Obsidian “properties” to help sort your stuff

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I’ve talked about Obsidian (the note-taking app) a few times on here, such as when I moved my notes into it last summer, and when I made the choice to stick with it earlier this year.

Many of my reasons for going with Obsidian were features that they had, but part of my reasoning was the hope for features in the future. Their enhanced properties were one thing I was waiting for, and the new feature that supports them is excellent.

Properties?

In Obsidian, properties are sort of a way to tag your notes but with more power than just “tags”. They’ve supported this feature for a few years, but it was using something called “YAML front matter”, which is essentially a small mess of code you needed to write. With “properties”, it’s much easier to understand and implement.

It’s still technically YAML behind the scenes, so it’s easy to export your notes to another tool in the future if you want, but the smooth overlay of “properties” makes them much easier to use.

Here is a video that shows a bit more about how they work:

Why use properties?

There are a lot of reasons you might want to use properties to help sort your notes, and here are a few ways I use them.

People

When I add a person to Obsidian, whether it’s someone I know personally, someone famous, or even someone from history, they all get the same set of properties added to them:

  • Tagged as “person”, so I can pull up all people on a page.
  • A “known” dropdown, to record how I know them (from business, they’re an author, they play golf, etc)
  • A “reachout” date to remind me to check in with them, as I explained here.
  • Their email and phone number, though I may not keep that around.

Books

I have a ton of books in Obsidian; some I’ve read, some I want to read, and some that are just listed for reference. For any book, I have properties like:

  • Tagged as “book”
  • Status, like “toread” or “currentlyreading”
  • The length of the Audible version of the book, to give me an idea of how long it is.
  • Author
  • Date finished
  • “Why”, so I can remember why that book is listed at all. Tracking this for books has been amazingly helpful, because it can sometimes take me a year or two to get to a book that I want to read, and remembering why it was on the list at all (“Suggested by Justin”) is excellent.

Yes, it takes work

Ultimately, this still doesn’t mean that everyone should use Obsidian. It’s a fantastic tool, but it requires a good bit of care and feeding, and simpler tools like Evernote or Apple Notes are a better fit for a lot of people. I mentioned my philosophy of “visiting my notes more often” and this plays into that. It adds a bit more work to keep notes accurate, but allows me to spend more time in them and also allows me to do some helpful lookups and sorting when needed.

If you use Obsidian, I think you’re going to love how they’ve added this new feature.

Too much feedback is a problem

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I talk a lot about giving feedback on here, both in terms of how to give good feedback to others, and how to appreciate feedback as a gift when it’s given to you. In both cases, though, too much feedback can be problematic.

Too much feedback could mean that your work is simply not good at all and requires being completely redone, but too much feedback could also just be getting too nitpicky and risks burying the helpful feedback among the cruft.

Excessive feedback can also be problematic when designing tools and devices. We’ve all had tools that beep and buzz and are constantly giving “feedback” to the point that you just tune them out. In his book “The Design of Everyday Things“, author Don Norman shares this insight:

Machines that give too much feedback are like backseat drivers. Not only is it distracting to be subjected to continual flashing lights, text announcements, spoken voices, or beeps and boops, but it can be dangerous. Too many announcements cause people to ignore all of them, or wherever possible, disable all of them, which means that critical and important ones are apt to be missed. Feedback is essential, but not when it gets in the way of other things, including a calm and relaxing environment.

Is the website down or not?

Excess feedback is something we’ve had to fight with at GreenMellen, but not (often) from our clients.

Among other services, we help manage a few hundred websites for our clients, and one thing we do is monitor them to make sure they don’t go down. Most of these sites are on a variety of inexpensive website hosting companies, and some of them tend to go down very briefly every few days. Well, “once every few days” times a few hundred sites can lead to a lot of “website is down!” messages from our monitoring tools.

In most cases, by the time we get the message and check out the site it’s already back up and running — it was just a little blip for a few seconds. Once you get those kinds of results dozens of times in a row with essentially meaningless alerts, you begin to tune out the uptime messages and you’re more prone to miss the real outages. Too much feedback was a big problem.

In our case, we simply refined the system to check twice. If a site is reported as down, our system would keep it to itself and then check again in a few minutes. In most cases, the site was back up by then and we wouldn’t be alerted at all. However, if they site was still down a few minutes later, this was likely a situation that required our attention and we’d jump right to it.

Work to reduce feedback where you can

On either side of the table, working to reduce feedback to an appropriate level of need is helpful. If you’re giving feedback, try to stick to items that will really make a difference. If you’re receiving feedback, particularly from inanimate systems, reducing the frequency of the feedback can greatly increase the value of it.

