Obsidian

A split-screen digital illustration contrasts two approaches to creativity. On the left, a cluttered wooden desk is covered in crumpled papers, scattered sticky notes, a messy notepad, and a wall of scribbled index cards—symbolizing Stephen King's chaotic, spontaneous idea capture. On the right, a sleek laptop displays a network of interconnected notes on its screen, set against a dark blue background with faint lines and nodes—representing the structured Zettelkasten method. Bold white text across the middle reads: The King-Kasten Method: Merging Creative Chaos with Digital Order.

The King-Kasten Method: Merging Creative Chaos with Digital Order

When the Master Meets the Method Imagine capturing a brilliant story idea while walking in the park, connecting it to a character sketch from last month, and discovering a theme that ties them together—all within minutes. This is the promise of what I call the “King-Kasten Method.” Stephen King collects ideas like finding shells on a beach. Niklas Luhmann built an academic empire with index cards. What happens when we merge these approaches in the digital age? ...

decoupling Obsidian from Hugo

This is the last blog coming out of my Obsidian vault for awhile. I don’t like the way the export works. I’m going to focus for awhile on getting Obsidian flowing like I want, and then worry about how to export appropriate excerpts to a public site.

Magnus having a pint of bitters in a London pub

Colophon

Essential tools: Hugo PaperMod theme Visual Studio Code Obsidian DigitalOcean App Platform AI is used as an assistant. I’m doing the writing, but with help (usually in the form of proof reading or helping with structure). I bounce around between a variety of tools. Claude - Often integrated with other tools like vscode, Obsidian, AnythingLLM. AnythingLLM Ollama Open WebUI ChatGPT - Largely Claude is replacing this. But I still use it some.

migrating Obsidian from iCloud to native Sync

Context Now that I’m getting into the swing of using Obsidian, and realizing how powerful the tool can be for organizing my busy meetings at work, I wanted to start using Obsidian in my work day. But without allowing my employer-issued MacBook to have full access to my iCloud drive. I’d originally set up my vault to sync to iCloud to make it easy (and free) to sync to my mobile devices, which are also all Apple devices. ...

obsidian notes linkup

This site is going to start showing more small “notes” that will usually be without a cover image or heavy composition. I’m working on a workflow for keeping notes in Obsidian while easily exporting my notes in one direction from Obsidian to Hugo. As I work through the book Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential by Tiago Forte, these pages will show referential links back and forth to one another. ...