ads' corner

Daily Notes in Obsidian

Obsidian is a note-taking software and knowledge base software, where the notes/files are written in Markdown. For quite a while I’m using it in my daily work.

One of the cool features it has is named “Daily Notes”. As the name implies, there is a new note generated for every day. For me, this is used for writing down notes which do not deserve their own note. But also this is rather heavily used to share all kind of content from my mobile devides into the daily note in the first place. Content doesn’t have to stay there, in fact most of it is either handled one way or another, or is moved to a different place. But it is a very nice collection point in the first place.


Watch for changed files in SyncThing

For syncing files between my devices I’m using SyncThing. This tool is reliable, available on Linux, Android, Mac and iOS. And it encrypts the communication.

But sometimes I want to know when files in certain directories have changed - as example in my Obsidian vault. This allows me to post-process the files.


Connect a Mac to a SMB server - as Guest

One of the things I do in our network is public drives. Every Linux system has a public incoming which is mapped to the primary user of the device (if there is one, like for a laptop). And this incoming shared drive can be accessed without password.

This makes it really convenient to copy files around from one laptop/user to another, or from mobile devices to laptops and vice versa, or use the printer/scanner to send the scan job directly to the laptop of the user’s device. All in all, the users like this, and use it a lot. There is also minimal protection built-in, it will only work in our home network, access is blocked when the laptop is connected to a different network. But the folders are mostly empty anyway. For sharing files over the Internet we also have a Syncthing instance running, but that’s a different story, and not as easy to use.

One thing which I was annoyed about is that by default a Mac will try to connect as a registered user. There is an option Connect as Guest, but it’s not pre-selected. Therefore every time I wanted to share something between Linux and Mac, I had to start Finder, to to Go and then Connect to Server, then click on the server from the list of last entries, and then also click on Guest. The built-in help is also not useful, as it only talks about “click on Guest”.