iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

kepano @stephango.com · 15/09/2026

I don't get what you mean, this doesn't work for you?

kepano @stephango.com · 10/09/2026

This is Knap. It's a new language I created that turns data into Markdown. Knap should feel familiar and comes with a wonderfully pleasant syntax to modify and format plain text.

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kepano @stephango.com · 09/09/2026

It's already there! Choose "Capture to Bookmark"

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kepano @stephango.com · 08/09/2026

it looks like they had fun adapting this quote from the 2016 article "Sam Altman's Manifest Destiny": "I have guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force, and a big patch of land in Big Sur I can fly to."

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kepano @stephango.com · 08/09/2026

In Obsidian 1.14 the new quick capture launches faster than the iOS animation takes to complete (currently available in early access)

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kepano @stephango.com · 09/08/2026

My open source html→markdown library Defuddle is suddenly getting a lot of downloads over the last month

Share showing stats from NPM
Weekly downloads suddenly surging to 329,383 after long slow growth

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kepano @stephango.com · 18/07/2026

formats evolve over decades, apps over months, intelligence is evolving every day in terms of pace layers "file over app" defines priorities: invest deeply in proven formats, and don't expect anything at the intelligence layer to last very long

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kepano @stephango.com · 10/06/2026

The new iOS share sheet in Obsidian lets you save YouTube transcripts, and content from within other apps. Everything is converted to durable Markdown files. Try it in Obsidian 1.13 (beta)

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kepano @stephango.com · 28/05/2026

how we made the new Obsidian Web Clipper icon

Screenshot showing design evolution of the Obsidian Web Clipper icon

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kepano @stephango.com · 22/04/2026

Obsidian Reader also works on mobile using Safari on iOS or Firefox on Android. You can set it as the default option when opening Web Clipper.

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kepano @stephango.com · 22/04/2026

Obsidian Web Clipper now lets you manage highlights, and stays in Reader mode when you click links. It's such a pleasant way to browse the web. You can control the colors, fonts, and easily copy anything to Markdown.

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kepano @stephango.com · 20/04/2026

New policy from Atlassian: Unless you opt out by August 17th 2026, data from Jira and Confluence will automatically be used for AI training. Some data cannot be opted out at all on some plans.

Atlassian recently announced updates to how we use eligible customer data so we can deliver improved AI experiences for all customers. We designed this change with your security and privacy in mind - giving you control over your data contribution with new in-app settings and strengthening our existing privacy-preserving measures - so you can adopt AI confidently. These changes are reflected in our customer terms and will go into effect on August 17, 2026.

As part of this change, we are:

Updating how we use metadata and in-app data to improve apps and AI experiences for all customers.
Introducing new data contribution settings in Atlassian Administration, so you can manage your organization’s contributions.
Note: Initially, these settings will apply to data in Jira, Confluence, and Jira Service Management, including data in your Atlassian Platform apps (Rovo, Home, Teams, Projects, Assets, Goals, Analytics, and Administration).
Strengthening our existing privacy‑preserving measures

Data contribution default settings follow the highest active plan in each Atlassian cloud organization.

Some Atlassian cloud organizations are excluded from data contribution due to their compliance requirements, so default settings are not available.

If your Atlassian organization has an active Enterprise plan, you can opt-out of metadata contribution.

If your Atlassian organization’s highest active plan is Free, Standard, or Premium, metadata contribution is always on, and you’re not able to opt-out.

All metadata is de-identified and aggregated before it is used to improve apps and experiences for all customers. We remove information that directly identifies individuals, such as name and email addresses.

You can learn more about what metadata is, how it's protected, and how it's used in the documentation.

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kepano @stephango.com · 10/04/2026

I can't go back to the regular YouTube UI after this 😅 Obsidian Reader now makes the transcript interactive so you can scrub, highlight, auto-scroll. It feels so nice.

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kepano @stephango.com · 03/04/2026

New in Obsidian Reader: - Themes and typography settings - Highlighting - Save options Also added a beautiful new reading experience for deeply nested comments on Reddit and Hacker News. Available with Obsidian Web Clipper 1.3 on all browsers.

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kepano @stephango.com · 01/04/2026

I want to try this tiny Obsidian travel setup now that iOS supports mouse input

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kepano @stephango.com · 27/03/2026

Obsidian Web Clipper is also open source, so I don't think that's a factor. Do you see this banner in AMO? I think maybe because Web Clipper is so popular it always goes to manual review?

