Obsidian! 1996 called and it wants its database back.

It's been quite the month.  Jason was pulled over in the Tinny (again),  Inger had a mole taken off her foot. We skipped the mailbag in favour of a deep nerd chat about Obsidian starting at 32:51. The discussion gets waylaid part way through by a mutual existential freakout about Claude Opus. It's... a lot. Enjoy!

Things we mentioned:
Kangaroo time - Winner of the Dance Your PhD competition
Be visible or vanish - the book Inger wrote with her colleague Simon Clews
PostAc (on Inger's research page)
Quit by Annie Duke
Mac Sparky Field Guides
Building a second brain and PARA from Tiago Forte (and his post on Tags)
Markdown explainer
An article Inger wrote about Claude
One useful thing blog from Ethan Mollick
Inger's sample 'coffee Vault' (down these files from Dropbox and point Obsidian at it to open)
Marie Kondo's life changing magic of tidying up
YAML explainer
Marked2 (markdown text convertor)
Scrivener
Elicit
Connected Papers
literature review matrix explainer
Zotero

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Transcript

Here's a summary of this episode, created by Claude Opus 3 from Anthropic

In this episode of the "On The Reg" podcast, Inger Mewburn and Jason Downs discuss a variety of productivity topics, with a focus on the AI writing assistant Claude and the knowledge management tool Obsidian.

Some key points:

• Inger expresses her enthusiasm for the AI assistant Claude, describing it as intuitive, helpful and able to reason in an almost human-like way. She shares examples of using Claude to write reference letters and summarize papers.
• They discuss the potential impact of AI tools like Claude on areas like student assessment in higher education. Inger believes many don't yet grasp how profoundly these tools could disrupt practices like essay writing.
• A significant portion of the episode dives deep into the knowledge management software Obsidian. Inger explains how she uses it as a flexible tool to capture, connect and rearrange her writing and ideas. She likens it to an "artist's studio" where you can creatively assemble content.
• Inger plans to create a starter Obsidian "vault" to share with students in an upcoming workshop, to help them get started with the software. She and Jason discuss Obsidian's benefits and challenges.
• In a "Two Minute Tips" segment, Inger recommends Elicit, an AI-powered literature review tool that can automatically extract key information from papers. Jason shares a Safari browser tip about using separate profiles.
• Throughout the free-flowing conversation, Inger and Jason touch on many other topics including childhood computer experiences, the Fediverse and social media, and using tags in Obsidian.

The overall tone is two friends enthusiastically nerding out about productivity tools and writing techniques. While they go on tangents, the central themes are the creative ways Inger uses AI and Obsidian in her writing workflow, and her thoughts on teaching others to adopt these cutting-edge tools.