You never have all of the facts

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People work hard to try to have “all of the facts” when making a decision, which is a wise thing to do. At some point, though, you need to realize that you can’t literally have all of the facts and you just need to make the best decision that you can.

I love this quote from Litton Industries founder Tex Thornton, from the book “Becoming Trader Joe“:

If all the facts could be known, idiots could make the decisions.

If you could have absolutely every fact in your hand, decisions would be easy. The opposite is what makes truly great leaders — being able to predict the future where facts simply can’t exist to support their view.

Steve Jobs was a master at this. When he released the iMac in 1998, he chose not to include a floppy disk drive in it. We can see now that it was a good decision, but people at the time weren’t so sure.

  • “That one glaring design mistake in the iMac is that Apple decided to build it without a floppy-disk drive” – Walt Mossberg in the Wall Street Journal
  • “My guess is that Apple is wrong about home users–most will still want a floppy (or zip drive) and will have to buy an add-on.” – Charles Piller from the Los Angeles Times
  • “If Steve Jobs is so damn smart, why did he approve the next great Apple disaster, the iMac? I can’t believe that Apple would return to the consumer market by offering a Mac that is completely incompatible with the current installed base of Macs and software. No floppy drive?” – Eric Wenocur (and others) in Macworld magazine

Jobs did it other times as well, being among the first to remove the CD-ROM drive from laptops, Flash from our browsers, and the headphone jack from our phones.

Those decisions all seem rather wise from our viewpoint, but they were bold moves at the time, largely because there weren’t facts to acquire to help make the decision. He could see trends moving, but those weren’t obvious decisions to most of us.

Add in the idea that good decisions can sometimes lead to bad outcomes, but they were still good decisions. That’s a concept that I struggle to see in some situations, but great decisions and great outcomes don’t always go hand-in-hand, and a lack of available facts is often a major contributor.

I’ll still work to gather as many facts as I can when making a decision, but I’ll also try to be bold enough to make decisions even when I can’t find enough facts to make it an easy call.

The magic is in the mundane

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Apple tends to do something very special with their products that other companies miss — they get the tiny details perfect. I disagree with some of their larger features and goals, but when they do something, they do it right.

Going all the way back to the Apple II, Steve Jobs insisted that the chips on the motherboard be lined up perfectly, even though they weren’t going to be seen by anyone. For things that would be seen, Jobs was even more precise.

In the book “Inside Steve’s Brain“, a few more anecdotes from Jobs were shared. First was how closely he looked at prototype details:

When they showed the working code to Jobs, he’d lean forward, his nose to the screen, and examine them closely, moving from the demo to the prototype and back again. “He would compare them pixel by pixel to see if they matched,” Ratzlaff said. “He was way down into the details. He would scrutinize everything, down to the pixel level.” If they didn’t match, Ratzlaff said, “some engineer would get yelled at.”

Jobs wanted absolute perfection, which made him a tough guy to work for, but produced amazing products. If you’ve studied Jobs much, though, the paragraph above wasn’t too surprising.

What was surprising was what followed. Most computers and phones have scrollbars on them for when there is additional content that doesn’t fit on the screen, and you likely have a scrollbar wrapping around this content right now. Most scrollbars seem pretty simple, but it took Apple six months to get the scrollbars just right for Steve. Again from the book:

Incredibly, Ratzlaff’s team spent six months refining the scrollbars to Jobs’s satisfaction. Scrollbars are an important part of any computer operating system but are hardly the most visible element of the user interface. Nonetheless, Jobs insisted the scrollbars look just so, and Ratzlaff’s team had to design version after version. “It had to be done right,” said Ratzlaff, laughing at the effort that went into such a seemingly minor detail.

Big ideas can be amazing, but the magic is in the details. Working that hard on things like scrollbars seems crazy, and perhaps it was, but that attention to detail in every area is what makes Apple so well-loved.

A good mental model of the internet is essential

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I’ve talked a lot about mental models on here over the years, and even did a series of them a while back (found here). Charlie Munger is a huge proponent of them, and I found my time digging through them to be very worthwhile.

However, there are models that can be more specific than the generic mental models I listed before. For example, if you are a golf coach, then you likely have a handful of solid models of how a swing should look and can assess and critique based on that.

I see the same with the internet. Generally speaking, people have a good idea of how things work; you need a browser to visit websites, password resets will go to your email, things like that. When you’re lacking that basic model, though, things fall apart very quickly. Kyle Caldwell shares that in this amazing TikTok video:

@kylecaldwell2 #stitch with @JD Roninstone I’d be shocked to find out her target audience could see this video #boomer #millennial #genz #storytime ♬ original sound – Kyle Caldwell

I kind of feel bad for both of them in this example, but the man didn’t have even a basic clue about how the internet worked, and he seemed disinterested in learning. That may be the bigger issue, because this kind of problem is likely to happen to him quite often until he’s willing to understand the overall model of how things work online.

