Progress Since My Last Post

When I was writing my last blog post, I realized that I was spending a lot of time doing little side-quests. While I was learning a lot of useful skills like Python, prepping my Active Directory learning environment through virtualization with VMWare, and DNS configuration, all of that time was taken away from my book study. Over the past two weeks, I sat down and completed Chapter 7 - Power Supplies, completed Chapter 8 - Mass Storage, and completed Chapter 9 - Implementing Mass Storage.

Chapter 7 covered power supply form factors, connectors, components and their functions, and processes for selecting, installing, and troubleshooting power supplies. AC Adapters, (RPS) Redundant Power Supplies, Modular Power Supplies, and general fire safety were also covered. It wasn’t until I hit this chapter that the power of Obsidian started to show itself.

Chapter 8 covered HDDs, SSDs, consumer standards (such as PATA, SATA, and NVMe), as well as Enterprise Standards (such as SCSI and SAS), albeit in lighter detail. Performance metrics, RAID configurations, and processes for selecting drives, installing them, BIOS configuration, and installation troubleshooting were covered at the end.

Chapter 9 was long, and was essentially Hard Drives pt.2. This chapter was all about logical drives and was extremely dense compared to previous chapters. Covering sectors, pages, blocks, clusters, partition tables, partition types, formatting, fragmentation, file systems, partitioning on Windows (with macOS and Linux basics), troubleshooting hard drives (again, with macOS and Linux basics), as well as covering the Windows tools Disk Management and Storage Spaces.

At the time of writing, I am currently 30% through reading and note-taking for the A+ certification (Meyers’ A+ Study Guide Book covers both Core 1 and Core 2 exam content at the same time in most chapters). While I believe that I am overstudying for these exams, I feel that having a strong foundational understanding will propel me to much greater heights. I’m the kind of person who, if you put a textbook in front of me and tell me to read it cover to cover and learn it on my own, wouldn’t follow through. The fact that I can study deeply for hours on end and enjoy every minute of it tells me this is the right move for me.

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Using Obsidian as a “Second Brain”

What is Obsidian, and what is that mess of dots and lines?

Obsidian is an extremely powerful note-taking application that uses Markdown formatting. Markdown is an easy-to-read markup language, if you’ve written a blog post here on Hashnode, then you’ve used Markdown. The key strength of Obsidian over other note-taking applications I’ve used (including pen and paper) is the ability to link to other notes. The screenshot above shows the Graph View. What you’re seeing may look quite messy, as each dot represents a single note, and each line represents a link from one note to another.

After finishing my note-taking on power supplies, I went for a different approach with my notes. I began creating Master Index notes for hardware components. For now, these are only at an A+ certification level of knowledge, but as I grow my career with on-the-job training and start tackling future certs, they will grow into being my knowledge base that I intend to use throughout my career. Back to that messy graph view, there’s a way to clean it up while using it as a valuable tool. Enter Obsidian’s next strength: tags.

Tags can be thrown into your notes, allowing you to change the color of the notes in the Graph View, or can be used in the search bar for review. A search for “#core1 #concept #cpu“ will pull up every note with those tags, effectively showing me every CPU concept that is covered on the CompTIA A+ Core 1 exam.

The way I have this set up currently, I can, at a moment’s notice, do a search for every “#core1 #key-term #hardware” (every A+ Core 1 key-term regarding hardware) or “#core2 #process #linux” (every A+ Core 2 process involving Linux). This is going to make review much easier, especially once I determine my weak points at the end of studying.

Searching for tags in action.

My Second Brain

What started as a vault to manage my CompTIA A+ studying, quickly turned into a general IT notebook. I have begun using it to organize not only my notes, but my transition into IT. I started using a home page for my notebook that has quick links to everything that I use, as well as a nice progress bar where I can keep track of my book study progress (this has been extremely useful for getting through such a thick book). It is here that I lay out my current plan. I know that I want to do something dealing with hybrid cloud infrastructure engineering. I’ve been slowly learning more and more about that field, and some of the different specializations (specific cloud environments, multi-cloud, automation, consultation, etc.).

