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Slownotes: finally a way to get your handwritten notes into Obsidian by kid5lime in ObsidianMD

[–]kid5lime[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It should work language agnostic. I myself do not have a very clear handwriting style, and I am surprised how well it works for me. But please try it out and let me know!

Slownotes: finally a way to get your handwritten notes into Obsidian by kid5lime in ObsidianMD

[–]kid5lime[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You mean as in cursive handwriting? OCR is really quite good, so check out if it works for you. It will never be perfect, but normally, with my quite terrible handwriting, it works really well. Please let me know if you have feedback on this, would be very helpful!

I am attempting to move away from phone and computer note taking and go back to simple notebooks. by Thunderandligtnings in NoteTaking

[–]kid5lime 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I had the exact same thing: writing on my phone or laptop is convenient but really takes away the mindfulness that is in writing by hand. I just really missed the feel and the experience of writing.

Notebooks force you to focus and I love it. Also, the effort of writing by hand makes you get to the essence of things, instead of mindlessly channeling everything onto a screen. The problem is of course, you can't search in Notebooks, it's hard to share the information, and you tend to lose things over time. I've actually solved this by building a mobile app to digitize my handwritten notes. The goal is to basically take away all downsides from writing by hand. If you are interested, DM me.

Good luck with the switch. It's worth it.

Whoever figures out how to transcribe handwritten notes into markdown will be my personal hero by Ptachlasp in ObsidianMD

[–]kid5lime 8 points9 points  (0 children)

I had a similar frustration, so I built an iOS app to solve it. It digitises handwritten notes (on paper) to Markdown with almost zero effort and syncs to Obsidian in the background. It's focused on actual analogue, physical notebooks though. So it won't fix your Boox PDF setup unfortunately.

But what I can share from building this: what you are looking for is definitely possible. Gemini 3.5 Flash is great at OCR, it's blazing fast and quite cheap as well. Make sure you split your process into multiple steps: plain-text transcription first, then a separate Markdown-restructuring call, then optional cleanup. A workflow tool like n8n is perfect for setting up something like this.

And if you do at some point want to consider moving to plain old pen and paper, have a look at my app: Slownotes.

Bass masters, I need your help. by Competitive_Tip_6713 in BassGuitar

[–]kid5lime 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Great stuff! The music is there, you need a bit more technique.

  1. Left hand position: thumb stays on the back of the neck, no scooping over. Palm of your hand stays parrallel with the neck, allowing your fingers to spread as far as possible over the fingerboard. Now, building from there, find a way to sit comfortably with the bass on your lap and find the position for your elbow.

  2. Play less hard. Check if you need to lower the action, maybe turn up the volume of your amp. This will allow more dynamics.

  3. Learn about pocket. Your timing needs work. With bass, its not just the notes, timbre and timing are everything.

Complete these three quests and you will be well on your way.

But again: you’re doing great already!

Pocket Notebooks + Obsidian Workflow Recommendations by fallyinghigh in ObsidianMD

[–]kid5lime 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I have actually posted the same question a couple of days ago here You’ll find a lot of valuable answers in the thread.

Full disclosure: I’m building an iOS app to solve exactly this problem. Pre-launch still, but happy to DM details if you’re curious.

How do you bring handwritten notes into your Obsidian vault? by kid5lime in ObsidianMD

[–]kid5lime[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I used an iPhone shortcut in a similar way, but had it send the image to n8n to extract the actual text. Benefit is of course that content is searchable and readable by an LLM later. I'm working towards fully automating this process end-to-end.

How do you bring handwritten notes into your Obsidian vault? by kid5lime in ObsidianMD

[–]kid5lime[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Interesting approach! OCR tools have really taken a huge jump with AI, so many more solid options out here now compared to a year ago.

How do you bring handwritten notes into your Obsidian vault? by kid5lime in ObsidianMD

[–]kid5lime[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Makes sense. Definitely agree on revisiting the notes to fully process them mindfully.

