PZTL 026 - Big time articles + more Foundations

Welcome back to PZTL, and our new look! I hope you like it - I realised that we were still cruising with the ordinary design, when we have the scope for looking a little more put together and professional (at least when it comes to the newsletter).

So, earlier this week I took an hour or so and put together this new design. We'll still be talking about the same things, just a lot more stylishly.

Aside from that, let's get on to this week's updates...

New articles going viral(ish)...

This piece talks about how I've been replacing many functions of the apps that I've been using with a workflow or profile added into my Hermes Agent interface.

I don't have a task management app anymore, and I'm very close to trading out my business and personal finance tracking mechanisms to do it all with Hermes and Obsidian. Another option is workout tracking, where I simply speak my sets, perceived effort and any notes into Hermes, and watch as it records this and suggests adjustments to my routine.

Aside from the cloud agent stealing the show, I wrote as well about the most up-to-date insight into how I'm using Codex locally as well...

In this piece I introduce Claudian (which you heard about briefly on a previous PZTL issue as I explained how it crushed my Obsidian-plugin-building dreams), and how I've been using it.

What this plugin essentially does is bring a very neat and tidy interface into an Obsidian tab, so that you can interact with local agents (Claude Code, Codex, that kind of thing) in a way that's full-featured and natural.

I was using a plugin called InternetVin Terminal before, and this was just as powerful, but you needed to know all the CLI commands to make things work. Now you're pretty much ready to go out-of-the-box, so long as you've used Claude Code or Codex before in their respective applications.

Both of these articles have been very popular over the last few days, so I'd urge you to give them a read whilst they're still hot...

Other than that, we're going to press on and talk about what's been taking up all of my time throughout the past week...

More from the Foundations program

We've also been rolling out the PARAZETTEL Foundations program for the last week, and it's been going great.

It's a breath of fresh air to be able to talk about PKM in theory and hypotheticals rather than being limited to suggestions that the Obsidian template matches perfectly.

So far we've covered the idea of a minimum viable system (MVS, linked very closely to Minimal Note-Taking), as well as a few other pieces inherited from across the rest of the Community library.

Coming up are lessons about managing and organising notes and ideas, and a novel insight about how to make projects easier to manage.

Keep your eyes open for today's lesson later, all about the Obsidian Web Clipper and why it's a necessity for any research-heavy PKM system.