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Ask HN: How to organize personal knowledge?

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Re: Ask HN: How to organize personal knowledge?

#201

Post by grusel »

nextos wrote: post #83
jasode wrote: post #55

>collected a large amount of ebooks, papers, articles, movies, pictures, etc. (all digital). Since you mentioned those specific examples, I see a commonality and so I'm going to assume you're primarily concerned about organizing files that are not authored/generated by you . (Except possibly pictures/photos since you might be talking about jpgs from your personal iPhone or digital camera.) This distinction is key bec…

While I agree leveraging the filesystem is the way to go in order to sort binary data (ebooks, papers, movies, etc), it's not true org-mode is not suitable to organize those. Since it supports hyperlinks to a wide variety of data, and Emacs is so easy to script, you can definitely do that. For example, org-ref has a lot of functionality implemented to organize academic papers, including the corresponding PDFs. In fac…

How do you mimic the desk feature (lay out a few cars on the table) in org mode?

Re: Ask HN: How to organize personal knowledge?

#202

Post by akaralar »

MapleWalnut wrote: post #96
markpapadakis wrote: post #38

I use Dropbox to store everything. There are no files that I care fore that are not managed by Dropbox (or iCloud, for my photos/videos). I use iA Writer to create lists and documents for everything in Dropbox folders. I also have a folder for PDFs/papers (also on Dropbox). There are also folders for my study nodes ( I study codebases ), notes on personal stuff, notes on Programming, on pretty much everything. I use…

I do the same with plain text files. The only problem I have is searching. I wish there was a Google for searching local files (i.e. concept search).

For macOS you can download Alfred, it can search all your filesystem for text inside files

Re: Ask HN: How to organize personal knowledge?

#203

Post by grusel »

megous wrote: post #163

I'm not sure why noone in 150 comments recommended RDBMS yet, but it's great way to store information in general. I put a lot of personal things into RDBMS either imported from external sources, or added manually: invoices, double accounting, time tracking info/worklogs, bank account records, phone company records, passwords, email, irc/chat logs, things to download, things I bought in aliexpress incl. description an…

I am curious about a longer more technical explanation of what you do, too.

Re: Ask HN: How to organize personal knowledge?

#205

Post by Quanttek »

patates wrote: post #37

I'd recommend perkeep[0] (previously known as camlistore). It is built for exactly what you are asking for. It's written in go and it is very easy to contribute. [0] https://github.com/perkeep/perkeep

How has your experience using it been like and how does it facilitate note-taking?

Re: Ask HN: How to organize personal knowledge?

#206

Post by I_complete_me »

inawarminister wrote: post #143
I_complete_me wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

zim-wiki for me, absolutely. Text-based, offline, decent plugins, cross-platform, easy. What I love is that if zim is not available I can use Sublime Text to view and navigate as a near replacement as long as the SidebarEnhancements plugin is installed. I stand by the supremacy of zim-wiki although it does lack "pretty".

Do any of you sync your Zim/open it from mobile, specifically Android? I've been using Zim for a few days now and it works well, but would be much better if I can access the database while on the go...

"There is currently no Android application for Zim available." from the github page https://github.com/jaap-karssenberg/zim-wiki/wiki/Android-ap.... An Android app would be great. What I do is start up the zim server and look at my notes over LAN. A poor substitute.

Re: Ask HN: How to organize personal knowledge?

#207

Post by xtiansimon »

I also follow many of the recommendations here and keep text files for my personal knowledge. I prefer to keep PDFs rather than HTML files. Currently I print webpages to PDF after rendering the page in (Firefox, Safari) Reader mode.

An idea on my back burner is finding a solution for auto-generating taxonomies using Python NLP. But I've been saying that for years. Soon.

Re: Ask HN: How to organize personal knowledge?

#208

Post by klenwell »

johntash wrote: post #175
bostonvaulter2 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What software do you use for your wiki?

I'm not currently using a personal wiki, but both MediaWiki and Confluence are pretty easy to set up. Confluence/Jira licenses are cheap for self-hosted personal use. MediaWiki is oss and probably not going anywhere anytime soon.

I second Mediawiki. I prefer that for professional use:

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki

Personally, I've been using WikkaWiki for years:

https://github.com/bakoontz/WikkaWiki

I would prefer something that supports markdown. Neither of these really do.

Re: Ask HN: How to organize personal knowledge?

#209

Post by lousken »

stuntkite wrote: post #140

Everyone else here has covered explicit file naming and data structure. That's totally key, but I'm trying to do what you're doing with Keybase[00] right now. Migrating away from Dropbox, Google Drive/Docs, etc. A caveat is that files are limited to 250Gb currently and private repos are 100Gb personal and 100gb per team. I'm not sure on team creation limits and I don't think they are offering paid storage yet. Becaus…

While keybase has been reliable so far github readme says "It is approaching release ready, though currently it is still in alpha. There may still be bugs, so please keep backups of any important data you store in KBFS. Currently our pre-built packages are available by invitation only."[0] so make sure to have a proper backup of your most important files.

[0] https://github.com/keybase/kbfs#status

Also one thing which bothers me is online only mode, you can't cache the data offline and in Europe those speeds are far from great (around 20Mbps for download).

Re: Ask HN: How to organize personal knowledge?

#210

Post by based2 »

based2 wrote: post #195

Trees -> Typed nodes -> Graphs MacInTouch More (1) macOz Omnigraffle (2) (1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MORE_(application) (2) https://www.omnigroup.com/omnigraffle Notes: TreeSheets: Free Form Data Organizer https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15057392 Quetree – A Q&A site that is tree-based and hierarchical https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17848846

Trilium Notes is a hierarchical note taking application (electron js)

https://github.com/zadam/trilium

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