Voice capture lets you take notes while you're walking or riding a bicycle. Works offline, and even when your phone is locked or while multitasking in other apps. Yes, it will come to Android too :)

Stone tablet of king Sejo's calligraphy "During the wars the royal collection of art and calligraphy was decimated or dispersed. King Hyeonjong (r. 1659-1675) launched a project to collect calligraphy works written by preceding kings and carve them into stone."

What can we remove? Our bias is to always add more. More rules, more procedures, more code, more features, more stuff. Interdependencies proliferate, and gradually strangle us. Systems want to grow and grow, but without pruning, they collapse. Slowly, then spectacularly. When a piece of trash drifts across the beach, it is our duty to pick it up so the next person can enjoy a pristine shoreline. When a thousand pieces litter the beach, it is too late. We can only lament the landscape. That’s just how beaches are now. A good system is designed to be periodically cleared of cruft. It has a built-in counterbalance. Without this pressure, our bias drives us to add band-aid after band-aid, until the only choice is to destroy the whole system and start from scratch. Why is it so much easier to add than to remove? Maybe because we attach our identity to what is visible. But there is a difference between the ornamentation that defines our style and the vestigial burdens we carry. Remember those who did the invisible work of removing. Their legacy was not to build a sand castle, but to care for the beautiful beach on which we play.

Pain is information As a child, you touched something hot, and it burned you. That pain gave you a piece of information: be careful touching hot things. When you sign up to run a marathon, you are signing up for pain. But whether or not you keep running is up to you. In Haruki Murakami’s words “pain is inevitable but suffering is optional”. You can choose pain without choosing suffering. Pain is information, and information is painful. Rewiring your brain is not a frictionless process. Some knowledge can only be discovered the hard way. The sooner you can convert pain into knowledge, the sooner you can experience the next useful pain. Don’t put yourself through the same pain too many times. To access new information you must experience new pains. They say “knowledge is power”. If pain is information, then pain can be converted to power. To do so, you must learn to control your suffering, accept that scars are beautiful. If you felt pain, ask what information it gave you. If that information was useful, seek the next pain. You are learning.

This is Pele, my new rendering library for diagrams and charts, compatible with the latest Mermaid syntax. - 100-500× faster than mermaid.js - 6× smaller bundle - No dependencies - Easy to theme - Responsive to device width In pursuit of making Obsidian insanely fast and cohesively designed, I always found the Mermaid library to be too big, too slow, and too hard to theme. Pele will be the new renderer in the next version of Obsidian, but you can start using it now. Pele [ˈpɛlɛ] is named after the goddess of volcanoes and fire. It's open source under the MIT license. Try the playground!

I have always loved reading annual reports like Stack Overflow, State of JS, etc, so we created our own survey and will share a public report by the end of the year. As always, Obsidian doesn't collect usage analytics or personal data, and this survey is anonymous.