My previous post dealt with building an easy way to convert Word files to Markdown and automatically incorporate them in Obsidian. That was accomplished by copying the DOCX file into a directory and having automation to perform the actions to get the file into the right place with the right format. I was pleased with the way that worked out and thought about other places where I’d like to use a similar approach.
I use Obsidian as a note taking journal, but I get a lot of documents in other formats that I’d like to include in that journal. One example is Word docs, such as my weekly reports. I’ve copied some PDFs into my Obsidian vault, but for some reason I hit on the idea of converting DOCX to Markdown.
What Didn’t Work Just to save you time, I’ll mention a few ideas that I tried and discarded on the way.
Hah! I don’t really believe that thing about being cooler, but have you ever done a project and just felt so pleased with yourself? I turned my Samsung Galaxy Tab S6 Lite into a Linux tablet/laptop and I’m feeling pretty happy. The actual process isn’t that involved, so a little of my self-congratulation is probably undeserved, but the result is stinking cool!
What is a Linux device? Before we get into the work, we need to take a philosophical detour.
What is the best way to be truly anonymous online? Most of the time our concern is about being commercially tracked and having our browsing habits shared (I understand this doesn’t creep everyone out as much as it does me). My kids think I’m paranoid. Just for fun, take a look at Am I Unique and browse through all the different data points that are shared by your browser and can be used to cross-reference and track you.
I’ve covered a few items in recent months around my home network, including using Tailscale as a VPN overlay and setting up a home DNS server. This entry is an update on living with those elements.
As a point of comparison, I’ve used Zerotier in the recent past and really liked it. With Zerotier, I had a dedicated Ubuntu server VM to route the local network onto the Zerotier VPN. That worked beautifully.