Beyond the lab

I'm a little obsessed with Obsidian. It's where I keep my second brain — linked notes that connect papers, code, ideas and projects instead of leaving them scattered across folders. The graph of connections ends up being as useful as any single note.

I don't just use it, I build for it. These are written in TypeScript against the Obsidian API, released through GitHub, and used daily in my own vault — which means the bugs are mine to live with. Everything below is open source and installable from its releases.

• Reading Room

  Read, highlight and annotate PDFs, EPUBs, web articles and YouTube transcripts without leaving the vault. A passage becomes a quote, a dragged box becomes an image, and every highlight stays anchored to its source.

• Finance Tracker

  Log spending as tags in your daily notes, then turn them into pace-aware budget, recurring-bill, split-expense, trip, forecast, net-worth and savings dashboards. Capture from Apple Shortcuts or a quick-add modal.

• Weekly Meal Shopper

  Plan a week of meals on a canvas, transcribe recipes from URLs and photos, and generate a shopping list already sorted by aisle.

• Wine Tracker

  Track a cellar by note, vintage, lot and drinking window, with dashboard, monthly and sidebar views. Markdown stays the only source of truth.

Reading Room's transcript support is split out as a standalone library, obsidian-youtube-transcript, which reads captions from a real YouTube page inside Obsidian rather than from an undocumented endpoint.

Music is the other half of my brain. I play guitar, bass, piano and drums, I sing, and I write my own songs. Being able to move between instruments means I can sketch a whole idea on my own — and there's something about songwriting that scratches the same itch as a good analysis: structure, pattern and the moment it finally clicks.

• Guitar
• Bass guitar
• Piano
• Drums
• Singing
• Songwriting

I'm an IKO-certified kitesurf instructor — there's nothing quite like the moment a student gets up and rides for the first time. My trips to Brazil were some of the best of my life: endless steady wind, warm water, and the flatwater lagoons of the northeast coast that make it feel like riding on glass. I'd go back tomorrow.