I try to be aware of other models as I go through life and learn them when necessary, kind of like I shared a few years ago when I dug into areas where I’m ignorant. Some places I think it’s ok to remain ignorant, and others I feel the need to fix. Knowing the difference, and being willing to do something about it, is key.

Tax the things you want to see less of

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Taxes can serve a few purposes — they can help bring in more money to the government, and they can encourage people to do less of a particular behavior (and often they do both).

Toll lanes bring in revenue but also limit who is on them so that they’re a faster way to go. If you want fewer people to use a particular lane on the highway, tax it.

Taxes on cigarettes lower usage, with a 10% increase in cost reducing usage by 4-7%. If you want fewer people to smoke, increase taxes on cigarettes.

This concept also applies in situations where it’s an unfortunate (but easily predictable) outcome. Last month, Canada passed a law on website links. Yes, Google and Meta/Facebook now need to pay in order to link to news sites in Canada. And yes, it’s as dumb as it sounds.

Ok, no links allowed

Meta and Google made very predicable moves after this happened, and they blocked links to those news sites on their platforms. If the government want to charge for them, they’ll will save the money and just not allow users to link to them.

This is the same thing that happened in Europe over the past few years, so I have no idea why Canada decided to follow suit, because we all knew what would happen. Not only do the sites fail to gain this new revenue, they also lose a bunch of traffic that Meta and Google used to send them. It was a lose/lose situation from the moment it was suggested.

Oh, those wildfires?

The timing is particularly bad for Canada, as shared by users:

Like many in Canada’s Northwest Territories, Poul Osted has been relying on social media to keep in touch with loved ones as they scramble to evacuate from nearby wildfires.

But Mr. Osted said he has been left frustrated by his inability to share news articles on Facebook during the active emergency situation, due to Meta’s ban on news content for Canadian users.

Not only is this bad for users like Mr. Osted, but it’s bad for the publishers that it was meant to protect. Instead of getting them extra money, they instead just get less traffic and therefore less revenue, and people can’t share links that are important. The tax did what taxes always do, even if that’s not what the folks in Canada really wanted.

Check out more in the full story on Techdirt.

Unfold It

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I haven’t talked much about my tech on here lately, because most of it has been fairly unremarkable — I love the tools that I have, but not much has been all that much different from past tools. For example, I purchased a new laptop recently (an ASUS Zenbook 14), and it’s an excellent laptop but it’s essentially just a newer version of what all of us already use

However, I recently picked up the new Google Pixel Fold and it’s worth digging into a bit.

Love it or hate it, is something very different from any phone that I’ve used before and it’s been fun to play with. Samsung has been building folding phones like this for a few years, and now it’s Google’s turn. It seems likely that Apple will reveal one in the coming years as well, but we’ll see.

If you’re not familiar with the Pixel Fold, this quick review from Marques Brownlee gives a great overview:

His take lines up well with what I’m experiencing, and I agree that the quality of the cover screen matters a lot. While I’m opening it up quite a lot right now to play with the large internal screen, I’m still probably 80% on the outside screen to quickly check text messages, emails, etc, throughout the day. If the outside is too much of a pain to use, that kills the entire experience. Fortunately, the cover screen on the Pixel Fold is quite solid.

The Apps

Because the inside of the phone is a weird aspect ratio, some apps work better than others. The native Google apps (Gmail, Messages, Maps, etc) are fantastic and make great use of the screen. Others, like Facebook and Twitter, don’t fill the space very well. They work fine, but it’s kind of ugly.

Obsidian

One app that really made me want to get this phone was Obsidian (my note-taking app of choice). While their normal mobile app is perfectly fine, they pack a lot in there and it was cumbersome to use. On the Fold, I’m able to see the sidebar while I’m working, which helps quite a lot. It’s still not nearly as useful as the full desktop app, but it’s far better.

Email is amazing

I spent much of yesterday with the family at the Georgia Aquarium and we had a great time. At one point, though, we were sitting in an auditorium for about 30 minutes waiting for the dolphin show to start, so I caught up on some emails. The Fold made that great!

As with Obsidian, it’s certainly no where near as useful as on a desktop, but having the split view made it much easier. Here’s an example of how Gmail looks on the bigger screen:

At the end of the day, this is the first foldable from Google and it’s far from perfect but it’s a fantastic phone. Given the fast processor, tons of memory, and awesome screens, it’s a great start. I expect far better foldables to come along in future years from Google, and hopefully with a push from Apple as well.

