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kepano
@stephango.com
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making @obsidian.md
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kepano @stephango.com · Nov 26
File over app · 2023
stephango.com/file-over-app
File over app is a philosophy: if you want to create digital artifacts that last, they must be files you can control, in formats that are easy to retrieve and read. Use tools that give you this freedom. File over app is an appeal to tool makers: accept that all software is ephemeral, and give people ownership over their data. In the fullness of time, the files you create are more important than the tools you use to create them. Apps are ephemeral, but your files have a chance to last. The ancient temples of Egypt contain hieroglyphs that were chiseled in stone thousands of years ago. The ideas hieroglyphs convey are more important than the type of chisel that was used to carve them. The world is filled with ideas from generations past, transmitted through many mediums, from clay tablets to manuscripts, paintings, sculptures, and tapestries. These artifacts are objects that you can touch, hold, own, store, preserve, and look at. To read something written on paper all you need is eyeballs. Today, we are creating innumerable digital artifacts, but most of these artifacts are out of our control. They are stored on servers, in databases, gated behind an internet connection, and login to a cloud service. Even the files on your hard drive use proprietary formats that make them incompatible with older systems and other tools. Paraphrasing something I wrote recently: "If you want your writing to still be readable on a computer from the 2060s or 2160s, it’s important that your notes can be read on a computer from the 1960s." You should want the files you create to be durable, not only for posterity, but also for your future self. You never know when you might want to go back to something you created years or decades ago. Don’t lock your data into a format you can’t retrieve. These days I write using an app I help make called Obsidian, but it’s a delusion to think it will last forever. The app will eventually become obsolete. It’s the plain text files I create that are designed to last. Who knows if anyone will want to read them besides me, but future me is enough of an audience to make it worthwhile.
stephango.com
As hyped as Claude Code + Obsidian is, I have no desire to upload my personal unencrypted vault data to Anthropic or anyone else.

I hope that the ideas of private inference and confidential computing that Moxie described take off. It's how all LLMs should work.
Confidential computing This is the domain of confidential computing. Confidential computing uses hardware-enforced isolation to run code in a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE). The host machine provides CPU, memory, and power, but cannot access the TEE’s memory or execution state. LLMs are fundamentally stateless—input in, output out—which makes them ideal for this environment. For Confer, we run inference inside a confidential VM. Your prompts are encrypted from your device directly into the TEE using Noise Pipes, processed there, and responses are encrypted back. The host never sees plaintext. But this raises an obvious concern: even if we have encrypted pipes in and out of an encrypted environment, it really matters what is running inside that environment. The client needs assurance that the code running is actually doing what it claims.
January 13, 2026 at 5:24 PM
stephango.com
give me one TINY thing you want fixed or improved in @obsidian.md — the smaller the better, I'm going on a paper cuts rampage
January 12, 2026 at 9:12 PM
stephango.com
In Obsidian 1.11 you can switch sidebar views in one gesture if you continue to hold down, then let go on the view you want to switch to.
January 12, 2026 at 5:52 PM
stephango.com
I used Obsidian 1.11 exclusively on mobile for three weeks while traveling all across China during the winter break.

We made this version of Obsidian so much faster, smoother, and more ergonomic. And there's lots more coming in 1.12.
obsidian.md Obsidian @obsidian.md · 2d
Obsidian 1.11 is now available for desktop and mobile!

The new mobile design gives more space to your notes, and helps you quickly navigate your vault.

You can now instantly access Obsidian from your lock screen, home screen, control center, Shortcuts, and Siri.
January 12, 2026 at 5:00 PM
stephango.com
early morning light and some new pocket doors, white oak
January 11, 2026 at 8:06 PM
stephango.com
I will reveal myself gradually you won't see me all at once your curiosity will be rewarded patience is required I will open doors doors you don't know about secrets dreams at my own pace you will never completely understand me I am always changing sometimes I will go away I am exploring myself there's a vast universe inside me you will not get bored sometimes I leave a door open for you to find you have to look for it
January 10, 2026 at 6:58 PM
stephango.com
be kikkoman
start a soy sauce company in the year 1600
make soy sauce for 420 years
keep making soy sauce for another 420 years
in outer space people still want soy sauce
a bottle of kikkoman soy sauce
January 7, 2026 at 2:27 PM
stephango.com
The future is plain text files — it's just not evenly distributed
January 3, 2026 at 2:46 PM
stephango.com
this harmonica band at the Hong Kong airport had no reason to go so hard at 8am on New Year's Day but I loved it
January 2, 2026 at 10:47 PM
stephango.com
Obsidian plugins reached 100 million total downloads!

2026 will be a big year for Obsidian plugins. The plan is to make plugins easier to discover, safer to use, simpler to build, and faster to approve.
December 30, 2025 at 2:49 AM
stephango.com
What do I mean when I say everything in Obsidian should feel instantaneous?

No more than 0.1 seconds.

The target was established in 1968 by Robert Miller and well described in 1993 by Jakob Nielsen here:
0.1 second is about the limit for having the user feel that the system is reacting instantaneously, meaning that no special feedback is necessary except to display the result. 1.0 second is about the limit for the user's flow of thought to stay uninterrupted, even though the user will notice the delay. Normally, no special feedback is necessary during delays of more than 0.1 but less than 1.0 second, but the user does lose the feeling of operating directly on the data. 10 seconds is about the limit for keeping the user's attention focused on the dialogue. For longer delays, users will want to perform other tasks while waiting for the computer to finish, so they should be given feedback indicating when the computer expects to be done. Feedback during the delay is especially important if the response time is likely to be highly variable, since users will then not know what to expect.
December 26, 2025 at 1:29 PM
stephango.com
Performance is design, and every millisecond counts.