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kepano @stephango.com · 27/03/2026

One thing that makes Obsidian Reader insanely difficult to build is that websites are full of bugs and bad HTML/metadata that I have to work around e.g. here New Scientist defined author as "#author.fullName}" in the metadata but Obsidian Reader still gets the correct one

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kepano @stephango.com · 26/03/2026

I still do! stephango.com/buy-wisely

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kepano @stephango.com · 20/03/2026

The future is not creating a power drill from scratch for every task. It's making reliable tools that can easily adapt to the task. A power drill provides motorized torque in a handheld format. It's more malleable than a screwdriver because you can change the bits.

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kepano @stephango.com · 18/03/2026

I have been working on Obsidian Reader for over a year. I didn't want to share it until I felt it was good enough. It's finally there. Consistent formatting for any article. Outline, syntax highlighting, nice footnotes, adjustable typography. Runs locally. Just rules, no AI.

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kepano @stephango.com · 12/03/2026

Defuddle now returns Youtube transcripts! Paste a YouTube link into defuddle·md to get a markdown transcript with timestamps, chapters, and pretty good diarization ...or if you just want to read it, try the new Reader mode in @obsidian.md Web Clipper powered by Defuddle

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kepano @stephango.com · 10/03/2026

help.obsidian.md/web-clipper/...

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kepano @stephango.com · 04/03/2026

Defuddle now has a website! This means you can use Defuddle anywhere to get the main content of a page in Markdown format. You can simply add "defuddle.md" before any URL, use it via curl, Skills, CLI, or add it to your app via NPM.

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kepano @stephango.com · 01/02/2026

A hearty oatmeal and buckwheat chocolate chip cookie for winter time stephango.com/hearty-choco...

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kepano @stephango.com · 20/01/2026

I have never liked the term "second brain" because it sounds externalized and passive ideally Obsidian should feel like strapping into your exosuit, a direct extension of yourself

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kepano @stephango.com · 13/01/2026

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.

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kepano @stephango.com · 12/01/2026

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.

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kepano @stephango.com · 11/01/2026

this hallway had three swing doors within a tight space, so I turned two of them into pocket doors it opens up much more usable space in the office and bathroom, (left and right) the bedroom door is not installed yet but will still be a swing door (center in this photo)

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kepano @stephango.com · 11/01/2026

early morning light and some new pocket doors, white oak

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kepano @stephango.com · 07/01/2026

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

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kepano @stephango.com · 02/01/2026

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

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kepano @stephango.com · 30/12/2025

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.

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kepano @stephango.com · 26/12/2025

"Human processor model" is a cognitive modeling method developed by Stuart K. Card, Thomas P. Moran, & Allen Newell (1983) used to calculate how long it takes to perform a certain task. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_p...

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kepano @stephango.com · 26/12/2025

"Response time in man-computer conversational transactions" by Robert Miller (1968)

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kepano @stephango.com · 26/12/2025

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.

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kepano @stephango.com · 25/12/2025

As of Obsidian 1.10 the app becomes usable after initialization and core plugins, the rest loads in the background. If you're on iCloud make sure you set Obsidian's folder to "Keep downloaded"

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kepano @stephango.com · 17/12/2025

Use the "insert attachment" button

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kepano @stephango.com · 05/12/2025

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.

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kepano @stephango.com · 09/11/2025

we used offcuts of wood from the kitchen project to make these napkin rings for our wedding guests

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kepano @stephango.com · 08/11/2025

Flexo is not amused by construction, but it was worth it

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kepano @stephango.com · 08/11/2025

this project was much harder than all the other ones combined because it touched everything: electric, gas, plumbing, hvac, flooring, roofing

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kepano @stephango.com · 03/11/2025

When you email issues to Obsidian Entertainment (the video game company) their AI support hallucinates and tells you to email Obsidian (the note-taking company) instead. If the reward function is to reduce the number of touches in a support ticket, this is one way to do it.

Thanks so much for reaching out and for the kind words about the game, we're thrilled you're loving Outer Worlds 2! It's great to hear you're even trying to contribute feedback on the issue tracker.
You've run right into a common security feature where disabling 2FA also requires a current code to prove you're the account owner making the change.
Since your issue is with the Obsidian account system (for the issue tracker) and involves account security, this is something our specialized account security team needs to handle directly. They're the only ones who can verify your ownership and safely disable the authenticator app link without a current code.

Please email their dedicated support channel directly right now at support@obsidian.md.

- In your email, explain exactly what you told me: you lost access to your authenticator app, you used a backup code to log in, but you can't disable 2FA because it still asks for an authenticator code.
- Mention that you can provide any proof of account ownership they need.

The support team at that address is equipped to work through the necessary identity verification steps to get that 2FA disabled for you.

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