as ...

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I'm back! Here's what happened...

... I got divorced.

There, I said it.

It went about as well as it could possibly have gone (we're still lovingly in each other's lives and families), but you don't leave a 20-year marriage without some emotional fallout. I've had to prioritise my mental and physical health over prett...

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Patreon exclusive: Coffee chat with Brandon Boswell

Hey folks! Here's a video just for Patreons, although Brandon and I may use short clips of this in future videos.

I've been following Brandon Boswell for a while, and I even reached out to him a few months...

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Connecting visual notes with Obsidian Excalidraw

I've been on a real visual note taking kick recently, thanks mostly to spending time with the visual PKM extraordinaire himself, Zsolt Viczián. This week's video addresses the problem of connecting visual notes in the same wa...

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Hybrid textual/visual notes with Obsidian Excalidraw

I just released a new video about hybrid notes with Excalidraw, and I'm quite eager to share it with you all because it's about the biggest recent change in the way I take notes.

2024-04-19 04:50:26 +0000 UTC View Post

Patreon-exclusive video: Onyx Boox Note Air 3C Unboxing

Two months ago, I bought a reMarkable 2 on a whim (unboxing video here) and while the onboarding experience wasn't the best, it DID whet my appetite for e-ink tablets in general. After that video and jus...

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My talk at the PKM Summit: Doing It in Public

On March 22nd and 23rd, I went to the PKM Summit, a conference held in Utrecht, the Netherlands. I had never been to an in-person conference just for Personal Knowledge Management and note-taking, and it was amazing.

I did two t...

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Peerdraft for collaboration in Obsidian + Patreon exclusive video

I've long wished for a way to work on notes on Obsidian with other people, and I've tried many different approaches. One of them, Etherpad, I even made a Patreon-only video about last year. But up until now, nothing really scrat...

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Talking in Public 02: Optimal quitting + Patreon giveaway

I had fun recording the last little audio clip, so I decided to also read out the second issue of my newsletter, Thinking in Public: Optimal quitting . The ...

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My second attempt at writing a book in public

I planned to write a book last year, but 2023 had other plans for me, and that didn't happen. This week's video is about what happened, and why I decided I'm writing a different book instead. I take you through th...

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Patreon-only video: Remarkable 2 unboxing

I've heard about e-ink tablets for writing for a while, but never really "got" the concept. I'm sure you already know I like digital note-taking, but I actually like analog note-taking too. I'm a huge fountain pen nerd and have quite a collection of pens, paper, and ink from all over the world. I...

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Ways to learn in public-- and starting my book on it

This week's video is about 10 concrete ways that I learn in public, and I'm putting my money where my mouth is by also announcing that I'm starting to write a book in public.


This isn't a marketing ploy. I don't have a book written out yet, I've never written a book before, and I...

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Patreon exclusives: Canvas Candy Tutorial + giveaway

More than a year ago, the Obsidian team released Canvas as a new core plugin. Canvas is a way to visually arrange your notes, media, and even embeds of external sites on a wide, infinitely scrolling space. It's supposed to mimic...

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Free alternative to Obsidian Publish: Quartz

Hi everyone!

This week's video is about a free, open-source, self-hostable tool called Quartz that you can use to publish Obsidian (or other Markdown-based) notes. It recently won the Best Tool in the 2024-01-26 12:18:56 +0000 UTC View Post

Wearing blades as well as jewels - Talking in Public, the NVDH Patreon podcast

So Patreon apparently has a podcasting feature! Of course I wanted to try it out. So here's something that's half me reading out the latest (aka first) issue of my newsletter, Thinking in Public, and then...

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Video preview: My information processing pipeline in 2024

This week's video is about the process and apps that I use to consume content (books, articles, PDFs, podcasts, and videos) and take notes on them so that I remember the important bits. I also talk about a controversial newsletter issue I read from Oliver Burkeman entitled 2024-01-18 23:06:32 +0000 UTC View Post

Video preview: my video creation workflow

I first started making videos on YouTube 7 years ago, but it's only in the last two years that I feel I really hit my stride in terms of consistency. Part of that is due to taking a lot (I mean, a LOT) of courses on creating videos for YouTube specifically, and the other part is building a system...

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Goodbye OKRs, hello yearly theme

Happy 2024! I wanted the first video of the year to be about balance.

Last year, and the few years before that, I've made more and more specific objectives for the year. The OKR (Objectives and Key Results) approach is something I'm familiar with in my day job, so it felt natural to extend ...

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Patreon exclusive video: Taking literature notes (Living in Information)

Hey folks! It's been a while. Lots of personal things have come up for me in the latter half of the year that have made me particularly glad that 2023 is over. Onwards and upwards!

I'm ramping up on creating more content for you all this year, and I'm brimming with ideas.

Interviewin...

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Patreon preview: A different way to publish Obsidian notes

Obsius Publish

Hey, folks! I'm finally back after a bit of a break, and this time with a preview of a video I'm publishing next week about a community plugin called Obsius Publish. Obsius Publish is my cur...

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Toxic productivity and burnout

For this week's video, I did something different: I recorded a conversation between me and my friend Andy Polaine, a leadership coach, about what happens when productivity gets toxic and turns into burnout. Some of you may recognize him...

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Follow my learning exhaust

Here's a preview of next week's video, in which I trace the path of one book I read throughout my vault, from raw Kindle highlights to the variety of notes, videos, and presentations I made from it as a result. The whole process took five months (so far).

The book in question is 2023-05-06 07:32:21 +0000 UTC View Post

AI tagging with Napkin.one

Hey folks! This week's video is going to be about an app I've been trying and using for seven months: Napkin.one. Napkin is an entirely separate app from Obsidian that uses AI to do something I haven't traditionally been a fan...

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Patreon preview: Emergent note taking

This week's video preview is about emergent note taking, which is the idea of taking modular notes and being able to put them together in new ways-- a good idea, but hard to put into practice. In this video, I talk about how that really boils down to two things:

  • how to write notes to ...

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Obsidian v1.2 Bookmarks and Emergence

I'd already done a preview a few weeks ago of the latest v1.2 version of Obsidian just for you lovely patrons, but next week I'm releasing a longer video about it now that it's been released to Insiders. I've had some time to th...

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Organizing PDFs and talking to Sly Flourish

Surely I'm not the only one who's struggled with how to organize and make sense of thousands of PDFs? Yeah, thousands. My TTRPG hobby makes it so that I literally have thousands of PDFs that are languishing in my Dropbox folder, and I've really been trying to find a way to actually make use of th...

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Taking notes on people + behind the scenes footage

I love people, and my Obsidian vault reflects that. This video is all about why, when, and how I take notes on people in different situations. This isn't for everyone, and I totally understand if my system is a bit overkill for most situations, but I've found it useful for getting to know people ...

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Notes for work and play (research and D&D)

This week I have two livestreams for you all!

How to learn stuff and an Obsidian preview

This week's video is a peek into my learning process. I have a history of jumping into new things I know nothing about and somehow ending up on the other side, and I thought I'd share some of my experiences and principles I keep in mind whenever I learn something new. I also show some examples of...

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Obsidian Dice Roller and the future of Obsidian

This week's video is about Obsidian Dice Roller-- but it's not in the context of gaming this time. I've covered Dice Roller a few times in other videos, but always while talking about using Obsidian for TTRPGs. I love playing with the affordances of things and using them for unintended purposes, ...

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