A tour of my Obsidian vault

I've named it, 'the Iosphere' after my main 'sona Io. And because 'Natsphere' sucks as a title.

I won't be showing everything (personal notes & all), so I'll just show the root folder collapsed & explain what's in each of them

• Art - Art-related notes, like on software, supplies, elevator pitches, etc.

• Gaming - Gaming Notes. Useful for keeping track of progress, coordinates/in-game locations, rhythm games songs I want to target, etc.

• Japanese - Notes for learning Japanese

• Linux - Notes on Linux

• ROOTS26 - Yes I'm this brain-rotted to make it a main wing: IIDX character info & head canons for quick reference

• The Everlogs - Where I write my website's blog posts. Doesn't follow my main tagging system, formatted to be dropped right into 11ty (rip graph)

• The Library - Notes on random topics & recipies I want to reference later.

• The Rec Room - Media log, notes, and reviews

• Transit - Offline mirror of transit info for planning & quick reference on the go.

• Misc. - Stuff that don't fit elsewhere, templates, and images. Also has 'experimental wings' and depreciated notes.

  • Daily notes - Currently experimental; mini-journal & to-do lists, as well as a 'general scratchpad' (I had a file at the root for this, but it got too disorganized)

• Welcome - Homepage with links to the about pages for each wing

Daily Notes Experiment

Currently listing as an experiment since I don't know if I'll keep this up yet? I honestly just wanted to try it & see if it worked for my use cases. Right now I'm using them as a 'want to do' list, mini-journal, and general scratchpad.

I had a 'general scratchpad' at the root of my vault that I'd use for quick pasting & notes. I don't know if daily notes will be better than the general scratchpad yet. Right now, leaning towards no. So I might use it as a mini-journal instead.

Current set-up:

A mock-up entry

• I use the yyyy-mm-dd date format for organizational reasons (trust me, for computers this works far better than mm-dd-yyyy or dd-mm-yyyy)

• Links to yesterday & the next day's note. Not sure if I'll keep this, but it's useful for quick navigation

• Want to do - To-do list... sort-of. More of just things I want to do regardless if I plan on doing it that day. More forgiving. I still check off things I did though.

• On my Mind - Random things on my mind, like wikipedia rabbit holes, reminders, my mood, daily happenings, memes that live in my head rent-free, story seeds.

I mean, it's neat & I like the journal aspect but I'm not sure if this takes away from the rest of my vault? Like I'd migrate important notes here to respective larger notes, but wouldn't it just be easier to take notes on blender on the blender scratchpad?

I should note this is just my usecases. For other people's systems daily notes work pretty well. But as it stands for now, it's kinda redundant.

Dream Journal

Not part of my main PKB; I have a separate vault for personal writing projects & I use it for dream journaling as well. Daily notes are actually pretty useful for this tbh. I don't have anything in there outside of a template that puts in a date (since well, it's a dream journal). Some of my dream journal entries were undated before, so this will help keep it tidy & easier to track.

Other things

• Right now I have 2 other vaults; one for writing projects & one for an OC/OC lore archive

  • I won't be touring either here, but the writing vault is for rough drafts & personal projects, and the OC vault is an offline text-only mirror of my OC info.

• I use different color schemes across all my vaults. This is important so I know which one I'm in at a glance & don't accidentally write my PKB notes in my writing vault, or fanfiction in my PKB.

  • Right now I use the Annpucin theme with the extended color schemes snippet.

• I use Syncthing to sync my notes between devices. Everything stays locally on my network.

• I don't too pedantic over the graph - It's pretty & cool to see how your thoughts link up, but for me it's mostly cosmetic & changing how i take notes to make it look nice is not really productive.

  • The graph is a fun fidget toy though

• No AI 'assistance' - I know the PKB space unfortunately overlaps with AI-bros + I have a negative bias against AI, but for my use cases & wants it defeats the whole reason I have a PKB. A large part of my use for the iosphere is organizing my thoughts for learning and referencing later. And I feel having a bot do the work for me is defeating the purpose of that. Notes written in a way that makes sense to me based on things I read / processed myself will stick longer than regurgitated chatGPT responses.

  • + even if I theoretically trained a model based around my own needs & uses, with all the effort & resources needed to make sure it runs right and doesn't hallucinate it'd take less effort to search and take the notes w/o one. If it ain't broke, don't fix.

• Minimize app lock-in - aka. make sure I'm not too dependent on plugins. This is important in the event a plugin stops being worked on, or if I decide to move from obsidian to another app

  • The plugins I prefer are either purely cosmetic (theme settings, banner images), or don't change how the notes work themselves (templating tools are ok, but notes themselves should be plain text).

  • Moving crossed my mind before, mainly for a moblie client since I don't like how the mobile app works (performance issues, not liking the UI). But as long as core functionality doesn't break & the devs don't do anything user-hostile it's in the camp of 'if it ain't broke, don't fix'