Every update in 2025 trimmed Obsidian's load speed. This is quite complex given the number of different configurations and operating systems Obsidian supports.
December 25, 2025 at 2:46 AM
stephango.com
40
December 19, 2025 at 10:45 AM
stephango.com
what's one improvement you'd like to see in @obsidian.md in 2026?
December 16, 2025 at 9:48 PM
stephango.com
Obsidian on mobile is getting so fast and smooth.
obsidian.md Obsidian @obsidian.md · Dec 10
Obsidian 1.11.0 (early access) introduces widgets and a new mobile design.

You can now instantly access Obsidian from your lock screen, home screen, control center, Shortcuts, and Siri.

The new design gives more space to your notes, and helps you quickly navigate your vault.
December 10, 2025 at 9:09 PM
stephango.com
if you want to watch me ramble for three hours about furniture design, Winamp skins, chocolate chip cookies, and other things:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8ve...
The Other Stuff #28 — Kepano: The Interconnectedness of Everything
YouTube video by The Other Stuff Podcast
www.youtube.com
December 10, 2025 at 5:10 PM
stephango.com
Thank you Paul Wieland for making ratgdo... I can actually open my garage door without having it connect to the internet thanks to this gizmo

it's seems rather dorky for a New York Times front page article, but hopefully it speaks to growing awareness for local-first software
A few years ago, Paul Wieland, a 44-year-old information technology professional living in New York’s Adirondack Mountains, was wrapping up a home renovation when he ran into a hiccup. He wanted to be able to control his new garage door with his smartphone. But the options available, including a product called MyQ, required connecting to a company’s internet servers. He believed a “smart” garage door should operate only over a local Wi-Fi network to protect a home’s privacy, so he started building his own system to plug into his garage door. By 2022, he had developed a prototype, which he named RATGDO, for Rage Against the Garage Door Opener. He had hoped to sell 100 of his new gadgets just to recoup expenses, but he ended up selling tens of thousands. That’s because MyQ’s maker did what a number of other consumer device manufacturers have done over the last few years, much to the frustration of their customers: It changed the device, making it both less useful and more expensive to operate.
December 5, 2025 at 10:44 PM
stephango.com
it's that time of year again
stephango.com kepano @stephango.com · Dec 4
Each year I ask myself these 40 questions.

This will be my eleventh year. It's still one of my favorite rituals. It helps me see how phases of my life wax and wane.

Each year new translations come in. We're up to 30 languages! Thank you to all the contributors 🥰

stephango.com/40-questions
1. What did you do this year that you’d never done before? 2. Did you keep your new year’s resolutions? 3. Did anyone close to you give birth? 4. Did anyone close to you die? 5. What cities/states/countries did you visit? 6. What would you like to have next year that you lacked this year? 7. What date(s) from this year will remain etched upon your memory, and why? 8. What was your biggest achievement of the year? 9. What was your biggest failure? 10. What other hardships did you face? 11. Did you suffer illness or injury? 12. What was the best thing you bought? 13. Whose behavior merited celebration? 14. Whose behavior made you appalled? 15. Where did most of your money go? 16. What did you get really, really, really excited about? 17. What song will always remind you of this year? 18. Compared to this time last year, are you: happier or sadder? Thinner or fatter? Richer or poorer? 19. What do you wish you’d done more of? 20. What do you wish you’d done less of? 21. How are you spending the holidays? 22. Did you fall in love this year? 23. Do you hate anyone now that you didn’t hate this time last year? 24. What was your favorite show? 25. What was the best book you read? 26. What was your greatest musical discovery of the year? 27. What was your favorite film? 28. What was your favorite meal? 29. What did you want and get? 30. What did you want and not get? 31. What did you do on your birthday? 32. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying? 33. How would you describe your personal fashion this year? 34. What kept you sane? 35. Which celebrity/public figure did you admire the most? 36. What political issue stirred you the most? 37. Who did you miss? 38. Who was the best new person you met? 39. What valuable life lesson did you learn this year? 40. What is a quote that sums up your year?
November 30, 2025 at 5:47 PM
stephango.com
making local files easy to adopt is filled with agony, luckily I like pain
obsidian.md Obsidian @obsidian.md · Nov 22
You can now convert your Notion pages and databases to durable, private, local files.

Your data, offline, forever, for free.
November 22, 2025 at 9:33 PM
stephango.com
one strategy is to keep doing your thing much longer than anyone thought you would
November 19, 2025 at 2:31 PM
stephango.com
oops I missed the outage, I was too busy writing in Obsidian
November 18, 2025 at 4:23 PM
Reposted by kepano
stephango.com
computers started local-first and will go back to local-first
January 22, 2025 at 7:32 PM
stephango.com
This is really nifty if you have a bunch of data in Google Sheets or Airtable that you want to bring into Obsidian
obsidian.md Obsidian @obsidian.md · Nov 12
Obsidian Importer now lets you generate Markdown files from a CSV.

It converts thousands records in seconds and automatically generates a Base that you can use to explore and edit the data.
November 12, 2025 at 8:27 PM
Reposted by kepano
obsidian.md
Obsidian 1.10 is now available! The mobile app now launches A LOT faster.

We've also made many improvements to Bases with new list views, map views, groups, summaries, and APIs to create your own views.
November 11, 2025 at 6:29 PM
stephango.com
we used offcuts of wood from the kitchen project to make these napkin rings for our wedding guests
November 9, 2025 at 5:21 PM