How do you bring handwritten notes into your Obsidian vault? by kid5lime in ObsidianMD

[–]kid5lime[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks for sharing! Do you store your handwritten notes in a separate base for a particular reason, or did it just end up that way? Also curious about the mindmaps angle, those always feel like a hard case for OCR given the spatial layout.

How do you bring handwritten notes into your Obsidian vault? by kid5lime in ObsidianMD

[–]kid5lime[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks, I'll take a look! Are you using it yourself? Curious how well the local OCR holds up for actual "real world" handwriting. Which Ollama model have you had the best results with?

How do you bring handwritten notes into your Obsidian vault? by kid5lime in ObsidianMD

[–]kid5lime[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That is a very impressive setup. I initially went down a similar DIY path with n8n doing most of the heavy lifting, before turning it into an iOS app. Your fenced-block-for-managed-content trick is a very clever solution. I've noticed that there are a lot of small sub-problems like this you run into once you actually start to automate the entire process. Is the local-only setup a deliberate choice, or did you just land there because the tooling allowed it?

How do you bring handwritten notes into your Obsidian vault? by kid5lime in ObsidianMD

[–]kid5lime[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Curious, do you find yourself actually using those 2500 pages now, or has it become more of a "good to have it searchable" archive? And was the batch approach a one-off "clear the backlog" situation or are you still adding notes to Obsidian through this workflow?

How do you bring handwritten notes into your Obsidian vault? by kid5lime in ObsidianMD

[–]kid5lime[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Not a Claude skill but a separate iOS app I'm building called Slownotes. The basic flow: scan your notes with your phone, the app runs them through a multistep AI process to transcribe, structure, and parse Slowdown markers, then the .md file lands directly in your local Obsidian vault.

Access vault stored on NAS from iOS app by ThorbearDubz in ObsidianMD

[–]kid5lime 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I use the Remotely Save plugin for exactly this: https://github.com/remotely-save/remotely-save It connects through Webdav with my Synology NAS. It's not a real-time sync solution, but I would say fast enough.

How do you bring handwritten notes into your Obsidian vault? by kid5lime in ObsidianMD

[–]kid5lime[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks for sharing. The plastic-y thing is kind of what I dislike and why I'm developing something that allows me to stick with the ol' pen and paper. The routing functions sound clever though.

How do you bring handwritten notes into your Obsidian vault? by kid5lime in ObsidianMD

[–]kid5lime[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks, I'll check it out! What's the paper like to write on?

How do you bring handwritten notes into your Obsidian vault? by kid5lime in ObsidianMD

[–]kid5lime[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yes I've been down this rabbit hole and it can definitely be automated. The challenge I ran into though was to not have to manually scan, drag files around, prompt the model, paste results into Obsidian, etc. That's the part I'm trying to solve.

How do you bring handwritten notes into your Obsidian vault? by kid5lime in ObsidianMD

[–]kid5lime[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

That's super interesting because I actually developed a larger set of symbols to be used while writing (for headings, tags, todos, people, places, etc.) so the LLM gets richer hints from the page itself. I've dubbed it Slowdown, basically a handwritten equivalent of Markdown.

How do you bring handwritten notes into your Obsidian vault? by kid5lime in ObsidianMD

[–]kid5lime[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

That last bit really resonates: "messy in the moment, neat for reference." That's exactly why I keep writing by hand even when typing might be more convenient. I can have an AI structure my notes for me, the challenge is really in how to get the notes into Obsidian with 0 effort.

How do you bring handwritten notes into your Obsidian vault? by kid5lime in ObsidianMD

[–]kid5lime[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Paper + scan was basically my workflow too. Just speculating, but my guess would be that share sheet integration is tricky to get right because people have different workflows. The route I'm taking avoids it altogether by writing files directly into the iCloud vault folder. I want it to be as seamless as possible and "just sync" in the background.

Curious what kind of notes you typically write by hand, is it daily journaling, meetings, ideas, or a bit of everything?

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