Linking Supernote and Obsidian https://medium.com/p/a7d635f468ab?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=fedica-Default-NonImage
What if your thoughts could be unified?
[#]Tech #Technology #Computers #Ideas #New #Cool #Futurism #PKM #PersonalKnowledgeManagement #LifeHacks #Advice #Organization #eInk #ePaper #ElectronicInk #Kindle #Supernote #ReMarkable
1/22
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What if you could carry with you all the knowledge of a second brain, filled with the tactile creativity of words formed by the nib of a pen?
💡Want to get straight to putting Obsidian on your Supernote? Click the link at the bottom of this article to read my guide!
2/22
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Discovering PKM
I learned about Obsidian from my writing mentor, Tobias Buckell, during a lecture at the Stonecoast MFA program back in 2019. He showed us a new application where you could take all the atomic pieces of your knowledge and link them in a vast web.
3/22
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And then I saw this web on the screen: Obsidian’s incredible graph view. I was hooked. As someone who has always struggled to find confidence in the knowledge he possesses, this idea of a tool that could help me make sense of my life seemed almost mystical. But there were still gaps in my flow.
4/22
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For one thing: I love writing by hand, and I wanted a device that could be the best of all worlds: long battery life, readable in the sunlight, and yet capable of connecting all my knowledge under a single umbrella. Cut to a year later, when the Supernote entered my life.
5/22
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While working for a tech news company, I formed a passion for electronic-ink (e-ink) devices. I purchased the Supernote A6X, a tablet with weeks of battery life and a sexy metallic pen, and fell in love.
6/22
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Ratta, the company that makes the Supernote, eventually sent me the larger A5X for free, and I still use that to this day. But a problem emerged. The more I used Obsidian to house my personal knowledge, the less I used my Supernote.
7/22
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Human beings are driven toward the easiest options and, when you are as busy as me, even a little bit of friction can break a habit. For years, the fixes available for running Obsidian on the Supernote were clunky and difficult to implement.
8/22
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Then Brandon Philips developed the Unofficial Supernote Plugin for Obsidian, and things got brighter. You could transfer files from the Supernote using either a cloud drive, or a physical connection, and they would actually show up within your Obsidian vault — readable! Still, I wanted more.
9/22
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I needed Obsidian itself to be visible on my Supernote, and I needed there to be zero friction getting my Supernote files into Obsidian.
10/22
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After building my own PC, installing CalyxOS on my Android phone, and diving into the world of Linux, the thought of side-loading an app on the Supernote didn’t seem so crazy.
11/22
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With an active community, the instructions were right there, I just had to act.
“Side-loading” is a term for unofficially adding an application to a device that wasn’t designed to run it.
12/22
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The Supernote runs on an older version of the Android operating system that is customized for the e-ink experience. But Ratta has allowed side-loading openly from the start, making it easy to experiment. And, lo and behold, it’s possible to side-load Obsidian.
13/22
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With a few tweaks, I had the app running. I even had Obsidian Sync on in the background, transferring over my files! But a huge problem remained. A problem that, as far as I could tell after watching dozens of videos and reading hundreds of posts, nobody else had solved.
14/22
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Because of how side-loading on the Supernote works, the files in my Obsidian vault would forever be kept separate from the handwriting files. Like a brain with its hemispheres severed, the different parts of the Supernote’s hard drive could not speak to one another.
15/22
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As I lay down to sleep on this problem, the solution struck like a thunderbolt. Surely, there must be an Android app capable of file syncing locally? Not to a cloud service or another device, but to a different folder on the same hard drive. I was right.
16/22
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I side loaded a new application that did just that: I could mirror the whole Notes folder on my Supernote to a location within my Obsidian folder (which I aptly named “Supernotes”). And magic happened.
17/22
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With the Unofficial Supernote Plugin installed, I could see my handwritten notes, alongside their extracted OCRed text (Supernote has fantastic handwriting recognition), right inside the Obsidian app! And it synced across all my devices like a smooth dream.
18/22
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Suddenly, the world of e-ink exploded, offering the opportunity to explore a whole new ideal way of interacting with the content of my mind.
19/22
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I’m looking forward to the opportunity to try the new Supernote A5X2 with this same set-up one of these days (I wouldn’t say no to another product review copy).
20/22
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The Supernote is by far my preferred device from all the e-ink offerings out there, largely due to the incredibly responsive team at Ratta. Obsidian is, likewise, my favorite personal knowledge management software. Paired? It’s like a futuristic fairytale.
21/22
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Want to follow in my footsteps and install Obsidian on your Supernote? Read all about the process, here: https://medium.com/@indubitablyodin/how-to-install-obsidian-on-the-supernote-0ec83d7dc56f?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=fedica-Default-NonImage
22/22
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