I’m not going to act like the next 5-10 years of my life are already planned out, but I have a rough understanding of the certs I need to go down a hybrid cloud path, and I imagine I will fall into something that I really enjoy as I go. Regardless, the idea here is that I will expand my Master Indexes with the material covered in future certs, and will be able to tag and link to those specific notes from that exam’s specific objective list.

This will effectively create a comprehensive notebook for study and review, as well as a personal notebook that I can reference for anything IT.

Customization

Your vault can be customized however you want, and can be designed for any use case. The plugin support is exceptional in Obsidian, allowing you to add progress bars, tools for creating tables, tools for creating diagrams (and embedding them into your notes), and much more. There are thousands of community plugins available directly from the app, and many more available on Github.

How Obsidian Helped Me Memorize Understand Complex Topics

The way I take notes starts with reading the book and taking notes as I go in a single, long note. I continue this approach until:

• A.) The chapter is finished (I’m making it to this point less and less as the material is getting longer and denser)

• B.) The single chapter note starts getting really long

• C.) The material starts making heavy references to topics, concepts, or key terms stated earlier in the chapter

Once I hit one of these, I start condensing my giant note into smaller, individual notes. Any term, concept, hardware component, or process gets its own note. I then organize these onto their own Master Index (or multiple Master Indexes depending on the context). For example, the chapter on Power Supplies went on a brief case airflow tangent. In this case, I created an Airflow Master Index and linked it to my Power Supply Master Index through the Power Supply Fan Component Note that I made.

For example, in my Mass Storage Master Index, I have a list of file systems used by each operating system (Windows, macOS, and Linux), each with their own note. I also created general notes for file systems usable by each operating system that I place in the Operating System’s Master Index.

This multi-step process, the book study, followed by reorganization of notes and creating notes for different master indexes, had an unintended side effect (one that I believe will be in even greater effect once I finish linking my notes to the official exam objectives). I found myself naturally learning through understanding exactly what operating systems use by default, and what they can use given a little bit of extra work, even if in a limited capacity (like macOS being able to read from NTFS file systems but not being able to write to them).

This same approach actually helped me develop a solid understanding of what the different RAID configurations do, what they’re used for, how many drives are required (and how many drives would cause the entire array to be lost), and what RAID looks like using a RAID controller vs. software configuration like Disk Management in Windows Server vs. Storage Spaces on home versions of Windows. I was really worried about trying to memorize RAID 0, 1, 5, 6, 10, 0+1, and all the information about them, but organizing my notes in Obsidian made this a non-issue.

Linking A+ Notes to Personal Experiences

At the very beginning of my BIOS/UEFI note-taking, I completed my first “home lab” assignment of converting my hard drive from an MBR to GPT partition. While this was less intentional and more of an unexpected rabbit hole, it proved incredibly valuable. You can read all about it here.

As I continued reading through subsequent chapters (specifically the end of the Firmware chapter and throughout the Mass Storage chapters), I noticed the topics covered directly correlated with my experience completing that process. While I may have had to go a little bit deeper than the A+ certification covers on its own, I was able to notice mentions of certain topics that were covered in that lab and link to the lab directly from my A+ notes. In the lab, I learned the process through troubleshooting and research; the book study and note-taking taught me the why. That deep understanding and documentation linking will be extremely helpful moving forward.

Your “Second Brain” Everywhere You Go

For version control and file synchronization, you have many options. In the past, I’ve synced my notes to Google Drive; you could use Syncthing, or even push your notes to GitHub. Obsidian offers a premium feature called Obsidian Sync. This lets you sync your vaults between all devices and works in real time. I know that setting up this synchronization myself would have been more cost effective, but being able to have access to my digital notebook from any device, at any time, is very helpful. Edits I make on my phone appear on my desktop PC almost instantly.

Advanced Usage

I have yet to see Obsidian’s full potential, especially through the use of plugins. I have, however, seen people integrate it into their IDEs and even implemented automated NotebookLM integration. Once I dig deeper into Python, I plan on experimenting with this. Having an AI assistant with my notes specifically as its source among other tailored sources sounds like it could be incredibly useful and I’m excited to see what can be achieved by doing so.

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Still all in – One cert at a time!