Have any of you used a foldable, whether this or Samsung or any others? I’m curious to hear your thoughts on them.

Headphones for every device

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While Apple (and to a lesser degree, Google) have made huge strides over the last few years in helping you move your headphones from one device to another throughout the day, it’s still often a little wonky. It can work well, but some days are better than others. I’m finding it much easier to just have a set of headphones dedicated to each device so that they always just work.

This started years with my desktop computers (one at home, one at the office), that each have a pair of cheap wired headphones always plugged in. If I need to hop on a call on those computers, or watch a video, or anything else that requires sound, I just pick those up and they work immediately 100% of the time. I played with the bluetooth settings on both computers to use my main earbuds for everything, but it was wildly inconsistent so I just stuck with the wired buds.

Mobile

I’ve been doing that on my desktop computers for years, but something I did recently on mobile expanded on this concept a bit. While I have a pair of wireless buds always connected to my phone (the Google Pixel Buds Pro), I had a different situation come up last week. I wanted to go for a run, which I often do without music, but I wanted some tunes with me. I didn’t want to carry my phone, so my watch was going to do the work.

Setting up the watch with offline music was easy enough, but I then had to pair some earbuds to it. Rather than using the same pair as my phone, I dug out an older pair of wireless buds instead and paired them with the watch.

It was perfect.

I generally keep the newer buds in my pocket so I have quick access to them for my phone. For running, though, I always grab the older ones because they only talk to my watch. Every device I use has a dedicated set of headphones, so there’s never a need to convince some bluetooth buds to switch with me to another device. They all simply work on their own dedicated device.

It’s a small thing, for sure, but in the hectic part of the day it’s nice to have one less potential issue to worry about.

We all have the same tools

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For hundreds of years, your ability to create was dictated by the tools that you had access to. If you couldn’t afford the right tool, some types of creation were just out of your reach.

Thankfully, that’s not true any more. Certainly you need to spend a bit of money to get some core tools, but most of us already have them. Even then, while a $2500 Macbook might be a fantastic machine, a $300 Chromebook will still be able to do pretty much everything you need.

The rich have no advantage

Where it gets more interesting is to think about the tools that wealthy people possess — they’re pretty much the same as yours! If you have the latest iPhone or Pixel, literally all the money in the world can’t buy a better phone.

I’m sure you can come up with some examples of where more money would get you better tools (for example, video editing on a high-end machine), and I don’t disagree, but for most things digital you’ve got all you need.

If you want to put out amazing social media content, produce more blogs, or make great videos for YouTube, now’s the time. You’ve never been on a more level playing field with everyone else, so take advantage of it and go make some great stuff!

Yes, it’s a scam

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It’s getting harder and harder to determine if something is a scam, particularly on the internet or over the phone, and your best bet is to just assume it is.

In his book “Excellent Advice for Living“, author Kevin Kelly puts it this way:

Assume anyone asking for your account information for any reason is guilty of scamming you unless proven innocent. The way to prove innocence is to call them back, or log in to your account using numbers or a website that you provide not them. Don’t release any identifying information while they are contacting you via phone, message, or email. You must control the channel.

I had this recently when my bank called to have me verify some information on my account. I’m pretty sure it was really them, but I had no way to know for sure. They were asking me to prove who I was, while I was asking them to prove who they were. It was almost humorous, but they couldn’t convince me that they were really my bank so I hung up. I later called the bank directly and it turns out it really was them, but it very easily could have been a scam.

With technology today you can’t trust:

  • The number that someone is calling from.
  • The voice on the other end (thanks to AI simulated voices).
  • The email address that an email appears to come from.
  • Even some personal information that helps “prove” that they’re legit, as much of that is leaked around the web.

For example, a common email scam the past few years is when a scammer reaches out to say they recorded you watching pornography through your web cam, and they provide you with a real password of yours as means of proof. Forbes details this scam quite well, but in this case they simply took a pile of leaked passwords and emailed everyone and showed them the leaked passwords. Most likely never watched pornography anyhow and trashed the email, but those that had viewed that kind of material had an email that looked awfully convincing and many paid out to “protect” themselves.

How to stay safe

As Kevin says in the quote above, the way to stay safe is to control the channel. If “your bank” calls, hang up and call them yourself. If you get an email about needing to update your password on a particular site, trash the email and go manually type in the website yourself. If you control how you’re accessing these companies (versus responding when “they” reach out to you), you’ll eliminate the vast majority of scam attempts.